The organist went to her, kissed her, and led her gently and affectionately back into her room; then he relieved me of the cake-dish with its cheese-rind and teaspoon and said. “I am her child.”
He laid a cloth over the kitchen table and put out a few cups and saucers, mostly unmatching; then he brought some twisted dried-up pastries cut into slices, a few broken biscuits, some sugar, but no cream. I knew from the smell of the coffee-pot that he had not been sparing with the coffee. He said that I was to have the only matching cup and saucer. I asked if he were expecting visitors, for he had laid the table for many, but this he flatly denied, except that two gods had promised to make an appearance around midnight. We began to drink the coffee. He urged the meager baking on me like a hospitable country woman, but laughed at me when I tasted some of it just to please him.
How I was beginning to long to know this man better, converse with him at length, ask him many things about this world and other worlds!—but especially about himself, who he was and why he was the way he was. But my tongue tied itself in knots. It was he who took up the thread again: “As we were saying, I have no time during the day, but you are welcome to come late in the evening or early in the morning.”
I said, “Excuse me, but what is your work during the day?”
“I dream,” he said.
“All day?” I asked.
“I get up late,” he said. “Would you care to hear something on the gramophone?”
He went into the inner room and I heard him winding up a gramophone, and then the needle started running and sound came. At first I thought the instrument was out of order, for nothing could be heard except thuds and thumps, rattle and clatter; but when the organist came back with such an air of sincerity, and exulting as if he himself were the composer, I was sure that everything was as it should be. But none the less I started sweating; again and again all sorts of tearing sounds rose above the growling background, and all at once I understood what a dog feels like when it hears a mouth-organ being played and starts to howl. I wanted to yell and at any rate I would have panted and screwed up my face if the organist had not been sitting on the other side of the table, looking devout and alight with joy.
“Well then?” he asked, when he had stopped the gramophone.
I said, “I don’t know what I am to say.”
“Did you not feel you could have done that sort of thing yourself?”
“Yes, I can’t deny that—if I had had a few tin cans and a couple of pot lids, say. And a cat.”
He said, smiling, “It is a characteristic of great art that people who know nothing feel they could have done it themselves—if they were stupid enough.”
“Was that beautiful, then?” I asked. “Have I such an ugly soul?”
“Our times, our life—that is our beauty,” he said. “Now you have heard the dance of the fire-worshippers.”
As these words were being spoken the front door was opened and there came a sound of much traffic in the passageway, until a pram was wheeled into the room by a young man; and this was god number one.
This incarnate spirit was tall and well-built and handsome in his way, wearing a herring-bone overcoat and with his tie carefully knotted in the way that only town people can do it and country people can never learn; he was bare-headed, with wavy hair parted in the middle, gleaming and smelling strongly of brilliantine. He nodded to me and looked directly at me; his eyes glowed piercingly, and he gave me the savage smile that people smile at those they are going to murder—later; and bared those splendid teeth. He steered the pram into the middle of the room and then propped up amongst the flowers a long flat triangular object wrapped in paper and tied up with pack-thread. Then he came over and offered me a clammy hand and mumbled something which sounded to me like “Jesus Christ”; I thought he smelled of fish. Perhaps he said “Jens Kristinsson”; anyway I returned his greeting and stood up according to the custom of country women. Then I peeped into the pram, and there slept a pair of real twins.
“This is the god Brilliantine,” said the organist.
“My goodness, to have these darling little children out so late at night!” I said. “Where’s their mother?”
“She’s south in Keflavik,” said the god. “There’s a Yank dance.”
“Children survive everything,” said the organist. “Some think it harmful for children to lose their mother, but that is a fallacy. Even though they lose their father it has no ill effect on them. Here’s some coffee. Where’s the atom poet, if I may ask?”
“He’s in the Cadillac,” said the god.
“And where is Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?” asked the organist.
“F.F.F.,” said the god. “New York, Thirty-Fourth Street, twelve-fifty.”
“No new metaphysical discoveries, no great mystic visions, no religious revelations?” asked the organist.
“Bugger-all,” said the god. “Except this character Oli Figure. He says he’s made contact with the Nation’s Darling.[6] The snot’s dribbling from his nose. Who’s this girl?”
“You as a god should not ask about people,” said the organist. “It is ungodly. It is a secret who a person is. And even more of a secret what a person is called. The old God never asked who a person was and what he was called.”
“Is Cleopatra better of the clap yet?” asked the god.
“Better, in what way?” asked the organist.
“I visited her in hospital,” said the god. “She was bad.”
“I do not know what you mean,” said the organist.
“Ill,” said the god.
“A person is never too ill,” said the organist.
“She was screaming,” said the god.
“Suffering and happiness are two matters so alike that it is impossible to distinguish between them,” said the organist. “The greatest enjoyment I know is to be ill, especially very ill.”
Then a voice was heard from the doorway, saying in fanatically religious tones, “How I wish I could at last get that cancer now.”
The newcomer was so young that his face was the color of ivory, with only a trace of down on his cheeks: a youthful portrait of a foreign genius, a postcard like the ones that hang above the harmonium in the country and which can be bought in the village of Krok—a mixture of Schiller, Schubert, and Lord Byron, with a bright red tie and dirty shoes. He looked around with the sudden strained expression of the sleepwalker, and every object, whether animate or inanimate, affected him like an overwhelming mystical vision. He offered me his long thin hand, which was so limp that I felt I could crush it into pulp, and said, “I am Benjamin.”
I looked at him.
“Yes, I know it,” he said. “But I can’t help it. This little brother, it is I; this terrible tribe, it is my people; this desert—my country.”
“They have read the Holy Scriptures,” said the organist, “and the Holy Spirit has enlightened them in their reading, in accordance with the precepts of our friend Luther: they have found the godhead without the mediation of the Pope. Have a cup of coffee, atom poet.”
“Where’s Cleopatra?” asked Benjamin the atom poet.
“Never mind that,” said the organist. “Help yourselves to sugar with your coffee.”
“I admire her,” said the atom poet.
“And I need to see her too,” said the god Brilliantine.
“Why should she be wanting to run around with two gods?” said the organist. “She wants to have her thirty men.”
I could no longer contain myself and blurted out, “Now really!—I am no model of virtue, but never have I heard tell of so immoral a woman, and I permit myself to doubt whether such a woman exists.”
6
Jonas Hallgrimsson (1807–45), Iceland’s greatest Romantic poet, who inspired the nineteenth-century nationalist revival.