The Great Weaver From Kashmir (4 page)

He waited. From the beginning he had always been accustomed
to her sitting and standing whenever he wanted. Wasn't she going to behave normally? He glowered at her silently.

But the longer this went on, the more difficult it became for her to look up. What did he think he could get from her when all he did was carry on with his ridiculous gladness? Why hadn't he gone to sleep? She had nothing left to say to him! Those who looked forward to leaving should leave quietly! He shouldn't expect that she would ever look at him again! She should get a lump in her throat; she should start crying, yes, start wailing and sit here all night and get a sore throat and a cold; but look at him, no, that she should never do.

Finally she jumped up and walked curtly over to the road and stopped there. She looked westward toward Þingvellir, then started walking again after a moment's thought, weaving her way along the path like a drunkard, slow, downcast, kicking with her toes at the gravel. All of her behavior came as a complete surprise to him. Finally he couldn't contain his resentment. He walked over to the road and called out after her, sharply and gruffly:

“Diljá!”

The voice that now tore through the still of the night and startled the girl was the old domineering, unreasonable one that had struck fear into the hearts of the other children with whom Steinn had once played. He jogged after her and caught up with her in the blink of an eye; she took one last wavering step, and then dared no more. He came up close to her, grabbed her by one arm, and tried to look into her eyes, but she bowed her head lower and lower.

“Diljá, what has become of you? You didn't act like this when we walked to Laugarnes last Sunday night! Have I offended you? Or
have you heard something about me? How am I to interpret this behavior?”

He was no longer her childhood friend and playmate; that was the one thing she noticed. He was something different and something more; she could feel so clearly that he was a man, a young man. And he was the only man she knew, the only one she wanted to know, the only one she had ever planned to get to know. And he was leaving and might never come back. She had grown up since yesterday, grown and become a woman at the thought that she might never see him again; she was a daisy sprung up overnight. It terrified her to feel his strong hand upon her arm; her whole body trembled. And she hid her face with her free hand, bowed her head and cried; the tears fell down her hand as if from the sepals when a stem bends under the weight of the dew on a flower.

“I'm so sad that you're leaving!” she moaned in desperation.

He let go of her arm and looked at her indecisively, as if he didn't believe her. Finally he pronounced her name in a voice that blended pity and reproach.

“Diljá!”

But she continued to sob into the hollows of her hands, and the tears continued to trickle down them and fall onto the road.

“I'm in anguish,” she sobbed again. “I know that it's terribly ugly of me to cry, I'm sorry that I should have started to cry, but I get so sad when someone leaves; I'm just seventeen.”

He put his arm loosely around her waist and directed her with manly confidence off the road, since otherwise she would have stood there and cried until morning. She had no further will; she just let herself be directed, crying, wherever it might be. They wound up
in a brake alongside the road; he pulled the scrubby birch branches apart, but still they hooked onto her dress; he let her walk ahead. They came to a flat mossy area. He pushed more than led her, sorrowful and stooping with her scarf covering her nose and mouth, until they came to a hollow growing with buttercups, wood crane's bill, green grass and many other types of vegetation, and there they sat down.

Her tears were somewhat stilled; all the same she was still reluctant to look at him. She was weak and frightened and only seventeen. He watched as she wiped her nose and mouth and cleared her throat; she ran tear-moistened fingers through her hair; her face was swollen and red from weeping, and he noticed how, while all of this had been going on, her face had taken on the look of a full-grown woman. Finally he said:

“Diljá. I don't understand why you're taking this so hard. I haven't seen you cry in many years. Imagine how painful it is for me to see you crying, when I've always turned to you for happiness. You who fill everything around you with lighthearted sunshine laughter! When I see you crying, it reminds me of the winter of plague, the day that I walked behind you in your father's funeral train. You were only fourteen then and you cried all the way to the churchyard, and I thought about how I was always going to be so good to you after that. I haven't seen you cry since then.”

Finally she looked up with tear-filled eyes. She recalled that raw, cold November day in 1918, when she was left with nothing else in the Lord's entire wide world to love. The sob in her breast had been stifled.

“Diljá, to see you saunter off like that made me angry. I'm sorry
I shouted your name so harshly. Yet I couldn't help but think: has Diljá become like all the others? Whom else could I then trust with my divine revelations? If you were to change then I wouldn't know anyone any longer. All of the people that I know are slaves to licentiousness, and it gets on their nerves like a silly prank if someone says anything about his soul. My dear Diljá, tonight I want to talk to you about God and about me. I want to confess to you now, in this, the temple of my mountains, on my last night here. Be as you were!”

“Steinn, I'm sorry!” she said in a suppliant voice. “I was so tired of waiting for you; I'd grown so cold,” she lied quickly, in order to excuse her capriciousness.

He gave her his hand and they walked up to the road again, and from there followed it side by side westward through the lava field.

He reached into his case, took out a cigarette and stuck it quickly between his lips, then immediately took it back between his fingers and gesticulated as he started talking.

“What I wish to confide in you, Diljá, is neither more nor less than the fact that I've been reborn.”

Here he paused for a moment as if he wanted to cover the silver of his words with the gold of his silence. She waited for more and avoided looking up, because she feared that he would grow angry again over the lack of understanding that her face would surely
reveal. Then he continued, slowly and deliberately at first, but with ever-increasing passion the more he spoke.

“I don't know if you understand the word ‘rebirth.' I don't understand it very well myself. I've discovered that writers of dictionaries don't understand it either. I don't know if anyone has ever understood it. But we live and move in God, so it is quite to be expected that we understand nothing. We only know that various things happen to us, and we give those things various names. It's only obsolete know-it-alls who have pretended to understand things.

“As far as I'm concerned, I don't understand what has happened. I'm entirely the same as I was before, but God has spoken to my soul. That's what has happened. It happened up on Öskjuhlíð on the fourth of May. I've kept quiet about it until now because it's so peculiar.”

When he reached this point his inspiration flared up and a hot draft swelled his voice. He tossed his unsmoked cigarette out into the lava and continued:

“What I mean is, God has given me new perspective. I know that he will also lead me to new and more beautiful lands. The great and powerful God has lifted me, a blind wretch, up from his road; he has invited me to his home and created in me new eyes with new pupils; he has taken me up in his hands like a hatchling that has landed on a barbed-wire fence and broken its wing. And behold, I have flown like a newly created Brazilian butterfly from the talons of the Almighty! I am new and everything around me is new, my being most like a refulgent pattern woven yesterday on the loom, and I myself helped to draw the thread through the heddles, a work of creation piping hot and fragrant like warm loaves of bread from the
baker's oven. I was remade so that I might be suited for composing perfect poems on the beauty of God. To be reborn – it is to learn to turn one's back on old masters and ancient loves and compose like God's firstborn. I've made a pact with the Lord about becoming the most perfect man on Earth.”

She looked up quickly and asked:

“Why do you want to become so perfect?”

But he would not grant an answer to such an ignorant question.

“I have vowed to leave no further room in my soul for anything other than the celebration of the spiritual beauty of creation. No soulless wish or physical longing, no fleshly desire or pleasure. I am betrothed to the beauty on the visage of things. I intend to travel back and forth through existence like a jubilant monk of the world who beholds the smile of the Holy Mother in everything that exists. My bread and wine will be the glory of God on the face of creation, the image of the Lord on the Lord's coins. I am a son of the Way in China, the perfected Yogi of India, the Great Weaver from Kashmir, the snake charmer in the Himalayan valleys, the saint of Christ in Rome.”

“I think that you might have lost your marbles!” said the girl, and she stopped to look in his face, because she understood nothing. They stood silently upon the road.

“It's as true as day, just as the sun will come up over there by Ármannsfell in a little while!” he averred.

She riveted her eyes on him until she herself was swept away by his devotion and felt that all of the holy foolishness shining from his face was the truth and reality, and that everything would happen just as he said: within a short time he would be gone, swept away and
lost somewhere out in the realm of incomprehensibility, gone east to Kashmir to weave silk and satin.

All she could do was lower her head and sigh; his name died out half-spoken on her lips. And they hurried off spontaneously, side by side, two creatures from an Oriental romance.

The first whimbrel cried out to the southwest like a young, sleepless drunkard. Otherwise the birds were not yet stirring. Two sheep, staid and respectable like old housewives, stepped leisurely along a narrow path a short distance away, their gait gentle and notable; they were thinking. The gentle breeze had given way to a dead calm; everything begins to glisten with dew. The birch-grown leading edge of the lava field smells sweet.

And finally, she absolutely could not help but ask: “Then you're not planning to get married?”

“I've vowed never to touch a woman again,” he answered curtly, pithily.

“Again?” she asked, without fully realizing what she was asking.

“It is imperfect to betroth oneself to any human creature,” he said. “A perfect man marries only his ideals. Had matrimony been the way to raise mankind from its sins, Jesus Christ would have redeemed the world by marrying and setting up a carpenter's shop in Jerusalem, with a sign over the door. The apostle Paul would have bought dining room furniture and a piano and settled down with his
wife, like an English missionary. If a man's soul became powerful and strong by sacrificing burnt offerings upon the altar of lust within the so-called temples of matrimony, the masters in Tibet would fall to their knees before red-cheeked chastity imps, and the saints and martyrs would fawn like buffoons on lewd doxies in décolleté negligé. It is horrendous to be betrothed to a woman: one can't go for a refreshing walk in the cool of evening, like the Lord, without having a whole side of female meat hanging on to one. And what's more, a man has to endure this infectious carcass in his bed at night, lying over him, smacking her lips and groaning in her sleep, puffing and snuffling. Marriage is an ignominious capitulation.”
⁹

“Steinn, shame on you! I suppose you think that a woman doesn't have a soul like a man, you cad?”

He answered without hesitating:

“Oh, it could very well be that a woman has a soul; when did I say that a woman doesn't have a soul? It just doesn't matter at all whether she has a soul, and anyway no one has ever cared a whit about that up until now. It would be worse if a man had to marry a soul. As if any man has ever at any time since the days of Adam looked at a woman because she had a soul – what nonsense! If anyone brought me a woman's soul in a glass jug, I would immediately have the jug taken down to the cellar and put into the little closet where my father keeps the empty bottles.”

The girl tried to run out into the lava, but he grabbed her, held her by the arm, made her follow him whether she wanted to or not, and poured from the cornucopia of his eloquence out over her wordlessness.

“Diljá, don't you have the nerve to watch as my heart is opened
and the naked truth steps forth? Or do you think that I'm standing here in front of you, trying to talk sense, for the fun of it? No, Diljá, no one does such a thing for fun. Diljá, stand still here for just a moment and look at me as one human being to another, and not like a Spiritualist looking at an ectoplasm. Consider once who I am without wrapping my image in a foolish shroud of sanctity. You mustn't believe that I speak like a master because I have sipped from nirvana! No, I speak like a bombastic poetaster from the days of Klopstock, because doggerel has been my life.”

He made her stop on the road to look at him and he pointed again at his chest:

“I forbid you once and for all to look at me like a photographer who fixes and refixes his overhead lights, his ground lights, and his prop lights on his test subject. Look here!” – and he again pointed at his chest:

“Here is where sin dwells! Here dwells the chief foe, the archenemy, that untiring torturer of the soul, who eternally seeks to cajole my spirit out into damnation:
cupiditas carnis.
Since I was a child at least half of all my spiritual strength has been pushed this way and that by passion and lust, has revolved around debauchery and pornography, the female body and copulation. There aren't any sexual misdeeds that I haven't become more cordially acquainted with than I have ever prayed the Lord's Prayer. Now it's been six years since I lost my virginity in the arms of a disgusting, stinking slut in the laundry room in the basement at home. That same summer and the following winter I joined in, as a rule, with several older chums in the drinking binges we held whenever we had the chance. We sat around with girls far into the night and acted as if we were
possessed by devils. If I didn't come home until the next day, I pretended to have been with the Væringjar boys
¹⁰
in Hafnarfjörður, or out at Rauðavatn, or here at Þingvellir. If it seemed better to tell a different lie, I told a different lie.