Walking Into the Night

by Olaf Olafsson

  I owned two good suits, but it was my bad luck to meet you in my waiter’s apron.

  As we sailed farther west there were boats drawn up on the gravel bank, fish-drying frames on the windblown shingle, the doors of a timber shack on the beach half-open, cold darkness within. Slowly we approached land. I could now see turf huts scattered here and there, sheep grazing in a dun field, dark clouds on the hills above. I already regretted having come back.

  But you were waiting. You were waiting for me beyond the fog; a distant smile, cold yet warm; eyes that seemed full of kindness—or was it pity? Not contempt but pity. It’s worse.

  I knew you, but didn’t know you. In your presence I never knew which leg to stand on. Yet I couldn’t stay away.

  19

  You greeted me on the quay, your father hanging back a little. I saw him watching us, a little embarrassed perhaps, and though I took you in my arms, I didn’t hold you as tightly as I wanted to.

  I had met your father several months before when he came to Copenhagen on business. He had been very pleasant when you introduced us, without a trace of arrogance or suspicion. He had taken an interest in my “studies”—rather too much interest, it seemed to me at first, but then I recovered—and told me about his business trips. He had just come from Spain, where he had started selling fish, and had been impressed by the country and its people. Later on, when I had taken over the company and went there on my first trip, I was surprised he hadn’t sold more, as he had formed good contacts. But that’s another story . . .

  Now he greeted me politely but had less to say for himself than in Copenhagen. He had a cold and kept blowing his nose into a red handkerchief.

  I was pretty sure that you were happy to see me. But your thoughts seemed miles away at times, even during those first steps up the jetty, as I was getting used to having land under my feet again. Your hand grew limp in mine, a mist passed across your eyes, and your mouth smiled its half-smile—you were gone. Where, I never knew. Neither then nor later.

  I felt as if I were holding hands with a woman in a fairy tale, until you leaned against me and whispered in my ear:

  “I’m so happy you’re home.”

  I walked up the jetty with my head held high and the sun at my side.

  I didn’t know in advance that I would be staying with your uncle and aunt in Reykjavik until the wedding. They lived down by the lake in the center of town and I had the basement to myself. My mother and father slept in the room next to mine when they came south. The house had thin walls.

  I don’t know who felt more uncomfortable, your relatives being stuck with us or us being stuck with them. On the first day, our hostess probably felt she couldn’t avoid inviting us to join them at tea, when their friends came for a visit, but during the following days I suspect she postponed any such gatherings until we had left so she wouldn’t have to repeat the offer.

  I had bought new outfits for my parents in Copenhagen but neither Mother’s black dress with its white collar nor my father’s gray suit could prevent them from looking out of place among the family and their visitors in that red, mahogany parlor. I couldn’t help noticing their discomfort; father rocked to and fro, as was his habit when nervous, while mother looked alternately down at her hands or at me in the hope of support.

  The arrogance of those people. The silent contempt. I could tell your aunt thought she could see right through me; she did nothing to hide her opinion that I wasn’t good enough for you. But she said nothing to my face; she didn’t need to.

  Why did your father arrange for us to stay with them rather than some other relatives in town? I still wonder what motivated him; he must have had his reasons.

  The suit I’d bought my father was a size too big. I hadn’t expected him to have shrunk like that. While I puffed at the cigar that your uncle had offered me and listened to my father’s awkward attempts at conversation with him and his wife, I suddenly recalled a midwinter afternoon at home when Mother and I were waiting for Father’s boat to appear out on the fjord. The dusk swiftly deepened to pitch blackness, a squall of snow battering the windowpanes. But no one came round the spit of land and she held me and comforted me until I fell asleep, exhausted in her arms.

  When a work-calloused hand stroked my cheek in the middle of the night, cold and hard from the sea, I half-woke, feeling such profound relief that I wept in my sleep.

  And now there he sat, opposite me in that red mahogany parlor. Cigar smoke between us, the lake smooth as a mirror outside the window, no danger anywhere. I looked at his hands and remembered feeling them wet on my cheek, smelled the oars they had gripped and tasted salt on my lips. Thought about the danger he risked. For a bucket of fish? No, for me.

  I concentrated on such thoughts to deflect the arrogant contempt which hung over me thicker than the cigar smoke, but it didn’t work. I was ashamed of my parents and hated myself for it.

  When my father died he was buried in the suit I’d bought him. He outlived my mother by only six months. I looked at him in his coffin and thought about those days before our wedding.

  He died in winter.

  A few years after we married, when your uncle got into financial difficulties and his wife approached you for help, you asked whether we could assist them, so I summoned him to my office the following day.

  I kept him waiting outside my office for over half an hour. The time passed slowly but I tried to enjoy it. When he finally came in I pretended to be ignorant of his affairs, forcing him to spell out how he’d got into his present predicament before he could reveal his errand and ask me for a loan. I said I’d have to think about it and told him to return the following day. Then I lent him a quarter of what he had asked for because that way I knew I’d have him in my power.

  He was dependent on my help for years and I always kept him waiting before admitting him to my office. My secretary would bring him a cup of coffee. I myself couldn’t work, knowing he was there on the other side of the wall. I might open a book but would put it down after flipping through a few pages, and get up and stand by the window, staring at the harbor, where workers were loading cargo, or out to sea, where a boat was leaving port, or at Mount Esja, white on a cold autumn morning. I would stand motionless, concentrating on the image I kept in mind of my father, sitting in that cluttered parlor with your relatives, old and dejected, so strangely small and dim that I had to concentrate to catch sight of him in my memory.

  I tried to convince myself that I was avenging him. But maybe I was just attempting to establish who had the upper hand.

  My secretary knocked at the door. She had begun to feel very uncomfortable. “One moment,” I called. “I’m just finishing up here . . .”

  I don’t know whether I ever really managed to convince myself. But one thing is sure: I never felt the anticipated pleasure when I finally opened the door and greeted him.

  20

  Kristjan slept badly. The spring night was awake outside his window and he could hear his parents tossing and turning in the room next door. He knew his father wasn’t asleep. He had seen Elisabet only twice since he came home; though no one had said in so many words that they were not meant to see each other until the wedding, he knew that this was the intention.

  He got out of bed. The pale night sapped all color from the earth, even more thoroughly than the dusk, dulling everything. The blue was drained from the sky and the white church on the far side of the lake was invisible in the bleached pallor. He had to strain his eyes to pick it out. Two more days.

  Two more days, and the fetters were already beginning to tighten. The filaments spun from the deceptive freedom of the open countryside and the smiles of people he did not trust. In the mornings he read aloud from the papers to his parents. They sat opposite him in silence, saying nothing when he forgot himself and stopped reading to stare into space, waiting patiently, staring into space with him.

  This coming Saturday, at two o’clock, Elisabet Thorstensen and Kristjan Benediktsson are to be m
arried in Reykjavik Cathedral. Elisabet is the only daughter of Henrik Thorstensen, of Eyrarbakki, and his late wife Margret Thorstensen. Kristjan is the son of Benedikt Arnason, fisherman, from Patreksfjordur, and his wife Helga Eymundardottir. The bride is a pianist; the bridegroom is a graduate of Copenhagen Commercial College.

  When he was a boy he would sometimes climb the mountain behind the village by himself. The wind would chase him, smoothing the grass before his feet, and birds would glide above his head. As he climbed, the tussocky slope grew stonier with every step until halfway up he came to a patch of green strewn with white and yellow flowers. He knelt, pulled one of them up by the root, and poked it into the front of his sweater. Then he scrambled up onto a large rock under a crag and turned to face the village below and the horizon at the rim of the ocean.

  “I’ll show you!”

  The village shrank beneath his gaze—the jetty a splinter in the sea, the houses like pebbles in his palm—his kingdom, until the mountain called in reply:

  “What?”

  His voice broke as he shouted from the rock:

  “I can fly!”

  He knew he could. He knew he had the strength and the determination. He took to the air, above the abyss, the precipice; the birds heeding his command and raising him towards the sky, the rocks echoing his voice, the sun watching from above.

  Then all of a sudden he fell.

  21

  A sweet smell of alcohol clung to Elisabet’s father when he and his daughter came to visit shortly after midday on the Friday before the wedding. He was singing as he approached the house by the lake and suddenly gave his daughter a smacking kiss on the cheek for no apparent reason, twirling her in a circle and shouting as he opened the garden gate:

  “Open up, Tomas, and welcome your brother-in-law!” Elisabet’s uncle was startled and Kristjan heard him say to his wife:

  “Your brother’s here. Were you expecting him?”

  Without waiting for anyone to come to the door, her father opened it himself and breezed into the front room.

  “Now, how about a coffee at Hotel Iceland? While it’s still dry. That was a hell of a downpour this morning.”

  He refused to take off his coat and sit down in the parlor, saying if he did they’d never set off.

  “You and your wife should do a bit of sightseeing while you’re in town,” he said to Kristjan’s father. “It wouldn’t make any sense to come all this way from the West Fjords and not visit some of the better establishments. So let’s go now, let’s get moving!”

  He spoke loudly. His brother-in-law tried to avoid going with them, asking whether he and his wife wouldn’t be in the way.

  “We’ve just had coffee,” said his wife.

  “Come on,” said Elisabet’s father. “It’s not every day that you’re invited out.”

  He went back out onto the steps, taking off his hat and looking up at the sky, brandishing his walking stick in the air.

  “No, damn it,” he said as if to himself. “I refuse to believe it’ll still be raining tomorrow.”

  Elisabet went straight out into the garden to pick some daisies. She returned with a bunch just as the others were putting on their coats.

  “I’ll put them in a vase for you, Gudrun,” she said.

  “Aren’t you coming with us?” asked her aunt.

  “No, I’m staying behind with Kristjan.”

  Her aunt looked at her brother.

  “They could do with some time together,” he said. “What with the wedding tomorrow . . . There’s a lot to think about.”

  Tomas closed the garden gate carefully behind him, with its number seven woven into the midst of the decorative ironwork, gold-painted and trustworthy. Kristjan had seen the maid polishing it twice since he arrived.

  Elisabet waved them goodbye, then closed the door. Kristjan was standing in the shadows in the front room. She handed him the daisies. A sunbeam found its way through the round pane of glass in the front door and fell between them; a butterfly danced in the light.

  “Look!” she said.

  She took off her coat and laid it over a chair in the front room. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed, but she didn’t notice. The silence was overwhelming. Finally she went over and put her arms around him.

  He stood rigid, staring in front of him, his hands at his sides. Gradually, however, he moved, dropping the daisies, slowly lifting his hands and laying them on her shoulders. She felt them tremble.

  “Come here,” she said and led him into the parlor. “Come here . . .”

  She walked ahead of him; when they crossed the threshold he took her in his arms and carried her to the sofa where her aunt like to sit. He laid her down gently, then loosened his suspenders.

  Above the sofa there were photographs of the family: the aunt beside a round table; her husband posing, pipe in hand; their grown-up children; distant relatives. When he lowered himself on top of her he found he was eye to eye with her aunt.

  A smell of cigar smoke hung in the room, the light was gray, a cloud covering the sun. His frantic movements didn’t seem to surprise her.

  “Let it all out,” she whispered to him soothingly. “Oh yes, my love . . .”

  A sharp spasm shook his body; he raised himself off her and knelt by the sofa.

  “There,” she said, “there. You feel better now, don’t you?”

  He looked down, didn’t answer her immediately.

  “What about you?”

  “Of course, darling. It’s enough for me that you’re here.”

  When she stroked his cheek he found that one of her hands was balled. He looked up.

  She smiled.

  “The butterfly,” she said. “It flew to me and settled on my palm. Poor little thing . . . I held it so it wouldn’t be hurt. I’ll let it go now.”

  She stood up, taking care not to close her fist, letting the air in through her fingers. He rose too and watched her walk out into the hallway.

  When she opened the front door the sun broke free of the clouds. The butterfly fluttered away on its paper-thin wings, was transformed into a spark of light, and vanished. As she turned round, he emerged from the parlor. She went to him, forgetting to shut the front door.

  The daisies lay scattered on the floor between them in a splash of sunlight. He watched her tiptoe among them as if she were walking on blazing water.

  22

  The rain began just after first light.

  He was awakened by the first drops as they vanished into the reddening sea of leaves outside, only a few at first, then a deluge. A squall swept the hillside but the bells remained silent in their towers; he concluded that the wind must be from the north. The leaves swirled in the gust, red and yellow; raindrops streamed down the windowpanes.

  He turned his head on the soft pillow and rubbed his eyes. The leaves looked like goldfish swimming in an aquarium.

  Summer was over but he didn’t miss it. The Chief and Miss Davies, who had been away since the beginning of spring, finally returned yesterday. The construction on the hill had been suspended for months; the summer days succeeded one another in a torpor of heat and drought. The workmen’s huts stood empty except for the one where the men responsible for maintenance and repairs lodged. Kristjan and the head gardener had been commended for managing to keep everything going with only half the staff, but neither was flattered by the praise.

  It was a Thursday in June when Kristjan had dismissed his staff; the head gardener had thinned out his workforce the day before. It rained on both days, and when Kristjan opened the window the following morning the warmth was gone from the air.

  In late June they were paid a visit by representatives of the people now overseeing the Chief’s property, to supervise crating up the works of art and antiques and transporting them to the docks. They swaggered around, talking loudly, so that no one could fail to realize that it was they and not the Chief who made the decisions now about what was to be sold and what could remain in the castle. When K
ristjan found them in Miss Davies’ bedroom, rummaging in her drawers, he had to fight to keep control of his temper.

  The Chief rang Kristjan daily to remind him that they mustn’t take anything but the things he had agreed to put up at auction, mainly mail-shirts, suits of armor, swords, spears, and shields, which were still in storage in the warehouse down by the harbor, never having made it up the hill. But the list also included ancient Greek vases and several statues, as well as a church ceiling which the Chief had bought at the sale of the Count of Almenas’s possessions in the winter of 1927.

  For two days in a row an echo could be heard from the tennis court: puck, puck, punctuating the silence. On the first day, Kristjan took cold drinks of lemonade and soda out to them on the court, making three journeys with glasses and jugs on a silver tray, as he was accustomed to doing for the Chief. But he didn’t like the way they looked at him—“those boys,” as he called them when he drank tea with the head gardener that afternoon; he got the sense they were sizing up the glasses, tray, and jugs as if calculating what they had cost and what could be got for them now. He suspected they were wondering whether he himself wasn’t superfluous, too.

  The following day he stayed in the kitchen when he heard them going out to the courts and let them go thirsty. He had locked the silver tray away in a cupboard because it was one of the Chief’s favorites. He thought it was safer.

  He relaxed when he watched them drive away shortly before sundown. A golden light still played around the buildings at the top of the hill, but the lower slopes were already in shadow. The car vanished into the darkness. He did not say goodbye to them, but ordered a houseboy to help them with their baggage.

  The only point of contention was the silver: the French silver service, which was on the boys’ list but not on the one the Chief had sent Kristjan. It may not have been the finest silver in the house, but the Chief always gave orders that it should be used when there were fewer than ten for dinner. And when he and Miss Davies dined alone, they invariably used the French service. Kristjan had objected at first, showing the boys his list and pointing out that there was no mention of a silver service, but when they started asking him about his own arrangements, how long he’d been there, how much he was paid, claiming they hadn’t seen his name on the payroll, he fell silent.