One Station Away

by Olaf Olafsson

  “Estelle told me where they went, and I looked a few things up online,” she said, trying to play down how prepared she was.

  Soon after we moved to Allington, I developed an obsession with learning about Iceland. I wasn’t very happy at the time; I missed Kingham, and I found Margaret more incomprehensible than ever. She seldom mentioned her mother country of her own accord, and usually changed the subject when I asked her about it. Only when she was at a particularly low ebb would she sometimes say that perhaps she would be better off in a backwater like Iceland, since nobody in England wanted her.

  Vincent had never shown the slightest interest in Iceland, and so it was hopeless asking him anything. He said there were few reasons to go there, although the mountains were beautiful. He mentioned Hekla in particular. I suspected it was the only one he knew.

  I went to Allington Library, which was on top of the hill on the other side of the football field. The only book I found on Iceland was Auden and MacNeice’s travelogue, Letters from Iceland, published in 1937. I hadn’t heard of it before, of course, and I sat down with it by the window, filled with anticipation. But my heart sank when I opened the book and found that the first chapter was written in verse, “Letters to Lord Byron,” part one of five. However, as I leafed through the book, things began to look up, because I found some photographs and discovered that the book wasn’t made up entirely of obscure poetry.

  On my first visit to the library, I mostly looked at the photographs. Although in my opinion there were too many of horses, some were instantly memorable: for example, a photograph of two boys watching a man cross a river on a ropeway, a farm on a windswept hill, and a man playing the accordion. I also came across a line from a poem that stayed in my mind as I headed home: This is an island and therefore unreal.

  In the weeks and months that followed, I went to the library every Tuesday and Thursday after school and sat by the window reading Auden and MacNeice’s book. The poems which at first had seemed so dense became clearer to me, and in the end I could recite many of them by heart. I never took the volume home with me, because I didn’t want to give Vincent or Margaret the chance to know I was reading it, and besides, it felt good sitting by the window in the peace and quiet of the library, watching the activity outside the garage across the street and the train as it came sweeping around the tracks into the town.

  After reading Letters from Iceland, I considered myself knowledgeable about the country, undaunted by the fact that the book had been written nearly half a century before. I wasn’t surprised that Margaret had abandoned such a tough, unforgiving place, for I couldn’t possibly imagine her in any of the landscapes evoked by those two poets, whether urban or rural. And what about Vincent? He would never survive there, of that I was certain.

  That is what I told myself, relishing the fact that I alone possessed this information without their knowing it. I was convinced I was an Icelander by nature, taking after my late grandfather, a sailor about whom my mother spoke little.

  When a year later Vincent told me one spring day that Margaret had been invited to give a recital in Iceland and to stay on and teach a class to a few chosen students, I was amazed that she accepted. And yet considering the difficult winter she had had—few triumphs and many more disappointments—perhaps it wasn’t so surprising.

  An Icelandic Ph.D. student at Cambridge, Ísleifur Kristófersson, helped organize the trip, working with his friends at the Reykjavík Music Society to arrange the recital and the class. Vincent helped with publicity materials, and Margaret even gave a short interview over the phone to the public radio.

  I thought about those days when Malena and I landed in Keflavík. I remembered the old terminal, long vanished, low shacks that could have been from the time of Auden and MacNeice, and Ísleifur and his friends who came to meet us dressed in their short overcoats. They drove us into town and I watched the lava fields out the window and Keilir, the mountain which I instantly recognized from Letters from Iceland. My heart leapt when it suddenly appeared through the mist, which was nowhere else to be seen on that clear day.

  When Malena and I had checked into our hotel we took a walk through the center of town, before heading up Bankastræti to buy some warmer clothes. I had already told her about Margaret’s recital at the old cinema, Gamla bíó. She had asked about my trip with my parents, gently of course, and I couldn’t avoid telling her more than I wanted. I seized the opportunity and walked with her to Ingólfsstræti, where I thought the cinema had been, and was relieved to discover I was right. She contemplated the building, even stepping into the middle of the road and gazing up at it. It was less imposing than I remembered, though I didn’t say so. She tried the door but it was locked.

  Standing there on the sidewalk, I was struck by the thought that I had never been there before. At first I made little of it, tried to brush it aside, but when that failed I became anxious. I glanced down the street, as though in search of some landmark that might put me back on the right track, and yet neither Arnarhóll looming close by or even Mount Esja on the far side of the bay looked familiar to me. And yet there the mountain was beneath the blue skies, just as it had been the evening Margaret held her recital in the cinema, regal and suitably distant.

  Malena was looking at the poster on the door, the image of a man in a green suit standing in what looked like an orange field, arms outstretched, either singing or calling to someone not in the picture.

  “Is he an elf?” she asked, turning toward me.

  “We should have gone to Greece,” I said, turning on my heel and walking away without looking back.

  Chapter 18

  I begged her forgiveness. We were back in the hotel room. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, she was standing by the window. I had walked until I reached the hotel, then at last I looked behind me. She wasn’t far away but had stopped calling out when she realized I wasn’t going to slow down.

  She had her back to me, her arms folded as she looked out over Austurvöllur square, or pretended to. The afternoon sun was shining on her, and I thought I saw a tinge of red in her dark hair.

  “I don’t know what came over me,” I said.

  She had never seen me lose my temper before; I very rarely do. I expected her to be hurt and angry, unsure for the first time what to make of me, possibly blaming herself for having forced me to come to Iceland; I envisioned a difficult trip ahead and felt sick when I thought about how I had behaved.

  And so I was taken aback when she turned around and smiled.

  “I knew we were meant to come here,” she said. “I knew we needed to.”

  I should have felt relieved, of course, and yet there was something in her manner that prevented me. I had always been able to smile when she talked about being a witch and things like that, and besides, her tone was then conscientiously mischievous, so I never took her seriously. But now I couldn’t help remembering the expression of despair clouding her face in Florence, and it struck me that she might think my behavior had somehow evened the score. Surely I was imagining things, and I reproached myself as I sat on the edge of the bed looking at her, and yet a seed had been planted which I didn’t like.

  That evening, in a little restaurant down by the harbor, I saw that she had prepared this trip very carefully. She didn’t admit it, of course, but made it look as if we were planning our itinerary together as we tucked into mussels and cod. Naturally, still ashamed for what had happened earlier, I did my best not to show that I knew. Our first stop would be Snæfellsnes, where she wanted to walk up the glacier, and from there to Stykkishólmur, where we would take the ferry to the island of Flatey. There was a small hotel on the island, she told me, perfect for an overnight stay. She wanted to visit the highlands, too, and thought it best to take the ferry from Flatey to Brjánslækur, and then to drive from there to Skagafjörður and on up to Sprengisandur. She had somehow managed to find out as well where we could rest on the way, and when we got back to the hotel, she showed me a photograph of a t
iny hut beneath a rocky hill.

  I did my best to respond with enthusiasm to her ideas, although I couldn’t understand why she had kept her travel plans secret from me. She must have spent weeks elaborating them, down to the very last detail, it seemed. It reminded me of the days when I used to sit in the library in Allington reading Auden and MacNeice, unbeknownst to my parents. Why had she played the same game with me?

  I tried to hide my misgivings and was as cheerful as I could allow myself to be, asking questions that affirmed my interest and eagerness. She replied informatively and showed me photographs on websites with cars crossing powerful rivers on Sprengisandur, of Snæfellsjökull under a bright blue sky, people climbing Drangey in Skagafjörður.

  “I’ve seen so many pictures now, there’s no need for us to go there,” I said, jokingly, then instantly regretted it.

  She shot a glance at me. I smiled and then she tried to smile back. We were on our feet, and I put my arm around her, but no matter how tight I held her, a breach of some kind seemed suddenly to have separated us. I was about to ask what was the matter, but she broke the silence first.

  “Look how beautiful the evening light is,” she said.

  Did I sense that we would never see Drangey or Sprengisandur except in the pictures on the website? Sometimes I think so, but that may just be my imagination.

  We set off early in the morning in good weather. I slept little in the light nights, and yet I wasn’t tired. We chatted all the way to Snæfellsnes (she especially), and after a while I felt everything was as it should be. Yet it was almost as if we didn’t trust the silence. Malena marveled at everything she saw, every rock, every river cascading down the mountains to the sea, old bridges by the sides of the road, having no purpose anymore, sheep grazing on the verges, and horses in the farmers’ fields. I told myself that I had won her back, her natural joyfulness and childlike excitement, her laughter as she clasped my arm, crying out: “Oh look, Magnus, just look at the waterfall, up there on the mountainside!”

  The flash of despair I had seen on her face in Florence belonged to the past; it no longer had any place in my memories, no more than my anger of the day before, which I had persuaded myself was nothing more than travel fatigue. We stopped beside a brook outside Borgarnes, had sandwiches, and drank water from the stream as the breeze caressed the yellow grass and our cheeks.

  She fell silent as we drove along the Snæfellsnes peninsula on our way to the glacier. I remembered a few things about it from when I was a boy, and I told her of Jules Verne and his book Journey to the Center of the Earth, and mentioned people’s long-held belief that the glacier possessed magical powers. I don’t recall whether I actually joked about these superstitions, but if I did it would have been good-natured anyway. She nodded a few times, but I sensed I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. She was busy looking out for the glacier, despite my assurances that you couldn’t really see it from the south of the peninsula until you were almost upon it; she seemed restless, anxious that we might somehow miss it. I said as much.

  “I doubt the glacier has moved,” I told her, patting her thigh. She smiled absent-mindedly, almost mechanically, and kept staring out the window.

  She said nothing when the glacier finally appeared, but I could hear her breathing becoming slower and deeper. I stopped for a moment so she could take in the scenery, before continuing up the hill to where we parked the car by the side of the road and got out.

  It was as if she had a plan, but wasn’t quite sure where to start. Finally, she rummaged in her bag and took out a bundle of papers I hadn’t seen before. She sifted through them for a while, and I decided not to ask any questions, zipping up the jacket I had bought the day before. There was a cold breeze, and we gazed at the sea far below. At last she looked up and said, as if it were the logical continuation of a discussion we had been having: “The energy from the glacier is strongest here on the eastern side, but we need to climb higher up.”

  I followed her up the foothills, toward the snow that glittered in the sunshine, but she seemed to find the going hard, and our ascent was slow. At last she stopped and sat down on a rock. I asked her whether her foot was still hurting.

  “Still?”

  “Since Florence,” I said. “Since you twisted your ankle.”

  “A little,” she replied. “I’ll be fine.”

  After a short rest, we turned around and started to climb down. I walked ahead. There were more people on the glacier than we had expected, most of them tourists, but soon she stopped again and asked me not to wait for her. I assumed she was trying to feel the power of the glacier, and I didn’t want to put her off by looking over my shoulder.

  We drove over the moor and caught the ferry from Stykkishólmur to Flatey. It was clouding over by then, but still dry. We stayed on deck during the crossing. It was cold out in the fjord and she wound her scarf more snugly about herself. Seabirds wheeled above the boat, and a man on the bench next to us claimed he had seen an eagle through his binoculars.

  By the time the ferry docked at Flatey, the wind had died, and a few drops of rain fell from the sky. We placed our luggage in a small car sent from the hotel, and were told that otherwise no one drove on the island. Malena still seemed to be limping, so I asked the driver whether she could get a lift with him to the hotel. She interrupted before the man had a chance to reply, insisting there was no need. I could see she was annoyed, but she forced a smile and said: “How beautiful it is here.”

  From the harbor to the hotel was a short distance, down a gravel road, past some low dwellings, farmhouses, and fish flakes. On the side of the road not far from the hotel was a chicken coop, and a tiny church on a knoll where sheep were grazing. Malena walked slowly at first, and I was careful not to go too fast myself, pausing every now and then to look around, the rain still only a light drizzle. Halfway down the road, I noticed her pace suddenly quicken. She seemed almost surprised at first, pausing as though unsure of her footing, then she brightened up, gliding ahead, light on her feet, as if she had sprouted wings. I said nothing, but remembered how good I felt when she looked over her shoulder, grinning from ear to ear, and said:

  “I’d love to live here.”

  I smiled back at her.

  “Let’s move here . . . Seriously.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, why not?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “You know I’d follow you anywhere.”

  We rested a little in the attic room which awaited us in the tiny hotel. White curtains fluttered before the window, through which the sounds of the sea seeped in. The boats idled in the harbor and children were playing by the shore. I fell asleep.

  It had stopped raining by the time we finished our dinner, so we decided to go for a stroll around the island. We threaded our way along the road next to the shore, on the north side where the hotel was, then turned east, leaving the houses behind as the hayfields took over. Malena marveled at the light summer evening, the stillness and the scenery, and said again that we should settle on the island.

  “I can teach dance,” she said, “and you can set up a doctor’s office where we live.”

  “Where will that be?”

  She looked around and pointed to a black timber house down by the shore.

  “There.”

  I told her that few, if any, people lived on the island in winter.

  “Then I’ll dance for you,” she said, and I waited for her to say that I would tend to her when she had a cold, or fell ill, but instead she said: “And you can fish.”

  I smiled, and we threaded our way along a narrow sheep’s trail, she in front. The sun came out over the fjord, lighting up the sea and the clouds that were slowly breaking apart. When we reached the nesting fields, we turned south, crossing the island diagonally, the arctic terns following us, screeching relentlessly and swooping above our heads. I handed Malena a stick with which to protect herself fr
om the diving birds. She found it amusing, and I said something about terns being good at protecting their young.

  All was well until we reached the southern shore and were about to head back to the hotel. When she tripped, we had just glimpsed the remains of a wrecked ship on the beach ahead of us, and she was running toward it. I was watching her and saw the way her feet gave way beneath her (one or both, I am not sure) as she pitched forward onto a boulder by the path. She cried out in pain, and I rushed over to her. I could see immediately that she had broken her left arm in the fall.

  I grappled with her for a long time where she lay on the ground, finally helping her to her feet and holding her up as we made our way back to the hotel. It seemed to take forever; the terrain was uneven so she paused with almost every step.

  There was no hospital or even a doctor on the island, but the staff at the hotel rallied and found a fisherman to take us on his boat back to the mainland. Malena waited in the lobby while I packed our things. Before closing the door behind me, I glanced out the little window. The sun was sinking toward the horizon, the rippling waves washing the last rays up onto the land, leaving them behind on the pebble beach.

  Chapter 19

  While I sat in the waiting room at Stykkishólmur staring out into the night at the veils of mist above the harbor, I remembered all the injuries Malena had struggled with that year. I hadn’t given them much thought and she had dismissed them as unimportant, although they had clearly prevented her from dancing most of January. For three weeks in a row she had stayed mostly in her apartment, insisting it was easier as there is no elevator in my building. When I offered to move in with her while she was convalescing, she thanked me but said she didn’t want to upset my routine. She claimed she was getting better and would return to my place in a few days. Of course we saw each other during that time, but not as often as I would have liked. She talked about being busy at school, and besides she was constantly going to physical therapy and yoga. I told her I was glad she wasn’t limping but she pulled a strange face and told me that the pain was intermittent. Of course I took her words at face value.