Iceland's Bell (34 page)

3

Around midmorning, when the vegetable seller behind the house had grown hoarse from shouting and the brushmaker had become quite drunk and the knackerish knife-grinder was busy displaying his grindstone at people’s doors, a certain man came strolling down the streets of Copenhagen. He was wearing his tattered walking-jacket, an aged top hat, and shriveled shoes, and he loped along with a peculiarly rhythmed, austere stride. His facial expression was so remote from its environs that the city and its spires, its eddies of humanity, and its contemporaneity all seemed to have disappeared within it. He looked upon neither the dead nor the living, so insignificant and hallucinatory to him was this city that had become his home only by chance.

“There goes that crazy Herr Grindevigen,” whispered his neighbors to one another as he passed by.

The gentleman stopped at a side street near the canal and looked around to make sure he was headed in the right direction, then he passed through a gate, traversed a courtyard, and followed a dim passageway until he found at the ground floor of a house the door he was looking for, which he rapped on several times. For a long time not a sound of life emerged from within, but the Grindavíkian continued knocking on the door and trying to open it, until he lost his patience and shouted through the keyhole:

“You can go on pretending to be asleep, you fox, but I know you’re awake!”

The house’s occupant wasted no time in opening the door after hearing this voice. It was drab within and the strong stenches of decay and fermentation came wafting through the doorway.

“What, shark meat, it can’t be anything but,” said the Grindavíkian, and he snorted and rubbed his nose, thinking he had caught a whiff of the fragrance of the most succulent of Icelandic delicacies, which is eaten only after it’s been buried in the ground for twelve years, or even better, for thirteen.

The master of the house stood in the doorway in a filthy nightshirt, and he pulled the visitor in through the threshold and kissed him carefully, then spat. The scholar from Grindavík wiped away the kiss with his coat sleeve and walked inside without removing his top hat. His host struck a match and lit a candle, barely illuminating the room. In one corner was a cot covered with an Icelandic sheepskin, before it a large chamber pot. One of the distinguishing features of this particular householder was that he never left his belongings out for all to see, but kept them packed up in sacks and bags. On the floor was a puddle so large that one could just as well call it a flood, and at first the Grindavíkian suspected that its source was the chamber pot. However, when he looked more closely in the half-light he saw that this was not the case—its source was actually closer to the opposite wall, beneath an oaken table upon which lay the drenched body of a drowned man, water dripping from him everywhere, especially from both ends. Off one end of the tabletop hung the man’s head and its shock of wet hair, off the other dangled his feet, in boots that had apparently been full to the brim when the corpse was dragged here. No matter how much the visitor had previously suffered similar outrages, and no matter what sort of relentless sermon he had conjured up to admonish Jón Marteinsson, it went now as it always did: the gallows bird had caught him by surprise.

“Wha-what are you doing with this corpse?” asked Grindvicensis, instinctively removing his top hat out of respect for the dead.

Jón Marteinsson laid a finger to his lips to signal that they should speak quietly, then carefully locked the doors.

“I’m planning to eat it,” he whispered.

The scholar from Grindavík shuddered and stared tremblingly at the householder.

“And here I thought it was shark, only to find it’s corpse-rot,” he said, and he snorted loudly as his trembling increased with agitation. “You must open your doors!”

“Don’t carry on that way, my boy,” said Jón Marteinsson. “Do you think it’s that poor devil’s corpse that smells, when I dragged him up just this morning at dawn—still warm? Quite the contrary: if you smell something, it’s probably my sweaty feet.”

“What do you think you’re doing pulling dead people out of the canal?” asked the visitor.

“Aw, it was so pitiful to see him lying there dead—he’s one of our countrymen,” said Jón Marteinsson, and he lay back down upon his cot. “To tell you the truth, I hate being wakened so early—it makes my flesh crawl. What do you want?”

“Are you telling me that this is our countryman? Do you think you can just steal dead men and go right back to sleep?”

“Take him then,” said Jón Marteinsson. “Take him with you if you want. Take him wherever you want. Take him to the devil.”

Grindvicensis took the candle, approached the corpse, and held the light up to it. It was of a tall, thin man, middle-aged and graying, wearing decently tailored clothing and good boots. The corpse’s face had a feeble expression like a sailor drowned at sea, the eyelids half-open in the head as it hung there off the end of the table, revealing only the whites of its eyes. Water dripped steadily from the corpse’s nose and mouth onto the floor.

The Grindavíkian gaped several times, snorted, rubbed his nose with the index finger of his free hand and scratched his left calf with his right instep, then his right calf with his left instep.

“Magnús from Bræðratunga,” he said. “How did he wind up here dead?”

“This man is hosting a banquet, can’t you see that?” said Jón Marteinsson. “He won his lawsuit yesterday, the poor beggar, and went to a tavern to celebrate.”

“Good, good,” said the gaping Grindavíkian. “You’ve drowned him.”

“I helped him win his lawsuit in life, and dragged him up in death,” said Jón Marteinsson. “Can anyone do more for his countryman?”

“A true devil is fiendish to all, including those whom he pretends to help,” said the Grindavíkian. “First you pushed him in.”

“You don’t say,” said Jón Marteinsson. “And it was about time I did poor Árni a little favor. Now Snæfríður Björnsdóttir is a widow, so Árni can divorce Gilitrutt* and marry Snæfríður and they can go live in Bræðratunga, which she now lawfully inherits—all through my agency.”

“Damn you, double damn you, and damn you forever for throwing your lot in with the Danes in a lawsuit against your countryman and patron, and for getting him convicted, which will surely make him the laughingstock of the rabble!”

“Pff, I’ll get right to work on the Supreme Court appeal if Árni wants me to,” said Jón Marteinsson. “But only if you’ve got enough money for beer, which of course you never do. Hey—see if there’s anything in the corpse’s pockets.”

“Go ask the Company for beer. Go ask the Swedes,” said the Grindavíkian. “Or maybe you think you’re the only one in this whole city who wants beer? You could probably get me to do a lot of abominable things, but I would never rob the dead for you.”

“If he’s hiding any coins, he owes them to me. Whatever small amount of honor there is that might cling to this corpse’s name was restituted by me, due to my long acta, petitiones, and appellationes—”* and with these words Jón Marteinsson jumped up from his cot and went over to search the corpse. “Do you think I have any respect for this man’s corpse, when in the life of the living he allowed others to deprive him of both his honor and his estate?”

“The least I could expect from a murderer would be for him to refrain from speaking cruelly of the man he has murdered,” said the Grindavíkian. “Such a thing was unheard of in the sagas. Not even the villains spoke cruelly of the men they killed. And even though this man was my master’s opponent in the life of the living, you’ll never hear me say a disrespectful word about soulless flesh. Requiescas, I say, quisquis es, in pace, amen.* But finally I come to the matter at hand: what have you done with the book
Scaldica Maiora,
which you stole from my lord’s bibliothèque?”

“The
Skálda,
” said Jón Marteinsson. “Did you misplace it?”

“My master knows only too well that there’s no one to blame but you,” said the Grindavíkian.

“No sane man would ever steal that book. If anyone were found with it he’d be arrested,” said Jón Marteinsson.

“What wouldn’t Satan steal to sell to the Swedes?” said the Grindavíkian.

“My dear Árni’s been naive for so long: he thought he could put food on the Icelanders’ tables by indicting the Company; he thought he could redeem Snæfríður Iceland’s sun by defaming her beloved; he thought he could save the honor of his fatherland by duping starved dimwits in Iceland out of the few books they still had that hadn’t gone rotten, and by piling them together here in Copenhagen in a place where they’re in serious danger of burning up altogether in one night. And now he thinks the Swedes aren’t as clever as he is. Let me tell you something: they are far more clever than he is, so clever that no power on earth will ever convince them that that collection of lice-ridden beggars on that shithole up north who call themselves Icelanders, and who will all be dead in a very short time, God be praised, wrote sagas. I know Árni impugns me for not gathering up and shoving into his bag every single scrap I can find. But can’t he take some comfort in having acquired the best of a bad lot of books? All I did was sell von Oxenstirna and du Bertelskiold some totally useless old rubbish; de la Rosenquist, however, has asked me for a genealogical table so he can trace his family back to trolls.”

“Even so, you’ll be labeled the
Skálda
-thief no matter whether the scholars in Lund call it an old West Gotlandic text—and now tell me truthfully where you’ve hidden the book or I shall write to a man west in Arnarfjörður who is skilled in the handling of characteres.”

“That’ll just get you burned,” said Jón Marteinsson.

By the time the story reached this point, he had found neither more nor less than the better part of two rixdollars on the corpse, and, thinking he would undoubtedly find more, he placed the coins on the windowsill beneath the carefully drawn curtains, and began trying to pull off the deceased’s boots. The Grindavíkian realized, as he had realized many times before, that words meant very little to Jón Marteinsson, so he let the matter drop and stood there gaping and staring.

When Jón Marteinsson completed his task he started putting on assorted pieces of clothing, then combed strong-smelling fat through his hair in place of washing it. Finally he put on a cloak that most resembled an ancient bishop’s frock in its expansiveness. He stuck Magnús from Bræðratunga’s boots into the cloak’s two pockets. Next he brought out his hat. Upon it were several half-dried spots of grime that he spat on and rubbed with his sleeve, then he smoothed out the worst of the crown’s dents and placed it upon his head. The man had a kind of crib-shaped mouth that enabled him to suck on his upper lip with his lower one, and since his upper gums had been toothless for many years his chin was all the more inclined toward kissing the spike of his nose, which had flattened with age. The corners of his mouth sunk down below his cheeks on either side of his chin. His eyes, however, were incredibly lustrous and the man needed only a few moments’ sleep in order for their gleam to be restored. He always spoke in a typically Icelandic tone of voice: a feeble, discontented whine.

“Aren’t you going to do something about the corpse, man?” said the Grindavíkian, as Jón Marteinsson locked the door behind them.

“There’s no rush,” he said, “he’ll still be lying there by the time we get back. The living shall drink. If I remember I’ll tell them tonight that I’ve found an Icelander in the canal—they’ll hardly be in any hurry to bury him.”

This being said, the two men went for a drink.

4

In their books scholars have recorded some of the diverse portents that occurred in Iceland prior to the great smallpox epidemic. Foremost amongst these must be reckoned the hunger and famine that affected all corners of the land, causing tremendous loss of life, especially amongst the poor. Widespread shortage of fishing line. In addition, unusually high incidences of robbery and thievery, along with incest and earthquakes in the southern part of the country. Various rare phenomena as well. In Eyrarbakki an eighty-year-old woman married a twenty-year-old man the autumn before the epidemic, and in the spring she wanted to divorce him, impotentiae causa.* On the seventeenth of May seven suns were seen. That same spring, in Bakkakot in Skorradalur, a ewe gave birth to a misshapen lamb: it had a pig’s head and a pig’s bristles, its upper jawbones were missing beneath its eye sockets, and its tongue hung out quite some distance over its lower jawbones, which appeared to be disattached from its skull. It had nothing at all resembling eyes. Its ears were long like a hunting dog’s, and hanging from the front part of its skull was a little ewe’s teat with a hole in it. When it was born the lamb was heard to speak clearly, saying these words: “The devil has his claws in the children of the faithless.” News came from Kirkjubæjarklaustur the winter before the epidemic that one evening the cloister steward and another man walking with him through the churchyard heard a howling beneath their feet. Uproar in the air in Kjalarnes. Fished up from the sea in Skagafjörður was a skate so odd that it started wailing and howling as soon as they brought it on board, and even after they had cut it up on shore each and every piece screamed and howled in the same way. As if that was not enough, after the pieces had been brought home each piece continued howling and screaming in its own way, so finally they all had to be thrown back into the sea. Men in the sky. And finally, mention must be made of the egg a hen laid at Fjall in Skeið. The egg was clearly inscribed with a certain dark pattern, apparently the mark of Saturn in reverse, meaning “Omnium rerum vicissitudo veniet.”*

Thirty years had passed since the last outbreak of smallpox and fifty years since the outbreak preceding that when the great smallpox epidemic hit the country.* Most of the Icelanders who lived into their thirties were marked by the disease: the hands or feet of many were withered, some had bulging eyeballs, others disfigured faces or scalps. Besides this the majority of people bore the scars of one or another of the chronic illnesses affecting the population: rickets left people doubled over and crippled, their limbs askew; the lepers were ulcerous and nodous; hydatids distended the abdomens of others. Many could barely keep themselves going, having suffered the ravages of consumption. Due to prolonged famine people’s growth was so stunted that anyone who reached a decent height became fodder for folktales. Such giants were not only considered the equals of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi and other ancient Icelanders, but were also thought to possess strength to match that of the Negroes sometimes found aboard the Danish ships.

The pox overwhelmed these folk once again, and now with such an unimaginable vehemence that nothing but the Black Death could have equaled it. The disease came out on a merchantman that had arrived in Eyrarbakki near the start of the moving days in the spring, and within one week three tenant farms in that district were laid waste. On a fourth farm all that survived was a seven-year-old child, and the cows were no longer milked. After ten days forty people in that poor district had lost their lives.

The decimation continued on in this way. Sometimes thirty people at a time were buried in the tiny churchyards. Heavily populated parishes recorded losses of two hundred or more people. The clerical ranks were hit so hard that divine services were no longer held. Many a married couple went hand in hand to the same grave, some lost all of their children at once, and in one particular case, the only surviving member of a very large family was the half-wit. Many became phrenetic or demented. Most were called away before they reached the age of fifty—the most youthful, healthy, and promising folk—while the aged and decrepit lived on. Great numbers lost their sight or hearing, others were bedridden for a long time afterward. The outbreak deprived the episcopal seat at Skálholt of its head and the head of its crown, when the bishop, that shining witness to the faith and friend to the poor, and his beloved wife, this country’s radiant light of piety and beneficence, passed away just one week apart and were laid together in one grave.

This was two years after His Royal Majesty sent hither his special envoy, with the full authority to take whatever steps were necessary to alleviate the people’s suffering. When Arnas Arnæus returned to Copenhagen he was met with the news that our then-reigning Highness lay upon his bier, and that the magnates were making preparations to crown the new king. The commoners were treated to soup and steak, beer and red wine, in the square before the palace on the day of coronation. It was the dawn of a new age in Denmark. The goodwill toward Icelanders that Arnæus, due to his long acquaintance with the court, had been able to awaken in the heart of His Highness was now benumbed along with Denmark’s sleeping king. Arnæus’s reports concerning conditions in Iceland, along with his proposals for the improvement of trade, industry, the judiciary, and the country’s government, were received unenthusiastically by the Chancery, and it was doubtful whether they would ever be given a reading; everyone knew that the new king’s thoughts were directed toward more valorous deeds than looking after the Icelanders. It would soon be necessary to renew the struggle against the Swedes. The functionaries gave little thought to anything but remaining in their posts after the crowning of the new king. In any case, it had never been of great advantage to advancement, and hence was not much of a temptation for the finest men in Denmark, to trouble oneself concerning that outpost of the Danish realm, that remote ulcer in the shape of a country whose name alone, Iceland, could nauseate any man in Copenhagen, even if everyone knew that from that country ran the whale oil that fed the lamps of their city.

Concerning the Icelanders there is this to say: although the members of the country’s criminal class might have been Arnæus’s friends, with one or two exceptions, including some of those whose brands he had invalidated, and although many Icelandic paupers rejoiced at the compensation he had forced the merchants to pay for their shoddy flour and at the grain supplements he had been able to importune from the crown, and although huge numbers of them were grateful to him for his willingness to carry to His Most Merciful Heart their petitions for fishing line, pig iron, and sacramental wine, not to mention more lenient taxes, which the governor had been shoving under his seat for seven years, there was scarcely less animosity directed toward Arnæus by the gentry in his fatherland than there had ever been at any time in Denmark. In addition, whereas the merchants had brought Magnús Sigurðsson from Bræðratunga to Copenhagen and financially supported his lawsuit for two years in order to get back at Arnæus, there now came word that the Icelandic bailiffs themselves were preparing litigation against him, with the goal of having the verdicts he handed down at Öxará, the so-called Commissarial Verdicts, overturned, thereby allowing them to recover the property that had been confiscated and vindicate the honor that had been defamed by the very same judge.

This bookman, who had let himself be lured away from his books for a time and who had for the sake of righteousness heeded the call to become the savior of his native country, now reaped what had once been sown, the reward of the eternal dolorous knight. The man who heeds this call never gains another opportunity to return to the books that are his entire world. And thus on the morning when he received news of the disappearance of the crown of all his books, all he could do was let himself sink back down, pale with insomnia, and say these words:

“I’m tired.”

He sat there for a long time after the Grindavíkian had gone, and finally started to doze off. He shook himself awake and stood up. He hadn’t undressed since leaving the queen’s banquet, but now he washed and tidied himself and changed his clothes. He bade his coachman prepare his carriage, and then they drove away.