The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  The atmosphere at home was like this when Örnólfur was gone, that a little girl never dared to say anything about what was on her mind. But I got my chance one morning when Örnólfur was alone in the dining room after breakfast, and I asked: “Örnólfur, do you think that their ship will sink?” He was reading foreign newspapers, but he looked up, stroked my cheek, and said: “No, no, Diljá dear, they don’t cross a danger zone. Steinn Elliði will make it home just fine.”

  And he stroked my cheek again and looked at me for a long time.

  One morning early in September, Örnólfur came to Grandmother and me and said: “The Bothnia has reached Grótta. Grímúlfur and his wife sent a telegram from the ship yesterday, but it wasn’t delivered until this morning. They’ll be in the harbor in half an hour.”

  I was overcome by such joy when I heard this wonderful news that I forgot to thank God for hearing my prayer until half a month later. And when we reached the pier the ship was just anchoring. The passengers leaned over the railing, smiling and greeting their friends on the pier. Your father was standing there in his plain black overcoat with its silk collar, serious as usual. Next to him stood your mother in a new fur coat, and you slipped your hand under her arm. I can still see you there, in a blue sailor suit, your trousers reaching down to your heels, with new patent-leather shoes, in a gray, unbuttoned overcoat, not wearing a hat, your hair parted to one side like a grown-up man. I wouldn’t let you out of my sight. You disembarked before your parents and said hello to us. I gave you my hand without a word. I was only ten and you were twelve. And I felt like you’d come home from war. I thought that during the last few months you’d heard nothing but the roar of cannons and seen nothing but fire.

  But all I could think was “Jeremiah!” because when it came down to it you were so incredibly full of yourself. You bowed to us as if you were greeting strangers overseas, and when you bumped into someone you said, “Um verzeihung,” because you’d been with your mother at a German spa during the summer, while your father was down south in Spain. You were so arrogant that whole day that I didn’t dare to look at you, except in secret. I didn’t dare to come into the dining room while you ate breakfast with us. I stayed in the kitchen with the maids. Oh, how terribly disappointed I was!

  But on the next day you came to us alone. Grandmother gave us chocolate and fruit. You were completely different than the day before: you’d put on shorts, a sweater, and waterproof shoes like every other Reykjavík boy, and you were starting lyceum in the fall. You spoke more naturally and told us about everything you’d seen. You’d seen everything. You’d seen ropedancers, and black men swallow fire, and bears ride bicycles, and horses dance polkas. And you’d seen all the soldiers parading through the streets in Germany. And when you looked down on the soldiers from the balcony of your hotel, it was as if you were looking out over meadows of incredibly tall grass, and wind was blowing through the grass. But that was the bayonets on the soldiers’ shoulders, all tilted in the same direction. You said you hoped that the Kaiser in Germany would conquer the whole world. And when Grandmother got tired of listening, you told just me about everything you’d seen. And I said nothing; I just gazed at you and sighed. No one can believe how happy a little girl can be when she reclaims her playmate from death.

  16.

  After you moved to your new home in Rauðarárvík we saw each other less often than when you lived in town. During the winters you were completely busy studying, during the summers either abroad with your mother or on some trip with the Væringjar boys. One summer you were up north in Akureyri. Often weeks went by when I didn’t see you, sometimes months. And every time I did see you I felt that you’d become a greater man than when I saw you last. I continued being a little girl and had no clue as to what was happening in the world, didn’t understand what people were talking about, but you lived and moved in reality. My thoughts were like fog in the spring.

  And there were all kinds of stories being told about you. Your schemes were supposedly endless. One person said that you were a brawler, another that you were a boor. My girlfriends talked about you: some were with you in lyceum, had crushes on you, and were never more attracted to you than when they told ugly stories about you. I often wanted to ask you when I met you next whether this or that story was true. But when we finally met you were so gloomy that I completely forgot what I’d wanted to ask you. Is it true that you once climbed from the street up onto the balcony of the parliament building and had the boys yell, “Down with the king!” and that you were admonished by the rector for it? Is it true that you once got some of the boys to help you light a shed on fire up in Mosfellssveit, and that your father had to pay for it? Is it true that you once knocked out one of your classmates with a billiards cue?

  Steinn, to this day I still shudder at one particular story, so you can imagine how I felt when I first heard it. Sigga P. told me. I cried most of the night. I’ve never blamed you, Steinn, not once then, no, not even once then. But that night I wasn’t a child; I don’t know what I was! I would gladly have come to you on my knees and begged you to be good to me. I felt like a foal caught in an earthquake or a dog in a thunderstorm. If I’d ever before thought that I had you measured, whatever I’d used to measure you was turned into a child’s toy. I realized that you were beyond all measure, like a force of nature.

  You once had four cats; do you remember? You kept them in a little room in the basement, never let them out, and fed them yourself. Everyone knew that sometimes you spent hours at a time alone with the cats, and that you’d come back scratched and bloodied. And when we came to visit you always took me down to the basement to show me the cat-folk. Rúrik and Hansína are a couple, and Hans and Rúsína too, you said, since you’d given the cats those silly names. And they all meowed around you before you’d even gotten through the door, jumped up to your shoulders or hung on to your clothes. I couldn’t help but feel disgusted by it.

  But once during the summer you invited me home to see something new. And I came over. You took me back down into the basement and opened the little room with a key. And how it surprised me to see a bunch of birds there, and the cats’ den empty! “Look!” you said, and you started making chirping noises, and some of them came and sat on your hand and others on your shoulders. And you fed them from the palms of your hands.

  “Those damned cats were nothing but trouble,” you said. “They’ve been set free. I had a fellow from the countryside get me these finches. There’re seven of them. They’re picky about their food and impatient, just like me. They long to be out in the open air just like me. But they’re not any worse for wear by being exposed to human life.”

  Steinn, where were your little birds the next time I came to visit you? Why didn’t you invite me to come and have a look in the basement? Why did you ignore it when I asked about your pets? You’d decided to become a musical virtuoso. Up until then you’d been too lazy to practice. Now you practiced from morning till night, said your mother, and took a lesson every day. No one said anything about your birds.

  It wasn’t until the fall that I found out everything. Sigga P. and I were out taking a walk at the southern end of Tjörnin 12 in the moonlight. We walked back and forth over the bridge ten times or more. She heard the story from her mother’s maid, who had heard it from your maid:

  “He said that he was completely bored with pampering the creatures. The cats continued to roam around the house, skinny and starving and an embarrassment to the household. And sometimes three or four days in a row would pass when he wouldn’t bother to feed the birds, but instead wandered around God knows where with the key to the room in his pocket. And those poor little things cheeped all day from hunger and thirst, and no one could get in to give them something to eat. And one night when he came home the housekeeper started scolding him for how he treated the poor creatures. And what did Steinn Elliði do? He went and rounded up all of his cats and took them to the basement. He didn’t come up to go to bed until after midnight. Nex
t morning the bird room was open, and there were bird feathers scattered all over the floor, along with half-eaten bones. He’d been amusing himself the night before by letting the cats hunt, thought the housekeeper. But what had become of the cats? That wasn’t discovered until a week later when they went to do the laundry. In the laundry room was a tub full of water, and down in the water was a sack full of something, with the head of a sledgehammer tied to it. After he had finished amusing himself watching the cats hunt he stuck them all in the same bag and sank it. Then he went to bed. And after that he decided to become a musical virtuoso.”

  You probably think that because of this I started thinking: Steinn Elliði is a scoundrel whom I don’t want to know anymore! No, Steinn, nothing is further from the truth. In my heart I pitied those blessed birds and those poor cats, but nothing was further from my mind than to blame you. I just saw you in a new light, mightier than before, savage, horrible, and at the same time raised above everything that has the name of good and right, the laws that others obey. I saw you as mysterious, incomprehensible, and limitless. No one but Grettir Ásmundarson 13 or Steinn Elliði could have come up with that. I thought the same thing on our last night at Þingvellir when you told me everything . . .

  When I see you walking down the street, it’s like seeing a phantom; when you recite your poems, your voice gushing with passion, or even if you do nothing but lift your head and look at me, it’s like lightning – I get frightened and know only this: you’re from a world that nobodies like me can’t measure.

  When I do something bad it’s because I’m imperfect and lack the strength to do what’s good. And when I do something good it’s because I lack the nerve to do something bad. But even your sins are enchanting, like in a myth. Even over your sins there burns an awful beauty, like cairn-fire.

  17.

  Just this, Steinn; I always find this same thing to be your chief characteristic the longer and the more that I think about you: you have grown beyond your work. Just as soon as you’ve composed something, whether it’s “beautiful” or “ugly,” you walk away from it, like a shepherd from the embers of his fire. I’ve never known anything to capture your heart as much as something you haven’t yet done. You would disappear for a few days, sometimes whole weeks; you’d lock yourself in your room and forget everything except for your new project. And when you finished your project you’d never mention it again. You only talked about what you planned to do next. All that mattered was what you planned to do next. What you’d done no longer existed.

  You practiced the piano for half a year. Then you got sick of the sound and never mentioned music again. Once you wrote a play. You came to me with the script in a beat-up old briefcase and started reading it. But you didn’t read to me for more than an hour. Then you left. I didn’t see you again until a week later, and then I asked you when you were going to read to me next. But you just shrugged your shoulders and didn’t answer. You’d lost the manuscript. “Where?” I asked. Either down in Hafnarfjörður or up at Rauðavatn. Once you sat for a whole day in the office at our house, and no one was allowed to come visit you. You were writing poetry. In the evening a boy came to take you to the cinema. And you were gone. On the desk lay a half-written drápa 14 on a pile of scribbled-up sheets of paper. When I reminded you a few days later that you’d left a half-written poem at our house, you’d already forgotten it.

  You never took anything so insignificant into your hands that it didn’t become a living world while you held it. And you never laid aside any precious thing that didn’t afterward become worthless, dead, and forgotten to you.

  Your schoolbooks became books of revelation to you while you were reading them. Sometimes you spoke with burning inspiration about the miracles in chemistry, the logic in a Latin text; next you were in seventh heaven over the Pythagorean theorem or some amazing thing from world history. Everything that appeared before your eyes was precious and beyond compare, everything new. And just as soon as you finished your exams in the spring you didn’t give a second thought to what you’d learned. Once you said that the goal of an educated man was to forget everything he’d learned.

  18.

  You often told me, Steinn, that I was the only soul in the world who understood you. That was incredible exaggeration; I often understood you only halfway, sometimes not at all. You never suspected how hard I tried to become your spiritual companion, ever since I was twelve or thirteen until the time you left. I hid all my efforts from you. Actually everything I busied myself with, either consciously or unconsciously, was aimed at trying to make myself fit to understand you, but in the end my thoughts were nothing but a weak echo of you. I drank up poem after poem, read author after author, everything that I thought would make me more worthy to follow you, which is also why I started taking French and German classes on my own initiative when I was just thirteen. For an awful long time I felt that I’d never be able to learn those complicated, peculiar languages; I was so slow; no one knew how much energy I put into them or how often I despaired. But I was driven by the conviction that the one thing that could make me worthy of your friendship was knowledge and understanding, and I vowed never to give up. But it was like you knew everything and understood everything automatically; it was easy for you to learn a whole language in a few days; while I was trying to break through the German verb declensions you amused yourself by reading Unamuno in Spanish and Pirandello in Italian.

  The summer that I was fifteen years old you were overseas again with your parents, but I’d been sick that winter and had gone up to Borgarfjörður for the better part of the summer to recuperate. I stayed at a nice farm and the children there were wonderful; there were four, all under ten years old. And what do you think I started doing there in the blessed countryside? I started writing stories for the children. They were incredibly simple and foolish, but I was proud of them, and I looked forward to showing them to you in the fall. I rewrote them again and again, wanting to make them as beautiful as possible, and finally I copied six of them in a little book, not larger than half the size of my palm, with pink pages gilded on the edges, bound in blue velvet. I wanted to give you this book when you came. One longs so much to be like those whom one believes in. I both looked forward to it and shuddered at the thought that you might read my little stories. When I came to Reykjavík in the fall you’d already arrived, two days ahead of me. You came to visit us as soon as you heard that I was home.

  Imagine that fall evening when I saw you again! You came suddenly into the room where we were sitting. I said hello to you and blushed. I’d been in the countryside during the summer and was tan and fat, my hands red and ugly. And there you came into the room, like a phantom, and walked straight toward me like lightning. You’d grown taller, I hardly recognized you. And you were wearing summer clothes with a tiny checkered pattern, a green necktie and green silk socks, and your collar was in a style I’d never seen before. The curls in your hair were like a work of art, your hands snow-white, and your nails shone as if you’d made a habit of going to a manicurist; you smoked perfumed cigarettes. While I’d been strolling alone in the Icelandic mountains, up ravines and slopes covered with heather, up along streams or in birchwood copses, you’d been in Madrid and Barcelona, Paris and London, writing voguish poetry in hotel parlors in the mornings, dancing at five o’clock teas in the afternoons, listening to concerts in the evenings, and driving home in an automobile at midnight.

  You brought back with you a fresh breath of air from out in the world. You’d devoured the latest works of the modernist masters, and now no poetic style was worth anything to you except for Dadaism and Expressionism, which you called “Essentialism.” You reeled off to me from memory whole pages of word games by Max Jacob and Mayakovsky, talked about André Breton, Soupault, and Ehrenburg as if you were talking about divine revelations, and professed your faith in the redemptive spirit that the Russian Revolution had for the arts as well as for everything else. And I listened to you like a dimwit, having never h
eard these writers’ names before, let alone comprehended anything concerning the redemptive spirit of the Russian Revolution.

  You were beside yourself with joy and inspiration and spoke to me in newly composed sorcerers’ chants and witches’ spells, and when you saw how dim-witted and unlearned I was you stroked my face:

  Hush, I know you,

  How little you are,

  Little and strange!

  For I am a Safir,

  From Sahara in Aharabia,

  Saba in Abaria

  And I know all;

  Abari from Sabari

  Saraba in Arabia

  And I know allallallallallallall.

  All.

  Táta,

  Come Táta,

  Come little Nótintáta

  To kiss Pótintáta

  Out in the woods.

  For my name is Máni from Skáni,

  Come from Spáni

  To see you

  Spámáni from Skáni,

  Skámáni from Spáni,

  From Skámánaspáni,

  And I’m coming to get you, get you–

  You didn’t speak like a man, but instead like a caricature of a man or, more correctly, like a caricature of life itself; everything you said was hallucinatory and made me more and more frightened:

  Eia, I am the forest,

  The forest itself,

  The morning forest driven with dew,

  The diamond land,

  No, I am the afternoon forest,

  The throstleharp,

  The chirruping evening forest,

  The crepuscule wood

  Swathed in white fog

  Greenclad cuckoomonth

  Of the godless earthdream,

  Heavenly prurience