He was standing beside me in the square; he said Hello and offered me his hand with that gentle nonchalant lightness of a man whom nothing can affect—in the first place because he has a million, and in the second place because everyone is to be hanged tomorrow; such was his unique, incomparable charm.
“Let’s go,” he said.
And before I knew it he had picked up my wooden case, that laughable receptacle made in a mountain valley where no one knew what a suitcase was—this man who flew between countries with a case made of soft fragrant yellow leather that creaked. He carried this trash of mine to his glossy burnished car that stood at the curb a few paces away. And before I knew it I was myself sunk deep in the seat beside him; and with a touch, the car rolled soundlessly off into the traffic.
“Aren’t you afraid,” I asked, “of letting the town see such a yokel getting into your car?”
“I am always getting braver,” he said, changing into third. “Soon I shall be a hero.”
We drove on in silence for a moment.
“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.
“To a hotel,” he said.
“I who gained nothing all summer except little Gudrun!” I said. “How do you expect me to have the money to sleep in a hotel? To tell the truth I don’t know what I’m doing in your car. I must be mad.”
“How’s Gudrun?” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “She weighed ten pounds.”
“Congratulations,” he said. “Incidentally”—and he glanced at me as we turned a corner: “I seem to recall that we were on less formal terms?”
“Will you please let me out now?” I said.
“In the middle of the road?” he said.
“Yes, please.”
“Can I then not invite you to stay the night?”
“No thanks,” I said.
“That’s odd,” he said. “I am always invited to stay the night whenever I come north.”
He slowed the car, and I saw that we were in front of the business premises of the Snorredda company. He drove round a corner and through a gate, stopped, stepped out, opened the door for me and locked the car. And once more I was with a man behind a house at night, except that here there was no need to be afraid of anyone in the windows. He took me through a little back door, up some steep narrow back stairs laid with multicolored rubber flooring so clean that no one seemed ever to have trodden on it before; and I followed him higher and higher, I don’t know how high, perhaps up through the roof; it was like a dream—perhaps one of those dreams of uncertain joy which end in a feeling of suffocation and nightmare; or was it the beginning of my becoming a person? Finally he opened a door for me, and I stood in a little hall and could see through a half-open door into a room—leather-covered furniture, a desk in the middle of the floor, books on shelves, a telephone, a wireless.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“This is my hideout,” he said. “There’s a bathroom over there, a little kitchen here. Further in from the living room is the cubbyhole where I sleep, but tonight I shall lend you my bed and I myself shall sleep outside the door.”
“But your home?” I asked.
“Where in the world is shelter sure?” he said, and smiled wryly at this hymn-opening.
“Why shouldn’t there be?” I said.
“My wife is in California,” he said.
“And Fruit-blood?”
“I sent her to a convent school in Switzerland.”
“And Jona’s Day-beam?” I asked.
“That Smaland-American female savior had started to beat my little angel with a cudgel night and day for saying Hell. So I fired the old hag, boarded out the children, and shut up the house. It has been empty ever since.”
The bathroom was inlaid with pink tiles and the water from the hot springs was fragrant in the tub. One whole wall was a mirror from floor to ceiling, and I stared amazed at this big strong woman who stood there with milk in her breasts, and regretted having to put on my clothes again and become a penniless girl from the north once more, and I dawdled as much as I could. At last there was nothing left but to chew some soap, and then I went out into the living room.
He was sitting on a chair reading a book, and had fried some ham and eggs and laid the table; water for the tea simmered in an electric glass kettle beside him. He motioned to me to sit down in an armchair on the other side of the table and started to make the tea.
And I stared at this man in a trance, this fairy tale personified: the man who owned the world, not just all the wealth that one could reasonably wish for; the man who enjoyed all the power to be had in a little country—and what is the difference between a little country and a large one except in degree?—but quite certainly endowed with soul, no less than the ponies who had once appeared to him in a divine vision; healthy, intelligent, handsome, virile, in the prime of life, his every word a poem, his every thought a joy, his every movement a game; in reality such a man is above everything on earth, a phenomenon in the sky—and how are the thoughts of an earth-bound pauper to be anything but a tasteless joke and dreary drivel in his eyes and ears?
“Is there anything more ludicrous than a penniless girl from the north who says she is going to become a person?” I said.
“All that you ask for, you shall have,” he said.
I still did not have much of an appetite, but I drank the tea he had made and enjoyed it.
“By the way,” I said, “where do these words come from?”
“I wrote them when I learned the truth,” he replied.
“The truth?” I echoed.
“Yes, it’s small wonder you laugh,” he said. “You think I have become a theologian like Jona and started hopping.”
“It depends on which truth it is,” I said.
“Quite so,” he replied. “The religious hero says, ‘Truth shall make you free’; and in that case truth is perhaps merely the face that Jon Smyrill of Braudhouses[24] was born into the world—which is, in fact, a matter of dispute, historically; or that foul fellow Mohammed—which is indisputable, certainly. But that is not what I mean. Do you remember once, last year, I told you the Einstein Theory? That is not what I mean, either, even though it is proved by calculations; nor even that simple, unforgettable, and irrefutable truth of junior school, that water is H2O.”
I said that I was becoming curious.
“I mean the truth of myself,” he said, and looked at me without his spectacles. “The truth of my own nature. That is the truth I have discovered, and if I do not live that truth my life is but half; in other words, no life at all.”
24
An old Icelandic scholastic “translation” of