Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  No further matters of theology or holy doctrine will be recounted here at present; the bricklayer himself, indeed, has said that nothing in the instruction at the archiepiscopal school there in Scotland surpassed the propositions that Pastor Runólfur had preached, and which have already been rendered in this little book. The story now moves on to a day when the birds were tuning up their songs in the trees there in the newly-green slope under Edinburgh Castle. Nearby lies Princes Street, which is broad and sunny and moistened with wholesome showers, more so than most city streets in the world, with the exception of the streets in the aforementioned God’s City of Zion, which were measured and laid out according to the principles of the All-Wisdom.

  On this day the bricklayer from Utah was strolling along Princes Street to buy himself shoes with thick soles for his trip to Iceland, and perhaps even a good hat. Then all of a sudden someone came up to him and clapped him on the shoulder among the throng in Edinburgh’s main street where all the gentlemen of quality wear skirts. This man was wearing an expensive fur coat and a tall tile hat of the same kind of fur; his moustache had been waxed and the ends turned upwards so that they stood erect like knitting needles. This was clearly no Scottish street-sweeper or shoe-cleaner who had stopped him. But what surprised the bricklayer from Spanish Fork even more was that such a man should shake him by the hand and greet him in his native tongue with all sorts of homely oaths as friends are apt to do: Well, if it isn’t the old so-and-so himself; what the flaming hell are you doing here? And so on and so forth.

  The bricklayer first blinked hard several times to get the dust out of his eyes and then swallowed carefully once or twice to loosen his tongue; and when he finally spoke it was not without a hint of a sob in his voice, but also with a touch of the laughter which always assailed him when he explained something he considered indisputable.

  “My name,” he said, “is Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork in the Territory of Utah. Quite so.”

  “Bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork, yes, what bloody lunatics you are! But to hell with that, and welcome to you anyway, and now open up and tell me how it is that I can’t get hold of as many women as Björn of Leirur and you.”

  The bricklayer said, “Oh, there’s no more to say about an old fellow like this than there ever was, except that my ears tell me that the birds have started to sing rather more than is proper in Scotland on such a day; they are probably doing rather more than saying their prayers, heeheehee.”

  “Don’t pay too much attention to what we are twittering,” said the man in the fur coat. “All the same, I’m taking you straight to my hotel over the road here and buying you a glass of beer.”

  “I cannot exactly say that beer is my drink, my dear sheriff,” said the bricklayer. “But I usually accept coffee when it is sincerely offered. It revives the spirit, rather than deadens it, if there is such a thing; and I might then find the courage to ask how it comes about that I should run into the sheriff, bless him, in this great world-street.”

  “There is nothing lower in Hell than being sheriff over lice-ridden people,” said the sheriff. “Never mind. To put it briefly, I have become tired of men who lie on their backs reading sagas while they wait for good fishing-weather. And finally, when it comes, a wave arrives which drowns them. In the hotel I sign myself Governor of Iceland, just for fun, and the doorman gets a penny for believing it every time I go in or out. To be Governor for a penny in the eyes of servants is at least better than being sheriff and judge in reality over people who cannot even achieve the minimum of human virtue because of their poverty. I have three missions in Great Britain: to form a British-Icelandic limited company to run trawlers; to raise capital to electrify life in Iceland; and finally to put the finishing touches to my book of poems.”

  Not even in God’s City of Zion had the bricklayer set foot in such accommodation as the hotel to which his sheriff now brought him. There were carpets on the floor as green and soft as lush meadows. From the ceiling hung chandeliers so spectacular that if Egill Skallagrímsson had set eyes on them he would certainly have fallen into a berserk fit no less frenzied than when Einarr Skálaglamm* fastened the shield, inlaid with gold and jewels, over his bedhead. There were also pictures of queens wearing clerical ruffs, and other distinguished folk who were beheaded in Scotland. The chairs were high, with tall straight backs and carved woodwork, so that anyone who sat in them was bound to feel as if he were mounted on a good riding-horse. Governor of Iceland Benediktsson carried on talking.

  It was quite evident that the sheriff had raised himself out of the peatbogs, where justice resides in Iceland, up into a no lesser splendour than the coal-biters of old who raised themselves from the ash-pit; but he had in fact always been well above the general run of sheriffs.

  The bricklayer could find no break in the conversation where he could sneak in a few words about the truth which the Latter-Day Saints were given along with Paradise. When he had sat there silently for a long time, either smiling or nodding his head absently, or giggling slightly to himself whenever the sheriff swore, he began to look for an excuse to take his leave. The mailboat for Reykjavík was expected that evening, and he had still various matters to attend to, including buying himself shoes to go evangelising in.

  “I know one who won’t take long to go over to Mormonism, and that’s Björn of Leirur,” said the sheriff. “I never tired of scolding him and saying to him, ‘You damned old devil, you get hold of all the wenches I should have had. I’ll settle your account some day,’ I said to him but the blame certainly wasn’t always his. For instance, I did everything I could to save your daughter, but it was hopeless. After God and men had joined forces to save her reputation and provide her with an acceptable father for the child, and old Björn had as near as dammit gone on oath, what was the end of it all? The girl made me a fool and a laughing-stock in the eyes of the Government. I even had it said to my face by the Governor that I was the sort of sheriff who pronounces virgin births. In the end I cleaned the old devil out of everything he had, in order to buy a trawler. But I never dared to mention electricity to him, because he doesn’t know what it is; he would have thought it was some remainders of damaged ship’s biscuits I was trying to palm off on him. But give him my regards all the same, and tell him that the British-Icelandic Company is under way.”

  The poet-Governor accompanied his visitor out through the hotel foyer and kissed him in front of the entrance. The doorman bowed so low that his coat-tails stood on end, and looked on with lofty condescension at how graciously the Governor took leave of the lowest of his subjects. But when the bricklayer had reached the pavement, the Governor remembered a little something he had left unfinished in his business with him. He hurried out after him, bareheaded, and shouted in Icelandic: “Steinar of Hlíðar, am I not right in thinking you are on your way home? Wouldn’t you like me to give you a farm?”

  “Oh, it is really quite unnecessary, bless your heart,” said the man who had suddenly become Steinar of Hlíðar, and turned round there in Edinburgh. “What farm would that be, if I may ask?”

  “It is the farm at Hlíðar in Steinahlíðar, which I put up for auction under execution to pay off taxes and outstanding debts, and knocked down to myself to prevent it from landing in Björn of Leirur’s collection. If you come with me to the doorman’s desk I shall scribble you a note you can stick in your pocket; and the farm is yours again.”

  The poet-Governor, Iceland’s new outpost in the British Empire, unfortunately did not turn out to be the only Icelander who showed no desire to hear about the Golden Book’s truth and the land beyond the wilderness which is thrown in with the truth for good measure. For three whole centuries, some say four, Icelanders had made it a rule to believe in dogmas that came from Denmark; indeed Bishop Þjóðrekur had declared that just as the Danes got all their wits from the Germans, so had Iceland’s brain—by mistake, it is to be hoped—landed inside the Danish king’s head: they too left the Mormons
in peace when they heard that Kristian Wilhelmsson did likewise in his own country. But that brings us back to the question that Bishop Þjóðrekur failed to answer when he returned to Utah from his later, and greater, missionary journey: was it a step forward for the Icelanders or a step backwards for them to stop beating up Mormons? In former times, the moment a Mormon stepped ashore in Reykjavík the riffraff and drunkards, who in those days characterised the town, would come flocking round and pursue him with catcalls and obscenities, while the youngsters threw stones or snowballs of slush and mud. If nothing better occurred to them they would shout that the Mormon’s head was too big for him, or that he had one leg shorter than the other. Whenever a Mormon tried to hold a meeting in order to publicize such vital matters as immersion and the need to abstain from cursing and swearing, along with information about the breadth of the streets in the resplendent City of Zion, these rioters would immediately surge on to the platform where the speaker was preaching and start giving the saint a beating. Lutheran bishops and divinity teachers busied themselves writing pamphlets eulogising the excellence of Luther and other Germans against the Mormons, because they knew that the Danes believed in Germans; similarly, various Icelanders with a tendency towards mental disorder wrote malicious articles in Þjóðólfur, or plucked verses from the Bible against the Mormons in the hope that this would hustle these terrible people straight to hell.

  But now times had changed. When Stanford the Mormon arrived in Reykjavík there was not a single guttersnipe or drunkard in the town who made any distinction between a Mormon and any old peasant from up-country. Most of the mentally disordered had forgotten about Mormons and had started thinking about electricity. In the newspapers of that period there is no mention at all of the arrival of this Mormon, with the exception of an advertisement that he himself inserted in Þjóðólfur; this stated that Stone P. Stanford, bricklayer and Mormon from Spanish Fork in the Territory of Utah, was holding a meeting in the Good Templar Hall on such and such an evening at the end of the fishing-season to expound the revelations of Joseph Smith. This Stanford is the only Mormon who came to Iceland without once being beaten up, and about whom there was published no pamphlet, neither by Doctors nor lunatics, apart from this worthless little booklet compiled by the humble scholar who wields the pen at present.

  Stanford the Mormon tried to engage people in conversation down by the harbour where they congregated sometimes in large numbers, especially late in the evening, and looked out over the bay with their wooden snuff-flasks rammed hard up their noses. He also accosted a water-carrier with four pairs of shoes and three battered hats, and a drunken old fishwife with a sack of salt on her back. He asked whether immersion would not do such people some good, and whether he could not lend them a pamphlet by John Pritt. People looked at him and never even shook their heads. Or would they rather, he asked, have that splendid masterpiece on the truth by Þjóðrekur Jónssón from Bóla in the Landeyjar? No one even told him to go and eat his own dirt.

  And when the spring evening arrived on which Stone P. Stanford was to hold his lecture in the Good Templar Hall on the revelation, the terns flew past the door and started to hunt for minnows in the Tjörn.* Not a living soul in the town went out of the way to hear about the good country where peace reigned and truth lived. And yet. Two elderly women in ankle-length pleated skirts and everyday blouses, with jet-black woollen shawls wrapped around their heads so that only the tips of their noses showed, came sidling in through the door and seated themselves at the back; perhaps they wanted to hear about polygamy. At long last another person appeared. A dignified-looking and somewhat corpulent grey-beard, obviously practically blind, came fumbling down the centre aisle with his stick and did not stop until he was right below the platform. He laid his hat beside him on the bench; but the stick had become the most important of this man’s senses, and he did not let go of it even when he had sat down.

  “Fine weather, then, eh?” he said when he was seated, looking straight ahead down the hall; he listened and waited for an answer for a while, and then added, “I presume that a large number of good people have gathered here this evening?”

  But when there was no reply from the hall the lecturer himself rose from his seat in a shadowy corner where he had been waiting for a public, and made himself known to this seeker after truth who had conquered his blindness and infirmity in order to gain knowledge about the land of lands.

  “Goodness gracious me, it can’t surely be Björn of Leirur? Hallo and welcome, my dear old friend,” said the man from Utah. “Am I right in thinking you don’t see so well? But you must not let yourself be downcast, the only sight that matters is . . .”

  “You can quite safely skip that chapter, lad, for I am already saved,” interrupted the blind man, feeling with his stick until he found the Mormon, then pulled him towards him and kissed him. “Hallo yourself and welcome, my dearest Steinar of Hlíðar. Your little scamp of a daughter converted me to Mormonism with much more convincing arguments than a fellow like you is capable of.”

  “Someone else was hinting something of the sort,” said the Mormon. “I could not bring myself to ask, for whatever the All-Wisdom has allowed to take place, that and that alone is right. Perhaps I have yet to covenant you to the eternal abode of the saints if we happen to come across a clear stream.”

  The blind man replied, “Oh, it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether you immerse this old corpse or let it stay dry: from now on we both have the same homeland. And if Sheriff Benediktsson had not made me a pauper with his persuasive powers, I would perhaps be in Utah by now to die, instead of sitting in Reykjavík plaiting hobbles for horse-copers to keep myself alive in my old age. They have started hobbling horses now, you see. New masters, new customs.”

  The Mormon replied, “Perhaps, in that case, I should not delay any more in passing on the regards I was asked to give you from the British-Icelandic Company in Edinburgh. I met our good sheriff in his new fur coat in Princes Street. He took me to a vast salon and bought me coffee and gave me a farm, heeheehee. It was rather like old Kristian Wilhelmsson’s little joke when he came over from Denmark some years back and gave Icelanders permission to stand upright in their own homes. But when will Icelanders progress so far that their society will be governed by the All-Wisdom according to the Golden Book?”

  “Yes, my friend, you can speak piously, for the Almighty gave you a riding-horse that was better than all my horses, even though I was the best-mounted man in Iceland,” said Björn of Leirur. “I shall never forget the time when Sheriff Benediktsson, the most brilliant persuader in the country, was putting out his feelers to get hold of the horse—not to mention the stupid coper from Leirur. Well, at last you’ve sold the beast for what he was worth. But of Björn of Leirur? A Króna per hobble, that’s all this old horse-tamer gets; and even so, his sprig is rooted just as firmly in Paradise as you. The All-Wisdom knows what it is up to.”

  It had all been very different in the days when sheriffs and arch-deacons made it known throughout their districts that whoever gave shelter to a Mormon for the night, or offered him so much as a drink of water, ought to be broken on the wheel. In those days fugitive saints crept along the sheep-paths late at night like outlaws, or curled up to sleep in outlying sheep-cots, where cud-chewing animals kept them company in winter and toadstools in summer.

  But now when this Mormon was nudging his way east through the southern lowlands, and knocking on people’s doors, he always introduced himself as a bricklayer and Mormon from the Territory of Utah, quite so, and then waited to see if anyone was going to beat him up. But instead of wrangling with him about correct thinking and then beating him up because of the Prophet’s Golden Book, every farmer all the way east to the Rangárvellir said, “Oh, are you a Mormon? Well, good day to you. I’ve always wanted to meet a Mormon. Won’t you come in?”

  Or: “Did you say Utah? Yes, it’s a fine place, they say, and grand people, too. I once had a kinsman who went there with his
sweetheart and a hand-cart. And the women are said to be not so bad, if they’re not turned into housewives before they’ve grown up properly.”

  Others said: “Hey, come on in quick, lad, I’ve got plenty of brennivín. Tell me how many wives you have.”

  The bricklayer answered all these questions courteously, but when he came to the last one he used to give a titter and reply with this riddle: “I am covenanted to three wives, my good man: one dead, two living. The first one I sealed to myself while she lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. . . . Of the other two, the one is my mother-in-law, the other is my step-daughter. The day after I sealed them all to me formally and to all eternity I set off for Iceland to teach you to embrace the Gospel. Work it out for yourself now, good brother: how many wives has a bricklayer who is and will always be the most wretched bricklayer of all until the end of time?”

  People racked their brains over this riddle, but no one could solve the problem of who could be the real wife of a man who, at one and the same time, married his mother-in-law and step-daughter, as well as the woman who lay at the bottom of the Atlantic. For that reason he was a welcome visitor everywhere.

  One Sunday in summer he began to find his surroundings familiar, as if he had been there before. He went up a path to a church which stood close to a grassy hillock. Ponies stood there, drowsing in the paddock, with their tails tied together; there were dogs brawling at the lich-gate or howling at the Vestmannaeyjar where saints are said to live; indeed, the islands had floated more than half-way up to heaven in the mirage. There were no people in sight. From all this he deduced that divine service was at its height, and the glad sound of singing could be heard from inside the church. In the home-field there were three tethering-blocks, half-sunk in the turf; they had been used in former times when the farm and church lay differently in relation to one another, but at this stage they had long been abandoned by God and men as well as by ponies. Stanford the Mormon waited until the service was over, and when the congregation came straggling out he stepped up on to the middle block and began to read from a work by John Pritt. He was half-expecting that some well-to-do farmers and other notables would come over and give a good thrashing to this uncouth fellow who claimed to be preaching correct social principles according to a document that the All-Wisdom dispensed on Cumorah Hill. But as he stood there on the block, reading aloud with John Pritt’s voice of truth, and some people had started to listen, who should come out into the field but the pastor himself in cassock and gown. He raised his hat to the speaker, went up to him, reached out his hand, and said, “Would the Mormon gentleman not prefer to come into the church and deliver his intimation from the pulpit, rather than perch on this unworthy stone? The congregation’s organist is prepared to play for you whatever hymns you wish to have, and which we can join in and hum.”