The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

By the month of Thorri,* a month which does not in fact exist in towns, I had become quite convinced-and indeed much earlier than that. The symptoms all matched; all the things were going on inside me that you read about in books for women, and much more besides, I think. I dreamed about the man all night sometimes, often nightmares, and started up from sleep and had to switch on the light, and could not go to sleep again before I had promised myself to go to him and beg his forgiveness for having shut him out on New Year's Eve; and invite him to provide for me in whatever way he thought best.

But in the mornings, when I awoke, I felt that I did not know this man at all, much less that he concerned me at all, and that the child was mine alone. Then I also felt that, in general, men never owned children at all, but rather that the woman alone owned them as in pictures of Mary with the Child; the Invisible is the father of all children, the man's part in it being purely fortuitous, and I understood well those primitive races that do not associate sexual intercourse with babies. He shall never see my child nor be called its father, I said to myself. Was it not now time that a law was passed forbidding men to call themselves the fathers of children? But when I started thinking more closely about it I felt that the mother did not really own the child either; children owned themselves-and their mother too, in accordance with the law of Nature, but for no longer than they had need of her; owned her while they were growing in her womb, and while they were eating her, or rather drinking her, for their first year. Human society is the one that has duties towards children, in so far as it has duties towards anyone; in so far as anyone has duties towards anyone.