The Great Weaver From Kashmir by Halldór Laxness Read Free Book Online Page A

either.”
    It was as if she knew how peculiar and clumsy these words sounded coming from her mouth, because she added, with eager conviction:
    â€œI made that vow a long time ago.”
    She looked him straight in the eye, and it was apparent that she herself did not know whether she was telling the truth or a lie. She wasn’t about to start carrying on about asceticism in grandiose poetic prattle or mystical exhortation, but the determination and passion in her voice were not affected. In the next instant she cast herself facedown onto the field.
    And she lay there before him young and fair, pressed herself down into the luxuriantly thick spring grass, herself nothing but a personification of the fertile earth. When she drew in her feet her clothing tightened over her hips, revealing their agreeable roundness; this slender, resilient body rested here in the spring grass, and the male partner in the tango could sway like a reed in the dance. She was a woman, fit to become the mother of generations, like Egill Skallagrímsson’s queen at Borg. But the ascetic would not take the opportunity to lift her into his arms in order to kiss her on the eyelids.
    â€œArise, Diljá! Take my hand! This hour is holy. I am bidding farewell to my childhood and leaving. And the sun has risen.”
    And he added, as if performing an old ritual bungled together by prelates:
    â€œLet us pledge to each other to offer our souls and bodies to the truth that is concealed behind creation and that radiates from the visage of things.”
    A moment passed and she did not move. She seemed not to have heard his words. She could just as well have been sleeping or dead. When she finally stood up it was as instantaneously as when she had thrown herself down. Her face was wet. She had been crying,silently, without a sob. She came so near to him at that moment that her face was no farther away than a few inches from his chest. It was as if she were dead drunk. With closed eyes and an exhausted sigh she reached out to him with her warm, damp hands, which she could just as well have folded onto her own naked bosom.
    â€œDiljá, we call God as witness to this vow of chastity,” said he, in a deep, solemn voice, as he looked at her eyelids. And she let the words echo in her mouth: “We call God as witness.”
    Then she looked up. The eyes of this living soul were aglow with suffering. She looked into his face and sighed once more. She tilted her head back, as if she thought that a cup would be raised to her lips.
    â€œYes,” she whispered with a shudder, and swallowed the sob that arose in her throat when she started to speak. “We call God as witness. We call Almighty God as witness.”
    They squeezed each other’s hands as hard as they could and gazed with drowning eyes at each other’s lips.

11.
    Steinn!
    Now winter has come and it’s been almost seven months since you left. You left in July; now it’s Christmas. It was bright then; now it’s dark. But more than likely winter only visits me, not you. You must be so happy there in the south.
    No snow falls to the earth in the south and you never experience a sunless day or a night of storm. Every day there is like a fairy tale, and at night everyone can sleep. The people there think only about God and the solar system and the glory on the visage of things. But at home boats are always sinking and men are always falling off of trawlers. And collections are taken for widows at every church door, burlesque shows are put on, dances and evenings of comic songs are held for the benefit of orphans. And here no one ever talks about the glory on the visage of things; they just insult each other in the newspapers.
    How could anyone possibly believe that you have a thought remaining for the ones you left behind in the cold and polar darkness;how could I be so foolish as to think that? The longer you’re gone the better I see how foolish I am.