Snowblind

by Ragnar Jónasson

  Úlfur was certain that Hrólfur would never agree to his writing for the Dramatic Society. Hrólfur had been kinder to Pálmi, the old teacher. In fact, despite Pálmi’s raw and less-than-promising first efforts, Hrólfur had continued to support him, giving him one opportunity after another. It had paid off. His work had improved – even Úlfur had to admit that. There was no doubt that the damned teacher had talent.

  But that wasn’t a problem any longer.

  Úlfur had already decided that he would quietly offer to fund the performance of his play himself – surely that would be enough to convince the Dramatic Society to stage it to coincide with his seventieth year. He wasn’t short of cash; his long diplomatic service saw to that. Despite his enjoyment of high living, he had invested shrewdly. The divorce had cost him dear, but there was plenty left of his savings.

  The divorce. His suspicions that something was wrong had become too strong to ignore around the time of Sonja’s fiftieth birthday. The age difference had never been a problem, until then. She was fifty and he was in his sixties, now an attaché at the Oslo embassy, a respected and highly placed diplomat, but with a few extra pounds around his middle and his hair long gone. Sonja had retained her youthful looks remarkably well. He knew what was coming the moment she mentioned to him – her voice sweet and unrepentant – that there was something they needed to discuss. She had met a younger man. In fact, quite a lot younger, a forty-five-year-old engineer from Oslo.

  Although he had half-expected the news, it still came as a shock to hear the finality in her words. He didn’t sleep for days, took sick leave for the first time in years, and lay at home in the dark trying to work out what had gone wrong.

  He had seen some twenty good years with her, but had wanted more. He had known in his bones that it wouldn’t last, but as the years went by, he held on to the slender hope that it would.

  Eventually they divorced, and Sonja moved in with her Norwegian engineer. Úlfur stayed on his own, suddenly an old man, carrying out his duties through force of habit rather than embracing new opportunities, waiting quietly for retirement to roll around.

  Two years later, his mother passed away in Siglufjördur. She had lived in the same big, old house where she’d raised her family far into her old age. Úlfur took three weeks leave and flew home to Iceland to arrange the funeral. He had been an only child, the last of his family. There was little chance that he would produce any heirs now.

  The funeral had taken place in the Siglufjördur church on a balmy summer’s day. His mother had been well liked and had many friends. Úlfur felt deep sadness at her passing, but he knew in his heart that she had waited patiently for over sixty years to meet his father on the other side. The ceremony was deeply moving. His mother’s close friend from the church had sung, and Hrólfur had offered to read a poem, a beautiful poem from his famous book, North of the Hills.

  An old schoolfriend ran a part-time estate agency business and offered to advertise the house for sale. ‘An elegant building in the best part of town’ the draft of the advert had read. ‘Would make a magnificent summer residence.’

  Úlfur asked for a little time to think it over and decided to stay in Siglufjördur for the remainder of his leave. Many years had passed since he had spent such a long time in his home town. He had tried to make the trip to see his mother once a year, normally at Christmas, Easter or during the summer, and generally with Sonja. Some years his mother had visited them, but stopped accepting invitations to travel to see them when her health began to fail.

  He spent a couple of strange weeks in the old town. His feelings of loss were magnified while he stayed in the house, missing his mother and mourning his father, and feeling that he needed to stay there. There was something about this small town that had a strong attraction for him: the sea, the towering mountains, the old houses. He realised he had even missed the snow.

  At least once every day he walked down to the dock and gazed out over the fjord, thinking of the father the sea had snatched away from him.

  It was something of a revelation to realise that he had made his peace with the fjord and the sea.

  It was time to come home.

  The news was all over the front page of the Sunday newspaper that was on the table at the station’s coffee corner. The paper hadn’t reached Siglufjördur until Monday, but it provided written confirmation of what everyone already knew, that Hrólfur was dead.

  Hrólfur Kristjánsson passes away.

  There were no big headlines, just a restrained black-bordered feature at the bottom of the page.

  The author Hrólfur Kristjánsson died in Siglufjördur on Friday evening at the age of ninety-one. He became a national figure in 1941, at the age of only twenty-four, when his novel North of the Hills was published. The book is regarded as one of the finest examples of Icelandic literary fiction of the twentieth century and its unique style marked a new school of literature, a revolutionary, modern take on the classic romantic style of Icelandic nineteenth-century literature. The book’s love poems, including the tragic Verses for Linda, written to the book’s heroine, have long held a place of their own in the national psyche. Hrólfur Kristjánsson was born in Siglufjördur on the 10th of August, 1917 and graduated from college in Reykjavík in 1937 before taking up a university place in Copenhagen, where he studied first history and then literature.

  He returned to Iceland with the passenger ship Esja when it sailed in 1940 from Petsamo in Finland with two hundred and fifty-eight Icelandic citizens on board, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. He later settled in his home town of Siglufjördur and stayed there for the rest of his life. During his lifetime Hrólfur Kristjánsson received a great many plaudits for his work. His novel was published in the United States and widely in Europe, receiving highly favourable reviews and becoming a commercial success with the reading public in various countries. He published poetry and collections of short stories until he retired in 1974. The President of Iceland awarded him the Order of the Falcon in 1990. He was also awarded honorary doctorates in literature by universities in both Iceland and Copenhagen. He was unmarried and had no children.

  Hrólfur Kristjánsson died in an accident on Friday during a rehearsal of the Siglufjördur Amateur Dramatic Society, of which he had been chairman for many years.

  ‘He rang me up,’ Tómas said.

  Ari Thór looked up.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He rang me up, the journalist. It didn’t take them long to work it out. He asked if the old man had been drunk.’

  Tómas scratched his head and raised one heavy eyebrow, giving him a strangely dramatic expression, while the other eyebrow remained practically still in its usual place.

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘He already knew. Someone must have told him. I said I had no comment to make. We’ll let the old fellow rest in peace.’

  ‘You’re still sure it was an accident?’

  ‘I am. Let’s not be making mountains out of molehills.’ Tómas’s voice was firm.

  ‘I heard there was an argument there on Friday.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tómas shot Ari Thór a suspicious look.

  ‘Didn’t you know? I heard that Úlfur and Hrólfur were going at it hammer and tongs.’

  Tómas looked surprised. ‘No, Úlfur didn’t mention that,’ he said, and looked thoughtful. ‘It can’t be anything unusual, just before a first night. You know what those artistic types are like – too excitable, the lot of them. How do you know this, anyway?’

  ‘Something I heard yesterday,’ Ari Thór said, hoping he could get away without any further explanation. He preferred not to let Tómas think he had discussed police business with Ugla. ‘Shouldn’t we ask a few more questions?’

  ‘Ask what? It was an accident. I have no intention of stirring up a hornets’ nest,’ Tómas said, his voice rising and his fist landing with a bang on the table.

  That was clearly as far as things were likely to go. />
  ‘I’ll go to the gym at the pool at lunchtime if that’s all right with you,’ Ari Thór said, and he saw that Tómas appeared to be relieved that he had dropped the subject.

  ‘Fine. You do that.’

  Caution. No running.

  Shallow end. Deep end.

  Ari Thór read the lettering on the wall for the hundredth time as he went down the steps from the changing room to the pool. It was tempting to dive in and see how his shoulder would cope after his injury, but instead he went past the pool and outside into the fresh air where the hot tubs stood surrounded by a high wooden fence. It was bitterly cold outside, the air still, as if holding its own breath. The snow had held off, and the sunlight was almost impossibly bright, reflecting on the frost-dipped landscape. Ari Thór shivered and squinted as he made his way towards the tub.

  Úlfur was there already, as Ari Thór had suspected.

  Ari Thór had been to the pool several times before – usually during his lunch break, when his shift had been quiet. A dip in the hot tub relaxed his muscles, and he would slip quietly into the water and lose himself in his thoughts. In the past, Úlfur had frequently been in the tub around noon, but the two men had never spoken – their silence respectful and personal. That was about to change. It was certainly Tómas’s right to decide whether or not to investigate the incident at the Dramatic Society, but he couldn’t forbid Ari Thór from talking about it.

  They were the only ones in the hot tub.

  ‘I’ve never understood,’ Ari Thór said, ‘why there isn’t an outdoor pool in a wonderful place like this, with a view out over the fjord. It’s a real shame that the pool has a roof over it.’

  ‘What?’ Úlfur said with a start.

  ‘Good morning. My name’s Ari Thór. We met on Friday.’

  Úlfur sniffed. ‘Yes, well. I suppose we did,’ he said. ‘The Reverend, isn’t it?’ He added in a low voice.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ari Thór said, letting the reference pass without comment. ‘Don’t you agree?’

  ‘What? The pool?’

  Ari Thór nodded.

  ‘Actually, no. I well remember when it was an outdoor pool, back in the old days.’ The look on Úlfur’s face and his tired eyes said that he meant the good old days. ‘It was no picnic in all that winter snow, believe me. It was a blessed relief when they finally built a roof over it.’

  The ice had been broken and Ari Thór pressed home his advantage.

  ‘I hear the opening night was postponed.’

  ‘Yes, there was no other option. We had to put it off until after the funeral.’

  ‘You knew Hrólfur well?’

  ‘Fairly well. He was of a different generation, although the lines start to get blurred with age,’ he said with a smile. ‘We were both in the pension club.’

  ‘Poor old fellow, falling on the steps like that.’

  Úlfur nodded and looked skywards.

  ‘It looks like snow,’ he said.

  ‘You must have been one of the last people to speak to him.’ Ari Thór said, trying to make his words sound careless.

  Úlfur appeared to take them that way and replied without thinking. ‘More than likely … we had made some minor changes to the script during the rehearsal. You have to do that sometimes, even though it’s irritating to alter things at the last minute. We were talking through some of the arrangements when the others had gone to dinner and, as usual, he came up with very apt observations. He was certainly alive and kicking,’ he said, and then stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry, that was a tasteless thing to say.’

  ‘But you worked well together, didn’t you?’

  ‘We did, not bad,’ he said and his gaze returned to the sky as if he was waiting for the first snowflakes of the day to fall.

  A young woman came and joined them in the tub, without uttering a word to either Úlfur or Ari Thór.

  Ari Thór wanted to ask about the drinking, to ask just how drunk Hrólfur had been, but this was exactly the kind of talk that could get him into trouble. There’s little juicier than a good morsel of gossip in a society where not a great deal of note happens. The woman who had joined them was more likely a local, rather than a tourist – at this time of year, with the town shrouded in snow and darkness, and the roads dangerous to the point of being lethal, there were few visitors to the area. The forecast was also poor, or so Ari Thór had heard somewhere in passing. He had stopped taking notice of weather forecasts after moving north as there was a constant prospect of foul weather.

  ‘He wasn’t the easiest character?’ pressed Ari Thór.

  ‘Yes, well, sometimes. Sometimes,’ Úlfur said and again looked up at the sky.

  Ari Thór couldn’t resist the temptation. ‘I hear there was an argument between the two of you on Friday,’ he said.

  Úlfur wasn’t fooled by Ari Thór’s lighthearted tone.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ he demanded, and stood up as if to leave. The first soft snowflakes began to drift downwards. ‘Is this some kind of damned interrogation?’

  Ari Thór said nothing, smiled and looked towards the young woman to avoid Úlfur’s eyes. Her expression remained unchanged, and it was clear that she hadn’t come to the hot tub to involve herself in other people’s arguments.

  By the time he looked back, Úlfur was gone and the snow was descending – like a thick, white darkness. Ari Thór took a deep breath and tried to fend off the impending feeling of claustrophobia.

  22

  SIGLUFJÖRDUR. MONDAY, 12TH JANUARY 2009

  Pálmi Pálsson had been pleased that Úlfur had only greeted him with a nod when they met in the early morning on the Town Hall Square. Pálmi had continued across the square and down to the quay, his regular route for a morning walk. This was a habit that had developed since his retirement from teaching three years before, when the staff and pupils had held a reception on his final day to wish him on his way. That had been a Friday, the last day of the term, when spring had arrived practically everywhere in Iceland except in Siglufjördur, with its white-faced mountains. There was sufficient snow on their slopes to suggest that summer was still a long way off, but not enough to run down them on skis. Pálmi was still an enthusiastic skier, even at seventy-three.

  Seventy-three. He could hardly believe it. His health was robust and friends and acquaintances commented constantly about his youthful looks. You don’t look a day over sixty, Pálmi. How on earth do you manage it? Of course, he knew that was a lie. His hair had gone grey, but that only served to make him look more distinguished. A glance in the mirror, however, told him he was far from young, the veins showing in a face that had become lean, his cheeks almost sunken. His mother had only reached sixty-seven before succumbing to a sudden stroke. In his younger years Pálmi had often feared that he’d go the same way, but he had long since got over that particular concern. He had already been teaching at the local primary for a good few years by the time his mother died, in 1983. She had lived in an old flat near the square and had steadfastly refused to move in with him, to the house he had bought on Hvanneyrarbraut, with its view over the fjord, where he still lived now. It was a location fairly close to the square and the theatre, but still pleasantly set – almost on the shore, with an unrestricted view of the sea.

  These strong genes must have come from his father’s side of the family, although his father’s life had been a short one, cut off by tuberculosis at only twenty-four. Pálmi had always felt a strong connection to the father he did not remember. A few pictures of the two of them together remained, taken in 1936 and 1937, shortly before his father had left his family behind to seek his fortune in Denmark, back when Pálmi had been just a year old. He and his mother had been left behind in Siglufjördur, but Pálmi had never sensed any bitterness on his mother’s part. He needed his freedom, he had heard her say once. His own warm feelings towards his long-departed father stemmed unconsciously from her positive attitude towards him, and she had loved his father, at least for a while.

&nbs
p; It hadn’t been easy for her, left behind with a small child in a remote coastal town in the north during some very hard years. Like so many, his father had contracted tuberculosis in Denmark and died far too young, only a year after leaving Iceland.

  Pálmi had been well liked at the primary school. He had been a conscientious teacher and spent his summers walking high in the hills and mountains. He had been abroad on only three occasions, each time on school trips with pupils. He had never experienced any strong urge to explore the wider world, something he imagined he had inherited along with his mother’s genes. She had always been careful, had always lived within her means, painstakingly counting her pennies. Pálmi had been surprised after her death to find that her estate barely covered her funeral costs.

  He had always been a loner. A good, well-regarded teacher, but he had struggled to establish friendships outside work. There had also been precious little romance in his life and now it was surely too late. Or was it? Maybe it was his own fault for hesitating, failing to leap when opportunity beckoned. He had been in love in his younger days, but let the chance slip away, not daring to gamble. If he thought back to those days it was with regret. However, he had a practical nature and trained himself not to look over his shoulder, as that generally brought too much pain.

  Since retirement he had immersed himself in writing. He woke early every morning, long before the rest of the town had drawn its curtains, and made a habit of writing every day in his study with its view overlooking the fjord. After dinner, the evenings would find him back at his computer for another hour or more. Through the winter, with its early nightfall, he would light candles and arrange them in old jam jars in the window. Sitting in front of the computer, he would look out into the darkness, through the heat rising from the candles, to the sea and the point of land on the far side of the fjord.

  His book was progressing well and he had already written three plays alongside his magnum opus. The plays came easily and made a lightweight counterbalance to his work on the novel. The first had been almost a farce, while the second had been a little more dramatic; the third, which he felt was the best, was a piece of real drama, with lighter moments neatly woven into the script. That was what people wanted, the chance to laugh and cry. The new play was the one that the Dramatic Society had intended to stage on Saturday.