Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  In the evening Bishop Þjóðrekur came over to the group of young people who were struggling to dance in the heavy seas to snatches of mouth-organ music played by a drunk. Seasickness was so foreign to them that they delighted in the towering waves which tumbled them all over the place according to the laws of physics. The bishop put his hand on the shoulder of the girl from Hlíðar, who had just been pitched into a man’s arms in a corner. She rose to her feet in confusion and brushed a stray lock of hair from her hot cheeks; the pupils of her eyes were dilated, glowing.

  “I have just come from your mother,” he said. “She has taken a turn for the worse, I fear. Your brother and the boy are both in bed in my place, and I am now going back to see to the child. If I were a young girl I would not hang around so much with vagrants from Galicia tonight.”

  The girl flinched at this admonition from the bishop, and the terrified look of a sleepwalker invaded her face. She disengaged herself from the Goldminer’s arms with the formula they had established: “One minute,” she said, and ran.

  It was now quite late and there were no other people about apart from those whose incontrollable glandular activity compelled them to dance in a howling gale at night on a floor that tilted fifteen degrees. From cabins and salons all over the ship came the sound of people retching or vomiting and groaning with seasickness. But the girl walked the heaving decks cheerfully and felt no discomfort. She tried to tend her mother, and gave her water and drugs as the doctor had prescribed. She tried to tell the exhausted woman about the weather. She said that young people who could not understand one another welcomed all the pitching and rolling, and she cheered this listless woman with the news that she had met some foreign gentlemen who were very nice to her. Although the woman did not react with any exuberance, she was not dead; she even half-opened one eye and smiled with one corner of her mouth towards her daughter in this aforementioned small red glow, as if to say that the happiness of youth is a beautiful thing and that people should enjoy it while they could: “I understand you, my daughter,” she seemed to be saying with that half-smile, “and I will not reproach you for as long as I can see you with one eye, by the grace of God.” And with that she fell into a coma.

  The girl began to struggle out of her clothes in the tossing of the waves. The ship creaked as it plunged into a trough, or clambered up a mountain of water so steep that the propellers rose threshing above the surface. There was no pause in the groans and screeches of the engines.

  One minute. The words still rang in her ears as she stood there half-naked and numb as the ship pitched under her, holding on tight to avoid a fall. The sound of the door being opened was drowned in the din. It was her Goldminer, intent on compensating her for the brevity of their leave-taking a short while ago, to say goodnight and take her in his arms. And now she recalled Björn of Leirur, who always used to put out the light at this point. As if nothing were more natural she turned down the lamp without moving from his embrace, and caught a gleam of his blond wavy locks at the same moment as the light went out. While the women carried on breathing their last she inhaled this youngster who by his mere presence held sway over all her veins. The moment had arrived that some authorities consider all-important—so important, even, that nothing further awaits when it is past. But nevertheless here were no proposals made nor promises, no confession, compliment nor poetry, let alone any argument about morals and philosophy. At this moment which could just as well contain the true essence of a whole life, no other words were uttered than the magic formula: One minute.

  Time dissolved in the heat of this night of oblivion on the heaving ocean rollers that hurled the ship from wave to wave, to the sparse breathing of the suffering women and the strains of the lost and gone forever Clementine. The sensations and dreams of the blood’s dark night merged into a strange picture-book or ebbed away into oblivion to the accompaniment of the protesting propellers that reared into the empty air on the crests of the waves; and of the mouth-organ outside. She had fallen asleep, and was aware of nothing until she awoke at the man’s presence again. The hands which clasped her like an urn were now cold, and refreshed her. And the fire of this wordless night burned on from sleep to sleep, from distant memories of Björn of Leirur’s aromatic beard all the way up to the cackling of hens.

  As was mentioned earlier, Bishop Þjóðrekur had thought the woman from Hlíðar in rather worse shape when he had visited her the previous evening. The bishop had found her daughter mixed up with some crowd of rascals and admonished the girl until she went below. Then he went to the dormitory where her brother and small son were lying in bed paralysed with seasickness. The bishop could not sleep for worrying about the distaff side of this family he had been sent to fetch home for God safe and sound to a holy land. Again and again during that night he was on the point of going to visit the woman once more to see how she was doing in this tempest, but hesitated to leave the ailing little boy. There was a sage old Mormon from England in there, however, who always woke up at the crack of dawn and started chanting to himself a beautiful Mormon hymn about a poor sorry wayfarer. And now early in the morning, when Bishop Þjóðrekur heard the old Mormon starting to chant, he left the small boy in his care and went off to visit the sick and the wretched, according to the Gospel.

  The sea was still high and the sky leaden, but the storm was abating and day was dawning. He groped his way aft along corridors and companion-ways. There was not a soul afoot. Dim lights glimmered here and there. He opened the door of the sick-bay, and found that the light inside had gone out and the patients were lying in complete darkness. He brought out some matches and struck a light. He glanced towards the bench where the girl had her bed, and was astounded to see lying beside her an oldish-looking man, far from handsome, bald, and with a hare-lip, his mouth wide open, and snoring. Beside him this young girl lay sleeping peacefully in all the bloom of her beauty. This sight astonished the bishop so much that he forgot for a moment his mission and went over to the bench and shushed at the sleepers with the sort of noise one makes when driving sheep to their night-pastures. The girl was the first to stir and she opened her eyes. She saw the bishop standing at her bedside, and lying beside her a creature which in her semi-waking state seemed to her to be a monster. With a scream she cringed away against the wall, covering her naked breasts with her hands. At this point her bedfellow awoke too. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and giggled, so that the deep cleft in his lip gaped wider, but into his eyes came the bestial look so typical of those whom nature has disfigured in this way. He also mumbled a few unintelligible words in a nasal voice as he grabbed for the first clothes he could find to cover up his nakedness, a lean, sinewy, bony, hollowchested man. He slipped into his shabby shoes, tucked the rest of his clothes under his arm, and went off without a word of farewell. The girl still sat there crouched in a huddle as if she were turned to stone, with her hands fastened in a cross on her breast and fingers splayed, staring after the man in a craze of anguish.

  “Pull the blanket over yourself so that you don’t catch cold, little girl,” said the bishop. “I’m going to see to your mother, who looks as if she is lying in some discomfort. She surely wasn’t left unattended all night?”

  The woman from Hlíðar had been thrown this way and that by the motion of the ship, no longer strong enough to brace herself against it in the way that people do instinctively in heavy seas, even when asleep, to protect themselves. She was now lying on her stomach with her face jammed up against the bars at the head of the bed. Bishop Þjóðrekur eased her down and laid her on her back. She was cold and heavy, and showed not the slightest reaction to anything that was done to her. One eye was open and the other was half shut. The bishop put on his glasses and laid his ear to her heart. But when he had listened intently for a while he took his glasses off solemnly and put them neatly away in his spectacle-case.

  “Your mother has gone on ahead of us to the land, little girl,” said the bishop. “Your father and I will baptize her in due
course and give her the opportunity to enter the Holy City for all eternity.”

  At this unexpected new blow the girl ceased all unnecessary sighing over her own manifest fall in the swell, and her face sagged into an expression of vacant relaxation, as if the clockwork of her consciousness had come to an abrupt stop. Then she hunched herself into a ball and turned towards the wall with her knees up to her chin, her plump young body all at once became as soulless and sexless as that of an overgrown child, and the bishop covered her up with the blanket for the sake of modesty before he went away to see the ship’s officers.

  All that day, and the next, the girl never raised her head from the pillow, took no food and spoke to no one, but merely cowered against the wall. At midnight on the following night the girl’s brother arrived with the message that their mother was now about to be buried. She made no reply except to draw the blanket up over her head, and grovelled even further down into the bed.

  The storm had blown itself out, and the sea was now comparatively calm. The stars looked down.

  On the stroke of midnight the ship hove to for three minutes, and into the sea was consigned the body of this woman who had left home to travel to heaven to meet there the best man she had ever known, who had been dead to her for a long while now. Present at this funeral were the captain and first officer and six able seamen in their Sunday best. There was also the dead woman’s son looking a little embarrassed in the too short trousers and mountaineering boots Bishop Þjóðrekur had bought for him in Scotland. The doctor was standing a little apart smoking a cigarette, as was then becoming fashionable. Bishop Þjóðrekur was there with the woman’s grandson in his arms in the night cold. Also in the company was the old Mormon who knew how to sing one of the finest hymns that has ever been composed about a lonely wayfarer; this hymn, however, he was not allowed to chant except in silence on this occasion, for it is by law the task of the captain to read the burial service at sea if there is no clergyman present of the sects that Mormons call Gentiles. But Bishop Þjóðrekur nevertheless managed to say a few prayers over the woman’s mortal remains in a language that no one understood except God, but not for more than about thirty or forty seconds, for this was no time for dawdling.

  The body had not been placed in a coffin, but lay on its bier wrapped in thick sailcloth and wearing a white nightshirt from The Company; and finally the red and white flag of the Danish king had been wrapped around it as a token of respect; for in the ship’s register of the world’s nationalities, Icelanders were not reckoned as Finnish, unbelievable as it may seem, but Danish.

  “Inside that colourful cloth sleeps your grandmother, my lad,” said Bishop Þjóðrekur.

  The captain, a short powerful man, grey-haired and ruddy in the face, turned the leaves of his book, stepped forward into the lamplight at the head of the bier, and recited in English the prescribed words for burial at sea. Then he beckoned to the Mormon. Bishop Þjóðrekur stepped forward and handed the boy over to the old man, crossed his hands on his breast over his carefully wrapped hat, and said:

  “This sister of whom we are now taking leave shrouded in red and white attire which is not however her attire, but the Danish king’s, is now being welcomed home by God in other attire, the only attire she had left when she left Iceland. And this attire bears an emblem which is above Icelanders and Danish kings; it has on it the image of the Bee-hive, the Sego-lily, and the Seagull; it is the emblem of the land that the Prophet gave us with the Golden Book and which will rise in heaven on the day the earth is laid waste.”

  After that Þjóðrekur took the child in his arms again. The sailors now unwound the Danish king’s flag and attached ropes to the bier. Then they lifted the bier over the rail and lowered it carefully down the side of the ship. Bishop Þjóðrekur carried the boy over to the rail and showed him his grandmother going down. The boy stared with big intelligent eyes in the night cold, and was silent; but when the bier slid into the sea and the bonds began to loosen, all he said, with tears in his voice, for they had been the happiest people in the world when they lived together as paupers on the croft, was: “Little Steinar wants to go with Granny.”

  At dawn next morning Bishop Þjóðrekur opened the door of the sick-bay and went over to the girl on the bench and greeted her. She looked up at him like an animal from inside its lair, without acknowledging his greeting.

  “Were you awake, my lamb?” he said.

  The girl was silent for a long time, until she replied, “I don’t recognize myself. I don’t know what I am. Am I a person?”

  “I should think it very likely,” said the bishop.

  “To wake up and have lost everything, and know that one has nothing any more, is that being a person?” said the girl. “Oh, where is our beautiful horse which we once all owned together?”

  “There is no gainsaying it: the spirits around you are not at all attractive. I have been standing guard here all night. I had my hands full driving these devils off. First came one, then came another, and then came the third. In their eyes you are the basest of all harlots.”

  “Was it this then that my father promised me?” said the girl, now overcome by grief. “I beseech you in the name of I don’t know whom, save me from it, never again let me be blinded by it. Shut me in. Turn the key.”

  “I have another idea, my lamb,” he said. “And it is in actual fact the same expedient I resorted to on the river last autumn, when Satan stood on the other bank waiting to seize the child: I covenanted him to myself before God. I can think of no alternative than to do the same with you.”

  “You can do with me what you like, Þjóðrekur,” said the girl, “if only you will keep me safe and never let me loose.”

  “I shall just have to seal you to me by covenant, my lamb, and make you my heavenly wife. Otherwise the shadow of your degradation would rightly fall upon me, not only in the eyes of the Lord, but also in the eyes of your father who deserves better of me than that I should deliver to him a wretch from the rubbish-dump instead of the little girl whom he set out into the world to redeem.”

  “Dear Þjóðrekur,” said the girl and raised herself up with tears in her eyes and reached out her arms towards him. “If you want to make any use of this miserable life of mine, then redeem me, so that I may once again feel the breath of the days when I was little at home.”

  28

  Good broth

  The federal government had for a long time shown a disposition to incorporate into its jurisdiction the Territory, as the Utah settlement was called by its inhabitants when they were not speaking Golden Book language. The Latter-Day Saints were not very enthusiastic about any such association. The Government found itself time and time again being forced to send police troops, which were called Feds, to intervene when conflict arose between divine revelation and the U.S. President’s views. The biggest stumbling-block of all for outsiders was the doctrine that a woman should be esteemed in heaven and on earth according to who her husband was, and that therefore it was the duty of honest and upright men to give as many women as possible a share in their reputation and thereby to enhance their status. It is always a heavy step for a church to renounce a doctrine which has been confided to it by the Godhead; and this holds good not least for moral tenets which are founded upon self-denial by the individual and social enthusiasm by the congregation, such as had been the case with holy polygamy among the Mormons.

  At about this time the main road to Utah had been improved and immigrants began to pour in from the eastern States. This wave of emigration was justified by the phrase “Good Times” which was then coming into existence in America and had never been heard in the world before; such “times” were said to be had in Utah. The majority of these incomers, however, were certainly no Latter-Day Saints, but Gentiles, as the Mormons, copying the Jews, called people who do not recognize the true God. They say that such people belong to the Great Heresy, otherwise known as the Great Apostasy, in which Christians had been ensnared from the third century un
til the Prophet found The Book on Hill Cumorah. The Gentiles had no sooner installed themselves than they rose up against the Prophet’s pioneers, called his revelation balderdash and preached holy monogamy against holy polygamy.

  The Government had spies out everywhere in Utah to see if there were not some wretch somewhere sleeping with two or three wives. If any such were found they were dragged into court and ordered to pay compensation to the Government, or despatched farther east and put behind lock and key. Particular efforts were made to punish the most prominent men in every community in order to intimidate the minnows. And now the time came to examine more closely the situation in Spanish Fork, to see who had obeyed God’s command in this instance rather than the Federal laws and, if so, was important enough to justify the expense of punishing him.

  It was now the turn of Bishop Þjóðrekur, who had committed the crime of raising Madame Colornay, the former ditch-dwelling child-bearer, as high in the eyes of God as the sainted but barren Járnanna, and then made things even worse by sealing a marriage before God for all eternity with poor old María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur. The Spanish Forkers told the Feds that the chap they were looking for was either at the North Pole or in Finland, teaching people to embrace the Gospel.

  It is unavoidable that the narrative should digress for a while from Stone P. Stanford, master-bricklayer in Spanish Fork, and the house he built, while events were taking place in other parts of the world. To ensure that such an excellent bricklayer is not entirely forgotten in this book or other books, we shall now take up the thread again at the description of his house. Stanford built almost the whole house in one summer, baking the necessary bricks himself in Þjóðrekur’s yard. First he built a main house, but then he began to get big ideas and added an extra building which he placed at right angles to the other one, as if they wanted to break apart and go their separate ways.