Independent People (24 page)

But tonight he felt he was no longer in any danger.

The light in the wall lamp had been quenched for economy’s sake, but there was a glimmer from the little dip flickering on the shelf above the old woman’s bed. Mother and daughter sat for a long time together, murmuring in the gleam from the little dip. From down below, a sheep could be heard belching occasionally, or Blesi in his narrow stall would shift his feet and give a little snort into the manger. The dog, lying against the wall under the range, would rise now and then to scratch itself, its hind leg thumping the wall in the process, yawn, curl up again. From the bed on the other side was heard the child’s shallow breathing, and an occasional whimper as if it were going to cry. However, it did not start crying, but fell asleep again.

At last the whispering was over and Finna came to take off her clothes. He heard her unbutton her coat and step out of her skirt. She drew a tightly fitting underskirt over her head with some difficulty. Then she got into bed beside the baby and removed the rest of her clothes beneath the coverlet. He heard her unfasten two or three buttons more, then wriggle out of her underclothes. She stretched herself out and scratched herself here and there, yawning sleepily and noisily.

The old woman still remained sitting on the edge of her bed in the glimmer from the dip, with her elbows in her lap now and a finger between her toothless gums. She was gazing down the hatchway, muttering something occasionally. Twice she went forward to the hatchway, cried shame on something and spat. On the second occasion she stood rocking herself backwards and forwards for a while, staring down and mumbling:

When she had recited this holy old prayer she crossed herself and said: “We give ourselves all into God’s hands and good night” Then she closed the trapdoor and went to bed. And with that they all composed themselves for sleep.

PART II
Free of Debt

S
LOWLY,
slowly winter day opens his arctic eye.

From the moment when he gives his first drowsy blink to the time when his leaden lids have finally opened wide, there passes not merely hour after hour; no, age follows age through the immeasurable expanses of the morning, world follows world, as in the visions of a blind man; reality follows reality and is no more—the light grows brighter. So distant is winter day on his own morning. Even his morning is distant from itself. The first faint gleam on the horizon and the full brightness on the window at breakfast-time are like two different beginnings, two starting-points. And since at dawn even his morning is distant, what must his evening be? Forenoon, noon, and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up; evening as remote and unreal as death, which the youngest son was told about yesterday, death which takes little children away from their mothers and makes the minister bury them in the Bailiff’s garden, death from which no one returns, as in grandmother’s stories, death which will call for you, too, when you have grown so old that you have become a child again.

“Is it only little babies that die, then?” he had asked.

Why had he asked?

It was because yesterday his father had gone across to the homesteads with the little baby that had died. He had carried it away in a box on his back to have it buried by the minister and the Bailiff. The minister would dig a hole in the Bailiff’s churchyard and sing a song.

“Shall I ever be a little baby again?” asked the seven-year-old boy.

And his mother, who had sung him remarkable songs and told
him all about foreign countries, answered weakly from the sickbed on which she was lying:

“When anyone grows very old he becomes like a little baby again.”

“And dies?” asked the boy.

It was a string in his breast that snapped, one of those delicate childhood strings which break before one has had time to realize that they are capable of sounding; and these strings sound no more; henceforth they are only a memory of incredible days.

“We all die. Later in the day he had broached the subject again, this time with his grandmother:

“I know somebody who’ll never die,” he said.

“Really, my pet?” she inquired, peering at him down her nose with her head tilted to one side, as was her fashion when she was looking at anyone. “And who might he be?”

“My father,” replied the boy resolutely. Yet he was not absolutely certain whether he might not be making a mistake, for he kept on gazing at his grandmother with questioning eyes.

“Oh, he’ll die, he’ll die all right,” snorted the old woman remorselessly, almost gloatingly, and blew sharply down her nose.

This answer only roused the boy’s stubbornness, and he asked:

“Granny, will the pot-stick ever die?”

“That’ll do,” snapped the old woman, as if she thought he was making fun of her.

“But, Granny, what about the black pan? Will that ever die?”

“Nonsense, child,” she retorted. “How can anything die when it’s dead already.”

“But the pot-stick and the pan aren’t dead,” said the little boy. “I know they aren’t dead. When I wake up in the morning I often hear them talking together.”

How foolish of him: there he had gone and blurted out a secret known only to himself, for he alone had discovered that, during what was perhaps the most remarkable of all the morning’s expanses of time, the pots and pans and other kitchen utensils changed their shapes and became men and women. Early in the morning, when he lay awake long before the others, he could hear them talking away to one another with the grave composure and the weighty vocabulary that is proper to cooking utensils alone. Nor was it merely by chance that he had referred to the pot-stick first, for the pot-stick, after all, is a sort of aristocrat among utensils; rarely used, and then as a rule for meat soup,
that most appetizing of dishes, it spends most of its time hanging on the wall in spotless cleanliness and decorative idleness. Once it is taken down, however, the part it plays in the pot is most noteworthy. The boy therefore regarded the pot-stick with particular respect, and felt there was no one he could liken it to but the Bailiff’s wife. The black pot, which was so often full to the brim and sometimes had a burnt crust at the bottom and a lot of soot underneath, the black pot was no other than the Bailiff of Myri, whose mouth was always crammed with tobacco. He could easily be seen simmering at times, and it was quite certain that there was a fire in his inside and that he had a Bailiff’s wife to stir him up so that he didn’t boil over on official occasions. The other cooking things were all the same: in the dark they changed into men and women, some rich and important, others poor and of little account. The knives were ugly peasants whom he loathed and feared, the cups dumpy young women with roses on their aprons who made the boy feel shy with their roses; and at meals in the bright light of day he avoided touching these people, avoided giving them so much as a sidelong glance even, lest they read in his face all that he knew of their adventures. By night they were complacent and full of self-assertion, by day slatternly and soiled, abject as sheepish visitors who sit and sniff and dare not move—he who knew so much about them in the liberty of their night felt sorry for them in the bondage of their day.

But one there was among them independent of night and day, of the freedom of the dark, of the bondage of the light; one that eclipsed the others with its splendour and made them look like so much trash. Such was the value attached to it that it was kept stored away at the bottom of the clothes-chest. The children saw it only if important visitors came at Christmas or on Summer Day, and even then they were never allowed to touch it, so precious was it. It was mother’s cake-dish—a gift from the Bailiff of Myri’s wife. It was the most beautiful dish in the whole world. On it there was a picture of a marvellous house half-hidden by flowering bushes. Leading up to the house lay a smooth winding path with green grass and smiling bushes on either side. And who was that standing on the path in a blue dress and a white hat, with flowers in her hand and the sun in her heart? He knew very well who it was, but he had never told a soul. It was the Bailiff’s daughter, Audur, who had gone abroad in the autumn and who would
return in the spring like a bird. And the house half-hidden by flowers was Audur’s house in far-off countries. Some day little Nonni would no longer be a little boy who slept in his grandmother’s bed.

For a while he was silent as he sat beside her on the bed, busy with his knitting. But presently he could contain himself no longer.

“I know something,” he said, letting the needles droop as he gazed at his grandmother. “I bet you I know something that can never, never die.”

“Oh?”

“Never,” he repeated.

“Well, tell me what it is then, child. Out with it.”

“No,” he said with great resolution. “I’m never going to tell a soul.”

Taking the wool with his right index finger, he looped it ready for the next stitch. It might be that now and then he did let out a secret or two, but one thing was above life and death, above the freedom of the dark, the humiliation of the day. What it was not a soul would ever get to know. The secret of mother’s cake-dish.

There are few things that fill the soul of man with greater disappointment than to wake up when everybody else is asleep, especially if it happens to be very early in the morning. Not before one is awake does one realize how far one’s dreams have transcended reality. Often the youngest son would dream of a dime, a quarter, even two quarters, but he would lose it all as soon as he woke up. He would drink meat soup, not from a bowl, but from a tub, and eat meat so fat that the grease trickled down to his elbows. He would eat huge slices of Christmas cake from a cake-dish without horizon, slices so thick that he could pick raisins out of them easily as big as a man’s eye. Such is the benefit that the human soul has from its dreams. But however hard he tried he could never fall asleep again to these delicacies, nor to the coins he had had in his hands, which were always of silver, like the money his father paid the Bailiff on the land, and which in his dream he had been going to spend on raisins and biscuits, as well as a pocket-knife and some string.

He was usually very hungry when he woke up, and would lie yearning for his dream like a dog for a bone it had lost, but he had been strictly forbidden to wake anyone up and ask for bread; otherwise his father would tie him up in the outhouse with the Reverend Gudmundur and his brother ram, who sometimes fought
the whole night through. This was a most unpleasant prospect, for no animal scared him half as much as the Reverend Gudmundur. This ram, which hated the sight of human beings, had a nasty trick of chasing the boy all the way into his dreams and through his dreams, and the boy would run as hard as he could, from one dream into another, fleeing in terror from this monster, which in spite of his father’s faith in its pedigree was as preternatural in its hideousness as the Christmas cake and the meat soup in their splendour. Thus there may also be an element of danger in a person’s dreams.

To forget how hungry he was he would often settle down to listen to the pots and pans holding their nightly meeting in the cupboard and on the shelves. What did they talk about, then? It is not so very easy for a little boy to follow the thread of adult conversation—they talked like the people of the district round about, everyone competing with everyone else to get a word in somehow, so as to attract at least a little attention, and everyone grumbling about parish paupers and the burdens of old folk, who never seemed to die off at a respectable age. And the taxes these days, man alive! They complained bitterly of the extravagant habits of young women, the migration of youth to the towns, the difficult times, the high price of corn, the new worm that was attacking the sheep in place of the tapeworm. The pot-stick held that all these evils were due to the lack of music. It was strange how grown-up these kitchen things could be in the expressions they used. What impressed the boy most was not the powers of logical thought they showed in their conversation, but the knowledge, the experience, and the richness of vocabulary it revealed—names of distant places, marriages in other parts of the country, crafty verse, swear words, news from town. Sometimes they even fell out with one another. Someone would say that the harmonium in the church was not good enough, or that the merchant in Vik was better to deal with than the merchant in Fjord; some of them would have illegitimate children, others did not believe in national independence, while there were even those who went so far as to say that the best thing to do was to fill the pot with horse droppings. Some of them wanted to write poetry like this: