Halldór Laxness
THE ATOM STATION
1. Budubodi
“Shall I take in this soup?” I asked.
“Yes, in the name of Jesus,” said the dull-eared housekeeper, one of the greatest female sinners of our time; she had a glossy picture of the Savior hanging up over the steel sink. The younger daughter of the house, a six-year-old tot named Thorgunn, but called Didi, never left her side, stared at her with the fear of God in her eyes (and sometimes with clasped hands), ate with her out in the kitchen, and slept with her at night; and from time to time the child would look censoriously, almost accusingly, at me, the new maid.
I summoned up some courage and went into the dining-room with the soup tureen. The family was not yet at table. The elder daughter, just newly confirmed, came in looking as fresh-coloured as cream except for her dark-painted lips and nails, adjusting with supple fingers her thick, blonde, cork-screw curls. I said Good evening, but she only looked at me distantly, sat down at the table, and went on scanning a fashion magazine.
Then the lady of the house came bustling in with brisk, short steps, bringing with her a chilly breath of perfume; not really a fat women, but plump and sleek and well satisfied, her bracelets jingling. She did not exactly look at me, but said as she seated herself, “Well then, my dear, have you learned to use the electric floor-polisher yet? That’s our Dudu there” (pointing to her daughter), “and here comes my Bobo. And then we have a bigger one who’s now in his first year at University—he’s out enjoying himself tonight.”
“How is an innocent girl from the north to memorize these barbarian names?” I heard someone say behind me; it was a tall, slim man with a Roman nose and a fine head, just starting to go grey at the temples. He took off his horn-rimmed spectacles and began to polish them; his smile, although unrestrained, was at the same time a little tired and absent. So this was the Member of Parliament for our constituency up in the north, the man in whose house I was now in service: Bui Arland, business magnate and Doctor of Philosophy.
When he has polished his spectacles and looked at me long enough he offered me his hand and said, “It was sweet of you to come all the way from the north to help us here in the south.”
And by that time I had begun to get palpitations; and was sweating; and could not say a word, of course.
He murmured my name over to himself: “Ugla—owl,” and then went on, “A learned bird; and her time is the night. But how is my old friend Fal of Eystridale with his herd of wild ponies? And the church? I hope we shall manage to squeeze some money out of this utterly heathenish Parliament next session so that the winds can sing psalms out there in the valley when everything is laid waste. But the wild ponies will have to look after themselves in their own godly way, for the German horse-dealers are now kaput.”
How relieved I was that he should carry on talking, to give me space to pull myself together, for this was the first time that talking to a man had ever made me feel funny in the knees. I said that I was going to learn to play the church harmonium, and that this was the main reason why I had come south: “We do not want the valley to become waste.”
I had not had time to take notice of the chubby, overgrown Bobo staring at me as I talked to his father while Madam ladled out the soup, until now he suddenly gave a roar of laughter, bulged his cheeks until they could hold no more air, and exploded. His sister stopped glancing at the English fashion magazine and also burst out laughing. In the open doorway to the kitchen behind me stood little angel-face, with no fear of God in her now, laughing and saying to her foster-mother in explanation of this unusual family hilarity, “She’s going to learn to play the harmonium!”
Madam smiled to herself as she glanced towards them, but their father gestured at them with his left hand and shook his head and kept his eyes fixed on my face, all at the same time; but did not say a word, and started to take his soup.
It was not until I had become used to seeing the elder daughter seat herself at the grand piano and play Chopin at random as if nothing could be more natural, that I realized how ludicrous it was to hear a big, strapping north-country girl announce in a civilized home that she was going to learn to play the harmonium.
“That’s just like you northerners, to start trying to talk to people,” said the cook when I returned to the kitchen.
Rebellion stirred in me and I replied, “I am people.”
My trunk had already been moved in, as well as my harmonium. I had bought the latter that same day with all the money I had ever earned in my life, and it has still not been enough. My room was on the attic floor, two stories up; I was allowed to practice whenever I had the time, except when there were visitors. My job was to keep the house clean, get the children off to school, help the cook-housekeeper, and serve at table. The house was much more perfect than the sort of gilt-bordered Christmas-card-Heaven that a crooked-nosed woman would sacrifice everything to attain in the next world: it was an all-electric house, with machines being plugged in and started up all day long; there was no such thing as a fire; heat came from hot-springs underground,[1] and the glowing embers in the fireplace were made of glass.
When I took in the main course the laughter had subsided; the young girl had begun to talk to her father, and only the little fat one was gazing at me. Madam said that she and her husband were “going out,” whatever that involved, and that Jona, the cook, was going to a meeting. “You are to look after the house and wait up for Bubu with something hot.”
“Bu… pardon?” I said.
“Yet another barbarian,” said the master of the house. “Apparently from Tanganyika, or Kenya; or the land where they decorate their hair with rats’ tails. That aside, the boy is called Arngrim.”
“My husband isn’t very chic,” said Madam. “He would prefer to call the boy Grimsi. But modern times are chic. Everything has to be a la mode.”
Her husband said, “You are from the north, from that unforgettable valley of Eystridale, the daughter of Wild-ponies Fal who is building a church: will you not please re-christen the children for me?”
I would rather be chopped up into a hundred thousand million pieces than be called Gunsa,” said the elder daughter.
“Her name, in fact, is Gudny,” said her father. “But they cannot get by with less than Africa at its very darkest—bu-bu, du-du, bo-bo, di-di…”
At that, the woman looked hard at her husband and said, “Is that the way you’re going to talk to the maid?” And to me: “Clear the dishes and take them into the kitchen, my girl.”
But I was not afraid of her at all, nor was I when I went in to her bedroom with her polished silver shoes (my own pumps had been bought in the village of Krok). She was sitting very scantily clad before a large mirror with another mirror at an angle behind her, painting her toenails and humming. Undressed, she was fatter than I had thought, but nowhere flabby.
When I had laid down her shoes and was on my way out again she stopped humming, saw me behind her in the mirror, and said, with her back towards me, “How old are you, by the way?”
I told her—twenty-one.
“Are you quite uneducated?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“And never been away from home before?”
“I had a year at girls’ college in the north.”
She turned round on the seat and looked directly at me. “At girls’ college?” she echoed. “What did you learn there?”
“Oh, nothing, more or less,” I said.
1
Two-thirds of all the houses in Reykjavik (pop. 70,000) are centrally heated by water pumped from hot springs in Mosfell District, some twelve miles away.