The Commandments : A Novel (2021)

by Gudmundsson, Oskar

  How could someone do this to him? He hadn’t done anything. He repeated it to himself in his mind. Every now and again he’d say it out loud. ‘I’ve done nothing!’

  But every time the thought came to him, a voice deep inside his head whispered to him, that’s not quite true, is it, Hróbjartur? Or sometimes, what about the boys?

  Try as he might to find where these thoughts came from, they had dug themselves so deep that he couldn’t reach them, as if these were the final remnants of conscience that did their damnedest to make themselves at home in the depths of his mind. There was no way to wash them away.

  No way to drown them out.

  He snatched up the newspaper, took it with him into the bedroom and lay on the bed. He looked over the front page and read the headline.

  Yesterday he had been to the shop. He’d said hello to everyone as he pushed a trolley in front of him, greeting people as he went on his way. Hello, mate, morning, love. Nice to see you. Good to see you the other day. Usually there had been nothing but platitudes about nothing special. But this time people seemed to be going out of their way to avoid him. Once he had encountered the third person who had no wish to say hello, let alone stop and chat, he began to suspect that something wasn’t quite right. Every time he made eye contact, it was as if his gaze burned deep. People avoided catching his eye.

  It wasn’t until he steered the shopping trolley up to the cash desk and was already placing his things on the conveyor belt that he glanced at the rack of newspapers. For a second it was as if he had been swept up and carried to a dark room where he stood alone. On the cover was a photograph of seven priests and he knew every one of them.

  Including himself.

  He put a hand on his heart. He could feel the pounding inside, as if someone had clambered up next to his heart, giving it a hammering.

  The headline screamed out at him.

  Church covers up child abuse

  Victims tell all

  That was all he could recall. He didn’t remember buying the newspaper, or leaving the shop. He didn’t even have any recollection of driving home.

  As Hróbjartur lay in bed, he thumbed through the paper to scan the article for the fifth time. He muttered to himself under his breath as he read.

  ‘It has been shown repeatedly that the victims are not known to each other. Therefore, there is no conspiracy at play here, as some people have suggested. Although some of them have come forward anonymously, it is simply not possible to overlook the fact that here is a group of individuals who have spoken up, all with much the same story to tell, and the same accusations to make. This speaks for itself. The church ethics committee will examine these new accusations, as well as investigating older cases. As a society we have a duty to get to the bottom of this. We must bring everything out into the open, and there are people who must accept responsibility and take their punishment. We will leave no stone unturned as this matter will be treated with the utmost seriousness,’ said the reverend…

  ‘This is just bullshit… The case was thrown out,’ he said out loud, throwing the newspaper to the floor. He folded his arms and stared at the ceiling, sighed heavily and closed his eyes.

  Hróbjartur was unsure when he opened his eyes whether or not he had briefly fallen asleep. He sat up. Had he heard something, or was it something he had dreamed? He listened and watched out through the open bedroom door into the living room.

  He started as he heard it, a rattling sound.

  Then silence.

  He sat upright, listened and heard the rattle again.

  Cautiously, he got off the bed and went to the door. He looked around and went slowly into the living room and from there to the kitchen. He could smell something, a smell that was out of place, because…

  … the rattle was there again, louder than before. Now he realised what the smell was. The coffee machine was spitting the last few drops of hot water into the filter.

  He saw his reflection in the window once more. Hadn’t he switched off the light?

  Hróbjartur stared at the percolator and tried to think back, to recall if he had made coffee and then simply forgotten about it? It went without saying that he hadn't been his usual self after the shock of reading that article.

  I’ve done nothing! he thought angrily.

  That’s not quite true, is it, Hróbjartur? he heard his deep inner voice say, and he put his hands to his head. He stared at the coffee machine and the steam that dribbled upwards from it. He watched a tar-black drop as it dripped from the filter. He felt the world around him slow down to a crawl. The drop fell with immeasurable slowness and formed a circle as it hit the smooth black surface of the coffee in the jug.

  ‘Hello, Hróbjartur,’ a voice said behind him.

  4

  Hróbjartur yelped and spun around. He stared at the figure in black standing in a corner of the kitchen.

  ‘Who are you?’ Hróbjartur's voice grated, once he had his breath back. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘We don’t know each other,’ the stranger said in a voice so calm it was disconcerting. ‘But we’re going to get to know each other better. Not that much better, though. There isn’t time for that. We need to talk.’

  ‘Talk?’ Hróbjartur said in surprise. ‘Talk about what?’

  ‘Sit yourself down,’ the man said, stepping forward and drawing a chair from under the table. ‘I made coffee.’

  Hróbjartur stood motionless, as if rooted to the spot. He glanced around and saw his phone lying on the worktop, plugged into the socket to charge the battery.

  ‘Ah,’ the man said, following Hróbjartur’s eyes. ‘I took out the SIM card,’ he continued, fishing it from his pocket and holding it up. ‘Sit down. Coffee.’

  Hróbjartur took slow steps towards the man. He weighed the difference in size between then. He himself was brawny and in pretty good shape, apart from a slight paunch; one metre ninety, and a hundred and five kilos. But he was also sixty-six years old, with a bad back and suffering from osteoporosis. He quickly abandoned the notion of attacking the stranger. The man looked to be a good few years younger, beefy and fit.

  ‘What… What do you want?’ Hróbjartur asked as he sat down. He placed his hands on the kitchen table, and took in the sight of the black leather gloves the man had placed on it.

  ‘Don’t look like that, Hróbjartur. You seem sulky,’ the man replied after he had filled two mugs and taken a seat on the other side of the table. ‘Shall we begin with this? Is there something you want to tell me?’ he said as he turned the newspaper to face him.

  For a long time Hróbjartur stared at the newspaper. He had failed to notice that it no longer lay on the bedroom floor where he had thrown it. He looked hard, but in fact he could see nothing more than some jumbled, unreal thoughts that flashed past his eyes.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Up to you,’ the man said, almost cheerfully and took an apple from the fruit bowl on the table. He looked at it for a while, turning it in his hands, and put it back. ‘But what happens in the next stage of this unexpected visit depends entirely on your answers.’

  ‘I don’t understand. What am I supposed to say?’ Hróbjartur said in sudden terror as he stared back at the stranger.

  ‘Take that look off your face. I already told you once,’ the man rasped and Hróbjartur winced. ‘But I’ll give you a clue: the truth.’ He pulled on one glove. ‘You tell me the truth, and everything will be fine.’

  ‘Yes… But. It’s… I don’t know how I… I haven’t done anything that…’

  That was as far as Hróbjartur got. The man moved fast and a leather-clad fist crashed into his nose.

  Hróbjartur howled and snapped back in his chair, but not so far that he was thrown to the floor. He put his hands to his face as blood spurted from his nose.

  ‘There, there,’ the man said gently, reaching for a dishcloth that lay by the kitchen sink. ‘Here you go. It wasn’t that much of a punch. The ne
xt one is going to hurt a lot more and you won’t even feel the third one. The fourth one will be lethal. All the same, there’ll be some pain between the third and fourth. That’ll be something you don’t want to experience. So, the truth, Hróbjartur. If you tell the truth, then none of this will need to happen. There, wipe your nose and we’ll start again.’

  The man waited patiently while Hróbjartur wiped blood from his face.

  ‘No doubt you’ve read more than a few times the article about the pervert priests and the cover-up perpetrated by the Church. All those accusations. And, after all that, most of those cases were dropped through lack of evidence or because the statute of limitations kicked in. But there are things that can still come to light if people tell the truth, Hróbjartur. That’s precisely the reason I’m here right now. I want to hear the truth, and you can start right away.’

  Hróbjartur still had the dishcloth held to his face as his eyes flickered from the man to the newspaper and back.

  ‘There’s… There’s… a lot that could have been so much better,’ Hróbjartur said, almost choking on his own words. ‘But please believe me when I tell you that I’ve done nothing wrong … and there’s not a shred of evidence to say I have. Nothing has come up that says I’ve done anything. At any rate, the case was thrown out and…’

  A heavy blow struck Hróbjartur’s hands that were still covering his nose, and something could be heard cracking.

  He howled, louder than before, falling to one side and landing on the floor. The man stood up and went to his side. He took hold of him under the arms, lifted and placed him on the chair.

  The stranger took a roll of kitchen paper from beside the sink and placed it on the table in front of Hróbjartur before again taking a seat facing him.

  Hróbjartur’s face was flushed red and tears of pain coursed down his cheeks. He tore a few sheets of kitchen roll and held them to his nose, where they were immediately saturated with blood.

  ‘Remember? You won’t even feel the third one. Now then,’ he said brightly, and opened the small knapsack he had brought with him. He extracted a bundle of papers, put them on the table and pushed them towards Hróbjartur.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘These are diary extracts. You can go to where I put the markers and read from there.’

  Hróbjartur looked at the stack of paper in terror, as if it were a contagious disease there in front of him.

  The man banged the table with a fist and Hróbjartur looked up in alarm.

  ‘Read!’

  Hróbjartur thumbed through the bundle to the first of the five marker notes the man had placed between the pages.

  He read in silence.

  As he read, he shook his head or groaned. He couldn’t be sure if the words that came to mind, this is dreadful, or good Lord, were in his thoughts or spoken out loud.

  In the meantime, the man had stood up and filled their coffee cups.

  Hróbjartur finished reading and looked down at his hands.

  ‘I can understand that telling the truth is likely to be a painful ordeal for you,’ the man said in a low voice. ‘But that’s what I’m here for. So let’s try again, Hróbjartur.’

  5

  A falcon with wings outstretched rode the wind over the Lax River in the Mývatn district. The river flows from the lake at Mývatn and along the Laxá valley, above the Brúár falls and the Laxá hydro-electric plant. No doubt the falcon was scanning the ground below for prey. It probably wouldn’t have to search for long, since the bird population along the banks of the river is among the most varied to be found anywhere in Iceland, with many species on the menu that are found nowhere else.

  The river slipped gently around Salka as she stood in the middle of the stream. She had never before experienced such a strong connection to the natural world, bursting with life all around her along the banks of the river – considered by those in the know to be the best in the country for trout.

  Salka tried to cast her mind back to the last time she had been to the Lax River. Yes, fifteen years ago. She had been twenty-three and it was as clear in her memory as if it had been yesterday. Her boyfriend – or rather, aspiring boyfriend – had pursued her and invited her to go with him. Eysteinn had taught her the art of fly fishing, and she had fallen for the whole package, the river and him. She wasn’t exactly sure, but she had long ago convinced herself that their daughter María had been conceived during that very first fishing trip, down there among the tussocks in the most beautiful spot by the river. Born prematurely, she had been such a tiny piece of life, with her thick mop of hair as red as fire. Salka laughed as she recalled lying for the first time with her in her arms after she had been taken from the incubator, and had made a tiny plait of her hair.

  Three years later they had walked up the aisle together.

  It hadn’t been just the fishing trips that had tipped the balance while he was pursuing her. Eysteinn was quite simply one of the good guys. He was reliable, and he could be as funny as hell. And he’d been dynamite in the sack. As time passed, it hadn’t done any harm that he did well in business and they never had to worry about money. She had never been acquisitive, had never been one for piling up earthly possessions or splashing out. Maybe they had been different in that respect.

  Four years ago they had moved to Britain. Eysteinn had landed a position leading the design department of a fairly new and adventurous tech company, partly owned by people in Iceland who had set up a branch in London. She had found a civilian niche with the Metropolitan Police as a crime analyst working with a CID team. The sun shone on the little family. The thought made her smile. But the smile wilted as she recalled what had changed everything: the arguing, the yelling. The time she walked out, slamming the door behind her, driving away from the house. Then she…

  She was startled out of her thoughts as a fish jumped downstream. Salka lifted the rod and flicked it back and forth. She gradually let out the line as it swirled above her head like a ballerina stretching her limbs back and forth. The dry fly landed gently on the surface exactly where she wanted it. She had planted the fly for a fish in exactly this spot before now. The fly was carried by the soft current, leaving fine lines of a wake behind it. She dipped a hand in the water to wet her fingers and ran them through her hair.

  Salka leaned slightly forward and peered, not sure if she could make out something watching the fly in the sunshine. She finally caught sight of it glittering on the surface as it approached the catch point, just below an outcrop of rock to one side. She could feel a rush of adrenaline and prepared to pull the line in as the fly reached the rock. It passed the outcrop – and nothing happened.

  She straightened up and was about to reel the line back in when her phone rang in one of her waistcoat’s many pockets. She sighed. She was sure that she had left the phone back at the chalet. She patted her pockets and found the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, my dear. It’s Mum,’ a gentle voice announced. ‘Am I disturbing anything?’

  ‘Well… hey. You don’t have to introduce yourself, Mum. You and your voice are very familiar,’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘I’m actually a bit busy right now. Is it all right if I…’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Feeling?’ she asked, and fell silent.

  ‘Are you still there?’ her mother asked after the silence had hung for too long in the air.

  ‘I feel fine. Was there anything in particular? Is everything all right?’

  ‘Sure. Your dad’s better. He’ll start treatment after the weekend, I hope.’

  ‘You hope?’

  ‘Oh, you know what the health service is like these days. But we’re hopeful.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ Salka said, and could hear that she’d had a drink. She was about to ask her mother how she was, when it all happened. It was as if someone had pulled at her hand with all their strength. The rod bowed and the line whined as i
t was hauled off the reel. Drops of water were cast from it as it spun, landing on her freckled face.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mum, I’m a bit busy right now. I’ll have to call you back. Is that all right?’

  ‘No problem,’ her mother assured her.

  The hook in its mouth, the big fish had twice danced on its tail across the river’s surface before she managed to put the phone away and get a grip on the rod.

  The feeling of wading against the flow to follow the fish was similar to when she put her exercise bike on its hardest setting.

  The fish shot upstream and down again, and after ten minutes it seemed to have taken the decision to dive to the deepest point in the middle of the river, and to stay there, motionless.

  Salka breathed fast and stood stock still with as much tension as she dared on the rod. She could feel the rush of adrenaline. She noticed a duckling by an islet in the river. It must have been separated from its family and Salka knew it wouldn’t survive long. It would quickly become prey for the falcon, or else for a trout that was nothing but an underwater predator. Several times she had gutted fish that had gulped down whole ducklings or field mice.

  The duckling twittered ceaselessly and she watched it dart again and again from under the high grassy bank of the island, as if in confusion.

  She thought of her mother, who probably felt much as the duckling did. Salka’s father had recently been diagnosed with cancer, and he simply vanished, as if at the wave of a wand. He retreated inside himself, taking with him most of the characteristics that marked him out as a person, his opinions, determination, initiative, his smile and his sense of fun. And her mother was left alone and at a loss.