The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

The maiden Fruit-blood often stared at me in a trance until I became afraid; sometimes I seemed to see refracted in her eyes all the life that exists in plants from the time that a little seed manages to germinate despite all the accumulated disadvantages of Iceland and Greenland, right up to the point where the god starts looking at you with those burning lustful murderer's eyes of his from the deep. Sometimes I would stamp my foot and say curtly, "Why are you staring like that, child? " But she would go on staring and chewing her chewing gum slowly and calmly. Sometimes she would start gliding through the rooms with a cigarette smoldering in a long tube, just like a cinema shark. Sometimes she would flip through her lessons with a great deal of smoking and chewing, or scribble a composition in enormous vertical lettering, and the scratching of the pen could be heard a long way away like canvas being torn; but soon she would be back into some American light reading with a cover picture of a masked murderer with blood-stained knife and a terrified bare-thighed girl with high insteps and slender ankles wearing stiletto heels; or start leafing through the pile of fashion magazines which arrived for the mother and daughter from all over the world every week and sometimes every day. A young sprig of a tree, nothing but springiness and sap, a mirage in female form, a parlor-reared Naiad-shape; and I, this lump from the far valleys; was it any wonder that sometimes I felt uneasy in her presence?

I cannot forget the first morning that I went in to her with coffee, and stood in front of the bed in which she lay sleeping.