The Atom Station

18. Gentleman behind a house

Although up-to-date writers say that it has a bad effect on children to rock them, I had all at once begun to take notice if there were something in the paper about cradles, even if it were only a cradle for sale. And now it was reported that the Town Council had defeated a Communist proposal to build a day-nursery. “Women” wrote to the papers and said that it would increase immorality in the country if such projects were subsidized from the public purse; the proper nurseries were the homes of true Christians and others of decent morals. But, I asked, why should there be nurseries only for the children of true Christians and those of decent morals? Why should there not be nurseries for the children of non-true Christians with wicked morals, such as me?

“We live in a society of people who have only one wish dearer than to care for rich children, and that is to kill poor children,” said the Communist. “A few generations ago the rich were so powerful, even though they were still lice-ridden, that about half of all the children born in Iceland died. If the masses had no solidarity, the children of the poor would still be dying; and if we did not continue to strengthen this solidarity the rich would still be persecuting the poor and their children with direct measures taken in the name of Jesus, with scourgings and drownings, just as before. The opposition to a day nursery for the children of penniless mothers reveals clearly their way of thinking; they only need the lice to be precisely the same as in the days of the Fornication Act.”[16]

I asked his friend, the bakery girl, “What would you do if you had a baby?”

Her smile vanished suddenly and her eyes widened, and she glanced questioningly at her Communist.

“It’s safe to tell her,” he said.

A woman asked for rye bread, and a girl for a cream cake, and then the shop was empty.

“Come this way,” said the girl, and opened the flap of the counter and invited me inside; she took me through a tiny dark box-room, combined storage room and washroom opening out into a yard. There was fierce rain from the east, and black storm clouds were overhead. Outside in the mud stood a pram with its hood up and a sack spread over the whole thing to protect it from the worst of the weather. The bakery girl lifted the sack aside and, smiling, peeped in under the hood.

The baby was wide awake, and stared up from the bedclothes with huge eyes. When he saw his mother he squealed and kicked and pulled with all his might at one of his thumbs.

“My little darling,” said his mother, and looked at her boy, entranced for a moment in the middle of the day’s work, with black storm clouds over the back yard.

“Look what intelligent eyes he’s got,” I said. “What a fine gentleman he must be.”

“If they found out that I keep him here I would be sacked,” she said.

In the front of the shop an impatient customer had started to pound the counter.

Doctor Bui Arland came home smiling, with water streaming down his face, took off his soaked overcoat, and said, “Well, now there is good news.”

I waited.

“I think I can say with certainty that I have at last managed to squeeze a few thousand kronur out of Parliament for your father and his church.”

“Oh?” I said.

He looked at me in amazement.

“And you do not throw yourself round my neck?” he said.

“Why should I?”

“For joy,” he said.

“I have learned that Luther was the coarsest man who ever lived,” I said. “So I have dropped the faith.”

“Well I’ll be damned!” he said, and took off his coat and wiped the water from his face, took off his spectacles and dried the raindrops off them. “By the way, can we still not believe in the man even though he sometimes said rectum and bumbus in abominable German instead of Latin when he was engaged in disputation over the Holy Spirit? Or mentioned the genitals of an ass in some mysterious connection with the Pope? He was still enough of a peasant to take Christianity seriously in the middle of the Renaissance, when the whole of Europe had stopped doing so; and rescue the movement; apart from the fact that he was fond of singing, like so many German peasants, poor wretch.”

“I didn’t know you were a Lutheran,” I said.

“No, I did not really know it myself either,” he said, laughing. “Not exactly. I had thought that I stood nearest to the one man in Christendom who demonstrably believes in nothing at all, namely the Pope. Except that I have made it a rule for myself to support old Jesus in Parliament, mainly because I agree with our uncrucified Jew-dog Marx that the Cross is opium for the people.”

“In other words you are a materialist,” I said.

“Why, what a long time it is since I have heard that word—in that denotation,” he said. “We political economists use words, you see, in a slightly different sense. But since you have asked me in all sincerity about my religious beliefs, I shall answer you in the style in which you ask. I believe that E equals me squared.”

“What sort of rigmarole is that?” I asked.

“It is Einstein’s Theory,” he said. “This says that mass times the velocity of light squared equals energy. But perhaps it is materialism to hold that matter as such does not exist.”

“And yet you take the trouble to procure money to build a church up in the far valleys for practically no one,” I said.

“When I discovered some years ago that your father believed in ponies, I vowed to myself to do everything I could for him. You see, I once had a religious revelation, rather after the manner of the saints. In this revelation it was revealed to me that ponies are the only living creatures that have a soul—with the exception of fish; and this is due, amongst other things, to the fact that ponies have only one toe; one toe, the ultimate of perfection. Ponies have a soul, just like the idols; or the paintings of some artists; or a beautiful vase.”

How smoothly he talked of the loftiest matters, almost absently, with that amiable civilized smile that was never quite free from sleepiness and could moreover sometimes end in a yawn, as indeed it did now; and he took out a cigarette and lit it And while I contemplated him, the earth vanished from under my feet and my feet from under myself, and I had to muster all my strength not lose touch with substantiality altogether. I braced myself and said, “I heard today that the rich were once again going to make famine and murder the fate of illegitimate children, and pass laws that their fathers should be flogged and their mothers drowned—if only they dared to in the face of solidarity of the mases. Is that true?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled amiably. “All For Virtue is our slogan, my good girl. Our wives want to have legitimate children, at least on paper; and preferably no competition. It is an an attack on the wives’ class to have day nurseries.”

“I do so want to put a question to you,” I said.

“I wish I knew the answers to everything you asked,” he said.

I asked: “Is it possible to be a Capitalist if one sees a baby child in a rainstorm behind a house?”

“That is a difficult question,” he said, and scratched himself behind the ear. “I do not think I am far enough advanced to be able to answer it; at least I would first need to go behind a house.”

“Why does Parliament and the Town Council not want my children to have a nursery like your children? Are my children not chemically and physiologically as good as your children? Why can we not have a society which is just as expedient for my children at it is for your children?”

He came right over to me and put his hand on the nape of my neck under the hair and said, “What has happened to our mountain-owl?”

“Nothing,” I said, and hung my head.

“Yes,” he said. “You have started thinking in a tight little circle from which you cannot break out. What is troubling you and getting worse every day?”

“I’m going,” I muttered into my bosom.

He asked where, and when.

“Away, at once,” I whispered.

“Tonight?” he said. “In this weather?”

“You have cast your vote against me and I have no home,” I said; and then I told him what had happened to me and turned away, and he stopped smiling and there was a silence. Finally he asked, “Are you fond of the man?”

And I replied, “No. Yes. I don’t know.”

He asked, “Is he fond of you?”

“I haven’t asked him,” I said.

“Do you want to marry each other?” he asked, but I could not answer such an absurdity except by shaking my head.

“Is he short of money?” he asked. “Can I do anything for you?”

I turned to face him again and looked at him and said, “I have now told you something that I have not even told him, and more I cannot do.”

“May I then not ask anything further?”

“I don’t even know what kind of a man he is,” I said, “so there is no point in asking. I am a girl, that is all there is to it. And you have cast your vote against me. If I did not have my old and penniless parents up north my child would be born a convicted outlaw, as it says in the Sagas, not to be fed nor forwarded nor helped nor harbored.”

He looked at me questioningly, almost timidly, as if he were seeing a danger he had long feared from afar suddenly loom close, and repeated in the form of a question, rather foolishly, the words I had just used—“Did I cast my vote against you?”

But when I was going to walk away he followed me and said, “Do not be anxious, you can get from me all the money you want, a house, a nursery, everything.”

“You cast your vote publicly against letting me and others like me be called people, but want to make me your beggar in secret…”

“Why in secret?” he interrupted. “Between you and me there is nothing done in secret.”

“No, now I am going, to have my baby with my own money,” I said. “Anything rather than accept money secretly from someone.”

I had no sooner got to my room than he had followed me, he even opened my door without knocking. Previously his face had momentarily tightened a little; for a while he had perhaps been on the verge of defending his point of view against me in earnest, but now his face had relaxed and he was once again gentle and unassuming, with that expression of candor that sometimes made him look more childlike even than his children.

“If I know our Red friends aright,” he said, “it will not be long before they bring this matter up again. Perhaps it will be dealt with differently next time. I shall talk to my brother-in-law and other strong men in our party. There shall be a day nursery, good heavens, never fear.”

“But if your brother-in-law says no?” I asked. “And the wives’ class?”

“You are making fun of me now,” he said. “Go ahead. The only consolation is—I do not consider myself much of a hero. But I promise you that in this matter I shall behave as if I were inspired by a woman…”

“A pregnant housemaid,” I corrected him.

“A woman whom I have admired from the very first moment,” he said.

“Yes, I once heard a tipsy man say that I was one of those women whom men want to go to bed with, without a word, the minute they see her for the first time.”

He came over to me and embraced me and looked at me.

“There are one or two women so made,” he said, “that a man forgets all his former life like a meaningless trifle the moment he first sets eyes on her, and is ready to sever all the obligations that tie him to his environment, turn around, and follow this woman to the end of the world.”

“No, I will not kiss you,” I said, “unless you promise me never to give me money, but let me work for myself like a free individual even though I am acquainted with you.”

He kissed me and said something.

“I know that I am terribly stupid,” I said afterwards. “But what am I to do? You are not like anyone else.”