Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  After this reprimand she changed her tone, offered the visitor her hand, and asked what she could do for him.

  Steinar explained how it came about that he was standing there, and that he had been sent by the bishop himself. He delivered his message that the bishop did not actually send his regards in the mundane sense, and did not send his sisters any of those gifts which could be considered a vanity in this world, but his blessings instead, with assurances of everlasting exaltation and glory.

  “You spoilt it there,” said the woman. “Rikki would never say any such thing. How is he, poor fellow?”

  “He asked me to say that he was in Denmark, where the king lives, composing a pamphlet for the Icelanders, and would not be back for three years.”

  “Do you hear that, sisters?” said the woman with the spectacles, and in a twinkling two other women appeared on the scene. “Our Rikki is with that terrible man who drank the lifeblood of Icelanders for many centuries until we had nothing but the shirts on our backs, and some not even that.”

  “I would rather not hear people speak ill of Denmark,” said Steinar, “least of all now that I have just arrived safe and sound in Heaven. For I can testify that Denmark has water called Kirsten Piil water, the best in the world. Bishop Þjóðrekur and I partook of that water together.”

  “Now we’ve heard everything, María dear,” said the middle sister, who was comparatively young and brisk. She was leading by the arm an ancient purblind woman who was shaped like a flour-sack. The old woman’s fingers were twisted out of shape like frost-tormented twigs; and the backs of her hands were swollen. She was practically bald. And when she smiled there were no teeth to be seen, just a maternal warmth that would, however, scarcely have appealed to anyone but infants; and perhaps men under sentence of death. At her skirts there clung some wide-eyed children.

  “I can see that you must be the woman I was to ask to take care that the children came to no harm,” said the visitor, shaking by the hand this middle sister who was so plump and buxom.

  “Hark at him, María, how formal he is,” said the middle sister, and slapped her thigh.

  “It is only proper in a bishop’s house, at least to begin with,” said the visitor.

  “How can Rikki imagine that the children could come to any harm before María’s eyes!” said the middle sister.

  “For goodness sake ask the visitor in and cook him some dinner,” said the old woman María, and it turned out that she could neither say r nor s on account of her toothlessness.

  Steinar Steinsson doffed his hat involuntarily. He took hold of the old woman’s warped hands and kissed her reverently to show her his respect, but did not manage on this occasion to repeat the message that Bishop Þjóðrekur had asked him to deliver to her.

  “The poor man, to come all this long way on his own,” said the old woman, feeling Steinar Steinsson with her twisted fingers both on the face and the body. “It’s quite sure that God has something in mind for us all. I am pretty certain I still have some grains of coffee in the tin since our Lutheran was here the weekend before last.”

  “Only if Pastor Runólfur has not appropriated it as usual,” said the middle sister.

  This was the sort of house which used to be found in Iceland in occasional places, but was rare in other countries: its doors stood open to visitors and passers-by night and day, with refreshment always on hand however long they might wish to stay. Such houses never seemed over-crowded. No one ever objected to disagreeable visitors, although there were many who were not particularly congenial. The host never expected any payment of any kind for the hospitality; it was taken for granted that all travellers were destitute, and that rich people did not move from their homes. At Bishop Þjóðrekur’s house in God’s City of Zion the only demand made on visitors was that they should walk straight in without knocking. Lutherans would be forgiven for two knocks; a third knock was an affront to the Holy Spirit.

  Most of those who were put up in Bishop Þjóðrekur’s house were homeless Icelanders, some of them newly arrived, while others had managed to find the truth in the Promised Land with their unreliable heads and even more undiscriminating hearts, but rather less with the more dependable organs. Many of Þjóðrekur’s guests made their own homes eventually. Among those who had been there a long time was the Reverend Runólfur, former pastor for Hvalsnes. On account of a divine vocation he had abandoned his living in Iceland to serve the smallest and sorriest Lutheran church in the world, which three eccentric families had founded right in the heart of God’s city of Zion. After he came to America he gradually became a Mormon, and was baptised by immersion. Shortly thereafter the windows of the Lutheran church were boarded up. No one really knew what it was that impeded Pastor Runólfur’s advancement in Zion, for there were few who pursued correct thinking with greater zeal than he after his conversion, and even fewer who had a better knowledge of what they believed; for he, as a man of learning, had closely studied the Golden Book as well as the Prophet’s revelations and books of the original saints. Other men, some of them ignorant and indolent, swarmed up the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment straight from the floor of the byre, as it were, and became counsellors in their Wards, as they called their parishes, or even Ward Bishops, if they were not hoisted straight up into the Stake (which supervises the bishoprics) and made Elders, Seventies, Melchizedek High Priests or even Apostles before the cow had time to low thrice. But Pastor Runólfur willy-nilly had to stick to these fifteen ewes that Bishop Þjóðrekur had put in his charge six years ago, on the day he was immersed. He had still advanced no farther than the post of Ward Assistant. Yet no one was better suited to rally the waverers, and especially to wrangle with Lutherans; he wrangled some of them out of the house and others off their land and some even out of the country. It could well be that this talent for disputation was considered a two-edged weapon, and give the Mormons cause for alarm. But the fifteen ewes in his care, whose numbers he had to keep steady however many of them were slaughtered, even if they were all put to the knife at the same time—they took to the pastor and throve, particularly their tails, which were not at all like the tails one sees in Iceland, but long and full. Bishop Þjóðrekur was so tolerant in religious matters that he instructed the three sisters always to run up a new Lutheran frock-coat for Pastor Runólfur when the old one was worn out, in accordance with the custom that an army general who has been taken prisoner by the enemy is allowed to wear his uniform as long as he so desires, and his sword too if it is not lost or broken. This short, nimble-footed slender man with the watery eyes and the face pulled crosswise, always frock-coated in the desert—this was the man who undertook to train Steinar Steinsson in correct thinking.

  And since Pastor Runólfur was a most knowledgeable man, and somewhat free of tongue, he was quick to give strangers an insight into people’s affairs in the district, including the family relationships in the bishop’s residence. Runólfur said that Bishop Þjóðrekur owned three wives, but that people believed that he had only ever loved the woman he had brought from Iceland into the wilderness, where she had perished of thirst. He had buried her in the sand. After her death he carried their baby in his arms farther into the wilderness for a while, but the child’s life ebbed away until all movement was stilled. Bishop Þjóðrekur buried it in a sand-dune and planted over it a cross made of two straws. This child was said to have been a little girl. Bishop Þjóðrekur was one of the pioneers from Iceland who had bought the Promised Land for the price it was worth.

  Crossing the wilderness in the same party in which Bishop Þjóðrekur had brought his beloved and lost her was a middle-aged woman, travelling alone; she was called Anna, and wore iron spectacles. She was fifteen years older than Bishop Þjóðrekur. She had shared her water-supply with the mother and daughter to the very last drop. She relieved him by lulling the baby to sleep at night after Þjóðrekur’s beloved had died; and for this, Þjóðrekur was grateful to her. When the survivors reached the Kingdom of Saints, he
proposed to her and married her at the same time as he sealed a union to all eternity with the one who now lay in the sand. Anna had since then been in charge of his household, and was known as Járnanna (Iron-Anna). They gave the church one half of everything they earned, and fasted four times as often as the laws prescribed; they baked bricks and built houses for people and raised Welshmen and Danes, as well as Icelanders, out of the holes in the ground in which the pioneers lived, and which were called dugouts. For this and many other social deeds Þjóðrekur was made Ward-leader, Elder, High Priest, Bishop, Stake-president, and one of the Twelve Apostles of the Lamb, according to the Saviour’s choosing in the Prophecy of Nephi in the Time of Grace and the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times. This was the man whom the Icelanders had bound to a tethering-block, gagged, and beaten during divine service.

  Wandering about in Salt Lake Valley and its environs at that time was a destitute woman who said she had been born into this world in Colornay. Some learned Englishman in the Stake thought that this was a town in France; but later it turned out to be a place in Iceland called Kjalarnes. She was a tall and stately woman; she had been held up by a troop of soldiers (when people in America say that someone is held up, they mean that he or she was threatened at gun-point). At this time the Federal Government of the United States had begun to send to God’s City of Zion armed troops to persuade the saints to abandon the Moral Law which had been manifested to them by God and proclaimed by the Church, including holy polygamy. These troops had put the girl in the family way. Next year she was held up by Redskins; these men use bows and arrows and kill people with great artistry, like Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi, as was written before. On account of these hold-ups the innocent girl was ostracised by various nationalities, particularly by the Welsh and Danish, who at that time vied with one another in living the pure life in Spanish Fork. There were not many people who wanted to have such an outcast in their homes, and she often had to spend the night in the tamarisk thickets on the banks of the salt-springs where frogs croaked and grasshoppers and crickets chirred. Her young children also slept with her there. One Christmas, Bishop Þjóðrekur rescued this wretched woman and her two children from the hollow in the ground where they were living, and said that it was contrary to Joseph’s Book and the doctrines preached by Brigham Young, the Prophet’s dedicated disciple, that women should be bedded out in the open by soldiers and Redskins to no good purpose. The Lord had purposely instituted polygamy by direct revelation in order that no woman should have to lie outside in ditches with her family at Christmas. It was the express duty and law of the Church of Latter-Day Saints that Mormons should protect as many women as possible with the seal of eternal matrimony instead of making them outcasts and jeering at them. On the basis of this conviction, Bishop Þjóðrekur invited Madame Colornay into his house and took her to wife along with Járnanna, whose spectacles were then becoming badly rusted. He also sealed to himself the children she had conceived during the hold-ups, and begat a couple more with her himself. With this, Bishop Þjóðrekur earned himself still more respect in Spanish Fork; it showed how much he excelled other men, in that his benevolence and wisdom matched his fearlessness towards the prejudices of the Welsh and the Danes. And no one supported him so steadfastly in this act of piety as his first wife, Járnanna.

  Nor did Bishop Þjóðrekur’s standing in the district lessen, particularly in the eyes of the wives he had already, when he decided to marry for a third time and seal to himself in heavenly matrimony poor old María from Ampahjallur, who was fully seventy years old, crippled with arthritis and blind. She too had trekked across the wilderness.

  This María hailed from the Vestmannaeyjar and had never been associated with a man in her life. She had come to America as a servant to a family from the islands. It was her task to carry the children across the wilderness and support their sick mother. Then the mother perished, as was the custom in the wilderness at that time. María did not abandon the children when the journey was over; she reared them herself and sewed every stitch of clothing they wore, taught them Hallgrímur Péturrson’s Passion Hymns, and told them parables about saintly people in the Vestmannaeyjar. She never let an angry word to man nor beast pass her lips; she was also one of those Icelanders who never speak ill of the weather. When her orphan brood had flown away and scattered to the four corners of the earth (some had gone to the war), she took upon herself another family of children who had lost their bread-winners. This brood too she reared to adulthood with wisdom from the Vestmannaeyjar and long night-vigils of knitting and washing even though she was now nearly blind; but most particularly with the kind of affection that fears nothing and grudges nothing. Time passed, and soon these children too were gone into the wide world to acquire all the things that María Jónsdóttir had never enjoyed. But word got around that there was an Icelandic woman who could bring herself to love other people’s children, and so María was asked to look after some orphaned Danish children in the holy city that the wicked called Salt Lake Puddle. She set off towards this good city, bent with age, half-blind, and destitute. The Danish children did not understand the Passion Hymns and so she had to make do with telling them parables about good folk in the Vestmannaeyjar and about young birds called puffins which were pulled out of their burrows in the cliffs there and made into puffin soup, until these children too were ready to say goodbye. The old bent woman was left behind on the broad streets of the holy city, alone, friendless, and homeless. And when she went out for a stroll she was knocked down on the road and injured. The police took her to a hospital there in Salt Lake Puddle. She said her name was María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur in the Vestmannaeyjar. It was then advertised in Spanish Fork that a lone and blind old woman from the Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, had been found lying injured on the road. No sooner did Bishop Þjóðrekur hear this than he harnessed his horses and drove his carriage to Salt Lake Puddle. He went to see the woman in hospital and greeted her respectfully and asked her to marry him with due seals of eternal matrimony in the temple before God. Then he gave her a dollar to buy herself coffee. He told the hospital superintendent to send him word when her broken bones had healed, and he would return to fetch her in his carriage. When the time came, he married her with all proper ceremony and took her home to the Bishop’s House, 214 Main Street, Spanish Fork. María took it upon herself to rear the children that Madame Colornay had brought into the world, and taught them Pastor Hallgrímur’s beautiful prayers as well as pious tales from the Vestmannaeyjar. María said she hoped that the Lord of Hosts would be pleased to send her other people’s children to have around her for as long as she was granted grace to be able to knit a sock.

  19

  God’s City of Zion

  The hoofbeats of cantering horses, large and small, sounded on the road, and the creak of axles and wheels. The foals that trotted behind looked confident but a little pensive. Men and women went riding past on important business, the women on saddles but the young boys riding bareback in pairs on old hacks, as they do in Iceland when they are herding cows. The neighbours stepped up on to the veranda to greet the visitor from Iceland. They asked for news of home. But no sooner had he started to talk than a distant look came into the eyes of the questioners. Iceland vanished as soon as its name was spoken. Their speech was as perfect, certainly, as the chirping of birds, and so polished on the outside and scrubbed on the inside that it took particular dexterity to introduce a foreign phrase; but if one used an old proverb or some well-known quotation from the sagas, people smiled amiably and absently, and had already forgotten it. The weather in Iceland last year and the year before last concerned them no more than the hydrocarbon halo around Sirius. News of men and affairs in Iceland only prompted them to expatiate on the great events of the present Kingdom of Saints and cite Joseph Smith’s Golden Book, or praise his successor Brigham Young, that chosen leader who towered over not only the mountains of the Territory of Utah but the whole of the western hemisphere as well. Iceland, with its litt
le parish officials and low mountains, its ever-hungry soil-grubbers who composed ballads, and its one (at most) well-to-do person per district—was it any wonder that such a country, in the minds of these Zion-dwellers, had faded away to the far side of the moon? Seldom had a country been so utterly lost to a people as Iceland was to those Mormons.

  Pastor Runólfur always took newcomers from Iceland into the enclosure to show them the sheep he looked after for Bishop Þjóðrekur, to let them admire how beautiful and thick their tails were compared with the stumps on Icelandic sheep.

  This is the place, Brigham Young had said when the Mormons finally came down off the plateau on to the shoulders of the mountain and looked out over the great basin with its unbroken soil, spring streams and cool groves. The Mormons never tired of recalling how only half an hour after their arrival in the Promised Land they unloaded an apology of a plough from a ramshackle cart which some emaciated oxen had dragged step by step in the name of Jesus across the endless wastes of America; now these bullocks stood there with the placidly sullen expression of beasts in the Bible, with blood on their hooves, shaking their heads so that their slaver glistened in the blazing sun and drinking from a stream; and the men had started to plough.

  After the stories about the trek across the wilderness came the episodes from the life of the early settlers, when everyone lived in dugouts—trenches which they raftered with ropes or roofed over with hides. Very few of the people had any clothes other than the hides of game-animals; some managed to get skins of mountain-goats or antelopes, others of deer or bison from which they made skin-hose or moccasins. Gradually the age of wool began, the days of the spindle and distaff. Brigham Young himself testified in all sincerity about the saints who were in his company, that some had blankets but many had none: “Some had shirts, but I think there were also some who had none, neither for themselves nor their families,” said the pioneer who led people to a greater bliss in this world and the next than most other leaders have ever done.