From the Mouth of the Whale (14 page)

WHITE WHALE:
from this creature is derived the proverb that ‘the white whale seldom fails on the fishing grounds’, for it is considered very wise and can often be found near fishermen, although it hides itself from view and rarely breaks the surface. The story goes that once all the crew but one were asleep on a shark-fishing vessel when a white whale surfaced and stayed beside the ship. The vigilant man reacted quickly and struck it with a club. When the rest of the crew awoke, they warned that he could expect retaliation, and heeding their warning, the man took to the hills. He stayed away from the sea for thirteen years. But at the end of that time, believing the white whale to be dead, he returned to the same fishing ground. A white whale appeared at once and seized him alone from the ship, and neither fish nor man was ever seen again. This is the origin of the saying about a man with a long memory: ‘he holds a grudge longer than a white whale’.

The kitchen is the smallest room in the hut; it is easiest to keep warm in here – if one can call it easy, or warm, for that matter. To fit the bed in here I had to pull the frame off the doorways between hall and living room, and between kitchen and hall. I did not replace the frames: they went on the fire. This is poor workmanship, I know – the hut will fall in on my head – but I needed the warmth after all my efforts. The kitchen doorway proving still too narrow, I had to break the legs off the bed in order to manhandle it through at a slant, and once it was inside I found it impossible to replace them, so I burnt them too. And since the base of the bed frame proved too long for the kitchen, I had to prop it up against the wall to the right of the door and jam the other end hard against the stones of the hearth. As a result, my bed tilts rather, meaning either my head is halfway up the wall and my feet by the hearth, or else my feet are up and my head is down, so when the pot is on the fire either my head boils and my feet freeze, or vice versa. I am continually turning round in bed, spinning back and forth like a top, which does my rheumatism no good at all. Thus I huddle by the hearth like a stay-at-home hero, edited out of my own story, too thoroughly buried and forgotten to be called on to perform unexpected feats of courage in a far-off kingdom. Yet I proved a useful guest in the realm of that busy monarch, Christian IV. Last summer I returned from Denmark in triumph, bearing a royal writ signed by His Majesty’s own hand and witnessed by many long-tailed seals, in which he enjoined his subjects, my countrymen, to accede to his wishes and revoke the foolish, brutal sentence they had passed on me at their libertine court in the mud of Thingvellir in 1631. With his own hand he had attached to his letter a sincere recommendation by the most learned men in the Danish realm, who had subjected me to a whole day of the strictest interrogation under the guidance of their rector and most erudite principal, Ole Worm. That throng of luminaries had gathered in the University Council known as the Consistorium, which for the infallibility and fairness of its judgements is respected and admired by all the nobles of that land, and thus these most skilled practitioners in the art of learning confirmed that Jónas Pálmason of Strandir had done nothing more heinous than compile an anthology of harmless ancient lore, of uneven quality to be sure, as with any human endeavour, and most of it outmoded, but the man himself far from being a sorcerer was a curious and diligent scholar of the arts of the mind and hand, although unschooled. Clutching this fine testimonial and the writ signed by the king, I boarded ship at Copenhagen last spring, confident that once home on Icelandic soil I could expect justice to be restored. But my happiness proved short-lived, for among my fellow passengers were the emissaries of that slanderous forked tongue that had so softly licked the ears of certain men in Denmark the autumn before and had me thrown in gaol. Their ringleader was the nephew of Sheriff Ari Magnússon, easily recognised by the family trait, a birthmark at the corner of his left eye. These little vipers won over the young captain who had been commissioned to carry me home, tricking him into believing that I was to blame for the winds that stirred up the sea and drove huge waves at his ship. They worked so well on his simple soul that when we reached the coast of Iceland near Rosmhvalsnes and sea devils, ratfish, malign mermen and other monsters raised a six-day storm that prevented us from going either forward or back, the captain, in the belief that I was stirring up the sea by sorcery, ordered his crew to throw me overboard. But no sooner had they dragged me up on the gunwale than the storm abruptly subsided, so there was no need to drown me on that occasion. After this the poor merchant and his crew were more convinced than ever that I was a sorcerer, but so in awe were they of my powers that I was left in peace for the remaining two days of the voyage. Naturally, it did not occur to any of them that blessed Providence might have intervened to save them from killing an innocent man. The vipers, meanwhile, slithered in among the coils of rope on deck and lay low until we reached land. The merchant vessel had barely cast anchor in Hafnarfjord before the slander-mongers put out a boat and rowed to shore. This did not bode well. Before I knew it, the governor’s executioner was being ferried out to the ship, accompanied by a second man and a neck iron, with the obvious intention of arresting me. I fled the executioner by swarming up the mast, from where I yelled that I would rather jump in the sea than set foot in my native land in chains. At which point it transpired that those same crew members who had been most eager to throw me overboard now wished by all means to prevent me from drowning of my own accord. Taking courage from the presence of the executioner, they chased me up the mast, dragged me down on deck and held me fast while he clamped the iron round my neck. And so I went ashore chained like a savage dog, which was a fitting preliminary to the brutal treatment that my tormenters had in store for me: they clapped me in irons, tied me backwards on an ancient mare and made me ride in front so that whenever we approached a farm on our way to Thingvellir the dogs would get wind of me first and run barking and baying around the mare, to be followed by a pack of crowing urchins and adults who abused me with ignorant insults and cat calls. Yet none of them knew of what crime the alleged felon was accused. When we reached court, the judges flouted the royal request, ignored the University Council’s words and confirmed their former sentence of outlawry. What made it all the more poignant for me was that the judges called themselves king’s men, a number were divines and others professed themselves Christians, and many of them had on their travels to Copenhagen been generously received at the home of the hospitable Worm and continued to enjoy his kindness after their return to Iceland. I had with my own eyes seen how these false friends plagued the learned doctor with letters importuning him to acquire for them all kinds of perishable items, from aqua vitae to Sunday breeches, or to mention their name at court, or to provide medical advice for their own or their mothers-in-law’s haemorrhoids, their wives’ tooth-ache and their children’s constipation – all of which ailments stemmed from the attempts of these homespun ‘aristocrats’ to ape the lifestyle of court in the Icelandic countryside, with the attendant idleness, intemperance and indulgence in sweet-meats in the Danish fashion. It was not enough that they required him to turn a blind eye to the indolence of their sons who were supposed to be studying at the university – the funds that were wasted on paying for those oafish gallants’ carousing and unheard-of extravagance in clothes would have been better spent if the Church could have commandeered them for the herd of barefoot beggars who were daily turned away from the kitchen doors at the childhood homes of these finely tricked-out drunkards – no, as if that were not enough, the most importunate among these petitioners actually expected Master Worm to take the time to compose obituary poems for them, though to lighten his burden they themselves provided the praise. In return for his trouble they sent him old books, healing stones and natural objects that seldom arrived in one piece: maggoty bird skins, rotten skates, shells and eggs in a thousand fragments, and stones of invisibility, clumsily faked. Preceptor Worm and I used to make fun of all this rubbish when I visited him, laughing aloud, the university man and the poet. Yet he put up with this one-sided trade with the Icelanders because just occasionally they would by accident send him something of value, such as the gaming piece of whale ivory, pretty old and decently carved, which is not surprising since it was a gift from that worthy fellow Magnús Ólafsson of Laufás. Although Ole Worm’s treacherous correspondents included honest men, like my Laufás kinsmen, none of this better group was among the judges who treated me so scandalously for a second time. If anything, their hatred was even more venomous than before as they were smarting over the fact that the University Council’s verdict declared in effect that their judgement of me had been ill-founded and deserved to be thrown out. Moreover, my friendship with the learned doctor had filled their hearts with envy and fear that I would tell him the truth about them: like the prankster who pisses on the calves after being flogged for throwing stones at the cows, they chose to compound their disgrace. Thus they reinforced my sentence by adding a clause that until someone was willing to give me passage abroad, I was to languish in irons in the dungeon at the governor’s residence in Bessastadir, in the full knowledge that no captain would be found for that passage any more than last time and I would have to end my days in the black hole, a prospect they found sweet. There I relived my nightmare of six years earlier, though now there was no Brynjólfur Sveinsson with his gentle touch. To the accompaniment of mocking jeers from the crowd I was tied on the mare’s back again and the executioner was just about to strike her when his master, the governor’s deputy Jens Söffrinson, steward of Bessastadir, called for silence. He beseeched the court to show mercy and spare him the burden of housing an ugly customer like Jónas Pálmason. The deputy’s words led to a good deal of tittering and sniggering, with accompanying hand gestures, head-tossing and tutting. However, once everyone had remembered their hands and wiped the froth from their lips, they acceded to his request and back I was sent to this island.

And there she lay, in the patch of heather beside the path leading to our hut, a plaything of the wind and weather: my wife, Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, now nothing but a heap of black rags. Throwing down my belongings, I ran to her, fell on my knees and flung my arms around her, crying: ‘Sigga, Sigga!’ Only to recoil at once, for a chill emanated from her body like the draught from a passageway. I raced in the direction of the landing place, waving and calling for help, but the lad who had ferried me to the island was out of earshot by now, bending to his oars off the north bank, and either did not or feigned not to see me. Running back, I took Sigga in my arms again, pressing her against me, but under the shawls she was nothing but bones. I struck my brow with my clenched fist: my God, oh my God! The damned swine had betrayed her; no one had helped her with the autumn chores or bothered to bring her supplies before Christmas or cared to see how the old woman on Gullbjörn’s Island was coping. I consigned them all to hell. Her shawl was pulled down over her nose and nothing could be seen of her face but the pursed lips and stubborn chin. I drew the cloth gently back over her brow; the bluish-yellow flesh was icy cold yet seemed unblemished, apart from a sprig of flowering thyme that sat fast in her right cheek. But where were her eyes? Had the ravens been at her? I fumbled at her eyelids; thank God, there was substance under them; I had been misled by their black appearance. I wept. It began to rain, then stopped. I wept on: for now I had killed my Sigga too. Evening fell and the rain started again. I carried her into the hut, laid her body on the bed in the living room, knelt down beside her and begged her to forgive me for all the wrongs I had done her, both great and small: for the trials she had been forced to endure on account of my obsessive curiosity and delving; the collecting mania that had filled all our chests with unidentifiable berries, fool’s gold and deadly poisonous plants, and books in languages that neither of us could read, while a cold wind blew among the empty cooking pots; the endless gabbling of elves and trolls; the evening I spoke harshly to her in front of the children; the hare-brained schemes and worthless conceits my mind constantly spewed forth that were to cost us so dear; the prospect of fame that dragged us from place to place, constantly on the move, from one side of the country to the other, only to end up in a bottomless well of debt to the very people who were supposed to make me rich, with the result that our home had to be broken up yet again. I begged her forgiveness for the deplorable sufferings I had caused her through my meddling in affairs too deep for a poor poet, by which I had provoked the enmity of powerful men with whom I could not contend, failing to realise that they were jackals, not lions, that they would not be satisfied until they had severed my head from my body. The silence that followed was overwhelming, unbroken this time by the quick retort with which Sigrídur had in recent years responded to any discourse of mine, regardless of topic: