Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

Author:Halldor Laxness [Laxness, Halldor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

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*1 Galatians 2:20.

*2 Chapter 19 of The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life, by the American Quaker reformer Hannah Whitall Smith (1832-1911), published in 1875.

3

It is strange that anyone in a village could feel bad on a tranquil Sunday in May, when the slopes surrounding the mirror-smooth fjord are turning green.

Salka Valka was on her way home with people’s illnesses in her heart, along with various other worries: low wages, unemployment— and the fact that soon, credit at the store would be cut off to all but bigwigs. Of course, thanks to her having both a share in a boat and vegetable patch, she was now rather highly placed in society, despite not yet being such a bigwig that she could accept at face value every Christian doctrine cooked up and served to those who had it worse than her. It was not for nothing that she was the daughter of the late Sigurlína of Mararbúð, whom God and men abandoned when she needed them most, precisely because she had put her trust in God and men; early on, this girl had lost the ability to see beyond so-called reality— that is, fish— and even before her confirmation, she had become convinced that neither God nor men can help people in trouble; they must help themselves.

At Fish Hill, as it was called, where the drying lots stretch out like meadows on both sides of the road, loomed none other than Jóhann Bogesen himself, out for a stroll with his walking stick. That man had a great deal to look after— as he himself said, work and worries had prevented him from keeping the Sabbath holy for many years; he was not even allowed to heed God’s Ten Commandments in his own village, like other people. He had to poke his stick into everything imaginable on Sundays no less than on other days— it was a kind of staff of wisdom made of ebony, with an ivory handle and gold collar, with which the Women’s Club had presented him as an honorary gift on his fiftieth birthday, the same occasion that the parish council gave him a gold snuff box (in gratitude for the stove and other things that he had donated to the church). He poked this stick of his into the fish piles on the quay, the fish tubs in the washhouses, and the stacks of fish on the drying lots. On sunny days, he often poked his stick into one or two fish among all those spread out to dry, like a king addressing one rank-and-file soldier out of ten thousand at a military parade. He also poked this stick into all sorts of wares in the boxes and on the shelves of his store, even into the raisins, sometimes at people’s boots in order to test whether they had been purchased here in this village, and sometimes under the skirts of the very women who had given him the stick, to make certain that

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