World Light (42 page)

One after another, people vied with one another to repeat the main points of the case: the outlook was terrible; not a fish out of the sea, the foreigners were catching not only the Sviðinsvík people’s fish but also their fishing gear; the nation was in danger; but what was all that compared to the fact that Pétur
ríhross was now going to squander this destitute parish’s government grant on luxury wares and extravagances like cement and iron! And anyway, what was the point of starting to build a breakwater—what ships were going to sail into that harbor? The few tubs that existed would be better in the fire than on the sea. One man asserted that this harbor which had given people the opportunity of shifting rock for a decade would never come to anything; the site the government engineer had chosen for it was on dry land except at high tide; there was every likelihood that the harbor would be more suitable for growing potatoes than for docking ships. Hjörtur of Veghús had started laughing again.

The poet listened to the meeting in a trance, thankful that it was not turning out to be a plot against the government or something even worse, and was happy to be away from his home for a while. He envied Hjörtur of Veghús for being able to succeed on his own at anything he chose to do while at the same time finding all problems laughable. In the sensitive eyes of his new-found daughter, the father’s unquenchable vitality expressed itself in a fanatical expectation of great but undefined things.

Everyone felt that something had to be done, and several proposals were put forward: to send a telegram to the government, to write to Júel, to talk to Pétur
ríhross. But all these had been tried umpteen times on similar occasions, without any visible results. Finally, some of the men had got the idea that the best solution would be to form a union; they had heard reports of successful unions in various other places. Others opposed the forming of a union, and cited the societies which had previously been established here on the estate, such as the late Regeneration Company which had brought everything to ruin, and the Psychic Research Society which followed in its wake and was to give people an afterlife here on the estate but had only achieved one thing before it passed away— the resurrection of two murderers. Someone asked, “How can we here in Sviðinsvík form a union against the government, the manager and foreign countries all at once?” Another maintained that unions and associations would be no earthly use until there was a radical change in the attitudes of each individual. The parish officer was in favor, up to a point, of the idea of forming a union to back their demands, but he said there was one drawback to laborers’ unions which called for the utmost care: he foresaw the danger that such unions might use their strength against society as a whole, which was surely in dire enough straits already.

“What damned society?” shouted Jens the Faroese.

“The thieves’ society!” said one cynical man by way of explanation.

The parish officer said there were examples in other places of unions being formed against society in general.

Someone said the time had come to overthrow the dogs who were always stealing from people. “What does Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík say? He’s a poet.”

“Yes, that’s right—Ólafur Kárason!” clamored the meeting, and people were now ready to listen to inspiration.

Ólafur Kárason said nothing, but got slight palpitations when he heard his name mentioned. He felt all eyes upon him. He was being challenged to contribute to the discussion. The daughter of Hjörtur of Veghús gazed at him with the expectation that commands something to come from somewhere and get something done.

“What am I to say?” said Ólafur Kárason.

“You’re a poet, man, stand up and make a speech!” they said.

He stood up, accustomed to doing as he was told, looked around in confusion for a while, felt giddy, ran his hand down his forehead and over his eyes and down over his face as if he were bothered by cobwebs, and heaved a deep sigh.

“How can I say anything, a man who is outside everything?”

But the meeting would not let him sit down again without speaking, now that he was on his feet: “You’re not above accepting support from our parish in order to live; so why should you be above sharing our interests?”

Then the poet began, little by little, to speak.

“I find it so difficult to speak,” he said. “Quite apart from the fact that I think that all of us who live on this estate are blind. If I’m to say anything, I think that this estate is ruled by an almost omnipotent enemy who ceaselessly demands our lives, but yet I feel we never see the battlefield we stand on nor the actual enemy who rules over us, and that is because we are blind. Sometimes I feel as if the enemy himself is part of our own soul. Perhaps there is no enemy other than our own blindness. Perhaps we would be free of our own accord if our blindness left us. I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Go on, carry on speaking,” they said. “Try to offer some conclusion, man.”

Then the poet said, “I find it difficult to speak. I said just now that I was blind. I said we were all blind. But I’m more than blind, and have an even harder furrow to plough than those who have lost their fishing gear and are in danger of having their wages reduced in the quarry or of losing their jobs altogether. I am a poet. I am the man who could never carry rocks, let alone have a share in a boat—that was what I meant when I said I was outside everything. I’m the village good-for-nothing whom everyone jeers at because I stay up at night and write books about men who were just as useless as I am myself. But for that very reason there is no thief so powerful that he can steal anything from me. Some say I’m allowed to work at the fish yards because I’m in tow with Pétur Pálsson the manager, but that’s not true; I have never done anything for the manager except to compose twelve elegies for him, which is the least one can do for anyone. But even though both king and bishop allowed me and no one else to work in their fish yards, and promised to pay me in gold and diamonds, I’d never dream of touching a single fin, except only because fish are the same color as the sunshine, and because the smell of fish matches the breeze off the sea.”

The meeting had already begun to interrupt him occasionally, but the poet Ólafur Kárason had now started and did not want to stop.

“Yes,” he said, “I can hear what you say. I have never thought of anything except being a poet and a scholar, and so I don’t care what others call me—fool, good-for-nothing, layabout, every bad name imaginable. But whatever I’m called, it doesn’t alter the fact that whoever is a poet and a scholar loves the world more than all others do, even though he has never owned a share in a boat, yes, and not even managed to be classed as a quarryman. The fact is that it is much more difficult to be a poet and write poetry about the world than it is to be a man and live out in the world. You hump rocks for next to no pay and have lost your livelihood to thieves, but the poet is the emotion of the world, and it is in the poet that all men suffer. ‘From the hoof of this damned world, O Lord, remove the small nails,’ says the old hymn. The poet is the quick in this hoof, and there is no stroke of luck, neither higher wages nor better catches, which can cure the poet of suffering—nothing but a better world. On the day the world becomes good, the poet will cease to suffer, and not before; but at the same time he will also cease to be a poet.”

He fell silent, looked around, and realized that the cobweb was gone from his face. And what he saw before him was wide, blue eyes, hot with the expectation of great, great things. Was it they which had called forth all this eloquence? He was not finished even yet.

“To be a poet is to be a visitor on a distant shore until one dies. In the land where I belong, but which I shall never reach, individuals have no cares, and that is because industry runs by itself without anyone trying to steal from others. My land is a land of plenty; it is the world that Nature has given to mankind, where society is not a thieves’ society, where the children aren’t sickly but healthy and contented, and young men and women can fulfill their aspirations because it is natural to do so. In my world it is possible to fulfill all aspirations, and therefore all aspirations are in themselves good, quite unlike here, where people’s aspirations are called wicked because it isn’t possible to fulfill them. In my land one can be content with looking at the clouds being mirrored in the sea, or lying on the grass listening to the brook purling through the dell. And when the great storms rage, people stoke their home fires generously, happy to own a sturdy house. And we hear a Voice which doesn’t express any pain, and makes no demands, but which never sounds sweeter than when the poet is silenced at last; and in my land, all men can hear it. But here on this shore . . .”

The men were getting restless and were searching their pockets for tobacco; it caused them almost physical pain to hear someone baring his soul like this. But Jórunn, the daughter of Hjörtur of Veghús, stood up in a trance, walked over to him, gave him her long, strong hand and said:

“It is the Dream of Happiness.”

The girl’s father bellowed with laughter.

Everyone had started mewing at one another again. The poet felt that no one had understood him except this girl, who had certainly been the cause of his speech, and yet he doubted whether she had understood him correctly; her unexpected handshake burned in the palm of his hand. Her hand was larger than his and undoubtedly stronger. But what worried him most was to have aroused Faroese-Jens’s jealousy, because suddenly the lovelorn skipper got to his feet and declared that everything Ólafur Kárason had said was useless poetic nonsense; he said he bought that sort of stuff when he had need of it and paid what he thought it was worth; he said he had not come here to listen to drivel but to make plans to put an end to injustice and tyranny, and to overthrow the thieves’ society. People urged him to carry on. “There’s nothing for it but to combine,” he said. “Form a union, get a reliable leader, start fighting!” At that the poet became uneasy. Soon afterwards he left.

The moment he was out in the open he realized that the air in the house had been stuffy. It was an unspectacular April evening of no particular beauty, lovely only because it contained a promise of spring, in the way that a young girl has no need to be pretty. He thought to himself that since he had been allowed out that evening without too much trouble, he would take the opportunity of going for a walk along the seashore. How the dickens had he strayed into a meeting full of people discussing Pétur
ríhross’s grandmother, and poured his heart out there? Obviously, all that talk about the millennium must have struck the people there as mockery, or at best as lunacy. He bit his tongue, but it was done now. In the evening stillness down by the sea, when he began to think about it honestly, he realized that he would never have spoken like that if the girl had not been there with those eyes. People had laid their problems before him and he had responded to their trust by romanticizing about a dreamland for a girl. What distressed him was that he felt he had stolen the girl from Jens the Faroese; he had sold the skipper an ordinary key to her heart, but he himself had opened it with a golden key so that she walked over to him in public and gave him her hand and spoke to him. The truth was that he had needed to reinstate himself in this girl’s eyes for having been turned back with the fish barrow that day. But had he the right any longer to keep the five krónur he had accepted from the skipper?