The church-builders thought that the ones they supported, and their opponents too, had all spoken well, just as much when they denounced one another’s crimes as when they flocked together and swore oaths. Of course politicians, like everything else in their eyes, were just a type of Saga, varyingly stout-hearted sea-raiders and clever brigands, who fought for other people’s possessions with terms of abuse and false accusations instead of sword and spear; a modern Saga, much duller, of course, then Egil’s Saga or Njal’s Saga, but one which had to be read with the same kind of objective attitude. They recognized all the candidates, understood them all and forgave them all—all except the Communist. They could not understand a man who claimed to be the spokesman of the poor, and they felt it downright treachery against themselves even to say that poor people existed. They knew not only Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga but also the Legendary Sagas. They were descended not only from the heroes of the Sagas but from the prehistoric kings too. They were themselves Vikings in disguise with invisible swords, even helmsmen of splendid ships. They got worked up whenever they referred to the Communist. They would much prefer to have forbidden such a man the right of speech. Did they, then suspect him of wanting to make alliance with the wolf Fenrir[21] fettered in their own selves, which threatened to tear off the false Saga-beards glued to their cheeks, strip them of the invisible sword of the champion and ditto the ship of the Viking who ran breathlessly up the hillsides after a ewe and had never even set eyes on the sea?
“Did our Member… swear?” I asked.
“It was easy to understand what he was getting at, even though he did not put much in his mouth, the blessed old worthy,” they replied, and from their answer I suddenly saw the mask he wore for his tired, penniless voters in the valleys of the north: an old worthy, something like an old and impotent bishop. But such men indeed would never have understood that he was himself too wearied of the sunshine of good days to have any ideals, too cultured to be affected by any accusations; that he looked on life an an empty farce, or, much more likely, an accident; and was bored.
“By the way, he came over to me and asked me to greet the Good Stepmother,” said my father. “And mentioned, moreover, that he would pay a visit up the valley to have a look at our church before he returned south.”
I am not going to describe the mist that descended on me, or how the strength drained from my limbs; I was beside myself all day, and did I not dream all night that he was standing outside with the wooden ladle ladling water out of the well? What well? There is no well there. Next day I heard nothing but hammer blows and no plover; until I said to my mother, “If he comes, I shall run up into the mountains.”
“And what do you want up in the mountains, my dear?” asked my mother.
“He shall never see me with a belly,” I said.
Then my mother answered, “You do not have such a father that you cannot hold up your head before any man, whatever condition you are in; and, I hope, not such a mother neither.”
I am not going to describe how relieved I was when news came that he had flown south, without warning, on urgent business. But the next day brought a visitor to our door from down in the district, who had with him a letter for me, and on it the words: To Ugla.
His visiting card, with no signature, but with a new telephone number—that was all the letter; and these words hastily scribbled in penciclass="underline" “When you come, come to me; all that you ask for, you shall have.”
21. All that you ask for
All that you ask for; you shall have: little Gudrun was born in the middle of August, or, by the way my father reckoned time, in the seventeenth week of summer. My mother said that the girl weighed ten pounds. I was scarcely aware of the birth until she had been delivered; perhaps I am one of those who can have ten-pound babies ten times over without feeling it much. When my mother showed her to me I felt I did not know her, but I felt a little fond of her at once because she was so little and large. And my father, who never laughs, laughed when he saw her.
The church was completed at about the same time. While I was still confined they brought the altar from the old church out of the storage attic where it had been kept since the nineteenth century. Throughout my childhood that altar had stood in there amongst old lumber, and although it had become so faded that one could only just make our traces of an occasional saint and half a word of Latin here and there, I had always as a child been afraid of this relic which had some mysterious link with the Pope. When I was on my feet again the altar had been placed under that untheological gable-window in the church, and they had painted it red so that neither saint nor Latin could be glimpsed any more.
The other possessions of the church were a three-pronged and thrice-broken brass candlestick, which I tied up with twine for them so that it would hang together so long as no one touched it; and a copper candle-snuffer. With this luggage we were going to start so-called spiritual life anew here in the valleys of the north.
The pastor wanted to baptize little Gudrun at the same time as the church was being consecrated; but when I told him that I had become scared of sorcery and exorcisms, and asked him if he did not feel it a grave responsibility to dedicate an innocent child to an institution that had been the arch enemy of human nature for two thousand years and self-confessed opponent of Creation, and asked if it would not be more prudent to keep the distance between gods and men as great as possible, he merely smiled and patted me on the cheek and then whispered to me in confidence: “Pay no attention to what I may recite from the manual with my lips; in our minds we shall dedicate her to the Slope of Life.”
The Women’s Institute brought a Danish butter-god rising from a cream trough, but when the time came there was no place to hang it in the church and so they took the plaque away again. But they brought other things with them which were much more useful for the dedication of a church, no more nor less than a complete refreshment tent and all that went with it—coffee and chicory, and biscuits in the enormous quantities you can only see in the country, made from flout; margarine, granulated sugar, and essence, in addition to layer-cake by the chestful. And though such baking might have had a touch of anemia, it played its part in saving the day’s morale, for outside there was rain and a great deal of Black Death. And no one could expect dalesmen to provide coffee and what goes with it for many districts, even though they happen to have knocked up a hut for God.
The pastor and the bishop made their two speeches apiece, and those who were sober crossed and uncrossed their legs and wriggled their toes and counted up to a thousand and from a thousand back down to one, over and over again all day long, until the speeches came to an end and the church was consecrated. Thereafter the pastor dedicated little Gudrun to the Slope of Life, according to our agreement. At the end of the service the cement-smeared plank benches in the church were moved out into the tent, and later used for firewood. And after that the church stood empty, filled only with a smell of cement, with damp walls and the saints and the Latin painted over. When the temporary door had been put back in place (it had been made out of packing cases to last the next hundred years), it came to light that on the door were the following words, upside down, in black printed letters: Sunna Margarine Company. Finally a bar was nailed across the church door on the outside, for the State grant had not sufficed to provide a lock. Somehow it was as if everyone had a feeling that God would not be worshipped in this place again in the near future.
21
In Scandinavian mythology, one of the monsters of darkness. He was fettered by the gods until, at the