“It must be strange to have such notions,” I said. “I find it difficult to understand, for I have never had strange notions myself.”
“It comes naturally to me,” he said. “Anything that others say is of no concern to me. I am above them all; above everything. I can’t help looking upon others with a smile.”
“Just so,” I said.
He went on, “I feel that the Godhead and I are one. I feel that I and Jesus and Mohammed and Bu… Buddhy are one.”
“Can you prove it?” I asked.
“I was born with it,” he said. “At first, for a long time, I thought that others had it too and that everyone was mad. I started to ask the other boys. But they didn’t understand me. Then it turned out that no one had it except me; and Benjamin; we two had it.”
“Had what?” I asked.
“A soul,” he said. “A divine, eternal soul; that means that God and I are one. You go out to steal, perhaps you kill someone; it doesn’t concern you, you are a soul, you are part of God. You are beaten up, but that doesn’t concern you either, especially if you are badly beaten up; or you land in a life-or-death fight; or the police cosh you on the head and then handcuff you—despite that, you are utterly happy and have no body. In the morning you appear in court, but your soul rests in God; you are thrown into jail, but you are aware of nothing, you understand nothing except Jesus and Mohammed and… what was the name of the third one again? You hear only this one voice which always whispers: ‘You are I and I am you.’ I am also utterly happy even though I am not beaten up, heaven and earth are open before me, nothing can hurt me, I understand everything and can do everything, own everything and may do everything.”
“I feel,” I said, “that if you are what you say you are, you must show some token of it.” But he did not understand what I meant by a token, so I added in explanation: “Perform a miracle.”
He said: “No man on earth can play a salted fish except me. If I wanted to I could go to Hollywood and become a millionaire.”
I did not say a word, and he took my arm and pulled me towards him and looked at me. “Aren’t you at all amazed? Haven’t you fallen for me at all? Listen, come on up the back here with me, I want to tell you something.”
I don’t know what sort of a fool I was, to go wandering with him behind a house; for of course before I knew it he had put me up against a wall and had started kissing me and trying to pull my skirt up, with the pram standing nearby. I was slow in getting my hands up to hit him, but as I gathered my wits I said, “No you don’t, my lad, even if you’re a treble god and your head plastered with brilliantine too.” Then I struck him, kicked him, and pushed him away.
“You damned bitch,” he said. “Don’t you know I can murder you?”
“Didn’t I know you were a murderer?” I said. “I knew it the moment I set eyes on you.”
“Then you can stare into the barrel of this,” he said, suddenly flourishing something in front of my face; I could not see what it was in the dark, but it could well have been a revolver for all I knew.
Someone in the house opened a window above us and asked what the devil we were up to, this was his ground, and told us to hop it or else he would call the police. The god Brilliantine thrust the revolver back into his pocket, if revolver it was, and wheeled the pram back to the road.
“I was just testing you,” he said. “You can more or less imagine whether I meant anything, a penniless father of a family like me. Now I’ll see you home.”
But then he suddenly remembered something: “Have I not gone and forgotten that damned salted fish? The wife’s sure to beat me if I don’t bring her some food for tomorrow.”
He ran back through the gate to fetch this sustenance for his family, and I made off while he was looking for the fish.
4. Persuasions
When my mother became sixty she was given a hundred kronur. It then turned out that she could not recognize money. She had never seen money before. On the other hand, the day had never dawned since she was twelve years old that she had worked less than sixteen hours out of twenty-four during the winter, and eighteen during the summer, unless she were ill. So it was little wonder that I felt I must have been drunk the previous evening, or in a cinema, to see all that money torn up and then burned.
Madam awoke for her chocolate at eleven o’clock and raised herself up in the huge big bed, glowing with happiness that there should be no justice in the world, and began to drink that sweet fatty brew and read the Conservative paper; for it was little wonder that the woman should think this a splendid world and want to conserve it. When I was on my way out again she cleared her throat delicately and told me to wait. She did nothing in haste, she drank up slowly and finished the article she was reading. When she had drunk and read her fill she got out of bed, slipped a dressing-gown on and sat down in front of the mirror with the back of her head towards me, and started to do herself up.
“You are a young girl from the country,” she said.
I did not say much to that.
“Naturally it doesn’t concern me at all how my maids spend their nights,” she said. “But for the sake of the house—you understand?”
“For the sake of the house?” I said.
“Exactly, for the sake of the house,” she said. “A maid once brought lice into the house.”
Then she turned round on the seat and looked me all over and smiled and said, “Cavaliers are not all the same.”
“Indeed?” I said.
“Very much so,” she said, still giving me that searching look, with a smile on her lips.
“So now I know,” I said.
“So now you know,” she said, and began to study her own reflection again. “My husband and I said nothing last year even though the maid brought in a Yank now and again; they get health inspections. We preferred that to having her sleeping out somewhere, for instance with some louse-ridden seaman.”
Why did she say ‘my husband and I?’ Had they lain awake for the housemaid, clock in hand? Or was she reminding me of the difference between lying married in a moral bed at home and being an outcast? She had long scarlet-painted nails, and I felt sure she scratched her husband. Originally I had intended to tell her the whole story about my night out the previous evening, but now all at once I felt that I had no call to make any explanations to this woman.
“But we will hang on to the hope,” she said, “that you haven’t landed up in one of those cells.”
“Cells?”—I said I did not understand the word.
“All the more dangerous for you,” she said. “Country girls who do not read the papers, and don’t understand what’s going on in the community, land up in a cell before they know of it.”
“Really, I’m becoming almost curious,” I said.
“No words can describe the bestiality of Communists,” she said.
“I’ll soon be almost taking a fancy to bestiality if you go on talking like this,” I said.
“No other girl in the whole country was in greater danger than I,” she said solemnly. “My father owns wholesale businesses and retail businesses, cinemas, trawlers, printing works, newspapers, fish-oil factories, and bone-meal factories; I could do anything and I was allowed to do anything; I could have gone to Paris any time I liked and taken part in whatever bestiality I fancied; I could even have become a Communist if I had wanted to, and fought to tear the shirt from my father’s back. But yet I did not land up in any bestiality. I met my man and with him have built my house. I have given birth to my children, my girl, and it has been my life’s work to bring them up for the community. No honorable woman regrets having given birth to her children and brought them up, instead of abandoning herself to bestiality.”