And the Wind Sees All

by Guđmundur Andri Thorsson

  Everything has its moment. A slice of marble cake waits to be eaten. A fridge in the corner hums and reminds him that it’s time for his afternoon beer. Anganóra the mouse, almost as old as Kalli, waits for the slice of bread with peanut butter he usually feeds her around this time. But there’s no rush; she’s fine, like everything else here.

  This is where people come when they can’t find the right washer or screw, because they know Kalli has all the right screws and all the washers that have ever been invented, along with nails of all sizes, timber, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, tyres, spanners. You can always go to Kalli with any problem, and if people don’t return his tools he just pops round later to their garages to fetch them himself, no fuss.

  This was once Kalli and Gúndi’s Body Shop. People brought their cars here for every problem. He was a sort of motorcar family doctor, even making home visits when people couldn’t get them to start. Gúndi looked after the books and administration, but disappeared off to South Africa one day with all the money, leaving Kalli with the debts. But they’d been good times, always new challenges, and his barn had gradually become like a surgery for objects; people brought anything that needed mending and he fixed it, and sometimes it stayed here, forgotten.

  And then he’d suddenly found himself knee-deep in employment issues, and became chairman of the local trade union because it needed somebody with a bit of guts to stand up to the Lárus mob. He was out at all hours, and when he did get home Jósa was always a bit grumpy about how little he did around the house and with their little boy, Gummi – which was hardly surprising – and it had all ended on a rather sour note.

  But at least they had the boy, they had that in common. All day, he’s thought so much about Jósa and the times they had together, and experienced this remembered feeling as a dull pain in his loins and chest.

  But he’s actually stopped doing any of it really. He doesn’t deal with union matters now and no longer fixes cars except for fun. But he does collect broken washing machines and mend them, which means that anyone can turn up here and get one for free. They’re lined up behind him like a happy, hopeful choir of all ages robed in various shades of white, waiting for him to step forward and spread his arms to embrace the village, like he’s done all these years.

  He is alone. He’s sitting in the sun, the generous afternoon sun that warms and shines for ever. All is still, the evening can come. And now there are two wagtails in the middle of the doorway, fussing over something. He slumps back in his chair, his gaze resting on the busy wagtails, his eyes soft, at peace – departed.

  Tales Never Told

  Some tales are never told, but lie buried deep down, imperceptibly affecting the village and lending colour to its appearance – unheard whispers in the wind.

  They’re sitting outside in the sunshine with Fríða’s dandelion wine in their glasses, the afternoon breeze on their cheeks and delight in the corners of their eyes. Fríða has brought out the CD player and Baggalútur’s gentle song about the sunshine in Dakota murmurs in the background. Everything’s lovely, and tonight the Valeyri Choir is giving a concert in the village hall, and they’ll stand on stage and sing, softly or loudly, following Kata Choir’s directions. Andrés is telling that story about when Lárentíus the local sheriff and Halvorsen the chemist argued in bad Icelandic. It was hilarious, the way those two spoke. They all listen eagerly – apart from Ásta, Fríða’s taciturn friend from Reykjavík; she finds it hard to keep her mind on the story and instead contemplates the splash of the surf, the shape of the mountain, the clattering of a motorboat, a fly that hovers over the dandelions and then suddenly changes its mind and buzzes straight through an open window into the house next door. She feels alone.

  A village is not just the movement of the surf and a life of work, the clattering of a motorboat, or dogs that lie in the sunshine with their heads on their paws. It’s not only the smell of the sea, oil, guano, life and death, the fish and the funny house names. It’s also a chronicle that moves softly through the streets, preserving an elemental image of the village created piece by piece over the course of centuries. This is us, what we are like, the people of Valeyri, we here, we. Everybody knows certain chapters of this chronicle: the tale of Dr Jónas and his depression; the love story of Guðmundur, the poets’ poet, and Katrín, and how she married Lalli Lár, his childhood friend, while Guðmundur, the poets’ poet, lay dying of TB – abandoned her poet for the village king; tales of wily ghosts and capricious witches; a ship’s crew miraculously saved at the eleventh hour, another who perished even though there was a dead calm out at sea; tales of missing persons and getting lost in perilous weather; stories of headstrong horses wandering off into the highlands and sightless dogs rescuing children; of the elves in the harbour-mouth cliffs, blown up as part of the harbour expansion in the herring years, and the curse that followed and made the herring disappear completely. Such tales: of women, seasonal workers, who took off their wedding rings on the way here to process the herring; of lovers’ trysts in the Láfalaut hollow; of lecherous accordionists, of canny milk-truck drivers, of drunken priests and hapless herring speculators; of nicknames, place names, insults, curses and blessings… Some storytellers can go on well into the night when there’s someone to listen to them. Some tales have been written down, some are only whispered after opening a bottle.

  And some tales are never told.

  Andrés from the museum is the one who tells these stories. Valeyri’s great chronicle flows through his mind, and he knows every house and its name and every soul who ever lived here. He knows every car, every horse, every boat, nearly every visitor who’s left behind a tale to tell.

  He was brought up in a little house by the harbour. His father worked on old Lalli Lár’s trawlers until he went into the nursing home to die, and his mother worked at the bakery. They had a small vegetable plot and a few sheep that Andrés was supposed to look after. They bought all the books they could lay their hands on. They lived to see their son go south to Reykjavík to study history at the university, but both died before he came home with his degree and Fríða – a Reykjavík girl raised in Karfavogur among poets and artists – and a baby girl, and moved into the old house, which he has restored beautifully with the help of good people. Not least among them Kalli, who looks in unasked every day to fix something or other, and then maybe tells Andrés a story he hasn’t heard yet, or a new version of an old story, or yet another nickname that he’s come up with (Kalli being the inventor of most of the Valeyri nicknames). They have replaced almost everything in the house – apart from the old grandfather clock, which they’ve kept because Andrés said that they had to listen to the remorseless ticking of time.

  Fríða cooks supper for them, when she gets home having waited on tables and dealt with everything else at the Puffin apart from the cooking. She pays the bills and works out what they can afford; she chooses everything they buy, from crockery to the car, which she repairs: at one point Kalli said that she seemed determined to turn her husband into a child, but Sidda replied that Andrés was an intellectual and needed space to think.

  They are different. He is short and a little chubby, and seems pleased with himself and perhaps a bit dim, like short and chubby men sometimes are, though he is neither. He’s cheerful and sincere – Kalli says he’s the personification of a smiley face. Sidda tells him not to say things like that. Fríða, on the other hand, has thick, curly hennaed hair; she wears tight clothes, high heels and make-up, and takes care of her appearance. Kalli says she’s a babe with jowls. Sidda tells him to shut up.

  Because he has an energetic and hard-working wife, Andrés can concentrate on the history of the village and the house. It’s a house with a rich past, in which he and Fríða have brought up three children who have all moved south. The vegetable plot remains in its place, full of interesting herbs cultivated by Fríða. Andrés feels like a well-established tree in the right place – in his soil. Fríða makes her dandelion wine, famous all over t
he area, and in the evening they often have a drink out in the garden, and share it with friends and acquaintances who happen to pass by, making it a happy hour. As more people turn up, they merely fetch more tables and chairs. And now it’s Midsummer Night, when all life turns into a golden moment. Having found a girl to fill in for her, Fríða has persuaded Lalli Lár to give her the day off from the restaurant, and now they are sitting in the sunshine with a glass of dandelion wine, and neighbours and passers-by and friends have joined them and Baggalútur are singing tenderly about the sunshine in Dakota. Everybody’s going to the concert in the village hall later, but that’s happening in a completely different dimension; now, at this moment, time is transformed and Andrés is in the middle of a tale about relations between Danish big shots in another century, Lárentíus the sheriff and Halvorsen the chemist. It’s a tale of cursing and swearing and wrong declensions, and everybody is very amused.

  The house attracts stories. The name, Brimnes 1913, is written on the wall, and it remembers everything, stores everything: love, arguments, tears, joy, loneliness – all the emotions that have raged here still live in its structure, all the words, all that has happened here – and tales never told.

  He was born in this house. He has read about its previous occupants, and he occasionally wonders whether he can sense some of them, a subject he often discusses with Fríða in the mornings, while she’s cooking the porridge. He hears a noise, and imagines the old woman who lived here for ages at the beginning of the last century, visualizes her in Icelandic national costume, her back ramrod-straight, her hair in thick plaits; or Thorkell the harbourmaster with a speech impediment, whom they called Skrolli; or Hafsteinn the headmaster, who lived here with another man, and nobody found fault with that arrangement whatsoever. He knows he isn’t ‘sensitive’, but sometimes on long autumn nights he can hear creaking, knots snapping, curtains swishing. He sometimes thinks that he can sense something the house knows.

  The little group sits sipping Fríða’s dandelion wine, and everyone’s very amused by the bad Icelandic the Danes spoke and how bad-tempered and silly they were. Apart from Ásta, Fríða’s taciturn friend from Reykjavík. A minute ago she was watching a fly buzzing around the dandelions and had stopped listening to Andrés’s prattling, and now she’s watching the grass moving in the breeze. She stares in front of her. She’s uncomfortable. She didn’t sleep well last night and she isn’t quite sure what to say to her friends.

  Ásta! She’d been woken up by someone whispering her name, ever so quietly. She opened her eyes wide and heard her name whispered again. She couldn’t see anyone. She couldn’t hear any sounds of sleep coming from her friends’ bedroom, couldn’t hear the humming of the fridge, or any of the sounds that had sent her to sleep, apart from the ticking of the grandfather clock. She looked around and the room felt odd. Was she still asleep?

  She closed her eyes and dozed for a while, till a gust of cold wind on her face startled her out of her slumber. She looked around the room. The wood panelling on the walls had been replaced by threadbare, rose-patterned wallpaper. The blue chest of drawers in the corner was gone and in its place stood a chair with shabby red upholstery. Sitting in it, cross-legged, was a young woman, slim, with long, tangled hair. She was staring straight through Ásta. She wore a tight-fitting dark-blue dress and gave off a strong whiff of the sea. Ásta could neither go back to sleep nor get up. She couldn’t utter a sound. Eventually, she managed to tear her eyes away from the young woman and looked towards the door: it stood open, admitting a faint light. She was sure that she’d shut the door before going to bed. The clock struck three. The floor was covered with what seemed to be drab, worn lino. She glanced at the chair again. The young woman had disappeared, but the smell was just as strong as before. She could hear the cries of Arctic terns.

  Without thinking, she climbed out of bed and walked across the room. It took an age. On the floor lay a mat with a faded pattern. Outside she saw a cloudy sky. She was awake, she knew that; and she was here, she knew that. But did she really know? And where was ‘here’? Tomorrow was Midsummer Day, she knew that too – so she had to be awake, here and now. But she still wasn’t sure. She walked slowly down the hallway with the worn lino, in time with the ticking of the clock; barefoot, she felt the chill of the stone underneath the lino. She shivered, she was freezing. An ice-cold breeze was blowing through the open front door. In the living room a small, green lamp cast its light on the young woman, now sitting on the sofa with a small child on her lap, holding it tight and silently rocking it. Ásta could see that it was dead – or, she thought, maybe she just knew it instinctively. The young woman looked up suddenly and her eyes met Ásta’s, sparkling ice-blue eyes.

  It seemed to Ásta that the woman was pleading with her. Perplexed, she looked behind her, into the green-and-white-tiled kitchen. A man was sitting at the table, head buried in his hands. She cried out but didn’t wake herself up – she clearly wasn’t asleep. They didn’t hear her. She was alone, trapped between dimensions. Something dreadful had happened here. She had to tell Andrés and Fríða about it, but she didn’t know how to, because the only way to do that was to wake herself up – but if she wasn’t asleep she couldn’t wake up. She looked again into the living room. The young woman with the ice-blue eyes and the dead child had disappeared, along with the green lamp, and everything was dark. The house had returned to normal: the parquet floor, the pictures on the walls, the light hanging from the ceiling, Fríða’s needlework on the chair, waiting for a new day. Only the ticking of the clock remained the same. She looked down – she was standing on the parquet. Underneath it the earth. The kitchen was dark and she heard the fridge’s soothing hum. The front door was closed. She went to the window and looked out into the bright, living night. Up on the breakwater stood an old man, staring out to sea.

  This morning when she woke up, she thought that the smell of the sea from last night was still in her room. But perhaps it had been there all along – it wasn’t far to the ocean, after all. She went into the kitchen, where her friends wished her good morning. When they asked how she’d slept, she said without thinking, ‘Well, thank you.’ She drank the morning coffee, and helped herself to Fríða’s delicious bread rolls and jam, all home-made. As they ate breakfast, she asked Andrés about people who’d lived in the house before them.

  ‘There were many others,’ he said, pleased that she’d asked. ‘There was Skrolli, for instance – I haven’t told you about him. He had this speech defect, and once…’

  ‘Did a couple ever live here? With a small child?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. Mum and Dad, for instance, when I was little. Then, later, me and Fríða with our kids.’

  ‘Did a child ever die here?’

  He stared at her, taken aback.

  ‘No, not that I know of,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. And I’ve probably heard everything there is to hear and read all that’s been written about this place. If something like that had happened, I’d know about it.’

  ‘Could a couple have lived here whom you don’t know much about?’

  ‘Well, um, let me think… of course, yes… there was that couple who rented the house for a short while during the herring years. They emigrated to Australia. Sigurður, he was called. And Emilía. I know very little about them, though. Truth be told, the only thing I managed to dig up was that he’d gone to Australia, and I assume she went with him.’

  Now she’s listening to Andrés talk about Halvorsen the chemist and Lárentíus the sheriff – a pair of utterly insignificant Danes, long since dead – impersonating them as if they were contemporaries. A seagull soars above the shore, the one from last night. The sea ripples bright blue in the sunshine. A boat glides steadily through the waves, heading for harbour, its engine clattering. Sunshine speckles the mountain. Stacked neatly against the house next door are several rolls of roofing felt, along with some timbers painstakingly arranged and covered with a tarpaulin. Stockfish are drying on woode
n racks down by the sea. A woman pushing a pram appears on the path; she smiles at them and they cheerfully wave back. She’s probably one of the Poles from the block of flats on the outskirts of the village. The garden is full of dandelion clocks and their seeds fill the air. The lawn needs mowing; maybe she should offer to do it – Fríða can’t manage everything and Andrés clearly doesn’t lift a finger. The friends are all laughing heartily as he finishes the story, and he sips his wine, contented.

  In the brief silence that follows she hazards a question: ‘Do any of you know anything about a child who died here, some time ago?’

  There’s a silence.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ says Kalli’s wife, Sidda, putting her glass down.

  ‘I don’t… I dreamed…’

  She doesn’t know how to continue the sentence. She can’t quite bring herself to tell them what happened last night.

  ‘As I said this morning, Sigurður and Emilía are the only previous occupants I don’t know much about,’ Andrés replies, ‘and there’s definitely no record of their having had a child.’

  Everyone is silent, and he adds, ‘All I know is they went to Australia.’

  ‘No, listen, this is what it is,’ says Fríða finally, slapping her thighs as if to indicate the end of the discussion. ‘If you dreamed that some people here had a child who died, then the child represents our republic, Iceland – in other words, the couple’s dream of a life here in Iceland. That dream died when they decided to go to Australia.’