World Light (70 page)

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 companion 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 life.”

“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.

“When I look back over my life,” said the old woman, “I feel it has all been one long, sunny morning.”

“And the forest fragrance we smelled in our sleep,” said the Echo.

“I’m only a poet,” said Ólafur Kárason apologetically.

He asked to be allowed to fasten a little mirror to the Invalid’s bedpost so that she would see the glacier again and stop crying. “In this mirror dwells One and All,” he said. Then he asked to be allowed to lie there for part of the night; but before dawn the next morning he got up, kissed the old woman, and said: “Now I must not tarry any longer, for soon the sun will be up. Good-bye, old woman.”

He also kissed the brow of the sleeping Invalid. “When she wakes up she will see the sun rise over the glacier,” he said.

The weather was calm, with the moon in the south and a cold, bluish light. He headed straight for the mountain. In the lower reaches there were long steep slopes, farther up they gave way to gentler mossy inclines, then boulder tracts, finally to unbroken snow. The moon’s face faded as the light strengthened. Over the ocean, black clouds started gathering. He continued on, on to the glacier, towards the dawn, from ridge to ridge, in deep, new-fallen snow, paying no heed to the storms that might pursue him. As a child he had stood by the seashore at Ljósavík and watched the waves soughing in and out, but now he was heading away from the sea. “Think of me when you are in glorious sunshine.” Soon the sun of the day of resurrection will shine on the bright paths where she awaits her poet.

And beauty shall reign alone.