World Light

by Halldor Laxness

  The poet was too agitated to attend closely to protracted literary realism and storytelling of this kind. The nearness of beauty made him forgetful of more realistic matters, not excepting ghosts. He heard snatches of the life story of a man who was drowned in a river one autumn on the way to see his sweetheart and now walked again, along with his horse and its harness—in particular a loudly jangling bridle. Thereafter he always rode into the yard of his sweetheart’s farm late at night when autumn came, and went to her room; the horse whinnied, there was the sound of hooves in the lanes, the bridle and bit jangled. The heartthrob had achieved perfection in the art of making the ghostly bridle jangle and the ghostly horse whinny wildly, the storm come sweeping into the house when the door was thrown open. The women screamed. The girl beside the poet gave a little start and moved farther along the bench, closer to her neighbor.

  Time passed, and the poet had no idea of what was happening. It needed nothing less than a child murder to make him come to himself again. All the genealogical, topographical, economic and meteorological preliminaries to this terrible crime had passed him by; the first thing he knew was that the mother had murdered the child and placed the body in a chest of drawers. But since this poet had become more or less inured to murders and other grim deeds from Christian family journals, his attention wandered again before long. He did not notice whether the mother was murdered, too, or whether she did herself in. One thing was certain: At night she used to come in through the closed door, go over to the chest of drawers, kneel down by it, and start tending the corpse in the drawer. Worthy men and virtuous women alike had watched this unusual spectacle between mother and child every night for more than a hundred years. The poet yawned slightly. Whenever a light was put on, the woman dissolved. The young girl shuddered, and she moved a little closer to the poet.

  A certain farmer was traveling through a strange district one autumn—a long genealogy, descriptions of the whole county with a catalogue of place names along little-used tracks, industries, economic conditions, year, month, weather. Evening came, and darkness fell. He found a small farm down by the sea, climbed onto the roof, and shouted down the smoke-hole “God be here!”

  After a long pause there came a reply from within:

  “There is no God here.”

  “Of course God’s here!” said the man crossly, and made his way into the deserted house. He settled down on the floor and fell asleep. But when he had been sleeping for a while he suddenly woke up with something being thrown at his chest. He fumbled all around and found that it was the head of a cat; but he was not going to let that affect him, and threw it back at once in the direction from which it had come, then lay down and went to sleep again. When he had slept for a while, he woke up again with something being thrown at his chest, much heavier this time than the time before. He fumbled for the object and realized that it was a seal’s head, and now he was getting angry; he took the head in both hands and hurled it furiously in the direction from which it had come, then lay down again and went to sleep. For the third time something was once more thrown at his chest, and this time much the largest object. The farmer woke up gasping, fumbled for it, and found that a woman’s head had been thrown at him, with long, flowing hair he could wind round his hand. And at that the farmer said these words: “Is the devil in earnest, then?”

  He got up, took the woman’s head and threw it back with all his strength in the direction from which it had come, then lay down again; but the story did not relate whether the farmer got much sleep for the rest of the night.

  A soft and unsteady hand, cold and clammy, had sought refuge in the poet’s palm like a sparrow from a bird of prey; the girl was sitting pressed close against him; he could sense the fragrance of her hair. But at that moment the steward opened the door and said it was midnight; the saloon had to be closed. Several people got up at once, relieved as birds at the coming of dawn, without waiting for the end of the story—or had that been the end of it? Bera had gone. Was it just the poet’s imagination that she had sat there and put her hand in his?

  20

  Next morning she looked at him with her deep blue eyes, that neutral spring sky which betokened endless promises without ever vouchsafing anything that could be put into words. It was as if she had not seen him before. The ship was moored at the quayside of a little trading station under the mountains. He started to converse with her.

  She had had two parents but no brothers or sisters, born in the capital but brought up in a distant county since she was three years old by her aunt and her husband, whom she called Uncle; he was a pastor. That spring she had been allowed to go south to visit her mother and stay with her for a while. Then she said no more, but the poet knew the rest: she had sat by her mother’s deathbed to the very end.

  “Your late mother will undoubtedly have been in poor health?” he said.

  “My father drinks,” she said.

  She spoke curtly and dispassionately, without any desire to reveal her feelings, and stared out over the unfamiliar fjord. Behind her father’s farewell twenty-four hours ago, Ólafur Kárason sensed a long story: an intelligent and educated man starts drinking heavily and drags a young wife down with him into misery and degradation. The little girl is saved from the morass when she is three years old and brought up in a respectable pastor’s home far away. But why had her mother not divorced the father when things went wrong, in order to look after the child and safeguard her own health? Perhaps she had loved him so much that she had forgotten her child and taken to drink with him. Thank goodness the child had been saved from this sad home and spared many a tragic sight. The poet went on regarding her cheek as she leaned out over the rail and gazed across an unknown sea toward unknown mountains. Had her mother looked like that once, perhaps? Can the world really corrupt anything that is beautiful by nature? Or are these sensitive people, whom the gods particularly love and have chosen to endow with beauty, in greater danger than others of being trodden into the mire, just because beauty is closer to ugliness than anything else? Would it also be this little girl’s fate to love a wicked man one day?

  “Shall we go ashore?” he said.

  “I’m waiting for a couple of girls,” she said.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Where are you going?”

  She had stopped using the formal “you,” but apart from that there was no hint of familiarity. He did not know where he was going, he was an inexperienced traveler, all places were unknown to him. Now the girls arrived. He did not ask to be allowed to accompany them, because he thought she might feel he was chasing her. But when she was on the quay she looked round for a moment, and he was still standing on the deck following her with his eyes. Then he went ashore alone. Soon afterwards he found her outside a shop.

  “Are you alone?” he asked.

  “They went into the shop,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you go, too?” he asked.

  “Because,” she said.

  “Were you going anywhere particular?” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “Really,” he said. “Oh, well, good-bye then.” And he raised his cap.

  Then she said, “I don’t mind if I walk with you.”

  Long afterwards he sometimes wondered if the girls had really gone into the shop, or if it was she who had given them the slip and stopped outside that window to wait for him.

  In this place there were no lowlands.

  “Shall we go up the mountain?” he said.

  “Not too far,” she said.

  “We’ll see if we can’t find some flowers we know,” he said.

  His strides were too long; she had to walk rapidly to keep up with him; she was almost tripping; perhaps her heels were too high. He could not stop looking at her as she walked by his side on the road, so slender and serious but bright and new, with that precious air of sunshine and spring about her hair, her lips and her cheek.

  “Don’t
you think it funny that we should be alone here in a strange place?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “What about you?”

  “In reality we have never existed until this moment,” he said.

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  “You and I were somewhere else before, certainly; but not We,” he said. “Nor the place, either. Today the world was born.”

  “Now you’re trying to frighten me again,” she said, but looked at him and smiled a little, so that he would not think she was angry.

  The Creator had given her that addition to conventional art which is sometimes associated with the unattainable, the mysterious pencil-stroke that everyone is aware of but no one can say exactly where it is drawn in the picture, that note which is impossible to interpret because it lies between all explanations and makes nonsense of every definition, and yet is both One and All. She herself had no inkling of this wonder and did nothing to exploit it; there was not a trace of coquetry in her behavior, no suggestion of wantonness. He was afraid that the man who first paid her compliments would break this enchantment with one blow.

  The dew was still on the lady’s-mantle. They sat down, each on his own stone, and looked out over the roofs of this unknown place at its calm fjord, the blue-green mountains, and the clear, unknown sky.

  “It’s so pleasant to see the world for the first time on a morning like this,” he said.

  “Really,” she said.

  “Bera,” he said. “Will you teach me to talk to you?”

  “No,” she said.

  He stood there defenseless before her perfect eyes, which made poetic talk sound silly.

  “Sometimes I feel as if your world is above human feelings,” he said.

  At that she shielded her eyes from him, pursed her lips, and closed her mouth and once again had that anxious, forsaken face which could just as well have been the beginning of an ill-starred, sorely tried woman whom everyone had deceived and whose every hope had turned into a will-o’-the-wisp. For a moment she seemed on the brink of saying something, but she could not find the right words; she stood up and walked away by herself.

  “Have I said something wrong now?” he said. “What am I to do?”

  “I’m going aboard,” she said. “My heels are too high for this terrible path.”

  He was distressed over his clumsiness and went on apologizing. Then she found a few flowers which she picked and showed him, and said, “Crowfoot, speedwell, meadow violet.”

  “Where did you learn these strange names?” he said.

  “From my uncle.”

  “How lucky you are,” he said, “to have an educated uncle. I was brought up at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti. There were two brothers there; they fought over who was to be my master. Sometimes the blows landed on me. Once I was ill in bed for four years. When I was a youngster I was the unhappiest person in all Iceland.”

  But when she looked into his eyes he felt it had been worthwhile to have endured it all and then be allowed to meet these eyes when it was over. He was surprised to find that youth had such gentleness and calm. When she had gazed into his soul she touched his arm and said, “Let’s walk where it’s smooth. Let’s not walk where the ground is rough.”

  “Forgive me for stopping talking about the flowers and starting to talk about myself,” he said.

  “Talk about yourself,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “No more. It’s not pleasant.”

  “Not pleasant?” she said. “Why?”

  “Because in your presence, my whole life should be burned to ashes and blown away, vanish,” he said.

  At that she put her palm against his chest as if to push him away from her, and said, “No, you’re making me frightened.”

  When they had walked in silence for a while, she asked out of the blue, “Why are you so strange?”

  He replied, “This winter, when gods and men had taken everything from me, not just the sun but my liberty, too, I thought for a time that I hadn’t a single friend any more. But just as I was dying I was suddenly given one sunbeam. It was thrown on a wall for me from heaven, and I heard a voice that spoke about you.”

  “Me?” she said. “That’s impossible. Why do you talk such nonsense?”

  “Bera, even if I’ve talked nonsense all my life, I’m not talking nonsense now,” he said.

  “My name isn’t what you think at all,” she said.

  “What are names?” he said. “The Revelation of the Deity, Sigurður Breiðfjörð, Ýmir, the Invisible Friend, Bera—it makes no difference to me. I don’t ask about names.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I don’t know who you are, either.”

  “I’m a poet,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, and it was as if she were rather relieved to hear it.

  “Why did you think so?”

  “I felt it in your hands,” she said, but without looking at his hands.

  “Bera,” he said, “may I compose beautiful poems about you?”

  “Yes,” she said simply, as if it were a very small favor to ask, so small that one could grant it however preoccupied one might be, and without looking at the supplicant. He wanted very much to find out if she really was without any feelings at all. When they had been walking for a while he asked, “Did you cry very much, Bera, when your mother died?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Bera,” he said. “You are undoubtedly rather unfeeling.”

  “Really,” she said.

  After a while she asked, “What makes you think I cried?”

  He said, “If I had lost my mother at your age I would have cried, even though she sent me away in a sack in winter. But when I discovered that I had never had a mother, I was too old to be able to cry.”

  After some thought the girl said, “I would perhaps have cried if I had been away; and if I hadn’t heard from her; if I had known that no one was with her. But I went south to be with her. And I talked to her before she died. And I was with her.”

  At these simple words he understood the whole story: a forsaken and despised mother in the city, a daughter who in the middle of the joy of spring travels from a secure home far away to tend her on her deathbed, to shrive her, to take leave of her in the last lightening before death, to sit by her bed while she drew her last breath, to lay out her body, to follow her to the grave.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I forgot for a moment that it takes a greater poet to conceal feelings than to reveal them.”

  She smiled at him as when the whole spectrum suddenly appears in a crystal, unreservedly, and he was once again seized with the grief that beauty always aroused in his breast.

  “Those were true words your father called out to you when we were sailing away,” he said, and was going to repeat them, but she put her hand over his mouth.

  “Don’t,” she said. “It’s not right of you to repeat them. My mother is lucky to be dead. It’s my father who is suffering.”

  They were on a stony path and he took her arm and guided her. They sat down on a grassy bank above the path, where all the world could see them. They saw all the world, the mountains, the sea, the sky. He sat at her feet and looked at her ankles, but she gazed silently towards the unknown paths.

  “Why are you called Ljósvíkingur?” she asked at last.

  “When I was a small boy I sometimes stood down by the sea in fine weather and looked at the birds. There was a little bay there, it was called Ljósavík.”

  “I thought you had a little house, and that it stood beside a little bay, and the bay was called Ljósavík, and that was why you were called Ljósvíkingur,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “It’s the glacier that faces my door. And the god dwells in the glacier.”

  She did not ask who the god was, but which glacier it was, and when he told her its name she smiled again and said, “Then it’s our glacier.”

  It turned out that they lived on eith
er side of the glacier. But when she said “our glacier,” what did she mean by it? Did she mean her glacier—her uncle’s and her aunt’s glacier? Or had she made him, the poet, joint owner with her? Did she perhaps mean their glacier— Bera and the Ljósvíkingur?

  “Yes,” he said. “It is our glacier.”

  “You’re lucky to live near it,” she said. “Between me and it is a two-day journey through uninhabited desert; from where I live, it’s like a distant cloud.”

  “One day I’ll come to you over the glacier, nonetheless,” he said.

  “No, we’ll meet up there,” she said, and smiled.

  21

  The more passengers who disembarked from the ship at each port of call, the easiser it became to distinguish one person from another. People formed into groups. At first it was the great men of the heartthrob’s class who had been to the fore, now it was leaders of lesser caliber who took the stage. On deck, between Bera and another girl, strolled a plump and jovial student from First Class. He was talking. The Ljósvíkingur kept watch on them from a distance, how she squandered her smiles and glances on this little man as if she had at last found the one she understood. This came as a shock to the poet, but it was no use denying it: in the company of this man she was in her element—neither suspicion nor reticence, doubt nor fear, just unreserved approval. Seldom had Ólafur Kárason understood so plainly where he stood. A poet and man of learning, what was the point of that? It was the fat conversationalists who conquered in the world, this world with its glorious women; it was their world, the self-satisfaction in their gait made one sick, but what did that matter? God liked them, that was why He created so many of them; He never sent any of their sort to Hell. The poet went below and sat with his head in his hands for a long time. Much later, when he walked past the door of her cabin, he heard cheery voices and laughter from inside, boys, girls, and brennivín, and if he was not mistaken it was Bera herself who was laughing the most wildly. Everything went black before his eyes. So that was how the dream of winter was to be fulfilled: the wanton and thoughtless laughter of one girl—that and no more was what a poet’s life was worth.