The Great Weaver From Kashmir by Halldór Laxness Page A

holding back sobs, and I couldn’t say anything. He wanted to take my arm, but I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to make him follow me, but this didn’t work and I felt even more resentful. By the time we reached the foyer back home, I was completely deranged and no longer knew what I was doing. Just as soon as he had taken my cloak, I threw my arms with no warning around his neck and cried loudlyat his breast in some sort of lunatic ecstasy, begged him to help me, said that I loved him, and so on. Thus was the groundwork laid for my marriage to Grímúlfur, Diljá dear.
    When we married I celebrated having been consecrated into the same sort of life of luxury in which I was raised, and I looked forward to the joys of wedlock, because in my childishness I had often thought that marriage meant the fulfillment of all hopes. This is what all of us women think before we wake up to reality; and our bosoms bubble and boil like mud springs from this incomprehensible yearning to encompass all the happiness of Heaven and Earth.
    But nothing is further than marriage from being able to satisfy the desires of a true woman – I don’t mean those soulless female things that let themselves be used like dull screws in the machine of society. The true woman soon discovers that the happiness of marriage is not the fulfillment of all hopes, but rather the relinquishment of all hopes: “resignation”; and that without this relinquishment there is no happiness. Marriage is a shipwreck in which the cruise ship is tossed against a cliff, a bankruptcy in which youth has nothing left over but debt. Nothing is more empty and sad than the long insomniac days of the first year of marriage, unless, perhaps, the grave itself. Imagine the young wife as she sits at home sleepy and alone and breathes in the revolting stenches of the new home, or else invites her girlfriends over, reluctant, cold, and matured after the fresh experience of her honeymoon. But the man doesn’t come home until evening, because he promised himself to another bride before his wife: his business, and its demands come before all others. And when a newly wedded woman finds herself at home surroundedby the brand-new furniture in her living room, she discovers that she herself is actually nothing but a piece of furniture, purchased to complete the ridiculous unit that the man calls his home. And when she takes her girlfriends from room to room to show them the wedding gifts, oh, all that disgusting cursed rubbish made of gold and silver and who knows what! – living room furniture, dining room furniture, the salon, the boudoir, the bathroom, the bedrooms – oh the smell, the smell! – then in her heart she feels almost the same as if she were showing them the crypt where her corpse is to wait for Doomsday.
    The man she marries is never the same whom she saw in her dreams, never the one she expected. The man she marries is never anyone but the one she let take her, the one into whose arms she threw herself in a kind of bewilderment, because she couldn’t find the one about whom she dreamt. The man she married was the one who offered her gold and green forests. She uses all of her powers of self-deception to settle for whatever he lacks of the outstanding qualities of her dream man, and even succeeds from time to time in convincing herself that her husband is a perfect image of the one she longed for, and determines to do everything she can to enjoy with him what she had imagined enjoying with her dream man. But all the time she knows this one thing, despite all the deception: that he is still not the same man she had desired. She might live with him her whole life and raise children for him, but nothing else is guaranteed except that deep, deep within her is hidden the hope that in spite of her fate and her ruined palaces, the moment might come when her sweetheart will suddenly sweep into her dull, everyday life: she quickens when he