by Sjón
It all happened at the same breathless pace as the famously inspired sermons that used to pour, fully formed, from Thorlákur’s lips, like a waterfall tumbling over a rocky crag, with furious haste, above all with haste, like a torrent that testifies to its power with a deep booming roar, only to break up into a chaos of splishing and splashing as it enters the plunge pool, whirling up from the surface in a shower of spray, as if intending in defiance of gravity to flow back up the falls, as bizarre and incomprehensible, mesmerising and alarming as the conclusions to his sermons that almost invariably culminated in the preacher speaking in tongues, laughing and weeping in the language of angels, before eventually collapsing on the floor, overwhelmed by his own eloquence and the power of the Holy Spirit. Brynhildur’s life with the man of God was to follow a similar pattern.
The first six months were a happy time. She was a married woman, the wife of the bank clerk Thorlákur Röykdal, who handled hundreds of thousands of krónur by day and in the evenings metamorphosed into a big-time shepherd of souls. She moved into his three-room apartment in a house on Thórsgata. Her old neighbourhood. Living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom and study: she hadn’t lived this comfortably since she was turfed out of her father’s house when Kiddi was two years old. The congregation rejoiced with them and Brynhildur thought how nice it was that women and men, ordinary members and elders, should take such a keen interest in their marriage, telling her more than once how relieved they were that Thorlákur had a woman by his side again. The only shadow over their happiness was his insistence that nothing in the flat could be changed: she wasn’t to alter a single thing, everything was to remain exactly as it had always been. But it was a small, pale shadow, since Brynhildur’s possessions amounted to no more than three changes of clothes, a coat, a pair of walking shoes, an evening dress and a pair of high heels, which were easily accommodated inside the wardrobe beside the clothes that had belonged to Sveina Röykdal, Thorlákur’s first wife. The two photographs – one of Kiddi at six years old, the other of herself with her parents and brother Ásgeir – could go on the night table between the couple’s beds since they were small enough to fit on ‘her side’. ‘His side’ had room for no such fripperies, only a heavily thumbed Bible and a magnifying glass.
Then, quite without warning, the good days came to an end, to be succeeded by four months of celibacy, rows and increasingly odd behaviour on the preacher’s part.
The beginning of the end came when a neighbour of Brynhildur’s from the camp – the woman who had dragged her along to that first revival meeting in an attempt to ease her grief at the loss of her son – drew her aside and suggested she ask Thorlákur about Anna. Anna? Yes, Anna, ask him about Anna from Skjaldarstadir. So, when she and Thorlákur got home after church, Brynhildur asked if he knew a woman called Anna.
Of course, he knew any number of them, Anna was such a common name. Yes, so did she, but did he know Anna from Stóru-Skjaldarstadir? What kind of question was that? Where had she got hold of her name? Someone in the congregation had mentioned her. Oh, well, if people had started talking to her about Anna, it wasn’t exactly a secret that Thorlákur had been married to her. Married? Was he a widower twice over then? Yes, yes, he was, he had lost two wives, but Anna wasn’t one of them. He and Anna had got divorced and she had moved back to the countryside, to take over the farm at Stóru-Skjaldarstadir. It was a bad business, a very bad business, but with the help of God and the congregation he had got over it. He had wanted to protect Brynhildur, to spare her from having to hear such a regrettable tale. But what about the third wife, who was the third wife, the one who’d died; where had she fitted in? Oh, he’d rather not talk about that, but seeing as he was in confessional mode, yes, her name was Helga. It was a sad story. At this point Thorlákur burst into tears and couldn’t speak for sobbing. He wept inconsolably, fending off Brynhildur’s questions until, without warning, he got a grip on himself, seized her by the wrist and led her into the bedroom where he pushed her down on her knees. They would pray for Sveina, Helga and Anna, pray for themselves, appeal to the Lord to heal the cracks in their marriage.
Brynhildur resigned herself to learning nothing more from Thorlákur about the vanished women who had left no trace of ever having lived in the flat – any more than she left any trace of her presence there now – since it was, in the end, still the home of Sveina Röykdal, the only one of the preacher’s wives considered worthy of taking his Norwegian-Faroese family name. Besides, Brynhildur could easily get the whole story from her old neighbour. More unexpected were the repercussions for her marriage. Up to now Brynhildur had had no reason to complain about Thorlákur’s performance in bed. His sexual appetite was every bit as voracious as she had imagined or dared hope – it was common gossip among Icelandic women that men of God were lecherous types, presumably because all the spiritual good works they did among sinners resulted in a tension below the waist; after all, there has to be a balance in everything. But after the prayer session in the bedroom where Thorlákur had lain with three other women before Brynhildur, he lost interest in her. And she knew he was bound to look elsewhere.
No, that wasn’t when the bad times began. They began when her brother Ásgeir was murdered – yes, her marriage to Thorlákur was bracketed by two deaths, the murders of Kiddi and Ásgeir – and she got a reputation in town for being one of those women who are adopted by bad luck at an early age: not only had she lost her brother and son at the hands of murderers but her mother had drowned herself when Brynhildur was fourteen years old; and in the camp she and little Kiddi had lived for a while with a violent thug who aspired to be a poet, before shacking up first with a depressive milk-lorry driver and later with a morphine addict who’d been stripped of his pharmacist’s licence.
Although the murderer had been caught when Ásgeir exposed him at a séance (the guilty man turned out to be a former champion athlete and stamp collector who had coveted the victim’s priceless collection) and the case had been solved, the wagging tongues increasingly got to her. Brynhildur began to feel as if the abominable crime were somehow her fault:
Why was she still alive when those dearest to her met with such horrible fates?
This bitter question soured the warm memories she had of the years when her mother had been alive. Before, she had always been able to take refuge in these memories but now she saw in the distorting mirror of discontent that she, her mother and Ásgeir had been no better than servants in her father’s house. Their entire life at number 9 Lokastígur had revolved around making sure that the antiquarian Helgi Steingrímsson had sufficient room for his enormous bulk and his grandiose ambitions for the great work he laboured over from morning to night, which was to twist a cable from the Icelandic sagas, create a power-line that would connect the modern Icelanders to their thundering source, harness the energy of the original settlers, men who had boldly looked kings and revenants in the eye; he would charge his countrymen with the electric current of literature and self-reliance; he would shape an independent nation from these feeble first drafts. The least his family could do was keep out of his way.
Was he handsome? Was he amusing? Was he good on the dance floor? How could the dainty, fun-loving Sóley ‘Álftavatn’s Sun’ Brynjarsdóttir have married the troll and monomaniac Helgi Steingrímsson, only to wither away in his shadow? Her mother had provided no answers. And now Brynhildur was asking herself the same questions about her marriage to Thorlákur, though she was built like a valkyrie and he like a sparrow.
Regardless of how or when the rot had set in, their marriage ended the evening that Thorlákur Röykdal preached the sermon on Christ and the fallen woman, shooting a look at his wife Brynhildur every time the words ‘fallen woman’ blasted from his lips.
Four years had passed.
It was a late evening in December. Brynhildur was battling the north wind on the road to Kleppur. Her coat soaked up the icy sleet until it was sodden. Heavy lumps of the stuff slid down her bare legs into her boots. To
her right, she could see a light shining in the window of the Aged Seamen’s Retirement Home. Brynhildur faltered. There was someone on night duty. Perhaps she should seek shelter there, borrow their phone to call the emergency services and ask to be picked up? Or beg a bed from them and continue her journey in the morning? No, they’d only notify the police and she’d be forced to spend the night in the cells where she was bound to encounter some of her friends and end up going straight out on the razzle in the morning. That mustn’t happen. She couldn’t be sure of ever sobering up enough to seek help again.
Between the curtains of driving sleet, Brynhildur glimpsed the white buildings of the mental hospital.
Life on the edge was one of unrelieved monotony. The day she took to the streets, she had simply shoved the stamp collection she’d inherited from Ásgeir into a bag, gone to the lunchtime bar at the City Hotel and got pissed. That had led to a party, then back to the bar, then to another party and straight back to the bar the following lunchtime, day after day after day. It didn’t matter what day of the week it was, whether it was twelve noon or twelve midnight, there was always a party on somewhere. In this company she was Biddí, famed for her ability to drink men of all shapes, sizes and social classes under the table, for her ability to party for a week at a time without needing so much as a hint of amphetamine. She crashed out wherever the fun was taking place, waking sometimes in an armchair, sometimes in the host’s bed, sometimes in a hotel room, sometimes on an office floor, sometimes in the back seat of a car. So passed the first twenty months of Brynhildur’s life among Reykjavík’s party set. By then she had drunk all the profits from the stamps and Biddí had nothing to contribute to the fun but herself. The venues became ever seedier, the hosts more inhuman, participation more dearly bought, but when she took the Miltown Meprobamate pills on top of the brennivín, the pain, whether mental or physical, went away.
In the end there was only one place left where she could be sure of a bed for the night without having to pay for it with her body – apart from the Salvation Army hostel that provided shelter for all those not visibly drunk or stoned – and that was at the home of a man Brynhildur knew nothing about, who luckily (more importantly) knew nothing about her. He lived alone in the basement of a handsome house on Ingólfsstræti. One bitterly cold Sunday morning in February he had found her lying unconscious by the garden wall and helped her into his warm flat. He hadn’t asked any questions then or later. Whenever she knocked on his door he let her in without a word, lent her a dressing gown and towel, made her soup or heated up the leftovers of his supper while she had a wash and rinsed out her clothes, then made up a bed for her in the sitting room, ate an early breakfast with her and slipped two or three 100-krónur notes into her pocket before she left. The entrance to the basement was round the back of the house, so she could come and go unseen, so long as she made sure she arrived after midnight and left before dawn. Not that he had requested this, but she was sure the house-owner, whoever he was, wouldn’t appreciate visits from a woman of the sort she had become.
There was a white-enamelled sign screwed to the front door that read ‘Jón Jónsson, ceramicist’ in blue, sloping script. She didn’t know if that was his real name. The man spoke with a foreign accent. He had books in Icelandic, German and Hebrew and a lot of ceramic figurines from Midgardur. On the patch of lawn that belonged to the basement he kept a black nanny-goat. Had she known any words of his mother tongue, Brynhildur would have described him as ein Mensch.
Try as she might, she couldn’t remember where she had been from the middle of November to December of 1961. None of her drinking companions when asked could remember either. Someone claimed she had boarded a trawler and ended up in Akureyri on the north coast, where she had walked through a glass door at Hótel KEA and crashed out at the home of the poet Davíd Stefánsson from Fagriskógur, until eventually she was injected with a sedative and escorted back to Reykjavík by the police – which could well have been true, had she not heard the same story told about the time she’d had a two-week blackout the year before.
At the end of January 1962 she began to worry that she was pregnant and, not long afterwards, her fears were confirmed. The symptoms were the same as when she’d been carrying Kiddi. At first she looked after herself, ate for two, quit smoking, drank only wine, but before long she’d slipped into her bad old ways. As soon as her bump began to show, she stopped visiting her benefactor at 10a Ingólfsstræti. Yet it was to him that she turned at four o’clock in the morning on 27 August, and there that she gave birth to the child at five past eleven. Through the haze of pain brought on by the contractions she thought she saw two other men in the basement: one was a black man standing two metres tall, the other spoke Russian.
After sleeping for forty-eight hours she got up from her childbed, pulled on her clothes and emerged into the living room. Jón Jónsson was alone. He was sitting by a cradle made from a pink hatbox, aiming a bottle of milk inside. From the cradle came the mewing of a baby. Brynhildur looked away. She went out into the hall, took her coat from the peg, pulled on her boots and opened the front door. After a moment’s hesitation she called back to the man:
‘I’ll register you as the boy’s father.’
She never came back.
Less than four months after giving birth, Brynhildur is standing at the turn-off to the Kleppur Mental Hospital. She decides to take a short cut and head straight across country to the main reception instead of trudging along the exposed road that describes a wide bend over the marsh. But when she steps off the road and begins to pick her way over the rough ground, she loses her footing in the slush and before she can stop herself she has fallen flat on her back and is sliding down a slope she hadn’t realised was there. In the fall she loses her boots.
She starts struggling forwards again on hands and knees in the direction of the hospital and by cutting diagonally across the slope, manages to crawl all the way to where she can see the staff accommodation at the top. Then she begins to drag herself back up to the road but with every metre’s height she gains, she slides back two.
Her last conscious thought is:
I’m not bloody dying here in the mud by the loony bin.
* * *
Aleta smooths out the crumpled front page of the Monday paper from December 1962.
‘Here it is among your things.’
She holds it up so Jósef can’t help but see what it says:
Dead woman found by asylum still unidentified.
The Dance
A spotlight falls on to the stage from the right, drawing a bright line on the black floor.
Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 13 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 21 January 1962 –✝21 January 1962, Boy: 24 February 1962 –✝27 February 1962, Boy: 1 March 1962 –✝14 April 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝14 May 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝17 May 1962, Girl: 5 May 1962 –✝21 May 1962, Boy: 7 May 1962 –✝25 May 1962, Girl: 19 May 1962 –✝26 May 1962, Girl: 27 May 1962 –✝27 May 1962, Girl: 28 May 1962 –✝29 May 1962, Boy: 22 June 1962 –✝23 June 1962, Boy: 27 June 1962 –✝30 June 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Girl: 30 April 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 16 July 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝18 July 1962, Girl: 19 July 1962 –✝19 July 1962, Boy: 31 July 1962 –✝31 July 1962, Girl: 1 August 1962 –✝1 August 1962, Boy: 29 March 1962 –✝3 August 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝4 August 1962, Girl: 13 February 1962 –✝7 August 1962, Boy: 1 July 1962 –✝18 August 1962, Boy: 17 August 1962 –✝20 August 1962, Girl: 3 September 1962 –✝3 September 1962, Boy: 1 October 1962 –✝6 October 1962, Boy: 18 November 1962 –✝18 November 1962, Boy: 27 November 1962 –✝27 November 1962, Boy: 18 December 1962 –✝18 December 1962, Girl: 16 December 1962 –✝23 December 1962, Boy: 19 November 1962 –✝? 1963, Girl: 27 July 1962 –✝9 February 1963, Girl: 8 August 1962 –✝14 February 1963, Girl: 30 March 1962 –✝16 February 1963, Girl: 21 October 1962 �
��✝3 March 1963, Boy: 1 August 1962 –✝1 April 1963, Boy: 7 June 1962 –✝4 April 1963, Girl: 27 February 1962 –✝10 April 1963, Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝15 April 1963, Boy: 11 November 1962 –✝1 May 1963, Girl: 3 December 1962 –✝14 May 1963, Girl: 30 June 1962 –✝16 May 1963, Boy: 19 July 1962 –✝8 August 1963, Boy: 11 December 1962 –✝3 October 1963, Boy: 5 February 1962 –✝26 October 1963, Girl: 29 May 1962 –✝26 October 1963, Boy: 6 May 1962 –✝14 November 1963, Boy: 14 January 1962 –✝16 July 1964, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝4 September 1964, Boy: 30 July 1962 –✝30 September 1964, Girl: 1 July 1962 –✝18 October 1964, Boy: 10 May 1962 –✝5 January 1965, Girl: 6 August 1962 –✝18 February 1965, Girl: 4 October 1962 –✝9 October 1965, Boy: 24 June 1962 –✝14 November 1965, Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝23 December 1965, Girl: 9 August 1962 –✝13 January 1966, Boy: 29 October 1962 –✝10 July 1966, Girl: 10 November 1962 –✝20 December 1966, Boy: 8 February 1962 –✝10 January 1968, Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝18 February 1968, Boy: 7 September 1962 –✝30 September 1968, Boy: 24 August 1962 –✝8 April 1969, Boy: 22 November 1962 –✝12 May 1969, Boy: 23 December 1962 –✝26 December 1969, Boy: 24 March 1962 –✝1 October 1970, Boy: 22 February 1962 –✝17 November 1970, Girl: 7 August 1962 –✝29 January 1971, Boy: 14 March 1962 –✝10 March 1971, Boy: 16 April 1962 –✝4 April 1971, Boy: 19 June 1962 –✝10 October 1971, Boy: 15 December 1962 –✝26 December 1971, Boy: 17 June 1962 –✝12 March 1972 …