Free The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

O-Olaf, what’s your surname again, lad?—Iceland must have her bones. The Icelandic nation needs spiritual maturity and light.”
    â€œAnd Love,” said the medium. “Don’t forget Love.”
    â€œListen, friend,” said Doctor Bui Arland to Pliers, “do you imagine that the Nation’s Darling ever paid any attention to grass-eaters and Good Templars like you, except on that one occasion when he wrote in a poem, ‘The cattle-rearing pasture grows on your mothers’ grave’?”
    â€œThe papers shall have it, the radio shall have it, the people shall have it,” said Two Hundred Thousand Pliers. “And if you defeat it in Parliament I shall go to Denmark myself and have him dug up at my own expense; I shall moreover buy the bones and keep them myself. Nothing shall come between my bones and his.”
    â€œWill someone not take it upon himself to provide that young man with a handkerchief?” said the Doctor, pointing to the medium.
    Pliers pulled a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, blew the medium’s nose hurriedly for him and then threw the handkerchief into the fireplace; all with these floppy movements like a rubber doll’s. The medium sniffed feebly after this operation and said apologetically, “They draw so much strength from me out through my nose, particularly the large spirits; and absolutely especially the Darling …”
    â€œI think you should learn to take snuff,” said the Doctor, and then offered the petit-bourgeois women cigarettes; but they only stared at him apprehensively. No further hospitality was offered to this half-class in such a house. I went on trying to get the white pellets into the black boy, and was perfectly clearly aware of the loathing that blazed in Madam’s body at seeing the maid playing in her husband’s room while she, this great woman descended from such great people, was coming from another world, brimming over with all that was holy. But her glares left me quite unmoved; for what was there for me to be ashamed of? If I had fled the moment she arrived, that would have been an act of shame, that would have been to accuse oneself without cause.
    â€œCome, friend,” said Pliers, and helped the medium to negotiate the open door so that he would not turn into nothing there in the middle of the room. Madam propelled the half-class women through the door as well and bade them farewell graciously, and they continued to bleat and groan in their sentimental falsetto about the wonders of the next world all the way out into the street.
    The Member of Parliament, Doctor Bui Arland, suddenly remembered that he had to have a few words in private with his underling; with a start he ran after him out to the Cadillac, where his agent was already behind the wheel, and conferred with him through the open car door.
    I had at last managed to get the pellets into the little nigger boy, and I laid the mirror carefully on the table so that they should not fall out again. But Madam walked into the room as I was leaving, picked up the mirror and shook it, and then flung it aside.
    While I was walking upstairs I heard her shouting through the open door to her husband, who was still talking to Two Hundred Thousand Pliers out at the Cadillac: “Bui, I want to talk to you.”
    * A contagious lung disease that killed hundreds of thousands of sheep in Iceland just after the war. The disease, which is peculiar to Iceland, has not yet been identified with any other known disease.

8. He who dwells in the mountain-tops, and my father
    The Nation’s Darling, the pride of all Iceland even though he was born in our forgotten valley, my valley, he who was the dearest friend of the nation’s heart, the reborn master-smith of this golden language, the resurrector who, by wiping away our blindness, gave us what we had never seen before, the country’s beauty, Icelandic Nature, and who sowed in the