“I think you should learn to take snuff,” said the Doctor, and then offered the petit-bourgeois women cigarettes; but they only stared at him apprehensively. No further hospitality was offered to this half-class in such a house. I went on trying to get the white pellets into the black boy, and was perfectly clearly aware of the loathing that blazed in Madam’s body at seeing the maid playing in her husband’s room while she, this great woman descended from such great people, was coming from another world, brimming over with all that was holy. But her glares left me quite unmoved; for what was there for me to be ashamed of? If I had fled the moment she arrived, that would have been an act of shame, that would have been to accuse oneself without cause.
“Come, friend,” said Pliers, and helped the medium to negotiate the open door so that he would not turn into nothing there in the middle of the room. Madam propelled the half-class women through the door as well and bade them farewell graciously, and they continued to bleat and groan in their sentimental falsetto about the wonders of the next world all the way out into the street.
The Member of Parliament, Doctor Bui Arland, suddenly remembered that he had to have a few words in private with his underling; with a start he ran after him out to the Cadillac, where his agent was already behind the wheel, and conferred with him through the open car door.
I had at last managed to get the pellets into the little nigger boy, and I laid the mirror carefully on the table so that they should not fall out again. But Madam walked into the room as I was leaving, picked up the mirror and shook it, and then flung it aside.
While I was walking upstairs I heard her shouting through the open door to her husband, who was still talking to Two Hundred Thousand Pliers out at the Cadillac: “Bui, I want to talk to you.”
8. He who dwells in the mountain-tops, and my father
The Nation’s Darling, the pride of all Iceland even though he was born in our forgotten valley, my valley, he who was the dearest friend of the nation’s heart, the reborn master-smith of this golden language, the resurrector who, by wiping away our blindness, gave us what we had never seen before, the country’s beauty, Icelandic Nature, and who sowed in the breast of posterity the secret sensitivity of the elf instead of heroism and Saga, while he himself lived in loneliness and died uncomforted in a far metropolis, overpowered by the apathy of this degenerate nation which he had touched with the wand of life, crushed by the hostility of degraded men towards things concerning the spirit, and culture, and art: again and again I had heard his name bandied about in unlikely places in Reykjavik, and always associated with the most ridiculous matters; first at the singing atom poet’s; then, because of the sale of the country, at a cell meeting; and now here. A country person in the city lets much go in one ear and out the other because he fails to understand the connection between things, cannot reconcile unrelated concepts.
“My friend the Darling has confirmed in your wife’s hearing…”
The household bondwoman, her face hot, pondered these words while she waited in her room for the master and Madam to go upstairs to bed so that she could tidy up the rooms for the night.
And at the same time another image came to my mind, the one that visits me in every difficulty and is the answer for me to many a question, not because I have ever understood it but most likely because it is so close to my own self, the marrow of my bones, the very substance of my blood: my father. And when I say his image, I do not mean that haggard face that once was full in the cheeks, the stringy body that once was strong, the hand long-ruined by primitive tools, nor the puckered weather-wise eye; I mean rather his spiritual image, the Saga, the one thing he acknowledged unreservedly with a sword in place of a scythe, ocean in place of land, a hero in place of a farmer—but yet softened by a century-old modern era, the era of the first volume of Fjolnir,[10] wrapping in silent bear-warmth the late-born elves who taught us to appreciate buttercup, bird, and star. And after having seen the pale necromancers who in that room with its many forgeries of Nature had talked long-windedly about mildewed bones to him who dwells inaccessible in the mountain tops, that fairy person deepest in our own breasts, I was refreshed and comforted by the memory of this rugged image of my origin.
And I was roused from my trance by a strange noise from below, a tear-laden cry, a scream. Was there murder in the house? Or childbirth in the next house? I opened my windows and there was silence all around, windows all dark: so it had to be here in the house. In a flash I was down the two staircases in my stockinged soles, and standing on the bottom step. Both the doors that were open earlier were still ajar, open into the street and open into the study.
“I hate you, hate you, hate you”—there was no trace of human sound in this hoarse screeching, nor in the mixture of inarticulate noises and coarse oaths which accompanied this inverted declaration of love. Then—“I will, I will, I will go to America.”
In the middle of the floor of the study this beautiful sleek woman lay on her back, her skirt up round her waist, wearing nylon stockings, silk panties and gilt shoes, belabouring the floor with her heels and fists and screaming, her bracelets jingling with the blows and one gilt shoe flying across the room.
Her husband stood at a distance, watching, wearing a surprised and helpless look; yet I suspected he had seen such a performance before and was not particularly amazed. But it would have been more than ordinary discourtesy towards such an excellent wife to behave as if nothing were happening when she went berserk. I say for myself that I stood as if nailed to the stop, dumbfounded at this unbelievable spectacle. When I had looked on for a while the man straightened himself slowly, walked to the door, and closed it with an apologetic smile. I closed the outside door and then went back up to my room, for it was not yet time to tidy up for the night.
The nice Americans would come when it was nearly midnight; they had stopped leaving their coats in the vestibule, and went straight to the master’s study; and if they came across a housemaid in the hall they patted her on the back and brought out cigarettes and chewing gum. Usually they did not stay long. When they left, the Prime Minister would arrive as before, then some more Ministers, the sheep-plague director, some Members of Parliament, wholesalers and judges, the mournful lead-grey man who published the paper saying that we had to sell the country, the bishops, and the oil-processing plant director. They often sat in conclave far into the night, talking in low tones, and went away remarkably sober.
And every time, on the day after these clandestine but dignified nocturnal visits by the great at this side of the street, it came about that other visits, public but rather less dignified, were paid at the other end of the street, whatever connection there might be between them: it was the populace paying a call on the Prime Minister. These people’s mission was always the same: to deliver addresses and present petitions to him not to sell the country; not to hand over their sovereignty; not to let foreigners build themselves an atom station here for use in an atomic war; Youth Fellowships, schools, the University Citizens’ Association, the Road-Sweepers’ Association, the Women’s Guilds, the Office-Workers’ Association, the Artists’ Association, the Equestrian Association: “In the name of God our Creator, who has given us a country and who wants us to own it, and which was not taken from anyone, do not sell from us this country which God wants us to own, our country; we beg you, Sir.”
10
An Icelandic periodical first published in Copenhagen in 1835; Jonas Hallgrimsson (the Nation’s Darling) was one of the founders. It was the rallying point of the nationalist and literary renaissance.