The Atom Station

25. Before and after atomic war

Of course this favorite of fortune was in a good mood. He was working on his flowers, with sleeves rolled up to the elbow and earth on his hands, planting roses, thinning, snipping off withered leaves, weeding, preparing the ground for winter. Various plants were still well in bloom, including a few of the roses. But when one looked around, one saw that the house was emptier than ever before, the battered harmonium away, the picture gone from the wall. Apart from the flowers there was little left except the three-legged sofa which required such skill to sit on.

“Good morning,” said the organist, fresh and cheery from his beloved daily work, his mere presence a peace-giving refuge, “and be welcome.”

He wiped off the earth and offered me his warm hand, kissed me, bade me welcome to the south, flattered me, and laughed at me—“Do please have a seat, the coffee will be ready in a twinkling.”

We put my wooden suitcase under the legless corner of the sofa and sat down, and he laughed—at us for sitting on such a wretched sofa, and at himself for owning it.

“And where is Cleopatra?” I asked.

“Cleopatra took off when my mother died,” he said. “She though she might get a bad reputation off me. Cleopatra always had a petit-bourgeois streak in her, even though she was a great woman; and Napoleon the Great a great man.”

“Napoleon the Great?” said the unself-conscious policeman in surprise.

“Fancy, so you can open your mouth after all. How very solemn you are, my friend,” said the organist.

“What is a man to say these days?” said the unself-conscious policeman. “The whole nation has lockjaw. As Ugla and I were just saying, people are so innocent that they cannot believe such a thing is possible; the man in the street hasn’t got the intelligence to imagine anything like it. Just when we had finished fighting for seven hundred years!”

“Would it be impertinent to ask what you are talking about, my friend?” said the organist.

“Sell the country, bury bones,” said the unself-conscious policeman. “What else?”

“What’s all this, children?” said the organist. “Don’t you want to have any heroes?”

“That’ll be the day.” said the unself-conscious policeman. “Heroes! Not half!”

“A man who risks everything for his cause, even his good name if his cause is defeated—I do not know who is a hero if not he,” said the organist.

“Then Quisling was a hero,” said the unself-conscious policeman, “for he knew right from the start both that he would be hanged and that the Norwegians would execrate him after his death.”

“Goebbels murdered his six children and his wife before committing suicide, rather than yield to the east,” said the organist. “It is a fallacy to think that heroism is in any way related to the cause that is fought for. We Icelanders, who have the greatest heroic literature in the world, ought to know what a hero is; the Jomsvikings[26] are our men, they made obscene remarks while they were being beheaded. We do not doubt that in the Fascist armies there were proportionately as many heroes as in the Allied armies. The cause makes no difference to the heroism. For myself, I believe that the Icelandic nation has gained a few heroes in the last few days.”

“And if their cause should conquer, are they still heroes in spite of that?” asked the unself-conscious policeman.

“They themselves know better than anyone that it never will. It has never yet happened that those who sell a country conquer. Only those who settle a country conquer. One simply must not confuse heroism, which is an absolute concept, with the fame of the conqueror. Take Hitler, the murderer of Europe: never once throughout all his murdering did it occur to him to surrender; he even got married with the noose round his neck. That brute Goering never cracked. Some think heroes are some sort of idealists and kind-hearted people like you and me, but I tell you truly that if we incline to such an opinion it could mean that all those millions whom Hitler burned in his furnaces would be called by the name of heroes, or even those hundreds of millions of women and children who will be roasted by the nuclear bomb.”

“But what if these heroes should succeed in murdering all Icelanders?” asked the unself-conscious policeman. “A military power is not long in converting a welfare station into a nuclear station, if need be.”

“We know how things went for Hitler,” said the organist. “People are immortal. It is impossible to wipe out mankind—in this geological epoch. It may well be that a sizeable portion of the earth’s population will die in the war for a more expedient community-pattern, it may well be that the cities of the world may have to be laid waste before this pattern is found. But when it is found, a new golden age will arise for mankind.”

“That’s small consolation for Iceland, if we are razed to the ground and annihilated by those who are fighting over the world,” said the unself-conscious policeman.

“Iceland does not matter very much, when one looks at the total picture,” said the organist. “Icelanders have not been in existence for more than, at the most, a thousand years, and we have been rather an insignificant nation; except that we wrote this heroic literature seven centuries ago. Many empires have been wiped out so utterly that we no longer even know their names, because they did not keep pace with evolution when Nature was seeking a more convenient pattern for herself. Nations are not very important on the whole, and indeed it is at one and the same time a recent and an obsolete phenomenon to think of nations as political entities: to confuse, in general, countries and politics. The Roman Empire was not a country but a particular armed civilization. China has never been a country, but a particular moral civilization. Christendom of the Middle Ages was not a country. Capitalism is not a country. Communism is not a country. East and West are not countries. Iceland is a country only in a geographical definition. The nuclear bomb wipes out cities but not geography; so Iceland will continue to exist.”

“And you who are a man of culture—can you look with equanimity on them levelling all the world metropolises where culture resides?” asked the unself-conscious policeman.

“I have always heard that cities were the more valued the more ruins they had,” said the organist, and laughed carelessly over the water that was beginning to boil in the kettle. “Long live Pompeii!”

“Yes, and do you perhaps want chickweed to grow on the pile of rubble where London fell in ruins, and duckweed on the pool where Paris sank?” said the unself-conscious policeman.

“Why not rose bushes?” said the organist. “And a swan on the lake? People reckon cities the more beautiful the larger the gardens in them, so that dwelling houses can disappear between apple trees and rose bushes and mirror themselves in still lakes. The loveliest garden is nevertheless the country side; that is the garden of gardens. When the nuclear bomb has razed the cities to the ground in this present world revolution because they have failed to keep pace with evolution, then the culture of the countryside will arise, and the earth will become the garden that it never was before except in dreams and poetry…”

“And we shall start believing in ponies again,” said the girl from the north, and lay down on the sofa behind her unself-conscious policeman, and fell asleep.