The Atom Station

11. The children I acquired, and their souls

Madam flew with Pliers to America one day, and I had the children: their father bequeathed them to me, rather than fathered them upon me, at dinner that evening, smiling and preoccupied; it was a case of immaculate conception, as in the fairy tale about swallowing the fish.[12]

“Then from now on you shall be called by your proper names,” I said.

“We shall reply by crushing you. We shall break your bones. We shall grind you,” said the beautiful daughter in a slow intense voice, savoring the words in her mouth like sweets—Crush, Break, Grind.

“Very well, then,” I said, “if you don’t want to be called by your own lovely names I shall re-christen you out of my own head, for I shall never address you in African. Arngrim shall be called World-glow, Gudney, Fruit-blood, Thord Goldram, and Jona’s little Christmas-card child shall be called Day-beam; and now come in out of the kitchen, Thorgunn dear, and eat with the rest of us.”

“The child’s mother has entrusted me with teaching the child Good,” shouted the cook through the doorway.

“I have no intention of teaching her Evil,” I said.

“That’s something new, then,” she said, “If salvation of the soul comes from the north.”

Doctor Bui Arland’s face lit up on hearing this reply, and he stopped reading his paper.

The cook through the opening: “Does the Doctor and master want to countermand his wife’s wishes on the very day she flies away—for the sake of northerners?”

“Hm,” said the Doctor. “I happen to be the Member of Parliament for these terrible people in the north: my constituency, you understand, my good woman?”

“Yes, but is it the constituency of the soul, pray, if I may make so bold as to ask the Doctor and master?”

The children’s faces lit up, the whole table lit up.

“What says Ugla, who has newly acquired all these children?” said the Doctor, and scratched the nape of his neck, putting on a careworn expression. “Does she think it healthier for the soul to eat in the dining room or in the kitchen?”

“If the soul lives in the stomach…” I began, but the cook was quick to interrupt me.

“And that’s a lie,” she said, “there’s no soul that lives in the stomach, the soul that my blessed Saviour suffered for doesn’t live in any stomach, so help me; on the other hand Sin has its origins there, for whatever happens below the waist is of the devil. And that’s why the mistress of this house and Doctor’s lady told me in so many words that this child should receive its nourishment through here with me with suitable prayers and thanks in the kitchen, so that this house shall have someone to redeem it in the same way as the righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah.”

“Yes, well, I think the soul finds salvation in the dining room,” I said, “and not in the kitchen.”

“There, you see,” said the master. “It is no fun having to adjudicate between Pakistan and Hindustan. The one state is founded on the thesis that the salvation of the soul started with the Hegira, on the day that Mohammed departed from Mecca; the other state claims that the soul cannot be saved unless we transmigrate at least into a bull, if not an ass or even all the way down to a fish. Such problems can be solved in no other way than by each person equipping himself with a dagger. As far as I can see, my dear Jona, we shall just have to equip ourselves with daggers.”

The cook’s foster child had adopted the habit, in order to counterbalance all the preaching, of missing no opportunity of cursing and swearing when the woman was not looking. I had sometimes been astonished at how long the child could sit in our privy behind the kitchen; she would be muttering something there in undertones for hours at a time. I thought at first that it was prayers, but when I applied my ear I discovered that she was, as far as I could hear, stringing together swear words. The poor thing, she only knew about three or four oaths, really, in addition to a few words for various tabooed parts of the body; these she had managed to discover by some unknown means. And when the darling little saint had cursed everything to Hell and back again in private on the seat for a good half hour she felt much better and came out uplifted, and began to tend her piddle-dolls. After a while she began to take advantage of the cook’s dullness of hearing; she would sit in the corner of the kitchen with clasped hands watching her foster mother at work, and move her lips constantly as if she were reciting prayers, while in fact she was striving to say Hell and arse-hole a hundred times in the one breath. Sometimes she would raise her voice a little, just to see how far she could go without the Saviour’s agent suspecting any wickedness.

The master continued to have the problems of the nation and other countries on his conscience, and for that reason he was always absent even when he was present, a stranger at his family’s table—or was he merely bored? He left when the meal was over. World-glow, whom I had so christened because he was the son of all darkness that existed in the world, was away with his friends somewhere. Gold-ram had gone out to jeer at strangers with his cousins, the Prime Minister’s children, down the street, or perhaps to examine locks for fun for an hour before bedtime. And the maiden Fruit-blood swayed silently through the open doorways like a river-trout. There was prayer-recitation going on in the cook’s place when I went up to my room.

And when I was upstairs, and by myself, I suddenly became so alone in all the world that I started thinking that I must be in love; and not merely in love, but literally unhappy, a manless maiden, tortured by the sort of love-sorrow which one thinks there can be no word for except in Danish, but which it is possible to establish and analyse with a simple urine test. I felt within myself all the strange humors that can rage within a woman, felt how this my own body was stirred by the enlarged and intensified presence of the soul, with the soul that was once merely a theological abstraction becoming a component of the body, and life becoming a strange greedy joy bordering on unhappiness as if one were wanting to eat and vomit at the same time; and not only could I see a difference every day in how I was swelling up, but there was also a taste in my mouth which I could not recognize, a glint in my eyes and a color on my skin as in someone who has had two drinks, a slackness round the mouth and puffiness of the face which suspicion and anxiety magnified for me when I looked at myself in the mirror: the woman who swallowed the trout. Catching my breath, and with palpitating heart, I stared at myself in the mirror. Some moments have the color of dreams of extreme peril, but this was not a dream: I had awoken halfway up a beetling precipice. Would the rope hold?

So I fell to tramping the harmonium, tramping and tramping with all the ignorance with which a country person can tramp in the hope of being able to hear yet again the echo that was in life before; until I was tired; and fell asleep; and slept for a long time, it seemed, until I woke up to a clamor.

There was a pounding on the door and shrieks; weeping; and my name being called over and over again, and then, “Murder, murder!”

It was the first time I had ever heard the word Murder used in earnest, and I was panic-striken.

But it was only those blessed children of mine that I had just acquired.

“What’s all that noise?” I said.

“He’s going to shoot me,” came a wail from outside. “He’s a murderer.”

I jumped out in my night-dress and opened the door. There stood my Gold-ram with genuine terror in his eyes, and both hands raised above his head as in American films when people are being killed. Down on the stairs stood World-glow with a revolver in each hand, calmly sighting at his brother. I think, to tell the truth, that I swore. World-glow apologized and said, “I’m getting tired of fellows like him.”

“Is there any need to shoot them?” I said.

“They stole revolvers,” he said. “I have decided to shoot them with the revolvers they have stolen.”

“I was in bed and asleep,” sobbed Gold-ram. “And knew nothing before he came home drunk and stole my revolvers, and was going to murder me. I’ve never tried to murder him.”

I walked to the stairs towards the revolver barrels, right up to the intending murder, and said, “I know perfectly well you’re not going to shoot that child.”

“Child?” said the philosopher, and stopped aiming the revolvers at his brother. “He’s in his thirteenth year. I had long since stopped getting pleasure out of stealing at his age.”

I went for him and wrested the weapons from him. He did not offer any real resistance, but dived into his pocket for a cigarette as soon as his hands were free of them. He was spent with liquor, and sat down on the stairs and started to smoke.

“When I was nine,” he said, “I stole half of all the spare parts for mechanical excavators which the Agricultural Society of Iceland managed to import that year. Let others beat that. And then—finished. A fellow who carries on stealing when he is grown up suffers from a disease we call in pyschology infantilism: Immanuel Kant, Charles the Twelfth. Their glands are stopped up. I had started wenching when I was twelve.”

“Give me my guns,” said Gold-ram, no longer frightened.

“Where did you get hold of these guns?” I asked.

“None of your business,” he said. “Give me them.”

“Are you being cheeky, my lad?” I said. “Have I just saved your life or have I not just saved your life?”

World-glow had subsided into a forlorn huddle, with the cigarette smoldering between his lips and the whites of his eyes just showing; in his father’s house of plenty he was a living portrait of the despair of the times, a homeless refugee in a hopeless station.

It was finally agreed that the brothers should go to bed and that I should keep the guns in my room; the elder one, however, sat on the stairs for a good while yet, smoking gloomily; I did not hear him reply when I bade him good night. I went to bed and switched out the light. But just when I was drifting into unconsciousness again my door was suddenly opened before I was aware of it, and someone sat down beside me and began to fumble with me. I quickly pressed the light switch above the headboard, and who should it be but this young philosopher?

“What are you doing here, boy?” I said.

“I’m going to sleep with you,” he said, and took off his jacket.

“Are you mad, child, taking your jacket off in here?” I said. “Put it on again at once.”

“I am neither a child nor a boy,” he said. “I want to sleep with you.”

“Yes, but you’re a philosopher,” I said. “Philosophers don’t sleep with people.”

“This isn’t a world to philosophize about,” he said, “so the next step is to abandon philosophy. The only thing I know is that you attacked me just now and I felt you; so the next step is to sleep with you. Let me into bed.”

“That’s not the way to go about it if a man wants to sleep with a woman,” I said.

“How then?” he asked.

“There, you see, my lad,” I said. “You don’t even know how.”

“I’m none of your lad,” he said. “And I shall sleep with you if I like; if not willingly, then forcibly.”

“All right, my dear,” I said. “But you overlook the fact that I’m strong.”

It was taking me all my time to ward off his fumblings.

“I’m not your dear,” he said. “I’m a man. I’ve slept hundreds of times with every damned thing there is. Aren’t you in love with me at all?”

“I was once in love with you,” I said. “It was my first night in this house. The police threw you into the hall. You were dead; stone dead; yes, absolutely wonderfully dead; a dead unweaned infant, and your soul with God, quite certainly. Next day you had come to life; and your face had once again tightened up in that horrible way that makes death beautiful by comparison. But now you aren’t drunk enough. Drink some more. Drink until you are utterly helpless and don’t even know of it when you are rolled through a puddle. Then I shall fall in love with you again. Then I shall do everything for you that is best for you: carry you to your room, wash you; perhaps even put you to bed completely, even though I didn’t dare do that once; but quite certainly tuck you in.”