The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

All that you ask for; you shall have: little Gudrun was born in the middle of August, or, by the way my father reckoned time, in the seventeenth week of summer. My mother said that the girl weighed ten pounds. I was scarcely aware of the birth until she had been delivered; perhaps I am one of those who can have ten-pound babies ten times over without feeling it much. When my mother showed her to me I felt I did not know her, but I felt a little fond of her at once because she was so little and large. And my father, who never laughs, laughed when he saw her.

The church was completed at about the same time. While I was still confined they brought the altar from the old church out of the storage attic where it had been kept since the nineteenth century. Throughout my childhood that altar had stood in there amongst old lumber, and although it had become so faded that one could only just make our traces of an occasional saint and half a word of Latin here and there, I had always as a child been afraid of this relic which had some mysterious link with the Pope. When I was on my feet again the altar had been placed under that untheological gable-window in the church, and they had painted it red so that neither saint nor Latin could be glimpsed any more.