The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

  She sat there hunched and motionless, reluctant to look at his face so as not to distract him; her ears were thirsty. But here he fell silent, and she felt that he was waiting for her to say something.

  “I’ve always known that you are a great man, Örnólfur,” she said, and looked calmly into his eyes, because she had somehow managed to steady herself, “a much greater man than all the others. And I have, what’s more, often thought, especially the last two years, that Steinn Elliði cannot compare to you in any way.”

  Then she looked down at her lap and continued: “I’ve sometimes feared that you were too selfish to be able to let yourself admire anyone in any noticeable way. Actually you are merciless, Örnólfur; you can’t deny it. It’s almost as if there are spells on you, as perhaps there are on all great men, to wish to put everything under you and to stop at nothing to do so. Have you at any time considered whether your desire for dominance is actually not the strongest of all your feelings? Domineering men frighten me.”

  “My dear Diljá!” he answered with a pained smile. “I see that you haven’t understood me, that you haven’t realized the main point, the thing that I named the foundation of my life. If I didn’t love you, Diljá, it never would have crossed my mind to reach down to pick up the glove lying on the stage before the jaws of the lion. I would have ended up out in colorless banality somewhere, among other mediocre men, without having spent any time on great works, set course into the storm, or played a risky game. A man’s love is a man’s omnipotence. It was to be elevated in the eyes of the woman I loved that I made a vow to become the most powerful man in the country or else be destroyed. It was for her that I longed to be able to dive into the deepest depths and fight against all the monsters of the deep, like the man who sought the cup, because I thought myself unsuited to stand in her presence until the tribulations had consecrated my might. Because of her I reared my work with affectionate care, as if it were my foster child, working days and nights. Because of her my work became not only my art and my science, but also my world.

  “It’s true, Diljá, my work was never contained in whatever it is that’s called doing good; it is, in general, impossible to express earnest work with a vain phrase. And it is also true that my love for mankind, of which these so-called men of the soul boast, is greatly lacking. But neither do I hate mankind: I am artless enough to admit that people are all the same to me. I discovered early on that all goals outside of my work were pointless and nonsensical. A serious man sets no goals for himself beyond his work. It is only through the perfection of his work that a man becomes powerful; to make one’s work one’s whole life is to realize this. A lawyer does not defend a case because he desires to advocate the cause of a client who claims to have suffered injustice, but rather because he loves the art of advocacy. A doctor does not heal because he loves the patient; he is quite indifferent to the patient. He heals because he loves his art, his science. I have nothing against the fact that you call whatever it is I have that surpasses other men selfishness, mercilessness, and a desire to dominate. If someone proves to be stronger than others in his lifelong battles, then he ordinarily possesses such qualities. Christian virtue always upholds and praises the weak; but we will not speak about that. I just wanted to remind you that if I had not been selfish, merciless, and domineering, Ylfingur would never have become anything other than an ordinary small retail company; wealth would not have been exploited; the lives of a thousand people would have been much sadder than they are now; their children would still be crying from hunger at the close of winter; a whole nation would have been timid, helpless, less educated, less independent. Because of the fact that my selfishness and my domineering nature have cost me many sleepless nights full of worries and headaches, yet another risky chess move played after the one before it was thwarted, I have still managed in the end to give my business enterprises a solid foundation. And although I am not the man to write a psychological essay about my feelings or to consider in any philosophically long-winded way how this so-called domineering desire of mine relates to my other feelings in certain situations, I would dare well stand in comparison with those in this country who have shouted most beautifully about brotherhood and the universe, the solar system and the cell, for in my hands I have felt the wealth well up from the wastes of the sea, seen children satiated and gladdened, the backbones of the cotters straightened, the condition of the entire nation blossom, its honor increase, its culture become fragrant with newfangledness. I am not seeking praise, either from you or from others; those who compose the poems have earned the right to be carried on golden chairs – they belong there. But face-to-face with the woman I love I find myself no less worthy than any other suitor, no matter how glorious his name might be.”

  Book Five

  53.

  The home that Steinn had lived in as a youth had neither center nor periphery. It was scattered here and there throughout the world. Reykjavík and Bilbao, Genoa and Baden-Baden, Brighton and Paris – newly refurbished mansions where the furniture smelled of polish – hotels, trains, and ocean liners – these had been his youthful homes. Each of his parents had had a different fatherland.

  The life and work of Grímúlfur Elliðason was founded on the aphorism “Ubi bene, ibi patria,” or, better put, “Ubi pecunia, ibi patria.”50 He was like a machine that God had created to calculate where and how a soulless company might make its greatest profit. He did everything in the right way and was lucky in everything as if by natural assignation, because he never gave himself time to think about the reasons why man was born into the world. He did not complain about making ten trips over the Alps in five weeks, provided that his trips might possibly profit a company whose only aspiration was greed. His zeal was as single-minded as that of a child building castles out of sand. He was actually a childish artist who lacked the ability to find his way through such an adventure as to think a thought from top to bottom, an imbecile who sat out and counted the stars not because he longed to know how many there were, but rather because he enjoyed counting, a sleepwalker in the hands of providence. After Steinn Elliði matured to manhood he never considered his father as anything but a fool.

  Existence meant something completely different to his mother. She lived in another world, was subject to a different type of providence. These two human beings had jumbled their fates together in a kind of blunder, without their souls possessing any sort of preconditions for meeting – if in fact they weren’t both soulless. His mother had her own fatherland, her heathen god: namely, her tuberculosis. She lived for this fatherland. And there was no doubt that one fine day she would die for it like a French soldier on the field of honor. Her disease was everything to her. Whoever met her was immediately led into a chapel with pale blue curtains and pale red flowers on the walls, and there stood the idol on a pedestal: pulmonary tuberculosis. Everyone was expected to bow down and kneel before this god. Around this daemon everyone had to tiptoe and lie prostrate. It was forbidden to speak loudly. No noise! Perhaps some vermin of a doctor had originally come up with the idea of telling her this lie in the hope that he could keep himself employed afterward by plying her with prescriptions and all kinds of old wives’ tales. After being diagnosed she took her greatest pleasure in maintaining the company of old and half-dead aunts and feebleminded boys who would lose heart over her wretchedness. Her son, on the other hand, was sincerely averse to fearing God because of tuberculosis. He never felt sorry for his mother. He became angry whenever he heard her talk about her sickness. But when he grew up he made it his habit to treat her with more consideration than in his youth, not out of love, but rather because he felt that nothing else suited good manners. It was a crime against common courtesy to jostle his mother. When he drove with her through Reykjavík on calm, bright days or sat at her side one hour a week and read a chapter from the fabrications of Blavatsky, Trine, Besant, Leadbeater, or the other false philosophers whom she most loved, it was cant; it was clear to him that the day was coming when he
would be forced to cut all ties to his mother. Now that day had long since passed. His mother was no longer anything but a base fairy tale from his childhood. When she wrote to him he threw her letters unread into the wastebasket.

  And when he was handed a telegram informing him that his mother was dead, he thought to himself: My precious Lord, why are they sending me telegrams though a woman died down south! What does it matter to me whether she’s living or dead? The only thing I care about is whether I myself am living or dead, and not even that! He did not, however, immediately throw the message away; instead he read it over and over, in a trance: “Your mother deceased last night. Bradford.”

  He started to rummage through the wastebasket, which was full to the brim with crumpled paper and other trash, until he finally found several of his mother’s last letters. He straightened them out, opened them, and ran his eyes over the dates. And then it came to light that the last one was dated to Taormina, Hotel Regina, one month ago, 15 April 1925. Taormina was a tourist town in eastern Sicily, halfway between Messina and Catania.51

  Her letters were, from beginning to end, nothing but the tormented sighs of a belabored soul, which hopes for what it fears, and fears that for which it hopes. She was reluctant to dredge up palpable pictures, but constantly bade her son to come to her and protect her, without clearly stating from what she needed protection; it was as if all of her thoughts were shrouded in hot steam, and he felt sick at reading the letters. He ran his eyes over page after page until he stopped at a little passage in the last letter, the only place where he thought a fish might be hiding under a rock:

  “It has perhaps been my most grievous affliction, my dear Steinn, this last half year, while I have been sinking bit by bit deeper and deeper into a laughing despair, to think about the spite that I deserve from you. And I often feel that if I had always had the good fortune of having you with me, my beloved boy, many things would have turned out differently. Once you were my little guardian angel who protected me from taking a terrible step, and so it might have been again these last months if I had only gotten to look into the clear blue eyes of my boy one or two more times; it is as if I understand it for the first time now, when all the bridges have been burned behind me, that the child alone is the savior of woman. Steinn, forgive your mother at least after she is dead, because the dust does not deserve to be hated.”

  Nothing was clearer than that these lines had been written with the last drops of blood of a human being for whom fate had passed final judgment; behind every line revolved a whole universe of the sheer despair of a lost soul. It is absolutely ridiculous how one little human being is able to suffer. A man falls over a cliff, is torn to pieces by the rocks on the shore, and there he howls until the next day when the sea flows over him; a woman’s child falls into a little pot and she boils it by mistake; a lover climbs up the Eiffel Tower to jump and break his neck; all of these are greater events than the eruption of Hekla or an earthquake in California, and yet people forget such events in exactly five seconds after they read about them in the papers. Why do people forget these great events so easily? It is because nothing is as common as human suffering. In London fifty people a day have their limbs torn off or suffer other such accidents from motorized vehicles. Steinn Elliði felt that if he were to take any notice of the distresses of these victims of bad luck, he could not get away from buying a car and doing nothing from morning to night but driving from accident to accident in order to pour carbolic acid into the wounds of people nearly dead. When he considered that mankind had from the beginning of roads been run over by buses and locomotive engines, chocolate wagons and other wheeled contraptions, he realized that in order to love mankind, no less love would suffice than that shown by God, who came down from Heaven and let himself be crucified out of pure compassion. He crumpled up the telegram from Taormina as well as all of the letters and threw them back into the trash, muttering one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “An seinem Mitleiden mit den Menschen ist Gott gestorben.”52

  54.

  The voice of the heart is more powerful than philosophy. Night after night Steinn’s mother came into his room in her burial shroud, bloody and filthy. She never opened the door; it never seemed to perturb her to walk through solid objects. At first Steinn felt sorry for her, such a fine woman, to have to go about in such a filthy shroud; but he couldn’t bring himself to address her decently for any length of time, because the face of the ghost was sad and distressed. Sometimes she thrust her clasped hands up toward her breast. Was her breast still sore? he thought. Couldn’t even death cure her breast? “Oh, Death,” she said. “He is the lover par excellence! No woman was born so haughty that Death would not be able to satisfy her affections. I fought against his obtrusiveness for many years, but he always snuck up to my bed at night after I had turned out the light, and touched my naked bosom with cold, slender fingers, and breathed the stench of the grave into my nostrils. And finally he possessed me completely. Life! – God bless life; I certainly do not reproach it! But Death took me before life had offered me any sort of sweet wine or kissed me with a cozy kiss on the cheek in the sunshine out in the woods. But if I had been able to have you with me, my beloved boy, many things would have turned out differently.”

  Of what use is philosophical reasoning when one is speaking to a ghost? For when Steinn thought that he had convinced her that he bore no responsibility for her death, and that she might thank her lucky stars to have gone down belowground while other souls were exhausting themselves aboveground, she started dancing like the great dancer Anna Pavlova, who was at that moment rehearsing for a trip to South America. He asked her to go away, but she would not. He recited the Lord’s Prayer, but she did nothing except nod, as if she thought the Lord’s Prayer were worthless. He heaped abuse on her and told her to go to Hell, but she bored her idiotic and soulless ghost’s eyes into his consciousness and stood still. He frowned and shouted, but she paid no attention and stayed. And although he was completely innocent from a philosophical point of view, his soul suffered the mental anguish of a murderer, like Raskolnikov,53 who killed the old lady and then spun around in a hundred thousand circles: he felt that he would never find peace until he had seen the place where he had committed the crime.

  When, after a nonstop trip of five days, Steinn Elliði stepped out of the train in Giardino, the station-village nearest Taormina, his whole body was in pain, like that of a martyr who’s been left on the rack for several days. After untold countless zigzagging turns up along a cactus-grown hillside, the car dropped him off at the entrance to the Regina Guesthouse in Taormina. It was at the time of day when the heat was at its worst, shades drawn before all the windows in people’s homes, and no one out on the streets but German tourists and dogs. No sooner has he been shown to his room than he throws himself down onto the couch – without having the energy to wipe the dust and sweat from his face, change his shirt, or brush the train soot from the pleats of his Wembley trousers – and falls asleep.

  It wasn’t until suppertime that he went to find the landlord, a dark-skinned Sicilian with a well-formed potbelly, clad in white flannel trousers and a sport shirt, cut and colored according to the latest fashion. Steinn gave his name and asked about his mother.

  The landlord put on a face of sincere sympathy when he finally figured out whom he meant. With two-thousand-year-old pliancy he explained that it would be his true pleasure to share all of the information at his disposal concerning the last moments di Signora Ellidaso,54 with emphasis on the “a,” the wonderful Scandinavian woman whom it had pleased il buono Dio55 to call to himself so far away from her kin and fatherland. No one who knew the madam had any doubts that she was of a great lineage, and furthermore, that she was surpassingly well educated: she spoke fluently in English, Spanish, and French. Yet he gathered that there was perhaps another man who might know more of the small details in this case: namely, the madam’s friend, Signor Bambara Salvatore, a scientist and shopkeeper who had been her guide when she and her
English maid came to Taormina at the beginning of April. It was fortunate, he said, that Signor Bambara Salvatore had not yet set out on his planned scientific expedition to Russia, and he added:

  “It will be your true pleasure to meet Signor Bambara; he is a millionaire from a family in Milano, a dealer in antiquities and an archaeologist, and he has traveled throughout the whole world; he has a special interest in iconography. He has spent time in all the corners of the world and his knowledge is limitless. And neither does he look down on le bellezze della vita,56 as so many scientists do, and thus he never says no to a dance with a lucky woman. Therefore I make bold to inform you of the trial undergone by Signor Bambara Salvatore, to have to witness such a fortunate woman give up the ghost in his arms in an innocent Charleston one evening at the end of the season, when we had arranged a tiny soirée internationale57 in the social hall downstairs. No one suspected that the madam your mother suffered from tuberculosis, and therefore you can imagine the terror that gripped us all when the madam suddenly started to spit up blood during the dance. After supper the signora your mother and Signor Bambara went out for a refreshing walk, north toward Hotel Castello a Mare to view Isola Bella 58 in the moonlight, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. Two hours later she was a corpse. We suddenly saw that Signor Salvatore’s shirt and vest were red with living blood, and that the madam had fainted in his arms. In the same breath he lifted her in his arms and carried her into a side room, and there she gave up the ghost in just a few minutes. A young British doctor, one of the guests, said that it would have been beyond any human power to do anything for her. A half-healed sore in her lungs had reopened, and she bled out in a number of minutes. The madam’s death was at the same hour reported by telegram to the signor your father in Genoa, and two days later he came here, along with a Danish consul from Palermo and an English Protestant priest from Rome. We had all witnessed an unforgettable tragedy, and I can assure you that we are inconsolable, sir!”