And now I had attended a cell-meeting.
The Cadillac was standing outside.
I could not remember exactly the name of the smell that met me when I opened the back door, I scarcely even knew whether I liked the smell or not; a smell is good or bad according to its associations in one’s mind. This was at least no worse than that of tobacco-smoke. Was something on fire?
When I went through the kitchen into the hall to find out what it was, I saw that the door of the master’s study was open. The Member of Parliament was sitting there in his room with his feet up on a chair, his back to the door, hunched over some task. He said Hallo, without looking, to the person he could hear walking outside in the hall, and continued to concentrate on his work.
“It’s only me,” said the maid.
“Would you like a cigarette?” he said. “There are some on the table.”
“I haven’t learned to smoke yet,” I said. “But I can smell something. Is this door meant to be open?”
“I opened it to clear the stink of incense. Come in. I am going to show you something you cannot do.”
He spoke as usual in that gay amiable tone, but a little absently; and so help me I did not know whether I ought to dare, even though he told me to. I was, as said before, the maid; and where was Madam? Still, I was no bondwoman, I was a person, I was a free woman.
“Come in and try your hand with this boy,” he said.
“Boy?” I said, and before I knew it I was in there and having a look. And was he not sitting there with a round toy mirror, the sort you get at Krok for ten aurar, with a little black boy on the back (for such articles must surely be manufactured for negroes)? There were a few small pellets loose between the picture and glass, two black, and five or six white, and the problem was to tilt the picture in such a way that the black pellets landed in the boy’s eye sockets and the white ones went into his jaws. And this was what my Member of Parliament was toiling over, with a cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth and his spectacles on the table.
“I’m afraid I haven’t the knack for that,” I said. “I’m such a clumsy fool with puzzles.”
“Me too,” he said, and looked at me with a smile; and handed me the toy; and before I knew it I had begun to have a shot, with him perched on the table to see how it was getting on. Then I heard some sort of mumbling going on in the next room, some solemn and yet half-stifled sermon, preached to an accompaniment of God-fearing moans like the last words of a dying man: “O ye, my yearning bones, O Love, O spiritual maturity, O light.” And there was a strange rattling sound in between, as if a sheep were having its throat cut.
“Are there guests in, then?” I asked, looking up in dismay.
“It seems to be the sheep-plague,”[9] he said. “We shall pay no attention to it.”
But after a while the sermon began again, with the moaning and rattling, and I started to listen.
“Pliers has rid himself of the former creatures and got himself something new,” said the master. “The next world, to be exact.”
“How do you mean, the next world?” I asked.
“A seance,” he said.
“And you here?”
“I spew six meters,” he said. “On with the boy.”
“Pliers,” I said. “That’s a queer name. Excuse me, but is it Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?”
“Yes, the poor fellow. He has this sort of belief in the next world plus vegetarianism, which is at one and the same time the after-effect and the converse of former alcoholism, a kind of binge gone wrong, if I may put it that way. While he was a straightforward drunkard and businessman, newly arrived from the north, he bought two pliers and five anvils for every single Icelander; hair nets, six for each and every person; an unlimited quantity of boiled American water in cans, to use in soups; ten-year-old sardines from Portugal; and enough baking powder to blow up the whole country—but even the Communists don’t know that. Finally, he had resolved to buy up all the raisins in the world and import them to Iceland, but by that time he had also lost his voice except that he continually screeched the vowel A. The Snorredda company saved him. We adore idiots. We are hoping that Two Hundred Thousand Pliers can become a Minister. Now he has made contact, as it were, with the Nation’s Darling, whom we consigned to a Danish death a hundred years ago. The Nation’s Darling wants Pliers to dig up his bones so that we Icelanders of today can become the well-merited laughing stock of history. We are thinking of exhuming him even though it was proved by experts years ago that his bones are lost. The Prime Minister, my brother-in-law, has now joined in the game. And there, look, you have just got the teeth into the boy’s jaw. Now I see that you can do everything.”
And at that moment singing broke out in the next room, albeit rather inferior singing, out of tune like the chanting at a pauper’s funeral—a harsh thing to say in one of the greatest houses in the country: “O, sing a new song to the Lord, sing all the earth to God.” Then this pitiful singing came to an end. There was a scraping of chairs, the sitters stood up, and the connecting door into Doctor Bui Arland’s study was thrown open. In stalked Madam, ennobled in soul by revelations, and a perky well-dressed man so loosely assembled that his limbs flapped when he walked, particularly his arms: this famous man, at last I was getting a sight of him. Between them swayed a lanky man with a thatch of red hair, glassy-eyed, sweating, and dishevelled, his necktie pulled to one side. Then came two women who were midway between being common and upperclass, the one in national costume and the other in a black taffeta dress with tassels dangling here and there; both were absolutely rigid with solemnity, both were in a spiritual condition.
And I was sitting in there with the master.
“What’s the maid doing in here?” asked Madam.
“She is trying her hand with the boy,” said the husband.
“What boy?”
“The black one,” he replied. “what news of the dead?”
“We got marvelous confirmation,” bleated devout woman number one.
“It was divine,” groaned devout woman number two.
Then they both sighed.
“My friend the Darling,” said Pliers, “has confirmed in your wife’s hearing—and the hearing of these two—what he has so often told me previously during seances with this future world-famous medium down south. O-Olaf, what’s your surname again, lad?—Iceland must have her bones. The Icelandic nation needs spiritual maturity and light.”
“And Love,” said the medium. “Don’t forget Love.”
“Listen, friend,” said Doctor Bui Arland to Pliers, “do you imagine that the Nation’s Darling ever paid any attention to grass-eaters and Good Templars like you, except on that one occasion when he wrote in a poem, ‘The cattle-rearing pasture grows on your mothers’ grave’?”
“The papers shall have it, the radio shall have it, the people shall have it,” said Two Hundred Thousand Pliers. “And if you defeat it in Parliament I shall go to Denmark myself and have him dug up at my own expense; I shall moreover buy the bones and keep them myself. Nothing shall come between my bones and his.”
“Will someone not take it upon himself to provide that young man with a handkerchief?” said the Doctor, pointing to the medium.
Pliers pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, blew the medium’s nose hurriedly for him and then threw the handkerchief into the fireplace; all with these floppy movements like a rubber doll’s. The medium sniffed feebly after this operation and said apologetically, “They draw so much strength from me out through my nose, particularly the large spirits; and absolutely especially the Darling…”
9
A contagious lung disease that killed hundreds of thousands of sheep in Iceland just after the war. The disease, which is peculiar to Iceland, has not yet been identified with any other known disease.