World Light (39 page)

BOOK THREE

THE HOUSE OF THE POET

1

High up the hillside, where you look out over the roofs of the houses, there crouched a wooden shack with a slanting roof and a porch, one room with a stove, and a little closet; and at the window early in spring a pale man sat lulling his sick child in his arms—the poet Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. Whoever has a sick child has a house. This house was called The Heights. There was sunshine on the sea, the lagoons dead calm. That morning when the poet’s intended had woken up, she had praised her God as usual and hurried down to the fish yards to earn some money. The poet gazed out over the roofs of the village, over the blue fjord, out towards the mystical haze of the mountains on the other side, and dandled his child. Anything was better than working for money. He bent down over the little girl and kissed her brow, and she smiled at him.

“My little darling,” he said, and now for the first time he felt fond of little Margrét; or at least he thought he felt fond of her. While she was healthy and merry he did not care—healthy, merry children do not worry anyone. Leave them be; we have obligations only to those who suffer, we love only those who are in distress. Although he had never even noticed before if she fondled his cheek, he now felt there was nothing he would not take upon himself for her sake. “My little darling,” he said, and hugged the sick child to his breast. “When the weather gets warmer and little Maggie’s strong enough to walk beside her daddy, then Daddy and little Maggie will go down to the beach to look for shells.”

“A-a,” said the girl, weakly.

“Broad cockleshells, narrow mussels, fine pink scallops,” said the poet. “Perhaps even sea snails.”

“And a bow-wow,” said the child.

“Yes, and then we’ll meet a bow-wow,” said the poet.

“And a miaow,” said the child.

“Yes,” said the poet. “And then a pussy will come along and say miaow.”

Then he saw a man coming up the hillside with his hands behind his back, tall and lean and a little self-important, and not the type of man to go visiting on a spring morning without a purpose; there was frustration in his eyes. The poet went to the door to welcome the visitor.

“Faroese-Jens! Hallo and welcome,” he said. “It certainly isn’t every day that skippers venture so high above sea level. I hope you’re not bringing the Devil with you up the hill?”

The visitor offered the poet a plug of tobacco in greeting, and took a chew himself.

“I walked up the hill here mainly to work off my bad temper,” he said, without any unnecessary banter.

“I’m afraid Jarþrúður, my intended, isn’t at home, so I can’t offer you any coffee,” said the poet. “On the other hand I can lend you a spittoon so that you can spit out your own tobacco while you’re here.”

“Oh, there’s no need at all,” said the visitor vaguely, but came in nevertheless.

“Well,” he said when he had listened absentmindedly to the poet’s inanities for a while. “It now looks as if it’s been decided to take away the people’s livelihood for good and all.”

“Oh, really?” said the poet. “And none too soon either.”

“I’m not joking,” said the man. “Do you see these?” And he pointed at three trawlers which were fishing at the mouth of the fjord. “They never move out of the seaweed; they scrape the bottom as if they were scouring a pot. You should be grateful you don’t have them coming into your cabbage patch. Two men had their nets destroyed this morning and have lost everything.”

“Where are the fishery patrol boats?” asked the poet.

“They’re down south, of course, ferrying the gentry as usual,” said the skipper.

The poet did not quite know what to say; unfortunately he could not get very excited about it. “Yes, that’s how it goes,” he said.

“It’s really no life at all any more,” said Jens the Faroese. “And one can’t even call it an honest war either, dammit. I go out with a dinghy and a bit of net, you go out with a trawler and a trawl. Is that an honest war? If two parties fight, and one of the parties is an unarmed dumb infant and the other is a fully armed berserk biting on the edge of his shield, is that war? No, it’s murder.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, perhaps,” said the poet cautiously. “But it’s certainly stealing, at least.”

“And now the fish merchants have conspired to lower the price of fish, and Pétur
ríhross flatly refuses to buy a single fin over and above what he needs for his own curing station, to give himself a monopoly over what little employment there is on the estate—and over who gets work. And now he has announced an all-round wage reduction in the government quarry.”

“Has anyone tried to complain to the authorities?” asked the poet.

“Are you off your head, man? You surely don’t believe in the authorities!” said the visitor.

The poet was stuck. Visitor and host sat for a while in silence. What on earth could have driven this severe, pessimistic skipper to visit a poet? Finally the visitor broke the silence and said, “And yet these are just trifles.”

Was the visitor not unnaturally pale? Was there not a white gleam in his eye? Surely he had not turned to Jesus? The poet began to feel a little uneasy; he could feel his heart beginning to beat faster. Granted that powerful thieves were scooping up the catches that could save the lives of the poor and the humble; granted that they were scouring the bottom of the fjord and ruining the bits of nets and lines which these little folk had acquired through unbelievable sacrifices; granted that the fishery patrol boats were being used for pleasure trips for the gentry while all this was going on; allow that the people were to be robbed not only at sea but on land as well, by means of all the price cuts and reductions and frauds which can be used against the poor, and that the authorities themselves no longer deserved our full confidence—but if all these were just trifles, dear God, what more was there to come?

But Jens the Faroese was unwilling to elaborate, and turned the conversation to unimportant matters. The poet did not know what to think. Finally Jens the Faroese said, “Hjörtur of Veghús—there’s a great man for you.”

“Oh, yes, he’s always fiddling around with something, that fellow,” said the poet.

“Yes, you’re a poet and therefore you don’t look at what’s happening on earth,” said the skipper. “The rest of us, on the other hand, look at what’s happening on earth. And for my own part, I regard Hjörtur of Veghús as a real man.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, perhaps,” said the poet. “But at least he has introduced hens to the place.”

“There are many people here who make fun of hens,” said Jens the Faroese. “But what birds are more useful than hens, may I ask? None that I know of.”

“That’s quite true,” said the poet. “Hens are very remarkable creatures even though they can’t fly.”

“But apart from that, Hjörtur hasn’t stopped at hens. Didn’t he bring a cow as well? Hasn’t he shown and proved that little folk can own a cow even after their souls have been mortgaged and their fjord cleaned out? I call that a downright stroke of genius. Previously people had to be at least Privy Councillors and
ríhross’s before they could even think of having a cow. Now everybody’s talking about cows.”

“Moo-moo,” said the little girl, weakly.

“Yes,” said the poet. “Moo-moo; perhaps Mummy will be bringing some milk from a moo-moo.”

“And in addition, Hjörtur of Veghús has raised some sheep. In his hands, every beast seems to have two heads. Who ever thought of keeping sheep here on the estate before him? And have you heard what he’s thinking of doing now? He’s going to re-seed the Privy Councillor’s old fish yards where the terns have been nesting for the last few years.”

On reflection, the poet felt that his visitor’s enthusiasm for Hjörtur of Veghús was not entirely misplaced. This man who had come to the estate by chance a few years back, empty-handed after losing everything he owned in another village, and had managed to squeeze a patch of gravel slope out of the manager—he signified in his own way the strange ups and downs in the history of mankind: the Creator’s inventiveness knows no limits. In the beginning God created the world, then came the Privy Councillor, and then the Regeneration Company, then the Psychic Research Society, and finally the terns took over the fish yards and foreign poachers occupied the fjord. But in spite of that, the history of mankind was not finished; a new man came, a new woman, new children; and poultry came. But the new man did not stop at hens; he could make grass grow on the land. This was the greatest and most astonishing miracle that had ever happened at Sviðinsvík-undir-Óþveginsenni.

Out of the blue, the skipper now told the poet that Hjörtur of Veghús had been twice married. His first wife had died many years ago; he had had a daughter by her, who had been brought up by her mother’s people in the south. But her foster parents were now dead, and she had come to stay with her father a few days ago. She was twenty-three years old, and her name was Jórunn.

“Is that so?” asked the poet.

There was a reverberating silence, as when one raps a pitcher while holding it by one lug. Finally, however, the poet said, “And is she a promising girl?”

“Promising?” echoed the skipper. “I don’t know about that. But I’ve just been telling you that even though everything has been stolen from everyone here on the estate, these are just trifles. I’ll say no more. Here are five krónur in cash. And I would like you to compose a poem to this girl for me.”

Ever since the poet Reimar had had to leave on account of an ill-chosen epitaph he had penned for twelve Sviðinsvík voters who had been drowned on trawlers down south, the poet Ólafur Kárason had been to all intents and purposes the only focus and switchboard for the emotions here on this estate. He composed love poems and letters of proposal on behalf of enamored suitors, and poems of requital and letters of acceptance in reply from lucky maidens. A love poem or a rhymed letter of proposal cost from a króna and a half to two krónur, often with a small percentage if the suit succeeded. A letter of proposal or an ordinary love letter—“Honored Miss, my most cordial greetings. It is not unlikely that you will be surprised to receive a letter of this kind from me. But I have resolved to write this to you and to none other. I love you in spirit, I adore you”—high-flown piffle of this kind, on the other hand, cost only half a króna. He also composed for people congratulatory poems, birthday poems, marriage poems and epitaphs; but he refused to compose lampoons, even if he were offered ten krónur, and he always took care in his poetry not to criticize those who owned the estate, or other property; that was the mistake the poet Reimar had made in his epitaph for the twelve voters and, indeed, Pétur Pálsson the manager had declared that this Reimar was a pornographer who defiled the hearts of the young. Reimar had been dismissed and evicted with all his brood in the middle of winter from the shack in which he had lived.

“Yes, it’s just like you to loiter at home like a mare over a dead foal and scrawl godless rubbish on a piece of paper instead of trying to give a little help to the parish which has supported you all winter,” said Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, his intended, when she came home after a day’s work at the fish yard.

“Someone has to stay with the sick child,” said the poet.

“That’s something new, if you’re now wanting to stay with the sick child, when hitherto you’ve scarcely wanted to know the child existed! It couldn’t be that this sudden concern for the child arises from the fact that you were offered work at Pétur Pálsson’s today?”

“Didn’t I stay up every night with little Kári last year before he died?” asked the poet.

She was preparing to cook some porridge, but the cooking stove would not kindle. Whenever she had difficulty in lighting the fire she always talked to the poet in the second or third person plural or the third person singular neuter—you, they, it.

“Though I live to be a hundred I shall never understand people who can look at other people without it ever occurring to them to want to become something. Nowadays when everyone’s copying Hjörtur of Veghús with his beasts, there isn’t even any attempt to acquire some hens, not to mention anything more ambitious.”

“I don’t really feel that hens are birds at all,” said the poet.