Paradise Reclaimed (21 page)
The housewife of Hlíðar kept on singing without listening, staring up to the heavens: “Praise the Lord and join with his angels in song.” But the girl’s dizziness out in midstream overpowered all emotions.
Bishop Þjóðrekur shouted, “You shall never take this boy alive, my friend.”
“Why are you sticking your nose into the boy’s affairs, foreigner?” asked the agent.
Bishop Þjóðrekur raised the boy aloft and said, “I, Þjóðrekur, bishop and elder of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints which stands in heaven and on earth, by immersion do here and now consecrate this child in water and spirit, and seal him to myself before God and men in this world and the next for all eternity. And after that I shall drown the child in this baptismal water here in the river, rather than let him fall, alive or dead, into the hands of the man who has addressed us from the bank.”
Þjóðrekur now removed the blanket in which the boy was wrapped, and the child started to cry at being woken in such strange surroundings. The Mormon paid no attention, but began to loosen the boy’s ragged clothing with hands whose clumsiness only made him all the more resolute, until finally he held the child naked in his arms in that ramshackle boat out in the middle of the river. The child cried with all its might. The men on the bank huddled in a group and told Björn that the Mormon had now taken all the child’s clothes off. Björn asked them if they thought it possible to reach the boat on horseback and try to rescue the child, but this suggestion got short shrift; they said it was quite impossible to ford the river there because of quicksands. And now, they said, he is holding the child aloft, naked, and is loudly declaiming some rigmarole; and now he has lifted the child out over the gunwale, and plunged him into the water. They said there was no doubt that the Mormon was determined to drown the child.
Now Björn of Leirur interrupted the speaker and told all his men to mount up at once and ride away before infanticide was done. The whole company responded at once and rode off out of sight as hard as they could.
While this was going on, and the bishop was immersing the weeping and terrified child naked in the glacier-river, the boy’s mother reacted as she always did in times of trial: she simply let things happen to her, and when the point was reached where words ceased to have validity she became oblivious to everything around her. She leaned back against her mother’s hymn-singing breast and fell into a faint, and the whites of her eyes glinted between her half-closed lids as she swooned.
When she came to her senses again she was lying on the riverbank with her head on her mother’s lap: the hymn was over. The Mormon was sitting on the sand cuddling her son against his skin under his shirt, to warm him. Gradually the child’s racking sobs died down as his terror abated, until he fell asleep against the warm hairy chest of this bishop who a short while ago had been planning to murder him, or rather had been ensuring for him the eternal life of the saints of Zion.
It was a pleasant autumn day; the soft breeze wafted the soul high above time and place, and here and there the occasional blue sheen of a raven glinted in the white sunshine over the sand. Bishop Þjóðrekur took off his topboots and removed his hat with its covering, as a sign that the ceremony was over for the time being; and the sun made up for it by breaking resolutely through the clouds. He tied the shoelaces to a specially-made loop on the hat, and then slung the lot over his shoulder, the boots behind and the hat in front. They headed in a straight line west across the sands; at the far end of the sands they encountered another river, with an unknown ferryman on the one side and no troop of champions on the other; and indeed there was little immersing or baptising or infanticide for the rest of the day. They were now in another district. Steinar’s wife could now no longer walk, and had to be carried on top of the baggage.
In this new district the blue raven cawed with bell-like tones in the sunshine, for this wise song-bird had modelled himself on the bells of the small churches of the littoral, like foreign toys washed ashore from shipwrecks. The little boy eyed the ravens in silence from the bishop’s shoulder; he did not have the confidence to reach out towards them until he was in his grandmother’s arms on top of the baggage. This area was called the Landeyjar from the grass-patches that retained moisture and were left there when the turf was stripped by erosion and turned into sand. These grass-patches could provide the sparse population with a reasonable livelihood; the farmhouses stood on humble hillocks which were often no more than turf ramparts against erosion. On the other hand, the mountains had all taken to their heels as the travellers approached, as if they feared that these people were going to drag them off to the Mormons, and had not halted before they were far inland—in direct contrast to the mountains of Steinahlíðar which had come rushing headlong down from the hinterland right up to the people’s faces, as it were, in their eagerness to be taken along by the little boy.
“If it isn’t, it isn’t,” said Bishop Þjóðrekur, looking all around him at this low-lying district which somehow glided unnoticeably into the sea and then merged into the sky. “It’s nothing, really,” he went on, “but yet the place has a faintly familiar look about it. Over there, where you can see a smudge of cliffs in the sea, that’s the Vestmannaeyjar, where my mother was sent to give birth to me; I always thought the biggest rogues in Iceland lived there, until sister María Jónsdóttir from Ampahjallur told me they were all saints. Now the ground starts rising a little, and then I am sure I shall get my bearings properly.”
It was late afternoon, and the sun was shining full in their faces as the ground gradually began to rise from the flats.
“I don’t suppose you can see a little green hillock at the foot of a rocky outcrop over there?” said the bishop. “Let’s go over and see if we can’t wring some supper out of them, and perhaps some milk from a cow of three colours for the boy. It’s called Bóla in the Landeyjar, that farm. It’s where my people came from originally; the parish council sent me to work for my living there when I was four years old. My mother was too broken in health to be able to support me; she was in service in the Vestmannaeyjar.”
When they reached Bóla in the Landeyjar, where they had been going to get milk from a cow of three colours for the boy, and perhaps other delicacies as well, there was unfortunately no one at home except for two marsh marigolds which had started sprouting that autumn among the reeds beside the farm-brook because they were expecting a little boy who was going away; but the farm itself had been derelict for more than forty years. The tumbled turf walls had long since fused and were overgrown. And just to keep the picture accurate, there were also two phalaropes nodding and bowing in the two-foot-deep pool in the farm-brook. No sooner had the boy been lifted down off the pony than he ran down to the brook to pull the marigolds that had been waiting for him, and to try to catch these well-mannered birds. His mother sat down on a tussock and stared entranced with questioning, wondering eyes at this remarkable frock-clad young gentleman, as if she had never seen anything like it in her life; and perhaps she had not. The bishop lifted the old woman and the baggage off the pony and did not seem appreciably disappointed that the farm was now derelict.
“We shall just have a bite of our own, then, others have had to do it before,” he said, and began to unwrap their provisions. In no time at all the black pate of a handsome rye-loaf was glinting at the mouth of the knapsack. “This one hails all the way east from Skaftártunga, no less!” said the bishop. “Kneaded and baked by a saintly person. I have been keeping it in the hope that I would be given the chance of eating it in good company. I wonder if I can find that famous doorstep somewhere around here, and offer you a seat on it; it is a slab which has haunted my dreams for long enough.”
The farmhouse paving, in fact, was now almost smothered by the grass, but Bishop Þjóðrekur knew where it lurked and did not take long to recognize a corner of it which was still visible above ground.
“Do have a seat,” said the bishop. “It was on this slab that the dog of blessed memory used to lie on my frock until the first day of summer.”
They sat down on the paving of Bóla in the Landeyjar. The bishop said grace and thanked the Lord on high for having saved the wanderers from the clutches of the unrighteous earlier that morning and admitted this young boy into the communion of souls and led them all to a green site beside a little brook where two marigolds grow and the smallest birds in Iceland bob their curtseys. Then they ate the appetising jet-black bread from out east in Skaftártunga, and had the setting sun for butter.
Then the bishop began to give them instruction there on the hillock.
“These ruins,” he said, “bear witness that every dwelling shall be laid waste if the people do not have correct opinions. Even though this was excellent farmland, the young were kept alive on bone-jelly and whey from midwinter until the cows were out at grass and beginning to yield some milk. When my master went to buy meal down at Eyrarbakki the week before Easter and came back with one pastry a head as a treat for the family, he always took care that there should be no pastry for the foster-child. I was invariably thrashed every morning for uncommitted crimes. I never managed to go through this door, in or out, without treading on the tail of the dog and being snapped at. Mercifully, the water here was good. Indulge my laziness, Víkingur lad, and go and fill that mug from the brook for us. And what do you have to say about all this, missus? In your shoes, most people would be yearning for the country where the truth lives.”
“Oh, yes indeed,” said the worn-out woman. “It was not to be that I should never leave my home and hearth. Indeed I feel as if I have already left this world and have come to a new one. But to be quite candid, let me tell you that in my time here on earth there were two kinds of farm. There were farms where people had food and clothing, and there were farms where people had neither. But I don’t think that it went by whether people had correct opinions; and luckily not the opposite either. I knew of people who never had a ghost of an opinion in their heads, and not that much kindness in their hearts, either; they lived on a barren moorland croft, but there was never any suggestion that they ever had to go hungry—indeed, they were rolling in fat. People who never have any opinions about anything attract profusion and plenty. It would be nice to be able to say that good and gifted people who adhere steadfastly to correct doctrine are provided with food and clothing in proportion; but that is not the case. In our household at Hlíðar there was always a shortage of the good things of life for which one gives thanks to God; and yet it would take some looking to find a man who had a better understanding of most things than my Steinar.”
Bishop Þjóðrekur did not at the moment care to enter into dispute with this homeless woman; instead he sipped the water that her son Víkingur had fetched for them from the brook, and changed the subject.
“It is good to come across one’s own stream again,” he said, “and be able to drink it with people whose feet are on the very threshold of the sacred city. Yes, these were glorious days, missus, when one wore the sack from under the dog and was thrashed every morning for the sins of the unlived day. No one here, with the exception of that little boy who is messing about in the mud beside the birds, has the glorious days yet to come. Praise be to the Lord for this water.”
“I have been wanting to ask the bishop something for a long time,” said Víkingur Steinarsson. “How much would a pair of shoes like the ones you are carrying cost? And where can they be obtained?”
Bishop Þjóðrekur replied, “No Lutheran could ever obtain a pair of boots like these, my lad. Boots like these are only made by saints. These shoes are a proof, my boy, that the Church of the Latter-Day Saints is founded on the All-Wisdom. If Lutherans ever obtain shoes, it is merely by chance. They manage to lose them in a year and never get another pair again. Yes sirree. No sirree. Not even one in a hundred in Iceland can obtain a pair of boots. These shoes have been a much stronger argument for me in arguments with Lutherans than any quotation from the prophets. On these boots one could climb most of the way up to the moon.”
26
Clementine
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine,
Dwelt a miner, forty-niner,
And his daughter Clementine.
All day long one could hear this dance-tune on the emigrants’ deck of the liner Gideon which was transporting people from the Old World to the New. Each and every one had his own goldmine on the other side of the ocean, and the song adjusted itself to the hope, as always. Young girls in far too heavy coats, some of them from the Carpathian Mountains, strolled hand-in-hand along the decks with the words of the song dancing in their eyes, alight with hope, and the wind in their hair on this morning of eternity. This song was the only one with any meaning for the young country lads, who were probably Gas-cons, in their black pea-jackets and embroidered shirts; or an apprentice from Bavaria with the broad-brimmed hat of his craft and wearing trousers so wide that they looked like a skirt on each leg. This was the tune that was danced to on the deck far into the night, and again on an empty stomach first thing next morning; it was played on harmonicas and mouth-organs, strummed on lutes and mandolins, and ground out on barrel-organs. It carried from the bar, blended with the bitter-sweet aroma of beer and, from the kitchens, mingled with the reek of vegetables and singed fat: Clementine, the romanticism of the age that went to America, with the characteristically melancholy note of the refrain:
Oh my darling, Oh my darling,
Oh my darling Clementine,
Thou art lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.
For the first few days after leaving harbour in Scotland the sea was calm. They all wanted to escape from the overcrowding and stuffiness below decks in steerage, and treat themselves to some inexpensive luxury such as the breath off the sea or the rays of some poorer star like the ones which shone on Steinahlíðar. Families gathered together in groups and sat or squatted on the deck. They removed the newspaper wrappings from their salted ham, home-baked rye-loaves and mandolins. The boys were sent for beer, and now there was feasting of a kind that made the entertainment provided by the emigration agents look pale by comparison. These people sang and talked in languages that no one understood except themselves; and so did the salted hams, pumpernickels and mandolins. Soon they all joined hands and started dancing in a circle. There were also plenty of young people who were going on their own or with a few companions to dig for gold in America. They and their friends gathered together on deck in the evenings under an oil-lamp and displayed whatever accomplishments they might have; some did sword-dances, others made prodigious leaps, clapped their hands and uttered shrieks and yells that outmatched anything to be heard in Iceland. This was all part of the dance. The brother and sister from Steinahlíðar gaped at the men fearfully. Here was the entertainment which had been banned in Iceland two centuries previously by royal decree, under pain of Hell. Here was no question of sparing the shoe-leather by treading lightly on the ground, as children were taught in Iceland; and all the musical instruments which the Danish king found sinful were here on show. The brother and sister from Steinahlíðar were the only young people in the world who knew no other entertainment than going to church, not even going round in a circle. They stood apart from the crowd and held hands and for a long time they did not understand what was going on. What was the meaning of it? Was this the correct way to behave? Look at that one doing a somersault in the air and landing on his feet! Was this perhaps a new way of going to Communion?
“It pierces the marrow of my bones,” said the boy, when the din of the bagpipes and drums was at its most frantic.
“I am almost glad that mother is ill, so that she does not have to see and hear all this,” said the girl. “I am sure she would never recover from it. Goodness me, I’m going to run away and hide!”
But despite all the goings-on they did not run away and hide, but stayed where they were, like two mooncalves.
In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine. . . .
They forgot time and place. They were spellbound by the kind of enchanted vision which opens the secret pores of the soul to the winds of regeneration. And suddenly, before she was aware of it, someone had grasped her round the waist; she was snatched from her brother’s side; a man was holding her in his arms and had begun to whirl her around; he was from a nation that dances the mazurka to Clementine. And now this young girl in her fetters of homespun found that inside this woollen guise there lived another girl who understood rhythm and followed it without making too many mistakes, and who knew instinctively this art that the Danish kings had forbidden to Icelanders. What was it that suddenly started stirring in all her limbs with such unnatural ease that one met oneself and did not know who it could be?
They were unused to seeing many strangers at a time, and inexperienced at distinguishing between foreigners (particularly in a herd), just as it is practically impossible to distinguish between the oyster-catchers that step aristocratically in flocks through the new-mown hayfields; and the faces of the people somehow blurred into a sea of porridge whenever the Hlíðar children tried to differentiate one from the other, and melted away like the bubbles in a simmering porridge-pot. This mob of foreigners, their shipboard companions, was one huge whale, a monstrous beast which stuck together of its own accord like the Vestmannaeyjar creature, with such and such a number of maws. It did not occur to them to single out any one individual in their minds, or to try to get some idea of which ones came from Norway and which from Montenegro. They had become like the English officials who interviewed them at the emigration office: these Englishmen thought they spoke Finnish because they came from Iceland. When Bishop Þjóðrekur said that they spoke Icelandic, the Englishmen retorted curtly, “Yes, and isn’t that just another kind of Finnish?” To the Hlíðar children, just as to the Englishmen, foreign tongues were either Finnish or yet more Finnish; with the best will in the world it seemed to them that this multi-mouthed monster always talked the same language, as far as they could hear. They had the impression that no one in this mob was a foreigner except themselves. But now the girl suddenly discovered that a particular individual had started to dance with her. She could not see him yet, admittedly, but she could feel him. And most particularly she could feel how the movements of his soul aroused due responses in her own; or rather—life had begun to flow. But she did not even dare to glance at him during the dance, neither when he pulled her close (for then she did not want him to suspect that she was conscious of herself) nor when he moved away from her again—for that would have been nearly as inconsiderate as asking one’s husband for his name on the morning after the wedding-night. Still, she got an impression of a tall and broad-shouldered young man, slim-waisted and supple to match. Quite accidentally she caught a suggestion in the lamplight of a sun-tanned manly chin and a lock of blond hair which he flicked back behind his ear. He said something to her which was quite definitely Finnish, and she was careful not to try to guess what he meant. If he were asking what she was called, she thought it a blasphemy not to conceal her name and her identity, language, family, people and country. What did such things matter? Life has no name.
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 paupers together.