The Atom Station

7. At a cell-meeting

Next day I met the girl and the young man in the baker’s. The girl gave me a friendly smile, and the boy solemnly raised his hat.

“I want to settle up,” I said, and handed over the money for the lottery tickets. “But you will pardon me if I doubt whether the Youth Center will be built.”

“Why not?” said the girl and looked at me a little grieved; and I felt that I had been beastly to her by owning to this doubt.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I did not want to grieve her further.

She looked at the young man and said, “You’ve lived in such a Center, haven’t you?”

“No,” he said, “but for three years I spent all my leisure in such a Center.”

“In Russia?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “In the Soviet Union.”

Then the girl started to laugh, she thought it so funny that I should have confused Russia and the Soviet Union.

“Russia,” he said in explanation, “was the land of the emperors: that Satanic prison of the nations.”

I thought it strange that he should say “that,” for I had never heard anyone use it in that way before. So I asked, “Why do you say ‘that’? Are you quoting from a book? Or is it Communist jargon?”

He thought about it and mumbled somehting over to himself, then finally he said, “‘That?’—as far as I know it’s perfectly good grammar: that young Iceland.”

“I’m sorry for picking you up on it,” I said. “Tell me more about the Youth Center.”

He had such a clear and spiritual look in his eyes that I asked myself: can such innocent-looking people belong to a cell? He did not know the difference between the spoken word and books, but that was the only false note in what he said.

“In a Youth Center youth meets in a civilized and organized fashion to enjoy all the different aspects of culture,” he said, “there is a swimming pool and a gymnasium, studios for acting and art, a tower for parachutists; rehearsal rooms for orchestras and soloists, general and specialized libraries; a workshop where boys and girls can learn welding, a printing works to teach hand printing as an art, a comprehensive technical college, a laboratory and a botany department, projection rooms, lecture rooms, refreshment rooms, sitting rooms…”

“And a room for flirting,” I said.

“Of course,” said the girl before she had realized it; and the boy stopped short in his list, cleared his throat and looked at her censoriously, and his mouth hardened a little.

“Icelandic youth should not lie in schnapps-spew under the feet of men and dogs,” he declaimed. “Icelandic youth should not be nurtured on murder films and pornographic thrillers, Icelandic youth should not live in the streets where it learns to blaspheme, to shriek, and to steal. Icelandic youth…”

“One white loaf and a kilo of biscuits,” I said.

“You don’t believe him,” said the girl, and served me sorrowfully. I saw that I had hurt her to the quick with my frivolousness. I paid for what I had bought and was about to leave.

“Perhaps I’ll have a few more tickets, come to think of it,” I said, before I knew I was saying it; and I felt myself go white the way one does when one embarks on a secret, strictly forbidden affair. And as always in having an affair, the moment one lifts one’s foot the step is taken. “There’s one thing I would like most of all,” I said, and I even got palpitations and laughed unnaturally: “and that is to attend a cell-meeting.”

There—it was said!

The boy and the girl looked at one another, in twofold seriousness this time, I am almost inclined to say in double-twice solemnity; there was a problem.

At last he said, “You aren’t in the Party.”

“What party?” I asked.

“The Party,” he replied.

“I’m not in any party,” I said. “But if I like the cell-meeting I might become a Communist.”

Now they both started laughing again, and the girl said, “I’ve never heard anything like it: if she likes the cell-meeting! This is literally the funniest thing I have ever heard.”

I walked out of that baker’s an utter fool, not even knowing the reason why until later—until after I had attended a cell-meeting.

For although they had received my request with less than alacrity at first, thinking it complete nonsense, they changed their attitude after I had gone, or perhaps they referred the matter to the Party leadership. Next day the bakery girl took me aside and said she had been deputed to inform me that I might attend. She said I was to come with her the following evening. That night I slept uneasily, troubled by thoughts of the alarming debauchery which my curiosity or congenital depravity was drawing me into. And seldom have I suffered such a disappointment as when I actually attended a cell-meeting; or rather, seldom has anything been such a relief to me.

In a low-ceilinged basement flat some men and women had gathered, most of them rather elderly; they had all come straight from work and had not had time to change their clothes. There were not enough seats for all of them; some stood leaning against the walls, and a few sat on the floor. The youngest child was sick on the floor. And this was the full extent of the debauchery and all the murder.

The business of the meeting was to debate the Central Committee’s draft of Party policy for the Town Council elections. There was a long discussion on whether certain marshland in Mosfell District should be turned into arable land or not. Most of them advocated a system of milk transport and milk distribution different from the one then in operation. An old man made a well-ordered speech about the necessity of inserting into the policy declaration a clause about improving the landing facilities for small boats at Reykjavik harbour: it had now come to the point that Reykjavik Corporation was quite literally evicting the little men who did their fishing in tiny inshore-boats here in the bay; the men who provided the inhabitants of the capital with good fresh fish from the bay had no place of their own along the whole length of the sea front controlled by the Corporation. Then the next item on the agenda was dealt with, the question of a day nursery. I was sitting with five others on a divan, crushed into a corner, and shame on me if I do not think I fell asleep; at least I cannot remember what decision was reached on the day nursery question.

Then a young man asked leave to speak and began to discuss the newspaper, it was the bakery girl’s friend. Yet again it had come to the point where the Party had to make a new effort for the paper, appeal to the Party members, collect new subscribers, collect money, find regular backers. Last week it had been mere chance that the paper had not closed down. The Government had ceased to advertise in the paper because the paper had exposed the Government’s plan to steal the country from the people and sell it; and for saying that these salesmen, moreover, were then going to freshen up their reputations by exhuming the bones of the Nation’s Darling from his grave in Denmark and giving him a tile-hat funeral in Iceland. The wholesalers had stopped advertising in the paper because it had said that they had F.F.F. in New York. The cinemas refused to advertise because the paper had said that Hollywood did not know how to make pictures. In other words, the truth had touched a nerve, the class-enemy feared nothing except the truth; feared lest the people hear the truth. Now once again the working classes had to make some sacrifices for the sake of their paper. The paper was the poor man’s cow; if he slaughtered her or let her waste away to death, the family would die. During this speech I woke up again.

And when I saw these penniless worn people, as worn and poor as my own people home in the valley, reach into their pockets for their purses and open them with these worn hands which all at once I felt I could, weeping, have kissed, and then take out that famous widow’s mite, some of them even emptying their purses on the table and those without purses scrawling their names on a list—when I saw this I felt I was utterly and completely in sympathy with these people and would always be so, however dreary the matters they discussed, whether they wanted to reclaim some marsh-land in Mosfell District or hold on to their country against the tile-hats who wanted to betray it from under them and sell it from them. So I too scrawled my name on the list and pledged myself to subscribe ten kronur a month to the paper’s funds even though I had never seen it.

The woman of the house wanted us to have some coffee before we went, but many, including myself, said they were in a hurry to get home; some said they had not even had a wash yet, and anyway it was getting late. The master of the house accompanied me to the door; he was the cell-leader. He said I was welcome to come again the next time, and that I must then stay on for coffee.

And now I had attended a cell-meeting.

The Cadillac was standing outside.

I could not remember exactly the name of the smell that met me when I opened the back door, I scarcely even knew whether I liked the smell or not; a smell is good or bad according to its associations in one’s mind. This was at least no worse than that of tobacco-smoke. Was something on fire?

When I went through the kitchen into the hall to find out what it was, I saw that the door of the master’s study was open. The Member of Parliament was sitting there in his room with his feet up on a chair, his back to the door, hunched over some task. He said Hallo, without looking, to the person he could hear walking outside in the hall, and continued to concentrate on his work.

“It’s only me,” said the maid.

“Would you like a cigarette?” he said. “There are some on the table.”

“I haven’t learned to smoke yet,” I said. “But I can smell something. Is this door meant to be open?”

“I opened it to clear the stink of incense. Come in. I am going to show you something you cannot do.”

He spoke as usual in that gay amiable tone, but a little absently; and so help me I did not know whether I ought to dare, even though he told me to. I was, as said before, the maid; and where was Madam? Still, I was no bondwoman, I was a person, I was a free woman.

“Come in and try your hand with this boy,” he said.

“Boy?” I said, and before I knew it I was in there and having a look. And was he not sitting there with a round toy mirror, the sort you get at Krok for ten aurar, with a little black boy on the back (for such articles must surely be manufactured for negroes)? There were a few small pellets loose between the picture and glass, two black, and five or six white, and the problem was to tilt the picture in such a way that the black pellets landed in the boy’s eye sockets and the white ones went into his jaws. And this was what my Member of Parliament was toiling over, with a cigarette smoldering in the corner of his mouth and his spectacles on the table.

“I’m afraid I haven’t the knack for that,” I said. “I’m such a clumsy fool with puzzles.”

“Me too,” he said, and looked at me with a smile; and handed me the toy; and before I knew it I had begun to have a shot, with him perched on the table to see how it was getting on. Then I heard some sort of mumbling going on in the next room, some solemn and yet half-stifled sermon, preached to an accompaniment of God-fearing moans like the last words of a dying man: “O ye, my yearning bones, O Love, O spiritual maturity, O light.” And there was a strange rattling sound in between, as if a sheep were having its throat cut.

“Are there guests in, then?” I asked, looking up in dismay.

“It seems to be the sheep-plague,”[9] he said. “We shall pay no attention to it.”

But after a while the sermon began again, with the moaning and rattling, and I started to listen.

“Pliers has rid himself of the former creatures and got himself something new,” said the master. “The next world, to be exact.”

“How do you mean, the next world?” I asked.

“A seance,” he said.

“And you here?”

“I spew six meters,” he said. “On with the boy.”

“Pliers,” I said. “That’s a queer name. Excuse me, but is it Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?”

“Yes, the poor fellow. He has this sort of belief in the next world plus vegetarianism, which is at one and the same time the after-effect and the converse of former alcoholism, a kind of binge gone wrong, if I may put it that way. While he was a straightforward drunkard and businessman, newly arrived from the north, he bought two pliers and five anvils for every single Icelander; hair nets, six for each and every person; an unlimited quantity of boiled American water in cans, to use in soups; ten-year-old sardines from Portugal; and enough baking powder to blow up the whole country—but even the Communists don’t know that. Finally, he had resolved to buy up all the raisins in the world and import them to Iceland, but by that time he had also lost his voice except that he continually screeched the vowel A. The Snorredda company saved him. We adore idiots. We are hoping that Two Hundred Thousand Pliers can become a Minister. Now he has made contact, as it were, with the Nation’s Darling, whom we consigned to a Danish death a hundred years ago. The Nation’s Darling wants Pliers to dig up his bones so that we Icelanders of today can become the well-merited laughing stock of history. We are thinking of exhuming him even though it was proved by experts years ago that his bones are lost. The Prime Minister, my brother-in-law, has now joined in the game. And there, look, you have just got the teeth into the boy’s jaw. Now I see that you can do everything.”

And at that moment singing broke out in the next room, albeit rather inferior singing, out of tune like the chanting at a pauper’s funeral—a harsh thing to say in one of the greatest houses in the country: “O, sing a new song to the Lord, sing all the earth to God.” Then this pitiful singing came to an end. There was a scraping of chairs, the sitters stood up, and the connecting door into Doctor Bui Arland’s study was thrown open. In stalked Madam, ennobled in soul by revelations, and a perky well-dressed man so loosely assembled that his limbs flapped when he walked, particularly his arms: this famous man, at last I was getting a sight of him. Between them swayed a lanky man with a thatch of red hair, glassy-eyed, sweating, and dishevelled, his necktie pulled to one side. Then came two women who were midway between being common and upperclass, the one in national costume and the other in a black taffeta dress with tassels dangling here and there; both were absolutely rigid with solemnity, both were in a spiritual condition.

And I was sitting in there with the master.

“What’s the maid doing in here?” asked Madam.

“She is trying her hand with the boy,” said the husband.

“What boy?”

“The black one,” he replied. “what news of the dead?”

“We got marvelous confirmation,” bleated devout woman number one.

“It was divine,” groaned devout woman number two.

Then they both sighed.

“My friend the Darling,” said Pliers, “has confirmed in your wife’s hearing—and the hearing of these two—what he has so often told me previously during seances with this future world-famous medium down south. O-Olaf, what’s your surname again, lad?—Iceland must have her bones. The Icelandic nation needs spiritual maturity and light.”

“And Love,” said the medium. “Don’t forget Love.”

“Listen, friend,” said Doctor Bui Arland to Pliers, “do you imagine that the Nation’s Darling ever paid any attention to grass-eaters and Good Templars like you, except on that one occasion when he wrote in a poem, ‘The cattle-rearing pasture grows on your mothers’ grave’?”

“The papers shall have it, the radio shall have it, the people shall have it,” said Two Hundred Thousand Pliers. “And if you defeat it in Parliament I shall go to Denmark myself and have him dug up at my own expense; I shall moreover buy the bones and keep them myself. Nothing shall come between my bones and his.”

“Will someone not take it upon himself to provide that young man with a handkerchief?” said the Doctor, pointing to the medium.

Pliers pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, blew the medium’s nose hurriedly for him and then threw the handkerchief into the fireplace; all with these floppy movements like a rubber doll’s. The medium sniffed feebly after this operation and said apologetically, “They draw so much strength from me out through my nose, particularly the large spirits; and absolutely especially the Darling…”

“I think you should learn to take snuff,” said the Doctor, and then offered the petit-bourgeois women cigarettes; but they only stared at him apprehensively. No further hospitality was offered to this half-class in such a house. I went on trying to get the white pellets into the black boy, and was perfectly clearly aware of the loathing that blazed in Madam’s body at seeing the maid playing in her husband’s room while she, this great woman descended from such great people, was coming from another world, brimming over with all that was holy. But her glares left me quite unmoved; for what was there for me to be ashamed of? If I had fled the moment she arrived, that would have been an act of shame, that would have been to accuse oneself without cause.

“Come, friend,” said Pliers, and helped the medium to negotiate the open door so that he would not turn into nothing there in the middle of the room. Madam propelled the half-class women through the door as well and bade them farewell graciously, and they continued to bleat and groan in their sentimental falsetto about the wonders of the next world all the way out into the street.

The Member of Parliament, Doctor Bui Arland, suddenly remembered that he had to have a few words in private with his underling; with a start he ran after him out to the Cadillac, where his agent was already behind the wheel, and conferred with him through the open car door.

I had at last managed to get the pellets into the little nigger boy, and I laid the mirror carefully on the table so that they should not fall out again. But Madam walked into the room as I was leaving, picked up the mirror and shook it, and then flung it aside.

While I was walking upstairs I heard her shouting through the open door to her husband, who was still talking to Two Hundred Thousand Pliers out at the Cadillac: “Bui, I want to talk to you.”