Paradise Reclaimed

by Halldor Laxness

  When she had danced for so long that she had not only forgotten that she did not know how to dance, but had forgotten everything except the dance, he suddenly stopped. “One minute,” she thought she heard him say. He put his arm round her waist and led her out of the dance circle. She felt as if she were floating on unfamiliar planes of air, borne aloft on a soft breeze. They drifted through the open door of a room where some men were sitting crowded round little tables and having a drink. There were two men sitting drinking on their own at one table, and she realised that they must be his comrades, for they applauded him boisterously for having got hold of a girl. They rose to their feet and bowed to her and said, as far as she could make out, that she was a fine piece. Then they made her sit down between them. They made another attempt to converse with her, but their language was Finnish and yet more Finnish. Even so she could not help laughing at their eagerness and this seemed to delight them, for she had excellent teeth, like all people who do not eat bread. She contemplated them while they were struggling to converse with her, and saw at once that her dance-partner, with his blue eyes and blond wavy hair, was much the most handsome of them. One of his companions was long and dark-haired, which made her think of a raven; his hair was as coarse as a horse’s mane, his cheeks hollow, and his hands were large and numb-looking, ice-blue hands ruined by chilblains, for the knuckles were badly swollen; or else they had been wrecked by poor implements. His cold glittering eyes began at once to probe into her half-angrily, as if he thought she were concealing under her clothing something out of which she had cheated him. She was not fully reconciled to him until he produced a mouth-organ and began to play with great skill on this instrument, which was swallowed up in his blue hands like a pea in a barrel. While he was playing the mouth-organ she had a chance of observing the third man in the party. This one effaced himself as much as he could and preferred to stay in the shadow of his companions; and this was because he had a gaping hare-lip and a cleft palate. His complexion was pasty from drudgery, and there was nothing but down left on the crown of his head; his teeth betrayed him as a bread-eater. But in Iceland the girl had been brought up to pay no heed to people’s external appearance, for human virtues do not all reside in the face; she gave no hint that she preferred her dance-partner to his comrades. And when Blue-Hands stopped playing and started knocking the saliva out of the mouth-organ into his palm, she gratefully enveloped him with the candid warmth of her eyes. No sooner had the music stopped before the man with the hare-lip began to display his own accomplishments, which consisted of cackling and crowing as if there were a whole hen-run next door. This amused the girl from Steinahlíðar intensely because she had never heard this fowl before. He could also mimic the unimpassioned and simple everyday clucking of these birds when pecking for grain in the midday quiet. Then Blue-Hands went into action again and produced a deck of cards and launched into a series of card-tricks, some of them so outrageous that his comrades pretended to thump him. Then the man with the hare-lip set about imitating the yowling of lovesick cats behind a house at night. The girl cheered up at all this ingenuity and laughed heartily, for she had never attended an entertainment in her life before. In gratitude she danced with both of the others the next time Clementine was played, for she was now an expert at that dance. They ordered one last round of drinks before the bar was closed and the lights put out, but the girl did not like the taste; it reminded her of stale urine, and she handed her beer-mug to the three men to share between them. After that they sat in a darkened corner of the deck and they sang Clementine to her over and over again and other songs, each one livelier than the last. One of them was holding her ankle. She was not very sure who it was and was not particularly pleased, but did nothing about it until the hand began to steal suspiciously high up her calf; at that she suddenly remembered that her mother was lying ill in the sick-bay and that she was to sleep with her that night and nurse her. She stood up. They could not understand why the girl wanted to leave so early. “Mamma, mamma,” she said. They imitated her and laughed. “One minute,” she said, pulling away from them. They laughed even more. In the end her dance-partner accompanied her on her way and his comrades generously raised no objections, for he quite indisputably had first claim on the girl.

  But when they were round the corner he stopped her and started to talk to her nineteen to the dozen. But words were of no use here. Then he pointed to her and then to himself, questioningly. No understanding, no reply. He pointed in the direction the ship was steaming and pretended to dig and shovel, but she did not understand properly, for the only shovelling she knew was dung from the byre. He led her over to a spot where the light was a little better, and pulled from his pocket a small object which a fist could easily hide. It was a lump of unrefined ore studded with gilt particles. Strangely enough, it so happened that the girl had once before seen the colour that glittered in this dross.

  “Gold,” she whispered, and got palpitations.

  He wanted to give her the piece but at that she became even more fearful, for she remembered all at once that a girl is worthy of gold only once in her life. She could not bear to think of the shame there would be if he gave her gold and it later came to light that she had been given gold already. “One minute,” she said, thrusting the lump of gold into his hand again, and hurried away. But when she had left him she began to have doubts whether there had been pure gold in the lump; the boy was still only on his way to America, after all. Perhaps he had only brought out this gold in earnest of the future. By the time she reached the room where her mother lay she had begun to regret not having accepted the lump, whether it was pure gold or not. She hoped and prayed that she had not offended the young man by refusing his gold.

  And what of the housewife from Steinahlíðar? This woman had set out from Iceland with a feebleness in the head and a weakness in the heart and so wobbly in the legs that she could not even walk across green fields, let alone sands. One might say that she had the desert itself in her legs. On the voyage from Iceland to Scotland the last of her strength ebbed away and she took to her bed, and was scarcely able to rise from it again. At this set-back her speech and her memory became blurred. She became so overcome by exhaustion that she could do nothing but lie back in bed. It is not the custom to make much fuss of destitute women from unknown parts who fall ill in emigration camps. Most people in Glasgow thought she was Finnish. Bishop Þjóðrekur gave instructions that her daughter Steinbjörg was not to leave her mother’s side night or day while they waited in Scotland, and he himself took charge of the little frock-coated gentleman whom he had immersed in the Jökulsá. And although she and the child were at last getting to know one another, she, too, handed him into the bishop’s care when they embarked on the emigrant ship; indeed, they were already father and son, as far as she could understand from the complicated formulas the bishop had declaimed out in the river. The bishop managed to arrange permission for the girl to sleep near her mother at night aft in the sick-bay. There were several other peasant women from Europe in it; one, who could not move a muscle because of some internal ailment and was green in the face, was hurrying to join her son in New York; another had broken a hip during all the rough and tumble that attends lower-class flittings, and the general opinion was that she could certainly not survive another such fracture. Here was a collection of people who, in the English idiom, were past all needs except for a last white shirt. Forbidding-looking iron bedsteads jutted out from the walls, and in a corner behind the door a bed was made up on a bench for Steina. Her task was to get up during the night and tend her mother whenever she groaned, and preferably more often than that, and give her medicine. The doctor and the nurse were always in a hurry on the few occasions they drifted in. Early in the morning Bishop Þjóðrekur would arrive with her grandson, and the exhausted woman from Hlíðar was happy when she felt the little fellow clamber over her as if she were the last tussock in Iceland and burble at his granny with the few words she had taught him while they were paup
ers together.

  And now we move on to the point where the girl had said “One minute” and gone below decks after refusing gold. It was around midnight. Her mother was now so weak that she could hardly take her medicine. A light burned faintly in one of those little red lamps which are used at night to comfort the dying. The girl was still keyed up by the warmth she had been given by the goldminer both in the dancing and the music. She forgave him for not having any particular accomplishment such as playing the mouth-organ or mimicking hens. She did not care in the least whether anyone knew how he had obtained the gold, or whether it was pure. And she was most grateful of all to him because it was not he who had been holding her leg above the ankle. She could not bear men like that. And then, before she was aware of it, she had put out the red light which was to have amused the women while they were dying. She tiptoed out again and hurried to the spot where she had said goodbye to him a long time ago. She had somehow got the idea that he was waiting there. But he was gone. Everyone was away except for a man who was embracing a girl against the mast; she almost bumped into them. Of course they were all gone! She could not understand how she could have thought otherwise in the middle of the night. She hurried down below decks and relit the lamp for the women and tried to make her mother drink a cupful of cold water, but most of it just spilled out of the corners of her mouth and ran down her neck. Then the girl went to bed on her bench.

  27

  One minute

  Next day the sea got rougher and the girl asked herself whether she liked the motion or whether she was beginning to feel cold at the temples. But anyway, if one thing were certain, it was that she had completely recovered from that foolishness with complete strangers the night before. Or was emotion just as incomprehensible to her in the morning as it was natural at night?

  And then without any warning she saw them come bearing down on her from a distance along the deck. Many a girl has asked herself whether it would not be just an act of courtesy and becoming modesty to look away and show no recognition. Finally they were all three at her side, fully refreshed by their sleep. They greeted her with the words that constituted the spiritual connection between them—“One minute”—and surrounded her. Before she knew it, she was once again standing beside the bright-haired goldminer. The other two at once started to perform for the girl to make up for the language deficiency, such as turning somersaults and playing leapfrog, and Blue-Hands tried to trip up the one with the hare-lip, who thereupon dropped down on all fours and bounded about the deck roaring like a wild animal. But the goldminer did not have to do anything, because he had the lump of gold in his pocket. When his rivals had started to stand on their heads and walk on their hands for the girl, he just stood there beside her without a word and put his arm around her waist.

  It had become the custom for her to go to see old Þjóðrekur in the morning, after breakfast, and take charge of her son for the rest of the day while she looked after her mother. It had truly been a happy day that dawned in her life, now that she was a fully-grown woman, when she had got to know this little boy whom she had not understood when he was born. And when she got to know him, she felt sorry that she had missed all his first attempts to talk; and she also regretted the tears that she had not been allowed to dry for him. But on this Atlantic morning with storm in the offing and a long slow swell, her new-found friend, the one who wore a frock-coat, had all at once slipped her mind completely. She did not come to until Bishop Þjóðrekur was standing beside her in his topboots and hat, with the boy in his arms. He asked who these nincompoops were who were standing on their heads nearby, but she could give him no answer.

  “Who are you, gentlemen,” he asked in English, but they did not understand the language.

  “I don’t understand them either,” she said, disengaging herself from the man who was steadying her as the ship rolled, and went over to her son. “The fair-haired one is the Goldminer,” she added, just to give the bishop some satisfaction. “The dark one with the chilblains I call Blue-Hands. But the one with the hare-lip I think of as the Hen-Keeper, because he can make the cockerels crow and the hens lay eggs. But now it’s time to see to my son.”

  It is not too much to say that the three artistes were shocked when they saw this girl of little more than confirmation age take a child in her arms and betake herself off with an ancient old American with grease-proof paper around his hat; they felt that this madam had played them a really dirty trick. But later that day they had found out all about these people from the ship’s officers: the passenger list said that the one with the grease-proof paper around his hat was a bishop, and the girl a widow. With that their spirits rose again; they forgive the widow and set off to find her again.

  And now the little boy found companions who did not stint the fun; they became his playmates, just as they had been for his mother: Blue-Hands with somersaults and music, the Hen-Keeper with a flock of hens, to which ducks had now been added, and even pigs, and finally a howling dog. People gathered round from all sides to listen, and the entertainment was received by the audience with great enthusiasm. But happiest of all was the girl from Steinahlíðar at being able to sit close to a young man who was not associated with any earthly phrase or image but could yet have been the father of this little boy, and feel how he enveloped her with a warmth that was above any games or tricks.

  A topic that sometimes succeeds in being fully resolved with the help of long explanations in speech or writing, with arguments and letter, but more often fails the harder it is pursued, can be resolved by dumbness in a single hour. That is why sages believe that language is one of mankind’s blunders, and consider that the chirping of birds, with appropriate gestures of the wings, says far more than any poem, however carefully worded; they even go so far as to think that one fish is wiser than twelve tomes of philosophy. The happy assurance that two young people can read in one another’s eyes becomes incomprehensible in verbal explanation; silent confession can turn into a denial if the magic spell is broken by words.

  Oh my darling, oh my darling,

  Oh my darling Clementine. . . .

  When Clementine had begun to reverberate again and everyone had found one another on the dance-floor which often reared up like a cliff as the ship rolled, the girl from Steinahlíðar and her Goldminer had also found one another in that all-expressive wordlessness which books can never articulate. In one day they had poured over one another in the language of fish that light of truth which a whole year of daily letters with constantly reiterated vows of eternal fidelity cannot create, not even when accompanied by philosophy and poetry recitations or even songs. They had not been able to tear themselves away from one another all day, when most people had crawled into their bunks and begun to vomit. But the girl somehow felt that the Goldminer shrank from disappearing for a single moment from the sight of his comrades; and she noticed also that they were just as careful not to leave his side, but went on confirming their togetherness with skill and ingenuity, as if each and all of them, by prior arrangement, had a share in any gold lump that any one of them dug up. “How wonderful it can be,” she said to herself, “and what nobility it proves in young men, when they pledge one another a friendship that can never be shadowed by selfishness, envy or jealousy.” It was also a proof of the Goldminer’s high-mindedness that he treated his comrades in every way as his equals, the Hen-Keeper no less than Blue-Hands. The humility which displays itself in valuing the lowest on a par with the highest, and being a true brother to the one whom nature has inflicted with a cruel handicap—this was something that Icelanders had been taught in theory on the principle that the Saviour had bought all men’s souls equally dearly. She was quite prepared to acknowledge this ideal in practice, although she was ashamed to have to admit to herself that she could not hit the right rhythm with his comrades when dancing but trampled on their toes and they on hers until she landed in the arms of her Pan again.

  Some authorities think that the attachment between a boy and a
girl is in some way less valid if the time factor is not given sufficient attention. Others think that implicit in the theory about the necessity of a period of courtship are subconscious associations with the fermentation of certain drinks, such as mare’s milk, or the peculiar fluid which in the Edda is called the mead of poetic inspiration; or even the need to bury certain delicacies in a midden for three years. But one thing is quite certain: that whereas the patriarchs and greybeards required lengthy negotiations to conclude the betrothal of a man and a maiden, Nature often requires only one minute, if she has her way.