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

seen all the soldiers parading through the streets in Germany. And when you looked down on the soldiers from the balcony of your hotel, it was as if you were looking out over meadows of incredibly tall grass, and wind was blowing through the grass. But that was the bayonets on the soldiers’ shoulders, all tilted in the same direction. You said you hoped that the Kaiser in Germany would conquer the whole world. And when Grandmother got tired of listening, you toldjust me about everything you’d seen. And I said nothing; I just gazed at you and sighed. No one can believe how happy a little girl can be when she reclaims her playmate from death.

16.
    After you moved to your new home in Rauðarárvík we saw each other less often than when you lived in town. During the winters you were completely busy studying, during the summers either abroad with your mother or on some trip with the Væringjar boys. One summer you were up north in Akureyri. Often weeks went by when I didn’t see you, sometimes months. And every time I did see you I felt that you’d become a greater man than when I saw you last. I continued being a little girl and had no clue as to what was happening in the world, didn’t understand what people were talking about, but you lived and moved in reality. My thoughts were like fog in the spring.
    And there were all kinds of stories being told about you. Your schemes were supposedly endless. One person said that you were a brawler, another that you were a boor. My girlfriends talked about you: some were with you in lyceum, had crushes on you, and were never more attracted to you than when they told ugly stories about you. I often wanted to ask you when I met you next whether this or that story was true. But when we finally met you were so gloomy that I completely forgot what I’d wanted to ask you. Is it true that you once climbed from the street up onto the balcony of the parliament building and had the boys yell, “Down with the king!” and that youwere admonished by the rector for it? Is it true that you once got some of the boys to help you light a shed on fire up in Mosfellssveit, and that your father had to pay for it? Is it true that you once knocked out one of your classmates with a billiards cue?
    Steinn, to this day I still shudder at one particular story, so you can imagine how I felt when I first heard it. Sigga P. told me. I cried most of the night. I’ve never blamed you, Steinn, not once then, no, not even once then. But that night I wasn’t a child; I don’t know what I was! I would gladly have come to you on my knees and begged you to be good to me. I felt like a foal caught in an earthquake or a dog in a thunderstorm. If I’d ever before thought that I had you measured, whatever I’d used to measure you was turned into a child’s toy. I realized that you were beyond all measure, like a force of nature.
    You once had four cats; do you remember? You kept them in a little room in the basement, never let them out, and fed them yourself. Everyone knew that sometimes you spent hours at a time alone with the cats, and that you’d come back scratched and bloodied. And when we came to visit you always took me down to the basement to show me the cat-folk. Rúrik and Hansína are a couple, and Hans and Rúsína too, you said, since you’d given the cats those silly names. And they all meowed around you before you’d even gotten through the door, jumped up to your shoulders or hung on to your clothes. I couldn’t help but feel disgusted by it.
    But once during the summer you invited me home to see something new. And I came over. You took me back down into the basement and opened the little room with a key. And how it surprised me to see a bunch of birds there, and the cats’ den empty! “Look!” you said, and you started making chirping noises, and some of themcame and sat on your hand and others on your shoulders.