Independent People (44 page)

“Listen, Helgi,” he said at last, for he had just had a brainwave, “why can’t we run away? You remember the foster-son at Gil who ran away. He ran away. He ran away all the way to Vile.”

“His father and mother lived in Vik,” Helgi informed him, “and they took him in when he came down from the hills. But us: who would take us in? And where? Nobody. Nowhere.”

The paving in front of the croft again, and the dusk of evening
growing heavier and heavier, especially over the younger brother, who was unfortunate enough to cherish rosy dreams; and when he could stand it no longer, he tried another suggestion:

“When Mother was a girl she used to be very friendly with some elf-people; it was when she lived at Urtharsel,” he said. “Last year when we used to go out along the hillsides, Mother and I, watching over Bukolla, she told me all about them. And she recited poetry. And once upon a time, when I was little, the elf-people told Mother that when I grew up I should sing—songs”—he did not dare confide in his brother that he was to sing for the whole world, lest his brother pour scorn upon this shy ambition of his, for the soul’s fairest wishes are as its deepest sorrow; he said only: I’m to sing for the people in Rauthsmyri Church.”

“Listen, Nonni lad, don’t you know yet that they tell you all sorts of things when you’re little? And why do they tell you these things? Just because you’re little. She told me the same thing. There are fairy-people, she said, they live behind the good weather and behind the storms; behind the sunshine, in another sunshine. Behind the days. And then she had a baby and it died, and she lay ill for weeks and weeks, and every time she breathed I could hear how much it hurt her, and sometimes I lay awake at night and listened to it hurting her. At night I used to go out, sometimes it would be snowing, and though no one knew about it, I went to every rock along the whole mountainside and whispered into them all, and knocked the snow off some of them so that they could hear me better, and I asked every single rock to help her, the same as the rocks had helped the people in her stories. One night I asked ten rocks, I’m sure I must have asked thirty rocks, for I thought to myself that if there weren’t any elves in this rock, perhaps there would be elves in the next rock. And I was sure that if they existed at all, they would help her. And maybe all of us. Until she died. Then she died. Tell me why they didn’t help her—you who think you know everything! Yes, I know you can’t tell me. I know I shall have to tell you myself why they didn’t help her. It’s because there aren’t any. Not in this rock and not in that rock; not in any rock. Mother told us those stories just because we were so little, and because she wasn’t bad enough.”

“You’re a liar,” cried Nonni, hurt, almost with a sob in his voice.

“And when I had grown up,” continued the other, “I often went up into the loft about dinner-time, and she was lying there ill, and I would think of asking her whether it was true. But I
never did ask her. Because if it was true, the elf-people would help her. And all of us. And if it wasn’t true, well, I didn’t want her to think that I had grown up. Then Father would come along and chase me out.”

“You’re a liar, a liar, a liar,” screamed little Nonni, laying into his brother with clenched fists as a tangible argument for the existence of another and better world.

“Nonni, do you remember the gale-hymn?” asked the big brother, logically unshaken, when the other had stopped thumping him. “Nonni, do you know what?”

“No,” said the younger brother, ‘leave me alone; it’s funny you can never leave a fellow in peace.”

“Have you noticed that when anything happens Grandma always says yes I know, or she says there’s worse to come, there was something unclean about here this morning? She’s always the same, whatever happens. Never glad and never sorry. Do you remember what she did when Mother died and Sola had laid out the corpse? She kissed the corpse and said: “And I don’t wonder.”

“That’s because she’ll soon be a hundred,” said the younger brother tonelessly and as if at random.

But not even in this was he allowed to be right.

“No,” said the elder brother, “it’s because she understands everything. She knows everything between heaven and earth. Don’t you remember the madman in the gale-hymn, and how he entered into the animals? Whoever understands Grandma understands everything.”

“Mother never sang any hymns,” said little Nonni. “And Father says there aren’t any Jesuses.”

“Maybe there aren’t,” said the other, “but the man in the gale-hymn exists all right, and it’s Kolumkilli and no other, as I can tell you myself. How do I know? I know because I’ve seen him with my own eyes. When? Often. Do you remember that evening in March last year, for instance, when Father was bringing the sheep home? You remember he found one of them with its ears all cut to pieces? Well, I saw it done. I watched him with my own eyes as he came out of a squall of rain and went up to one of the sheep and did something to her. I didn’t know at the time who or what it was, but it was that. It was him.”

“Was it him?” asked the little boy stupidly.

“And the spring before last, when the sheep were dying off, it was because he did something to them first. Arid afterwards they died. It was Kolumkilli, Kolumkilli, who has been killed seven
times, but who has always come to life again and laid waste to the croft He has laid waste to the croft seven times, as anyone can tell you. I see him every day.”

“You’re a liar. You never see anyone,” cried the younger boy, beginning again to thump his brother, this time half-wailing.

“And do you know why I see him?” continued the other. Gripping little Nonni’s wrists, he held them fast as he whispered into his face: It’s because I’m dead too. Nonni, look at me, look at me closely, look into my eyes. You see a dead man.”

Two complementary antitheses, the eternal antitheses in human form; in a new autumn, at the onset of winter; dusk; the boundaries of world and unworld obliterated; a new moon behind the clouds.

A
DVENT.

Bjartur had gone out to the ewe-house. The snow was frozen hard and there was no prospect of pasture. Numb-fingered, the grandmother was fighting her eternal fight with winter’s stubborn fire, while huddled up in the smoke lay the children, sleeping or waking the same as last year and the year before, and either listening or not listening to the feeble crackle of the brushwood in the range; and before the grandmother had made her first fruitless attempt to rouse Asta Sollilja, little Nonni was making an attempt even more fruitless to apply his mind to something that might happen at least some time; somehow; somewhere; and, it was to be hoped, when someone or other was present. Last year they had all been living here in the shelter of one living agony, one painful breathing that was as silent now as the violin string of the poem; gone is the anguish that loves us all and gives life to the soul, gone the anguish that gives life even to the inanimate objects within the soul; the wooded cake-dish too has long been broken.

Then suddenly, long before the fire had begun to draw, longer still before the water was anywhere near bubbling, their father came raging up the stairs. He rushed across the room and, grabbing his slaughtering-knives, unwound them.

“Huh! It looks as if something else is to be butchered,” said the grandmother.

“Out you get, you kids,” he cried, hauling the children out of
bed with the gleaming steel in his hand. “You had better come with me into the huts and see the signs of what has happened so that you can answer your grandmother.”

“Oh, no one need wonder though things happen here,” replied the old woman. “It’s only what’s to be expected.’

Thin ranks in the stalls this winter. The fittest survive, the rubbish goes, as Olafur of Yztadale often said, hoping to comfort himself and others with a scientific doctrine that even foreigners have times without number reiterated in the newspapers. And they were fine sheep all right, lovely sheep, that stood at Bjartur of Summerhouses’ mangers that winter, and the crofter was, if not fonder of them in their fewness, at least as fond of them as he had been of the entire flock. His was not the custom to lament what he had lost. Some people do so, but Bjartur of Summerhouses thought that a man should console himself with what he had; or rather with what he had left, when he had lost what he had. Worms are not the worst calamity that can befall a moorland crofter; rather the secret powers that cannot be kept in check even with a good crop of hay. The old woman had been right when she had said there was worse to come. These secret powers were now at work.

That morning he had been going down the ladder in the ewe-house for hay, and what should he find there rammed in between the rungs? In this incredible place he had found one of his ewes, dead, trodden into the steps, stuffed like an old rag between the rungs, the spine crumpled, one of the horns twisted round the edge of the ladder. He gave vent to all the profanity that he could lay his tongue to at such short notice, pulled the ewe out of the rungs, laid her outside on a snowdrift, called the children. And now he stood looking down at the dead sheep, and the children stood looking down at it too, all wondering, in the grey light of the morning. It was frosty but dull. Some days seem strangely idiotic when one looks about one; they appear to be incapable of answering anything, whereas other days are intelligent and can provide the answer to everything. Gvendur thought the sheep had been trying to sneak into the hay-barn and had got itself fast “Fool,” said Helgi.

Young Nonni took hold of his eldest brother’s hand and released it again. Asta Sollilja’s teeth were chattering. “You don’t take after your mother,” said Bjartur; “she didn’t jump at trifles, like an old woman on a pot.” But she said she wasn’t afraid, for it was naughty to be afraid, she was only cold.

For two days the shadow of this atrocity brooded over the farm. There came visitors from the homesteads, harmless un-named people, but Bjartur was in anything but a pleasant mood and declared that it was with grudging hand that he offered such vermin coffee. Actually it was wrong to encourage such folk about the place with coffee, such folk should be given hogwash. They were almost certainly the descendants of criminals, especially sheep-stealers; never before had such misbegotten scum set foot on Summerhouses land. What had happened? “If you were sent here to ask that, my lads,” he replied, “you can say that you didn’t find out” So the visitors set off on their return home, as wise as when they had come.

It was on the third morning, when he was going into the lamb-house, that he bumped his head into something hanging from the roof. “Well, damn me,” he thought, and had begun swearing immediately. It was one of his finest lambs, with a halter round its neck. He cut it down and examined the cord closely, but could not recognize it as any of his. “No, this can’t be the work of man,” he thought—he could not imagine any human being so vile as to think of hanging a sheep. On inspecting the snow around the hut, he found it hard, frozen and icy, no tracks—and this had to happen to him, to Bjartur of Summerhouses of all people, a man who didn’t even believe in the soul, let alone devils and ghosts. But this time he made light of it in the croft, saying that he had had to loll a lamb that had eaten wool. No one, least of all his own children, should find any chink in the armour of scepticism that from the beginning had endowed him with greater moral fortitude than that possessed by the other men. Yet when he was alone, the events of the past few days continued to prey upon his mind. He would stand staring at the sheep, frowning and muttering to himself; damn and blast it, he thought for the hundredth time. He could not apply himself to anything, either inside or outside the croft “Find me a pair of clean oversocks,” he said at last to Asta Sollilja, “I think I'll just take a walk over to the homesteads.”

“The homesteads?”

“Yes,” he replied, “I think there may be rats in the sheep-cotes.” This he added by way of explanation, apologetically, like someone with cancer who pleads that it is only a touch of the colic.

“Rats?” asked the parish in wonder. “Whence come these rats? Surely they’re only mice?”

He found his neighbours Olafur of Yztadale and Einar of Undirhlith prophesying and taking snuff in the dusk, as is usual in Advent, so Bjartur also took snuff and prophesied. They said it
couldn’t be a rat Bjartur replied that in his view there was very little difference between a rat and a mouse. Einar said that his opinion was, naturally enough, of little account, but he had always understood that a rat was considered to be a rat, and a mouse a mouse, “and as long as I remember I’d better hand you these few verses that I wrote in the autumn, when the thick of the haymaking was over. I wrote a memorial for your first wife,” he added, “so I thought I might as well write one for the second one too. They were excellent women, inestimable women both; yes, inscrutable are the ways of the Lord.” Olafur, however, affirmed that if it was a mouse, and if it was attacking the sheep, it was an old man’s remedy that practical experience had established beyond question, though maybe it hadn’t got the length of the papers yet, that if it had eaten its way into the withers, for instance, and you could get your hand on it and rub it into the wound so that its in-sides were squeezed out and mixed with the wound, the wound was supposed to heal.

“You can keep your memorials,” was Bjartur’s reply to Einar. I’ve no time for hymns, either for the living or the dead, and never have had, as I thought you knew years ago. No hymns were written for the Jomsvildngs, and yet they fell with good fame; and if memory serves me right, Grettir was avenged all the way south in Miklagard, without any hymns, and yet he was considered the greatest man in Iceland. So I see no reason why, just because a couple of womenfolk have kicked the bucket, people should start writing religion about them. I’ve never been particularly fond of religion, or on the whole anything spiritual. But if either of you would like to sell me a tom-cat, I would consider it a good turn, and it can be as wild as it likes.”

He came home in the evening with a tom-cat in a sack and emptied it out on the floor, and what is that, inquired the children, and it’s a cat, said he, and there was joy in the evening, while the story swept the countryside like a change of weather and everyone said: the rat in Summerhouses. There by the hatchway stood the torn, grey-striped and suspicious and casting his eyes warily about, with huge dilated pupils and one paw lifted, mewing in perfect misery, yet showing no signs of losing his courage; cats may make the most mournful noise in all Iceland, but no one has ever heard of a cat giving in, cats don’t give in. “Just see that the bitch and he don’t get at each other,” said Bjartur. Outside under the wall he began to wonder whether he must not have been mad to have brought a cat back with him.