“My dear,” said the man to the woman, “I think we shall find ourselves in difficulties. You are about to go to America. Who is going to look after the house for a whole year? You know that our Jona is more than half away with the Smaland-American gods.”
“I can get a hundred maids who are not impertinent to me to my face in my own house,” she said. “I can get a thousand maids who either have the grace to tell a lie, or at least say nothing, if they have been up to something the night before. This woman has given me nothing but insolence ever since she came into this house, full of some sort of northishness as if she were my superior. I cannot stand her.”
After a moment’s thought I realized that I had no further obligations in this house and walked up to my room to gather up my few belongings, determined to go out into the cold rather than stay in this place another minute.
Just then footsteps came pounding towards my door, there was a violent knocking and the door burst open simultaneously; the little fat boy stood there breathlessly in the doorway.
“Daddy says you’re to stay until he’s talked it over with you,” he said.
“How nice it is to be such a chubby little daddy’s-boy,” I said and patted him, and then went on with my packing.
I expected him to leave when he had delivered his message, for he had always had little enough to say to me before, except when he sat on a wall with the Prime Minister’s children and the other better-class children of the neighbourhood, shouting at me, “Organist, Coal-bum, O my blessed countryside!” Now he waited and watched me folding my Sunday dress and laying it topmost on my trunk, until he said in a funny mixture of impudence and wheedling, “Can I come with you to a cell meeting?”
“You’ll get spanked, dearie,” I said.
“Shut up and lemme come to a cell meeting,” he said. “The damned Communists will never let a chap come.”
“You’re surely not thinking of becoming a damned Communist, a sweet little dumpling like you?” I said.
He bristled and said, “You’ve no right to say anything to me while you’re here in this house.”
“Now I can say both Yes and No in this house, for I’m leaving,” I said.
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a few crumpled hundred-kronur notes: “If I give you a hundred kronur will you let me come to a cell-meeting?”
“Do you think I’m going to make a damned Communist out of such a sweet little dumpling for a hundred kronur?”
“Two hundred,” he said.
I kissed him and he rubbed it off with his hand. But when he had raised his offer to the equivalent of a month’s pay for a maid I could no longer restrain myself and said, “Away with you now and think shame on yourself, my poor little thing. I really ought to take down your trousers and spank you. A mite like you, trying to bribe grown-up folk—I should like to know where you’ve learned that trick, and you with such a wonderful man for a father.”
“D’you think my father doesn’t offer bribes if he needs to?” said the boy.
I gave him a box on the ears.
“You’ll be put in prison,” he said.
“And who’s still got a bandage on his hand since the day he was slaughtering stolen minks?” I said.
“Are you stupid enough to think that anything will happen to me or my cousin Bubb?” he said. “We can do anything, and we can even be Communists if the damned Communists would allow it.”
“Communists only want to have good boys,” I said.
“I want to see everything and try everything,” said the boy. “I’m against everything.”
And then I took a look at this child. This was a twelve-year-old boy with blue eyes and curly hair. He stared back at me.
“Why do you always shout names at me when I walk down the street?” I asked.
“We’re amusing ourselves,” he said. “We get bored. We want to be Communists.”
Ready to go, I shook my head.
“Daddy says you’re to stay. To wait,” said the boy.
“What for?” I asked.
“Wait until Mummy leaves,” he said.
“Go downstairs and say that I have nothing to wait for,” I said.
I was busy for a moment turning the key in the lock of my trunk, for the catch had jammed. When I looked up again the boy was still standing there in the middle of the floor, with that silken hair, still staring at me with those clear blue eyes. He has stuffed the hundred-kronur bills back in his pocket and was biting his nails furiously; I had caught him at last in the act his nails bore witness to, always bitten down to the quick.
“Don’t go, stay,” he said, without threats and without bribes this time, just in a sincere childish way, plaintively and a little shyly.
And now somehow I felt terribly irresolute, suddenly so sorry for the child; I sat down half-helplessly on my trunk and took hold of his hands and held them tight to stop him maltreating his nail like that, and pulled him close to me and said, “My poor little boy.”
11. The children I acquired, and their souls
Madam flew with Pliers to America one day, and I had the children: their father bequeathed them to me, rather than fathered them upon me, at dinner that evening, smiling and preoccupied; it was a case of immaculate conception, as in the fairy tale about swallowing the fish.[12]
“Then from now on you shall be called by your proper names,” I said.
“We shall reply by crushing you. We shall break your bones. We shall grind you,” said the beautiful daughter in a slow intense voice, savoring the words in her mouth like sweets—Crush, Break, Grind.
“Very well, then,” I said, “if you don’t want to be called by your own lovely names I shall re-christen you out of my own head, for I shall never address you in African. Arngrim shall be called World-glow, Gudney, Fruit-blood, Thord Goldram, and Jona’s little Christmas-card child shall be called Day-beam; and now come in out of the kitchen, Thorgunn dear, and eat with the rest of us.”
“The child’s mother has entrusted me with teaching the child Good,” shouted the cook through the doorway.
“I have no intention of teaching her Evil,” I said.
“That’s something new, then,” she said, “If salvation of the soul comes from the north.”
Doctor Bui Arland’s face lit up on hearing this reply, and he stopped reading his paper.
The cook through the opening: “Does the Doctor and master want to countermand his wife’s wishes on the very day she flies away—for the sake of northerners?”
“Hm,” said the Doctor. “I happen to be the Member of Parliament for these terrible people in the north: my constituency, you understand, my good woman?”
“Yes, but is it the constituency of the soul, pray, if I may make so bold as to ask the Doctor and master?”
The children’s faces lit up, the whole table lit up.
“What says Ugla, who has newly acquired all these children?” said the Doctor, and scratched the nape of his neck, putting on a careworn expression. “Does she think it healthier for the soul to eat in the dining room or in the kitchen?”
“If the soul lives in the stomach…” I began, but the cook was quick to interrupt me.
“And that’s a lie,” she said, “there’s no soul that lives in the stomach, the soul that my blessed Saviour suffered for doesn’t live in any stomach, so help me; on the other hand Sin has its origins there, for whatever happens below the waist is of the devil. And that’s why the mistress of this house and Doctor’s lady told me in so many words that this child should receive its nourishment through here with me with suitable prayers and thanks in the kitchen, so that this house shall have someone to redeem it in the same way as the righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah.”
12
A common motif in folk-tales: the barren woman swallows an enchanted fish and becomes pregnant.