There could be little doubt about it—our pastor had already composed his funeral speech, and started trying it out on me.
“But my dear Reverend Traustik,” I said, when he had rattled on for a bit, “in our minds he has never died. That’s why we have never made a fuss about his so-called bones nor his lack of a stone in Denmark. He dwells in the blue mountain peaks we can always see when the weather is fine.”
In the back of a big truck at the other side of the gully were two crates, each of about the capacity of a barrel; and when it was broad daylight my father and I walked over with the pastor to examine these wares.
“Two crates,” I said. “He hasn’t half grown bulky from not existing for a hundred years.”
“Yes, it is undeniably a little odd,” said the pastor. “But they set off in a great hurry. They say that one of the crates is undoubtedly the right one.”
We examined the crates and found addresses printed on them: “Prime Minister of Iceland” on the one, and “Snorredda Wholesale Company” on the other—two names for the same enterprise. Then my father noticed that on one crate the following words had been tarred in Danish—“Dansk Ler.”
“What do these words mean?” he asked.
“Dansk Ler, Dansk Ler,” muttered the pastor pensively. “That is just like the Danes. That nation invariably tries to insult us Icelanders.”
“It means, at its best, Danish Clay,” I said. “Should we not first take a look into the other crate? It looks more promising to me even though I don’t understand the foreign writing on it.”
We forced up one of the planks of the lid with a crowbar, and I groped amongst the packing for the contents; and what did I pull out but a small tin, about two hundred grams in weight, wrapped in semi-transparent paper. I recognized the merchandise quickly enough from my pantry work in the south: Portuguese Sardines imported from America, that fish which the papers said was the only fish that could scale the highest tariff walls in the world and yet be sold when ten years old at a thousand percent profit in the greatest fish country in the world, where even the dogs walk out and vomit at the mere mention of salmon.
“Miracle fish, to be sure,” I said, “but not quite the miracle we expected.”
“We shall not open the other crate,” the pastor said then. “We shall let faith prevail there. In actual fact it is irrelevant what the crates contain. This is a symbolic consignment. At a funeral it is not the chemical contents of the coffin that matter, but the memory of the deceased that lives on in men’s hearts.”
But by then my father had opened the second crate and taken the packing out through the opening. And it was just as I had suspected—in that crate too there was not much that was likely to enhance the nation’s prestige. But yet, if one believes that man is dust and dirt, as the Christians believe, then this was a man the same as any other; but not an Icelandic man, for this was not Icelandic dirt; it was not the gravel nor earth, sand nor clay, which we know from our own country, but a dry, greyish calcareous devil like nothing else so much as old dog’s dirt.
“Well,” I said, “is the Nation’s Darling Danish Clay or Portuguese Sardines?”
“Do you believe in nothing, little girl?” said the pastor.
“A prank!” said my father, and walked off to see to his ponies.
“Do you believe?” I asked the pastor.
Suddenly there was a hard expression round the mouth of this cheerful kindly man who was normally the least orthodox of men, something adamant and dogmatic—I am inclined to say hard-hearted—so that I scarcely knew him for the same person; and there came a cold gleam of fanaticism into his eyes.
“I believe,” he said.
“Do you believe in just the same way, when you can touch it and see clearly that it is the opposite of what you thought?” I asked.
“I believe,” he said.
“Is it then belief to believe what one knows with absolute certainty is not so?” I asked.
“I believe,” said the Reverend Trausti, “in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland. This clay, which perhaps preserves the sap from the bones of the freedom hero and great poet, is to me a sacred symbol. From now on it shall be an article of faith for Iceland that the Nation’s Darling is once more back in his own valley. The Holy Spirit in my breast enlightens me in this Icelandic belief. I hope that our district will never again let go of this symbol of its faith in itself.”
Then he looked out over the valley between the mountains and said in a solemn altar voice, with an exalted glow in his eyes: “May the Lord for ever bless this our district of districts.”
The silence woke the gods after a short while, and my mother brought them hot coffee. When they had inhaled a few more cigarettes they went out with a gun.
It was one of those tranquil autumn days which sometimes come to the valleys, when a tiny sound awakens echoes out of distant cliffs. It was not long before the mountains on both sides of the valleys reverberated with gunfire, and this peaceful valley behind the world was stricken with panic: autumn birds dashed past in violent flight, sheep halfway up the mountain slopes formed into file and headed for the wilderness; and the snorting ponies surged away up and down the mountain.
One of the loveliest and most magnificent events that can happen in the country is when ponies take fright, particularly in a herd. A meadow-pippit has flown past. The ponies’ fear is at first blended with play, even with mockery, amusement touched with a shudder, not unlike the behavior of the mentally ill. They trot as if they were retreating from a slow-moving stream of fire, but with lightning in every action, storm in every nerve, swinging their heads everywhere as if the front of their necks were made of elastic, gracefully flirting their tails. They can even pause for a moment, and start biting and boxing, with those romantic mating cries of theirs. Then all at once it is as if the fire has started flowing right under these strange creatures, they charge away like a storm incarnate over scree and bogs and landslides, dipping the tips of their toes for a fractional moment into the furnace that blazes beneath their hooves, cutting across waterfalls, gullys, and boulders, galloping steeply for a while until they stand trapped at last on some ledge high in the mountaintops, there to die and be eaten by birds.
The gods returned just before noon. They had succeeded in shooting one lamb, and had dragged it between them down off the mountain; Brilliantine, this sole Luther of the present, as skilled a family man as he was an interpreter of religious mysteries with the help of the Spirit, did not venture to return home empty-handed to his wife and twins.
My father groped for the lamb’s ear and recognized the mark of one of the farmers in the district, and said that this would come before the sheriff unless they paid for it and excused it as an accident. They found it a harsh doctrine that one should not be allowed to shoot the sheep that ran wild in the mountains, and asked what farmers lived on if they could not shoot sheep.
A little later they toppled the crates off the truck and called on the pastor to come along. Nothing could shake the Reverend Trausti’s conviction that they were the instruments of Higher Powers, if not manifestations of the godhead itself as they themselves claimed; he said that he was a Lutheran pastor, and that he believed those who let themselves be governed directly by the Holy Spirit and understood holy writ without the mediation of the Pope. The pastor’s last words to us as he climbed up into the truck with them were that within two days he would come back here to the valley with a congregation and some district worthies, and give the Nation’s Darling a proper funeral.