The Atom Station

17. Girl at night

By the month of Thorri,[15] a month which does not in fact exist in towns, I had become quite convinced—and indeed much earlier than that. The symptoms all matched; all the things were going on inside me that you read about in books for women, and much more besides, I think. I dreamed about the man all night sometimes, often nightmares, and started up from sleep and had to switch on the light, and could not go to sleep again before I had promised myself to go to him and beg his forgiveness for having shut him out on New Year’s Eve; and invite him to provide for me in whatever way he thought best.

But in the mornings, when I awoke, I felt that I did not know this man at all, much less that he concerned me at all, and that the child was mine alone. Then I also felt that, in general, men never owned children at all, but rather that the woman alone owned them as in pictures of Mary with the Child; the Invisible is the father of all children, the man’s part in it being purely fortuitous, and I understood well those primitive races that do not associate sexual intercourse with babies. He shall never see my child nor be called its father, I said to myself. Was it not now time that a law was passed forbidding men to call themselves the fathers of children? But when I started thinking more closely about it I felt that the mother did not really own the child either; children owned themselves—and their mother too, in accordance with the law of Nature, but for no longer than they had need of her; owned her while they were growing in her womb, and while they were eating her, or rather drinking her, for their first year. Human society is the one that has duties towards children, in so far as it has duties towards anyone; in so far as anyone has duties towards anyone.

But when I was coming home from my music lessons in the evenings, before I knew it I had started walking along a particular street and gazing at a particular house, up at a particular window where sometimes there was a particular light and sometimes a particular darkness. I paused, but after a moment I was no longer safe from the imagined eyes that peered at me from countless windows, and I took to my heels and did not come to my senses until I heard my own heartbeats at the other end of the street. It is unbelievable how many souls a female creature can have, especially at night.

Yes, I had slammed the door on him; but was that not just because I had at that time not yet fully convinced myself that I was pregnant? And if I longed to be with him now, was it not simply because I was now quite sure? And wanted to hang on to him? Perhaps even haul him to the altar? To such depths must a woman’s thoughts stoop, and she must needs get herself a slave and set up with him that milk bar which is called marriage and was once a sacrament, the only sacrament that holy men might spit on; otherwise she must go about for life a woman of misfortune, carrying a love-sorrow like some sort of stone child in her system, with a live child by her side, an accusation against gods and men and a provocation to society, which had tried all it could to get rid of it for her both born and unborn, but without success. Most briefly, I loved him; and had slammed the door on him because a woman has many souls; and for that reason now had no one definite to take twins out for a walk in a pram for me.

No. I took the same turning into the street again. It may well be that a pregnant girl will marry just anyone, for she, like Nature, does not care very much what name is entered as the child’s father by the pastor; but it was him, him, him I loved, despite everything and despite everything. Yes, this particular man; reserved, intelligent, clean; who had a vocation he would not divulge; and who looked at one with that secretly warm glance, enveloping but not piercing, so that things were never dead around him however much he was silent, and a girl was aware of him and no one but him in a crowded room; and went upstairs with him in silence afterwards; and he took her into his bed without first trying to persuade her by reciting a whole newspaper article over her; just as if nothing could be more natural. And when I shut the door on him on New Year’s Eve he stayed on with me; and he stayed on with me because I had not let him in. If he had tried to persuade me with arguments or soften me with pleas I would perhaps have let him in finally, but he would then not have stayed on with me as soon as he left next morning; his arguments would have done no more, at most than convert my mind. And if I met him now I would not with so much as a half a word give him a hint that I was pregnant, and least of all suggest that he should marry me; instead, I would say to him: I love you, and that is why I ask nothing of you; or else: I love you and that is why I do not want to marry you.

And then suddenly I saw a woman sitting on some steps. She had her hands to her bleeding head and was sobbing aloud in the quiet of the night. Her handbag lay open on the pavement as if it had been thrown down, and her mirror, lipstick, handkerchief, powder compact and money were strewn all around. There was singing going on inside the house. I walked over to this woman to find out what the matter was; and it turned out to be Cleopatra.

“You reincarnate Skarp-Hedin Njalsson, you are not crying, I trust?” I said.

“Yes,” said Cleopatra.

“What has happened?” I asked.

“They beat me up and threw me out,” said Cleopatra.

“Who did?” I asked.

“Who but Icelanders?” she said. “These damned Icelanders.”

“What for?” I asked.

“They didn’t want to pay,” she said. “First they tricked me into the house with them. Then they refused to pay. I shall kill those damned Icelanders, by golly.”

“Yes, but after all they are our countrymen,” I said.

“I don’t give a damn,” said Cleopatra. “They refuse to pay. They beat you up and throw you out. And they take snuff.”

“I’ll get a doctor for you, Patra dear.” I said, “and make a complaint to the police; and take you home.”

“No-no-no,” she said. “Not a doctor, and no complaint to the police, and least of all take me home.”

“Home to our organist’s,” I said.

“I have no home,” she said, “and least of all with him, even though I have been an overnight guest with his mother for four years just because he is a holy man. It was all right while there were Yanks. But now there are only a few strays left and they all have something steady, so I have to start scratching around like when I was a girl, and going home once again with Icelanders who take snuff and beat you up and refuse to pay. These damned sandy wastes and fellows were in fettle! Dear darling Americans, Jesus let them come with the atom bomb quick.”

“God help you, Cleopatra,” I said. “Skarp-Hedin Njalsson would never have spoken like that, not even if the axe Battle-Troll had been buried deep in the middle of his head.”

“If I haven’t got leave to be sorry then go away,” said Cleopatra.

She had been given a bleeding nose and a black eye, and there was a slight smell of Black Death off her; but she was more or less sober—she had no doubt sobered up with the beating, and was now only slightly fuddled. I gathered her belongings into her handbag and gave her the handkerchief so that she could wipe off the blood, and it was soaking at once, and my own handkerchief became soaked with blood too. I started thinking a bit, and came to the conclusion that this girl’s blood and tears were of the same chemical composition as that of other girls, and so I invited her home with me to stay the night. She invoked God and Jesus over and over again on my behalf and I don’t know what else, for it is just people like her who are the greatest theologians you can find. She stood up and I stood up, and under the first street-lamp she took out her lipstick and mirror and painted her mouth; and this performance moved me like a magnificent moral achievement in the middle of the night in this wicked world, so that I was ashamed of what an insignificant person I was.

She regretted how improvident she had been in the Yank business not to get herself decent accommodation, that’s how stupid one could be, one hoped that the war would last for ever, and they were always throwing parties in those splendid huts with Kosykorners and fancy lights, that was the life, gee, man. She had started with a sham colonel between Hafnarfjord and Reykjavik, and ended up with a real colonel, gray-haired, and with diabetes. She had been at a Yank party with the Prime Minister, for the Americans are liberal-minded people because they have the atom bomb and make no distinction between Prime Ministers and girls. The colonel gave her a red coat and white bootees and the hat that was so broad-brimmed that one had to tilt one’s head to get through a doorway; and money like dirt of course, man. Gosh. He had promised to come and fetch her when his wife died, but now he himself was dead, he could not endure the peace, probably his wife had killed him because she was young. And then Cleopatra started crying again; she had suffered a sorrow that was in every respect chemically correct and what’s more just precisely as spiritual as other sorrows, painful and yet wonderful, and I was sorry for her, even in earnest.

“That’s how one loses everything and everything and everything,” she said, “and dies, and has to start living again when one is dead. Isn’t it fantastic that I who have been loved by a colonel should be beaten up by a nation that takes snuff?”

She had reached the age when the chemical changes that take place in a woman’s body begin to make her disappointed with life, dead weary of the night roamings of youth, the adventure of the unknown no longer attracted her, youth’s faith in something new and unique had turned into everyday bread-slavery, she was truth to tell just about ready to abandon these damned men of hers wherever they came from, some from the north, some from the south. She wanted a settled life, a fixed place, just like any other woman of thirty five. And, as she said, for that she had to have a little den of her own, not just living for ever off holy people who called you Cleopatra and lucky if is isn’t Skarp-Hedin in the Burning: “For of course my name isn’t Cleopatra and never had been that, still less whatever else; my name is Gudrun, known as Gudrun the Wilderness.”

I asked if she wanted to get married, but she did not know what to make of such an unseemly suggestion: “The very idea!” she said. On the other hand she confided to me, when we were in bed with the light switched off, that her dream of the settled life was a little flat with a living-room and bedroom, carved Renaissance furniture, a kitchen, and a bathroom with a shower, and then to fix herself up with three steadies: one a married businessman with a little money, approaching his silver wedding; a seaman who was only ashore every now and again; and an educated young man who was engaged to an upper-class girl.

We discussed this idea at some length until we grew sleepy, and soon we lapsed into silence, until she said in the darkness after a good while, when I thought she was asleep, “Well should we not be saying our Lord’s Prayer now?”

“Yes,” I said. “You say it for both of us.”

She recited the Lord’s Prayer, and then we bade one another Good night and went to sleep.