The Atom Station

20. The country sold

The hammering faded into its own echoes and melted into the quiet of the mountain valleys; and still the plover was heard. Why not live for ever in tranquillity and peace, and fetch water from the stream instead of making it gush from an indoor tap? And no mixing machine? And the question of a privy still undecided?

Unfortunately, peace and tranquillity are only a poem to be recited in cities, the poem of country folk who have straggled into the towns through lack of money and there been infected by the great world-bacteria; and soon not even a contemporary poem any longer, but a poem by Jonas Hallgrimsson. Would it strike any chord in a modern poet to hear a church being hammered together in a far valley and the golden plover calling in between the hammer-blows? And the southeast breeze, which does not in fact exist in the south—where is the poet now who knows it?

Until the calm was suddenly shattered: the politicians had started screeching, there was to be an election. This unpleasant crew, which it was impossible to get rid of by any known device (the only consolation being to know it far away), had now migrated to us for a while. Their words of abuse and mutual insinuations of crimes filled this tranquil, discreet-tongued valley. And the story repeated itself: even though country people heard them outlaw one another all day, and always with irrefutable evidence, it never occured to them to believe any of this mutual smearing, any more than it occurred to them to believe what the pastor said in the pulpit. When the candidates had concluded their addresses, the country people greeted them smilingly just as if they were ordinary plain folk.

A man who slaughters the wrong ewe in a district is excluded from the genealogies after his death, and his descendants, moreover, are branded for two hundred years; so it is little wonder that country people are sceptical of the misdeeds that the politicians prove against each other; indeed, they listen to the crime-stories of political meetings in the same frame of mind as to Saga-tales of throat-biting, vomit-squirting, and the gouging out of eyes. And inasmuch as they are themselves guiltless, whether because they have never had the opportunity to commit crimes or because they are holy men by nature, they find it as easy to forgive crimes as they find it difficult to believe them.

No power could have forced my father to believe, even had it been proved with hard facts before his very eyes, that there existed in Iceland men who wanted to hand over her sovereignty to foreigners the year after the establishing of the Republic, or, as it is called in modern terms: Sell the country. Right enough, it had happened once before in the Sagas, Gissur Thorvaldsson and his associates had handed over her sovereignty to foreigners: sold the country. That crime, which the men of the valleys would have refused to believe in the year 1263,[20] they had now, after a 700-year-long struggle for independence, forgiven with an historical forgiveness. If now there arose new politicians to sell their country, they would not believe it even though they saw it, but would forgive the crime with an historical forgiveness again when their descendants had struggled for another 700 years.

The politicians swore solemn oaths in the north that summer, no less than they had done in the south that winter: Iceland shall not be sold nor the nation betrayed, no atom station shall be built where Icelanders can be wiped out in a single day; at the very most a resting place will be allowed, out on Reykjaness in the south, for foreign welfare missions. They swore it on the country, on the nation, and on history, swore it on all the gods and sacred relics they claimed to believe in; swore it on their members; but first and foremost they swore it on their honor. And then I knew that now it had been done.

There was one further thing that gave me an indication: they had started the bones rigmarole again. They made fervent speeches about the Nation’s Darling and called him our fellow-parishioner, the freedom of the Icelandic nation had been his life, nothing would be left undone to find his grave and raise his bones from foreign soil and give them a stone because they had not been given bread while they were alive.

The church-builders thought that the ones they supported, and their opponents too, had all spoken well, just as much when they denounced one another’s crimes as when they flocked together and swore oaths. Of course politicians, like everything else in their eyes, were just a type of Saga, varyingly stout-hearted sea-raiders and clever brigands, who fought for other people’s possessions with terms of abuse and false accusations instead of sword and spear; a modern Saga, much duller, of course, then Egil’s Saga or Njal’s Saga, but one which had to be read with the same kind of objective attitude. They recognized all the candidates, understood them all and forgave them all—all except the Communist. They could not understand a man who claimed to be the spokesman of the poor, and they felt it downright treachery against themselves even to say that poor people existed. They knew not only Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga but also the Legendary Sagas. They were descended not only from the heroes of the Sagas but from the prehistoric kings too. They were themselves Vikings in disguise with invisible swords, even helmsmen of splendid ships. They got worked up whenever they referred to the Communist. They would much prefer to have forbidden such a man the right of speech. Did they, then suspect him of wanting to make alliance with the wolf Fenrir[21] fettered in their own selves, which threatened to tear off the false Saga-beards glued to their cheeks, strip them of the invisible sword of the champion and ditto the ship of the Viking who ran breathlessly up the hillsides after a ewe and had never even set eyes on the sea?

“Did our Member… swear?” I asked.

“It was easy to understand what he was getting at, even though he did not put much in his mouth, the blessed old worthy,” they replied, and from their answer I suddenly saw the mask he wore for his tired, penniless voters in the valleys of the north: an old worthy, something like an old and impotent bishop. But such men indeed would never have understood that he was himself too wearied of the sunshine of good days to have any ideals, too cultured to be affected by any accusations; that he looked on life an an empty farce, or, much more likely, an accident; and was bored.

“By the way, he came over to me and asked me to greet the Good Stepmother,” said my father. “And mentioned, moreover, that he would pay a visit up the valley to have a look at our church before he returned south.”

I am not going to describe the mist that descended on me, or how the strength drained from my limbs; I was beside myself all day, and did I not dream all night that he was standing outside with the wooden ladle ladling water out of the well? What well? There is no well there. Next day I heard nothing but hammer blows and no plover; until I said to my mother, “If he comes, I shall run up into the mountains.”

“And what do you want up in the mountains, my dear?” asked my mother.

“He shall never see me with a belly,” I said.

Then my mother answered, “You do not have such a father that you cannot hold up your head before any man, whatever condition you are in; and, I hope, not such a mother neither.”

I am not going to describe how relieved I was when news came that he had flown south, without warning, on urgent business. But the next day brought a visitor to our door from down in the district, who had with him a letter for me, and on it the words: To Ugla.

His visiting card, with no signature, but with a new telephone number—that was all the letter; and these words hastily scribbled in pencil: “When you come, come to me; all that you ask for, you shall have.”