When I came home one evening, between Christmas and New Year, there, standing in the hall, was the man who was to me the most unknown of all, the most incomprehensible and the most distant, even though he was closest of all to me in that mysterious disintegrating way which I shall never admit: the father of the children; the husband of the woman; that famous man, my employer.
“Hello.”
I replied, “Good evening.”
There was no party on, and the house was silent. He had just arrived from the airport, and his leather case stood in the hall.
“Where are the children I gave you?” he said.
I said I hoped they were out enjoying themselves.
“Let us hope so,” he said. “People should enjoy themselves while they can, for the time comes when they are bored with enjoying themselves. I would give a lot to be able once more to enjoy going to the cinema.”
I only wanted to disappear as quickly as I could behind locked doors, for I could never think of anything to say when he spoke to me; I am sure that in my eyes could have been clearly read the palpitation of my heart at his return, once more chatting in that bantering melancholy absent-minded way of his.
“Good night,” I said abruptly and without preliminaries, and turned to go.
“Ugla,” he said.
“What?”
He inhaled so deeply on his cigarette that no smoke came out. I paused in the doorway.
“These children,” he said.
I waited in the doorway and watched him smoke.
“It is said that a man forgives those he understands, but I think that is a fallacy; at least, a man first and foremost forgives those he does not understand, such as children. Now the year is almost at an end and the main juvenile entertainment of the year is approaching—blowing up the police station. My cousin the Chief of Police is always telling me to keep the little boy indoors. Should I bother to do that at all? My children have anyway always taken part in blowing up the police station on New Year’s Eve. I think it much the simplest thing just to let them blow it up, forgive them, and then build a better police station.”
“Forgive me for being so silly,” I said, “but—blow up the police station? On New Year’s Eve? The children? Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Doctor Bui Arland. “But it is always possible to think something up: New Year’s Eve is the time that reminds us most of the impotence of the self in time. Previously, children could conquer God by loving Him and praying; He made them shareholders in omnipotence. Now God has departed, no one knows where—unless something of Him is left in the Smaland-American sect. And the children raise a rebellion against the impotence of the self in time.”
“But the police station?” I said.
“Perhaps that is one of the symbols,” he said, “a symbol the child understands; a symbol of this enemy of the self; a symbol of this disembodied power that says: You have no share in omnipotence. New Year’s Eve—time is passing; you are not only impotent in time, but soon there will be no self at all. Do you understand me?”
“No,” I said. “I think we need a Youth Center, that’s all.”
He smoked and smoked, but no smoke ever appeared, and he puckered up his eyes against the headiness of the tobacco.
“No wonder you do not understand me,” he said. “A healthy person does not understand philosophy. But you who do not understand philosophy, tell me this—what is to be done with children? A Youth Center, you say. Perhaps. Previously, when we understood the god but not the man, there was no difficulty in bringing up children. But now: the god, the only thing we understood, has betrayed us. Man is left by himself, the unknown. Could a Youth Center help in such a case? I’m sorry for detaining you like this.”
“It gives me nothing but pleasure to hear you speak, even though I don’t understand you,” I said.
“Say something yourself now,” he said.
“I haven’t anything to say.”
“A Youth Center,” he said. “Yes, it could well be. But…”
“And now I ask for a day nursery,” I interrupted, and felt myself suddenly go hot all over.
“Ah yes, I’m afraid we are against Communism,” he said, and yawned wearily. “We are not reflex-conditioned to it, as they say in psychology; we are conditioned against it and consequently afraid of it. But no one doubts that Communism will win, or at least I know of no one who doubts it—I can confide all this to you because the hour is twelve midnight, and a man becomes loose-tongued then, if not downright frivolous. You, on the other hand, are not conditioned against Communism and you have no occasion to be afraid of it; so for that reason you can be a Communist if you like, it’s quite becoming for a healthy country girl from the north to be a Communist—more so, at least, than being a lady. I understand you, even though I myself would rather prefer to go to Patagonia.”
“Patagonia?” I said. “What’s that? Is it an island?”
“Perhaps I should rather come to you,” he said: “to the overshadowed valley, the secret place, as Jon the Learned[13] put it. Perhaps we shall set up house and keep a ewe and play the harmonium. Good night.”
“Well then, now we shall go to a cell meeting,” I said on New Year’s Eve, and took Gold-ram with me—to the organist’s. Later the boy told me that it had been the most enjoyable New Year’s Eve he had ever spent, and that he had never once wanted to blow up the police station all evening. And yet nothing really happened at the organist’s except the usual—coffee, cakes, and cordiality. The Cadillac was parked outside, and the pram stood inside the room. The gods were highly elated and said they had murdered Oli Figure to celebrate Christmas.
“What about the Cadillac?” asked the fat unself-conscious policeman.
“Pliers is in America,” they replied. “And we have the keys.”
“I’ll be surprised if you don’t come a cropper over stealing the Cadillac,” said the unself-conscious policeman.
The atom poet sang the Greek hillsmen’s song Ammanamma, which was like the howl of an extremely unhappy dog, and Brilliantine accompanied him on the salted fish. Then they sang a dirge they had composed in memory of Oli Figure:
There was a country pastor sitting in the kitchen playing Ombre with the host and the two policemen; they were all in excellent humor, particularly the pastor, who had been with the gods and got some Black Death from them. When I arrived with the boy they quickly made room for him in the Ombre game, and the fat policeman, who was off duty that New Year’s Eve, gave him some snuff from a silver mull, making him sneeze, instead of serving him with tear gas in front of the police station, as he had done the previous year. The old woman went round with water in a cardboard box saying Please do, and patted us on the cheeks and blessed everyone in the world and asked how the weather was. Cleopatra lay on the broken sofa, elegantly dead, with half of her set of false teeth in her lap.
13
Jon Gudmundsson, a seventeenth-century Icelandic antiquarian; a prolific writer, and deeply superstitious, he wrote a book in 1644 about the “hidden places” and “secret valleys” of Iceland.