Under the Glacier (4 page)

Funny to see just the one tern, someone says; I’ve never seen terns except in their thousands. Then up pipes a woman, saying it was a scout sent by the other terns to see if the land was still above water.

How does she know that? someone asks.

Anyone can figure that out, says the woman, because it’s only the 11th today and the tern never comes before Term-day on the 14th.

Question: Who’s to say that all terns except this one come on the 14th?

Woman: It says so in the papers.

The arctic skua is a sinister bird. In a flat calm he flies like a piece of paper blowing about in a gale, hardly moving his wings at all. He lets the air do the work, and does nothing himself except steer; sometimes he pretends his flying has failed him or even that he has lost the art altogether, and he blows about and blows about until he falls with his white bottom uppermost; he starts struggling down on the ground; it’s as if his wings are broken or out of joint; they trip him up when he tries to toddle, so that he almost somersaults. What’s the meaning of these antics? Is it all just to tempt the ladies?

It’s strange that all birds don’t fly in the same way. After all, the air’s just the same at the same place and the same time. I’ve heard that the wings of aeroplanes all conform to the same formula, whereas birds each conform to a formula of their own. It has undeniably required more than a little ingenuity to equip so many birds each with their own formula, and no expense spared, either. Nevertheless, there has perhaps never been a bird that flies as correctly as an aeroplane; yet all birds fly better than aeroplanes if they can fly at all. All birds are perhaps a little wrong, because an absolute once-and-for-all formula for a bird has never been found, just as all novels are bad because the correct formula for a novel has never been found.

4

Evening at Glacier

We are at Glacier; the driver says this is where you get off. On the seaward side of the road, behind a green hillock in the homefield, is a bare patch of gravel. On it stands a ramshackle old shed of corrugated iron, about two metres by three. It’s shut. Evening; fog has settled on the brows of the mountains. Apart from the shed, the only other sign of human habitation is a decaying wooden bench of three planks, fastened to the ground beside the door. The undersigned sits down on the bench with his duffel bag beside him and brings out a map. The fog has sliced the tops off the mountains, and is thickest where the glacier should be, according to the map. There is a fine drizzle. The hillock glows green in the twilight, and lava-knuckles protrude from it here and there. When I tried the locked door again I noticed there was a board above it; some letters had been painted on it with lamp-black or tar a long time ago, and even though the lettering was blurred and grimy and the board decaying, one could still make out the words: PRIMUSES REPAIRED HERE.

The bridle path to the parsonage lay in a semicircle past the hillock. Beside the path stood a tethered calf, very wretched-looking, swollen-bellied, suffering from the scour, wry-faced, his forehead matted, hanging his head, not lowing. The visitor stops on the paving at the door. The long side of the house faced the sea, and the homefield reached to the edge of a sea-cliff where white birds sailed overhead.

Is it the bishop? a woman asks, coming to the door.

Embi: No, I’m afraid not. But I have a letter from the south.

Woman: You’re the same as a bishop, and there was a telegram saying you were on the way. Do come in. But the pastor isn’t at home.

It’s a labyrinth of a house, put together from many elements; a long front building lying east to west, made of timber clad with corrugated iron; windows and door on the side facing the sea. Thereafter came a row of misshapen wooden hovels that merged into an infinity of turf huts, tumbledown or ruined; those farthest away had become one with the green hillocks in the homefield; this kind of architecture, one shed after the other, is a little like the propagation of coral, or cactuses. The woman invited me into the living room. Then she disappeared.

I settled down to wait. All the doors were wide open, letting in a dank draught, and the chilly bleating of the seabirds on the cliffs filled the open house in the twilight. The front door was off its hinges; the living room door opened onto the passage and creaked piercingly if one tried to move it. The room had once upon a time been painted light blue, but the paint had peeled off, leaving patches that were dark red from some even earlier coat of paint, and there were now patches on the patches; these inner patches were poison green. In the living room there was an enormously long table with wooden benches along both sides; everything was made of undressed deal planks hammered together with four-inch nails. The furniture consisted of a chest of drawers, a writing desk, and a bureau, all much the worse for wear; nor was it easy to imagine what had happened to the drawers, as they had all disappeared.

When the bishop’s emissary had been sitting for an hour, he began to feel the effect of the raw cold. What was your emissary to do with himself? Should he perhaps go and look for the woman and tell her he was cold? Had he then come to a stranger’s house just to complain about his own lot? He came to the conclusion that he had no right to complain. He had been sent here only to look for facts. If he had to sit here without food all night, that was as good a fact for his report as any other. It’s about as unscientific as it would be dishonest to stop a scientific process in midstream on moral grounds—for instance, because one’s feet are frozen.

Your emissary had occupied himself for the first hour by jotting down in shorthand an account of the day’s journey, but he stopped because of the cold, besides which it was scarcely light enough to write, and that’s why the journey peters out with the arctic skuas in Kolbeinsstaðir District. He gets up, stretches, wrestles with the creaking door for a bit, then goes outside and heads for the sea. He stands on the edge of the cliff—forty fathoms high in many places, at least sixty in some. These coal-black cliffs looked as if they were snow-covered, so crowded were the white birds sitting there in the dusk. On a ledge no larger than a man’s palm lived many families. It is a kittiwake colony.

Even at midnight a kittiwake colony is seldom quiet at this time of year, at least not for long. Although they all seem to have said their prayers, suddenly someone breaks the silence in a shrill falsetto like a fire alarm. Sometimes the voice is sharp and pained, like the yelp of a dog wakened by its tail being trodden on; sometimes as when an infant starts screaming in terror out of the depths of slumber, roused by some wordless dream that at the very worst was caused by a touch of heart-burn. The kittiwake colony is wide awake at once and joins in for a while, until they all agree to say their prayers again and wait for the next reveille. The undersigned had meant to get a little warmth into his body, but it only adds to the shivers to listen to the bleating of birds on a raw night early in spring.

5

The Story of Hnallþóra
and the Fairy Ram

The time is 0000, midnight. Upon my word, isn’t that some kind of coffee smell wafting towards me out of the house! Inside, the table had been covered with a cloth and laid with a variety of cakes of many shapes and colours; I think I’m safe to say that there were hundreds of them, set out on nearly twenty plates. To cap it all, the woman brought in three war-cakes, so called because they became fashionable during the war, each about twenty centimetres in diameter and about six to eight centimetres thick. Finally the woman brought in coffee and switched on the light, a naked 15-watt bulb that hung by a flex from the ceiling.

Woman, apologetically: I’m going to light this thing anyway, even though we don’t go in much for that sort of thing in this house. It was forced onto pastor Jón a year or two back when every farm was connected up in accordance with the new regulations, whether people wanted to have it or not.

The undersigned wasn’t very sure at first what the “this” was that couldn’t be mentioned by name. Gradually it dawned on me that the woman was talking about electricity.

Embi: It’s quite unnecessary to switch on the electricity for my sake. A candle will do.

Woman: That’s hardly good enough for bishops.

However, the upshot was that the woman switched off the light with the unmentionable name and lit a candle; this was actually far more festive than the naked 15-watt bulb. The woman poured the visitor a cup of coffee and invited him to help himself, then took up position by the door with a stern expression on her face. The coffee had a mouldy taste, and truth to tell I was paralysed by the sight of these innumerable cakes arrayed around such awful coffee. I felt that the woman was watching over me in the same spirit of duty as when one is making sure that animals are eating the fodder they’ve been given.

She is a woman of dignity, but taciturn; perhaps she yearns for eternal silence and feels uncomfortable in body and soul if anyone addresses her first; it’s better to tread warily. Perhaps there was just a small railing around her, like a statue in a square. A cleanly woman. Not much over sixty. Thickset, rather clumsy.

Embi: Perhaps the pastor has gone to bed?

Woman: That I do not know.

Embi: Excuse me, but aren’t you the pastor’s wife?

Woman: I’ve not been so considered hitherto.

Embi: Never before have I seen so many cakes all at once. Did you make all these cakes?

Woman: Who else, indeed? That’s why they call me Hnallþóra (Pestle-Thóra) hereabouts.

Embi: An unusual name.

Miss Hnallþóra: I suppose the folk here think I wield the pestle in the mortar rather vigorously.

Embi: A very entertaining notion, certainly.

Miss Hnallþóra: There’s a lot of envy around here, you know. The madams with their mixing machines say things about my mortar. But what’s cardamom until it’s been under the pestle, say I! Do have some more cakes.

Embi: Excuse me, but is the pastor’s wife not at home herself?

Miss Hnallþóra: I don’t know. I rather think she isn’t here. Did the bishop need to have a word with her?

Embi: No, not really. I was just asking.

Miss Hnallþóra: Quite so. One could try asking down at Neðratraðkot (Netherlane Croft). It’s thought to be haunted sometimes in springtime, or so they say.

Embi: But you’re the housekeeper, are you not?

Miss Hnallþóra: I’m simply here. I go with the parsonage.

Embi: Were you already here when pastor Jón came here?

Miss Hnallþóra: Yes, I’m from up the mountain.

Embi: From up the mountain?

The lady heaved a sigh, closed her eyes, and inhaled a needless sort of “yes” all the way down into the lungs—yessing on the in-breath, as it’s called.

Embi: From up the mountain? Is that some particular family?

Miss Hnallþóra: I don’t come from any particular family. That’s for other folk.

Embi: Nothing particular in the way of news around here?

Miss Hnallþóra: There’s nothing much happens around here. Nothing ever happens to anyone. No one has ever seen anything.

Embi: Nothing ever happened to you either? Never seen anything?

Miss Hnallþóra: Nothing to speak of.

Embi: Perhaps something you cannot speak of? Have you never owned a horse, for instance?

Miss Hnallþóra: No, praise be to God. Others have owned horses, I’m happy to say, but not me.

Embi: Who owns the calf?

Miss Hnallþóra: The calf! That thing on its last legs? I’ve no idea why I was given it. There’s nothing here to feed to a calf except coffee once in a while, and old cakes I mash up in it. On the other hand I won’t conceal the fact from anyone that once upon a time a little something happened to me. I saw a little something. But never except just that once.

Embi: This is turning out better than seemed likely.

Miss Hnallþóra: Of course, I wouldn’t tell a soul about it.

Embi: That’s not so good!

Miss Hnallþóra: I’ll just go and make some more coffee.

Embi: Thanks, but there’s really no need. I’m not accustomed to drinking more than a half a cup or so. And I’m sure that coffeepot holds at least a litre and a half.

But there was no stopping her going out again with the coffeepot to replenish it, even though the level couldn’t have been lowered by much. While the lady was out, the bishop’s emissary could scarcely take his eyes off the three war-cakes bulging with spices and measuring a total of sixty centimetres in diameter. I was sweating a little on the forehead.

In the hope that with a little patience some information might be got out of the lady, I accepted a third cup contrary to my custom. It worked. The visitor’s coffee-swilling began to have a loosening effect on this fettered woman. Her reactions became more human, and she submitted to that softening of the soul and surrender to God and man that comes from telling a story. She returned to that one thing that had ever happened to her in her lifetime, that one and only time she had ever seen something. It was very nearly fifty years ago, but, she says, I remember it as if it had happened yesterday. May I not cut the bishop a wedge of layer cake?

Embi: There’s really no need, but, well, yes, thank you.

Miss Hnallþóra: Would you not like a piece from each one? It wasn’t the intention to have to throw it to the dogs.

The visitor besought her only to cut from the one, preferably the one with the sugar icing, because that one wasn’t as moist as the others and wasn’t oozing quite so much juice and tinned fruit. So she cut me a wedge that would have been a suitable portion for seven people, and laid it on my plate.

Miss Hnallþóra: I was just a chit of a girl at the time. I was sent on some errand out to Bervík. Instead of going the direct coastal way along the seashore, I followed the sheep-paths higher up, straight over the glacier moraines. There are lots of lovely dells up there, full of mosses and heathers. And then, as I am walking over one of the ridges, suddenly I see a brown ram with trained horns standing there on its own, with no other animal anywhere near, and looking up at me from the hollow. I’ve never been so frightened in all my born days, a speechless person, a helpless girl, because I knew that neither this nor any other straight-horned brown ram existed here at Glacier. A golden lustre shone from him. Never in all my born days have I seen such a fleece on any living animal. I felt I was turning to stone. For a long time I couldn’t tear my eyes from this beautiful animal that I knew didn’t exist here in the valley nor down by the shore nor anywhere in Iceland. The ram just stood there and gazed at me. I feel as if I’m standing there this very day and the ram is gazing at me. What was I to do? In the end I had the sense to run out of sight. I made a wide detour down from the ridge and ran helter-skelter along the hollows all the way down to the sea until I reached the main road. Thanks be to God.