The Atom Station

23. Phoning

“I’m sorry for phoning, and so late; but I’ve come. And you wrote that I should come to you… first; at once. I have been hoping that you know of some job or other. But now I’m not going to tell how I feel over phoning like this; to be such a peasant as to take politeness seriously… not even changed out of my traveling clothes, and covered with dust from head to foot.”

“Dust, who is not dust? I am dust. But I am your Member of Parliament… nevertheless.

“Yes, but do you know whether I vote for you?”

“I was asked to take a little parcel with me in the plane south this summer on behalf of a political opponent, a woman from the Os district who has just gone south to have her gums cleaned out and had forgotten her eiderdown, and was lying in bed in the south with nothing to keep her warm in the middle of her toothlessness. I said of course, naturally…”

“Yes, I am just exactly like that woman…”

“Except that you have a full complement of teeth and choose me—perhaps, some time. In a word, I am your Member, whoever you vote for. Where are you?”

“In a public phone booth; standing in the middle of the square with a wooden case.”

“And with nowhere definite to stay the night, of course.”

“Yes, perhaps—at my organist’s.”

“Are you with… the little one, what was her name again?”

“Her name is Gudrun, and she’s staying in the north until I have managed to fix myself up.”

“And what are your plans?”

“I want to become a person.”

“What do you mean, a person?”

“Neither an unpaid bondwoman like the wives of the poor, nor a bought madam like the wives of the rich; much less a paid mistress; nor the prisoner of a child society has disowned. A person amongst persons. I know it’s laughable, contemptible, disgraceful, and revolutionary that a woman should not wish to be some sort of slave or harlot; but that’s the way I’m made.”

“Don’t you want to get a husband?”

“I don’t want to get a slave, neither under one name nor another.”

“But at least you want to get a new coat?”

“I neither want to make a poor man dress me in rags nor a rich man dress me in furs, for having slept with them. I want to buy myself a coat for money which I have earned for myself because I am a person.”

“I can cheer you up with the news that from now on no one need become a Communist for lack of a day nursery. Indeed, the new authors say that only scoundrels rock their children, and only sadists sing Hushabye Baby, so you must not think it was a painless matter getting Town Council agreement on such a perilous project. I shall not attempt to conceal it from you: we sweated profusely, and trembled considerably, even foamed at the mouth… a little; also, ‘Women’ had published reams and reams in the papers saying what a scandal it was to have the children of Communists rocked at the public’s expense. Finally, I betrayed my party over it, and another member did likewise for my sake; and, as I said, it scraped through.”

“Well, it’s time to say goodbye and thank you for everything.”

“Is that all—when I have become a party renegade for your sake?”

“No, I thank you especially and particularly for your wanting me to phone; and then of course for everything else. And I beg pardon that I did as you asked. Even when you mean nothing with what you say, you can get me to do everything I don’t want to do. I know I’m a fool, but what am I to do? Well, now I’m going to go on my way, good night. My greetings to everyone.”

“Wait a moment, I’ll drive through the square in three minutes…”

I think that was our conversation, as nearly as one can recall a conversation when a girl talks to a man and a man to a girl, for of course the words themselves say least of all, if in fact they say anything; what really informs us is the inflection of the voice (and no less so if it is restrained), the breathing, the heart-beat, the muscles round the mouth and eyes, the dilation and contraction of the pupils, the strength or the weakness in the knees, as well as the chain of mysterious reactions in the nerves and the secretions from hidden glands whose names one never knows even though one reads about them in books; all that is the essence of a conversation—the words are more or less incidental.

And when this conversation was over, I felt a marvelous elation in the blood and my heart was beating as if I were high on a mountain; I had lost all substance and everything was possible from now on, with every trace of weariness gone.

Three minutes, I thought; no, it’s quite out of the question, I’ll run. How could it ever occur to me, even though he had scribbled it lightheartedly on his card? To tell the absolute truth it had not really occurred to me at all; that whole day, on my way through unfamiliar country, I had in fact been thinking: what absolute nonsense, this was the very last thing that could ever have happened to me; I had not even allowed such foolishness to reach the surface of my thoughts; I had been looking at Nature out of the bus window, and had decided in my own mind where I was going to stay the night: some distant relatives in town would, out of kindness for the north country, allow a girl from the north to stay the night. But how hot my cheeks had felt; and I had not been able to get any food down in three counties, except a caramel and some burp-water in Borgarfjord. On the ferry from Akraness an extremely ugly woman had stared at me wherever I went, and I had the impression that she would walk over to me when least expected and say, “Of course you’re going to phone him.” I had wanted to hit this woman. It would be not merely rudeness to phone him, but a breach which would never be healed, and above all a surrender, I almost say the ultimate surrender, that unconditional surrender which was talked about during the war and which no victory can ever follow, ever. The ferry had slid to the quayside—and what had happened to that ugly woman? She had gone. And I had stepped from the ferry on to land—and straight to this phone booth on the square; and phoned. But as I said, now I was going to run.

He was standing beside me in the square; he said Hello and offered me his hand with that gentle nonchalant lightness of a man whom nothing can affect—in the first place because he has a million, and in the second place because everyone is to be hanged tomorrow; such was his unique, incomparable charm.

“Let’s go,” he said.

And before I knew it he had picked up my wooden case, that laughable receptacle made in a mountain valley where no one knew what a suitcase was—this man who flew between countries with a case made of soft fragrant yellow leather that creaked. He carried this trash of mine to his glossy burnished car that stood at the curb a few paces away. And before I knew it I was myself sunk deep in the seat beside him; and with a touch, the car rolled soundlessly off into the traffic.

“Aren’t you afraid,” I asked, “of letting the town see such a yokel getting into your car?”

“I am always getting braver,” he said, changing into third. “Soon I shall be a hero.”

We drove on in silence for a moment.

“Where are we going, anyway?” I asked.

“To a hotel,” he said.

“I who gained nothing all summer except little Gudrun!” I said. “How do you expect me to have the money to sleep in a hotel? To tell the truth I don’t know what I’m doing in your car. I must be mad.”

“How’s Gudrun?” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “She weighed ten pounds.”

“Congratulations,” he said. “Incidentally”—and he glanced at me as we turned a corner: “I seem to recall that we were on less formal terms?”

“Will you please let me out now?” I said.

“In the middle of the road?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

“Can I then not invite you to stay the night?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“That’s odd,” he said. “I am always invited to stay the night whenever I come north.”

He slowed the car, and I saw that we were in front of the business premises of the Snorredda company. He drove round a corner and through a gate, stopped, stepped out, opened the door for me and locked the car. And once more I was with a man behind a house at night, except that here there was no need to be afraid of anyone in the windows. He took me through a little back door, up some steep narrow back stairs laid with multicolored rubber flooring so clean that no one seemed ever to have trodden on it before; and I followed him higher and higher, I don’t know how high, perhaps up through the roof; it was like a dream—perhaps one of those dreams of uncertain joy which end in a feeling of suffocation and nightmare; or was it the beginning of my becoming a person? Finally he opened a door for me, and I stood in a little hall and could see through a half-open door into a room—leather-covered furniture, a desk in the middle of the floor, books on shelves, a telephone, a wireless.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“This is my hideout,” he said. “There’s a bathroom over there, a little kitchen here. Further in from the living room is the cubbyhole where I sleep, but tonight I shall lend you my bed and I myself shall sleep outside the door.”

“But your home?” I asked.

“Where in the world is shelter sure?” he said, and smiled wryly at this hymn-opening.

“Why shouldn’t there be?” I said.

“My wife is in California,” he said.

“And Fruit-blood?”

“I sent her to a convent school in Switzerland.”

“And Jona’s Day-beam?” I asked.

“That Smaland-American female savior had started to beat my little angel with a cudgel night and day for saying Hell. So I fired the old hag, boarded out the children, and shut up the house. It has been empty ever since.”

The bathroom was inlaid with pink tiles and the water from the hot springs was fragrant in the tub. One whole wall was a mirror from floor to ceiling, and I stared amazed at this big strong woman who stood there with milk in her breasts, and regretted having to put on my clothes again and become a penniless girl from the north once more, and I dawdled as much as I could. At last there was nothing left but to chew some soap, and then I went out into the living room.

He was sitting on a chair reading a book, and had fried some ham and eggs and laid the table; water for the tea simmered in an electric glass kettle beside him. He motioned to me to sit down in an armchair on the other side of the table and started to make the tea.

And I stared at this man in a trance, this fairy tale personified: the man who owned the world, not just all the wealth that one could reasonably wish for; the man who enjoyed all the power to be had in a little country—and what is the difference between a little country and a large one except in degree?—but quite certainly endowed with soul, no less than the ponies who had once appeared to him in a divine vision; healthy, intelligent, handsome, virile, in the prime of life, his every word a poem, his every thought a joy, his every movement a game; in reality such a man is above everything on earth, a phenomenon in the sky—and how are the thoughts of an earth-bound pauper to be anything but a tasteless joke and dreary drivel in his eyes and ears?

“Is there anything more ludicrous than a penniless girl from the north who says she is going to become a person?” I said.

“All that you ask for, you shall have,” he said.

I still did not have much of an appetite, but I drank the tea he had made and enjoyed it.

“By the way,” I said, “where do these words come from?”

“I wrote them when I learned the truth,” he replied.

“The truth?” I echoed.

“Yes, it’s small wonder you laugh,” he said. “You think I have become a theologian like Jona and started hopping.”

“It depends on which truth it is,” I said.

“Quite so,” he replied. “The religious hero says, ‘Truth shall make you free’; and in that case truth is perhaps merely the face that Jon Smyrill of Braudhouses[24] was born into the world—which is, in fact, a matter of dispute, historically; or that foul fellow Mohammed—which is indisputable, certainly. But that is not what I mean. Do you remember once, last year, I told you the Einstein Theory? That is not what I mean, either, even though it is proved by calculations; nor even that simple, unforgettable, and irrefutable truth of junior school, that water is H₂O.”

I said that I was becoming curious.

“I mean the truth of myself,” he said, and looked at me without his spectacles. “The truth of my own nature. That is the truth I have discovered, and if I do not live that truth my life is but half; in other words, no life at all.”

I asked, “Which is your truth?”

“You,” he said, dropping into the intimate form of address. “You are my truth: my life’s truth. That is why I offer you everything a man can offer a woman. That is what I meant when I wrote to you on that card.”

I give you my sacred oath that I lost my sight completely and died.

“Don’t you see these rags I am in from Krok?” was the first thing I said when I came to life again; also using the intimate address.

“No,” he said.

“I know no languages except Zoega’s English Primer,” I said.

“Really?” he said.

“And play the harmonium, which in itself is ridiculous even if one plays it well; and have never had varnish on my nails nor scarlet on my lips except at the most perhaps off some red fruit-soup; and you accustomed to women who look as if they had drunk black bull’s-blood and scratched raw human flesh.”

“Yes, all that is precisely what I meant,” he said. “That’s why I am turning over a new leaf.”

“But when you have slept with me for a night, or two nights, or even three at the very most, you will awake from your torpor and look at me, horrified, and ask just as in a folk-tale: Whence came this witch into my bed?—and then you will steal softly away from me before dawn and never come back again.”

“What do you want me to do?” he said, “and I shall do it.”

I gazed at him for as long as I could, then down at my knees; but I could make no reply.

“Do you want me to renounce everything?” he said. “The firm, the constituency, public posts, party, acquaintances, friends?—and be once again a plain penniless man of culture?”

“I could never, never bear to have you lowered by a hair’s breadth on my account,” I said. “Besides, I am sure that though you were penniless you would carry on being what habit has made you, the man you are; and I what I am, a country kid, a housemaid, common; nothing but a longing to become a person, to know something, to be able to do something for myself. Where would a place exist for both of us?”

“Now you must see that Patagonia is not such a bad idea after all,” he said.

“Does any Patagonia exist?”

“I shall show it to you now on the map.”

“Isn’t it some barbarian land?” I asked.

“Is it not all the same?” he replied. “Soon the whole world will be one vast barbarian land.”

“And there was I, thinking that world civilization was just beginning,” I said. “I thought we were beginning to be people.”

“The attempt seems to have failed miserably,” he said. “No one any longer imagines for a moment that it is possible to save capitalism, never mind resurrect it; not even with Poor Law Relief from America. Barbarianism is at the door.”

“Is Communism barbarianism then?”

“That is not what I said,” he replied. “On the other hand, Captialism will drag world civilization down with it to the depths when it falls.”

“Iceland too?” I asked.

He said, “There exist land and sea, divided between east and west; and the atom bomb.”

“Has Iceland then been abandoned to—the atomic war?” I asked.

Suddenly he rose to his feet, turned away and walked over to the radio, and switched off some Spaniard who was making a speech on the other side of the world.

“The conflict is between two fundamentals,” he said. “The battlefield covers all lands, all seas, all skies; and particularly our innermost consciousness. The whole world is one atom station.”

“And Patagonia too, then?”

He had managed to find some light music somewhere on the instrument. He came over to me and sat down on the arm of my chair and put his hand on my shoulder.

“Patagonia is a different matter altogether,” he said. “Patagonia is the land of the future in the middle of the present, the land that has always been what Europe and the United States have yet to become: a wasteland where a few ignorant shepherds look after sheep. I hope you understand that the world in which I have lived is doomed and that there can be no appeal against that sentence; and further, that I do not care, that I am losing nothing if I renounce it all. The decision is yours. Say what you want.”