The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

Author:Halldór Laxness
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504011938
Publisher: RCS Libri/Rizzoli

14. Oli Figure murdered

As a result of the Prime Minister’s last oaths there was no more discussion for a while about selling the country. There was now to be an interval of a year, followed by Parliamentary elections over the matter, and meanwhile attempts were to be made to get the representative of the Great Power to moderate the wording of the application: to ask not for a base for attack or defence in an atomic war, but rather for a shelter for any welfare missions which might be dispatched to alleviate the sufferings of European races. A temporary truce was declared between street and State. The Communists stopped saying that F.F.F. was going to sell the country, and F.F.F. stopped writing that people had to be true Icelanders and dig up bones. But in the middle of the calm that had fallen over country sales and exhumations, the main tidings of Christmas were that Oli Figure was found in a hut down by the sea with his head smashed in; the iron bar with which he had been assaulted lay nearby. As is the custom when murders are committed, little was written about it in the newspapers, so as not to offend the murderer and his family; until someone had the fine idea of blaming the murder on an unknown American negro, for it did not matter in the least if a colored Yankee and his family were offended.

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE ADVANCED

When I came home one evening, between Christmas and New Year, there, standing in the hall, was the man who was to me the most unknown of all, the most incomprehensible and the most distant, even though he was closest of all to me in that mysterious disintegrating way which I shall never admit: the father of the children; the husband of the woman; that famous man, my employer.

“Hello.”

I replied, “Good evening.”

There was no party on, and the house was silent. He had just arrived from the airport, and his leather case stood in the hall.

“Where are the children I gave you?” he said.

I said I hoped they were out enjoying themselves.

“Let us hope so,” he said. “People should enjoy themselves while they can, for the time comes when they are bored with enjoying themselves. I would give a lot to be able once more to enjoy going to the cinema.”

I only wanted to disappear as quickly as I could behind locked doors, for I could never think of anything to say when he spoke to me; I am sure that in my eyes could have been clearly read the palpitation of my heart at his return, once more chatting in that bantering melancholy absent-minded way of his.

“Good night,” I said abruptly and without preliminaries, and turned to go.

“Ugla,” he said.

“What?”

He inhaled so deeply on his cigarette that no smoke came out. I paused in the doorway.

“These children,” he said.

I waited in the doorway and watched him smoke.

“It is said that a man forgives those he understands, but

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