by Tia Wilson
Chapter Ten
Two Weeks From Now
The graveyard was nestled against the gentle curve of the base of the mountain. As was tradition all of the crosses marking the graves were made of wood reclaimed from the sea. No stone structures had been erected in the graveyard in the three hundred years that the site was used for burials. The first settlers made simple markings out of driftwood collected from the shore as raw materials were few. The first people who settled this land also faced another problem, there was a lack of usable stone to build dwellings with. The first houses built were simple constructions made out of mud bricks and covered with a layer of sod. When the first roads opened to the mainland it was still too expensive to transport headstones made out of granite and so the people of the fjord, without saying a word to each other, decided that they would continue the tradition of the original settlers and only use simple wooden crosses to mark their loved ones final resting places.
Life in the fjord was hard for the first settlers. Long winters and very little land to cultivate for farming meant that the bounty of the sea was what allowed them to survive. Journeys out past the protective mountains of the fjords and into the open sea were taken in the depths of winter and at a great cost. As time moved on and the mud brick houses of the past eventually changed to the wooden framed structures of present day, one thing stayed the same. The call of the open sea and the lure of the flicker of silver shoals beneath the churning sea remained a constant. The fjords were a place steeped in sorrow as every generation lost their strongest to the clawing grasp of the open waters. Even as the towns of the fjords shrunk as people moved to the big cities and away from a life on the sea, there was still a dedicated few that wished to keep the old traditions going. And like every generation before it this one would also suffer great losses from the endless surge of the wide open waters.
Sasha blinked away the snow flakes catching in her eyelashes and concentrated at a far off point outside the bounds of the graveyard. At the sharpest angle of the mountain huge earthen banks had been constructed to sweep any avalanches away from the houses in its path, and to divert the flow of snow out into the sea. As she concentrated on the peak of one of the sloping banks, three ravens rose in unison with wings outstretched and glided until they were obscured by another wall of the avalanche barrier.
A woman blew her nose into a crisp white handkerchief and Sasha turned away from the bright white snow and made herself look at the dark oblong cut into the frozen earth. A pile of soil waist high and with a shovel sticking from its peak was dusted with a sugar frosting of ice. Sasha looked at the handle of the shovel and she felt tears begin to well up as she noticed the scuffed and worn marks on the wood. It almost looked like fingers had made smooth grooves in the handle through years of use. How many graves had the blade of the shovel dug in its lifetime. How many tears had been shed before it as it waited for human hands to pick it up and begin the process of shovelling the earth back into the hole.
The three ravens appeared in the distance and turned in a wide arc and headed in the direction of the graveyard. The middle raven made a clicking sound like the turning of a tumbler on a safe door and the other two ravens returned its call with deep throaty clicking. A tall man with a suit that was frayed at the cuffs looked up at the birds as they flew overhead. He followed their progress as they flew towards the red roofed church and then onwards towards the fish drying shacks at the edge of town.
Sasha looked out across the graveyard at the wooden crosses, anything so she wouldn't have to look at the blackness of the waiting grave. The cold wind blowing in from the sea penetrated her to her bones and all the layers she was wearing seemed to have no stopping power. The cold was in her and she shivered and struggled to hold back tears as she though of the coldness of the open earth and the final resting place of all to come.
He squeezed her hand and it brought her back from the edge of tears. His bulk was like a wall against the oncoming attacking hordes of grief and disbelief that this was how everything would turn out. He put his arm around her and she pulled in close to him, needing the contact to help her make it through the day. His body emanated heat like a stone in a fireplace. It was a constant blast of warmth and she allowed him to hold her tight, to hold her together through this day.
The twenty or so waiting people were silent until the gate to the graveyard squeaked on its hinges and the hearse drove along the rutted road and then parked close to the burial site.
Even with two pairs of gloves on Sasha’s hands were shaking. She stuck them deep into her pockets to try to stop it.
“Do you want these?” he asked peeling his gloves off. His hands were still bandaged across his knuckles from his wounds.
Sasha took them off him without speaking and slipped her hands into them. She couldn't speak. She knew if she uttered a word she would immediately lose control and start weeping. She looked up at him towering above her and blinked away snowflakes without saying anything. He looked down at her and gave her a weak smile. The brash friendly man from a month ago was gone and Sasha could see the pain etched in his face. He was strong but he also needed Sasha to be strong for him, she knew this looking at him. She knew he would never ask for her help directly.
“We can get through this day together,” Sasha said in a low voice.
He gave her shoulder a squeeze and then looked off across towards the mountains as the coffin was carried from the hearse and placed beside the grave.
Chapter Eleven
Present Day
Sasha sat in the small cozy kitchen and stared out at the swirling snow. Her vision jumped and strobed with the effects of countless cups of strong Icelandic coffee. She had no idea how long she was sitting in the kitchen staring out into the blackness. The only marker of the passage of time was the empty cup sitting before her and the ritual of brewing another pot. Jonas could be gone an hour or he could be gone forever, Sasha was numb to the possibilities. She knew he had to brave the bad weather for his friend, no amount of her trying to dissuade him would of worked. Sasha knew that already about Jonas, he had a strong moral compass and he was compelled to go searching for Rafn, even after the official searches had been called off.
As she sipped on another steaming hot mug of coffee Sasha followed the swirling patterns in the storm outside. It was pitch black out and a thick layer of cloud obscured the stars. From behind a rolling bank of clouds a dim glow could be seen, as if someone was shining a torch through a layer of fluffy cotton. It could be the middle of the day or I could be in the depths of the night Sasha pondered as the blizzard outside seemed to coalesce and form a swirling cone that focused her attention.
A memory that hadn't surfaced in decades formed as she stared at the swirling mass outside and Sasha closed her eyes and retreated into a cherished moment from her past, a time when her uncle loomed large in her life and it looked like he would always be a presence who brought happiness to her. His move to Australia and the pain it caused was still some time away.
Sasha flung open the door to the basement and began to go down the stairs, slow and careful as her mother had showed her. When she turned the corner at the end of the short corridor, there he was, her uncle Tyron sitting in his favourite reading chair with his feet propped up and a book in his hand. Sasha stood in the doorway without saying a word and watched her uncle read until he finished the page and then he looked up at her as a smile cracked across his face.
His smile quickly faded when he saw Sasha’s downturned eyes and the stress furrowing her seven year old brow. “What is it?” he asked in his warm voice, a deep baritone that reminded Sasha of the rumble of an approaching train.
Sasha looked up at him and then quickly diverted her eyes. “ Mary Jane Pupkin told me that reading is dumb. She called me a geek when she saw me reading at lunchtime. I don't want to be a geek.” Her cheeks burned at the insinuation that by proxy her uncle was also a geek.
Tyron closed his book and placed it on the stack beside his bed
. He motioned for Sasha to come over and sit on the bed across from him and she did this while looking away and not wanting to look him in the eye. “Do you think only geeks read?
“No,” Sasha said in an unsure voice. Mary Jane was a popular girl in school and while Sasha didn't want to be friends with her it still hurt in some inexplicable way that Mary thought of her as a geek.
“Louder,” Tyron said with a smile.
His smile always worked on Sasha and she smiled back and said, “Smart people read.”
“Better,”Tyron said, “Don't you ever listen to any kid that tries to put you down. I’ll let you in to a little secret about those kinds of people. They usually have their own problems and they try to deflect it by lashing out at others. I wouldn't be surprised if Mary Jane Pupkin is a slow reader and seeing you enjoying a book made her angry.”
Sasha screwed up her face, this was something she did when she was thinking and it always cracked up Tyron. “Mary Jane had to read a passage from the jungle book out to the class and she stumbled over her words.”
Tyron slapped his thigh and said, “See, what did I tell you. Don't let any thing she said to you lodge in the old grey matter,” and he tapped his temple. “Are you up for a day trip?” he asked her as the smile widened on his face.
“To the library?” Sasha asked. The nearest library was two bus journeys away and Tyron had been promising to bring her for the last month. Sasha had only ever been in her small school library which was really only an empty classroom with metal shelves around the walls and two rows down the centre of the room. Nothing had been done to make it feel more than a makeshift setup. Any time Sasha had visited the place she had always crinkled her nose at the smell of mould that hung in the air. The school library looked nothing like the grand building that her uncle had shown her in a picture book.
The book was filled with photographs of libraries around the world and Sasha had become transfixed on the photo of the library in Trinity College Dublin. Stacks as tall as a house flanked a central area that had desks with lamps with curved brass necks. One of the ladders was pulled right to the end of a stack and a woman in smart dress was at the peak and holding a leather-bound book the size of a dinner tray. The picture was bathed in warm light from lamps hanging on long cords from the vaulted ceiling. The whole room was muted browns and autumnal shades and Sasha could almost smell the decades of polish on the scuffed floorboards.
The library in Trinity College was a world away from the damp smelling room in her school that served as their pathetic version of one. Sasha imagined herself sitting at one of the big oak desks with a lamp over her pile of books as she leafed through an ancient tome packed with illustrations of animals. Ever since Tyron had shown her the book she had been asking him a couple of times a week if she could go to the library with him. He had never told her no, just asked for patience from her and now it looked like it had paid off.
The day trip to the library with her uncle was more than she could of ever asked for and looking back she wished she had of noticed how guarded and stressed her uncle had been. When he brought her in to the children's section that had furniture designed for children and bright paintings on the wall Sasha fell in love with the place. She was giddy with excitement as she took a stack of books off a shelf and found a corner table to read at. “Did I take too many?” She asked her uncle.
“Knock your self out kid,” he replied with a catch in his voice. He got up and found himself a book and sat down beside Sasha.
She felt older sitting beside her uncle as she flipped through the illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, being in the library was like stepping in to a secret part of adult life that Sasha had only ever seen in pictures. As she browsed through the book she was already planning other trips with her uncle, to other libraries all across the city.
It never happened. Days after the day trip her mother told her over breakfast that her uncle was going to Australia for work. The news was like a slap to the face and Sasha struggled to hold back a flash of tears and said, “I can phone him, or write him a letter, or send him a package with books for him to read.”
Her mother shook her head slowly and said, “He’s going to be moving around a lot and wont be able to contact us. He will be working in places off the beaten track so for awhile when he leaves we wont be able to hear from him at all.”
The pain of her mothers lies still hurt in Sasha's chest when she thought back to that summer and how she had waited every day by her window, looking out for her uncle to amble up the street with a book in his hand, wishing she had of said goodbye to him when the chance was there. Sasha waited all summer and he never returned.
Sasha drained the last bitter drop of her coffee and got up and stretched. I can’t sit her wallowing she thought as she got up and looked at the row of books on a shelf at the other side of the kitchen. She could see why this room would be a good one to sit in and curl up with a good book. The small size of the room made it feel cozy and the view from the windows looked across the open sea to the other side of the fjord with its towering mountains smoothed by months of snowfall. She ran her fingers along the spines of the book and tried to pronounce the Icelandic names in her head as she imagined the sounds for letters that she had never seen before. Her finger stopped on on book with a blue spine and an image of a gold fish at the bottom. She took it out and then pulled her chair to the window at a good angle so she could see a wide expanse of the storm battering the fjord.
The front cover of the book had a black and white picture of a woman standing outside a house made of turf and covered in a layer of fuzzy grass. The woman wore a long black dress and a white bib that looked like traditional clothes. She had a fierce sternness in her eyes as she stared off at something out of the frame of the picture. Sasha flicked through the book and found page after page of old pictures of women all with the same stern look on their faces. Even through the blank stares Sasha could pick up on a sadness in their looks as if they were looking out towards a distant future and a better day to come.
The first couple of pages were all in Icelandic and it wasn't until a quarter of the way in that Sasha found her first passage in english. The picture was of a woman in a thick woollen jumper with her hair tied up in to a round bun. She held a baby in her arms and two small children stood beside her, their hair blowing back from a strong wind. The family stood in a field with a small cabin in the background and beside the woman was a huge curving piece of whale bone sitting on the grass. The woman and the children stared across the fjord towards the neck of it that opened out into the ocean beyond. Waves churned and crashed against the small dock at the end of the field. Sasha felt a ball of tension in her stomach as she began to read the text across from the picture.
It read: Katya Krumholt originally from Germany watches and waits for her husband and the crew of the fishing boat the little duck to return. Katya moved to Iceland after meeting her Husband in Germany and was living in the country ten years at the time of this picture She waited for seven days standing in the field watching the open waters of the fjord for any sign of her husbands return. That winter three of the worst storms of the decade hit the west coast. Many lives were lost. Katya's husband never returned and his crew of six able bodied men was never found. That year twelve lives were lost out at sea in the fjord known locally as “the fjord of deep shadows and sorrow.” Katya soon left Iceland and nothing more is known of her fate.
Sasha slammed the book shut and pushed it across the table as if it was scorching hot. She could feel tears begin to well up in her eyes and she tried to blink them away as she turned her chair around, not wanting to look at the book anymore. Is this how my life is destined to go she thought, the world of terror inducing storms and tiny boats bobbing on waves the size of mountains is so far removed from my life of air conditioned offices and project crunch time stress. Will I be one of those women staring off into the distance waiting for Jonas to appear as he takes another risk with his life by going out to
sea. So far I have been dreaming about a new life filled with quaint Icelandic villages with brightly coloured houses, wide open vistas of spectacular beauty and Jonas by my side. Am I naive for only thinking about that she wondered.
The alternative was like a cold blast of winter air that sharpened her mind to the real possibilities of life in a place that was so stunning and also one drenched in a history of deaths at sea. This would be your new reality Sasha told herself, if you lived in a place like this fjord Jonas or anyone else you get to know will be tied to working on the sea. In the relative safety of San Francisco she had never really thought about dangers lurking around every corner. In Iceland she was getting the sense that things were different. The people lived with nature right at their front door and the cruel and unrelenting power it could yield was always present.
Sasha tried to get the picture of the German woman out of her mind and it wasn't working. It was as if she could see every wrinkle and worry line on the womans face etched out in stark cartoonish details, thick dark brushstrokes across her face so that the pain of waiting was heightened. The walls of the cabin bulged inwards and Sasha tears begin to well up again.
She got up and did what she always did back home to clear her mind. Sasha grabbed her jacket off the rack by the door and slipped her feet into her boots. Snow pelted off the front door and it sounded like someone hurling handfuls of sand against it. I’m not going to let the storm put me off Sasha thought as she pulled her jacket up tight around her neck. When she opened the door the fingers of winter quickly made their way into the house, she got out and slammed the door shut behind her. Snow compacted an inch thick on the door came off in a long chunk and fell to the ground with a soft thump.