The Great Weaver From Kashmir

by Halldor Laxness

Of the heathen earth.

  And all creation drinks itself drunk beneath

  my leaves.

  I am the hundredcolored fallforestsymphony;

  Behold my leaves fall;

  They fall to the earth

  And die,

  Trampled by the birder’s boots,

  While the hawks perch in white branches.

  And the sorcerer’s hounds prowl in my pale

  leafhair.

  I was a little girl, ignorant and primitive, and I could do nothing but blush. And after you left I hid my blue silk book in a place where no one could find it, and looked at my hands and started to cry.

  19.

  The King’s Three Sons

  A LEGENDARY HISTORY BY LITTLE BJÖSSI

  Once there was a great king in the Southlands called Hexameter, and he had three sons with belts and swords and three golden crowns upon their heads. And so he sent them to war to fight with a terribly cruel king up north in Finnmark. And they made their way through a thick forest and were so tired and hungry in the evening that they wanted to die. And then the moon came up, and they saw a little house nearby, and in front of it was a little silver blue lake. And they went into the house, and there they found a table with a tablecloth and three fried trout and cream in three jugs. Goodness me, how the king’s sons were delighted!

  Snati

  FROM THE MEMOIRS OF LITTLE SIGGA

  Poor old Snati, who rests his head on his paws outside the storehouse door, what might he be thinking now? Remember, my dear Snati, when we were little, when we both went sledding? All of a sudden there blew such a gust that I thought trolls were coming to take me. Do you remember once when we were down by the sea gathering shells, and you hopped around me? That was such fun, dear Snati! But now you are old and I am grown up, and you lie outside the storehouse door, but I am home helping Mama in the pantry. Good-bye, dear Snati; I’m going in to kiss Mama.

  In the Homefield

  A FAIRY TALE BY LITTLE GAUJA

  Look at the little blue cuckooflower in the homefield. It’s teasing the buttercup, saying: “The calf doesn’t want to eat you, you’re so tart!” Then the dandelion comes and says, “Hush! There’s no milk in you like there is in me!”

  And because of all this the buttercup started to cry; and the cuckooflower also started to cry. But the milk in the dandelion has a terribly bitter taste. And just then the calf came up and ate the cuckooflower. And sister Sigga swished up the sunflower and stuck it in her hair. And little brother grabbed up the dandelion and drank all of its milk and got such a terrible stomachache that Mama and Kitty both had to come looking for him out in the homefield. And Kitty went hunting sparrows all over the homefield.

  The Crow in the Tower

  A FAIRY TALE FOR CHILDREN

  In a church tower in Spain is a terribly ugly crow. Once an evil robber with a black beard came and tried to do something that he wasn’t supposed to do. Then the crow came, sat down on his hat, and said:

  “Fie, fie, evil robber, I’ll peck out your eyes if you don’t beat it back up the mountain where you live with all the other evil men.”

  The robber was frightened, because even though he was bad he didn’t want to be blind. And he went back to all the bad men on the mountain and said:

  “There’s a terribly ugly crow in the tower.”

  And the poor ugly crow sang through its rusty windpipe all day, because it was so happy. And the poor ugly crow shall always have its home in the tower.

  La pomme qui dort

  A FOREIGN STORY FOR CHILDREN

  On a tree between green leaves hangs a little apple. Its little cheeks are so red that it’s easy to see that it’s sleeping. Under the tree stands a little child, who calls out:

  “Apple, apple, wake up! You’ve slept enough!”

  Thus begs the little child, but do you suppose the apple woke up? No, the apple didn’t even stir in its air nest between the green leaves.

  Just then the dear, blessed Sun was taking a walk in Heaven.

  “Oh, listen to me, my dear Sun!” said the child. “Wake up the apple for me; it’s slept enough!”

  “Why not?” answered the Sun, and he shed his rays on the face of the apple and embraced it kindly.

  We Send Our Best Wishes

  It is incredibly beautiful up by the stream. And the little trout play in the sunshine, and they are colored so beautifully. And there’s a completely different sound in the brook up on the hill than down in the field. And should I tell you what the brook is saying in the sunshine as it runs down the hill? It’s saying:

  “I’m on my way down into the district to have a talk with the bailiff’s children. I’m going to talk to Steini and Little Tobba and Little Imba and tell them the news from the mountains. The elves wear blue jerkins and dance in the dells, and I think that an outlaw lives in the canyon.”

  My dear brook, give our best to Steini and Little Tobba and Little Imba!

  20.

  Hotel Britannique, Naples. January 1922. I address these pages to you, dear Diljá, and send them to you. I’m writing to relieve some tension; time is going by too slowly. And I know that you understand me because you’ve turned eighteen years old, as I was when I married, and besides that you are an intelligent girl and keep yourself away from all the disgusting pruderie of a small town; oh, Heaven knows that I have suffered like a fish on dry land in that priggish atmosphere at home, where every woman drapes herself in poésie, lies, and sanctimony, and no one can speak except under the rose for fear that the scandalous stories might lose their sweet savor. Yes, I know that you, a woman who cannot be scandalized by anything between Heaven and Earth, can imagine what I had to put up with, living all those years in the sanctimonious and poetic joylessness of the world of the nineteenth-century woman.

  That does not mean that I am overjoyed to have traveled here to the south; no, nothing could be further from the truth. Because even though all the Pharisaism was crushing me and suffocating me at home, solitude is even worse, when all the things that one knows are thousands of miles away and those whom one loves are gone. No, I’ve been dreadfully lonesome, and my health isn’t getting any better, always a cough, often blood, my heart either weak or crazed. And always this fear, just as before, and long sleepless nights. The noise here is absolutely dreadful: all the livelong night a clattering of carriages and cracking of whips, and all during the later part of the day the city hums with the endless shouts and calls of the street vendors, packs of gypsies, and madmen. If a man braves the traffic he is surrounded by those lazzaroni15 who bully foreigners with all kinds of gotaterri.16 It must have been a wretched idiot who invented this idiom: “Vedi Napoli e poi muori.”17

  Oh, I saw everything there was to see of this life in huge hotels a long, long time ago: servants practically kowtowing from courtesy and pretense; orchestras as cold and spiritless as barrel organs; Americans with diamond rings mollycoddling European mistresses without having the slightest clue concerning civilized customs; English mummies with bulldog snouts, their hands stuck in their pants pockets, brooding over their wives or escorts while Italians wait on them with precisely the same vain gusto that was in fashion five hundred years ago; oh, those Italians live in an entirely different century than other races!

  And when I come home in the evening with my English maid, having been disappointed at the San Carlo Opera or the Teatro Bellini, or having watched some cinematic rigmarole until I was half dead, there is no one that I can talk to, because I’m bored with this poor English maid, and then maybe I sit alone long into the night, and my thoughts revolve only around me, my whole life, about all the wild vitality of youth and all my hunger for the fulfillment of life, which was assuaged by nothing but banality and apathy, discouragement, boredom, fear, nervousness, ruefulness, and sickness. The pantomime of my memories passes through my conscience: I yearn for one thing and one thing only, and what I yearn for is the one thing that I’ve never gotten, but everything else I have gotten, both w
hat I didn’t desire and also what I feared. I never found my own life.

  My final disappointment occurred when my boy turned his back on me and forsook me. I had decided not to go with Grímúlfur in the hope that Steinn and I could be together, since as long as we, mother and son, were together, it was possible for us to have something resembling a home even if Grímúlfur was always fluttering about. But even the sturdiest knot can come undone. Steinn commended me to the dreariness of exile one October night last fall. I was left standing alone in the railway station, and his train vanished into the darkness.

  As you know, we, mother and son, as well as my English maid, stayed during the two hottest summer months in Brighton, since I was reluctant to come here to the south in the worst of the heat. Grímúlfur continued on without stopping in England; he doesn’t notice the difference between warm and cold.

  During our first days in Brighton, Steinn was like a considerate and good son: in the mornings he went with me on walks by the sea, along King’s Road and Marine Parade, and we often went together to the Regent Palais de Dance in the afternoons, and he was still a good boy, courteous and delightful, and often danced with me a bit. But what do you think it is that took him away from me? What do you think captivated my boy so in the most splendid city in England, and made him turn his back on his mother? What but a decrepit old fellow in a white linen suit, rust brown in the face. It’s incredible but true: several days after Steinn met this detestable ghost at the Hotel Metropole, where we were staying, he became an entirely different child. Imagine it, when I went out alone with my maid in the mornings I could expect to meet them on the coast road where they rambled along absorbed in palaver and walking arm in arm! It was simply grotesque!

  “Steinn,” I said, “show me a little more consideration, at least while the guests in the hotel are watching, and don’t sit down to chat with this Carrington while everyone can see that I am sitting alone at my table!”

  And what do you imagine he answered? “I am forced to inform you, dear woman, that the time is past when sons are to be daughters to their mothers!” Imagine it – he said “dear woman”! And when my maid, Miss Bradford, found out that I’d been crying all day because of this rude reply, she couldn’t keep from bringing it up with him that evening. And what do you imagine he answered the poor girl? “I don’t want you to speak to me!” – that’s what she got.

  Nevertheless, I convinced Steinn to come south with me in September; first we stayed several days in Rome, and then here, but his mind had turned away from his mother. He was cold toward me and silent, but I found out that he kept up a steady correspondence with this Carrington fellow. One morning here at the Hotel Britannique he tells me, completely out of the blue: “I’m going to England tonight.”

  My tears and prayers were of no avail. He left that night without giving me an address or any idea at all of what he was planning. Since then I’ve gotten two postcards from him, but he didn’t write his address on either of them. His father, who had been staying in Palermo since last summer but has recently gone to Genoa, hasn’t had a single word from him.

  Imagine, Diljá dear, how lonely I am, left behind in this lunatic town like in a lion’s den, consumption and memories of an aimless life my company. No one loves me but Death, who prowls around me day and night like an abominable adulterer.

  21.

  I would have found it plausible if you had asked me why I married a man like Grímúlfur, as young as I was. Many people have asked me the same thing, few have understood it, most have reproached me; everyone knows that we are no more alike than two creatures from different planets.

  But in fact there is nothing more comprehensible than that I should have taken this destiny-laden step in the heedlessness of my youth. I was raised in complete affluence, yes, in far greater freehanded indulgence than you could ever suspect, and had never been acquainted with anything but luxury from my earliest childhood. And precisely when everyone thought that our power was at its peak my father went bankrupt, and died shortly afterward. We siblings were left orphans, and wound up with our father’s friends, except for the two oldest, who went abroad and made their own livings. I was sixteen years old at the time and ended up with Madam Valgerður, your foster mother. And about a year later I became her daughter-in-law, tacitly and calmly. I would gladly have become the daughter-in-law of any other woman in the country, had it not now pleased chance to hang me around the neck of her son. And I was ready to throw my arms round the neck of any man whatsoever; I was wild about men.

  This was a few years after Grímúlfur and your father, Þorsteinn, started in on their business enterprise; business boomed, and out of it grew Ylfingur. Grímúlfur was more like Örnólfur in those days than now. Of course he was never so charming nor as beautifully built as his younger brother, nor as talented, but a lot of girls desired him, because he was a renowned financier and had everything it took to become fabulously wealthy. One winter he asked me to a dance; I’ll tell you about it in as few words as possible, because the story of our coming together is in fact so unremarkable. I was in fairly poor condition: I looked horrible, and I knew it. Even if I was fully mature by my eighteenth year and had long been used to being looked upon as a grown-up girl, on that particular night the gentlemen wouldn’t give me a second glance. I suppose that even then I was already considered Grímúlfur’s betrothed. Long before the dance was over I went to him and asked him to take me home. My throat was tight from holding back sobs, and I couldn’t say anything. He wanted to take my arm, but I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to make him follow me, but this didn’t work and I felt even more resentful. By the time we reached the foyer back home, I was completely deranged and no longer knew what I was doing. Just as soon as he had taken my cloak, I threw my arms with no warning around his neck and cried loudly at his breast in some sort of lunatic ecstasy, begged him to help me, said that I loved him, and so on. Thus was the groundwork laid for my marriage to Grímúlfur, Diljá dear.

  When we married I celebrated having been consecrated into the same sort of life of luxury in which I was raised, and I looked forward to the joys of wedlock, because in my childishness I had often thought that marriage meant the fulfillment of all hopes. This is what all of us women think before we wake up to reality; and our bosoms bubble and boil like mud springs from this incomprehensible yearning to encompass all the happiness of Heaven and Earth.

  But nothing is further than marriage from being able to satisfy the desires of a true woman – I don’t mean those soulless female things that let themselves be used like dull screws in the machine of society. The true woman soon discovers that the happiness of marriage is not the fulfillment of all hopes, but rather the relinquishment of all hopes: “resignation”; and that without this relinquishment there is no happiness. Marriage is a shipwreck in which the cruise ship is tossed against a cliff, a bankruptcy in which youth has nothing left over but debt. Nothing is more empty and sad than the long insomniac days of the first year of marriage, unless, perhaps, the grave itself. Imagine the young wife as she sits at home sleepy and alone and breathes in the revolting stenches of the new home, or else invites her girlfriends over, reluctant, cold, and matured after the fresh experience of her honeymoon. But the man doesn’t come home until evening, because he promised himself to another bride before his wife: his business, and its demands come before all others. And when a newly wedded woman finds herself at home surrounded by the brand-new furniture in her living room, she discovers that she herself is actually nothing but a piece of furniture, purchased to complete the ridiculous unit that the man calls his home. And when she takes her girlfriends from room to room to show them the wedding gifts, oh, all that disgusting cursed rubbish made of gold and silver and who knows what! – living room furniture, dining room furniture, the salon, the boudoir, the bathroom, the bedrooms – oh the smell, the smell! – then in her heart she feels almost the same as if she were showing them the crypt where her corpse is to wait for Doomsday.


  The man she marries is never the same whom she saw in her dreams, never the one she expected. The man she marries is never anyone but the one she let take her, the one into whose arms she threw herself in a kind of bewilderment, because she couldn’t find the one about whom she dreamt. The man she married was the one who offered her gold and green forests. She uses all of her powers of self-deception to settle for whatever he lacks of the outstanding qualities of her dream man, and even succeeds from time to time in convincing herself that her husband is a perfect image of the one she longed for, and determines to do everything she can to enjoy with him what she had imagined enjoying with her dream man. But all the time she knows this one thing, despite all the deception: that he is still not the same man she had desired. She might live with him her whole life and raise children for him, but nothing else is guaranteed except that deep, deep within her is hidden the hope that in spite of her fate and her ruined palaces, the moment might come when her sweetheart will suddenly sweep into her dull, everyday life: she quickens when he grasps her hand, trembles at his glance, her heartbeat is irregular, and all of the pillars of her past tumble down like a house of cards. And then she knows that nothing can hinder her any further, and she seizes the first opportunity to cheat on her husband and drown herself in the embrace of the man who gives her everything, and she is lost. In sin alone is the fulfillment of all her hopes.

  “Who gives her everything” – how misguided it is to say such a thing! Because her lover gives her nothing but one gift: he takes everything from her. From her husband she makes demands without giving; to her lover she gives without making demands. She is ungrateful to her husband because he gave her a different kind of car than the one she had dreamt of. She makes little show though he brings her costly gifts every month. But she is ready to kiss the earth if her lover cuts a lock of his hair for her. Love: it is not a bounteous home filled with merriment and dinner parties, or big families and blue-eyed children. And there are no calm winter evenings, full of tendresse sans passion,18 when husband and wife sit at home and discuss the day’s events or the newest books or whatever has appeared most recently in the daily papers, or make their plans for the future, go over the details for their next trip abroad or what dishes they should serve at the next party. No, this is not love, dear Diljá. All of this is vanity.