The Great Weaver From Kashmir (35 page)

Shortly before nine in the morning the bell in the foyer of Director Örnólfur's house is rung. Who could possibly think of ringing on the foyer side so early? The cook hurries bewilderedly upstairs to call on the chambermaid; the chambermaid looks quickly into the mirror, then runs down and opens the door, but not until the doorbell has again sounded several times.

“Good day!” – a foreign accent can clearly be heard in the visitor's speech. “Is Madam Valgerður home?”

“Madam Valgerður is unfortunately unavailable. The madam hasn't risen yet.”

The visitor looks at his watch in half surprise, as if he has no idea that in this town it is not the custom to get up before noon.

“Is Örnólfur home?” he asks next.

“Örn – the Director? No, the Director is unfortunately not at
home. The Director is in Spain. The Director left last week. The Director will not come home until the end of August.”

Some director! thinks the visitor, and he looks again at his watch.

“Is mademoiselle home?”

“What?”

“Isn't there a girl here named Diljá?”

Now Stína lost all faith that the visitor was in his right mind, but still she replied:

“You don't perhaps mean the Director's wife?”

“The Director's wife? Who is that?” he asked. “Is Diljá Þorsteinsdóttir here or not?”

“If you mean the Director's wife, she hasn't gotten up yet. That is to say, the Director's wife is still asleep. Who might you be, if I may?”

But he did not introduce himself, and instead gave the girl a penetrating stare, completely dumbfounded.

“Go inside,” he finally ordered, “and announce that I am waiting for them here in the foyer.”

“From whom am I to say this message comes?” asked the girl again.

“That's not your concern!” he said, and he walked into the foyer past the girl, took off his coat, removed his hat and threw both to the side, then sat down in the nearest chair. The girl paused for a moment before leaving. A brindled tomcat came in from the next room, courteous and coy like a valet de chambre, greeted the guest by rubbing itself against his foot, and then continued on, out through the front room, over onto the stairs, to look at the birds. Afterward there was no other sign of life in the house for a quarter of an hour.

Finally the Ylfingamóðir herself appeared on the stairs in a simple morning dress, her hair set loosely up, distinguished and strong, entirely unchanged, stout and heavy-stepped. But when the visitor stands up to walk over to her, she stops in her tracks, unable to believe her eyes any longer.

“Steinn Elliði! If it isn't you, child!”

“Hello, Grandmother,” he says, and kisses the old woman in greeting. “Yes, I have come.”

She looks him over from tip to toe, and tears come involuntarily to her eyes. She kisses him again on the cheek, because he is, after all, her grandson, whom she lulled to sleep when he was just a babe in swaddling clothes.

“Welcome, my dear,” she says. “And how you have become so different-looking, so doleful. I've often pitied you, poor thing, for the misfortune of never having anything resembling a family home. You certainly must never have felt very well.”

But the Ylfingamóðir was, generally speaking, not a sensitive soul, and she quickly switched to a more lighthearted tone.

“But what were you thinking, child, not to send us a telegram so that we could come meet you at the ship? How could it cross your mind to surprise us all like this?”

“It's not my habit to send telegrams,” he said. “And now I'm here, anyway. What's new?”

“Oh, everything's been fairly decent lately, thank you very much. But what can you tell me of your affairs? Sometimes we've been worried about your fate, but now you've certainly become famous, isn't that so? They've written about you in the papers here; and at
one time those poems of yours were being circulated here; they've been praised as paragons! But I didn't understand them, my boy, though that certainly doesn't make any difference whatsoever. How is your father?”

“That I don't know. I haven't seen him for several years.”

“Didn't you write to each other?”

“I never write to anybody.”

“Then you didn't have any contact with your blessed mother during her final years?”

“Nothing that could be called contact.”

“Well now, my boy. We won't talk about that. She's at peace now.”

“Everything is in God's hands.”

“It pleases me to hear you say that, my boy,” answered the old woman. She showed him to a seat and sat down opposite him.

“But listen, my dear, have you had anything to eat or drink this morning?”

“I had some coffee at the hotel.”

“Hotel? What did you say, child? You haven't taken a room in a hotel? For goodness' sake, why didn't you come straight here from the ship? We would have had a room prepared for you immediately.”

“I don't doubt that. But I'm staying at Hotel Iceland. Don't trouble yourselves on my behalf. I'm going up to the mountains.”

“There you go again. You don't think much, do you, about what folk might say.”

“Folk? What folk?”

“Then aren't you here to stay?”

“No.”

“I can't think of letting you stay in town, Steinn. Do you hear me?”

“The girl told me that Örnólfur is married.”

“What is this, child? You didn't know that?”

“How was I to know that? People get married without asking me.”

“They've been married since April before last.”

“Are they happy?”

“Why do you ask, child?”

“Are they satisfied?”

“Thanks, they feel fine enough under the circumstances, God be praised.”

“Circumstances – what circumstances? Are they poor?”

“Poverty is a blessing – not a curse, dear Steinn. But poor Diljá has met with deep misfortune.”

“Have things gone poorly for Diljá? I'm sorry to hear that. And I hear that Örnólfur has gone to Spain.”

“Their boy died in February.”

“Their boy? What bad news!”

“Such a gloriously fair boy, and he was getting on so well. He was named Úlfur. He suddenly fell sick and died, ten months old. Yes, those were sorrowful days for Diljá, the poor dear.”

Prior to this Steinn had listened to his grandmother as if he were reading an ordinary newspaper article. But the news that Diljá had not only become a mother, but had also had to see her child buried, shocked him thoroughly, and he asked:

“How did she handle it?”

“Well, what can I say? As you must surely understand, it is a more
painful loss than one can put into words for a young mother to have to see her child buried.”

But it was a family trait to put little stock in human feelings, and he asked:

“Couldn't she always have another one?”

His grandmother gave him the calmest of looks.

“It is little comfort for a young mother to tell her that she can have another one,” she answered. “Of course the mother knows that she can have another one; yes, maybe even five or six more, but she can never have the same child again.”

He kept quiet for a short time and harbored doubts as to whether what his grandmother was saying was rubbish, or whether it might contain dearly bought life experience.

“Did she cry?” he finally asked.

“I would have thought that you wouldn't have had to ask me that,” said the old woman, and she added, unprompted: “She had the little body kept in the room there, behind that door to the left,” and she pointed to the door whence the cat had come. “For a whole month afterward I slept with Diljá in her room, the poor dear, and tried to do what I could for her. It was strange at first: she seemed not to be able to understand that little Úlfur was dead. It was as if she were angry with us for having thought of telling her the truth. Time and time again I had to go and bring her down here in the middle of the night. When she thought that I was sleeping, she'd sneak to her feet. And there I would find her, as she sat with the stiffened corpse on her knees, rocking back and forth. It was as if she always believed that he was still alive. It was horrible, my dear Steinn. But that's in the past; wounds of grief heal like other wounds.”

The old woman's entire bearing appeared to become more gentle in relating this tale, and her grandson asked nothing further.

“Rest here a little while, my dear. I'm going to wake Diljá and tell her that a visitor has come. I hope that you'll have morning coffee with us and tell us your news.”

They greeted each other like two cousins who are raised in separate countries and meet for the first time today. At the last minute they realized that their relationship was only a misunderstanding resulting from a genealogical error. They were simply two strangers. The smiles on their faces were stillborn. To her his return was no more unexpected than if he'd gone off to Stokkseyri the day before yesterday. All the same she welcomed him back to Iceland. She was wearing a sleeveless pink dress, which hugged her bosom and hips; her hair was cut
à la garçonne
. Her eyes shone with a fatal gleam; in her bearing there was not a trace of the exultant joy of a happy wife; her face was marked with lines of age, long before she had aged at all.

She listened to her mother-in-law go on and on about Steinn's return, and about the unseemliness of his having gone to stay at a hotel; it was out of the question that he should stay at Hotel Iceland – he must have his luggage sent here immediately. What's more, he wanted to go up to the mountains, which was certainly opportune, since they would be going for their annual summer holiday to the
Ylfingabúð, starting next weekend; he would of course have to come with them. Diljá looked at her mother-in-law, then quick as a flash at him.

“We must have a little party here tonight or tomorrow night, Diljá,” continued the old woman, “and invite some of those blessed artists and writers and others whom Steinn would be pleased to see.”

“No, Grandmother,” he interrupted. “By all means spare me from such a thing. I can't stand parties. I've long since stopped enjoying mingling with people. I've got nothing left to say to anybody.”

“Nothing to say! Once upon a time you didn't think yourself too great to grant people the pleasure of your conversation! Don't you know that you're renowned here at home as a poet and a celebrity for those poems you published in England? Word would get around, to the family's shame, if we pretended not to know about this.”

“Celebrity! Me? Damn it! Great poet! Me?
Vanitas vanitatum!
They might just as well have written that I'd gotten gastritis. Nor have I published any poems. That's untrue. They were stolen. I don't care to see anyone. I'm going up to the mountains.”

“What is this, child? I thought that you would have been in seventh heaven for publishing a book of poetry in the most widely read language of culture in the world!”

“Stop it, Grandmother; I'm tired of this. Language of culture! Rubbish! What is a language of culture? Perhaps Aramaic, the mother tongue of Jesus Christ.

“English is the language of pirates. Where were the English when the Gospels were written? Where were they when Lao-tzu composed the
Tao Te Ching
or the Indians the wisdom of the Vedas? No, dear Grandmother, don't invite anyone here.”

“You're the same as you were when it comes to exaggeration, dear Steinn,” said Madam Valgerður. And the Director's wife glanced at him without lifting her head. Her eyes looked outward and inward at the same time; she looked at him as she would a phantom in an insomniac dream, all the while comparing his voice to that of her childhood memories.

Madam Valgerður poured coffee into their cups and offered them cakes. They sat in the sun-drenched foyer before open doors, surrounded by Keilir and the mountains of Langahlíð. Steinn felt it almost unbelievable that he should have returned home to his fatherland, so cold were the mountains before which he had knelt in his dreams.

“Where have you come from, Steinn Elliði?” asked the Director's wife courteously.

“I've come from Belgium.”

“I see. How did you get on there?”

“Well.”

“They speak French there?”

“Yes, they speak French there. Also Flemish, and actually all sorts of other languages and dialects.”

“This Flemish is similar to Dutch?”

“With slight differences.”

“It often happened that those so-called Flemings stranded their ships out east, not far from where we were living when my husband was a bailiff,” said the old woman. “Sometimes we put up whole crews of them. They were courteous and gracious.”

There was nothing more that anyone could think of to say about Flemish or the Flemings, and so there was silence.

“You didn't spend much time in Italy,” began the Director's wife again, just as courteously as before.

“I went there last year, shortly after my mother died.”

“I'm sure that she couldn't bear the climate there, down south by Africa, or wasn't it in Sicily where she died?” asked the old woman warily.

“Yes.”

“Was the grave properly looked after?” she asked next in a low voice, full of delicacy.

“I know nothing about graves,” he answered coarsely, silencing the speakers again momentarily.

“It must be terribly hot down there in Sicily,” said the Director's wife; she could not get past geographical locations.

“Winter there is similar to summer here.”

“Aren't people half-savage down south?”

“The people there are like they are everywhere else.”

“Do you mean to say that people are the same everywhere?”

He looked quickly up, in precisely the same way as he always had, and answered as sharp as lightning: