The Great Weaver From Kashmir (45 page)

“
Benedic, pater, quia peccavi
.”
¹³⁵

And the Father Confessor made the sign of the cross over him and answered:

“
Benedicat te omnipotens Deus: In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti
.”

There was silence in the cell.

For several moments Steinn buried his face in his hands without finding an outlet for his thoughts in words, and when he finally started to speak his voice was stern and brittle.

Before he confessed particular sins he spent a long time chastising himself for the crime of the complete corruption of his soul, his strong, intractable passion for concealing his personality, his limitless joy in kindling marsh-fire over his own vanity, his lack of courage to come forth with the sincerity and humility of a clean soul;
in everything he had shrunk from assimilating himself to the will of God. He loved every single most unrighteous movement in the depths of his soul and had created for himself as quickly as he could a philosophical system as an excuse, found himself guilty of crimes against the will of God. He believed in God and God's Church, but had chosen his own lies and delusions over the redeeming truth. He knew precisely what was true and what a lie, what vanity and what reality, what was right and what wrong, and he loved a lie knowing full well it was a lie, chose vanity over the eternal truth, and wrong over right. When he rejected God and joined hands with the Devil, it was neither from blindness nor weakness, but rather, quite bluntly, because he was enchanted by the Devil and loved him. He longed, quite bluntly, to revolt against eternal life and Almighty God and sell his soul to the Devil. He had, time and again, considered whether he ought not call upon the Devil sometime during the night and make a contract with him for his soul. He frequently and sincerely longed to be able to go to Hell so that he might take part in the revolt against the eternal and Almighty God of judgment for all eternity. He would not yield a hair's breadth to this almighty tyrant of being. He knew well that the Devil and his imps were condemned to eternal suffering; but he chose eternal suffering rather than the alternatives, to lose himself or submit to God.

Such were his thoughts, such his will. He considered himself lost, felt that there was nothing left in him that could save him; when he looked in the mirror he thought he could see
poenam damni
¹³⁶
in his own face. Nothing could help him but the hand of God himself. He did not wish to mend his ways, could not do this voluntarily; nothing could correct him but God, the author of his soul. If he were not
to be lost, God would have to take him by force and renew his soul from its bottom up, think for him, will for him, make him put one foot in front of the other as if he were a lifeless doll, because if he controlled his own footsteps, he would walk straight into perdition. He was so deeply sunken that he had lost all hope of being able to lift himself out of the depths.

Next he counted up specific sins in thoughts, words, and deeds, one after another, the last being that he did not repent of anything that he had done, but rather presumed himself entirely lost, and concluded by saying that he considered himself completely unworthy of being granted absolution. A long silence followed his confession, and the penitent again hid his face in his hands.

Finally the silence was broken by the voice of the Father Confessor, gentle, lyrical, and bright: no despair, no surprise, no disquietude, no sign of any desire to blame or to rebuke.

“
Domine, si me vis esse in tenebris, sis benedictus
,”
¹³⁷
he began. “We must never forget to thank God when he has led our souls into the darkness whence we see no way out. For Jesus Christ is our Redeemer, not we ourselves. It is he who seeks out the soul of man in the darkness and leads it forward into the light. In truth, we are nothing unassisted. My friend, we both know that the way toward blessedness is narrow and steep. But on that road Christ himself and all of his saints are our guides, and the angels of God our defenders. We stumble. There is nothing more certain than that we will stumble. We fall and lie there where we have fallen. Again and again we are convinced that we can do nothing unaided; that even our best will is worthless without God's grace. Then all we have left is to allow our lament to ascend to God. But God has never refused his
mercy to those who consciously lament their weaknesses. Remember that the holiest men have fallen before you ever did. They have lain powerless and despairing in the dust like you. And they decided to lie there where they had fallen. Nowhere do we behold God more powerful than in our weakness. God reveals his power in our weakness. The more powerless that we find ourselves, the more securely we may trust the guidance of God. And the saints recalled how Christ himself fell three times to the earth beneath his cross on the road to Golgotha. He even prayed in Gethsemane that the bitter cup might be taken from him. And his sweat was like drops of blood that fell to the earth. And when the saints recalled this they got back up, like Christ who had to get back up three times before he carried his cross to the end of its trail. My friend, remember that Christ himself fell beneath his cross before you did. The cross of Jesus Christ is the one joy of a sinful man. Christ, Christ, it is you who carries your cross before me, scourged and crowned with thorns, and who calls me to follow you to the heavenly wedding feast! I love only you, my Creator and Redeemer, my Lord and God, who have descended from your Heaven for my sake.”

Copenhagen. Hotel Phoenix. 2 February 1927.

My most dearly beloved friend.

Have all of my letters been lost?

Or am I to believe that you have forsaken me, after I have forsaken everything for you?

Time and again I wrote to you at the abbey in Belgium without receiving any answer, and now I am told that you are somewhere in Rome; therefore I send these lines to the Danish embassy with tearful pleas that you answer me if they reach you.

Steinn, do you still not know what has happened? Fate has made everything happen as it must happen. Steinn, you disappeared without saying good-bye, and yet you must have known that the vow you took from me would surely cut two threads that were wound together. Do you not know, Steinn, that I have become a murderer for the vow I was made to swear to you that last night? Where are you, Steinn, so that I can make more vows to you? Will you never answer me again?

Yet Örnólfur was perhaps the best man in the world, the only noble man whom I have known, the only good man. He gladly did everything he could for me when I was little.

He lived for me and believed in me ever since I was little.

Steinn, can't you believe in anything but God? Steinn, God doesn't love you as much as I do.

When I told Örnólfur that I was no longer true to him, all things became worthless in his eyes. I know that they will hound me to death, those terrible words that I let fall from my lips in sheer panic the first night he came home. I said that I hated him, that he terrified me, begged him to kill me rather than to touch me any longer as his wife. I have written you all of it in long letters, but you haven't answered. Do you then have no word of comfort to lend to your lover
who has sacrificed everything for you and sold the peace of her soul for her freedom? Yes, she has sacrificed the health of her soul to you for as long as any eternity exists, has become a murderer for your sake. Now she awaits your order. There is no crime so unspeakable that she would not commit if it were your will.

Don't you also know that I carried your child for two months in my womb, and didn't know until after a long illness that I had miscarried? Steinn, I have carried your own progeny in my womb. And when I came to my senses after the delirium I met your grandmother's glance. And I understood everything at once. For two months, while I was recuperating, I had to live and breathe in the piercing, contemptful cold that is reserved for whores and murderers in the eyes of that soulless witch.

One morning in the fall I found myself alone; someone came to me and said that Örnólfur had been found dead with a bullet in his head. I was all by myself, alone, and no one farther away from me than you.

But what is it that I have endured, Steinn, if you have faith in me? Nothing! A game! A game! One can endure anything for the person one loves, yes, even reject God and all goodness and commit outrage after outrage; I shall be exactly as you wish, do with me everything that you will, because you own me entirely in body and soul, every hair on my head, every cell in my body; it is all yours; but I ask you only one thing: do not drive me away from you! Only one thing can repair what I have broken, and that is if you allow me to love you and live for you, endure for you. God will forgive me if you allow me to love you. And if God exists, I have no reason to believe anything but that you love me. You cannot push me away from you so long as you
believe that God has created us, reigns over us, and will judge us! Because if you do not love me then no atonement exists for our sin within the boundaries of existence!

Oh, Steinn, let it no longer be proven that everything that touches me dies! No, Steinn, I know, I believe, that you love me. I want to believe it! Wrap your arms around me and allow me to become the mother of your happiness and your children! I shall forget everything and bring them to my breasts and suckle them so that I am not lost for eternity. And I shall teach them to cry out to God. And we shall pray to him to erase the past entirely. Steinn, Steinn, come and speak one word in my ear! No saint has desired God as passionately as I desire you, no saint has ever loved his Lord more profoundly than I love you.

Roma. Convento Salesiani, Via Romagna.

I do not ask you to forgive me for anything, because it is not in your power to forgive. I am bound to answer to another mightier God for my sins. When you say that you love me you have no suspicion of what it is you say. You have never seen me as I am, do not know who I am, do not want to know who I am, would die if you knew who I am. You have only caught a fleeting glimpse of the part of my being that turns from God. You have been bewitched by the hallucinations of the Devil in my nature. A woman does not love a man, but rather the beast in a man. You love the part of myself that I hate and despise,
my imperfection. My perfection hates you. To the side of my being that turns to God your eyes will never be opened; because the only thing that panders to a woman's nature is deception. You have no higher desire than to be allowed to join with the part of my being that the Lord commands me to defeat for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. I am an immortal soul, created to rest in God and eternal life. Nothing is of any worth to me but the predestination of my soul for eternal life. “My heart lacks all peace, until it rests in God.” All is vanity but God. Nothing is true but God. My soul longs for the eternal reality behind creation.

Rome in all of its glory has incredibly little attractive power for a young, fatigued woman who has traveled night and day for seventy-two hours in order to rescue her lover from the hands of trolls.

On a raw, cold morning early in the last month of winter, she steps out of the Munich-Rome express, exhausted after a sleepless night, alien and speechless. After getting directions from thievish porters and larcenous cabbies she sits down to breakfast with her maid in a dirty hotel, in a large hall open at both ends, where savage dogs slink in and out and scowling salesmen offer stolen rubbish at half price. The city is one street after another of filthy, dilapidated houses, black ugly hulls of churches, abominable statues. Thus does Rome greet a grieving and wretched pilgrim of love. Would she like to buy a fountain pen?
Prima qualità, signora, pure trente lire!
Or a meat
grinder?
Piccola, facile, signora;
might I have the honor of taking it apart and showing the madam its insides? Or a violin? Stradivarius, built in 1728. Would the madam like to peek inside and see the stamp as proof?
Di una originalità assoluta, signora–

She looks at herself in a mirror in her large and shadowy room, where every piece of furniture is rickety; beetles crawl across the floor, and from her bedclothes wafts a stale human stench. She is gray and jaded, her eyes bloodshot: the lines beneath her nose have never been so visible as on this morning; oh, she is a world-weary woman who has nothing left untouched in her possession; in just a few years she will have become a witch. Her youth had come and gone like a rainbow or a multicolored butterfly. She had dreamt dreams by the window; reality is never anything other than the relics of the palaces of dreamland. The young girl who once upon a time felt the dream of life give her precious chills has now brought death to all; what touches her dies. She throws herself onto her bed to let the gnawing weariness pass from her limbs.

The Tiber River tumbles on with the history of mankind in its brown waves. It is a senseless satire, without beginning or end, like a dance of death in a graveyard. And a certain man fords the river on a braying donkey and reaches the bank right where she is standing, and the donkey shakes itself and continues to bray. “Greetings!” says the man; he is dressed in a nappy black overcoat and has turned the collar up and pushed his hat down over his eyebrows to make himself look odd; he is wearing light gray spats and steak brown shoes.

“How lucky it is for us to meet, since your journey has led you here,” he continues. “Because then I get to enjoy the pleasure of showing you a little of Rome. Please climb up here in front of me.”

The man did not say his name, but she recognized immediately who he was, longed to flee but was unable to do so, finally saw that her most hopeful chance was to pretend that she took him for a stranger who worked as a guide, and mounted the donkey in front of him trembling in anguish. But the man was determined to talk and certainly thought he was likeable: he was well-informed in history and gave her a summary of the most important events in the Roman Empire, old and new.