Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  Stanford was favourably impressed by her home; indeed, she had tidied up the room and closed all the doors. The pictures on the wall of the Prophet and Brigham Young were veritable masterpieces. But the bricklayer was really astounded to find that in this very place, right in the middle of the floor, should stand the proof that Pastor Runólfur had adduced for his thesis that in Utah man had achieved prosperity through having correct thoughts: a sewing machine. The machine stood on a special table in the middle of the room, as if the house had been built round it.

  “I would never have believed that this machine would be found at a Josephite’s,” said Stanford.

  “But I always thought it was Josephites who invented the sewing machine,” said the woman.

  “Is that so?” murmured Stanford, running his hands over this prince of machines cautiously and reverently, as if he had come across a bird or a flower in the middle of the wilderness. “What is the extension of the Golden Book itself if it is not a sewing machine? And that reminds me that when I took leave of Bishop Þjóðrekur in the city of Copenhagen where we had been drinking Kirsten Piil water, my prospects were so gloomy, and the poverty of my soul likewise, that I could only afford a packet of needles to send home to my wife.”

  “All I know is that the very best Elders in the Church come to me with their wives and daughters, sometimes on horseback, sometimes in sprung carriages. In that cupboard there I could show you a row of half-finished dresses for people in Provo, all made from pure silk in the latest New England fashion and so low-necked that you haven’t seen the like since you were being suckled.”

  Her coffee warmed the cockles as always, as one says in Iceland about a really hospitable pot of coffee. He drank two half-cups with a long interval in between, and on each occasion he ran his palms over his hair (which in fact was all gone by now), either because he felt it standing on end or because his scalp broke out into a sweat owing to the unspeakable power that lay latent in the coffee. The woman contemplated him deeply out of her long, dark subterranean dream. She was one of those women who had been graced in her youth by some muscular restriction at the corners of the mouth; this not only tempered the smile, but quite literally restricted it. And though it had often been stretched by involuntary spasms of laughter, it quickly reasserted itself, but had still not turned altogether into a wrinkle or a grimace, the way in which all the world’s beauty does. The woman stared sleepily straight ahead and right through the man, occasionally drawling some low-voiced, worried remark and sighing.

  “How are the women looking after you at the Bishop’s House?” she asked.

  “Turkey and cranberries, dear lady,” said the bricklayer. “When I look at the tables of plenty in this land of the All-Wisdom, where parts of more animals than I can name lie side by side on the board, as if in a millennium, and the milk so rich that it would truly be called cream among people who had not yet found the truth—is it any wonder that I am impressed by what people can manage to conjure up out of these salt-flats if they have the right book? If it were not wicked to say so, the only thing this little fellow from Iceland misses is some sour blood-pudding. Heeheehee.”

  “Excuse me, but have you anywhere to sleep?” she asked, sunk in thought.

  “What’s that?” said the bricklayer. “Where do I sleep? I really cannot remember, dear lady. I don’t believe I have ever noticed. It makes no difference where one sleeps in God’s City of Zion, the air is everywhere just as all-embracingly pleasing. Sometimes one stretches out on a bench out in the garden, with a jacket round one’s head for the flies; sometimes up on the balcony if it rains. This summer I often spent the night in the brickyard on top of my bricks. Now that it is getting cooler at nights, I stretch out on Pastor Runólfur’s floor. But I cannot deny that I am just beginning to wonder whether I should not build myself a little shed; but not for my own sake.”

  “I understand,” said the woman.

  “I have no doubt told you already that I have a wife,” he said.

  “Was that not on the other side of the moon?” asked the woman.

  “Does that not rather depend on which side of the moon one happens to be oneself?” said the bricklayer with a smile.

  “Whichever side she is on, does she not live in a house where she is?” said the woman.

  “Heavens above, one can put a name to anything,” said the bricklayer. “But that is not the whole story: this good woman bore me two children.”

  “Aren’t they doing all right?” said the woman.

  “Thank you for asking,” said the bricklayer courteously. “When I looked at them sleeping when they were small, their happiness was so beautiful that I almost felt sad to think that they would have to wake up. Once I thought that I could buy them a kingdom for a horse. But little came of that. And yet. Who knows? The night is not over yet, as the ghost said.”

  “I shall give you this house,” said the woman. “The house we are in now. If your wife comes, I shall not take from her anything she has a claim to. The only thing I ask in exchange, for my daughter and myself, is a share in a good man’s status.”

  He had not recited a verse to himself since the year in which he made the casket; but now he had started to rock back and forward and chant the way he used to:

  She gave food for hungry hound,

  She gave bed for sleeping sound.

  “This one wife was for me the same as Bishop Þjóðrekur’s three wives, Brigham Young’s twenty-seven wives, and the ten thousand wives that the god Buddha is said to have in his stomach.”

  All at once the corners of her mouth started straining, until she burst. She laughed long and heartily.

  He stopped his chanting and looked at her. She said, “I only hope that this wife of yours wasn’t like the monster that came ashore at the Vestmannaeyjar when Ronki’s grandfather was pastor there.”

  She heaved a sigh, and was no longer laughing.

  He did not let himself become confused, but said in a rather more deliberate tone of voice, “This woman’s indulgence towards me was not based on how much I could enhance her status in the eyes of man and God, for I have not yet been man enough to give her anything apart from that packet of needles. You will see from that, my good woman how likely I am to make other women more estimable in God’s eyes, when that was all I could do for the one who was all women to me.”

  A little later the bricklayer sat down and embarked on a letter to his benefactor, Bishop Þjóðrekur, who was now travelling some distant road. He said in his letter that it was unnecessary to try to express his thanks for the doctrine that the bishop had brought him and which had this advantage over other doctrines, that those who believed in it, prospered. He said that the more he contemplated the book that Joseph found on the hill and which Brigham upheld to the people thereafter, the less value he found in other books. “It is difficult to doubt that a book which can make roses bloom on a barren branch must be right. And in that case, the truth is something different from what we once thought,” said the bricklayer, “if it is as a result of a lie that the wilderness has become green pastures or golden acres of maize and corn.”

  Then he described freely how he himself had made good in God’s City of Zion, which he referred to as the Territory of Utah, as it was now called. He had become both a bricklayer and a housebuilder in Spanish Fork and its environs. He had been put in charge of other bricklayers and been paid foreman’s wages, and double pay had also been forced on him for toying with carpentry. He said the only reason he had accepted the money was his certain conviction that he was now in the land of divine revelation. He had been elected Ward Assistant and instructed to prepare himself for ordination which would authorise him to conduct ceremonies within the Ward. Although he was not an eloquent speaker, he had also been requested by the Stake to sit on the committee of the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association, where one discussed such things as the proper attitude towards proposals and how the behaviour of young people during courting should best be harm
onised with eternal matrimony sealed with the authority of High Priesthood. An Elder in Salt Lake City had said that he, Stanford, should be prepared to be elevated to the Stake. “The only thing,” wrote the bricklayer, “that grieves me in all this is that my mentor, Pastor Runólfur, the most learned and wisest of men, should not have been nominated to this position first. I cannot bring myself to accept preferment as long as my worthy spiritual father is given no promotion.”

  Finally he reached what was meant to be the main point of this letter. He said he had to admit that he sometimes noticed a certain coldness towards him from others; indeed, he himself felt misgivings about his own failure to fulfil the divine Moral Law, and most particularly to live up to the divine revelation concerning holy polygamy. Certainly he never for a day forgot God’s command that righteous men and true Latter-Day Saints should take unto themselves several wives under the seal of everlasting matrimony, and thus deliver them from physical loneliness, spiritual distress and lack of glory in the eyes of God. He was appalled at the tragedy, he wrote, of strikingly capable women, in every way deserving of heavenly matrimony, running around with Josephites, while their daughters fell into the misfortune in their youth of taking up with Lutherans, so that the names of the poor creatures became almost unmentionable in human society. He could also well appreciate the golden example that Brigham Young set the world when he had a house built with twenty-seven doors. But his, Stanford’s, weakness was no less great; in particular, he felt himself to lack the courage to undertake the responsibility of managing several wives while he had still not fulfilled his obligations towards a certain house and home with which he was not entirely unacquainted at a certain place in the world.

  His children, who had slept more beautifully than any others—what had they not deserved? Everything except what he himself was man enough to provide for them. “When they were reaching the stage of waking up into a world that was no longer a fairy-tale book I found their presence becoming more and more unbearable because of my utter failure to be worthy of them,” he wrote. And the woman who was so loving and compliant to her husband—her he left, and went on his way. He took with him a horse and a casket, which he called the horse of his soul and the casket of his soul; no doubt he hoped to buy happiness with them in the marketplace; or at least an earldom. But got a packet of needles.

  Thus ended the letter from Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer, of Spanish Fork, God’s City of Zion, Territory of Utah, to Bishop Þjóðrekur, Mormon, presumably touring somewhere in the Danish Kingdom P.S. “I enclose in bank-notes fares for my family and ask you to bring them over with you when you come; I shall try to have finished building them a brick house. St. P. Stanford.”

  22

  Good and bad doctrines

  Mine is a bad doctrine,” said the Lutheran. “And, what’s more, I cannot substantiate my doctrine. The man who has the best doctrine is the one who can prove that he has the most to eat; and good shoes. I have neither, and live in a dugout.”

  “I’ve heard that one before many a time,” said Pastor Runólfur. “Those who never have anything to eat or to wear are never tired of declaring their aversion to people who have plenty of food. And yet one of the Prophets said that a man needs to have food and clothes in order to perform virtuous deeds. You forget that every single thing contains a higher concept—good broth no less than a pair of topboots; the Greeks called this the Idea. It is this spiritual and eternal quality in all existence and in every thing by which we Mormons live. If anyone is so incompetent that he has neither broth nor topboots, nor the manliness to raise himself from a dugout, he is not likely to have a spirit, or eternity, either.”

  “I don’t care,” said the Lutheran. “No one will ever make me believe anything other than that Adam was a dirty shit. And Eve was no improvement.”

  At that time there was a great furor over the published dogma that Adam was of divine nature no less than the Saviour, on the grounds that God Himself had gone to the trouble of specially creating them both. With this, the Lutheran had touched upon a topic that really roused the defender-of-the-faith in Pastor Runólfur.

  “I might have known you would bring that up,” said Pastor Runólfur. “It has always been the sure sign of a drunkard and philanderer when he starts to abuse poor old Adam. Anyone who has anything on his conscience immediately slaps the blame on him. But I can assure you that Adam was a perfectly sound chap. Those who run down Adam are children of the Great Apostasy and the Great Heresy. Do you think that the Lord of Hosts would have debased Himself by creating a rotten shit? Or even a Lutheran? Do you think that when God made Adam He used material inferior to what He used when He made the Saviour? I deny absolutely that there is any fundamental difference between Adam and the Saviour.”

  “May I ask, what did this Adam ever accomplish?” said the Lutheran. “Did he ever make any money? I’ve never heard it said that he got himself a house, far less a carriage; not even a pair of shoes. He probably just lived in a dugout like me. And what did he have to eat? Do you think he had broth every weekday and turkey with cranberries on Sundays? I wouldn’t be surprised if he never had a square meal except for that apple his old hag offered him.”

  Thus they went at it hammer and tongs in the brickyard night and day, but never more fiercely than just before daybreak. Pastor Runólfur made a habit of waylaying the Lutheran at dawn on his way home from his mistresses to his Welsh wife in the dugout. It has never been worked out just how much of a theologian this intemperate dugout-dweller really was, and perhaps he was no more of a drunkard and philanderer than the unpleasantness of his homelife warranted. But for all that, Pastor Runólfur held him directly answerable for Luther’s heresy in particular and the Great Apostasy in general. And no matter how worn out the Lutheran might be, he was always just as eager as ever to stand up for Luther there in the middle of the road. He only asked his antagonist, Pastor Runólfur, leave to pop into the brickyard where he always had a drop or two left in the bottle carefully hidden in the pile of bricks for bracing himself before his wife woke up to read him the morning’s lecture. Stone P. Stanford never revealed where the Lutheran kept this mercy-font except for that one occasion which has already been related. But just as soon as the Lutheran had got hold of his bottle in the brickyard, no power in the world could hold him back any longer from his endless disputation with Pastor Runólfur—which seemed, indeed, to have an independent life of its own. Stanford, busy preparing the sun for its useful daily task, often heard the din of their disputation blended with the dawn chorus of the birds; on the one side schnapps, on the other side the Holy Spirit.

  But one day the page was turned, as it were: at dawn there was nothing to be heard but the song of the birds and the chirring of insects instead of theological disputation, and Stanford heard it rumoured that the destitute Lutheran had moved from the district.

  Time passed. And then it so happened late one evening, when Stanford was in the bishop’s brickyard stacking new-baked bricks, that all of a sudden an unknown visitor appeared before him as abruptly as when one sees a vision. It was an extremely young woman. She was one of those youngsters who suffer so overwhelmingly sudden a growing-up that physical maturity is upon them the moment they wear out their childhood shoes. She had a rather hard-boiled look on account of some gratuitous experience of the world, and did not know how to return a civil greeting.

  “Mother sent me,” said the girl, and bit her lip instead of smiling. “I was to bring you coffee.”

  “It is not the first time in the history of Mormonism that people have been sent something good,” said the bricklayer.

  She handed him a bottle inside a sock. Stone P. Stanford recognised both the sock and the bottle.

  “This is the next best thing to meeting your mother herself,” said the bricklayer. “A very good day to you, my dear, and my warmest thanks to you both. To get coffee this year, too, from Madame Þorbjörg, the seamstress—I can hardly believe my luck. It would have been quite enough to giv
e me coffee while I was a complete stranger here, without overwhelming me with kindness after I have become an everyday sight and when all reasonable folk have long ago discovered what an ordinary sort of fellow I am. And now, little girl, be so good as to have a seat on these new-baked bricks over here while you tell me the news.”

  The girl sat down on the bricks, bit her lip and was silent.

  “It is a long time since there has been coffee in my mug, if only I have not lost it,” said the bricklayer, searching around for it. When he had found his tin mug he reached forward with it and asked the girl to pour. He went on chatting with her so that

  “Somehow I had an idea that my friend, Madame Þorbjörg Jónsdóttir, had a daughter, even though I saw little sign of it that time I paid a visit to your house. You will have been born by then, I fancy, and not all that recently, either.”

  “I should jolly well think so,” said the girl, and snorted contemptuously. “I was practically in labour already!”

  “All the doors were shut, if I remember,” he said.

  “Of course they were all shut,” she snapped back at him.

  “It is a good custom and a fine rule to close the door, I was taught back in Iceland, even though there was no great surfeit of doors in people’s houses there,” said the bricklayer.

  At that the girl sat up straight and said accusingly, “Just so long as nobody is locked in.”

  “Oh, perhaps not every pleasure is to be found out of doors, my dear,” said the bricklayer.

  “They call us Josephites,” said the girl. “Every time I went out, the children jeered at me that we drank coffee.”

  “People are sometimes pretty empty-headed,” said the bricklayer. “And the greatest empty-headedness of all, I think, is to jeer at people who are different from oneself. It was endemic in Eyrarbakki, once upon a time. From there it must have spread all the way east to the Rangárvellir (Rangriver Plains) and then to America. Some people say it is wicked and ungodly and sinful to drink coffee. These people are undoubtedly right as far as they themselves are concerned, and accordingly they should never drink coffee. Then there are other people who can quote medical books to prove that coffee damages the heart, not to mention the liver, stomach and kidneys in this temple of God which is the human body. These people should not drink coffee either. But speaking for myself, I always drink coffee when I feel that it is