Independent People (43 page)

“Haven’t you got into your clothes yet, boy?”

“What have I to do?”

“What have you to do? You have to do what I damn well tell you. Down with you.”

He drove the boy downstairs before him while Finna stared with frantic eyes at her husband as he stood by the hatchway with a knife in each hand. Did she perhaps think, this worn-out woman who believed in the ultimate victory of good and who had made a whisk according to the teachings of Jesus Christ, that she could do anything to deflect that uncompromising will to conquer on which the nation’s freedom and independence have been built for a thousand years? Iceland’s thousand years. She threw her arms round her husband’s neck as he stood by the hatchway with a knife in either hand. “It’s the same as killing me, Gud-bjartur,” she moaned, “I can’t bear to see the children starving any longer,” and shook from head to foot with her weeping. One eternal flower with trembling tears. But with a jerk of the shoulders he threw her off, and she watched him with her frantic eyes as he disappeared down the stairs.

For a while there was nothing to be heard but wordless movements. He untied a rope’s end and made a halter; then the cow, more dead than alive, was prodded on to her feet, groaning with the exertion. He unfastened her stall-rope; she lowed piteously through the open croft door.

For Finna of Summerhouses, that silent, song-loving woman who had borne many children both for the independence of the country and for death, this moment marked the end of all things. She was good. She had friends among the elves. But her heart had long beaten in terror. Life? It was as if life at this moment once more sought its source. Her knees gave way and in perfect silence she sank into old Hallbera’s arms; like insignificant dust she drifted down upon the withered bosom of her mother.

Book Two

PART I
Hard Times

W
HEN
there is death in the spring, summer passes with a funeral, and the soul—the soul? What thoughts does the soul harbour, in a new autumn, at the onset of winter?

“And if it happened to be a long winter,” says the eldest boy as he sits on the paving in front of the croft in the dusk, “if there happened to come the sort of winter that keeps on stretching out and stretching out and spinning round and round in a circle from there on, senselessly, like a dog running in circles because somebody’s taken hold of its tail; and then keeps on spinning, round in a circle, on and on, always in the same circle, till at last it can’t stop, whatever anyone tries to do—what then?”

And answers his own question: “Nothing could happen any more.”

The youngest brother: “There couldn’t be such a long winter. Because if there was such a long winter—a hundred years, for instance—I for one would go up the home mountain.”

“What for?”

“To see if I could see the countries.”

“What countries?”

“The countries my mother told me about, before she died.”

“There aren’t any countries.”

“There are, I tell you. In the springtime I’ve often seen the waterfall blowing back over the top.”

The elder brother naturally did not deign to answer reasoning so inimical to all common sense, so obviously emanating from the world of wishes, but contented himself, after a pause, with continuing from where he had left off.

“But suppose there was a long funeral,” he said. “Suppose there was a funeral so long that the minister’s sermon kept going
of itself, like a leak, for instance, drop after drop, you know, and suppose it never ended. Suppose he said about a hundred and fifty amens one after another. Suppose he kept on saying amen for a hundred and fifty years. What then?”

“There couldn’t be such a long funeral. The folk would stand up and walk out.”

“But the coffin, you fathead. Would that stand up and walk out?”

The folk would take the coffin with them,” replied the youngest brother.

“Are you daft, man? Do you think anyone would have the nerve to pick the coffin up and take it away with them before the minister had said amen for the last time?”

“When my mother was buried, the minister went on talking and talking, I know; but he did stop in the end. When the minister begins to feel like a cup of coffee, he stops of his own accord. I always knew he would stop some time.”

The elder brother moved nearer still to the younger where they sat together on the paving and laid his hand on his shoulder like a protector. “You’re so little yet, Nonni lad, you can’t be expected to understand.”

“But I do understand,” objected young Nonni, and would not suffer his brother’s protecting hand on his shoulder. “I understand everything you understand, and more.”

“All right, then,” said the other, “since you’re so clever, what is a funeral?”

The youngest brother bethought himself awhile, because he was determined to give the right answer, then he bethought himself a little longer, and still without finding a completely satisfactory answer, and finally he bethought himself so much that he couldn’t for the life of him discover any sensible answer to this simple question, and so the elder brother had to answer it himself:

“A funeral is a funeral, you idiot,” he said.

And young Nonni was half surprised at himself that it should never have occurred to him, and it so obvious.

Then the elder brother continued: “And it never ends from then on. Though the people go away; though the minister says amen for the very last time; even though the waterfall runs backward over the mountain, as you say it did last spring, which actually isn’t true, because no waterfall could ever run backward over a mountain—it never, never ends from then on. And do you know why?”

“Don’t be so silly, you great fool.”

“It’s because the corpse never comes to life again.”

“Oh, why must you always be on top of me? Can’t you leave me alone?” and the younger brother moved away a little.

“Are you frightened?”

“No.”

The dusk over the paving grew heavier and heavier; freezing; dark banks of cloud on the horizon; maybe it was coming on for something, Grandmother was expecting a new moon.

“Listen, Nonni lad, would you like me to tell you something?”

“No,” said the little boy, “you needn’t bother.”

“If we sat here on the paving for a hundred years, maybe a hundred and fifty years, and it was beginning to get dark like it is now, and Father was always feeding the same sheep with the same hay from the same truss, and—”

“If Father was at home he would give you a good beating for sitting there blathering like idiots when you know you have to keep on doing something “—it was the middle brother, Gvendur, who had come stealing into the mystical conversation, like a thief in the night.

But incredible as it may seem, it was the brother who had understood least who took up the cudgels for the one who had talked the most, and demanded sharply of the middle brother: “Was anyone talking to you?” And the eldest added: “No one’s so daft as to talk to you.” Their brother Gvendur had never understood the soul, whereas they in private endlessly argued about its hopes and its despair. This difference in outlook united both of them against the other, who thought only of keeping on doing something.

“Oh?” replied Gvendur. “You ask Father and he’ll tell you that there’s more of a man in me than there is in the pair of you put together.”

“Who cares? It was us that Mother liked best.”

“I like that, when there wasn’t a sign of a tear in your eyes when she was buried; neither of you; and old Gunna of Myri said it was a disgrace to see you, your mother being buried and sitting there gaping at the minister like a couple of calves, she said.”

“So you think we would do Father the favour of blubbering and crying? No. Not likely. We don’t give in either; we are Joms-vikings too. It’s you that blubbers. We curse.”

Just when the quarrel was wanning up nicely, Asta Sollilja
showed her head in the doorway and peered through the dusk towards the road, wiping her long-fingered, water-bled hands on her rag of a skirt. “Boys, don’t you see anything of him yet?”

“Who do you mean?”

“Who do you think I mean? Show some sense for once in your lives.”

“Do you think he’s dead, or something?”

“For same! I don’t know what you’re coming to the way you think and speak about your father.”

Gvendur: “Yes, there’s nothing they’d like better than seeing him dead so that they needn’t keep on doing something and could lie like dogs out on the paving here chewing the rag all day.”

Young Nonni: “Oh, well go away and travel the whole world over when we feel like it, and leave the lot of you behind.”

Asta Sollilja: “Oh, for heaven’s sake, get away off into your world, then, and the sooner the better. There’s no one will envy you”—this she said because she knew the world from personal experience. She turned and went inside again.

So they were left sitting alone on the flags as before.

“She was blubbering too,” said Helgi at last, when the silence had grown too long.

Nonni: “Yes, and she still blubbers. She was blubbering the night before last. And she was blubbering again last night. No one would think of blubbering half as much about it as our Asta Sollilja.”

“Do you know what, Nonni? She has no right to be crying. She wasn’t even a relation of Mother’s. And therefore no relation of anybody else’s here.”

“Yes, no relation of anybody’s.”

“You can tell best from her eye, too. It’s a cockeye.”

“Yes, it’s a cockeye.”

“And though she thinks she’s big and can boss everybody about because her chest is beginning to swell on both sides like a woman’s, actually she isn’t big at all and she can’t boss anybody, as I saw again last night when she was getting into bed. But look out that she doesn’t hear you; she has a nasty habit of listening and giving you a thump when you’re least expecting it.”

“I don’t care. It was her fault that Mother died. It was her that got a coat when Mother couldn’t have a coat, and she was allowed home twice a day while Mother had to keep on working out in the fields though she was ill.”

“Nonni, do you remember when Mother fell into Grandma’s
arms and couldn’t stand up again? Do you remember how her whole body shook?”

Once more the little boy didn’t dare to answer.

The elder: “It was the day our Bukolla was killed.”

Silence.

“Nonni, have you ever noticed that some people are dead though they are alive? Haven’t you ever seen it in some of the folk’s eyes that come here? I see it right away; they only have to look at me and I see it; they don’t even have to look at me. That day that Mother fell into Grandma’s arms, that was the day she died; she was never alive after that. Don’t you remember how she looked at us that night?”

“Oh, shut up, Helgi. Why must you always be on top of me?”

“Everything that old Fritha prophesied a couple of years ago has come true, mad as she was. The tyranny of man,’ she said; ‘in this way hell kill you all. ”

It was the eldest brother who said this. Some people are gifted with a sense of the working of fate. Their perceptions incline all towards what is obscure, even what is most obscure: they sense even those terrifying dimensions that open behind life and behind the world, the sight of which God has otherwise spared mortal eyes. In the face of such powers, such vision, the younger brother stood ignorant and helpless, he who cherished a wish, wishes. “Helgi, I wish I was grown up,” he would say, for with his wishes, and the wishes with which his mother had endowed him, he tried to evade the decisions of fate and of that which lies behind fate. Yes, it would be nice to have wings and fly over destiny, like the birds that flew over the big fence at Utirauthsmyri; yes, even over the telephone; but however hard he tried, he was always like a farm animal, four-footed and wingless, and his elder brother was around him like a many-stranded fence, an enormous entanglement of barbed wire; he could spin out the dusk over the paving into an eternal amen, and though one shifted one’s seat on the paving and sat on the next flag, it availed nothing, for there came only an amen even more prolonged, an amen still more sepulchral.