She looked at me and said, “You have a faint education look about you. An educated girl never has an education look. I cannot stand an education look on women. It’s Communism. Look at me, I passed my University entrance, but I don’t show it. Girls should be feminine. May I see your hair, my dear?”
I went over to her and she examined my hair, and I asked if she thought I had a wig, or perhaps lice.
She cleared her throat elegantly and said as she pushed me from her, “Remember where you are.”
I was going to leave the room without a word, but she took pity on me and said, to console me, “You have strong hair. But it’s a dirty yellow, it would wash better.”
I told her the truth, that I had washed it the day before yesterday, before I left home.
“In cow’s urine?” she asked.
“Soft-soap,” I replied.
She said, “You could wash it better, I say.”
When I was half-way out of the door she called me back again and said, “What opinions do you hold?”
“Opinions? Me? None.”
“All right, my girl, that’s fine,” she said. “And not one of those who wallow in books, I hope?”
“I have lain awake many a night with a book.”
“God in Heaven help you,” said the woman, and looked at me aghast. “What were you reading?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“In the country, everything is read,” I said, “beginning with the Icelandic Sagas; and then everything.”
“But not the Communist paper?” she said.
“We read whatever papers we can get for nothing out in the country,” I replied.
“Take care not to become a Communist,” said Madam. “I knew a lower-class girl once who read everything and became a Communist; she landed up in one of those cells.”
“I’m going to be an organist,” I said.
“Yes, you certainly come from the depths of the country,” said the woman. “Off you go now, my dear.”
No, I was not in the least afraid of her, even though she was closely related to the Government and I the daughter of old Fal in the north who was trying to build a roof over God’s head but whose ponies went roofless all the year round; and she made of porcelain, I of clay.
2. This house—and our farm
The cook said she had been in many faiths, but had at last found haven in the one which preached the true Christianity. This faith had been discovered in Smaland and was financed by the Swedes, but had emigrated across the Atlantic and was now called after an American city with a long name which I cannot remember. She wanted me to come with her to a meeting. She said she had never received full forgiveness for her sins until she joined this Smaland-American group.
“What sins?” I asked.
“I was a simply terrible person,” she said. “But the Reverend Domselius says that I can hop after two years.”
According to the Smaland-American faith people started hopping, as it were, when they became holy. But sins so burdened this big-boned woman that she had difficulty in rising off the ground. When I said that I had no sins she looked at me with pity and dismay but offered to pray for me nevertheless and claimed that this would help, for she reckoned that the god of the Smaland-American group paid special regard to her and followed her advice. She had been forbidden to take the child with her to evening meetings, but before she went out she would drag the poor thing out of bed and make her kneel on the floor for a long time in her spotted nightdress, hands clasped under her chin, and recite terrible litanies to Jesus, confessing to countless crimes and beseeching the Saviour not to take vengeance on her, until finally the tears were streaming down the child’s cheeks.
All life fled from the house in the evening, and I was left alone in this new world which in a single day had made my previous life a dim memory—I am tempted to say a story in an old book. There were three public rooms, forming an L-shape together, crammed full of treasures. These thousand lovely objects seemed to have come there of their own accord, without any effort, in the way that livestock make for an unfenced meadow in the growing season. Here there was not one chair so cheap that it could be bought for our autumn milch cow; and all our sheep would not fetch nearly enough to seat this whole family at once. I am sure that the carpet in the big sitting-room cost more than our farm, even including all the buildings. We only owned one article of furniture, the sagging divan that my father bought in an auction some years ago, and only the one picture, a portrait of Picture-Grim, as we children used to call old Hallgrim Petursson[2] in his pulpit surrounded by his holy pictures; and also, of course, the old harmonium, my dream, but that had been out of order unfortunately for as long as I could remember, because there was no stove in the room. The wild ponies were our only luxury. Why do those who labor never own anything? Or was I a Communist to ask such a question, the ugliest of all that is ugly, the only thing one had to take care to avoid? I fingered a note on the piano in the house—and what a paradise of tone if it was played in harmony! If there is any such thing as sin, then it is a sin not to be able to play a musical instrument; and yet I had told the old woman that I had no sins. But the worst was when I went into the master’s study near the front door, nothing but books from floor to ceiling: no matter where my hand paused, I could not understand a word; if there is any such thing as crime, then it is a crime to be uneducated.
Finally I went up to my room and played on my new harmonium the two or three tunes I knew from the north, as well as the tune that only those who know nothing know: it is played with crossed hands. I was disgusted at myself for being so uneducated, and took out one of those dreary educational books published by Mal og Menning[3] which eventually, one hopes, would make something of anyone who could be bothered to read them.
Thus the evening passed, and the people began to straggle home one by one; first the cook from the Smaland-American absolution business, then the middle children, separately, and finally the master and mistress; soon everything was quiet. But the one I was waiting up for with hot food in the oven did not come and then it was three o’clock, with me wandering about the house to keep myself awake, until at last I dropped off in one of those deep armchairs downstairs. At about four o’clock the doorbell rang, and I went to the door heavy-eyed with sleep and opened it. There were two policemen standing there, carrying between them a horizontal figure. They bade me Good evening, formally, and asked if I lived there and whether they could just dump a small corpse into the hall.
“That depends,” I replied. “Whose is the corpse?”
They said that I would find out soon enough, tossed the corpse on to the floor, saluted, said Good night as formally as they had made their greeting, started up their car, and were gone; and I closed the door.
The man lay on the floor, if you could call him a man; he was more or less just at the shaving stage, his hair still bright with childhood, and he had his father’s head. His coat and new shoes were covered with mud, as was one of his cheeks, as if he had fallen asleep in a puddle or had been rolled through a swamp; and there was vomit down his front. What was I to do? When I bent over him I heard him breathe. In addition to the stink of vomit, he reeked of poison—tobacco and schnapps. Luckily I had sometimes seen men paralyzed by Black Death[4] at public festivities out in the country, so I knew what was up, and decided to try to bundle him up to his room on my own rather than rouse such splendid and cultivated parents—and they the owners of this wonderful house, too, more perfect than Heaven. I shook him lightly but he only moaned a little, and his eyes did not open except for a thin glimpse of white between his eyelids. I soaked a sponge in cold water and wiped his face, and he was utterly innocent and utterly good and only sixteen, seventeen at the most, and his hand lay open. But he was absolutely dead, except that he breathed. His head lolled back helplessly when I tried to raise him up. Finally I picked him up and carried him in my arms to his room, all the way to his bed. His brother was asleep in the other bed and never stirred. I relieved him of his coat and took off his shoes and loosened his clothing here and there, but could not bring myself to undress a sixteen-year-old youth completely, even though he were dead. Instead, I went up to my room to sleep.
4
Icelandic schnapps (brennivin), made from concentrated alcohol and water, flavored with aniseed oil; about as potent as whisky. The nickname comes from the black label on the bottle.