Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  “The sun shines on lots of things,” said the passer-by, “and not all equally beautiful.”

  “In my opinion nothing the sun shines on is evil,” said Stone P. Stanford. “If the cosmic law were not tolerant by nature, it would have created nothing but sun, and no clay. Excuse me, but where are you coming from at this time of day?”

  “Since you are so tolerant,” said the passer-by, “I suppose I might as well tell you. I am coming from my mistresses. I am a Lutheran.”

  “You should become a Mormon, my dear chap,” said Stone P. Stanford. “Then you would be at liberty to have a long lie with your womenfolk.”

  “That’s a liberty I least desire,” said the Lutheran. “No one understood that better than Joseph the Prophet. He looked enviously at every coffin on its way to the grave that winter when God had commanded him to marry his sixth wife. Could I ask you to do me a little favour?”

  “What is that?” asked the bricklayer.

  “Would you let me hide this bottle of schnapps in one of your brick-piles?” said the Lutheran.

  People who wanted to build houses for themselves or for others came by on the road where the bricklayer was standing in his yard. They weighed his bricks in their hands with an expert air and said that they were poor adobes. And crooked, too, what’s more. A house built with them would soon collapse. Stanford explained that he was only making them for fun, in order to get to know bricks; he said he had for a long time wanted to understand this form of stone. “And anyway I am a light sleeper once the winter passes; and there are no women to keep me back in the mornings.”

  “There is never any winter here to pass,” they said. “It’s not like in Iceland, where winters pass. I would sleep until midday if I made such bad bricks and had no wife either. These bricks are only worth half as much as Bishop Þjóðrekur’s bricks.”

  “I never imagined for a moment that I would be reckoned half as good at bricks as Bishop Þjóðrekur,” said Stanford. “That’s good enough for me. Help yourself to these bricks and do what you like with them, friend.”

  They drove off with Stanford’s bricks and gave little in exchange. But soon afterwards some other people arrived, saying that they had heard about these bricks and would like to have a look at them. Stanford had more bricks by now. They said they were really handsome bricks and offered high prices for them and, what is more, paid for them cash down. This former farmer from Steinahlíðar, who had scarcely ever seen minted silver before, now stood there in the middle of the Promised Land clutching a handful of large silver dollars. The sun shone on the money.

  After that people kept dropping in, some with mules, and drove away with the bricks he had created; and he was left standing there with money in his hands.

  Stanford felt that his understanding of bricks was not complete because he had never been present when walls and other structures were being built of this kind of stone. He now got permission to accompany his products to the sites where they were being used. As was previously written, the settlers in Spanish Fork, some of them Icelandic, some Welsh and a few of them Danish, were so well off by this time that they were tearing down as fast as they could the log-cabins which their sainted fathers, the desert-trekkers, had built for themselves when they crawled out of their dugouts.

  It is obvious that a man descended from many generations of expert wall-builders in Steinahlíðar who had only had mountain-rubble to work with would not take long to learn to lay stones whose shape he himself had determined. People were soon beginning to admire the house-walls he built, and said that nowhere could one see such symmetry in brick-laying, always excepting the bricks that Bishop Þjóðrekur himself had laid; in Spanish Fork people went by the old German adage, that no one is better at anything than the boss. People asked how it came about that an unknown incomer could build walls of such artistic texture. Stone P. Stanford replied, “Brick, by the grace of God, is mankind’s most precious stone. That is because the brick is rectangular. That is what Bishop Þjóðrekur taught me when we drank water together in Denmark.”

  “Are you a Mormon or a brick-worshipper?” people asked. “In Brigham Young’s mansion there are many doors,” said Stone P. Stanford, and tittered.

  Since manual skill was promptly appreciated in Spanish Fork at its true worth, the bricklayer found it hard to avoid working night and day for other saints. Although his palms were often sore to begin with, particularly when he willy-nilly had to grasp handfuls of silver, he never disguised the fact that he thought that Providence had, contrary to expectation, proved a surprisingly nimble guide during these latter days.

  On one occasion during an evening meeting in the church, when he had been called upon to step forward, he spoke as follows:

  “ ‘This is the place’ is what the divinely-inspired leader is reported to have said when Salt Lake Valley opened out before the slavering oxen with blood on their hooves and the men who had managed to cross the wilderness even though their children and sweethearts still tarried in the sand. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am dead and have come to the land of eternity. Of such a land it says in a hymn I once knew, that there stood a wondrous palace on pillars, inlaid with gold and brighter than the sun. I certainly never had many dreams of inheriting this palace for myself, for I am someone whom the Lord has scarcely intended to enjoy complete and utter happiness, but rather for my little children whom I left sleeping so beautifully and for the wife who was so compliant to her husband. When I now look back across the ocean to the land whence I came, I glimpse behind me a sparse and barren coast, as the hymn puts it. There stands my family, and looks sorrowing out to sea.”

  The generations march by, obedient to their destiny, but in Spanish Fork there still stand houses built with such reverence by this man Stanford. His walls attract the eye more than other walls, and make one want to touch them with one’s fingers. Nor was this man who had made a casket for emperors and kings thought less of a craftsman in wood than in stone.

  One day Stone P. Stanford was in his brickyard when a woman came by. She was good-looking and well-dressed, but a little past her prime; she was pale of complexion but dark of brow, with a veiled but penetrating gaze. She halted, leaned up against the fence that enclosed the brickyard, and stared at Sierra Benida in a trance. The sun was low in the west. Stanford greeted the woman; and when she bade good evening in return, her thin and brittle voice betrayed more self-pity and despair than circumstances seemed to warrant.

  “Who are you, my good woman?” asked Stanford.

  “Well, I don’t rightly know,” she replied. “I am probably your elf-woman here. Certainly, you’ve never seen me even though I walk past here every day at about this time when I go to the store.”

  “Many people walk past here,” said Stanford. “This is a broad and handsome road.”

  “It’s little wonder you don’t notice an eyesore like me,” said the woman.

  “To tell you the truth, it is the mules that catch my eye most of all, I am so unaccustomed to them,” said Stanford. “They are remarkably distinguished beasts.”

  “Sorry,” said the woman. “Unfortunately I’m not a mule.”

  She burst into peals of laughter at the fence, and it was as if some inner tension had snapped.

  “Ronki says you are called Stonpi,” said the woman. “Is that true?”

  “I’m ashamed to say that I, like you, no longer know myself,” said Stanford, “let alone what my name is. Heeheehee.”

  “No wonder you don’t know yourself,” said the woman, and now she was no longer laughing. “Anyone who doesn’t know others doesn’t know himself.”

  The bricklayer stopped thinking of his bricks for a moment and went over to the woman at the fence and almost stealthily allowed himself to announce his old name: “Old Steinar Steinsson of Hlíðar. But perhaps not.” When he had gone back to tend to his bricks, he added this philosophical epilogue: “Quite so.”

  “And I was once called Þorbjörg,” said the woman. “No
w I am called, at best, Borgi, and my daughter is called nothing at all.”

  “How extraordinary,” said the bricklayer. “Hmmm. It has been wonderfully seasonable here this summer so far.”

  “Seasonable?” said the woman. “What’s that?”

  “I just meant that God can never be overpraised for the weather, like everything else,” said the bricklayer.

  “Is He not being praised here incessantly?” said the woman. “I haven’t noticed any stinting of the prayer sessions. Even if you’re only offered a cup of mineral water from the spring, you get a rigmarole along with it. I say for myself that I would rather have a good cup of coffee without the prayers.”

  “That’s perfectly true, pious sir, as the woman said to the ghost; or was it to the devil?” replied the bricklayer. “And now I shall tell you what happened to me. After drinking water in Denmark nearly a year ago, I lost all desire for coffee.”

  The woman sighed wearily. “That’s the way it always goes when you want to give someone a treat: he doesn’t need it. When everyone has become sainted and is in Heaven, it’s impossible to do anyone any good. Or any harm either, come to that. It’s the same as in prison: everyone has everything. I had thought it would be a real act of charity to bring a lonely stranger coffee, even though it were only once a week.”

  “I am ashamed to say that I am not so sainted that I would turn up my nose at a cup of coffee I was offered out of kindness,” said the bricklayer with a titter. “There is more to Heaven than mineral water alone. But once a week, my dear—is that not too much? Should we not say once a year? I could perhaps give you a hand some day with a brick or two if any of your walls needed repairing here and there. Hmmm. Incidentally, did I hear you aright, my dear, is the Gospel beginning to stick in your throat a little?”

  “I believe what I like,” said the woman in that petulant tone of voice which never left her except when she burst out laughing. She kept on staring out over the brickyard and right through her interlocutor to the mountain on the other side. “Once, when I was a girl, someone tried to explain the Gospel to me. I laughed so much that I had to be carried out on a stretcher. I married a man who was a Josephite.”

  “My word!” said the bricklayer. “Excuse my ignorance. What does your good husband believe in?”

  “He believed that the Saviour would be coming soon,” said the woman. “And he believed that when the Saviour came, He would first go to meet a man whose name I forget, who lived in Independence, Missouri. Is that wrong?”

  “It is at least a most remarkable idea,” said the bricklayer. “And since you have a husband, I would be just as pleased to have a talk with him and be allowed to call on you at home and drink some coffee with you both and discuss these phenomena.”

  “Yes, you’re welcome to drink coffee with him,” said the woman. “You see, he left for Independence, Missouri, eighteen years ago, to wait for Jesus Christ to descend from Heaven.”

  “Independence, Missouri. How extraordinary,” said the bricklayer. “A remarkable place, indeed. We were always taught, back home in Iceland, that when the Saviour returned He would arrive in Jehashaphat Valley.”

  “If the Saviour returns at all,” said the woman, “why should He not come to Independence, Missouri? But as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter whether He goes there or to some other place. I only know that my husband turned up missing.”

  “Oh, really?” said the bricklayer. “Turned up missing? You have my sympathies.”

  “Oh, it’s not really the first time they’ve turned up missing hereabouts,” said the woman. “They turn up missing in droves. But I think it pretty hard that the saints who can still be accounted for here in the Valley should not offer a respectable widow a helping hand, instead of exposing my daughter and myself to Lutherans. Excuse me, but has anyone left a bottle of schnapps anywhere here in a brick-pile, if I may ask? If so, I want to ask you to show me where it is, so that I can smash it against a stone.”

  21

  Good coffee

  From then on the woman brought this bricklayer coffee in a bottle once a week. She put the bottle in a sock and tucked it away under her coat. He thanked her each time most profusely for her generosity and produced the mug which he normally used for a drink of water. But he never drank more than half the bottle, and always made the woman take the rest back home with her.

  “My husband always drank a whole bottle,” she said.

  “But then he was a Josephite,” said Stone P. Stanford, but apart from that he took care not to remind the woman of how things had gone with this man.

  Then the woman laughed.

  She was not particularly talkative, and when he made some remark she was often so preoccupied that she did not hear what he was saying and was only roused by her own laughter.

  “A thousand thanks for the coffee,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  But when she had given him coffee for a few weeks, she suddenly said, right out of the blue, “How is it that you have been a Mormon all this while and haven’t got yourself any wives yet?”

  “I have one, and that is sufficient for me,” he replied, and tittered.

  “One wife, what’s that?” she said. “It certainly wasn’t considered much in the Bible, at least. Perhaps you’re not a genuine Mormon?”

  “I know some Mormons who are certainly no more imperfect than I and don’t have any wives at all,” said Stanford, naming as an example his comrade, Pastor Runólfur.

  “Oh, Ronki?” said the woman and laughed. “You surely don’t think that Ronki is good for anything, do you? No, it’s a poor Lutheran who isn’t better than old Ronki.”

  “You are talking about the one subject in which no male can pass judgement on another,” said Stanford, “and so I say nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still a bit of a Lutheran at heart,” said the woman.

  Once again, it was just before sunrise when the Lutheran returned. He went over to the brick-pile and could not find his bottle of schnapps.

  “I never really liked the look of you much, and now you’ve proved me right,” he said. “Where’s my schnapps?”

  “A woman came along,” said the bricklayer, “and took the bottle out of the pile and broke it against a stone.”

  “Oh, the bitches!” said the Lutheran. “They’re always themselves, day and night: they even go to the length of ransacking a pile of bricks and stealing one’s last drop of consolation.”

  “She is a generous and capable woman,” said the bricklayer.

  “Since you allowed them to treat my schnapps like that, it is my dearest wish that you get to know them better. And with that I’m off, insulted and without a drink. Good night.”

  “It is really time to get up, so I can hardly bring myself to bid you good night; but may God be with you nonetheless, even though you wish me ill,” said the bricklayer.

  He accompanied his visitor out of the yard as a host should.

  “To tell you the truth, I think you ought to marry this woman,” said the bricklayer, putting his hand on his visitor’s shoulder when they reached the gate.

  “I would perhaps have done so if her daughter had not threatened to palm a child off on to me,” said the Lutheran tearfully.

  “All the more reason,” said the bricklayer. “Embrace the Gospel and marry them both, my friend.”

  “Women are my ruin,” said the man, wiping his face with his sleeve. “These dragons use me as a plaything and torment me. I try to betray them, but they hound me down and say they love me. If I had no schnapps to take refuge in, I would be dead.”

  The bricklayer replied, “That is the difference between the Latter-Day Saints and the Lutherans. The Prophet and Brigham want to give women a share in the honour and dignity which men have achieved in the eyes of God. Women are neither tobacco nor schnapps. They want to be wives, in a house. That is why Bishop Þjóðrekur married not only Anna with the iron-rimmed glasses, but als
o Madame Colornay and finally old María from Ampahjallur from as well.”

  The following week, when the woman arrived with coffee in a sock, Stone P. Stanford had vanished. He had gone off to do some bricklaying and perhaps even some joinery in various places. He was only in his brickyard for an hour at the very most to prepare the sun for its day’s task at a time of day when neither Mormons nor Josephites were awake. But one day towards autumn, when the chirring of the cicadas was at its loudest and the frogs were roaring at the salt-pools, he was back in his brickyard.

  “So that’s how unfaithful you are,” said the woman, popping her head over the fence. “You simply run away from me. I would never have believed it of a man like you, to make me wait all summer with the coffee. I was beginning to think you had turned up missing.”

  “That is the way we bricklayers are,” he said. “All of a sudden we just turn up missing. Quite so.”

  “Before I lose you again I’m going to try to persuade you out to visit me at home at the far end of the street,” said the woman in a high-pitched, distant voice. “I have been wanting you to have a look at something for me. Everything’s falling down about my ears.”

  Next evening he borrowed the bishop’s pram and put in it twenty-four bricks to take as a present for this stately seamstress and dream-woman.

  She had a little corner house, No. 307. The brickwork was badly in need of repair in places; these were obviously poor adobes. He also thought the garden rather neglected. But to make up for it there were plenty of gaily-coloured drawers hanging on the line. He took the bricks out of the pram and stacked them neatly at the door.

  She came out wearing an apron and flushed in the face from baking him a berry pie.

  “Where are you going with that pram?” she asked.

  “I brought some bricks with me,” said Stone P. Stanford.

  Prams were one of those quite unpredictable things that roused this woman to laughter; perhaps also bricks. She stopped dreaming her sorrowful day-dreams; instead she shut her eyes and threw herself headlong into the surf-topped ocean of laughter, where she was tossed from wave-top to wave-top until sorrow washed her ashore again and she opened her eyes.