The Atom Station

22. Spiritual visitors

One autumn night I woke up in the greyness that precedes dawn; and to the best of my knowledge it was our pastor outside on the paving talking to my father through the living room window. Soon I heard the footsteps of visitors at the farm door. I dressed in a flash and put the child away, but while I was tidying up the spare room, where my daughter and I stayed, the visitors came in.

It seemed at first glance an ominous sight to see a pastor, sober, and without warning, in a remote parish-of-ease at that time of day, but the balance was restored by the fact that on this occasion he had picked himself companions who well became a true pastor on an unexpected journey—the gods themselves. I am not going to describe the shock it gave me to see the two so-and-so’s, those phenomena who had done most to turn the tarmac into folk tale in my memories, crossing a threshold north of the mountains in the flesh. But this was clearly not the time and place to indulge in stupid witticisms: the Joint-Stock Company Earnest was deeply imprinted on the expressions of the visitors—I am tempted to say, the Murder Corporation Solemnity; the atom poet Benjamin strode through the mountains with his face to the skies, and in Brilliantine’s eyes there lurked that unique shallow stab of insanity which is practically made for bewitching a pastor, yes, even for beguiling a girl in a garden behind a house.

“Where are the twins?” I asked.

“I promised the wife to shoot them a lamb,” said Brilliantine, and bared those smooth glistening front teeth.

“Fancy you up here in the country,” I said to the atom poet, who had flopped exhausted on to our divan.

“The whole world—one station,” he replied. “And I Benjamin, this little brother.”

“They do not come empty-handed,” said the pastor.

“We were sent,” they said.

I asked by whom, but the pastor was quicker and said, “They have a mission.”

“We were sent by the godhead,” they said.

“Which godhead?” I asked.

“These young men are instruments,” said the pastor. “Remarkable instruments. Hmm. In response to inspiration they have brought with them here to the north the earthly remains of the Darling. They have received a command of a kind I do not care to call into question. And at the same time, our dear district’s age-old dream seems about to be fulfilled.”

“Well, well, is that so?” said my father, and looked at the visitors with a benevolent smile. “And who are your people, boys?”

“We belong to the atom bomb,” they said.

At this reply my father’s face stiffened and his smile vanished as if he had heard something flippant and cheap.

The pastor said that the boys were rather sleepy.

“One is a poet and singer and former message boy with the joint stock company Snorredda,” I said, “and the other is a model family man and owner of twins, former storekeeper with the same enterprise: both friends of mine from the south.”

“Great believers, and they have had a remarkable experience,” said the pastor. “I do not call anything of that kind into question.”

“We don’t believe,” corrected the god Brilliantine. “We are. We have direct contact. We could, moreover, have become millionaires long ago if we had so wished; perhaps got to Hollywood, what’s more.”

“We are at war,” said Benjamin. “He who does not believe in us shall first be crushed, then wiped out. We shall not cease before we have stolen everything and broken everything. Then we shall burn everything. Down with Two Hundred Thousand Pliers! We shall not even spare Portuguese Sardines nor Danish Dirt. Am I mad or am I not mad?”

My father had gone out. The pastor nodded to himself over these remarkable instruments of the Almighty, and offered them a pinch of snuff, but they only wanted to puff their own cigarettes; on the other hand, the pastor was allowed to light them for them.

“This silence will drive me mad,” said Benjamin.

“Isn’t there a wireless?” asked Brilliantine.

After a short while they were both asleep, one on the divan and the other on the bed. I removed their cigarettes, from the mouth of the one and the fingers of the other, so that they would not set themselves on fire while they slept.

“A symbolic event of historical significance has taken place in the life of this nation,” said the pastor. “Today this remote valley is once again the center of national life, as it once was long ago in the day when the Nation’s Darling was brought in swaddling clothes here to this Eystridale church. The champion of Icelandic freedom and the poet of our spirit is once again home in his valley; our trinity—star of love, ptarmigan, and dandelion slope—welcome anew that friend whom a blind nation lost in a foreign graveyard for a hundred years. But while he lay there hidden under no stone all his ideals were realized, and Iceland’s every cause did triumph. The Icelandic people greet…”

There could be little doubt about it—our pastor had already composed his funeral speech, and started trying it out on me.

“But my dear Reverend Traustik,” I said, when he had rattled on for a bit, “in our minds he has never died. That’s why we have never made a fuss about his so-called bones nor his lack of a stone in Denmark. He dwells in the blue mountain peaks we can always see when the weather is fine.”

In the back of a big truck at the other side of the gully were two crates, each of about the capacity of a barrel; and when it was broad daylight my father and I walked over with the pastor to examine these wares.

“Two crates,” I said. “He hasn’t half grown bulky from not existing for a hundred years.”

“Yes, it is undeniably a little odd,” said the pastor. “But they set off in a great hurry. They say that one of the crates is undoubtedly the right one.”

We examined the crates and found addresses printed on them: “Prime Minister of Iceland” on the one, and “Snorredda Wholesale Company” on the other—two names for the same enterprise. Then my father noticed that on one crate the following words had been tarred in Danish—“Dansk Ler.”

“What do these words mean?” he asked.

“Dansk Ler, Dansk Ler,” muttered the pastor pensively. “That is just like the Danes. That nation invariably tries to insult us Icelanders.”

“It means, at its best, Danish Clay,” I said. “Should we not first take a look into the other crate? It looks more promising to me even though I don’t understand the foreign writing on it.”

We forced up one of the planks of the lid with a crowbar, and I groped amongst the packing for the contents; and what did I pull out but a small tin, about two hundred grams in weight, wrapped in semi-transparent paper. I recognized the merchandise quickly enough from my pantry work in the south: Portuguese Sardines imported from America, that fish which the papers said was the only fish that could scale the highest tariff walls in the world and yet be sold when ten years old at a thousand percent profit in the greatest fish country in the world, where even the dogs walk out and vomit at the mere mention of salmon.

“Miracle fish, to be sure,” I said, “but not quite the miracle we expected.”

“We shall not open the other crate,” the pastor said then. “We shall let faith prevail there. In actual fact it is irrelevant what the crates contain. This is a symbolic consignment. At a funeral it is not the chemical contents of the coffin that matter, but the memory of the deceased that lives on in men’s hearts.”

But by then my father had opened the second crate and taken the packing out through the opening. And it was just as I had suspected—in that crate too there was not much that was likely to enhance the nation’s prestige. But yet, if one believes that man is dust and dirt, as the Christians believe, then this was a man the same as any other; but not an Icelandic man, for this was not Icelandic dirt; it was not the gravel nor earth, sand nor clay, which we know from our own country, but a dry, greyish calcareous devil like nothing else so much as old dog’s dirt.

“Well,” I said, “is the Nation’s Darling Danish Clay or Portuguese Sardines?”

“Do you believe in nothing, little girl?” said the pastor.

“A prank!” said my father, and walked off to see to his ponies.

“Do you believe?” I asked the pastor.

Suddenly there was a hard expression round the mouth of this cheerful kindly man who was normally the least orthodox of men, something adamant and dogmatic—I am inclined to say hard-hearted—so that I scarcely knew him for the same person; and there came a cold gleam of fanaticism into his eyes.

“I believe,” he said.

“Do you believe in just the same way, when you can touch it and see clearly that it is the opposite of what you thought?” I asked.

“I believe,” he said.

“Is it then belief to believe what one knows with absolute certainty is not so?” I asked.

“I believe,” said the Reverend Trausti, “in the function of country districts in the national life of Iceland. This clay, which perhaps preserves the sap from the bones of the freedom hero and great poet, is to me a sacred symbol. From now on it shall be an article of faith for Iceland that the Nation’s Darling is once more back in his own valley. The Holy Spirit in my breast enlightens me in this Icelandic belief. I hope that our district will never again let go of this symbol of its faith in itself.”

Then he looked out over the valley between the mountains and said in a solemn altar voice, with an exalted glow in his eyes: “May the Lord for ever bless this our district of districts.”

The silence woke the gods after a short while, and my mother brought them hot coffee. When they had inhaled a few more cigarettes they went out with a gun.

It was one of those tranquil autumn days which sometimes come to the valleys, when a tiny sound awakens echoes out of distant cliffs. It was not long before the mountains on both sides of the valleys reverberated with gunfire, and this peaceful valley behind the world was stricken with panic: autumn birds dashed past in violent flight, sheep halfway up the mountain slopes formed into file and headed for the wilderness; and the snorting ponies surged away up and down the mountain.

One of the loveliest and most magnificent events that can happen in the country is when ponies take fright, particularly in a herd. A meadow-pippit has flown past. The ponies’ fear is at first blended with play, even with mockery, amusement touched with a shudder, not unlike the behavior of the mentally ill. They trot as if they were retreating from a slow-moving stream of fire, but with lightning in every action, storm in every nerve, swinging their heads everywhere as if the front of their necks were made of elastic, gracefully flirting their tails. They can even pause for a moment, and start biting and boxing, with those romantic mating cries of theirs. Then all at once it is as if the fire has started flowing right under these strange creatures, they charge away like a storm incarnate over scree and bogs and landslides, dipping the tips of their toes for a fractional moment into the furnace that blazes beneath their hooves, cutting across waterfalls, gullys, and boulders, galloping steeply for a while until they stand trapped at last on some ledge high in the mountaintops, there to die and be eaten by birds.

The gods returned just before noon. They had succeeded in shooting one lamb, and had dragged it between them down off the mountain; Brilliantine, this sole Luther of the present, as skilled a family man as he was an interpreter of religious mysteries with the help of the Spirit, did not venture to return home empty-handed to his wife and twins.

My father groped for the lamb’s ear and recognized the mark of one of the farmers in the district, and said that this would come before the sheriff unless they paid for it and excused it as an accident. They found it a harsh doctrine that one should not be allowed to shoot the sheep that ran wild in the mountains, and asked what farmers lived on if they could not shoot sheep.

A little later they toppled the crates off the truck and called on the pastor to come along. Nothing could shake the Reverend Trausti’s conviction that they were the instruments of Higher Powers, if not manifestations of the godhead itself as they themselves claimed; he said that he was a Lutheran pastor, and that he believed those who let themselves be governed directly by the Holy Spirit and understood holy writ without the mediation of the Pope. The pastor’s last words to us as he climbed up into the truck with them were that within two days he would come back here to the valley with a congregation and some district worthies, and give the Nation’s Darling a proper funeral.

After further consideration, the herd of ponies had left off being frightened at all and had calmed down, and were now grazing in the home pastures, on the grass fields and gravel banks or in the home meadow close up to the farm. I stood at the window in that autumn light that makes the dead and the living more sharply discernible than the light of any other season. Yes, what a well-sculptured creature the pony is, so finely carved that even if there were no more than half a chisel stroke extra the workmanship would be ruined; that curve from neck to rump, and all the way down to the fetlock, is in actual fact a woman’s curve; in the oblique-set eyes of these creatures lies buried a wisdom that is hidden from men but blended with the mockery of the idols; around the muzzle and the underlip hovers the smile that no cinema shark has ever been able to reproduce; and where is the female star who smells as wonderful as the nose of a pony? And what about the hoof, where all the world’s fingers end: claw and cloven hoof, hand and flipper, paddle and paw, fin and wing. And probably because the pony is such perfection, the pony’s token, the horseshoe, is our token of faith over all our doors, the symbol of good fortune in fertility and woman, the opposite of the sign of the Cross.

When the peace of autumn has become poetic instead of being taken for granted… the last day of the plover become a matter of personal regret… the pony become associated with the history of art and mythology… the evening ice-film on the farm stream become reminiscent of crystal… and the smoke from the chimney become a message to us from those who discovered fire—then the time has come to say goodbye. The world-bacteria has overcome you, the countryside has turned into literature, poetry, and art; and you no longer belong there. After one winter in the company of electric floor polishers, farmer Fal’s house in the valley has become only a brief shelter for the girl in the poem Snow swirls across the hills,[23] in order not to die of exposure. I had long begun to count the days until I could once again leave home, where I felt an alien, and go out into the alien world, where I was at home. But still I paused for a while over my thoughts of departure, and listened to the silence that had robbed the gods of sleep; and dusk sank slowly over the ponies.

That same night, near bedtime, Government messengers arrived in police cars to fetch the Portuguese Sardines and D.L.