The Atom Station Read Free

Cleopatra.”
    I said it could hardly be Skarp-Hedin, for he died, as everyone knew, with his axe beside him in the Burning of Njal. “But who’s Cleopatra?” I asked. “It wouldn’t be the queen that Julius Caesar married just before he was murdered?”
    â€œNo, it’s the other Cleopatra,” said the organist, “the one Napoleon went to visit at Waterloo. When he saw the battle was lost he said ‘ Merde ’ and put on his white gloves and went to visit a woman in a house nearby.”
    Through the half-open door, from the inner room, came a woman’s voice: “He never speaks the truth.” And out sailed a large handsome woman, heavily made up and with belladonna in her eyes, wearing sheer stockings, red shoes, and a hat so wide-brimmed that she had to tilt her head to get through the door. She kissed the organist on the ear in farewell as she walked past, and said to me as if in explanation of why he never spoke the truth, “As a matter of fact, he is above God and men. And now I’m off to the Yanks.”
    The organist brought out a white handkerchief, wiped the moist lipstick from his ear, smiling, and said, “That was she.”
    At first I thought this was his wife or at least his sweetheart, but when he said “That was she” I was not very clear what he was getting at, for we had been talking about the woman Napoleon went to visit when he saw that the battle was lost.
    But while I was pondering this, another woman came through the same door; this one was very old and lame, wearing a soiled flannel nightgown with her grey hair done up in two meager plaits, and she was toothless. She brought out a cheese-rind and a teaspoon on a patterned cake-dish, laid this offering on my knee and called me her dear one, bade me please eat and asked me about the weather. And when she saw that I was in difficulties with the cheese-rind and teaspoon she patted me pityingly on both cheeks with the back of her hand, looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “Poor blessed creature.” These words of compassion she repeated over and over again.
    The organist went to her, kissed her, and led her gently and affectionately back into her room; then he relieved me of the cake-dish with its cheese-rind and teaspoon and said. “I am her child.”
    TWO GODS
    He laid a cloth over the kitchen table and put out a few cups and saucers, mostly unmatching; then he brought some twisted dried-up pastries cut into slices, a few broken biscuits, some sugar, but no cream. I knew from the smell of the coffee-pot that he had not been sparing with the coffee. He said that I was to have the only matching cup and saucer. I asked if he were expecting visitors, for he had laid the table for many, but this he flatly denied, except that two gods had promised to make an appearance around midnight. We began to drink the coffee. He urged the meager baking on me like a hospitable country woman, but laughed at me when I tasted some of it just to please him.
    How I was beginning to long to know this man better, converse with him at length, ask him many things about this world and other worlds!—but especially about himself, who he was and why he was the way he was. But my tongue tied itself in knots. It was he who took up the thread again: “As we were saying, I have no time during the day, but you are welcome to come late in the evening or early in the morning.”
    I said, “Excuse me, but what is your work during the day?”
    â€œI dream,” he said.
    â€œAll day?” I asked.
    â€œI get up late,” he said. “Would you care to hear something on the gramophone?”
    He went into the inner room and I heard him winding up a gramophone, and then the needle started running and sound came. At first I thought the instrument was out of order, for nothing could be heard except thuds and thumps, rattle and clatter; but when the organist came back with