The Atom Station Read online

  “Now I shall see you home,” he said.

  “Would it not be more like it for me to help you with the twins?” I said.

  “Leave them to themselves,” he said.

  “Whose are these twins, if I may ask?” I said. “Aren’t they yours?”

  “They are my wife’s,” he said.

  “Well, anyway,” I said, “there’s no sense in letting them cry.”

  I tried as far as I could to console the poor things out there in the street in the drizzle in the middle of the night. A crowd of drunks gathered round us. After a little while the mites went to sleep. I wanted to go off on my own then, but it turned out that the god and I were going the same way westwards.

  When we had walked for a while along the road I could not restrain myself from asking, “Was that real money, or was it fake?”

  “There is no such thing as real money,” he said. “All money is fake. We gods spit on money.”

  “But the atom poet must surely be well off to be driving such a cat.”

  “All those who know how to steal are well off,” said the god. “All those who don’t know how to steal are badly off. The problem is to know how to steal.”

  I wanted to know where and how that little poet had stolen that huge car.

  “From whom but our master, Pliers?” said the god. “What, you haven’t heard of Pliers? Two Hundred Thousand Pliers? F.F.F.? The man who sits in New York and fakes the figures for the joint-stock company Snorredda and the rest? And wrote an article in the papers about the next world and built a church in the north?”

  “You must forgive me if I’m a little slow in the uptake,” I said. “I’m from the country.”

  “There’s no difficulty in understanding it,” he said. “F.F.F.: in English, the Federation of Fulminating Fish, New York; in Icelandic, the Figures-Faking-Federation. One button costs half an eyrir over there in the west, but you have a company in New York, the F.F.F., which sells you the button at two kronur and writes on the invoice: button, two kronur. You make a profit of four thousand per cent. After a month you’re a millionaire. You can understand that?”

  Suddenly we heard someone hailing us, and a man came running up behind us, bare-headed. It was the organist.

  “Sorry,” he said, out of breath with running. “I forgot something. I don’t suppose one of you could possibly lend me a krona?”

  The god found nothing in his pockets, but I had a krona in my coat-pocket and let the organist have it. He thanked me and apologized and said that he would repay me the next time: “You see, I need to buy myself fifty grams of boiled sweets tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he bade us goodnight and left.

  We walked on in silence for a while with the pram, and now it was past midnight. I was busy with my thoughts, trying to fathom the night’s events, until my companion said, “Don’t you think I’m rather different from other men, actually?”

  He was certainly very handsome and must undoubtedly have charmed many girls with those piercing eyes and that moist murderer’s smile, but somehow he had no effect on me at all; I scarcely even heard him when he was saying something.

  “Fortunately no two men are alike,” I said.

  “Yes, but don’t you feel an uncanny current coming from me?” he asked.

  “If you yourself feel that an uncanny current comes from you, isn’t that enough?” I said.

  “I have always felt that I was different from others,” he said. “I felt it when I was small. I felt that there was a soul in me. I saw the world from a height of many thousand metres. Even when I was thrashed it was of no concern to me; I could tuck Reykjavik under my arm and go away with it.”

  “It must be strange to have such notions,” I said. “I find it difficult to understand, for I have never had strange notions myself.”

  “It comes naturally to me,” he said. “Anything that others say is of no concern to me. I am above them all; above everything. I can’t help looking upon others with a smile.”

  “Just so,” I said.

  He went on, “I feel that the Godhead and I are one. I feel that I and Jesus and Mohammed and Bu … Buddhy are one.”

  “Can you prove it?” I asked.

  “I was born with it,” he said. “At first, for a long time, I thought that others had it too and that everyone was mad. I started to ask the other boys. But they didn’t understand me. Then it turned out that no one had it except me; and Benjamin; we two had it.”

  “Had what?” I asked.

  “A soul,” he said. “A divine, eternal soul; that means that God and I are one. You go out to steal, perhaps you kill someone; it doesn’t concern you, you are a soul, you are part of God. You are beaten up, but that doesn’t concern you either, especially if you are badly beaten up; or you land in a life-or-death fight; or the police cosh you on the head and then handcuff you—despite that, you are utterly happy and have no body. In the morning you appear in court, but your soul rests in God; you are thrown into jail, but you are aware of nothing, you understand nothing except Jesus and Mohammed and … what was the name of the third one again? You hear only this one voice which always whispers: ‘You are I and I am you.’ I am also utterly happy even though I am not beaten up, heaven and earth are open before me, nothing can hurt me, I understand everything and can do everything, own everything and may do everything.”

  “I feel,” I said, “that if you are what you say you are, you must show some token of it.” But he did not understand what I meant by a token, so I added in explanation: “Perform a miracle.”

  He said: “No man on earth can play a salted fish except me. If I wanted to I could go to Hollywood and become a millionaire.”

  I did not say a word, and he took my arm and pulled me towards him and looked at me. “Aren’t you at all amazed? Haven’t you fallen for me at all? Listen, come on up the back here with me, I want to tell you something.”

  I don’t know what sort of a fool I was, to go wandering with him behind a house; for of course before I knew it he had put me up against a wall and had started kissing me and trying to pull my skirt up, with the pram standing nearby. I was slow in getting my hands up to hit him, but as I gathered my wits I said, “No you don’t, my lad, even if you’re a treble god and your head plastered with brilliantine too.” Then I struck him, kicked him, and pushed him away.

  “You damned bitch,” he said. “Don’t you know I can murder you?”

  “Didn’t I know you were a murderer?” I said. “I knew it the moment I set eyes on you.”

  “Then you can stare into the barrel of this,” he said, suddenly flourishing something in front of my face; I could not see what it was in the dark, but it could well have been a revolver for all I knew.

  Someone in the house opened a window above us and asked what the devil we were up to, this was his ground, and told us to hop it or else he would call the police. The god Brilliantine thrust the revolver back into his pocket, if revolver it was, and wheeled the pram back to the road.

  “I was just testing you,” he said. “You can more or less imagine whether I meant anything, a penniless father of a family like me. Now I’ll see you home.”

  But then he suddenly remembered something: “Have I not gone and forgotten that damned salted fish? The wife’s sure to beat me if I don’t bring her some food for tomorrow.”

  He ran back through the gate to fetch this sustenance for his family, and I made off while he was looking for the fish.

  * Eldest son of Njal, in the medieval prose epic Njal’s Saga.

  * Jonas Hallgrimsson (1807–45), Iceland’s greatest Romantic poet, who inspired the nineteenth-century nationalist revival.

  * Icelandic currency is based on the kron (pl. kronur); the krona has 100 aurar (sing, eyrir). The official rate of exchange is now 105 kronur to the pound sterling.

  4. Persuasions

  When my mother became sixty she was given a hundred kronur. It then turned out that she could not recognize money. She had never seen money bef
ore. On the other hand, the day had never dawned since she was twelve years old that she had worked less than sixteen hours out of twenty-four during the winter, and eighteen during the summer, unless she were ill. So it was little wonder that I felt I must have been drunk the previous evening, or in a cinema, to see all that money torn up and then burned.

  Madam awoke for her chocolate at eleven o’clock and raised herself up in the huge big bed, glowing with happiness that there should be no justice in the world, and began to drink that sweet fatty brew and read the Conservative paper; for it was little wonder that the woman should think this a splendid world and want to conserve it. When I was on my way out again she cleared her throat delicately and told me to wait. She did nothing in haste, she drank up slowly and finished the article she was reading. When she had drunk and read her fill she got out of bed, slipped a dressing-gown on and sat down in front of the mirror with the back of her head towards me, and started to do herself up.

  “You are a young girl from the country,” she said.

  I did not say much to that.

  “Naturally it doesn’t concern me at all how my maids spend their nights,” she said. “But for the sake of the house—you understand?”

  “For the sake of the house?” I said.

  “Exactly, for the sake of the house,” she said. “A maid once brought lice into the house.”

  Then she turned round on the seat and looked me all over and smiled and said, “Cavaliers are not all the same.”

  “Indeed?” I said.

  “Very much so,” she said, still giving me that searching look, with a smile on her lips.

  “So now I know,” I said.

  “So now you know,” she said, and began to study her own reflection again. “My husband and I said nothing last year even though the maid brought in a Yank now and again; they get health inspections. We preferred that to having her sleeping out somewhere, for instance with some louse-ridden seaman.”

  Why did she say ‘my husband and I?’ Had they lain awake for the housemaid, clock in hand? Or was she reminding me of the difference between lying married in a moral bed at home and being an outcast? She had long scarlet-painted nails, and I felt sure she scratched her husband. Originally I had intended to tell her the whole story about my night out the previous evening, but now all at once I felt that I had no call to make any explanations to this woman.

  “But we will hang on to the hope,” she said, “that you haven’t landed up in one of those cells.”

  “Cells?”—I said I did not understand the word.

  “All the more dangerous for you,” she said. “Country girls who do not read the papers, and don’t understand what’s going on in the community, land up in a cell before they know of it.”

  “Really, I’m becoming almost curious,” I said.

  “No words can describe the bestiality of Communists,” she said.

  “I’ll soon be almost taking a fancy to bestiality if you go on talking like this,” I said.

  “No other girl in the whole country was in greater danger than I,” she said solemnly. “My father owns wholesale businesses and retail businesses, cinemas, trawlers, printing works, newspapers, fish-oil factories, and bone-meal factories; I could do anything and I was allowed to do anything; I could have gone to Paris any time I liked and taken part in whatever bestiality I fancied; I could even have become a Communist if I had wanted to, and fought to tear the shirt from my father’s back. But yet I did not land up in any bestiality. I met my man and with him have built my house. I have given birth to my children, my girl, and it has been my life’s work to bring them up for the community. No honorable woman regrets having given birth to her children and brought them up, instead of abandoning herself to bestiality.”

  VISITORS BY NIGHT

  That evening she told me to look my best, for there were some distinguished men from America coming to talk to her husband. She said that I was to open the door for them and invite them in, but warned me not to greet them or look at them and above all not to look affable, for foreigners misunderstood such things. If I knew no English it was safest just to be silent; and I should be particularly careful not to say “Please” when I brought them soda-water. “My husband will see to the whisky,” she said.

  I waited half-anxiously throughout the evening for these guests who were so high class that they could be soiled if an ordinary person greeted them. At last they arrived. Their car sped up to the front gate and was speeding away again almost at once, and they on the doorstep with a finger on the bell; I opened the door and let them in. One was a stout man in general’s uniform, the other a lanky man in civilian clothes. I had expected them not to look at me, much less dirty themselves by offering a greeting, but it was not like that at all: these men were kindliness itself and it was as if they had met an old girlfriend. They smiled genially and talked nineteen to the dozen; and one of them patted me on the back; there was no question of my being able to hang up their coats and headgear for them, they did that for themselves. The general, moreover, dug into his pocket for a handful of chewing gum and gave it to me, and the other, not to be outdone, gave me a packet of cigarettes. To tell the truth, I had hardly ever met more affable people, and yet so free and easy; so that I forgot all the stiff manners which had been impressed on me, and I smiled and was their friend. When I brought them the soda-water and glasses a moment later they were seated beside the master of the house with maps in front of them, both of Iceland and the world. The master stood up and came towards me and helped me to put down the tray and asked me to be at hand in case they should need anything with it, but they required nothing all evening. Near midnight their car came up to the gate and they rushed off; for some reason it was not considered a good idea to let their car pause for any length of time outside the house.

  Very few minutes passed before there was another visitor on the porch. This was the first time I had seen the Prime Minister, Madam’s brother, I knew only that he lived in the corner house a minute away down the street, but I recognized him from his pictures. He did not give me so much as a glance when I opened the door, but more or less barged through me into the house, still wearing his hat. When I took in a glass and cold soda-water for him, the master said in his very Icelandic way, “And this is our mountain-owl from the north.” But the Prime Minister lit himself a cigar, his shoulders hunched, with an expression on his face of pained constipation, full of assumed profundity, and made no reply to such trivialities.

  From midnight onwards more and more visitors filtered in; I suspected that the Prime Minister had been telephoning and rousing them from sleep. Some of them were the type who give the impression that the center of the universe is always where they themselves happen to be. They sat in the Doctor’s study and talked in low tones, and did not get drunk. I was told that I should go to bed, but far into the night I felt that the house was some sort of clandestine marketplace.

  ICELAND IN THE STREET. THE YOUTH CENTER

  At dusk next day I went to the baker’s shop on the corner opposite the Prime Minister’s house; there was always a pensive girl standing there behind the counter serving milk and bread, and sometimes there was a young man standing in front of it, talking to her. And suddenly there was unrest in this restful street, with loosely-knit groups of young people milling around in front of the Prime Minister’s house; something had happened, there was vehemence in their eyes, and no one was smiling. Curious passers-by paused on the pavement, and windows in the vicinity were thrown open. Under a lamp-post stood two policemen with black helmets and truncheons; and I don’t suppose it was burnt cork they had smeared around their eyes?

  “What’s this?” I said to a dignified-looking man who was hurrying along the street with a profound air. He replied tersely, “It’s the Communists,” and vanished. Now I began to get curious in earnest, and put the same question to someone in grubby overalls; he looked at me in amazement at first, then replied rather brusquely as he turned away, “The country is
to be sold.”

  “Who’s going to sell the country?” I said aloud to myself out in the middle of the street, and people looked at me in surprise. After a little while I heard the groups of young people start to shout at the Prime Minister’s house, “We don’t want to sell Iceland, we don’t want to sell Iceland.”

  Some young man climbed on to the wall in front of the house and began to harangue the Prime Minister’s windows, but the police walked over to him and told him to stop, since there was no one at home—the family had gone out into the country for the day. Little by little the youth stopped making his speech, but someone suggested we should sing Our fjord-riven fatherland, and this was done. Soon the youth contingents drifted away, heading down town, still singing; the people on the pavements dispersed, and the windows in the vicinity were closed again.

  The baker’s shop was still open, the girl still behind the counter and the young man in front of it; they were looking very serious, with large clear eyes, and did not notice when I said Good evening.

  “Was that the Communists?” I asked.

  “Huh?” said the girl, coming to with a start and glancing at the boy.

  “It was the Teachers’ Training College and the Young Men’s Christian Association,” said the boy.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  He asked whether I did not read the newspapers, but I laughed and said that I was from the north. Then he showed me an article in the evening paper which said that a request had been received from one of the Great Powers that Iceland should sell, lend, or give it her capital city, Reykjavik, otherwise named Smoky Bay, or some other bay equally suitable for attack or defense in an atomic war. I was speechless at such nonsense and asked in my innocence if this were not the same as everything else one read in newspapers: one of the first things I had been taught as a child was never to believe a single word that was written in newspapers.

  “Listen,” he said, “don’t you want to take part in a lottery in aid of the Youth Center? You can go round the world in an aeroplane.”