The Great Weaver From Kashmir (6 page)

They had watched each other grow. Once she had been six years old and he eight. What had changed? They hadn't been aware of any changes, but even so, they stood here tonight on opposite sides of the road, full-grown.

And when he beheld her smile, unsteady and weak, he understood that he had not confessed gratuitously; she was raised above all sin and forgave everything. She was too pure to comprehend that there was anything foul in sin. She loved those who were in trouble, that was all. And at that moment the sun rose over Ármannsfell.

In fact it was unlike any other sun; it was truly more like blood gilded with fire, gushing from a fissure on the mountain. It erupted in all directions. A tall man could easily have stuck his hands into it and let it foam like soap through his fingers. It must have been healthy for a sinful man to wash himself in this blood.

He quickly took her by both hands, like a man in a poultry shop grabbing two chickens that he wants to buy. They walked down to the grassy plain through Fagrabrekka in order to watch the fire, and sat down entirely unconcerned that the dew would wet their clothing. The air was cold and clear. The morning stepped ever higher; the chaos over the mountain soon changed into sunshine. The dew began to glisten. In an hour a snow-white fog would extend itself over the entire copse. Everything was still drowned in shadow although the sky was radiant. “Chastity is the highest of all blessings,” he said.

“A chaste man is a holy man; whatever he does is holy. Chastity is the fount and foundation of what old chronicles call virtue. Chaste men, and no others, are possessed of a strong will, unfailing powers of accomplishment, an all-seeing intellect, an affectionate heart, an
alien beauty, and a magnetic personality. A chaste man puts a yoke on his flesh for the freedom of his soul. Freedom is formed beneath the yoke and nowhere else but there. No one is free but a chaste man. The most powerful establishment in the world, the Roman Catholic Church, is founded upon chastity. It is thanks to chastity that it has not collapsed. When its monks swerved from its ideal of chastity its success diminished. When the ideal of chastity came once again to the fore it experienced a renaissance. If I believed in even half of all the truth found in the Bible, I would become a Catholic monk and dedicate my soul to God and Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the holy Anna, and that entire household. But no matter what, my life must become a hymn of praise to chastity. Poetry is my lover, the new poem. God himself has told me that if I am pure enough, I can inspire a new era in world literature, like Dante Alighieri.

“Diljá, this is no phantasm!” he reiterated, and he gave himself over to the power of his inspiration. “Diljá, I am gifted and strong! Powerful! I believe that I can rule a huge kingdom! My childhood dream was to subdue all of Asia to the east of a line from Kamchatka to Persia, and I still feel that I was born to be king over the largest country in the world. Diljá, I love the world and all that is in the world!

“I could die for the world if I wanted to, let myself be crucified for all that is in the world. I love all men, love them all, love them like infants in white gowns, like French girls on parade, innocent, bright, and helpless. I long to take them all into my arms and stroke their cheeks with my hand, erase struggles, trials, and sins. Come all ye to my breast, my friends! I love the most vicious criminal among you just as passionately as the holiest saint! My Holy God, no one
understands better than I why you should have wished to become a man and live among us.”

He buried his face in his hands for a few moments, and when he looked again toward Heaven his eyes were drenched with tears.

“I love all of it,” he continued in a passionate, quivering voice, “all that exists, all that there is! The glorious radiance of the universe overwhelms me. I am prepared to kneel before everything, everywhere. God, take me unto you!”

His rapture was like a flood bursting all riverbanks; he was forced to fall silent. Finally he spoke again, more calmly than before.

“I love the asphalt street in the evening after rain, the life of the street, the whirling jungle of the pavement, and the lampposts with their shining electric fruits, the streets of the city with all their thousand-and-one-wheeled reality. The huge advertisements that the merchants paste up on the walls along the streets inspire me no less than the oil paintings from Pompeii do the English tourists, who examine them with the aid of three guidebooks. I read the classified advertisements in the newspaper with just as much inspiration as old women do the Bible or the bourgeoisie the masterworks of poetry. And whereas it took no less than a symphony orchestra in the Queen's Hall in London to inspire the old poets, I am filled with blissful admiration for the rhythmless caterwauling of a harmonica down in Melar, and it is an aesthetic pleasure for me to listen to the false notes played on the flutes of beggars on the squares down south in Barcelona. And I am seized with no less mystical joy when paying attention to the hens, which peck dainty, glittering grains from the rubbish on the side streets of Þingholt, than when watching the golden plover or ptarmigan on the mountains, about which the great
poets sang glorious odes. Nothing touches me more deeply than the simple and plain, things whose power resides in being whatever they are. My most precious gift is that I have been given an aesthetic soul, the ability to worship the glory on the visage of things.”

After several silent minutes he pulled the end of one sleeve back from his watchband and looked at his watch.

“Diljá,” he continued. “I'm leaving and have come to say good-bye. I am for the moment standing at the heart of my country, but within a few hours I will have embarked upon the sea, with foreign shores before the ship's prow. I feel as if I'm setting out into pitch-black eternity, alone, on foot, over countless seas. I have of course been abroad every second or third summer since I was a child, but this is the first time that I've felt as if I were leaving. Now I'm leaving. Who knows, perhaps I shall never return, Diljá. Father and friend of all that is, tend to this green plot!”

And after a short silence:

“What else might lie before me than to become lost? A man who has spoken to God must become lost. And I yearn to be sucked into the whirlpool of life until I have become a tiny pupil that peeks out along the streets of some huge city, a tiny songbird's tongue so that I can sing about what I am. When I finally leave this place, I wish that these might be my parting words: ‘What I saw was beyond compare.'

“Have you heard the story that most suits the calling of the poet? It is the story of Vyasa. Vyasa composed a poem that is seven times more sapient than all the Holy Scriptures. The poem is called the Bhagavad Gita. And it starts out by saying that Vyasa sang this poem, ‘. . . but concerning Vyasa nothing is known, neither when
he lived nor where.' God grant that I might become forgotten and lost like Vyasa, but that my verse might live; that I might be forgotten like the king Shah Jahan, who built for his deceased queen the Taj Mahal palace, the most glorious building in the world. Peace be to Vyasa, peace be to Shah Jahan and his wife. I pray for the same peace. God grant that those of other faiths exalt my verse in the temple while they kowtow in praise of the One who gave me my harp! God grant that the children in the side streets sing my verse in the evenings while they dance beneath the street lamps, Hesperus gleaming beyond the wall. Diljá, we may never see each other again.”

His last words slipped into her heart like an arrow; she gasped quickly for breath and slowly shut her eyes. Then she moved just a touch nearer to him as if cuddling up to him were foremost on her mind. All that he did was give her a stern, investigative look.

“Yes, Diljá, I'm leaving,” he repeated, with unswerving emphasis on every syllable, perhaps from premeditated cruelty. And she looked at him in a way that showed her ignorance of the art of language, although the pious sorrow and the anguished affection on her face were mightier than words. And he was suddenly stymied.

“Diljá,” he said suddenly, “I shall never, ever forget you.”

His voice burned with passion for a single moment, and it was clear that he had to constrain himself into silence. He looked down at the grass. They sat a little distance apart from each other and did not touch. She also looked down at the grass and said:

“I'm never going to get married either.”

It was as if she knew how peculiar and clumsy these words sounded coming from her mouth, because she added, with eager conviction:

“I made that vow a long time ago.”

She looked him straight in the eye, and it was apparent that she herself did not know whether she was telling the truth or a lie. She wasn't about to start carrying on about asceticism in grandiose poetic prattle or mystical exhortation, but the determination and passion in her voice were not affected. In the next instant she cast herself facedown onto the field.

And she lay there before him young and fair, pressed herself down into the luxuriantly thick spring grass, herself nothing but a personification of the fertile earth. When she drew in her feet her clothing tightened over her hips, revealing their agreeable roundness; this slender, resilient body rested here in the spring grass, and the male partner in the tango could sway like a reed in the dance. She was a woman, fit to become the mother of generations, like Egill Skallagrímsson's queen at Borg. But the ascetic would not take the opportunity to lift her into his arms in order to kiss her on the eyelids.

“Arise, Diljá! Take my hand! This hour is holy. I am bidding farewell to my childhood and leaving. And the sun has risen.”

And he added, as if performing an old ritual bungled together by prelates:

“Let us pledge to each other to offer our souls and bodies to the truth that is concealed behind creation and that radiates from the visage of things.”

A moment passed and she did not move. She seemed not to have heard his words. She could just as well have been sleeping or dead. When she finally stood up it was as instantaneously as when she had thrown herself down. Her face was wet. She had been crying,
silently, without a sob. She came so near to him at that moment that her face was no farther away than a few inches from his chest. It was as if she were dead drunk. With closed eyes and an exhausted sigh she reached out to him with her warm, damp hands, which she could just as well have folded onto her own naked bosom.

“Diljá, we call God as witness to this vow of chastity,” said he, in a deep, solemn voice, as he looked at her eyelids. And she let the words echo in her mouth: “We call God as witness.”

Then she looked up. The eyes of this living soul were aglow with suffering. She looked into his face and sighed once more. She tilted her head back, as if she thought that a cup would be raised to her lips.

“Yes,” she whispered with a shudder, and swallowed the sob that arose in her throat when she started to speak. “We call God as witness. We call Almighty God as witness.”

They squeezed each other's hands as hard as they could and gazed with drowning eyes at each other's lips.

Steinn!

Now winter has come and it's been almost seven months since you left. You left in July; now it's Christmas. It was bright then; now it's dark. But more than likely winter only visits me, not you. You must be so happy there in the south.

No snow falls to the earth in the south and you never experience a sunless day or a night of storm. Every day there is like a fairy tale, and at night everyone can sleep. The people there think only about God and the solar system and the glory on the visage of things. But at home boats are always sinking and men are always falling off of trawlers. And collections are taken for widows at every church door, burlesque shows are put on, dances and evenings of comic songs are held for the benefit of orphans. And here no one ever talks about the glory on the visage of things; they just insult each other in the newspapers.

How could anyone possibly believe that you have a thought remaining for the ones you left behind in the cold and polar darkness;
how could I be so foolish as to think that? The longer you're gone the better I see how foolish I am. Forgive me for being such a child! Forgive me for being so paltry compared to you.

I waited here impatiently for every ship that came, all the summer and all the fall, as if I expected that they would bring me greetings from Steinn. But those huge strong ships that come all the way from the continent never bother to bring me greetings. They rush into the bay like mighty whales and blow their horns in the harbor so loudly that the mountains shake. But I sit fearfully by my window.

Couldn't I just as well have assumed that Steinn would forget, forget, and never again remember what once was? Shouldn't I have known you well enough to know that every past event in your life is like a hundred-year-old old wives' tale to you? No one was more eager to forget! Your life happens in leaps and bounds. And you never stop anywhere except on mountaintops where the winds of the sky come to meet you. On every peak four winds blow around you. How could you possibly recall what once was?