The Atom Station

3. The house behind the buildings

Behind the largest buildings in the town center there stood a small house which could not be seen from any street, and which no one would imagine existed. A stranger would argue, even swear on oath, that there was no house there. But there was one nevertheless, a ribbed wooden house, just one little story and loft, sagging with age—a relic of the old market-town of Reikevig. Angelica and chervil, tansies and dock, ran riot in the garden, so that one could just make out the tumble-down moldering palings here and there amongst this tall forest of weeds, still green and juicy although autumn was now well advanced. I never thought I would find this house, but in the end I did.

At first there seemed to be no sign of life about it, but on a closer look a pale streak of light could be seen at a window. I looked for the front door, but the house was set at an angle to the other buildings; at last I found the entrance, round at the back opposite the retaining wall of a large building—the street had probably lain that way in days gone by when the house was originally built. I opened the door and entered a dark passageway. At one point a gleam of light showed through a crack between door and jamb, and I knocked. After a brief moment the door was opened, and there stood a slim man of indeterminate age except that every other hair was going grey; and somehow I felt that he knew me the moment he looked at me with those clear expressive eyes, at once mocking and affectionate, from under his bushy eyebrows. I took off my glove and greeted him, and he bade me please enter.

“Was it here?” I asked.

“Yes, here it was,” he said, and laughed as if he were making fun of me, or rather of himself perhaps, but quite without malice. I hesitated about walking in and repeated, in the form of a question, the words of the newspaper advertisement:

“Organ-playing for beginners after ten at night?”

“Organ-playing,” he said, and kept on looking at me with a smile, “the organ-play of life.”

Inside, he had a coal-fire burning in a stove; he did not use the town central-heating system. The furniture consisted merely of a host of green plants, some of them in bloom, and a battered three-legged sofa with torn upholstery; and a little harmonium in the corner. A door into another room stood ajar and through it came streaming an aroma of many perfumes; the door to the kitchen was wide open and through it could be seen a table and a few backless chairs and stools, and a kettle on the boil. The air was a little heavy from the flowers, and there was more than a suggestion of smoke seeping from the stove. On one wall hung a colored print of some creature that might have been a girl had the head not been cleft down to the shoulders; she was bald, her eyes were closed, her profile was superimposed on one half of her face, and she was kissing herself on the mouth. And she had eleven fingers. I stared at the picture dumbfounded.

“Are you a farm girl?” he asked.

“Yes, indeed I am,” I replied.

“Why do you want to learn the organ?”

At first I said that I had always listened to music on the wireless, but when I thought it over I felt that this answer was too ordinary, so I corrected myself and added, “I am thinking of playing in our church at home in the north when it is completed.”

“May I see your hand?” he said. I consented, and he studied my hand and said, “You have a good hand, but on the large side for music.” He himself had a slim, long-fingered hand, very soft to the touch but somehow quite neutral and uncharged with electricity, so that I did not blush even when he fondled the joints of my fingers; nor indeed did I find it disagreeable, either.

“Excuse me, but what faith is to be preached in this church at your home in the north?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t suppose it will be anything very remarkable,” I said. “Just the same old Lutheran faith, I suppose.”

“I don’t know what is remarkable if it isn’t meeting a girl who is an adherent of Lutheranism,” he said. “It has never happened to me before. Do have a seat.”

“Luther?” I asked hesitantly as I sat down. “Isn’t he ours?”

“I don’t know,” said the man. “I have only known one man who read Luther; he was a psychologist and was writing a thesis on pornography. Luther, as a matter of fact, is considered the most obscene writer in world literature. A few years ago, when a translation was made of a treatise he wrote about the poor Pope, it was impossible to get it published anywhere, on the grounds of indecency. Won’t you have a cup of coffee?”

I thanked him but said it was really quite unnecessary, and added that perhaps I would stop playing for this scandalous person Luther if he was such a coarse man, and decide just to play for myself instead. “But that picture over there,” I said, for I could not take my eyes off it. “What is it meant to be?”

“Don’t you feel it is marvelous?” he said.

“I feel I could do that sort of thing myself—if… Excuse me, but is it meant to be a person?”

He replied, “Some say it is Skarp-Hedin[5] after he had been cleft to the shoulders by the axe Battle-Troll; others say it is the birth of Cleopatra.”

I said it could hardly be Skarp-Hedin, for he died, as everyone knew, with his axe beside him in the Burning of Njal. “But who’s Cleopatra?” I asked. “It wouldn’t be the queen that Julius Caesar married just before he was murdered?”

“No, it’s the other Cleopatra,” said the organist, “the one Napoleon went to visit at Waterloo. When he saw the battle was lost he said ‘Merde’ and put on his white gloves and went to visit a woman in a house nearby.”

Through the half-open door, from the inner room, came a woman’s voice: “He never speaks the truth.” And out sailed a large handsome woman, heavily made up and with belladonna in her eyes, wearing sheer stockings, red shoes, and a hat so wide-brimmed that she had to tilt her head to get through the door. She kissed the organist on the ear in farewell as she walked past, and said to me as if in explanation of why he never spoke the truth, “As a matter of fact, he is above God and men. And now I’m off to the Yanks.”

The organist brought out a white handkerchief, wiped the moist lipstick from his ear, smiling, and said, “That was she.”

At first I thought this was his wife or at least his sweetheart, but when he said “That was she” I was not very clear what he was getting at, for we had been talking about the woman Napoleon went to visit when he saw that the battle was lost.

But while I was pondering this, another woman came through the same door; this one was very old and lame, wearing a soiled flannel nightgown with her grey hair done up in two meager plaits, and she was toothless. She brought out a cheese-rind and a teaspoon on a patterned cake-dish, laid this offering on my knee and called me her dear one, bade me please eat and asked me about the weather. And when she saw that I was in difficulties with the cheese-rind and teaspoon she patted me pityingly on both cheeks with the back of her hand, looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Poor blessed creature.” These words of compassion she repeated over and over again.

The organist went to her, kissed her, and led her gently and affectionately back into her room; then he relieved me of the cake-dish with its cheese-rind and teaspoon and said. “I am her child.”

He laid a cloth over the kitchen table and put out a few cups and saucers, mostly unmatching; then he brought some twisted dried-up pastries cut into slices, a few broken biscuits, some sugar, but no cream. I knew from the smell of the coffee-pot that he had not been sparing with the coffee. He said that I was to have the only matching cup and saucer. I asked if he were expecting visitors, for he had laid the table for many, but this he flatly denied, except that two gods had promised to make an appearance around midnight. We began to drink the coffee. He urged the meager baking on me like a hospitable country woman, but laughed at me when I tasted some of it just to please him.

How I was beginning to long to know this man better, converse with him at length, ask him many things about this world and other worlds!—but especially about himself, who he was and why he was the way he was. But my tongue tied itself in knots. It was he who took up the thread again: “As we were saying, I have no time during the day, but you are welcome to come late in the evening or early in the morning.”

I said, “Excuse me, but what is your work during the day?”

“I dream,” he said.

“All day?” I asked.

“I get up late,” he said. “Would you care to hear something on the gramophone?”

He went into the inner room and I heard him winding up a gramophone, and then the needle started running and sound came. At first I thought the instrument was out of order, for nothing could be heard except thuds and thumps, rattle and clatter; but when the organist came back with such an air of sincerity, and exulting as if he himself were the composer, I was sure that everything was as it should be. But none the less I started sweating; again and again all sorts of tearing sounds rose above the growling background, and all at once I understood what a dog feels like when it hears a mouth-organ being played and starts to howl. I wanted to yell and at any rate I would have panted and screwed up my face if the organist had not been sitting on the other side of the table, looking devout and alight with joy.

“Well then?” he asked, when he had stopped the gramophone.

I said, “I don’t know what I am to say.”

“Did you not feel you could have done that sort of thing yourself?”

“Yes, I can’t deny that—if I had had a few tin cans and a couple of pot lids, say. And a cat.”

He said, smiling, “It is a characteristic of great art that people who know nothing feel they could have done it themselves—if they were stupid enough.”

“Was that beautiful, then?” I asked. “Have I such an ugly soul?”

“Our times, our life—that is our beauty,” he said. “Now you have heard the dance of the fire-worshippers.”

As these words were being spoken the front door was opened and there came a sound of much traffic in the passageway, until a pram was wheeled into the room by a young man; and this was god number one.

This incarnate spirit was tall and well-built and handsome in his way, wearing a herring-bone overcoat and with his tie carefully knotted in the way that only town people can do it and country people can never learn; he was bare-headed, with wavy hair parted in the middle, gleaming and smelling strongly of brilliantine. He nodded to me and looked directly at me; his eyes glowed piercingly, and he gave me the savage smile that people smile at those they are going to murder—later; and bared those splendid teeth. He steered the pram into the middle of the room and then propped up amongst the flowers a long flat triangular object wrapped in paper and tied up with pack-thread. Then he came over and offered me a clammy hand and mumbled something which sounded to me like “Jesus Christ”; I thought he smelled of fish. Perhaps he said “Jens Kristinsson”; anyway I returned his greeting and stood up according to the custom of country women. Then I peeped into the pram, and there slept a pair of real twins.

“This is the god Brilliantine,” said the organist.

“My goodness, to have these darling little children out so late at night!” I said. “Where’s their mother?”

“She’s south in Keflavik,” said the god. “There’s a Yank dance.”

“Children survive everything,” said the organist. “Some think it harmful for children to lose their mother, but that is a fallacy. Even though they lose their father it has no ill effect on them. Here’s some coffee. Where’s the atom poet, if I may ask?”

“He’s in the Cadillac,” said the god.

“And where is Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?” asked the organist.

“F.F.F.,” said the god. “New York, Thirty-Fourth Street, twelve-fifty.”

“No new metaphysical discoveries, no great mystic visions, no religious revelations?” asked the organist.

“Bugger-all,” said the god. “Except this character Oli Figure. He says he’s made contact with the Nation’s Darling.[6] The snot’s dribbling from his nose. Who’s this girl?”

“You as a god should not ask about people,” said the organist. “It is ungodly. It is a secret who a person is. And even more of a secret what a person is called. The old God never asked who a person was and what he was called.”

“Is Cleopatra better of the clap yet?” asked the god.

“Better, in what way?” asked the organist.

“I visited her in hospital,” said the god. “She was bad.”

“I do not know what you mean,” said the organist.

“Ill,” said the god.

“A person is never too ill,” said the organist.

“She was screaming,” said the god.

“Suffering and happiness are two matters so alike that it is impossible to distinguish between them,” said the organist. “The greatest enjoyment I know is to be ill, especially very ill.”

Then a voice was heard from the doorway, saying in fanatically religious tones, “How I wish I could at last get that cancer now.”

The newcomer was so young that his face was the color of ivory, with only a trace of down on his cheeks: a youthful portrait of a foreign genius, a postcard like the ones that hang above the harmonium in the country and which can be bought in the village of Krok—a mixture of Schiller, Schubert, and Lord Byron, with a bright red tie and dirty shoes. He looked around with the sudden strained expression of the sleepwalker, and every object, whether animate or inanimate, affected him like an overwhelming mystical vision. He offered me his long thin hand, which was so limp that I felt I could crush it into pulp, and said, “I am Benjamin.”

I looked at him.

“Yes, I know it,” he said. “But I can’t help it. This little brother, it is I; this terrible tribe, it is my people; this desert—my country.”

“They have read the Holy Scriptures,” said the organist, “and the Holy Spirit has enlightened them in their reading, in accordance with the precepts of our friend Luther: they have found the godhead without the mediation of the Pope. Have a cup of coffee, atom poet.”

“Where’s Cleopatra?” asked Benjamin the atom poet.

“Never mind that,” said the organist. “Help yourselves to sugar with your coffee.”

“I admire her,” said the atom poet.

“And I need to see her too,” said the god Brilliantine.

“Why should she be wanting to run around with two gods?” said the organist. “She wants to have her thirty men.”

I could no longer contain myself and blurted out, “Now really!—I am no model of virtue, but never have I heard tell of so immoral a woman, and I permit myself to doubt whether such a woman exists.”

“Immoral women do not exist,” said the organist. “That is only a superstition. On the other hand there exist women who sleep thirty times with one man, and women who sleep once with thirty men.”

“And women who don’t sleep with a man at all,” I said, meaning myself in fact, and had begun to sweat; and there was a mist before my eyes and I was undoubtedly blushing all the way down to my neck and making myself utterly absurd.

“Augustine, one of the Fathers of the Church, says that the sexual urge is beyond the will,” said the organist. “Saint Benedict gratified it by throwing himself naked into a bed of nettles. There are no sexual perversions other than celibacy.”

“May I see you home?” said the god Brilliantine.

“What for?” I asked.

“There are Yanks around at night,” he said.

“What does that matter?” I said.

“They have guns.”

“I’m not scared of guns.”

“They will rape you,” he said.

“Are you going to fight for me?”

“Yes,” he said, and smiled his piercing smile.

“What about the children?”

“Benjamin can take them in the Cadillac,” he said. “Or if you like I shall beat Benjamin up and take the Cadillac off him. I have just as much right to steal the Cadillac as he has.”

“I’m going to look for Cleopatra,” said Benjamin the atom poet.

“One tune first,” said the organist, “There’s no hurry.”

The god Brilliantine rose to his feet and brought out the flat triangular object which he had propped up amongst the flowers, loosened the twine and unwrapped the paper. It was a salted fish. He tied the twine most artistically to make two strings running the length of the fish, and started strumming on them. With his right hand he made agile flourishes as if he were striking the strings, and one could hear a sound like a guitar being played, a Hawaiian guitar. He was crooning limply through his mouth and nose, and the guitar-sound was made by plucking his nose between his thumb and forefinger in mid-flourish and checking the air in his nostrils. The atom poet stepped to the middle of the floor and began to strike an attitude. He had all the gestures of the world’s greatest. It had not occurred to me that he could sing, and I was all the more surprised when he opened his mouth: a singer, with the bright and the sombre blended in his voice; an actor, moreover, who knew the anguish of the soul and could imitate the sobbing of the Italians. He turned to face me:

While the accompaniment was ending he put his hand casually into his pocket; and it seemed as if he had been carrying eggs in it and they had broken and his hand had become all covered with muck—was this play-acting? The only certain thing was that he began to pull out of his pockets vast sums of money, bunch after bunch of bank-notes, ten-kronur bills, fifty-kronur, hundred-kronur bills;[7] and in a sudden fit he began to tear the notes in two, crumpling up the pieces and throwing them on the floor and grinding them down like a man killing an insect. Then he sat down and lit himself a cigarette.

The god Brilliantine continued to play until the postlude was finished. The organist first laughed, rather affectionately, then fetched a brush and dustpan and swept the floor, emptied the dustpan into the fire, thanked them for the song, and offered more coffee. The twins had woken up and started crying.

The atom poet drove away in the Cadillac, that aristocratic car the like of which I had never seen. The god Brilliantine was left behind with the crying twins; and myself.

“Now I shall see you home,” he said.

“Would it not be more like it for me to help you with the twins?” I said.

“Leave them to themselves,” he said.

“Whose are these twins, if I may ask?” I said. “Aren’t they yours?”

“They are my wife’s,” he said.

“Well, anyway,” I said, “there’s no sense in letting them cry.”

I tried as far as I could to console the poor things out there in the street in the drizzle in the middle of the night. A crowd of drunks gathered round us. After a little while the mites went to sleep. I wanted to go off on my own then, but it turned out that the god and I were going the same way westwards.

When we had walked for a while along the road I could not restrain myself from asking, “Was that real money, or was it fake?”

“There is no such thing as real money,” he said. “All money is fake. We gods spit on money.”

“But the atom poet must surely be well off to be driving such a cat.”

“All those who know how to steal are well off,” said the god. “All those who don’t know how to steal are badly off. The problem is to know how to steal.”

I wanted to know where and how that little poet had stolen that huge car.

“From whom but our master, Pliers?” said the god. “What, you haven’t heard of Pliers? Two Hundred Thousand Pliers? F.F.F.? The man who sits in New York and fakes the figures for the joint-stock company Snorredda and the rest? And wrote an article in the papers about the next world and built a church in the north?”

“You must forgive me if I’m a little slow in the uptake,” I said. “I’m from the country.”

“There’s no difficulty in understanding it,” he said. “F.F.F.: in English, the Federation of Fulminating Fish, New York; in Icelandic, the Figures-Faking-Federation. One button costs half an eyrir over there in the west, but you have a company in New York, the F.F.F., which sells you the button at two kronur and writes on the invoice: button, two kronur. You make a profit of four thousand per cent. After a month you’re a millionaire. You can understand that?”

Suddenly we heard someone hailing us, and a man came running up behind us, bare-headed. It was the organist.

“Sorry,” he said, out of breath with running. “I forgot something. I don’t suppose one of you could possibly lend me a krona?”

The god found nothing in his pockets, but I had a krona in my coat-pocket and let the organist have it. He thanked me and apologized and said that he would repay me the next time: “You see, I need to buy myself fifty grams of boiled sweets tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he bade us goodnight and left.

We walked on in silence for a while with the pram, and now it was past midnight. I was busy with my thoughts, trying to fathom the night’s events, until my companion said, “Don’t you think I’m rather different from other men, actually?”

He was certainly very handsome and must undoubtedly have charmed many girls with those piercing eyes and that moist murderer’s smile, but somehow he had no effect on me at all; I scarcely even heard him when he was saying something.

“Fortunately no two men are alike,” I said.

“Yes, but don’t you feel an uncanny current coming from me?” he asked.

“If you yourself feel that an uncanny current comes from you, isn’t that enough?” I said.

“I have always felt that I was different from others,” he said. “I felt it when I was small. I felt that there was a soul in me. I saw the world from a height of many thousand metres. Even when I was thrashed it was of no concern to me; I could tuck Reykjavik under my arm and go away with it.”

“It must be strange to have such notions,” I said. “I find it difficult to understand, for I have never had strange notions myself.”

“It comes naturally to me,” he said. “Anything that others say is of no concern to me. I am above them all; above everything. I can’t help looking upon others with a smile.”

“Just so,” I said.

He went on, “I feel that the Godhead and I are one. I feel that I and Jesus and Mohammed and Bu… Buddhy are one.”

“Can you prove it?” I asked.

“I was born with it,” he said. “At first, for a long time, I thought that others had it too and that everyone was mad. I started to ask the other boys. But they didn’t understand me. Then it turned out that no one had it except me; and Benjamin; we two had it.”

“Had what?” I asked.

“A soul,” he said. “A divine, eternal soul; that means that God and I are one. You go out to steal, perhaps you kill someone; it doesn’t concern you, you are a soul, you are part of God. You are beaten up, but that doesn’t concern you either, especially if you are badly beaten up; or you land in a life-or-death fight; or the police cosh you on the head and then handcuff you—despite that, you are utterly happy and have no body. In the morning you appear in court, but your soul rests in God; you are thrown into jail, but you are aware of nothing, you understand nothing except Jesus and Mohammed and… what was the name of the third one again? You hear only this one voice which always whispers: ‘You are I and I am you.’ I am also utterly happy even though I am not beaten up, heaven and earth are open before me, nothing can hurt me, I understand everything and can do everything, own everything and may do everything.”

“I feel,” I said, “that if you are what you say you are, you must show some token of it.” But he did not understand what I meant by a token, so I added in explanation: “Perform a miracle.”

He said: “No man on earth can play a salted fish except me. If I wanted to I could go to Hollywood and become a millionaire.”

I did not say a word, and he took my arm and pulled me towards him and looked at me. “Aren’t you at all amazed? Haven’t you fallen for me at all? Listen, come on up the back here with me, I want to tell you something.”

I don’t know what sort of a fool I was, to go wandering with him behind a house; for of course before I knew it he had put me up against a wall and had started kissing me and trying to pull my skirt up, with the pram standing nearby. I was slow in getting my hands up to hit him, but as I gathered my wits I said, “No you don’t, my lad, even if you’re a treble god and your head plastered with brilliantine too.” Then I struck him, kicked him, and pushed him away.

“You damned bitch,” he said. “Don’t you know I can murder you?”

“Didn’t I know you were a murderer?” I said. “I knew it the moment I set eyes on you.”

“Then you can stare into the barrel of this,” he said, suddenly flourishing something in front of my face; I could not see what it was in the dark, but it could well have been a revolver for all I knew.

Someone in the house opened a window above us and asked what the devil we were up to, this was his ground, and told us to hop it or else he would call the police. The god Brilliantine thrust the revolver back into his pocket, if revolver it was, and wheeled the pram back to the road.

“I was just testing you,” he said. “You can more or less imagine whether I meant anything, a penniless father of a family like me. Now I’ll see you home.”

But then he suddenly remembered something: “Have I not gone and forgotten that damned salted fish? The wife’s sure to beat me if I don’t bring her some food for tomorrow.”

He ran back through the gate to fetch this sustenance for his family, and I made off while he was looking for the fish.