The Atom Station

19. Church-builders

Out of sight in a hollow to the east of the farm knoll rose the church; with a grassy slope behind the chancel. They had begun pouring the concrete the previous autumn, but had not had the money to buy a roof. The walls had stood in their molds until now, springtime, when the money started to arrive from the Treasury to buy a roof. I was sitting down in the gulley beside the stream, where the smell of the reeds is stronger in winter than in summer; it was here that we had played as children with sheep’s horns and jawbones, and filled a rusty tin can in the stream with the sort of water that could just as easily be cocoa, or mutton broth, or schnapps. And later there stood a tent here on the bank for three late-summer nights. And as I sat there I could hear above the murmur of the water the hammering of the church-builders alternating with the cries of the golden plover.

A long time ago there had been a church parish here of twelve farms, some say eighteen, but during the last century the church was abandoned. Now another church was rising here, even though there were only three farms left in the valley—and the third farmer, Jon of Bard, the head carpenter, only counted as half or scarcely that, having lost his wife and with his children away in the south and fire no longer kindled in the farm except for the fire that burned within the man himself; and his faith the sort of horseman’s faith that it would be more accurate to connect with the phallus than with Christ. Bard-Jon never called a church anything but “God’s window-horse,” nor the pastor anything but “the stallion of the soul-stud”; and neither I nor others were ever aware that he knew any other prayer than the old Skagafjord Lord’s Prayer which starts like this: “Our Father, oh, is that blasted piebald foal not tearing around all over the place again…” And that prayer he would mumble to himself all day long.

And Geiri of Midhouses laughed—that laugh that would suffice to build a cathedral, even on the summit of Mount Hekla. This many-childrened man, our neighbor, the other main farmer in the valley, was the incarnation of the most potent point of view in the world, the point of view that no argument can affect, neither religion nor philosophy nor economics, not even the arguments of the stomach, which are nevertheless always more sensible than the arguments of the brain, not least if it is the stomach of our children that is talking: this man said that he would never depart from this valley alive, accepted his pauper’s grant, and laughed. He said that he hoped to God that if he had to bury any more unbaptized children it should be done at the church where Iceland’s greatest man of renown had been baptized. He said that he himself was looking forward to lying for all eternity in one of those pleasant dry graves here in the uplands and rising from it when the time came in the company of the poets and heroes of old, rather than in a damp and tedious grave farther down in the district amongst the farm-louts of today and slaves who fished the seas.

For most of the day they would discuss the Saga heroes over their carpentry.

Bard-Jon was a particular devotee of those heroes who had lived on moors or on outlying skerries. He did not admire above all else the hero’s poetry, but rather how long the hero could hold out along against many in battle, quite irrespective of his cause; it made no difference to Geiri whether the hero was in the right or in the wrong. As a rule, heroes were in the wrong to begin with, he would say; they became heroes not through any nobility of cause, but simply by never giving up, not even though they were being cut to pieces alive. Of those heroes who had lived in the wilderness as outlaws he loved Grettir the Strong best of all, and for the same reasons as are enumerated at the end of Grettir’s Saga: that he lived longer in the wilderness than any other man; that he was better fitted than all other men to fight with ghosts; and that he was avenged farther away from Iceland than any other hero, and what’s more, in the greatest city in the world, away out in Constantinople.

My father’s heroes were cast in a more human mold; they had at least to be lineal progenitors before they could engage his full confidence, and more especially they had to be poets. Mountains and outlying skerries were not the right setting for his heroes. This man of integrity, who had never taken a wrongful farthing’s worth from anyone, never found it remarkable that these heroes should have sailed with gaping dragon-heads and open jaws to Scotland, England, or Estonia, to slaughter innocent people there and plunder them of their possessions. Nor did this courteous upland farmer think it a blemish in the hero’s conduct that he squirted his vomit into people’s faces, bit people in the throat, or gouged their eyes out with his finger as he walked past, instead of raising his hat; and a Saga woman could be none the less noble for having a destitute boy’s tongue cut out for eating off her dish. I do not think there was a single incident in the Saga of Egil Skalla-Grimsson which was not more absorbing, nor indeed better known, to my father than all the important events that had taken place in the country during his own lifetime, and scarcely a couplet ascribed to Egil which could not come dancing off his tongue.

“My hero is and always will be Thorgeir Havarsson,” said Geiri of Midhouses. “And why? It is because he had the smallest heart in all the Sagas put together. When they cut out that heart of his which had never known fear, not even in Greenland, it was no larger than the gizzard of a sparrow”—and with that he laughed one of those laughs that would suffice to raise a cathedral.

The pastor thought nothing of calling in from farther down in the district, a five-hour ride, to take snuff and drive in a few nails with these entertaining believers. And now when the moulds were removed from the concrete walls it was seen that by far the largest window was on the east side, over the altar, looking out on to the slope where the meadow began to climb the hillside.

The pastor’s expression was solemn that day, until at last he declared over the coffee: “A tremendous revolution has taken place here—one of the greatest that has ever occurred in the history of mankind; and like all great revolutions it has happened silently, without anyone taking any notice of it.”

We had no idea where this was leading to, and waited.

“I do not know precisely how many churches have been built in the world since the introduction of Christianity,” said the pastor. “But this is the first time in the history of mankind that any man has dared to design a church with a window over the altar. Previously, any church-builder who made so bold as to dare to do that would have been boiled alive.”

Gieri of Midhouses brightened up and roared with laughter, for he thought the pastor was making yet another of his jokes.

Bard-Jon said, “It would not have been much of a window-horse if there had only been blank wall there.”

“How lovely the slopes are,” said my father.[17]

“How lovely the slopes are,” echoed the pastor. “There, you see, the paganism in the Sagas suddenly breaks through. The purpose of Christianity is that men should not see the slopes; and the purpose of a church is to shutter Nature from man’s eyes, at least during divine service. In old churches, all windows were painted. And above the altar in every church in the world, even in our Lutheran churches, in all except this one, there hangs a picture of a symbol that leads man’s thoughts towards the mysteries of holy faith and away from the delusions of Creation.”

“Why then are you having a church?” I asked them. “What do you believe in?”

At that the pastor rose and came over to me and patted me on the cheek and said, “That’s just the thing, my dear: we believe in the land that God has given us; in the district where our people have lived for a thousand years; we believe in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland; we believe in the green slope where Life lives.”

Often I felt that these men were play-acting: the unreality of their role was their security, even their own destinies were to them Saga and folk-tale rather than a private matter; these were men under a spell, men who had been turned into birds or even more likely into some strange beast, and who bore their magic shapes with the same unflurried equanimity, magnanimity, and dignity that we children had marvelled at in the beasts of fairy tale. Did they not suspect, moreover, with the wordless apprehension of animals, that if their magic shapes were to be stripped from them the fairy tale would be at an end and their security gone, too, while real life would begin with all its problems, perhaps in some town where there was neither Nature nor mirage, no link with folk-tale and the past, no ancient path to the far side of the mountains and down to the river-gulleys and out beyond the grass-plains, no landmarks from the Sagas?—only a restless search for sterile, deadening enjoyment.

“How can it occur to you, Father,” I said, when the pastor and the church-builders had gone, “that it is possible to live off 45 lambs when you know that a lamb only provides one laborer’s single day-wage? When you have received these 45 day-wages for your efforts there are still 320 days of the year left.”

“We live,” he said. “We live.”

“And only two milk-meager cows, dry in turns for half the year? And it says here in the paper that in America it is only considered an average day’s work to make a hundred horse-loads of hay and look after a hundred and twenty cows and milk them.”

“It also says in the paper there that in America forty million people would be blown to shreds on the first day of a nuclear war. All their milk would not help them then. It is better then to be an Eystridale man in a dry grave and rise from it again in one piece beside one’s church.”

“Do you all then farm solely to be able to lie in a dry grave?” I asked.

“I know perfectly well that it is impossible, according to arithmetic and scholastic books, to live in a far valley off a handful of ewes and two low-yield cows. But we live, I say. You children all lived; your sisters now have sturdy children in far-off districts. And what you are now carrying under your heart will also live and be welcome, little one, despite all the arithmetic and scholastic books. Here, moreover, life will be lived off one cow, and the child will thrive on it, long after Paris, London, and Rome have become insignificant moss-grown heaps of rubble.”

“But apart from the nuclear bomb, Father,” I said, “I still feel that you would be better to own even one stallion the fewer and build yourself a privy instead.”

“I know they have these privies in the south,” he said. “But we have Nature. If one considers human life from that particular standpoint, then Nature is the best privy. And the ponies, little one, they live in the mountains.”

“I heard it said in the south that you actually believed in wild ponies, Father,” I said.

“They say the most unlikely things sometimes, our friends in the towns,” he said. “But it is quite true, on the other hand, that here in these parts it has long been the custom to reckon a man’s worth in ponies. No one ever thought much of a man in these parts who did not have a choice of ponies if he had a journey to make. It’s a fine sight in summer, the herd of brood mares; and a splendid beast, the stallion.”

“It’s even harder to understand that men who can use Nature for their privy and who worship ponies should build a church before anything else,” I said.

“Man is that animal species that rides a pony and has a God,” said my father.

“And builds a roof over God and lets the ponies go roofless,” I added.

“The herd looks after itself,” said my father. “But the God is a domestic animal,” he said, giving the word a neuter inflection.

“The God?” I said.

“The God.” said my father. “Snorri Sturluson[18] inflected ‘god’ as a neuter, and I am not going to pretend to know better than he.”

“What God is that, if I may ask?” I said.

“To explain God would be to have no God, my little one,” said my father.

“It can hardly be a Lutheran God,” I said.

“Icelanders have always been taught that Lutheranism was forced on us by a German robber, King Christian the Third of Denmark,” said my father. “His Danish stewards beheaded Bishop Jon Arason.[19] We who work our farms up in the valleys of Iceland do not much care what Gods are thought up by Germans and preached with murder by Danes.”

“Perhaps then it was the late Papal God,” I said.

“Rather Jon Arason than German Luther and those Danish kings,” said my father. ‘But still that is not it.”

I asked if he did not then want to change the church into a temple dedicated Thor, Odin, and Frey.

My father repeated their names slowly and thoughtfully, and his face softened again as if at the memory of departed friends: “Thor, Odin, and Frey. Be blessed for naming them. But still it is not they.”

“I think you do not know yourself what you believe in, Father,” I said.

“Oh yes, little girl, I believe in my God, we believe in our God,” replied this unfanatical believer, and smiled at our innocent chatter. “It is certainly neither a Lutheran God nor Papal God; still less a Jesus God, although that happens to be the one most often named in the pastor’s prescribed reading; neither is it Thor, Odin, and Frey; nor even the stallion himself, as they think in the south. Our God is that which is left when all Gods have been listed and marked No, not him, not him.”