World Light (66 page)

“What do you think of the murderer?” asked Ólafur Kárason.

“Uhu,” said the cathedral pastor. “Christ doesn’t judge men by what they have done, my brother, but according to whether they feel the true meaning of the hours and days deep in their souls. I am an old man now. When age begins to tell on a tired man, he doesn’t talk about sin any more, my brother. The joy at having found God’s grace, that is the Joy. Those who understand that trial and grace are two sisters—their house is a large house; it is a beautiful house; and it stands high upon a rock.”

He brought a small booklet out of his pocket and gave it to the poet. “May I leave with you a small pamphlet by a famous man in Denmark?” he said. “It is called
Come to Jesus
.”

“Thank you very much,” said the poet. “This is the same book you lent me the other day.”

“Well, well, my brother, I’m so glad,” said the cathedral pastor. “I am quite sure you have felt the blessed warmth that radiates from this little book.”

At this, the poet had to admit that he unfortunately had not read the book yet.

“Perhaps my brother doesn’t care for books much?” said the cathedral pastor.

“I was brought up on such a tedious
Book of Sermons
that I doubt if I’ll ever recover from it,” said the poet.

“Dear me, how unfortunate,” said the cathedral pastor in the same tone of voice, but ready to vindicate everyone. “It must have been Árni’s
Sermons
. He was sometimes a little long-winded, bless him. Some people are long-winded about Jesus; some are brief. But it doesn’t really matter, and you mustn’t despair simply because some people are long-winded about Jesus. The main thing is to speak about Jesus neither briefly nor at length, but to yearn for Him in silence; to have a place for Him in one’s house; and to be glad.”

Ólafur Kárason was silent for a long time, fascinated by this talk, and went on contemplating this old, peaty-brown, parchment face under the silvery hair, where every passion had long ago been transformed into gratitude; was anything on earth more blissfully happy? In the presence of this man there was shelter against all weathers.

“I hope nonetheless,” said the cathedral pastor finally, and stood up, “that I may leave this little book with you before I go. It’s by a famous man in Sweden and it’s called
Come to Jesus
. Just as bad books are bad if they are bad, so good books are good if they are good, my brother.”

“Thank you very much,” said the poet; he accepted the book, and laid it beside the other copy on the top of the New Testament on the shelf.

“Now, it’s possible that we won’t see one another for a while,” said the cathedral pastor. “I have a daughter in Copenhagen. She and her husband have built themselves a house there and invited me to Copenhagen to see their new house.”

“I’m sure that nothing but good can happen to you, but let me wish you a good journey nonetheless,” said the poet and clasped the cathedral pastor’s hand, and his eyes moistened a little because he was so happy for the old man to have a daughter in Copenhagen and to be going to see the house.

“I’ve really got two long journeys ahead of me now,” said the cathedral pastor; he was trembling a little with age, and there was a glint of humor in his smile, as if he were going to say something daring. “I have ahead of me a journey to Heaven. And I also have ahead of me a journey to Copenhagen. To tell you the truth, I am looking forward even more to going to Copenhagen. Have you any friend in Copenhagen to whom I can give your greetings, my brother?”

“If you should ever on your long journeys come across a despised poet and poor man like me, then he is my friend, and I ask you to give him my greetings,” said Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavik.

“Thank you, I shall remember that,” said the cathedral pastor, perhaps a little absentmindedly. “And now good-bye; with all my heart I wish you all the best in body and soul, now and always; and a happy Christmas. May the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.”

This was in the middle of August.

Ólafur Kárason was sorry that the cathedral pastor was going abroad, and at once began to look forward to his return.

16

And it was not long, unfortunately, before the prison ceased to be an enjoyable novelty for the poet; its attraction was exhausted, even the murderer was no longer an interesting or desirable companion. In place of the cathedral pastor there came occasionally a tall and tedious curate, and they all felt he came there only from a sense of Christian duty and not because he loved his brothers in a simple and natural way, let alone because he thought he learned more from the inmates of a prison than from those outside it or felt happier in this house than in other houses, like the cathedral pastor. Sometimes there came also a skinny missionary who understood God but not people, and knew all the less about people the more he knew about God.

One night the poet woke up with internal pains. He was convinced that he was about to die. Suddenly he remembered that he was not a free man. He sat up in bed and felt for the pains in his innards in a panic; yes, one was sure to die of such pains. What frightened him most was that the hope of being allowed to live before one died had vanished. Perhaps he now for the very first time appreciated liberty to the full. The irresponsible life of the prison, carefree, at the expense of others like the life of the rich—what was that compared with being a despised poet and a poor man on the outside? Without liberty there was no life. To live in penury as a parish pauper, beggar, versifier and figure of contempt, his honor blemished, and even in poor health—nothing mattered if you were free. Liberty was the crown of life and the most precious of all precious things—the freedom to lie in a green dell beside a brook, the freedom to look at the sky, the freedom to see a girl in the distance, the freedom to sing, the freedom to beg. And now suddenly he was about to die. He got out of bed and touched the cold windowpane with his fingertips and gazed for a long time at the stars shining in the sky, like a penniless child standing outside a shop window full of expensive toys.

From that night on he was tormented by the fear of the emptiness around him: of being alone, of knowing no one in the world; of loving no one, of knowing himself to be loved by no one; but above all else by the fear that true love did not exist but was only a jug of water in the heat of the sun. His days passed in a foreboding of death. He tried to drown his anguish by wrestling with poetry and prose, but the visions of the land rising obliquely against reality would not reveal themselves to him; and the winged word associations had taken flight.

When he finally got a letter from his wife, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, his eyes filled with tears, not because she wrote so movingly, because she did not write her letters herself, and not because she was so noble at keeping faith with a husband of his sort, but because money is reality, and out of the letter rolled two silver krónur. This woman who could not forget how the southerners had treated Pastor Hallgrímur Pétursson understood the necessity of not running short of pocket money in the south. But how the poorest woman in the poorest district in the country could conjure minted silver from her sleeve— that was a miracle that made even the forger himself an ignoramus and a sneak thief.

This wife, who thought that she herself had committed sins the size of elephants, said not a word about his own transgression. On the other hand she mentioned that Helga, the daughter of the ravine farmer at Berá, had gone out to collect firewood that autumn and never returned. People thought she had been pregnant, but it was not known that she had been associating with a man. True, a boy had been staying at the cottage since spring, but he was so recently confirmed that no one could believe that he could have had any ideas about women. But if it had been so, the girl’s disappearance had only been a proof that over us human beings there hangs an awful sword of justice. Finally the wife said that if the bailiff flatly refused to reinstate Ólafur Kárason at the school when he came back, she would try to arrange with the pastor that he would get some kind of official post in the future, at least as Bervík’s dog-doctor.

Towards Christmas, when the darkest shadows lay over the world, he thought he might find relief in starting on the long-desired poem about the sun, despite all the advice of the sages in Aðalfjörður. But the weeks went by without producing a single couplet which he thought worthy of the subject. The anguish of the heart was still stronger than his belief in the sun, and the poet went on lying awake at night, sweating, with palpitations and bouts of shivering. Often he was convinced that he would die before he managed to compose his poem about the sun; seldom has a distant heavenly body made life so difficult for a poet. His mind wandered off along ever more dangerous paths. Finally he had begun to wonder if the fiery furnace of this orb was not just an accidental blaze caused by an explosion or some other disturbance in matter, or simply some breakdown in space, this soulless space, this eternal void, which actually seemed to be the only rational and justifiable condition possible. He asked if the solar system had not come into existence through some mysterious accident, if the life that sparked from this ill-starred energy was anything but a corruption of matter, and if it would not be extinguished after a calculable, yes almost foreseeable, number of years, and with it the buttercup in the homefield and the fine poems of the poets. In a word, his thoughts led him to the point where one ceases to understand the sun. Christmas passed this wretched poet by; in a fog he saw old, sin-laden women from the missionary society spying at the door or bleating hymns around a Christmas candle, and also the lanky, boring curate, but there was no Music and no Light; and on Christmas Day the poet got up and said to the warder in a strange voice:

“Soon I shall be dead.”

At this, the warder became a little alarmed.

“Isn’t the cathedral pastor coming soon?” asked the poet.

“He’ll be away for a year. He’s in Copenhagen with his daughter.”

“Thank goodness,” said the poet, and cheered up a little at knowing this delightful man to be in the one place that was better than being with God.

But one morning not long afterwards, the poet could not get up, but lay still. He said he had unbearable pains all over, and claimed that old ailments that had afflicted him in his youth had flared up again. He did not eat anything, he did not talk to anyone, he turned his face to the wall. A doctor came and listened to his chest and took his temperature. He was asked if he had any friend in town, but he said he had no friend. The doctor said it would be best to take him to the hospital. He was carried out on a stretcher to an ambulance, but unfortunately he was in no state to enjoy life to any extent while he was being driven from the prison to the hospital. He was examined for a few days with magic methods, hundred-thousand krónur apparatuses and frightful medicines, and X-rayed body and soul; but science found no ailment to speak of in him apart from this ailment of matter, these accidents in the ether, this misunderstanding in space, which is called life. He asked politely if science thought he was lying in bed for fun?

“Well, what’s wrong with you, then?” asked science.

“I can no longer understand the sun,” said the poet.

At that, science gave him a mass of mixtures and tablets and sent him back to the prison.

And the long, dark winter went on passing.

The inmates of the house were very worried about their poet; they all wanted to cheer him up or do something for him. The thief brought a pack of cards and wanted him to play Snap for money with him and another thief; the moonshiner brought a brew from a midden which someone outside the prison, a colleague of his, had managed to smuggle to him in a flask; even the murderer came to share silence with him and look at him from his unapproachable distance from which all things seemed to be nothing but trivialities, except for one exception. But it was all to no avail.

The poet was certainly neither ill-natured nor morose, just taciturn and exhausted like a consumptive. With a gentle but strange smile he declined the invitation to play Snap with his young protégé, the thief, and to drink dunghill-brew with his poetic friend, the moonshiner. Even the pride of the prison and the company’s internal ballast, the murderer, was not able to elevate the ailing soul of his brother, the poet, to a higher level.

And then one day it so happened, if one could talk of days any more in the life of this poet, that he dreamed a dream. He had dreamed many dreams, certainly, when he dozed, but they were difficult dreams, for there was no waking thought so pygmy that it did not take on a giant’s shadow in sleep; but this was an exceptional dream, perhaps not just a dream but a portent and a revelation, a higher perception, a reality, and yet only four words, or rather, one name.

He did not know what time it was nor what day it was, for he had long since stopped asking about the succession of the hours or the names of the days. A bound man, his heart frozen, in the midst of that endless death which brooded over the world’s most insignificant life—and then suddenly he was seized by the presentiment that Sigurður Breiðfjörð had now driven down from the skies after all this time. Divested of the cloak of visibility, the poet had now returned, perhaps inhabiting higher spheres than before, where neither color nor form reigned any more. Whatever heaven he inhabited, his golden chariot was here. And he spoke four words. He spoke one mysterious name. This name echoed through that myth-like dream, and in a flash it was woven with letters of fire across the soul’s heaven: “Her name is Bera.”

And then the dream was finished. He sat up wide awake and looked around. The first sunbeam of the year was on the prison wall above his bed.

“Is her name Bera?” he asked.

He got up on his knees on the bed, put both palms against the wall and touched the sunbeam. He rose to his feet and let the sunbeam fall on his face.

“I would never have thought that her name was Bera,” he said.

He forgot the shadow of death; his mind went on dwelling unbidden on these saving words, on that name, that key to the future, this unknown happiness, this life. When it was dark, his mind dwelt on the message from the poet’s golden chariot; and when there was a knock at the door, he expected to see a woman with a white head-dress and a golden diadem on her brow. But it was only the warder with his supper.

“Has anyone been asking for me today?” asked the poet.

“No,” said the warder, relieved that the prisoner should be speaking to him at last after a month’s silence. “Are you expecting someone?”

“Yes,” said the poet. “If a woman by the name of Bera asks for me, tell her that I’m waiting.”