The Atom Station Read online

  “Or get a sewing machine,” added the girl.

  “I have no wish to go round the world,” I said. “And I can’t do anything with my hands.”

  “But you want a Youth Center,” said the boy.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “You’re from the north, I’m from the west, and there’s no Youth Center,” said the boy.

  “So what?” I asked.

  “Every cultural subject in the world is cultivated in a Youth Center,” he said. “The Icelandic nation should be the best educated and the noblest nation in the world. Capitalism says that Iceland’s youth should be like the wild ponies that are never given shelter. That is wrong. Iceland’s youth should have the largest Center in the country.”

  “What does it cost?” I asked.

  “Millions,” he said.

  “I have twenty-five kronur,” I said. I had been thinking of buying myself some underclothes.

  “Aren’t you with Bui Arland’s wife?” asked the girl. I said yes.

  “Don’t say another word,” said the boy. “The ones who have the Thieves’ Company in New York? They could build a Youth Center on their own with the money they have stolen from us with their fraudulent price-scales all through the war. Take about ten tickets.”

  “Would it not be better for me to support the church my father is going to build up north in Eystridale?” I asked.

  Up to this point they had both been earnest, but now all at once they were amused; they looked at one another and burst out laughing.

  STORM IN A SOUP PLATE

  During dinner I asked if anyone wanted to buy lottery tickets in aid of a Youth Center. Such a jest had never been heard at that table since the new maid announced that she was going to learn to play the harmonium. Soup spouted from the mouths of the two middle children. The eldest son, who was a full-time employee of Universal Suffering, Inc., contented himself with throwing me a look of mingled pity and nausea. Madam looked at me speechlessly at first, and then cleared her throat ominously; her husband woke up from his newspaper, looking tired as if he had not slept well, and said, “Huh?”

  “She’s selling tickets for a Youth Center,” said the little fat boy.

  The Doctor asked to see them and I showed him a ticket—on one side a picture of a Center and on the other a picture of the prizes offered.

  “Thank you,” he said, and returned the ticket to me with that tired smile of his; but I was glad to see a gleam in his spectacles and a glimpse of his white teeth. “We had this in Parliament,” he said. “And we also had it in the Town Council.”

  “Where did you get these chits, my dear, if I may ask?” said Madam.

  “I was out at the baker’s during the disturbance and met the girl there …”

  Madam interrupted me and said, “I’ve heard she’s a Communist.”

  “… There was a young man with her who asked if I would take a few tickets,” I said.

  “They’re Communists,” said Madam.

  “What happened out there during the disturbance, by the way?” asked her husband.

  “Oh, there wasn’t much of a disturbance really,” I said.

  “Yes, there was,” said Fatty. “It was the Communists.”

  “There was a small crowd of people who were saying, ‘We don’t want to sell the country.’ I was told that it was the Teachers’ Training College and the Christian Association.”

  Madam said, “Oh, is that so, indeed? That settles it, then! Always when they spread the word that it was someone else you can be sure that it was them. They know how to urge fools on. Teachers’ Training College and the Christian Association, indeed! Why not the Woman’s Emancipation Society and the China Mission? I advise you to rid yourself of these tickets as quickly as you can. This Youth Center—it’s a cell-building.”

  “Let me see them,” said little Fatty, “Let me have them.”

  I was standing behind the chair of the elder daughter of the house; and before I knew it she dug her nails fiercely into my legs just behind the knee and darted her icy-hot look at me, without giving me the least idea whether she was in favor of a Youth Center or not.

  In all innocence, I gave the boy a ticket.

  “All of them,” he said.

  But just as he was reaching out for them a hand glittering with diamonds and bracelets came swooping through the air and snatched them from me. It was Madam. In a twinkling she had torn them to pieces, across and down, and tossed the shreds behind her through the open folding doors into the next room. With this done she looked at me coldly and said without endearments, “If you start any Communist propaganda in this house again I shall dismiss you.”

  Then she took a spoonful of soup.

  It was the elder son’s habit to smoke between courses. He brought out a cigarette; he was frowning heavily, his mouth pulled down at the corners in infinite disgust after the soup.

  “There’s no point in getting excited, Mother,” he said. “Fascism has been tried, and it didn’t work. Communism will conquer the world. Everyone knows that. Rien a faire.”

  She straightened in her chair, looked directly at him, and said to him with icy porcelain severity, “My boy, the time has come to send you to an asylum.”

  “Did I create this world you brought me into?” asked the boy dispassionately, and went on smoking.

  “And it’s high time I told you a few more things, my child,” she began, working herself up to eagle heights, so that her husband woke up again from his newspaper, smiled, and laid his palm on the back of her hand. This distracted her from her course, and she turned on him instead. “You smile!” she said. “Yes, you probably have a very nice smile, but unfortunately it’s a little out of place here.”

  “My dearest Dulla,” said her husband, imploringly.

  I left the dining-room and did not stop when I reached the kitchen; I walked straight up to my room in the middle of the family’s soup course and started thinking. Was it not best for me to pack up and go? But when I began to gather up my few possessions I remembered that I had nowhere definite to stay the night if I left; and no place for the harmonium. How much can one sacrifice for the sake of one’s pride? Everything, of course—if one is proud enough. There is not anything as wretched as letting oneself be trampled upon, except spending the night out of doors. Then the cook was standing in the doorway, saying, In the name of Jesus, was I not going to hurry in with the gratin?

  When I came back to the dining-room, having recovered from my anger, the family had finished with the soup and were being strenuously silent. The Doctor was reading his paper again. I cleared the dishes and brought in the next course and went out. The lottery tickets for the Youth Center lay on the floor, and I left them there.

  In the evening the house was silent. The middle children went out to stand at the corner of the house with the Prime Minister’s children and other better-class offspring to jeer at the passers-by; it was a game they could enjoy for hours at a time in the evenings. The eldest son vanished to some unknown destination. The cook’s God-fearing elf-child had two mechanical dolls that could wet their nappies, known as piddle-dolls, which the little darling had to tend carefully before she began on her Jesus-chants. Madam had gone out to a party to play the kind of whist they call bridge, in which the players tell each other what they have in their hands before the first card is led. And I had long since cooled down.

  When I had been sitting for a good while at the harmonium, struggling with these big disobedient fingers of mine that are so ignorant of any art, I finally came to and noticed that my door was open and that there was a man standing in the doorway. I thought at first I had begun to have hallucinations. He was looking at me with his eyes puckered up a little, and was polishing his spectacles; and smiling. First I went cold, then I went hot. I stood up but there was no strength in my knees; a mist swam before my eyes. And I swear a sacred oath this had never happened to me before.

  “I heard music,” he said.

  “You should
n’t make fun of …”

  He asked who my teacher was, and I mentioned the organist’s ordinary-sounding name.

  “Has he become an organist too now?” said Doctor Bui Arland. “Yes, well, why not? He was always far ahead of the rest of us; so far ahead that he got into the habit of sleeping all day so as not to have to look upon this stupid criminal society.”

  “He grows flowers,” I said.

  “That’s nice,” said the Doctor. “I wish I grew flowers. While I was reading newspapers, he was reading the Italian Renaissance authors in the original. I can remember him saying that he was going to save the war news for himself until, after twenty years, it would be possible to read about the whole war in two minutes in an encyclopedia. I am glad he grows flowers. Do you think I should send my children to him? Do you think he could make something out of them?”

  “You’re asking a big question,” I said. “You don’t seem to realize that I am the most stupid thing there is in the whole of Iceland, and that I don’t have opinions about anything—least of all in your hearing.”

  “You are fully earthed,” he said, and smiled. “May I see your hand?” And when he had studied it he said, “A large, well-shaped hand.”

  And I was feeling as if I had been roasted, drenched in sweat all over, that he should study my hand.

  He slipped his spectacles back on to his nose with a gesture of long practice. Then he reached into his pocket and brought out a hundred-kronur note and gave it to me. “Your lottery tickets,” he said.

  “They only cost fifty kronur,” I said, “and I haven’t any change.”

  “You can get change later,” he said.

  “I don’t accept money for nothing,” I said.

  “Don’t be afraid, everyone pays as little as he can get away with,” he said. “It is a natural law; I am a political economist.”

  “Yes, but then I shall have to get you another ten lottery tickets,” I said.

  “But preferably don’t give me them over the soup,” he said, and smiled, and left, and closed the door behind him.

  5. At my organist’s

  Judging by pictures on postcards, one would think that great musicians had been gods, not men. But now I learned that the world’s greatest composers have been the most wretched outcasts of humanity. Schubert was considered by good-class people in Vienna nothing but an uneducated boy who did not even know anything about music; and he revenged himself, indeed, by composing a cheap tune like Ave Maria that even country people in the north know; and died of malnutrition at about the age of thirty. Beethoven did not even get a rudimentary petit-bourgeois education; he could only just use a pen, no better than a farm hand; and he wrote a ludicrous letter which is called his Testament. He fell in love with a few countesses, rather like an old hack falling for stud-mares. In the eyes of good-class people in Vienna he was first and foremost just a deaf eccentric, badly dressed and dirty, not fit for decent company. But these two outcasts stood high in society compared with some others of the world’s greatest composers. Many of them were employed by comic-opera kings and were kept to play for them while they were feeding—including Johann Sebastian Bach, who, however, wasted even more years quarrelling with the bourgeois riffraff of Leipzig. Haydn, the world’s greatest composer of his time, was frequently beaten by the Esterhazy family, for whom he was a workman for thirty years; he was not even allowed to eat at their table. Mozart, the man who most nearly reached the celestial heights, stood lower in the hierarchy of society than the lap-dogs of the petty kings and bishop-oafs who used him as a drudge. When he died of misery and wretchedness in the prime of life, not a living creature followed his coffin to the grave except for one mongrel; people made the excuse that it had been raining; some said they had had influenza.

  By now I was asking for the dance of the fire-worshippers: wild men beating drums at night around a pyre out in the rain … and suddenly some instrument breaking into a four-note melody with a searing quality that went right through me; and a few days later, in the middle of my work, I would wake to a sudden sweet stab of longing for that wild, brief, blazing melody.

  And one day I noticed that there was some hair after all on the head of the cloven girl I had thought bald—light-blue hair, or rather green, thick and greasy. I had not previously noticed that head and hair were painted separately; well, thank goodness all her hair was there for certain—only separated from the head by a white line.

  Queen Cleopatra, barefoot, wearing silk panties and a fur coat, with a cigarette in her mouth and covered with makeup, went gliding into the kitchen from the room of the bedridden mother of the house.

  “I’m beginning to want that coffee,” she said.

  The organist: “Cleopatra, you own the whole of Brazil, and Turkey, and Java”—and I cannot remember what other coffee-lands he listed.

  “Yes, but she hasn’t got eleven fingers,” I said, and looked at the picture on the wall.

  “Who knows,” said the organist, “but what the eleventh finger is the very finger she lacks even though she deserves to have it?”

  “A picture is still a picture,” I said.

  “And nothing else,” he said. “The other day I saw a photograph of a typist, and she has thirty-five fingers.”

  “Shall I go into the kitchen and count Cleopatra’s fingers?” I said.

  He said, “A picture is not a girl, even though it is the picture of a girl. One can even say that the more closely a picture resembles a girl, so much the further it is from being a girl. Everyone wants to sleep with a girl, but no one wants to sleep with the image of a girl. Even an exact wax model of Cleopatra has no blood-stream, and no vagina. You do not like the eleventh finger, but now I shall tell you something: the eleventh finger takes the place of these two things.”

  When he had said this he looked at me and laughed. Then he leaned over to me and whispered, “Now I am going to let you into the most remarkable secret of all: the image of Cleopatra that resembles her more closely than all other images, namely the person who has just walked through this room and into the kitchen to make some coffee—she of course has a blood-stream and many other nice things, but even so, she is furthest of all from being Cleopatra. Nothing tells one less about Cleopatra than this apparently haphazard but yet logical biochemical synthesis. Even the man who celebrates a silver wedding anniversary with her after twenty-five years of marriage will not know more about her than the one who lay with her for half an hour, or than you who see her for a few seconds crossing a room; the fact is, she is not even a likeness of herself. And this is what the artist knows; and that is why he paints her with eleven fingers.”

  THE PICTURES IN THE HOUSE

  Next day I stood in the middle of the room beside two domestic animals—an electric floor polisher and a vacuum cleaner—and began to study the pictures in the house. I had often looked at these ten- or even twenty-centimeter mountains which seemed to have been made sometimes of porridge, sometimes of bluish sago pudding, sometimes a mash of curds—sometimes even like an upturned bowl with Eiriks Glacier underneath; and I had never been able to understand where I was meant to be placed, because anyone who comes from the north and has lived opposite a mountain cannot understand a mountain in a picture in the south.

  In this house there hung, so to speak, mountains and mountains and yet more mountains, mountains with glacial caps, mountains by the sea, ravines in mountains, lava below mountains, birds in front of mountains; and still more mountains; until finally these wastelands had the effect of a total flight from habitation, almost a denial of human life. I would not dream of trying to argue that this was not art, especially since I do not have the faintest idea what art is; but if this was art, it was first and foremost the art of those who had sinned against humanity and fled into the wilderness, the art of outlaws. Quite apart from how debased Nature becomes in a picture, nothing seems to me to express so much contempt for Nature as a painting of Nature. I touched the waterfall and did not get wet, and there was no so
und of cascade; over there was a little white cloud, standing still instead of breaking up; and if I sniffed that mountain slope I bumped my nose against a congealed mass and found only a smell of chemicals, at best a whiff of linseed oil; and where were the birds? And the flies? And the sun, so that one’s eyes were dazzled? Or the mist, so that one only saw a faint glimmer of the nearest willow shrub? Yes, certainly this was meant to be a farmhouse, but where, pray, was the smell of the cow dung? What is the point of making a picture which is meant to be like Nature, when everyone knows that this is the one thing that a picture cannot be and should not be and must not be? Who thought up the theory that Nature is a matter of sight alone? Those who know Nature hear it rather than see it, feel it rather than hear it; smell it, good heavens, yes—but first and foremost eat it. Certainly Nature is in front of us, and behind us; Nature is under and over us, yes, and in us; but most particularly it exists in time, always changing and always passing, never the same; and never in a rectangular frame.

  A farmhouse with a turf roof is not what it looks like from a distance some sunshine night in July; nothing is further from being a farmhouse. I had spent all my childhood in a farm opposite a mountain; it would be no use for anyone who wanted to paint my farm to start from the turf roof, he would have to start from the inside and not the outside, start from the minds of those who lived there. And a bird, I also know what a bird is. Oh, those dear divine birds! It may well be that this picture of a bird cost many thousands of kronur, but, may I ask, could any honorable person, or any person who appreciates birds at all, justify to his own conscience painting a bird sitting on a stone for all eternity, motionless as a convicted criminal or a country person posing for the photographer at Krok? For a bird is first and foremost movement; the sky is part of a bird, or rather, the air and the bird are one; a long journey in a straight line into space, that is a bird; and heat, for a bird is warmer than a man and has a quicker heartbeat, and is happier besides, as one can hear from its call—for there is no sound like the chirp of a bird and it is not a bird at all if it does not chirp. This soundless bird on a stone, this picture of no movement, no long journey in a straight line, might have been meant to represent the dead stuffed bird that stood on top of a cabinet in our pastor’s house at home; or the tin birds one could buy at Krok when I was small. But a picture of a dead bird is not that of a bird, but of death; stuffed death; tin death.