I asked if she wanted to get married, but she did not know what to make of such an unseemly suggestion: “The very idea!” she said. On the other hand she confided to me, when we were in bed with the light switched off, that her dream of the settled life was a little flat with a living-room and bedroom, carved Renaissance furniture, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower, and then to fix herself up with three steadies: one a married businessman with a little money, approaching his silver wedding; a seaman who was only ashore every now and again; and an educated young man who was engaged to an upper-class girl.
We discussed this idea at some length until we grew sleepy, and soon we lapsed into silence, until she said in the darkness after a good while, when I thought she was asleep, “Well should we not be saying our Lord’s Prayer now?”
“Yes,” I said. “You say it for both of us.”
She recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then we bade one another Good night and went to sleep.
18. Gentleman behind a house
Although up-to-date writers say that it has a bad effect on children to rock them, I had all at once begun to take notice if there were something in the paper about cradles, even if it were only a cradle for sale. And now it was reported that the Town Council had defeated a Communist proposal to build a day-nursery. “Women” wrote to the papers and said that it would increase immorality in the country if such projects were subsidized from the public purse; the proper nurseries were the homes of true Christians and others of decent morals. But, I asked, why should there be nurseries only for the children of true Christians and those of decent morals? Why should there not be nurseries for the children of non-true Christians with wicked morals, such as me?
“We live in a society of people who have only one wish dearer than to care for rich children, and that is to kill poor children,” said the Communist. “A few generations ago the rich were so powerful, even though they were still lice-ridden, that about half of all the children born in Iceland died. If the masses had no solidarity, the children of the poor would still be dying; and if we did not continue to strengthen this solidarity the rich would still be persecuting the poor and their children with direct measures taken in the name of Jesus, with scourgings and drownings, just as before. The opposition to a day nursery for the children of penniless mothers reveals clearly their way of thinking; they only need the lice to be precisely the same as in the days of the Fornication Act.”[16]
I asked his friend, the bakery girl, “What would you do if you had a baby?”
Her smile vanished suddenly and her eyes widened, and she glanced questioningly at her Communist.
“It’s safe to tell her,” he said.
A woman asked for rye bread, and a girl for a cream cake, and then the shop was empty.
“Come this way,” said the girl, and opened the flap of the counter and invited me inside; she took me through a tiny dark box-room, combined storage room and washroom opening out into a yard. There was fierce rain from the east, and black storm clouds were overhead. Outside in the mud stood a pram with its hood up and a sack spread over the whole thing to protect it from the worst of the weather. The bakery girl lifted the sack aside and, smiling, peeped in under the hood.
The baby was wide awake, and stared up from the bedclothes with huge eyes. When he saw his mother he squealed and kicked and pulled with all his might at one of his thumbs.
“My little darling,” said his mother, and looked at her boy, entranced for a moment in the middle of the day’s work, with black storm clouds over the back yard.
“Look what intelligent eyes he’s got,” I said. “What a fine gentleman he must be.”
“If they found out that I keep him here I would be sacked,” she said.
In the front of the shop an impatient customer had started to pound the counter.
Doctor Bui Arland came home smiling, with water streaming down his face, took off his soaked overcoat, and said, “Well, now there is good news.”
I waited.
“I think I can say with certainty that I have at last managed to squeeze a few thousand kronur out of Parliament for your father and his church.”
“Oh?” I said.
He looked at me in amazement.
“And you do not throw yourself round my neck?” he said.
“Why should I?”
“For joy,” he said.
“I have learned that Luther was the coarsest man who ever lived,” I said. “So I have dropped the faith.”
“Well I’ll be damned!” he said, and took off his coat and wiped the water from his face, took off his spectacles and dried the raindrops off them. “By the way, can we still not believe in the man even though he sometimes said rectum and bumbus in abominable German instead of Latin when he was engaged in disputation over the Holy Spirit? Or mentioned the genitals of an ass in some mysterious connection with the Pope? He was still enough of a peasant to take Christianity seriously in the middle of the Renaissance, when the whole of Europe had stopped doing so; and rescue the movement; apart from the fact that he was fond of singing, like so many German peasants, poor wretch.”
“I didn’t know you were a Lutheran,” I said.
“No, I did not really know it myself either,” he said, laughing. “Not exactly. I had thought that I stood nearest to the one man in Christendom who demonstrably believes in nothing at all, namely the Pope. Except that I have made it a rule for myself to support old Jesus in Parliament, mainly because I agree with our uncrucified Jew-dog Marx that the Cross is opium for the people.”
“In other words you are a materialist,” I said.
“Why, what a long time it is since I have heard that word—in that denotation,” he said. “We political economists use words, you see, in a slightly different sense. But since you have asked me in all sincerity about my religious beliefs, I shall answer you in the style in which you ask. I believe that E equals me squared.”
“What sort of rigmarole is that?” I asked.
“It is Einstein’s Theory,” he said. “This says that mass times the velocity of light squared equals energy. But perhaps it is materialism to hold that matter as such does not exist.”
“And yet you take the trouble to procure money to build a church up in the far valleys for practically no one,” I said.
“When I discovered some years ago that your father believed in ponies, I vowed to myself to do everything I could for him. You see, I once had a religious revelation, rather after the manner of the saints. In this revelation it was revealed to me that ponies are the only living creatures that have a soul—with the exception of fish; and this is due, amongst other things, to the fact that ponies have only one toe; one toe, the ultimate of perfection. Ponies have a soul, just like the idols; or the paintings of some artists; or a beautiful vase.”
How smoothly he talked of the loftiest matters, almost absently, with that amiable civilized smile that was never quite free from sleepiness and could moreover sometimes end in a yawn, as indeed it did now; and he took out a cigarette and lit it And while I contemplated him, the earth vanished from under my feet and my feet from under myself, and I had to muster all my strength not lose touch with substantiality altogether. I braced myself and said, “I heard today that the rich were once again going to make famine and murder the fate of illegitimate children, and pass laws that their fathers should be flogged and their mothers drowned—if only they dared to in the face of solidarity of the mases. Is that true?”
16
In 1564 the Danish Governor of Iceland proclaimed a law under which adultery was to be punished with the death penalty.