“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.”
7
Icelandic currency is based on the