Broad, flat meadows with the fragrance of mown grass from the haycocks, the evening star and the sickle moon reflected in the sedge pools and rush-grown ponds, or glittered in the placid flow of the river; and this simple splendor of the skies reigned over the land. But from the lakes a white, thin vapor rose in the dusk of the summer night and spread slowly over the damp meadows. In light such as this was the Soul born.
They stopped on the grassy bank of the river and saw a few harlequin ducks swimming in the moonlight; from the distance came the call of the old-squaw duck in the meadow ponds: a-aa-a, over and over again, with a long a.
“That’s a strange bird,” said the girl. “What do you think it’s saying?”
“He’s saying, ‘We a–are to,’ ” said the poet.
“No,” said the girl. “How can you think the bird says such nonsense?”
“Birds are strange,” he said.
“Yes, but they’re not as strange as you say they are.”
When they sat down under a haycock on the riverbank, with the summer fragrance of the earth in their nostrils, he wanted to kiss her, but she would not let him.
“We a–are to,” he said.
“No,” said the girl. “We a–aren’t to.”
Then they kissed.
The evening went on passing.
“You don’t say anything to me,” she said after a long while. “Why don’t you say anything?”
“You have forbidden me to talk,” he said.
“I would much rather you said something I could understand than that you kissed me so much,” she said. “I don’t know how to kiss very much. Dear God, if my uncle knew of this!”
“Would you understand if I said that I love you . . .”
“Will you please leave me alone?”
We a–are to, we a–a–are to, said the bird, with a longer and longer a.
“No,” said the girl, “we a–aren’t to.”
Considering what a natural and obvious thing love is, Nature is still remarkably conservative over the first lover. Perhaps a woman only loves her first man. At least she loves her first man despite her suffering; it is the pointer towards motherhood; she loves him despite herself—that is sacrifice. The one who comes afterwards receives her pleasure, certainly, but not her sacrifice; there is even nothing more likely than that she will love herself more than him. Several tried to conquer her, but only to one did she give herself forever, however many came afterwards. Those who came afterwards—what were they? Opportunity, accident, nature, place, time, amusement. The first one, he was not your amusement, much less your need like the ones who came later, but the poem itself—the naked poem behind the poems, your love as suffering, your love in the guise of blood, the deepest humiliation of your body, the sacrifice of your conscience, the proudest gift of your soul. You are different to what you were a moment ago, and will never be the same.
“Oh, my uncle!” she cried.
She wept and moaned for a few moments, then she turned away from him and hid her face in the crook of her elbow and lay quite still, apart from intermittent spasms of sobs, as when the sea is dying after a surf. He sat beside her and tried to console her and said beautiful words; the more beautiful the words, the more dulled the conscience. On the way to the ship she leaned against him and held him tightly; her legs moved as if she could not walk unaided.
“Know one thing as proof of my love,” he whispered. “On the day you grow tired of seeing me, I shall go away from you forever and ever.”
“It won’t come to that,” she said. “After one day and one night I’ll be going away from you, and we shall never meet again.”
Instead of slackening her grip on him she tightened it as if she would never let him go, ever, from that moment on; she nestled against him as they walked through a strange town side by side in the bright summer night. She did not see the people who looked at them; they did not exist.
Next night she came to him in his cabin and stayed with him. In the morning she said, “I’m glad I’m going away now. If I stayed with you longer I would find it even harder to leave you.”
“May I think about you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Always?” he asked.
“Not in darkness,” she said, “only when the sun shines. Think of me when you’re in glorious sunshine.”
That same morning the ship cast anchor at a desolate bay just outside a little trading station, and a boat was launched from the shore. In the boat sat a tall, dignified man in a black coat, with a grey moustache, and a silver walking stick. He came aboard for a moment, embraced his little girl, took her suitcase, and helped her down into the boat. She sat down beside him in the stern, serious and taciturn, and the cool morning breeze played on her fair locks. Then the oars-men took to their oars.
When she had gone, the poet discovered that she had forgotten to take her mirror. It was a very small, round mirror for the pocket or the handbag. It certainly could not have cost more than a few aurar; on the other hand, it had mirrored the most beautiful picture in the life of mortal man. All that day, the poet worked on a poem about the mirror.
Your mirror I discovered, lovely maid,
The fairest picture mortal man has seen;
O face that haunts my every waking dream,
O precious star of eve, O vernal glade—
Your mirror I discovered, lovely maid.
In this your mirror dwells both One and All:
The One I longed for when I was a boy,
The All that brings us comfort, grace and joy—
A hundred thousand million times in all.
In this your mirror dwells both One and All.
In this your mirror smiles my sun on me:
Your youthful eyes so deep and clear and kind
Reflect that secret heaven of the mind
Which gives a poet immortality.
In this your mirror smiles my sun on me.
This mirror you forgot yesterday:
Within it dwells the image of your face.
O lovely maiden, locked in his embrace,
In loving tenderness with him you lay.
This mirror you forgot yesterday.
23
Ólafur Kárason had always kept to himself and did not interfere in other people’s affairs; it sometimes also happened that he was not very familiar with his own affairs. After he came back from the south, he did not even notice the walls of the living room at Little Bervík. For days on end he would disappear, hiding in dells and gullies or wandering about near the glacier. If anyone spoke to him he would give inscrutable replies; people knew he was there but no longer knew where he was. There was a new teacher. The education committee discussed whether Ólafur Kárason would be capable of curing dogs, but órður of Horn flatly refused to entrust his dog to him since he had not composed a poem about his mother-in-law; he said the man was not a poet but a useless wretch—the most he was fit for was to instruct beginners in religious education and arithmetic as an assistant teacher. The pastor said that one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen this district had been to send this man south for punishment, because he had become so perverted and depraved in the hands of the authorities that it was obvious he was no longer capable either of teaching Christianity or administering medicine to dogs.
Sometimes the poet got up in the middle of the night and set off over Kaldsheiði towards Kaldsvík. When people began to investigate what he was up to, it turned out that he was posting letters. It was also said that his letters were all to the one person; it was a woman’s name, addressed to a parsonage in a far-off district. When autumn came, he sometimes walked a long way in uncertain weather to intercept the post. Once it became known that he had received a letter.
Near the end of October, it was learned that the poet Reimar Vagnsson had taken over the carrying of mails for the winter in another county. When the news reached Ólafur Kárason, he set off from home at once. He found his traveling compani
on and fellow poet in the shop at Kaldsvík, where he was discussing intricate poetry and practical philosophy with a few men at the counter. Reimar greeted his friend cordially and invited him out into the yard so that they could talk together in peace; they had not met since the year before last when they had traveled together to Aðalfjörður one winter’s morning.
“Thank you for untying me from the horse’s tail,” said the poet.
“Oh, don’t mention a trifle like that,” said the poet Reimar. “Let’s hope one will never be in such a bad way that one can’t release a friend from a horse’s tail”—and wanted to hear more interesting news.
“Well, there’s only one thing to tell about myself, and most people wouldn’t think it news,” said Ólafur Kárason with that distant smile which came more and more easily to him. “And I don’t know what you’ll think of it. And yet, as a poet I think you ought to understand it. I have seen beauty.”
Then Reimar the poet laughed and said, “You’ve got me beat there, my lad!”
“And the remarkable thing was,” said the Ljósvíkingur, “that on the day I saw beauty, I suddenly discovered immortality.”
“The devil you did!” said Reimar the poet, scratched his head and squinted with one eye at his friend.
“Once one has seen beauty, everything else ceases to exist,” said the Ljósvíkingur.
“Yes, he who gets burnt knows best how hot the fire is,” said Reimar the poet. “Is it a woman?”
“For a long time I thought that beauty was just a dream of the poets. I thought that beauty and human life were two lovers who could never meet. As long as you think that, everything is relatively simple. You can endure any hardship, any dungeon; darkness and cold cannot hurt you; beauty doesn’t live on earth. But one midsummer night of white mists, beside running water and under a new moon, then you experience this wonder which doesn’t even belong to matter and has no relation to transcience even though it appears in human shape; and all words are dead; you no longer belong to the earth.”
For the first time, Reimar the poet looked seriously at his friend with his shallow, opaque eyes; he had ferried this poet, suffering from thirty ailments, on a stretcher over the mountains, and between the country’s main towns as a criminal tied to a horse’s tail; but now he saw that there was something wrong.
“Listen, my lad, you’ll have to get hold of this woman, and sooner rather than later, or else you’ll be in a bad way,” he said.
Ólafur Kárason put his hand in his pocket and brought out a notebook, and from it a little letter in neat but not very practised handwriting, although she wrote without errors. “Ljósvíkingur,” the letter said. “Thank you for the poems you have sent me. I keep them in a safe place. But don’t write too often, because Uncle and Auntie have difficulty in understanding it. Forgive me for writing so briefly. I am not very well. The only thing I can tell you is that I think about you too much. You said once that I was unfeeling. That is not true. Please take it back. Bera.”
“One has seen them hotter sometimes,” said Reimar the poet when he had run his eye over the letter; but right enough, this parsonage was one of the places he would be passing in the coming winter. He was traveling in the county; he had an official post there, probably permanent, and would be coming back here for a brief visit in the spring to fetch his family. Ólafur Kárason asked him to take a letter and some poems for him and be an intermediary and confidant if it was difficult for her to write.
Winter came, and Reimar Vagnsson took up his new duties in a distant district. Ólafur Kárason made a few more trips to Kaldsvík, but he never got any more letters. He became more and more depressed as time passed, more and more taciturn, until he no longer said anything, and stopped getting up, just turned his face to the wall when anyone spoke to him. He broke this habit only at New Year, when the bailiff came to examine him on behalf of the parish council.
“I have a strange suspicion that I base on dreams,” said the poet.
“What about?” said the bailiff.
“That Beauty is in danger from bad poets.”
“Hardly from any worse poets than you,” said the bailiff.
“I am assailed by fears that certain poets have murdered Beauty,” said the poet.
“God help a penurious district council to get a young man like this on the parish,” said the bailiff. “He could live for thirty or forty years.”
These were grave times for the nation.
The poet remained in his bed. Month followed month, and he took care not to betray any sign of life in the presence of witnesses. But late in the evening, although only if no one was in, he ate the food that his wife Jarþrúður had left at the side of his bed. And in the depth of the night, if he felt quite sure that no one was awake, he might light a little lamp beside his bed, and then he would sometimes bring out his notebook and write down a few words with long pauses in between. If he noticed his wife or the child stirring in their sleep, he would put out the light. And so the winter passed.
A week before Easter, Reimar came back to the district again to fetch his family and move to his new post. He made a trip to Little Bervík to have a word with the Ljósvíkingur, and asked everyone else to leave the room so that they could talk in private. His errand was to inform his brother poet that the girl he had called Bera was dead. But when he had broken this news, and was going to tell how it happened, the Ljósvíkingur simply gave a short laugh, as if he were saying, “No, Reimar, you won’t manage to make a fool of me this time”—and he would not listen to anything else his brother poet had to say about it.
“Last winter I dreamed that you had murdered her,” he said, and smiled apologetically. “But now I am free of that dream again. The versifier doesn’t exist who can murder the beauty of the heavens. The beauty of the heavens cannot die. It will reign over me for all eternity.”
Reimar the escort took leave of his friend, brother poet and traveling companion, and for the first time was at a loss for words; perhaps he was a little depressed. Every transgression is a game, every grief easy to bear compared with having discovered beauty; it was at once the crime that could never be atoned and the hurt that could never be assuaged, the tear that could never be dried.
24
Though grave-clothes shroud your figure, slender maid,
And silent earth now houses your blue eyes
Where once I glimpsed the beauty of the skies—
O distant star of eve, O vernal glade—
And even though the bloom fades from that lip
That thawed the frozen chains that bound me fast,
And though the hands that freed me are now dust
And death’s cold handshake holds them in its grip,
It doesn’t harm my song; my memory of thee
Has taken root forever in my mind,
Of tenderness and love and mercy kind,
Just as you were when first you came to me;
Just as you left me, proudly, though you cried,
With tears upon your cheeks that never dried.
25
During Easter Week, the word flew round that the old man in the Ravine farm was failing fast. All the way to the living room at Little Bervík came the echo of the talk of the difficulties that the old woman would now find herself in, left alone with the Invalid one of these days. It was also learned that the Invalid had broken her mirror and could no longer see the glacier.
The weather was calm, with cold nights and days of sunshine.
Late in the afternoon of Easter Saturday the poet got up and asked for his Sunday-best suit.
His wife, Jarþrúður Jónsdóttir, asked Hallgrímur Pétursson reincarnated not to tempt the Lord his God.
“I have heard that the Invalid has broken her mirror,” he said. “I promised to give her a mirror.”
“It’s very late,” said the wife. “Let it wait until tomorrow.”
“The feast of resurrection has begun,” said the poet. “The earth has been given new li
fe.”
“It is Jesus Christ who is risen,” said the wife.
“No,” said the poet. “I am risen.”
“At least put a scarf round your neck,” said the woman. “And put on two pairs of socks.”
But nothing this wife said had any effect on the poet any more; he smiled oddly at her admonitions, and she was a little alarmed and did not dare come too close to him. No, he did not want to wear a hat, either.
He wandered off over the ridges with his drifting gait which made it hard to see which would happen first—that he would fall to the ground in exhaustion, or rise up into the air and fly. Ice-free waters, the cold spring sky was mirrored in the clear pools of the river; honking barnacle geese flew in over the land. He stopped in the ravine, listened to the din of the water, and lifted his face to the exalted calm of the glacier in the gathering dusk. The wind blew in his hair that had not been cut all winter.
The old man had given up the ghost in the middle of the afternoon and the old woman was just finishing laying out his body with the help of a neighbor. The Invalid was crying, and had broken her mirror. The little boy played on the doorstep. The old woman received her visitor serenely, dignified and kindly. She had had sixteen children and had lost them. She worked for them by day and sat up over them by night. And when they smiled at their mother, every cloud vanished from the skies, and the sun, the moon and the stars belonged to this woman. She had become a little hard of hearing, and when the poet mentioned the sky and its beauty she thought he was going to speak disparagingly of the earth, and hastened to interrupt: “If God had been as good to everyone as he has been to me, then earthly life would be beautiful.”
And then the poet thought he heard echoing through the house: “And beautiful we thought the earth.”
When her children gave up the ghost after difficult death throes, she dressed them in a white shroud and smoothed out every fold with the same care as if she were dressing them for a party. She wept when she stood over their clay, and then went back home to the living. The others she took leave of, fully grown, at the garden gate when they set off into the world. The bones of her daughter Helga had been washed up on a gravel-bank a year after she disappeared; the old woman walked down to the bank herself and collected the bones, and there were other little bones. She sewed a shroud for them all and laid them in a coffin and followed them to the grave and then walked back home to love those who lived. In this house, love reigned. That’s how life was eternally greatest: to smile with one’s child when it laughed, to comfort it when it cried, to carry it dead to its grave, and to dry one’s own tears and smile anew and take everything as it came without asking about the past or the future; to live; to be kind to everyone.
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