World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  But—“Vegmey Hansdóttir, why don’t you want to ask me in any more?”

  No, she did not laugh as gaily and freely and entertainingly as she had laughed at first; instead she stood in the doorway and whistled, and shook her head in a blend of petulance and impatience, but it was the same melody.

  “These damned pauper children. They’re a terrible rabble. It’s forbidden to rear them for slaughter and that’s why no one can be bothered feeding them, least of all those who own the food and the money, and so these devils go round the village shrieking, swearing and telling lies about innocent people. But God knows I’ve just about had enough now, even if He doesn’t exist.”

  “What a way to speak, girl!” said the poet. “What on earth has happened?”

  “Imagine it, one’s own brothers and sisters! They’ve been lying to the other children that I slept with you when you stayed the other night, and since then I haven’t been able to show my face outside. These devils are all around me at once, yelling at me that I’ve been sleeping with an eccentric. And naturally the grown-ups do their bit as usual, as you can imagine. Everyone always believes everything nasty of everyone else, and especially if it’s a lie.”

  “Yes, but when one has a clear conscience, it doesn’t matter what people say,” he said consolingly.

  “D’you think it feels any better to be torn to pieces by cannibals even if one has a clear conscience?” she said. “And anyway, who says I’ve got a clear conscience?”

  “How very angry you are!” he said.

  “Yes, and no wonder!” she said, and laughed. And with that she was no longer angry.

  “I thought we had become such good friends that it was only natural for you to ask me in, whatever anyone says.”

  “I’m such a fool,” she said. “I’ve never known such a fool. I can’t even be a friend. And I hate being a brother and sister.” And she added in a nasal falsetto, half laughing and half whimpering, but still looking at him with those heavy, hot eyes of hers, “You should be ashamed of yourself for the other day!”

  “Why?” he said.

  “Tcha, you’re a fool, too,” she said, “you’re just as much of a fool as I am. I’ve never known such a fool in all my born days.”

  “So you don’t want to talk to me any more?” he asked.

  “Am I not talking to you now?” she replied. “Are you deaf?”

  “When can we see each one another?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you seeing me now?” she answered. “Are you blind?”

  “I mean like the other day,” he said.

  “And how d’you think that would end? I’ve never known such a fool!” she said.

  He stood on the roadway, obstinate and uncomfortable, and did not want to go away, but did not know what to say.

  “I haven’t time to talk to you any more just now,” she said.

  “You haven’t talked to me at all,” he said.

  “You can write a poem about me,” she said.

  “I’ve done it,” he said. “Would you like to hear it?”

  “N–no,” she said. “I don’t want that.”

  “So that’s the way you are?” he said.

  “Don’t be angry,” she said, “you who are now in with Pétur ríhross and soon to become one of the gentry. What am I? I’m nothing! Hahaha. Go away.”

  No, her laughter was not as clear and genuine as before, nor as wonderfully meaningless either; something had happened.

  “May I never come again, then?” he said.

  “You can walk along the road here tomorrow,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Next day he walked by at the same time. She stood in the doorway and laughed a little. He wanted her to ask him in. She said, “No, I’ve never heard anything like it, to think that a girl would ask a man in!”

  “You did the other day,” he said.

  “Ssssh,” she said, and looked all around. “Don’t talk so loud.”

  “I’ll never ask you again,” he said.

  “You who live in the biggest house in Iceland, why don’t you ask people in?” she asked.

  “Any time,” he said. “You’re welcome whenever you like. But I’m afraid you’ll have to crawl in through the cellar window, because the doors are nailed up.”

  “Are you daft, man?” she said. “You surely don’t think I’m going to visit a man?”

  “I can hardly call myself a man,” he said, very unassumingly. “But still, I’ve got an old divan. And I can at least offer you a seat on it. But unfortunately there are no panes in the window; so if the weather’s bad, the rain comes in.”

  “I hope you’ve got an eiderdown for yourself?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve got a big eiderdown for myself—and others.”

  “Really?” she said. “Where did you get an eiderdown?”

  “Hólmfriður in the loft lent me it.”

  “Really?” she said. “That was lucky for you. She’s a poetess like yourself, although no one’s ever heard anything she’s written, thank goodness.”

  “If you come to visit me tonight, you’ll get a poem.”

  “No, I’ve never in all my born days heard such effrontery to imagine that a girl would go and visit a man! What sort of dreadful person do you really take me for? As far as I’m concerned you can just spread the rest of your eiderdown over Hólmfriður, who’s a poetess like you! And now I haven’t time for any more of this.”

  “May I walk by tomorrow, then?” he asked.

  “D’you think I can forbid you to use the road?” she said.

  “Then it’s best we never see one another again,” he said, theatrically sorrowful.

  At that she laughed and said, “Yes, come again tomorrow.”

  And so it went on, day after day. This was not the first time that those who had at first smiled at him turned their backs on him and began to think of themselves instead of thinking of him. Sometimes it was as if you understood people’s souls; a few days later, you understood nothing. One day you were kissed, and it meant everything; next day, you were not kissed.

  11

  He consoled himself by looking at his exercise books with the poems approaching the thousand total soon, and more. Perhaps the world would some day understand that the heart existed. Some day. Once upon a time there were two poets, the two greatest poets in Iceland; they were enemies because they served the Muse, each in his own way, but they both loved the Muse with all their hearts—yet perhaps they loved even more this nation which has the misfortune to foster poets. They both died young, penniless and forgotten, the one in Copenhagen and the other in Reykjavík; the grave of one is lost, and some say the other never had a grave. But their poems will warm every Icelandic heart for a thousand years. Who am I, Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík, to expect greater happiness than they?

  “Are you the one who lives in the palace?”

  A man came walking towards him on the shore road late one evening. The stranger was shorter in build, but broader in the shoulders; his eyebrows grew in an unbroken line. He had light brown hair and a green glint in his eyes, and his face was drawn into a haughty pucker as if no one could tell him a thing any more. He had a deep voice, his neck was bare, and he wore tattered canvas shoes. Ólafur Kárason had not the faintest idea what the stranger had in mind, but he replied apologetically that he was allowed to stay in the building at night because he had nowhere to live.

  “I know you,” said the stranger. “You’re the poet.”

  His hand was small and well shaped, the wrist thick, the middle of the hand beefy but the fingers slender and tapering like a woman’s, with lone curved nails. But his handshake was firm and friendly.

  “My name is órarinn Eyjólfsson,’’ he said. “It’s a name from antiquity, as you can probably hear, and that’s why I call myself Örn Úlfar*; you’re to call me that, too. The village calls me that fellow from Skjól.”

  He talked in an earnest, measured way, almost like a book,
knitting his brows fiercely, screwing up his eyes and pulling down the corners of his mouth, and even when he was talking to someone and looking at the person he was talking to, his look seemed directed towards some undefined immensity. But in his face there was a strange beauty which made this haughty expression understandable and justified it. He spoke in a deep voice which had the ring of fine metal, and yet not without a mellow veneer.

  “I was once a poet, too, like you,” he went on in that proud voice of his. “Let us stroll along this shore road together. I feel we are going to become friends.”

  “Give me your hand again!” said the poet. “I’ve always longed so much to have a friend; I’ve never had a friend before. My name is Ólafur Kárason, and I call myself ‘Ljósvíkingur’ because when I was a small boy I often stood at a little bay called Ljósavík, and watched the birds.”

  “Ljósvíkingur,” said Örn Úlfar, “I want to ask you one question. Why do you write poetry?”

  This question took the poet so much by surprise that he forgot to keep putting one foot in front of the other. He stood stock-still.

  “I l–love . . .” he said, but when he came to the object of the sentence he became tongue-tied—what was it really that he loved? He stood open-mouthed and waved his arms in the air like a man trying to catch a butterfly which has already flown by, and it was night and day at the same time, and a dead-calm, golden-clouded sea, and beyond the fjords the mountains were turning blue, one behind the other in an ever more unreal haze.

  “You love,” Örn Ulfar prompted. “What do you love?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Ljósvíkingur, and set off again. “But probably it’s beauty I love.”

  “What do you say about Sviðinsvík, in that case?”

  The poet realized all too well how inadequate his answer to his friend’s question had been, and went on gazing into that mesmerizing immensity of blue sky without being able to turn his mind from that unexpected question.

  “The mountainscape here at Sviðinsvík is unique,” he said at last.

  “Do you know that these mountains you’re looking at don’t really exist at all?” said Örn Úlfar. “Or can’t you see that they belong more to the sky than the earth? All this enchanting blueness which enthralls you is an illusion.”

  “What does exist, when it comes to that?” asked the Ljósvíkingur. “What isn’t an illusion?”

  “Human life,” answered Örn Úlfar. “This life.”

  “It would be more natural if beauty and human life could be united and never more be parted,” said the Ljósvíkingur.

  “Beauty and human life are two lovers who are never allowed to meet,” said Örn Úlfar. “Do you remember the poem ‘About My Sister,’ with these lines in it?

  ‘She is glad in goodly weather

  Golden-bright her flowing hair.’ ”

  “Don’t even mention it; that is sheer genius,” said the Ljósvíkingur. “How on earth could he write so simply?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Örn Úlfar.

  “What then?”

  “My sister,” said Örn Úlfar; “she is dead.”

  At that the Ljósvíkingur did not know what to say; so they walked on in silence for a while. Then his friend went on:

  “Yes. It’s about three months now since she died. It was early in April. We’re in the habit of saying here, ‘Everything gets better in the spring when the sun begins to shine.’ But she died. My last poems were three sonnets. She had golden-bright hair, just as in the poem, and blue eyes which believed and hoped and loved. That bright hair of hers—I thought perhaps we would be allowed to keep her with us because all the other brothers and sisters had died. But we weren’t allowed to. I touched her cheek as she lay on the bier the morning she was buried. I also touched her hand. Death is one of the few things a man cannot believe, perhaps the only thing. I don’t know whether you’ve ever touched a dead person. I don’t know whether you know the sound of the first spadeful falling on the coffin lid. I don’t care now. All I know is that I shall never write poetry again. I know that I, too, shall die of consumption one day. But that doesn’t matter. I’m no longer afraid of anything. But nothing is beautiful anymore, either.”

  They walked together like that all night, and there was no night, just a slight unreality, a momentary trance, with mist here and there as if the landscape were about to dissolve, and then nothing dissolved and the mist had vanished again. There was a crimson glow on the highest mountain ridges, and shining birds swarming in their thousands over the flame-gilded, mirror-smooth sea. And they went on talking together. Ólafur Kárason had no conception of the passing of time; only that voice with its dark, silk-edged, golden tones reverberated through his consciousness. When a man has lost what he loves most, there is no need to write poetry; the timbre of a man’s voice expresses all the poetry of life. How destitute the Ljósvíkingur felt at not having lost everything, or rather at never having had anything to lose!

  “Since you have torn up all your poems, I’m convinced that my own poems have no validity,” said the Ljósvíkingur. “I don’t even know how to write a sonnet.”

  “We are two kinds of destiny,” said Örn Úlfar. “I live in this curiously hollow sound of the first soil falling on the coffin lid. But you, poet, have been raised from the dead.”

  “When I have been in great distress,” said the Ljósvíkingur, “I have always tried to concentrate on what is beautiful and good and to forget what is wicked.”

  “I acknowledge no beauty for as long as human life is one continuous crime,” said Örn Úlfar. “If I did, I would regard myself as a degenerate coward.”

  “Are you accusing God, then?” asked the Ljósvíkingur.

  “If you can convince me that it was God who never wanted daddy and mummy to be able to afford to buy milk for us when we were small; if it’s God who prevented us from having enough food for months on end; if it’s God who never wanted us to be able to buy firewood to warm our hovel in the winter frosts; if it’s God who didn’t want us to have clothes to cover our bodies; if it’s God who never on any account wanted us children to be free of colds and tonsillitis, winter and summer—yes, then I accuse God. But to tell you the absolute truth, I simply don’t believe you can convince me that it is God who governs this village.”

  “That’s what Hlaupa-Halla says, too,” said Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík thoughtfully.

  12

  Örn Úlfar was, in the eyes of his softhearted friend, the rock against which the injustice of the world would be broken, a mighty, beautiful and awe-inspiring willpower. He did not have one view of life when the sun shone and another when the darkness fell; nothing could shake his convictions, his philosophy provided his feelings with a clear framework and was never their pendulum. Ólafur Kárason was like water which trickles through in various places but has no regular channel.

  Admiration for this new friend, and the longing for his company, was a new state of mind, and with it came anxiety about disappointing his hopes, the gnawing certainty that he was not his equal in anything, and the fear of earning his contempt because of his worthlessness. If more than a day passed without their meeting, he gave up all hope, and thought, “He never wants to see me again.” He set out in a kind of restlessness, but when he realized that he was on the way to see his friend, he turned back and walked in the opposite direction. When he stood at last in front of the tottering hovel at Skjól, he tried to persuade himself that it was by accident. He stopped at the gate, which scarcely reached up to his knees, and looked around in some embarrassment, like a stranger who has lost his way and finds himself at the wrong house.

  “Wonderful weather,” said the old fisherman. Because of poor health he was now incapable of doing quarry work, and was pottering about in his tiny cabbage patch.

  Ólafur Kárason agreed, and could not take his eyes off him—he found it so odd that this should be his friend’s father.

  “Yes, such blessed fine weather in the ski
es,” said the old man, still amazed at it all.

  “Yes, it’s strange,” said the poet.

  “One thought the night before last that it was clouding over and veering to landward, but it looks as if it will turn out fine after all.”

  “Yes, it’s absolutely amazing,” said Ólafur Kárason, and could not understand all this fine weather, either.

  Örn Úlfar appeared in the doorway, barefoot in trousers and shirt, ran his fingers through his hair, drew down the corners of his mouth in a haughty horseshoe, knitted his brows and looked out to sea with the far-sighted eyes of a mariner; his face was an inscrutable contradiction to the surroundings. The words of the poetess came to the Ljósvíkingur’s mind; face to face with his friend, he could not help asking himself whether it was only men like these who were doomed to become drunkards because they were not clever enough to become criminals, and because society was too abject to be able to create heroes.

  His mother called out from somewhere inside, “Fie on you and put your shoes on, I say, and see that you keep your shirt buttoned up to the neck!”