Under the Glacier (25 page)

And with that touch alone the woman had taken me to her completely.

44

Away

In Chinese literature there are many references to calves, and the master Kvangtse says these words: A wise man’s expression is like that of a newborn calf. In some variants of the text, this is said to be reduced to: A wise man is a newborn calf.

This was an orphan calf and no one knew what had become of the heavy-uddered cow, his mother. He got no other swill from the fairy-ram woman Hnallþóra than cakes softened in coffee, which brought on all kinds of ailments. Though you gave him a good long scratch, he didn’t have the heart to low when you left him again; he just gazed after you, gloomily. It now seemed to me that this calf’s forehead was neither as bulging nor hairy as before. He seemed to be feeling better in these three or four stomachs that are said to be found in any one calf. As was said before, he had now been joined by some rams and had started to live off the abundance of the land. This company now lay chewing the cud in the churchyard. The rams stood up and stalked away when I approached, but the little calf came towards me; probably thought that I would give him some coffee.

When I had given him a little farewell scratch round the jowls and snout and had walked away, at first he watched me as I went and then trotted along behind to the lych-gate—he had somehow or other got in through it even though he couldn’t get out again. He uttered a little broken-voiced sound, like the bass in a children’s concertina, by closing both corners of his jaws and only just opening the mouth. And on that note this report on Christianity at Glacier should come to an end, as far as I’m concerned. I hope I’m not exceeding my terms of reference as reporter, or depriving my lord bishop of the opportunity of thinking for himself, if I end this document with the hope that the much-mentioned calf will survive.

It is doubtless right that in a report one should not expound but express. One has tried to see the thing, or at least couldn’t help seeing it, with this eye that some people think we have inherited from the monsters of earth history, instead of looking with the eye that dwells deepest in universal space.

An unbreakable obligation is involved in seeing and having seen. The report has not just become part of my own blood— the quick of my life has fused into one with the report. Inadvertently I had not only been an eyewitness but also the motive power of things unknown. Who will roll away the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre for us, it was once asked. Who will redeem us from a report?

After a daylong feast with all the delicacies that are to be found in the trunk of an Imperial, the woman now drew the curtain, locked her door with a key, and the house no longer existed. The undersigned stepped into this woman’s heavy car. We drove away with the evening sun on the nape of our necks—home.

Away—home.

It was one of those wholly beautiful May evenings when life’s happiness lies open before mortal man. On such a day the ancient Greeks used to say: No one is happy before his dying day. The glacier, the tureen-lid of the world, arches over the secrets of the earth. It gazes after me and the woman, perfectly still, in the certainty that if it moves a tiniest fraction it would crack open for the mouse to jump out.

She drove easily along the rolling gravel road, almost free of traffic in the early summer. The mountain range to one side, broad marshlands towards the sea on the other side, with gravel banks and erosion wherever it was higher and drier. Streams and rivers cascaded off the mountains and flowed under the bridges on the road and ran down through the lowlands to the sea. The sound of birdcalls from the marshes and moors drowned the muted tyre-noise of the car. The woman drove well, certainly, but cautiously, as if she were a little out of practice.

What impelled a resourceless young man with a duffel bag into such a woman’s car? What was the strange web of events into which I had suddenly become interwoven?

Was this woman’s embrace perhaps that shelter which is called the mother’s lap, and is the only place where people live secure on earth as long as it lasts? Was not such an embrace as this woman’s a little too large to enfold a travelling boy? Were not other women at Glacier more suitable, and yet doubtless with a nice embrace in their own way? Why hadn’t I leaned against Miss Hnallþóra, who had seen a ram? Wouldn’t I eventually have got fish—at least on the sly—instead of the lady having baked and baked until the Great Powers ate the cakes? This young man who wandered almost unpaid about the country on behalf of the bishop, couldn’t he by some knack have ingratiated himself with the merry widow Fína Jónsen from Hafnarfjörður and become a partner in the good scrubbing brush that had cleaned God’s House at Glacier? Wasn’t it time that the widow got rid of that boring ordinary Icelander, Jódínus the poet, whom she only loved in moderation, to put it mildly? I am sure that, thanks to such an excellent scrubbing brush, she would let me live with her down in Hafnarfjörður so that I would never have to think about anything other than the herring news on the radio and the bankrupties of the quick-freezing plants, and then go out to buy an evening paper.

Had I set off with this woman because she drove a bigger, sleeker car than other women at Glacier? And because she had inherited more than most other women, so that her millions lay scattered like brushwood all over the world in dollars, pounds, piastres, and pesos, unlikely to do anyone any good except her husband pastor Jón Prímus, who nonetheless was already the richest man in the world? Did I see in a vision jet planes and yachts, palaces and hotels, the golden sands in Miami and the skis in Garmisch-Partenkirchen—not forgetting the high culture in London Paris New York Los Angeles Buenos Aires and whatever they’re called, all these places in the weekly magazines? Not forgetting Lima in Peru, where the sea-mittens went.

Who am I to have fallen victim to the sorcery of stumbling on an image that Goethe had looked for and never found, eternity in female form? Had the Almighty yet again visited the person who was as totally destitute as the snow bunting on the ice, and revealed to him a mystery? The foremost women of the world all speak to me with one mouth: the Virgin Mary with the Infant on her knee; the Greek golden age with the washerwoman bun and Venus from Willendorf, vulgar and Simon-pure with her face hidden behind her hair and her buttocks bare, the bitch-goddess of mythology, the Virgin Whore of Romanticism, Ibsen’s fate-woman, the Mater Dolorosa of the Gospel—but above all the good abbess, Saint Theresa from Spain, in search of a new Saint John of the Cross.

45

Home

She stopped the car and we walked alongside running water in the world and watched mallards swimming in pools under the banks. There, too, swam the ever-bowing northern phalaropes (phalaropus hyperboreus). We sat on a moss-grown promontory with a bird-knoll on top, and we looked at a herd of horses in a hollow; the horses had started carrying their heads high after the ordeal of winter, biting one another, kicking up their heels, squealing, wrinkling their noses, mating. Newly marked lambs were still bloody about the head, some unlicked and only just born, others not born at all. Seldom had the sun been as bright all spring as today, but towards evening a gold-coloured fog was born far out to sea.

We came to a café that was some kind of modern heaven on earth, a compound of plastic, shellac, oil paint, turpentine, and glass but suffering from a lack of the smell of food and people. Here there was no sustenance to be had except boiled sweets. For thirst one could get carbon water, which is also out of this world, and we drank this from an unspeaking waitress. We sat side by side at a wafer-thin plastic table that stood on spindly iron legs in this shiny turpentine heaven outside existence. The woman looked from far within herself at her companion, caught his head now and again and placed it under her cheek, sighing and whispering that tonight we would go together to the end of the world; then put the head back where it belonged. But when we came out, the golden haze that a while ago had looked like a cold theatrical fire away on the horizon had reached land; a black cloud obscured the sun.

It’s safer not to go off the road now, said the man who filled our petrol tank; it’s not good for walking now.

We hadn’t been driving long before the fog poured over us, at first dry as dust but soon becoming dank. Within a short time there was a fine drizzle, then a mizzle with a cold breeze off the sea. The woman had to speed up the wipers so that they could manage to keep the moisture off the windscreen. It got darker, and she switched on the lights. Then I noticed that the clock on the instrument panel was nearly twelve, but I wasn’t entirely clear for a moment whether it was midday or midnight; nor indeed did it matter very much.

The woman made no noticeable effort to get out of this hellish fog quickly. If anything, she drove with even greater caution than before, and she kept a particularly close watch to the seaward side on the right, as if she were expecting something from that direction. Every now and again she pulled up on the road, wound down the window, and peered out into the fog. Every time she came to a crossing she got out and inspected the turning-off even though it was only an insignificant path. I asked what she was looking for, but she made no reply. Thus we groped our way slowly through the drizzle far into the night.

After many attempts at establishing her position she finally found an insignificant side road that formed a right angle with the main road to the right. It was on sandy gravel. This side road, if it could be called a road, had been so little used that it was difficult to say when it had last had a vehicle over it; one could just make out some wheel-tracks, but they could well have been several years old, because in some places sea-campion and alpine sandwort had had peace to grow on the road, and even madder. It was onto this dubious side road that the woman now steered her big car in the fog, at a time when every bird in the land was silenced.

Where are we going?

The woman smiled at me and answered gently: Where do you think, my love, except to the end of the world?

And we continued to drive along the sandy gravel and tried to make out the track, but the fog reduced the horizon to three or four metres in front of the car.

After a while the landscape changed and this so-called road began to cross meadowlands pink with withered grass. Worst of all, the ground now became extremely soggy and this big car, nearly three tons in weight, and low-slung, began to have difficulty in making headway.

The woman’s companion did not feel he had the right to make suggestions in such an unrecognisable place; at the very worst the car would get stuck. And so it did. In the middle of my determination not to think nor draw conclusions in this matter, we landed in a morass and the engine cut out. When we tried to start off again, the wheels raced; the back wheels dug themselves still deeper down. The car rested on its axle. The visibility had gone so completely that the mascot on the radiator could no longer be seen. As a result, our morass had lost its boundaries. The woman laughed until she started crying and laid my head under her cheek. We’ll wade home through the marsh, said the woman.

She was wearing expensive waterproof boots up to the calves, ideal for strolling in the sunshine of Nice and San Remo. Yet she was much better shod for difficult journeys than the undersigned in his shiny black chrome-tanned leather shoes with narrow toes. When we had succeeded in pushing open the front door on one side and making a little opening, the mud from the morass poured into the car. As soon as I stepped outside I sank in up to the ankles.

The woman said we should leave our things behind, except that she was bringing with her this soft red case: There is some ham in it, and tea. Your things can wait until morning!

Embi: I have nothing but a duffel bag. But I don’t dare to leave it in a morass at night. The car might sink. In the duffel bag are my shorthand notes and notebooks, my tape recorder, and all the tapes with the recordings. These are nominally speaking official documents, and if they sink or fall into the hands of dishonest people then I have broken confidence and lost my honour.

The outcome was that we fetched out my duffel bag and the woman’s case, and then she locked the trunk. We set off, each carrying our own luggage. She said she could find where she lived by the smell—from here one went by the stink of decaying seaweed, which smelled like train oil.

Now we waded back and forth across this rotting swamp, I don’t know for how much of the night, because the sense of time is said to be the first of the senses that goes when one is lost. Even at the height of spring a foggy night like this is dark. My shoes filled up and I took them off lest they got left behind in the mud. I never became quite clear whether this horrible swamp covered a huge expanse of land or whether we kept on going round in circles in the morass. One thing was certain: we never got back to the Imperial again. Perhaps it had sunk. And then we suddenly stumbled across unmistakeable wheel-tracks that led out of this broad morass at one spot but seemed to have no connection with other roads.

Woman: This is the bog-dwellers’ road to my home.

We now followed this path, endless at one end, in the direction that led away from the morass, and gradually reached drier going than there had been for a while, the ground between marshland and moor. Then sandy dunes with tangle and algae. Now it felt underfoot as if there were a slope a short distance ahead. I had my shoes under my arm and wiped the mud off them on the grass. I hadn’t a dry stitch left.

All of sudden there was the turf of a homefield underfoot, and meadow-flowers growing in old farm-lanes. On a low grassy bank a farmhouse loomed through the fog.

We stood opposite the ribbed front of a little house with a turf roof. Sheep bleated at us from the roof. The living room window had six panes, but the window upstairs under the gable-head had four. The walls of the house were of turves that were long since overgrown. Once upon a time the gable had probably been red, then tarred, then limed; now much worn by wind and weather. In front of the window hung a faded piece of cotton that had received the sunshine of many a feeble summer.