Under the Glacier (13 page)

Embi: I would advise you not to say that out loud.

Saknússemm II: You do not understand us because you forget that in the depths of our souls we ourselves are naked peasants far beyond unknown oceans. We yearn to kill the naked peasant within ourselves. It is our belief that he who kills a naked peasant with a complex gun is the world’s greatest.

Embi: I have always heard that in war there are two causes: the bad and the good.

Saknússemm II: Bullshit.

Embi: Are you an anarchist, if I may ask, sir?

Saknússemm II: Football consists of one ball and one agreement. When two dogs fight they are sharing the same ideal; the same faith. In war there is no cause except the cause of war and that is to have a war. The leper’s cause is to be a leper. Leprosy has no cause except leprosy. Siva is dancing. Because I love you. Bear witness, good brothers!

It was clear to me by now that I was talking to a dialectician.

The musician who bears the name of the Drop bends even lower over his instrument and tries to make out its weak tone against the bleating of the birds. The yogi Epimenides, the one who has slept for fifty-seven years and bears the beautiful countenance of India’s eternal famines, rises solemnly to his feet as if he were going on an important journey. But he only turns a half-circle. Then he sits down again on his haunches on the edge of the cliff and smiles in his sleep over all the ocean, and the glacier was no longer visible behind him.

24

The Red One Found,
the Grey One
Bolted Again

A little more than half an hour before I am due to board the long-distance bus, I catch sight of the district officer of the Langavatn people, farmer Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir, shuffling his feet on the paving in front of the house, holding a red horse by the reins. Eventually he decides to knock on the door of the parsonage, but the hammering cannot be heard in the “old house,” at least it doesn’t reach the leathern ears of Miss Hnallþóra. So the pastor’s overnight guest goes to the door and greets the district officer of the Langavatn people.

Langvetningur: Greetings and blessings, vice-bishop! What luck for me that all the ecclesiastical authorities haven’t gone with the wind! Though you’re all apathetic, I’m still counting on you. I come back to the trifling matter I was mentioning to old pastor Jón yesterday morning.

Embi: I congratulate you on finding the red one.

Langvetningur: Well, that’s quite a story, I can tell you. When I woke up this morning down by the coast where I spent the night with the two horses, believe it or not the grey one had bolted again! Horses always head for the places where they suffer the most, up to the remote valleys or out on the headlands where there isn’t enough to fill even a bunting’s beak. Now I’m off to look for my grey one again, because they’re both promised for a glacier trip tomorrow morning. That’s the way the world goes. But thank goodness, at least I’ve met the same-as-a-bishop. And now I say, as the Bible puts it, I won’t let you go until you bless me.

Embi: I’m just leaving for the south.

Langvetningur: It’s terrible never to get peace and quiet to talk to you people from the south, and me with such heaps of things to argue with you; all in a brotherly way, of course.

Embi: Do come into my room, I’m just finishing my packing. There’s not much in the way of chairs here, but you could try sitting on the edge of my bed. But I’m afraid there’s little to be gained from a discussion with someone who has no special revelation, hardly even a proper creed. I’m not even any use at helping people find a stray.

Langvetningur: As you know, the Master has arrived in the district.

Embi: What master?

Langvetningur: The great Master.

Embi: Oh. Really.

Langvetningur: The last time the Master was here he got two reliable men, or let’s hope they’re that, anyway, to take a small box up onto the glacier. A casket. One of these men was me with my horses, the other was Jódínus.

Embi: I know what was in the casket. I should like to know when the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs gave permission for this transportation.

Langvetningur: Perhaps no one remembered to think of that.

Embi: Was this person killed, or what?

Langvetningur: That was none of my concern. I was never allowed to look into the box. But isn’t that beside the point? The main point, it seems to me, is that the Master is back now, along with his submasters, three bioinductors—high reincarnations, I hope I can say—to carry out the work. The idea is that this body is to be life-induced. We need a church for the task. But pastor Jón refuses to open the church.

Embi: He opened it yesterday.

Langvetningur: He has nailed it up once more. I see no alternative but to apply to the bishop.

Embi: You’re not going to land me with that lot, as the man said who refused to harbour Grettir the Outlaw. And besides I have no authority to lend this church to anyone. Least of all for such a purpose. Christianity has had its resurrection once and for all. And what’s more, so far as I can see, what is to be performed here is some kind of mechanised resurrection, engineering. Churches are not for that. If I send the Bishop of Iceland a telegram, or ask him for something like that over the telephone, he would think I had taken leave of my senses.

Langvetningur: Has the bishop then not read Dr. Guðmundur Sigmundsson’s books?

Embi: I haven’t the faintest idea.

Langvetningur: Many would say that this church would be no worse off for being used for an experiment that without exaggeration affects future life on the earth. If it were possible to make a resurrection of life happen in a church like this, I’d call that pretty good.

Embi: This isn’t much of a church.

Langvetningur: I can guarantee that the bishop has only to say the word and the Master will have a church built here worthy of being called the Glacier Cathedral and being in communion with the galaxies.

Embi: What kind of communion do you yourself have, actually?

Langvetningur: I have the same communion with the Master that the moon has with the sun.

Embi: Where did you dig up this master?

Langvetningur: When Guðmundur Sigmundsson came here to Snæfellsnes after more than thirty years’ absence abroad, I was hired to ride with him on his fishing trips, show him the rivers, point out the pools and broken water, carry his baggage.

Embi: The picture I’ve got of this man in the course of one day is now suspiciously like the one of an elephant that four blind men conjured up for themselves not long ago, in India I think.

Langvetningur: I also thought this was just an ordinary angler and wholesaler chap until he produced his booklet, which was still in manuscript then—and then I saw what was what. In fact, an untrained country teacher of the old school was the one who helped to elucidate it; because the Master had become unaccustomed to composition in his native tongue after all these years. I was also the one who took the booklet to Reykjavík that autumn and had it published and paid the printing costs in full. I was the one who was to sell the booklet and keep the proceeds for my trouble. Unfortunately no one wanted to buy it. As it says in the booklet, in Iceland protomory and heteromory and dysexelixis prevail. No one understands bioradiophony or astrotelekinesis. And diexelixis isn’t popular with the government. I am the man who alone was chosen to understand this booklet and thereby become redeemed and reborn.

Embi: What about the poet Jódínus Álfberg?

Langvetningur: Jódínus built the house and shifted the palisander. But few would try to drive a reliquary onto Snæfellsjökull in a twelve-ton truck. For that kind of job you need the small man with a horse. But on the other hand I guarantee, even though I’m only a district officer in a derelict area, that the bishop will get whatever rent he cares to name for the church.

Embi: We take the subject off the agenda. Better go and look for the horses.

This district officer’s sunshine smile is more akin to high summer than the uncertain season between hay and grass. The undersigned feels that someone who is looking for horses should not let opportunities go by for himself and for others. But he continues to expatiate.

Langvetningur: The history of mankind could well take a new course here at Glacier on and after tomorrow.

Embi: Provided the horses are found.

Langvetningur: I’m confident that you as a young Christian and a bishop will think twice before you exclude such an event from the church; because despite everything, it is a holy place.

Embi, now a little snappish at continually being called a bishop: My dear right honourable sheriff, schoolteacher, free-holder, and turf-whale out there in Langavatnsdalur! If the faith by which you are redeemed preaches a different resurrection than the New Testament does, why don’t you bury your whale in the peat-bogs at Torfhvalastaðir and make it rise again there?

Langvetningur: The Master makes particular demands on behalf of life itself, and I expect these are not entirely unknown to the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs.

Embi: What demands are they?

Langvetningur: In Guðmundur Sigmundsson’s booklet, emphasis is laid on the sacred right of earthly life to a share in the power of the heavens.

Embi: I seem to recall that these are the demands that agriculture makes of the State.

Langvetningur: My master is called Lord Maitreya by his loving disciples and henchmen.

Embi: Then I think it more likely that the case has been referred to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. By the way, it would be enlightening to hear why these broncos don’t stay at home around the equator, or at least in the tropical belt, where superstitious nonsense doesn’t freeze solid.

Langvetningur: People with second sight have known for a long time that some places are more susceptible to spiritual presences than others. From the locales where the All-mind has made His abode, the human intelligence has access to the Supercommunion if it can get away at all, and if it really tries. Iceland is one of the spheres for this special presence; people knew this even in the Middle Ages while hell was still in Iceland. There are special spots here where the All-thought is manifest in the elements themselves, places where fire has become earth, earth become water, water become air, and air become spirit.

Embi: I thought it was the other way round.

The Langvetningur is of the old Teachers’ College and learned algebra from the Danish book by Pedersen: The order of the factors is immaterial. The main point is that here at Glacier the divine oxen of immortality will be harnessed to the plough of the soul: we are in Supercommunion, and the origins of life are in our power.

Embi: I have missed my bus because of you and am now stranded here. But we shall come to an agreement nonetheless. I shall wait until you return from the glacier with the casket tomorrow. You will open it. And if the contents relate to theology I shall see to it that they receive ecclesiastical treatment. And now off you go and look for the hacks.

Langvetningur: I take this as a promise on the bishop’s part, and bless you for making it and may God reward you and I hope I may always count on you.

Farmer Helgi of Torfhvalastaðir kisses the undersigned farewell and sets off on the red one in search of the grey. I gaze enviously after this disputatious, but in no way tedious, man who had lost his horses, to be sure, but instead had caught hold of a considerably larger horse than most men. It is to be hoped that such a man doesn’t land on one of those stars in the galaxies that are 100,000 times larger than the earth and consequently 100,000 times harder to keep horses together on, not to mention find them again if they bolt.

And now there is probably nothing for it but to go and have coffee and cakes with Miss Hnallþóra.

25

Banquet of
Dried Halibut

Pastor Jón Prímus has a word with the overnight guest that evening as he sits on the edge of his bed, still glancing through his notes:

Some southerners gave me dried halibut; would you like some of that? says the parish pastor.

Strange to say “that” about dried halibut. Certainly, Icelandic doesn’t have a partitive article like French, but it would have been politer and better Icelandic to have said for example: I was given fish; may I offer you some of it?

Pastor Jón Prímus: It costs £10 a kilo, they were saying—the most expensive food in the world apart from mammoth meat from the tundras.

He took me into the spare room, which resounded with emptiness since the drawers from the furniture had been used as firewood during the spring of the great snows. Then he handed me a strip of this fine white dried fish.

Embi: I feel one could well have used a stronger word than “that” about a delicacy that costs £10 a kilo.

We chewed the dried halibut lustily.

Pastor Jón: I hope there’s room for quality fish like this in the report.

Embi: It’s an open question whether the reporter’s diet has any place in a report. Luke recorded the Acts of the Apostles, but it doesn’t say what he had to eat the while.

Pastor Jón: More’s the pity.

We sat on backless wooden benches on either side of the deal table on which Miss Hnallþóra would spread a cloth when she served coffee and cakes. Luckily it isn’t the custom to eat dried fish off a tablecloth; dried fish lies to the north of cutlery in space and belongs to the Stone Age, or at least the Middle Ages, in time. Nor could Miss Hnallþóra restrain herself when she came into the room and saw these goings-on.

Miss Hnallþóra: May God in Heaven help and forgive the parish pastor for offering a decent man fish, and him from the south, yes the same as a bishop! And now the doctor-professor is here as well, perhaps he too is to be made to gnaw at some rock-hard dried fish! This is the absolute limit! If he bangs on the door I’m not even going to answer it; wouldn’t dream of it unless I had at least thirty-five sorts. And may I add that there’s a stray ewe that has started guzzling the dandelions and buttercups out on the paving; she has lost her lamb, and the professor has started pacing up and down the homefield and frightening my calf, in addition to all the Danish saviours of mankind who are here already.