Read Online The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness - Free Book Online Page B

having its throat cut.
    â€œAre there guests in, then?” I asked, looking up in dismay.
    â€œIt seems to be the sheep-plague,” * he said. “We shall pay no attention to it.”
    But after a while the sermon began again, with the moaning and rattling, and I started to listen.
    â€œPliers has rid himself of the former creatures and got himself something new,” said the master. “The next world, to be exact.”
    â€œHow do you mean, the next world?” I asked.
    â€œA seance,” he said.
    â€œAnd you here?”
    â€œI spew six meters,” he said. “On with the boy.”
    â€œPliers,” I said. “That’s a queer name. Excuse me, but is it Two Hundred Thousand Pliers?”
    â€œYes, the poor fellow. He has this sort of belief in the next world plus vegetarianism, which is at one and the same time the after-effect and the converse of former alcoholism, a kind of binge gone wrong, if I may put it that way. While he was a straightforward drunkard and businessman, newly arrived from the north, he bought two pliers and five anvils for every single Icelander; hair nets, six for each and every person; an unlimited quantity of boiled American water in cans, to use in soups; ten-year-old sardines from Portugal; and enough baking powder to blow up the whole country—but even the Communists don’t know that. Finally, he had resolved to buy up all the raisins in the world and import them to Iceland, but by that time he had also lost his voice except that he continually screeched the vowel A. The Snorredda company saved him. We adore idiots. We are hoping that Two Hundred Thousand Pliers can become a Minister. Now he has made contact, as it were, with the Nation’s Darling, whom we consigned to a Danish death a hundred years ago. The Nation’s Darling wants Pliers to dig up his bones so that we Icelanders of today can become the well-merited laughing stock of history. We are thinking of exhuming him even though it was proved by experts years ago that his bones are lost. The Prime Minister, my brother-in-law, has now joined in the game. And there, look, you have just got the teeth into the boy’s jaw. Now I see that you can do everything.”
    And at that moment singing broke out in the next room, albeit rather inferior singing, out of tune like the chanting at a pauper’s funeral—a harsh thing to say in one of the greatest houses in the country: “O, sing a new song to the Lord, sing all the earth to God.” Then this pitiful singing came to an end. There was a scraping of chairs, the sitters stood up, and the connecting door into Doctor Bui Arland’s study was thrown open. In stalked Madam, ennobled in soul by revelations, and a perky well-dressed man so loosely assembled that his limbs flapped when he walked, particularly his arms: this famous man, at last I was getting a sight of him. Between them swayed a lanky man with a thatch of red hair, glassy-eyed, sweating, and dishevelled, his necktie pulled to one side. Then came two women who were midway between being common and upperclass, the one in national costume and the other in a black taffeta dress with tassels dangling here and there; both were absolutely rigid with solemnity, both were in a spiritual condition.
    And I was sitting in there with the master.
    â€œWhat’s the maid doing in here?” asked Madam.
    â€œShe is trying her hand with the boy,” said the husband.
    â€œWhat boy?”
    â€œThe black one,” he replied. “what news of the dead?”
    â€œWe got marvelous confirmation,” bleated devout woman number one.
    â€œIt was divine,” groaned devout woman number two.
    Then they both sighed.
    â€œMy friend the Darling,” said Pliers, “has confirmed in your wife’s hearing—and the hearing of these two—what he has so often told me previously during seances with this future world-famous medium down south.