World Light (59 page)

7

Between Christmas and New Year, Ólafur Kárason was summoned to Kaldsvík to appear in court. He set off early in the morning with a scarf round his neck and a few slices of bread in his pocket. His wife wanted to accompany him with Jón Ólafsson, because she had the peculiar belief that the court would be moved at seeing a baby; but the poet flatly refused to accept this escort. He reached the trading station shortly after noon, and went to the courthouse where he was to present himself; it was just like any other courthouse—rusting corrugated iron, creaking walls, broken steps, faulty door-handles and sagging hinges. Inside, a small group of people sat waiting on benches made of unplaned wooden boards; their breaths made a freezing mist in the air; the windowpanes were thick with hoarfrost. Ólafur Kárason raised his cap and said Good-day, and got only a reluctant response. He could just make out the bailiff’s face through the mist, as well as the schoolgirl Jasína Gottfreðlína, the lighthouse keeper, and the mother and daughter from Syðrivík. Everyone was freezing.

“Is the sheriff not here yet?” said Ólafur Kárason when he had been sitting for a while and was getting cold.

The bailiff explained that the sheriff had come specially for this court-sitting from Aðalfjörður that morning—“And when have scoundrels and suspicious characters refrained from inconveniencing the authorities and other honest men in the middle of winter in a hard frost, yes, and even in the middle of the Christmas festival?” The widow from Syðrivík said that at the moment the sheriff was at table in the home of Kristinsen the merchant. The lighthouse keeper said he did not understand how the people who lived in Iceland at present could be descended from the men of old. Ólafur Kárason said nothing. People went on waiting and freezing, and the young girls blew into their hands. Eventually the bailiff started pacing the floor and cursing, and said that the sheriff had been eating for three hours. The lighthouse keeper said that the Danes had corrupted the Icelandic nation; he said that Danish merchants had always cowed the common people and led the officials astray. The widow from Syðrivík tried to smooth things over, and said that the merchant Kristinsen was only Danish by descent, and only on one side at that.

“Then why don’t we get roast meat?” asked her brother, the lighthouse keeper, angrily.

“Did we come here to eat roast meat, then?” replied the woman.

“I don’t care what you say,” said the lighthouse keeper. “In my eyes, all merchants are Danish.”

Finally the bailiff said that as bailiff he could not justify keeping the witnesses waiting any longer in this damned cold; he appointed the lighthouse keeper to deputize for him, and set off in search of the sheriff. And they went on waiting.

At last, heavy footsteps and loud voices were heard in the vestibule, and the door was thrown open. The sheriff appeared in the doorway—a mountainous man with the outsize face of a red sea perch, wearing several overcoats, a fur hat, and high boots. In his wake came a number of lesser officials, including the sheriff’s clerk with the court record books under his arm, and the county doctor. The sheriff sat down at a table, took off his fur hat and clapped a little skullcap over his bald pate, ordered the record books to be opened, and gave instructions for the witnesses to be kept in the vestibule and brought before him one at a time.

First he made the widow from Syðrivík give evidence of identification of the schoolgirl, Jasína Gottfreðlína Jasonardóttir, and then about the arrival of the primary schoolteacher, Ólafur Kárason, at Syðrivík two nights before Christmas. What was the visitor’s condition that evening, what were the circumstances in the house next morning, what had the girl said about what happened while the others were out? About the latter, the widow testified that her daughter Dóra had taken her aside when Ólafur Kárason had gone, and said, “ ‘Mummy, Jasína says the teacher got into bed with her this morning.’ ‘Into bed with her, what nonsense is this?’ I said. Then my daughter said, ‘There’s blood in the bed.’ ‘What nonsense you talk,’ I said. But when I took a look for myself, it was true. And when I asked the girl herself, she said that all of a sudden he had got into bed with her and taken her catechism away and put out the light. ‘Did you let him harm you? ‘I asked, and she replied, ‘I hardly felt a thing, and he was away in no time.’ ”

The cousin, Dóra, was called next, and was asked how the schoolgirl Jasína had described what had taken place between her and the teacher that morning. The girl was more dead than alive from cold and anguish, and her teeth chattered in her mouth. The sheriff’s questions soon became too coarse for this sensitive body, and when she did nothing but tremble in front of the sheriff, delicate and anemic, there was nothing for it but to remove her and put her into someone else’s hands.

The schoolgirl, Jasína Gottfreðlína Jasonardóttir, only just fourteen years old, said she had been reading the
Children’s Christian
Primer
that morning after the housewife and the older children had gone out to see to the sheep and the cows. When she had been reading for a while, the visitor, her schoolteacher, woke up and said Good-morning. She said she had not made any reply. He had spoken a few more words to her, she could not remember what about, except that he had offered to explain the catechism to her. Then what? Then nothing. Did he not get into bed with her? Not really to speak of, he was feeling a little cold, he had scarcely touched her, then he went back to his own bed at once and she went on reading her catechism. What had she told Dóra? A lot of nonsense! They were always making up things to laugh at. Then the sheriff became very friendly and asked how Jasína Gottfreðlína liked Ólafur Kárason as a teacher and a person. Jasína Gottfreðlína said that Ólafur Kárason was a very nice person. The Sheriff asked with an oily fish-smile if she did not think Ólafur Kárason handsome.

She replied, “I’m not telling anyone that.”

At that the smile vanished abruptly from the sheriff’s face, along with all the more agreeable characteristics of the sea perch, and in its place came the expression of a sea scorpion. He glared at her with cold, empty, slimy eyes and started asking her the sort of questions that at their mildest were at least on a par with ordinary rape, while some of them would undoubtedly have made even the most hardened prostitute blanch. At first the young girl did not know what he was driving at, and was tongue-tied; but when she began to feel outraged, she replied bluntly, “I’d never even dream of answering such drivel!”

At that the sheriff asserted himself more forcefully and asked if the witness were aware that she was standing before the authorities?

The schoolgirl replied, “There are no authorities over me.”

The schoolteacher, Ólafur Kárason, described how he had come to Syðrivík, cold and exhausted in darkness and foul weather, and asked for shelter for the night. The widow made him go to bed at once and gave him some brennivín. He said he was quite unaccustomed to brennivín and the effect had been that first he had fallen fast asleep in the middle of a conversation with the widow, and later had woken up extremely early with a strange feeling in his nerves as if he were hanging by a thread, and cold shivers. He said he was anxious to avoid saying anything which might be construed as ingratitude for the hospitality he had received, but undeniably the eiderdown had been on the short side and the bed cold. He also explained that there had been a strange soughing sound of surf in the house. To get rid of the cold shivers, he said he had crept into bed beside his pupil but had gone away again quickly when it occurred to him that this move might be misinterpreted. He firmly denied that he had done the girl any harm. The sheriff now started questioning him insistently, but Ólafur Kárason was a past master at evading awkward questions; finally, however, he said that he did not dare to deny on oath that he had had an ejaculation in the warmth under the schoolgirl’s eiderdown, but on the other hand he steadfastly denied that he had had criminal intercourse with her. Then the sheriff instructed the clerk to read out the certificate that the doctor had signed after examining the schoolgirl the day before; this examination had revealed injuries for which there was no natural explanation for a girl of her age. The torn pieces of a pair of drawers, and bedclothes with blood-stains on them, were produced as evidence against the teacher.

Then the witnesses were brought in again and again and interrogated until weakness had overcome them and every trace of modesty had been expunged from them as thoroughly as from the authorities themselves. The girl had started to give answers to various questions about her earlier relations with the teacher which did not concern this case at all: she told the story of his light cuffs and their scuffle one evening, of how she had flown at him in a temper as she often did with her father, and how he had tripped her and thrown her to the floor. The sheriff asked if he had not lifted her skirt, but at that she hastily said No; the sheriff asked if he had not unfastened any of her buttons, but she said that was a lie. But when this point had been reached, her evasions were nearing their end. When her modesty had been sufficiently dulled, and cold and hunger had allied themselves with the sheriff against her strength, she suddenly blurted it all out before she knew what she was doing: yes, he had done this on the morning before Christmas Eve; and he had also done the other; yes, first this, then the other. And then she came to her senses again and realized she had said too much, and hastened to add that she had not really felt a thing, it did not matter at all, it was not really anything, it was not even worth mentioning.

On the other hand, Ólafur Kárason stuck firmly to his earlier testimony despite hunger, cold, and weariness; no, he had not done this and he had not done the other either. The girl must be imagining things. The sheriff was sustained by the merchant’s roast beef and was livelier than ever, and the questions went on raining down. It was late in the evening. Finally Ólafur Kárason stopped answering, let his head droop down on to his chest, and closed his eyes. At that the sheriff ordered him to be arrested, and adjourned the court.

8

The sheriff decided to ride home to Aðalfjörður through Gamlafellsdalur that evening, and asked for men and horses to transport the prisoner, whom he was going to take with him. As soon as the hearing was over, he himself went to the merchant’s for supper with his retinue. He deputized Jason, farmer and lighthouse keeper, to guard the prisoner while he was having his meal.

The mountain from which the village took its name was called Kaldur. It was freezing hard, and the snow was drifting a little; a half-moon glistened on the sea and on the rime-covered cliffs where the surf growled menacingly in the night breeze.

The prisoner and his guard stood in the open yard in front of the merchant’s house down by the sea, with orders not to move from there before the sheriff was finished. The news of who was in the yard soon spread, and a few young girls went out of their way to have a look at the criminal. It was difficult to say offhand which of them was the criminal, but the majority of the girls inclined to the view that Jason the lighthouse keeper would be the one. A few young men from the village also arrived. One of them thought he knew who they were, and said that Jason the lighthouse keeper was not the criminal; it was the lanky one. At that the boys and girls raised their voices and jeered at the poet with tolerably witty jibes, from ordinary obscenities to the foulest language imaginable. But when it came to the bit, Jason the lighthouse keeper could not avoid feeling that he was, despite everything, related to this poet now, and realized that blood was thicker than water; besides which, the crown authorities had placed this man in his custody; so he thought he was within his rights to speak to this mob as roughly as he pleased, and told them all to go to Hell.

Gradually the young foulmouths dispersed, but in their place came two drunks who asked why these damned peasants were hanging around here. No doubt they were waiting to waylay the merchant to trick some work out of him which belonged by rights to honest folk and good Kaldsvíkings; they said they would live and die for Kaldsvík, and invited the strangers to the sort of trial of strength in which one or other, but not both, would live to tell the tale. Jason the lighthouse keeper fought them both and put them both down and sent them home and told them to go to bed, while the prisoner stood in the lee of the wall of the house and blew into his hands and stamped his feet to pass the time.

“Well, then,” said the lighthouse keeper when he had put the Kaldsvíkings to flight, “it was a stroke of luck to get these damned ruffians to warm oneself on. By the way, aren’t you getting hungry, lad?”

“Oh, just a little, perhaps,” said the poet.

“Have you brought anything with you?”

“I’ve got some slices of bread in my pocket, certainly,” said the poet. “But I thought it perhaps wasn’t appropriate to start eating, the way things are with me at present; at least, not without permission.”

“Of course you must eat, whatever the circumstances!” said the guard. “Nothing ever made Halldór Snorrason* lose his appetite. None can act on an empty stomach. As your guard I give you full permission to eat.”

It was a matter of honor for Jason the lighthouse keeper to carry out his custodial duties most conscientiously, but not without tempering justice with mercy.

The poet took the bread out of his pocket without stopping shuffling and stamping his feet; his hands were so numbed that he had to hold the bread between his clenched fists when he bit into it. He became a little warmer when he started chewing. A few gulls came gliding in from the sea over the yard, and the poet broke off some pieces of his bread and threw them to the birds. The guard had some food in a kerchief, better and more of it than Ólafur Kárason had, and he gave the prisoner a slice of smoked lamb. They sat down on the steps of the merchant’s house and ate in the frost, and there was a ring around the moon. There were lights in all the windows of the house and sounds of great revelry from within, loud arguments, funny anecdotes, nose-blowings by the bailiff, singing, the clatter of cutlery, the clink of glasses. Now and again they caught the fragrance of roast, coffee and tobacco smoke.

When the prisoner and his guard had fed for a while, the latter broke the silence anew.

“Well then, lad,” he said. “You’re a poet, and that’s why I want to know what you think about Gunnar of Hlíðarendi. Don’t you think that Gunnar of Hlíðarendi is the greatest man who ever lived in Iceland?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said the poet. “But he was undoubtedly one of the great men in many respects.”

“Oh, he was a great man in every respect, man,” said Jason the lighthouse keeper. “And, he was the only man in the Sagas of whom it was said, clearly and explicitly, that he jumped his own height forwards and backwards wearing full armor. It even gives the place and the time: if I remember rightly it was out east in Estonia, in the battle with the brothers Hallgrímur and Kolskeggur on the occasion when Gunnar won the halberd. He leapt backwards over a boom on the ship to avoid a lethal spear-thrust, and saved his life thereby.”

“Yes,” said the poet. “And here we sit outside other people’s doors.”

“Eh?” said the guard. “Who was saying anything about that?”

“No one,” said the poet. “But all sorts of things can come to mind.”

“Gunnar of Hlíðarendi comes to my mind on many occasions,” said the guard. “In moonlight like this, it comes to mind that he was one of the few Icelanders who have composed just as good poetry after death as when they were alive. It was on a night like this that he turned in his cairn, looked at the moon, and said:

“ ‘Hogni’s generous father,
Rich in daring exploits,
Who lavishly gave battle
Distributing wounds gladly,
Claims that in his helmet,
Towering like an oak tree
In the forest of the battle,
He would rather die than yield,
Much rather die than yield.’

“I regard that as the best verse that exists in the Icelandic language even though it was composed by a dead man. And it’s a great spiritual inspiration for someone from the Outer Nesses to think back to the time when the nation really could be called a nation and lived in the land. There’s no fighting in Iceland any more, except when infamous poltroons and wretches molest innocent folk in a drunken frenzy.”

Then Ólafur Kárason said, “And here we sit on someone’s threshold shivering in the night, you a hero and I a poet: two beggars.”

“What? Are you out of your mind?” said the guard. “When was I ever a beggar? If you’re cold, here’s some twelve-year-old shark-meat—or rather, thirteen-year-old.”

“Many thanks,” said the poet. “I’ve no doubt that shark-meat is wholesome food, but unfortunately I cannot stand either the smell or the taste of it.”

At that the lighthouse keeper became impassioned, and said that this was these damned modern times all over: to prefer to die rather than smell. “It’s a scandal and a disgrace to call such people Icelanders who are ashamed of smelling of shark-meat!”

“I hope you won’t be angry with me, my dear Jason, if I put one question to you,” said the poet. “I must emphasize that you don’t need to answer it if you don’t want to. Do you think that Kjartan Ólafsson ate twelve-year-old shark-meat on the day he proposed to Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir?”*

“I can’t be sure about that,” said the lighthouse keeper. “But I do know that the men of old had nothing at all in common with the present band of leaders who despise the common people. And Guðrún Ósvífrsdóttir wasn’t ashamed of doing her washing in a stream even though she was a great woman: and she spun twelve ells of yarn on the morning Kjartan was slain.”

When they had finished eating they sat on the steps for a little while longer, but the festivities inside the house showed no signs of ending. The guard was beginning to grow uneasy.

“For my own part it’s obviously immaterial to me what becomes of me, the way things have turned out,” said the poet. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if I had developed pneumonia by tomorrow.”

“No man could stay in Jómsborg* who lost heart or showed fear in the face of danger,” said Jason the lighthouse keeper. “Take a turn along the shore to get some warmth into your body.”

The poet Ólafur Kárason now started to flail his arms and jump about in the yard with bizarre gestures; the guard paced to and fro under the merchant’s windows, glowering, but after the twelve-year-old shark-meat he was impervious to cold. Finally the prisoner grew tired of jumping about and came back into the lee of the house.

“Did that warm you up?” said the guard.

“I’m afraid not,” said the poet. “I’ve got a stitch in the chest.”

Jason now found himself in a dilemma. As a veteran public servant in the Taungar lighthouse, he was aware of the importance of carrying out faithfully the duties entrusted to him by the authorities; and according to the letter of the law it was his task to guard this prisoner whatever happened, irrespective of whether the man got pneumonia or died of exposure out here in the yard. But nonetheless, compassion continued to sway in the guard’s breast; the duty of one human being to another is above the law and above public office, irrespective of what is entrusted to us by the authorities, irrespective of whether it concerns a criminal who has disgraced our family, or a good friend and son-in-law.

“Perhaps the sheriff has changed his mind about taking you to Aðalfjörður tonight,” said the guard.

“Perhaps he’s forgotten all about us,” said Ólafur Kárason.

“If you like, I could knock at the door and ask on your behalf, as the party directly concerned, what the sheriff intends to do,” said the guard.

It was a long time before anyone came to the door. After protracted knocking, a woman opened the door and asked what was going on, was everything in heaven and earth going mad, or what? The guard explained in his best official voice that two men were waiting here outside, a prisoner and his guard, and the former wished to know whether the sheriff was still determined to ride through Gamlafellsdalur that night.

The woman promised to make enquiries, disappeared into the house again, and shut the door behind her. After a while, someone came to the door once more. The sheriff’s clerk lurched into the doorway, very drunk, and asked, not without arrogance although his speech was thick, who was presuming to disturb the state’s officials at this time of night?

“The prisoner asked me to ask the sheriff . . .” began Jason the lighthouse keeper, but the clerk interrupted at once and said, “The sheriff says the prisoner can go to Hell!”

With that the clerk slammed the door in the guard’s face.

After this brief and pithy message from the banquet, the two cold men of the night went on sitting side by side on the doorstep for a long time without exchanging a word. The surf creamed itself on the glistening rocks and threw its spray against the silk-smooth seaweed in the moonlight, and the drifting snow swept across the ice-covered yard in eddies as in a dance where the dancer whirls round and vanishes in a swirl of snow-white veils. Finally the guard broke the silence anew.

“You who are a poet,” he said, “and therefore see matters more clearly and profoundly than other people, will you answer me one question? Aren’t you sometimes, when you’re alone, appalled at the oppression which we Icelanders have had to suffer from the Danes down the centuries?”

“If I’m allowed to see a little corner of the sky,” said the poet, “then I’m prepared to forgive everyone.”

“My grandmother told me that in her great-grandmother’s day there came an ordinance from the king that all the copper in Iceland was to be taken abroad. They went into every church in the province and made a clean sweep of them all. Candlesticks and chandeliers, all of them choice treasures, were torn away and carried off to ships. But the worst of all was when they took down the church bells in Bervík church, which were famous throughout the land for the beauty of their chimes. They had been there since before the Reformation. These lovely-sounding bells the Danes broke into small pieces so that they were easier to carry in packsaddles and transported them down to the shore. Then the copper was melted down and used for palace roofs in Copenhagen.”

“I’ve never had a grandmother, a great-grandmother, nor a great-great-grandmother,” said the poet. “I never even had a mother. I have certainly missed a great deal of love thereby, but fortune has compensated me by not giving me the capacity to hate anyone, neither nations nor individuals. If candlesticks and church bells have been plundered from my ancestors, then I’m only grateful that I’m so ignorant about genealogy.”

“In my family there was a man who farmed a tenant’s cottage near Bervík, who inherited the last six sheets that were found of
Korpinskinna,
whose every sheet was assessed at a hundred hundreds in land values; and if these sheets could have been kept in the family I would now be the wealthiest man in Iceland and could order the government about. But the king got the pastor at Bervík to wheedle those sheets from my ancestor in exchange for some stockfish, and they were sent to Denmark, where the main part of the codex had already been taken. And now it’s called the greatest book ever written in the North and the finest treasure in the whole Danish empire, and it’s kept in a special palace in Copenhagen; but the Icelanders never got anything in exchange from the Danes, except hunger.”

By the time the lighthouse keeper had recalled a few more instances of Danish oppression, and the humiliations the Icelanders had had to suffer at the hands of that race, he was in a towering rage. The party inside the merchant’s house was at its height: singing, laughter, and other sounds of revelry came pouring out in waves into the night into the still assembly of stars where these two eternal Icelanders sat, the poet and the hero. At last the guard stopped talking and was gazing up at the window with a not-very-amiable expression on his face. It was already long past midnight. Finally he made his decision, went up to the front door for the second time, and started knocking. No one showed any sign of coming to the door. He knocked with increasing force. Eventually the door was cautiously opened, and the same woman as before peered out and asked what on earth was going on in the middle of the night.