The Atom Station

15. Cold on New Year’s Eve

The boy was not at all put out when he realized that I had tricked him by taking him to an organist’s instead of to a Communist’s. He said, “I’m sure that Communists aren’t nearly as clever as organists; and the organist said I could come back and solve chess problems with him whenever I liked.”

The boy walked beside me in silence for a while and then said, “Listen, do you think these two madmen have really killed a man?”

“Far from it,” I said. “I think they were just teasing the pastor.”

“If they’re in contact with God they have every right to kill people,” he said. “But I don’t think they’re in contact with God. I think they’re extremely ordinary people, except that they’re mad. Don’t you think people who say they’re in contact with God are mad?”

“That may well be,” I replied. “But I also think that people who steal minks and revolvers are a little mad too.”

“You’re an ass,” he said.

It was New Year’s Eve, and there were sleet showers. I was triumphant and relieved—or was I perhaps not—at having left without saying a word to that stranger, the policeman from the north; I had not even looked in his direction all night, although I had wished him a Happy New Year for appearances’ sake along with the rest of them. I should think not, indeed.

“Let’s walk faster,” I said to the boy. “I’m cold in this raw weather.”

He caught me up at the gate. He must either have run or taken a taxi, for he had stayed behind in the kitchen at the organist’s when we left.

“What do you want, man?” I said.

“I never see you,” he said.

“To the best of my knowledge you have been looking at me all evening,” I said.

“I haven’t seen you for nearly two months,” he said.

“What does he want?” said the boy. “Shall I call the police?”

“No, dear,” I said. “Hurry inside to bed. I’ll be right behind you.”

When the boy had gone in, the northerner asked, “Why are you angry with me? Have I offended you in any way?”

“Yes and no,” I replied.

“Aren’t we friends?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It doesn’t look like it. And now I’n not standing out here any longer, in the raw cold.”

“Come home with me,” he said. “Or I’ll come with you—upstairs.”

“What for?” I said.

“I need to talk to you.”

“I should think not, indeed,” I said. “First I go home with you one night, because I’m a coward who knows no one, anywhere. I must probably have thought we would become friends. Then a month passes, and another month passes; it doesn’t even occur to you to telephone. Finally at long last we meet by accident, and then you think you all of a sudden need to talk to me. What do you need to talk about?”

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“Is it not Cleopatra you mean?” I said.

Then I walked the three or four paces from the gate to the house and opened the door. He followed me. “Wait,” he said, when I had crossed the threshold. But he made no attempt to take hold of the door against me, even though I was not holding it very tightly, nor did he stick his foot in the door when I closed it, but was left behind outside. And I walked up to my room a free woman, if such a woman exists.

The house was asleep—or was there no one at home, perhaps? I opened up the rooms and switched on the lights to see what had to be done for the morning, but there did not seem to have been any party. I was about to go upstairs, when I heard someone come out of a room on the first floor; and suddenly I saw a grand majestic lady come gliding down the stairs towards me. At first I could only distinguish the outlines, a voluminous wide-sleeved fur coat and underneath that a full-length evening-gown; next I saw protruding from under the hem of the gown red-painted nails through open-toed white shoes with platform soles a hand’s breadth in thickness. She hugged the fur to her breast with one long white hand agleam with jewels, and her hair was brushed out across her shoulders in a mixture of some magnificent coiffure and natural waves; she had pancake make-up on her face, near-black lips the color of dried blood, and a sleepwalker’s frozen expression. I literally felt I was once again watching the mobile cinema at Krok: this was exactly the woman used in all Hollywood pictures to beguile country folk and the people in a hundred thousand little places, this creature who also starred in all the cinema magazines which are bought in wretched destitute homes where there is no water closet… until suddenly I saw that this was not a woman, this was a child; it was none other than Fruit-blood, alone in the house, coming downstairs to go out in this monstrous outfit, and the time nearly morning.

“What a sight you are, Fruit-blood, what damned cinema shark are you copying, child?” I said. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

She did not look at me, but went on gliding down the stairs in the same trance, then past me through the hall on her way out through the vestibule without seeing or hearing. But as she took hold of the door handle I put my hand over hers: “Fruit-blood, are you walking in your sleep, child?”

She stared at me with those piercing unearthly-cold night-eyes and said, “Leave me alone. Let me go.”

“I can’t believe you’re going out, child, alone; it’s nearly morning.”

“Yes,” she said calmly. “I was just coming in. And now I am going out. I was at a dance. And now I am going to a dance.”

“Walking—in that get-up? I said. “In sleet and slush?”

She stared at me with those eyes in which I could never distinguish cinema from insanity, and then replied very calmly, “If you wish to know where I am going, I am going to walk into the sea.”

“Fruit-blood,” I said. “What’s the point of this foolery?”

“Foolery?” she said. “Do you call it foolery to die?”

She tried to turn the door-handle, but I still held on to her hand.

“You’re not in your right mind, child,” I said, still keeping her away from the door. “I’m not letting you go until I’ve asked your father.”

“Ha ha, do you imagine he’s at home for festivities?” she said. “In this loathsome house? With these loathsome people?”

“Now you’re going to talk to me, Fruit-blood,” I said, “and I to you.”

“That shall never be,” she said, and then tried to compensate for the hollowness of that old Saga phrase in her mouth by assaulting me. She beat me a few times with her clenched fists, not with the knuckles but like a child, with the soft edge of her hands, and then she tried to bite; but I would not let her out. She did not bother to fight me for long; when she saw she was not my match she turned back into the hall, and as she stood there in the middle of the floor after the struggle she let the huge fur sink, as if she were losing hold of it, down off her slight shoulders to the floor, where she let it lie like some sort of discarded magic cloak, and became once more a slimly-built girl with awkward, loose-jointed calf-movements in her body. Then she huddled herself into a ball in the corner of a sofa so that her knees touched her chin, knuckled her hands into her eyes, and wept—at first with huge convulsions and great sighs, but changing soon into the squealing of a child. Then I realized that this was not all pure play-acting. Or was it such good play-acting?

I tried to approach her as cautiously as I could: “What’s wrong? Can nothing be done to make it better? Can’t I do something?”

She took her fists from her eyes and waved them about in the air as if she were whipping two churns simultaneously, screwed up her face and bawled, “Ah-a-a-ah, I’m pregnant as hell.”

“Oh the soundrels!” I blurted out. “That’s just like them!”

“And he didn’t dance with me all night, didn’t even look at me, and just imagine, what a swine—he went home from the dance with his wife; he could at least have controlled himself over that, he could have spared me that. I didn’t think I deserved rudeness from him on top of everything—with his wife, can you imagine it?—And me pregnant for six weeks.”

“I thank you for telling me this, Fruit-blood,” I said. “Now we shall put our heads together.”

“I will, I will go into the sea,” she said. “How is a girl like me to live? The children will hiss at me in school, my mother will kill me in New York, the Prime Minister will sell me to a brothel in Rio de Janeiro, and my grandfather would rather lose his fish oil factory. My father will be jeered at in Parliament and the University, and the people in Snorredda will snigger into the adding machines as he walks past; and the Communists will stage a protest march past the house and say: There’s the little pregnant bitch of a Capitalist brat.”

“I can swear to you that such a wicked word as you used just now doesn’t exist in the whole Communist Party,” I said. “It is called in the language of all decent folk to be ‘blessedly in the family way.’ In your shoes I would go straight to my father, that man of no prejudice.”

“Never as long as I live shall I do my father that shame,” she said.

“As if he hasn’t found a way out of greater difficulties than this,” I said. “Genteel people with morals and sensitive nerves send their daughters abroad when they get into trouble, even though uncouth people like us don’t understand that sort of thing and just have our children where we are. And now I shall tell you a little story, my girl: I think, you see, that I am pregnant myself.”

“Are you telling the truth, Ugla?” said the girl. She sat up on the sofa and embraced me. “Can you swear it on oath? And are you not going to kill yourself?”

“Far from it,” I replied. “But the time is coming when I shall have to go north, for my baby’s day-nursery is with Wild-ponies Fal of Eystridale.”

She leant back from me again and said, “I’m sure you’re trying to trick me. What’s more, you’re just trying to comfort me, and that’s a hundred thousand times more humiliating than letting oneself be tricked.”

“Now I’ll tell you, Fruit-blood, what your father will do if you go to him and tell him everything,” I said. “He will write out a dollar order for you and send you with the next plane across the Atlantic to your mother. And no one need try to tell me that such a woman does not understand her children. And so you’re in America. No one suspects anything, you’re in America and you have the child, and afterwards you stay on in America for one, two three years, and finally you come home, a reinstated virgin as we say in the country, and the best match in the whole of Iceland.”

“But what about the baby?” she asked.

“After two-three years, when the news gets about, the story will by then be too old for anyone to say anything, and everyone will love the child—yourself most of all. And it’s a common saying that the children of children are fortune’s favorites.”

“Shall I then give up the idea of killing myself?” she asked. “And I who had been so looking forward to returning as a ghost and haunting that swine who went home with his wife!”

“Men don’t care in the least if women kill themselves,” I said. “If anything, they feel relieved. They are rid of all the fuss.”

After some thought she asked, “Don’t you think he would feel then that it was he who had killed me?” But she answered herself, “I could best believe he doesn’t have a conscience at all. In actual fact, I ought to kill him. What do you think? Shouldn’t I attack him, as in the Sagas, and kill him this very night?”

“Women never did that in the Sagas,” I said. “On the other hand, they sometimes got betrothed a second time and then, when opportunity arose, they sent this second lover to an encounter with the former one. It was their custom to make the one they loved less slay the one they loved the more. But in the Sagas things did not happen all in the one day, Fruit-blood.”

Eventually, the result of our discussion was that the maiden Fruit-blood neither went out to die on that occasion, nor to murder her lover either, but asked if she could not sleep with me up in my room for the rest of the night, because she was slim and shaky in the nerves and I sturdy and from the north.