The Great Weaver From Kashmir (3 page)

After Örnólfur went inside, Madam Jófríður shook her head and looked plaintively at her mother-in-law.

“What really gets to me,” she said, “is when I hear this man complain about laziness, because if any man is going to die from ungodly overstress it'll be Örnólfur. That Kristján, one of their managers, was even talking about it with me yesterday at breakfast. It's been nearly a week now since Örnólfur came back from his little trip to Akureyri, on some kind of wretched fishing tub, and Kristján said that he would venture to swear an oath that this entire week he hasn't slept more than three hours out of twenty-four, if in fact he even tried to sleep at night at all! ‘It's no mortal man who works like the director of this fishing company'; those were his exact words. He, who's in charge of so many offices. He confided to me that Örnólfur didn't just think for and control the company, but literally knew every single thing that concerned the company inside and out, both at sea and on land, by night or day. He knows where every ship is stationed at all times; he knows about every worker in the company, man and woman, what each one is supposed to be doing at all times; he knows about every truck, yes, every wheelbarrow! It's as if he knows every item by rote, every number in the accounts, both small and large, and I'm sometimes close to believing that he flies off
on his broomstick to the company's offices in Genoa and Barcelona so that he can get their numbers as soon as they're written down. He's the kind of man I would dare to trust with a kingdom.”

After concluding this description Madam Jófríður added: “I've never heard anyone talk about a mortal man the way the workers talk about Örnólfur.”

“That's right,” answered Madam Valgerður, without taking her eyes off the door, which had closed behind her son. “How often haven't I said to the boy: ‘You must have built such an expensive summerhouse here for something if it's not just for your foreign guests, like the ones who were here last year and the year before, or for me, the old lady, and those impetuous girls, Diljá and her girlfriends.' Last week there were sometimes seven of them here, surrounding me with their constant music and racket. He himself has never enjoyed a single week's rest here in this blessed beauty–”

“No, it's not a week's rest that Örnólfur needs,” interrupted Jófríður, “and the last time I told him that was yesterday, when I stopped him in the foyer of the National Bank and ordered him under threat to invite me to midafternoon coffee at Hotel Iceland. It's something else he needs to be getting. He needs a wife. And I said to him: ‘I would have been willing to be your wife if your brother hadn't already spoken for me twenty years ago. You should get yourself a darling young wife and a comfortable home; you obviously have your choice of women both here and abroad,' said I; ‘. . . a beautiful and loving wife, yes, a devoted wife, dear Örnólfur, who waits impatiently for you to come home from your office at three and serves you your afternoon coffee; receives you with both hands whenever
you return from a trip abroad, throws her arms around your neck, kisses your eyes and mouth, and runs her hands through your hair. Just like that,' said I, ‘that's what you need, my boy.' There's nothing like a wife. Nothing can keep a man in line but a wife. A wife's the best elixir of life there is if you pick the right one.”

“And what was his reply?” asked Madam Valgerður in a low voice.

“Oh, it was completely useless! He smiled and said, ‘Mmhmm; first we'll wait and see how the new markets are doing in Portugal and Sicily.'”

“Oh, yes, I've heard such answers before; Lord knows how I've been put to the test by Örnólfur's eccentricities!” said Madam Valgerður.

Both of them shook their heads and looked sadly into the distance. Grímúlfur was still sitting pensively, waiting for both his cigar to burn out and the moment when it would suit the women to get up and his mother to invite him to coffee. No more music came from the parlor. The clock in the house struck eleven.

He had greeted her as cheerfully as ever. But, truth to tell, there had been no joy in their parting. It was night; he had come to say goodbye; in the morning he was gone.

He said he had come to speak to her, but he ended up saying nothing. All he did was ask her to play the grand piano; he would accompany her. But it hadn't worked – neither of them was in
any mood to play or sing. They couldn't even laugh at their own awkwardness.

She stood up and walked across the room, although on no particular errand, and he went to the piano and closed it; the curtains in the parlor were thick and shadows filled the room. She leaned up against the windowsill and watched him attend to the piano; night closed over her face.

“Are you leaving tomorrow morning?” she asked, abruptly and dully.

“The ship leaves just before noon,” he said. “It's been nothing but parties since the voyage was announced. Tonight we were supposed to have gone to yet another party, but Mother chose to come out to Þingvellir and visit Grandmother, instead of sitting up until midnight in the company of potbellied misers. I myself went to a party that started at five today – there were young poets and artists, schoolmates and a few girls, toasts and good-byes, a bit of dancing. At eight-thirty the car honked outside; there was silence in the hall, a moment's sadness, then the shouting of good-byes: ‘Farewell, Steinn Elliði!' said my friends. ‘Hail, ye who put to sea in your golden magical swift-sailing vessels, to search for new lands, explore new worlds, new philosophies, new mythic worlds of the living arts! And sail home again hale, arrow of southern fire, laden with holy power, the bearer of the new arts to your people in the north, Icelandic ambassador to the new dawn in the culture of a youthful Europe!'”

She didn't care a whit for the clever words of his friends' farewells, and instead asked in a faraway voice:

“Why do you have to go, Steinn? You're not going to sell fish?!”

“I go because I want to go! Of course I will go, go, go! What further
business do I have among these rustics, surrounded by barbaric boors and avaricious fisherfolk in this land of plebeian wisdom, where the vanguard of culture is composed of beggars, grannies, fortune-tellers, and retired bailiffs? I'll never be the main character in a romance with a setting and characters such as these! God bless the mountains of Iceland!

“I want to go out into the world, dear Diljá, to where the world wars were fought, in countries where cathedrals were shot at just for the fun of it and widows' hearths were leveled due to unscrupulous mistakes. You must have heard of such things. I want to see the day dawn over broken roods and carven images of Christ cut in half, over grapevines torn asunder and grapes trampled underfoot, forests uprooted; see the blessed human being who lies exhausted in the grass and either praises the Lord for the victory or curses the Devil for the defeat as he licks at his swollen wounds. I want to greet the day that dawns over the nurslings from the summer of 1914, who lost their fathers as offerings to the hands of the Kaiser, the fatherland, and the lie, freedom, slogans, and the Devil. I want to go, Diljá; Diljá, I want to see. I'm born to see; born for the wide world, the great huge world with its countless kingdoms and cities, a world full of monuments, crumbling or intact, from untold ages of culture, from ages of ascendancy and periods of decline, a world that hopes to see seven suns of new culture rise over the crumbling walls of palaces and tumbled-down towers.”

She was silent for several moments, half-hypnotized by his passionate outburst, but when she regained her senses, she said:

“I thought perhaps, Steinn, that you would have found it difficult to leave Iceland, the mountains, and your friends, but now I can hear
that you're in seventh heaven. Don't you know that Italy is teeming and swarming with crooks, thieves, and murderers, and that it's totally corrupt? Folk there are like savages, and they worship idols that they call saints.”

He walked over to the window where she was sitting and, with the intention of ridiculing her, laughed out loud.

“Where in the hell did you acquire all of this wisdom about Italy?” he asked.

But she only looked down at her toes, avoiding his glance, and without looking up fled over to the piano once again. She recalled having read it somewhere: in her history book, or in Karl Finnbogason's
Geography.
⁸
But maybe she hadn't read it anywhere; she just knew it offhand; in fact she'd never given a thought to Italy before yesterday.

A maid knocked at the door, then stuck her head in and announced that the coffee was ready in the dining room. Neither Steinn nor Diljá moved. Steinn Elliði fiddled with his cigarette case and lit a cigarette; neither of them said anything. But the air around them quivered with future tidings, burned with secrets. The clinking of tableware was heard from within the room at the other side of the hallway, where everyone else had gone for coffee. The grandmother called out:

“Children! Come while the coffee is warm!”

Diljá came to her senses and said:

“Yes, what are we doing here alone like asses?”

He cleared his throat and replied, in an annoyed, impatient tone:

“There's never any peace with these old grannies about! They grumble and rumble like spinning wheels, three or four at a time. Do
they think we're all better off just because we've poured lukewarm coffee down our throats? Didn't I just tell you, Diljá, that I need to discuss an important matter with you?”

In the next instant his tone changed; he held out his hands like a rhetorician and said abstractedly:

“I ought to tell you something, Diljá. I was up all night thinking about the heavenly divinity that radiates from the face of this earthly world; I was thinking of what things I should say to you before I left. What is disturbing me, Diljá, is of no small consequence. All spring long I sat by my window in the brilliant sunshine and composed a princely hymn to the sun, in between skewering fish flies with my fountain pen. No one in the world has ever conceived such magnificent thoughts as I did this spring.”

“Don't you think then that you ought to lie down and get some sleep before morning, Steinn?” she asked.

“Me?” he asked warily. “Do you think that I'm the kind of creature who could sleep here tonight? No, tonight I'm planning to stay awake, to gaze at the mountains and talk. And if no one wants to listen, then I'll talk to the mountains.

“Diljá,” he added quickly, imploringly, “I have to speak to you tonight after everyone goes to bed! Stay awake!”

But she still lacked any coquettish promptitude in her responses.

“Stay up, me?” she replied hesitatingly. “I don't know about that. The idea never really crossed my mind. But what is this, boy, you're going to miss the coffee!”

Then she added, in a lower voice: “At least Grandma mustn't know about it if I do stay up.”

The clock in the house strikes one, just one tiny stroke.

It is noiseless and still; he starts up at the dulcet metal sound and looks around the loft where his bed had been prepared. Had he drifted off? Was he the kind of creature who would let himself fall asleep? Hadn't he been dreaming of a girl with golden arms and red lips? Damn. Or had he dreamt that the night before? Or was it a memory of an even older dream? Damn.

The day would soon dawn behind Ármannsfell – it was much brighter now than it had been at midnight. Everyone was surely asleep, guests and residents; nothing stirred except for a window hasp that dangled from the frame of an open window somewhere on the back side of the house, and the flag rope that smacked at the gable at long intervals. They hadn't set a time for their meeting, but he snuck downstairs in complete certainty that she was waiting for him, and found the veranda door open. Only those doors through which someone is expected to come stand open like this at night, he thought, and he stepped out onto the veranda. He peered about; the maid had stacked the chairs before she went to sleep, to speed up her morning cleaning duties. He peeked through the windowpanes: the parlor window to the right of the door, the dining room window to the left, but no one was there.

A high-pitched screech sounded from the lava to the west: someone was whistling through bentgrass. He turned on his heels and saw her. She was sitting out by the road, just on the other side of the bridge over the cleft closest to the house, on the rim of a notch in
the lava rocks, with her feet down in the grass-grown crack. Her face was turned away from the Ylfingabúð, as if she had neither looked in that direction nor seen Steinn. She held her hands to her mouth, engrossed in signaling. Had he not been slightly nearsighted, he would have seen her immediately from the open veranda door. He walked straight over to her.

She had buttoned her coat up around her neck, but sat in a rather careless posture, as adolescent girls do. The hem of her coat reached to just above her knees, her strong calves stuck obtusely out, and she was not in the least bit conscientious about revealing her extraordinarily stout knee joints. This unhindered, imprudent pose was a reliable witness to a maidenhood too cloudless and untouched to know anything about protecting itself from danger. And yet there was a hot gleam in her steel gray, unswerving eyes.

He swelled with joy and jumped into the air:

“Tonight I'm as happy as an American boxer,” he said. “Or as Douglas Fairbanks, who leaps over fences from happiness and grins like a horse.”

But she had waited for him for an entire hour out in the night breeze, and when she heard how happy he was she was annoyed. She did not look up even though he was standing right in front of her; she looked at her open palm, which was green and wet from squeezing the grass between her hands.

Why couldn't she look up and smile? Hadn't it been her nature, since the time she had entered this world, to look up and smile? And hadn't he composed a poem about the girl who looks up and smiles? Had she changed and become someone else?