They were a couple.
In the evenings they often sat together in the old dining room, he behind his big computer screen, she in the red chair, reading novels, cutting things out for her scrapbook, playing with her hair, lost in thought. An Arvo Pärt album in the background. Sometimes he went out and walked down to the town lake, even entered a bar where he would watch and listen to the girls – like buds of the coming zeitgeist – while pretending to listen to his old schoolmates trying to acquaint themselves with a new land-use plan for their over-mortgaged castles in the air. Let’s keep in touch, was his usual farewell as he stood up and went out into the cool evening. Sometimes she would go out to meet her friends and sometimes she went up to the bedroom, dived under her duvet without a book and lay there, awake and open-eyed, looking into herself, closed. Her presence all the more tangible when she was not sitting in the red chair.
After three years together, they began to talk about maybe having a child. Three years later they began talking about maybe adopting a child. Sometimes she would phone her friends to talk about children, and they would all urge her to do it, quoting cases where it had been a great success, and sometimes she dialled the adoption agency’s number as he sat with her, held her hand and nodded, but she always pressed the red button before the conversation could begin. Sometimes he asked, ‘Shouldn’t we get on with adopting a child?’ At which she would nod, bite her lip and say yes. But the days passed, weeks, months, years, and she always pressed the red button before the conversation could begin. Sometimes she didn’t go to work but lay in bed fully clothed under the duvet, her eyes open, looking inwards, closed. Sometimes she didn’t come downstairs for supper on Thursday evenings, even though he had put on his red smock and had begun to cook his anchovy pasta. Then he ate alone and drank the whole bottle of white wine by himself, after which he went up to the bedroom and sat by her and stroked her head helplessly while listing ten points that made life worth living.
One evening she disappeared and didn’t come home until the following day. He shouted at her, shook her, repeatedly slapped his forehead, but she remained silent and withdrawn, went up to the bedroom and climbed into bed fully clothed and pulled the duvet over her head and lay there, closed and open-eyed, looking into herself. When he asked later that evening where she’d been, she said that she’d been at a friend’s place and had fallen asleep in front of the television. He knew she hadn’t been drinking, but he didn’t know whether she’d taken something. He knew nothing.
One Monday evening in autumn he was sitting at his computer, soft music coming from the record player – a suggestion of strings and densely woven low voices. She was sitting in the red chair, a novel in her lap. The room was cold. Outside, autumn winds raged, sending a chilly draught through the gaps in the ill-fitting windows. A curtain fluttered. She had a shawl wrapped around her and fiddled with its fringe as she read. Suddenly, she stood up and came over to him, distracting him from his screen. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked softly, and smiled. ‘Am I disturbing you?’ He shook his head but said nothing, smiled back. She stroked his head, and he felt a deep, strong yearning. He felt as if they were far inside a dark, ugly building with grotesquely winding passages, with ceilings so low that you had to bend down as you fumbled to find your way, and there was no music anywhere, just a low hissing, and no colours anywhere, just grey walls, dark walls. And all the rooms were the same. He felt that they would never find a way out of these corridors to the place where they should be, their place – the open space after making love, when they lay side by side and talked about colours and poems. He looked away from the computer screen, turned around in his chair to face her, took her hand, closed his eyes and forced a smile. He couldn’t find their space. He still felt that they were in a cramped and dark place, full of hissing and labyrinthine passages. And even though he had his eyes shut and a smile on his lips that was supposed to indicate reconciliation, and even though he felt this yearning surge inside him, he sensed her fear. She hadn’t touched him for a long time and seemed unsure whether he wanted her touch or was waiting for her to make her own way out of this dark maze. He couldn’t find the words to tell her that her touch was exactly what he wanted. He stood up, but he couldn’t raise his arms. They hung by his side like a puppet’s; he couldn’t embrace her. Her stroking became confused, circling the same spot on the back of his head, and finally stopped. She masked her insecurity with a warm smile. He returned her smile, made a desperate attempt to find the way back to the space they had shared before, by repeating some banter he’d heard earlier in the day and found amusing. It wasn’t the least bit funny and her attempts to laugh both exhausted and infuriated him. So now they stood there, the two of them, facing each other in a hideous, low building in a dark place, feeling nothing other than an overpowering mutual longing. She was about to turn thirty, he in his early forties. Her hair was blonde and shoulder-length, his streaked with grey. Both were tall and slim. Both had a dimple in one cheek. Both had long arms, long hands, long fingers. She had brown eyes, his were blue. Watching her move quietly into the kitchen to get some water, he felt that he had neither life nor existence. She went upstairs to the bedroom. He resolved not to sleep until he had found their space, retrieved her love. As he followed her up the stairs, he tried to compose in his head ten points that make life worth living.
When he entered the room, she was lying with her eyes closed and didn’t respond to his attempts to wake her and tell her about the ten points. When he woke the next day, she was gone. She never returned.
First thing each morning, he goes outside to look around, then goes back in, goes to the loo, makes porridge, brews coffee, lights his pipe and returns to his study to continue writing his history of the village. He is always alone, every night all he embraces is absence. She went abroad, he thinks, somewhere south. To Morocco or Martinique – somewhere south, where the buildings are light and full of all kinds of arches and the morning breeze is gentle and people’s skin is soft. The south would suit her well. She would be wearing a white robe, with long, grey-streaked hair, working in her restaurant, washing dishes, giving change, tanned and beautifully wrinkled, serving the families who would show up at six o’clock sharp to have a fish course that was still evolving but always based on cod and garlic, fennel and white wine. The sun would stream in through the west-facing doors. Suddenly she would think she’d heard something, her eyes would light up and she would go outside to look around.
The White and Wonderful Dimension
The old couple sit at the kitchen table munching custard creams. Skipper Guðjón is thinking about the great northern diver he saw in the valley at Lake Valeyri yesterday evening, about its majestic glide along the lake and its long dive for fish, as if careless of time, as if free. Sveinsína is somewhere in the middle of Biggi’s guitar solo at that gig in Austurbæjarbíó, the solo which, later that night, he said had been for her alone.
Guðjón drinks his coffee, the colour of a weeks-old puddle, from his special milk glass, the one he always uses. He slurps it through a mouthful of biscuit, enjoying the sensation as the dough softens and disintegrates, and the flavours of coffee and cream filling mingle. He is thinking about the great northern diver he saw last night, and the barnacle goose someone has told him about and which he has decided to look out for later this evening. His mind glides from bird to bird, as he gazes out of the window at the afternoon pulsating in the sunshine. He hears the redshank go chew-chew-chew, which makes him think of the oystercatcher going cleep-cleep-cleep as if wanting to hurry you along – he wonders whether they understand one another, the redshank and the oystercatcher. He has never wondered about it before, and yet he often thinks about birds and always watches them when he is ashore, or on holiday in the summer. The other day he spotted a little auk, and it felt as good as a big catch, being able to watch this tough little bird that had the sense to leave Iceland. Then he starts thinking about all the lads in his crew and their latest successful fishing trip
, about the new boy, an undergraduate from down south, about Garðar the coxswain and his gallstones – he really should just get on with it and have them removed – about Teddi and whether he should be worrying about him.
Sveinsína takes a biscuit, decapitates it, then swallows it regretfully, half-chewed. Looking out of the kitchen window, she catches sight of Kata Choir cycling past. She is thinking about Biggi and his fair hair, always so clean and thick, and his guitar solo in Austurbæjarbíó, how it had seemed that it would never end, must never end, just got louder and louder, faster and faster, soaring further and further in more and more directions, louder, faster, longer. After the concert, everybody talked about his solo, how he had seemed to abandon his body and enter some white and wonderful dimension. It said exactly that in the Thjóðviljinn review published the following day: ‘…into some white and wonderful dimension’. She is thinking what a pity he never recorded it properly – never recorded anything at all properly, come to that, how nothing remains now of what he did or could do, how he’d never made much of anything, how nobody but she remembers him. She hears the solo in her head, enters it, stays there for a moment engulfed in the bright glow of its majestic chaos, soars…
She asks Guðjón if he would like more coffee.
‘Ta, love.’
She half-fills his glass, fetches milk from the fridge and tops it up.
‘Pastry?’
‘Mm, please.’
She goes to a cupboard to fetch a bag of pastries and arranges them around the custard creams on the plate.
He says, ‘Listen, Sveinsína. Teddi. I’m a bit worried about him. Maybe we should invite him and Gugga and the kids here for supper?’
‘Sure. Give him a call. They can come tomorrow. He’s singing tonight, of course, in the concert. Was it a good trip, by the way?’
‘We caught a bit,’ he says.
He is thinking about the great northern diver – its black head, its red eyes, its chequered back, how it glides haughtily across the lake, how it suddenly dives whenever it pleases and stays underwater as long as it pleases and catches whatever it pleases. He thinks: I wish I knew what it’s like to be free.
She is thinking about that long winter when Biggi died. Teddi was only five years old at the time. They were living in a block of flats in Ljósheimar in Reykjavík and Biggi had started working in the Landssmiðjan metal works; at weekends he played at Hótel Borg with the Binni Frank Band, a bunch of old charlatans who played the notes mechanically off the page and never allowed him any proper solos – they wouldn’t let him soar. She and Biggi had been just kids, really, and he was like a bird trapped in an oil slick.
‘Penny for them?’ he asks, dunking his pastry in the pale-brown coffee.
‘I’m thinking about Biggi,’ she says, stroking the handle of her cup. ‘About that last winter of his.’
‘Ah. Yes,’ he says. ‘Not much of a life.’
‘No,’ she sighs.
‘Yes,’ he replies.
‘D’you really think Teddi is depressed?’
‘I hope not. No, probably not. It’s just a feeling. Silly of me. No, no. He’s holding up.’
Their front door stands open. They can hear their family: Teddi and Gugga’s kids squealing, the clattering of the motorboat Teddi VA as it approaches land, the distant din of the ocean that blends with the salty smell of the sea. They hear the redshank go chew-chew-chew, the faraway screech of the Arctic tern, the impatient oystercatcher’s cleep-cleep demanding an end to all this feasting. Can they understand each other’s twittering?
The sun streams in, fills every corner and illuminates their full, fleshy faces; thickset, broad-cheeked, eyes narrowed against the light, they are ox-sturdy and can lift anything, settle anything, deal with any problem.
‘What about you, Guðjón, my love?’ she asks warmly, putting her hand over his and squeezing it. ‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing special, really,’ he replies. ‘How about we ride up the valley after the concert this evening? Look at the birds. You can take the piebald.’
‘That’d be nice,’ she says.
He is thinking about the great northern diver on Lake Valeyri and how it glided about in the pale summer night, filling the valley with its mournful wail – or was it laughter? Then suddenly dived, on impulse, just as if it knew how to be free, to be alone. She is thinking about Biggi and the long winter when he died, that winter in Reykjavík in that godforsaken block of flats, and Teddi was only five and followed his daddy out onto the balcony and watched him climb over the rail on the seventh floor and jump, watched his daddy briefly soar through the air – soar through his white and wonderful dimension – before hitting the pavement. He sometimes spoke about it when he was in his cups, said he remembered it, but she wasn’t sure that was true. He says a lot of things, does Teddi.
One thing she does know: his spirit can soar, but also crash. He had been conceived in the rapture following the Austurbæjarbíó gig, when Biggi had played the guitar solo that went on and on, soared higher and higher, faster and faster, the solo everybody talked about – and which was for her. Every day she hears it. Every night, before she falls asleep, she sees Biggi on the stage in Austurbæjarbíó, wearing the purple shirt with frills, his full, long hair that was always so clean, and then she hears the music, bright and free, and it transports her into this white and wonderful dimension.
Evening Can Come
Life is outside. She sometimes hears it as it passes: there is a sound, a barely audible gust that she hears, and recognizes as life passing by. She hears children shouting and calling out, and sometimes she wants to open the door and offer them sweets or a Coke, but when it comes to it she loses her nerve. And they stay outside while she is here, inside. She hears planes and cars and motorbikes and lawnmowers and electric saws, and she thinks that this is what modern times are like. Everything moving so quickly. This impersonal noise. This loathsome brutishness. She is going to stay here, indoors.
In here. She has dusted everything and hoovered and washed the dishes. There’s a leg of lamb in the oven, carefully seasoned with herbs from her garden: thyme, rosemary, basil and mint. She will feast on it when she has made the gravy and boiled a few potatoes, and it’ll last her the whole week, maybe longer. The washing machine is purring away, and through the speakers Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are singing dreamily about the fire and the flowers and the vase. She la-la-las along in indistinct but perfect harmony. Everything is easy, they say. And now evening can come. The mist and the ill-will it had brought have disappeared. Evening light floods in through the window, unhurried and resolute in its thousand-year silence. The smell of lamb, herbs and cleanliness wafts through the house. She’s had a shower and put on her neat grey trousers, and the blue T-shirt with the picture that her son, Gummi, had printed on it to publicize the place in Akureyri that he was running that year. Her hair is still wet and she has combed it straight back, making her delicate face look more rounded, with softly shaped cheekbones and blue eyes, a small chin and slender neck. She is young-looking, slim, with perfect manners in any company. Everybody warms to her. Somewhere she has old friends, and now she sits at the coffee table scanning old school photos to put up on Facebook, humming along to the music – Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young & Jósa. She looks up as if there was something to see outside the window, but there is only that foreign girl cycling past at the end of the road. The girl with the choir, which she would have joined if it wasn’t for Kalli. She looks down at the faces in the photos, but sees only herself and Kalli. Later on tonight she might microwave some popcorn and drink a couple of beers as she watches television. Maybe an old film or a crime drama, or perhaps Benny Hinn on that Christian channel if he’s on tonight. She finds him entertaining, though she isn’t particularly religious. He’s always full of life and fun; he reminds her of Kalli, with this boundless energy surrounding him. And he uses his energy to enter the lives of people who are going through a rough time, to fix things i
n an instant by shaking them up or getting the Holy Spirit to shake them up, she’s not sure which. She herself has stopped bothering about cures or changes, because there’s nothing wrong with her apart from life being outside and her not being particularly old yet.
She isn’t old, but it’s a long time since anybody has visited, a long time since she’s met people, a long time since she has felt enthusiasm for something. Every day she goes to work at the bank, sits in her cashier’s chair and deals with those customers who still don’t bank online. But that’s not the same as meeting people. On her way home she bumps into all sorts of people who say all sorts of things to her. But that’s not the same as meeting people. Sometimes Kalli’s sister, Sveinsína, drops by for a visit, sits at the kitchen table and talks about her Guðjón and her Teddi and other locals and their children and their in-laws and their in-laws’ cousins and their children. But that’s not the same as meeting people.
She is always alone. Occasionally Gummi rings. He came last summer, on his own. He’d asked whether he could come for the weekend, he wanted to cook cod for her and drink white wine with her, spend cosy time together. He is like that: considerate, sweet. And so he arrived just after noon on a Friday, his rucksack bursting with all kinds of spices and vegetables, garlic and ginger and coriander and dill, tomatoes, fennel and heaven knows what else, and bottles of white wine that he put straight into the fridge. He knocked up some dough for bread in no time at all, and was then off down to the harbour to see if he could get cod, but none was to be had so he went to the Bónus supermarket, where the only thing available was frozen haddock fillets. But he didn’t lose heart. He went to see Kalli, his dad, in his barn, and then spoke to Teddi, who was up for going out with him to catch cod. That’s what Gummi is like. He didn’t stop until he’d managed to get the fish he was determined to cook for his mum. It was seven o’clock when he came back with two lovely cod, which he gutted and deboned. He opened a bottle of wine and began to cook while he told her all about what had happened in his life and she told him nothing about what hadn’t happened in her life. This was a real moment. She listened to his voice that evening and watched the smile at the corners of his eyes and mouth. His words were scented. They were ripe with sweetness and exotic flavour, just as every bit of the cod was. His life had been full of energy and colour, and it had been happening outside while she was here, inside.
And the Wind Sees All Page 3