Free Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

Spring is on the side of calves.
    Embi: In a way, a good representative.
    Pastor Jón: Certainly closer to the Creation of the world than the parish pastor.
    Embi: I don’t doubt that a calf fulfils his role in the Creation of the world even if he’s dying of starvation. The parish pastor, on the other hand, has the role of preaching to farmers. Why does he not fulfil that role?
    Pastor Jón: Farmers have cattle and kinsfolk.
    Embi: Cattle die, kinsfolk die.
    Pastor Jón: It doesn’t matter.
    Embi: We ourselves must also die.
    Pastor Jón: Allah is Allah.
    Embi: No revelation?
    Pastor Jón: The lilies of the field.
    Embi: Yes, the lilies of the field! Exactly! Isn’t it ideal to preach about them—at Christmas, for instance?
    Pastor Jón: Oh no, better to be silent. That is what the glacier does. That is what the lilies of the field do.
    Embi: Are you sure the flowers are silent? If a sensitive enough microphone were placed beside them?
    Pastor Jón: You are welcome to take the pulpit, young man. We’ll have the nails out of the church door in a trice.
    Embi: I can of course take the pulpit for you, since I’m supposed to be a theologian; but I don’t see how that would help matters much. I wasn’t sent here to be your curate, in fact, and besides, I am not ordained. I’m inquiring about parish life and the discharge of pastoral duties. And I have instructions to make an inspection of the church.
    Pastor Jón: Then I shall have to fetch a crowbar. But first I suggest we have a cup of coffee and some genuine Thunderer. To tell you the truth it’s a long time since I had anything to eat. Do you mind if I light my namesake, the primus?
    It would have been hardly polite to decline the hospitality of a man who was so much my superior in years and dignity. Indeed, I had already successfully withstood two tidal waves of coffee that morning along with the obligatory flotsam of sweet-cakes. Perhaps what settled it was hearing the pastor mention good honest rye bread, even though he gave it a name in keeping with his own scant orthodoxy. He went inside the shed and I watched him manipulate the primus: pour meths into the bowl, light it and wait until the burner heated up, close off the air in the container, and then start pumping the paraffin with all his might up through the glowing burner; and a violet flame formed; this was accompanied by the romantic sound of a waterfall; the whole procedure just as the parish clerk, Tumi Jónsen, had described for me in outline. The pastor had some water in a bucket, and coffee in a tin. When the water began to boil he sprinkled ground coffee haphazardly from the tin into the kettle. He stirred the foaming coffee with a file so that it wouldn’t boil over. Then he produced a handsome loaf of black pot-bread, dug into his pocket for a clasp-knife, and cut some generous slices, never less than three centimetres thick. He kept some butter in an earthenware jar among a pile of rusty scrap-iron, and said the iron kept it cold so that it didn’t melt even if the shed got hot on a summer’s day. He gouged the butter out of the jar with a chisel; nor was there anything stingy about the helping. He told me to put it on with my clasp-knife, and if I didn’t have one, to spread the butter with my finger, and he taught me the method: the right thumb is applied obliquely, that’s to say, to form an angle of nearly thirty degrees against the bread. He apologised for the fact that his hands were too dirty to do it for me himself. Then he poured coffee into two old earthenware jars that had no doubt originally contained Danish jam of the kind that was imported early this century. These jars hold nearly half a litre. From a square tin he spooned out with a putty knife an enormous quantity of brown sugar into the coffee so that it nearly brimmed over the jars, and he stirred both our mugs with a six-inch nail. We sat down again on the bench by the shed directly facing the glacier, and started