She looks around triumphantly and everybody nods.
‘You should never take dreams literally,’ she adds. ‘You have to interpret them.’
‘I suppose you could say that goes for many of us too,’ ventures a quiet man with a wrinkled brow. ‘I mean, that the Icelandic republic is for us a child who died.’
They all look thoughtful, nod gravely and quickly have another drink in case they should think of something that might deepen this discussion even further.
Sidda gives Ásta a curious look. ‘Is that what you dreamed? That there were people here with a dead child?’
‘Yes, something like that. Just nonsense, probably.’
Sidda smiles. ‘Yes, one dreams so many things.’ Then suddenly she lifts her arm and waves to a young woman cycling past; her smile widens and she shouts, ‘Hey, Kata! See you later!’
Baggalútur are singing about the sunshine in Dakota: After I am dead and done / and earth decays my bones / a lovely sight will be the sun / shining on my headstone. Andrés stretches and says, ‘Hey, Sidda, what about Kalli? Wasn’t he going to join us?’
‘Yes, he should be here by now. He’s probably got his head inside one of his washing machines and has forgotten all about us.’
‘Well, I’ll wander over to the barn and see what he’s up to. But help yourselves to more drink.’
Fríða reaches for the nearest bottle, uncorks it with a flourish and briskly tops up their glasses. They sip at the wine and smack their lips, sighing with pleasure. Ásta smiles. This conversation’s not going anywhere. She feels Fríða’s gentle touch on her arm. A duck waddles past with her trail of ducklings and she realizes that the dream was really about her own intense longing for a baby, and how it’s too late now, and how she no longer has life under control. She looks across at the slope to the east of the house, watching the grass rippling in the breeze, the same gentle breeze that plays on her cheeks and neck. She sees the dandelions – some young and bold, others already fluffy dandelion clocks – and next to them carpets of four-leaf clover.
Búft
A fly buzzed across Reverend Sæmundur’s face, disturbing his sleep. It landed on his duvet, where it briefly darted about, got bored and took to the air again, zipped past his forehead, then around his nose and finally onto his ear. He mumbled and swatted at it, and it did a little circuit round the bed before landing and starting to crawl up his arm. The fly seemed determined to rouse him, almost as if it had turned into the golden plover from that poem, telling him to ‘wake up and work’. But it was only a little fly. Sæmundur could hear a real plover out on the moors, happily calling tyu-wee as if it wasn’t thinking about him at all. It had its own life to bother about.
He felt the sun hot on his temples, intrusive as an overfriendly relation. It drilled into his head, into his consciousness. He had a headache. Saliva was smeared on his sweaty pillow. He remembered where he was and where he had been. In the same place, and yet not. He was here now, though. Friday. Midsummer Day.
He’d slept through the whole day. He hadn’t gone to bed till the early hours, that much he remembered. He’d slept through midday, although he’d planned to look in on that old widow, and the afternoon, when he’d meant to put together a few words for tonight’s concert. What did he have to say about choral singing? O God, my heart is fixed; I will sing and give praise, it says in the Psalms. He opened his mouth and tra-la-laed quietly to himself for a moment. He sounded like the buzzing fly, which took his singing as a signal for another attempt to get him out of bed.
He lay for a while watching the creature circling above his head. From outside came the distant sound of a song about sunshine in Dakota. He thought about the sunshine. He thought about all this sleeping in the baking-hot sun, this summer light on duties, his ministry, his life. He took a look at himself.
The mingled stench of tobacco and beer pervaded the atmosphere like a curse. Last night he’d drunk the best part of two six-packs – the entirety of his strict, self-imposed weekly ration – and smoked a whole packet of cigarettes. He licked his lips, swallowed, and reflected on his smoking and drinking. Then the night’s online activities came into his head and he felt himself grow pale inside.
He was here – here and now. Friday, Midsummer Day, and there were things to do. He was lying in his bedroom, so had evidently managed to take off his clothes and get into bed. He hadn’t phoned Kata Choir last night and had not gone round to her house and tried to get her to let him in. Not this time. He remembered that, and was immediately seized by an odd feeling of pride, that he had done so well; he deserved a medal. Earlier in the summer, he’d howled outside her window until Kalli came and shooed him back home. But now was here and now. The window was open and the curtains drawn. The faraway sounds of summer wafted in and a gentle, carefree breeze brought him the scent of sea and flowers, despite all the depravity in here: the ash, the grey odour of smoking and beer-drinking.
Why wasn’t he wandering among flowers? Or at sea, sailing in the wind bestowed unto us by God Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth? Or among birds, celebrating creation? Why was he addicted to sin? For that which I do I allow not, he muttered to himself. For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate, that do I… He reached for his well-thumbed Bible and leafed through the Psalms as if to gain strength, or to get an idea for his speech later: Hear my cry, O God; attend unto my prayer. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed… He closed the book. He had been called to this place. Or had he? And by whom? Did God think about him at all – wasn’t He just busy with His own stuff?
Many came from Valeyri. For instance, that rock star who stayed in his parents’ old house for a week every summer, and always alerted the press to it; the celebrity dentist from Hafnarfjörður; Jói and Anna’s daughter, famous for her business sense; the fish factory elite. But very few came to Valeyri. Apart from him, there were only Dr Jónas, who shut himself away in his surgery and never spoke to anybody, and of course Kata Choir. Maybe he should marry Kata Choir. Maybe Kata Choir would move in here and deliver him from evil.
When he goes shopping, he doesn’t know anybody – but everyone knows him. The locals gave him a warm enough welcome at the time, and yet they always treat him like a guest, rather than a vicar. They’re always talking about Kjartan, his predecessor, and his wife, Árný, who had been the local nurse since time immemorial. Dr Jónas always let her talk to the patients and preferably treat them too. While old Reverend Kjartan had been the sun that shone on everyone here, Árný was the rays of that sun, which still warmed people now. She knew everyone’s ailments and alleviated all suffering; she sat with the grieving, visited the elderly, and turned up at all family celebrations, where she would sit in the middle of the parlour with a glass of sherry and tell everybody, ‘I feel as if I own a little bit of you, my dear’ – because she had indeed delivered everybody. They thought Reverend Kjartan’s sermons monumentally dull, even incoherent, and his interpretation of scripture fanciful – despite the fact that his sermons usually concerned whatever was currently the talk of the village. Such as the time Lalli Puffin broke his leg while on the booze and Kjartan shamelessly exploited the occasion by saying that Lalli had been trying to clamber onto the camel’s back in order to get through the eye of the needle – and Lalli had joined in the laughter.
The fly was on Reverend Sæmundur’s face again. It had buzzed busily around his forehead before landing on his nose as if wanting to tickle it. Irritated, he jumped out from under his duvet and sat for a while on the edge of the bed, naked. He hung his head. The good that I would… he thought. The good that I would…
For a moment, the fly seemed to have disappeared, but then he spotted it crawling up the window as if wanting to escape and brag to the plover about having thrown the priest out of bed. He reflected on his life and his sins. Finally, he heaved himself to his feet and moved slowly and purposefully towards the kitchen, as if in control of himself and his situation. He opened t
he fridge, fished out a litre-bottle of Diet Coke and greedily drank. He went to the bathroom, peed for a long time, flushed the loo and, standing in front of the mirror, extended his hand and shook it, saying solemnly, Yes, Ólafur, this is indeed a very happy day. He turned on the shower and stood under its spray for a good while, intoning The Lord be with you… He felt the living water on his head and brow, and thought about the well of water springing into everlasting life, and told himself that he’d been permitted to drink from that spring and would never thirst hereafter.
He turned off the shower. He shaved, applied aftershave lotion and deodorant, brushed his teeth, gelled his thick, fair hair and combed it back, inspected himself in the mirror – he looked pious but good-natured, friendly yet responsible – and then opened the bathroom window. Outside, the afternoon was filled with the sound of lawnmowers, the clattering of a motorboat, giggling children on trampolines – the sounds of summer. He went back into the bedroom and put on his trousers and a shirt, which he buttoned carefully and tucked in neatly. He took his mobile out of his jacket pocket and dialled Sigga the mayor’s number; her husband, Ólafur, was chairman of both the parish council and the choir. He didn’t want to ring Kata Choir herself; she wouldn’t answer, not after the other day. For the briefest of moments he stood, phone in hand, and reflected on sin and the commandments, water, death and the life he lived, but then said, loudly and decisively, ‘Yes, good morning!… Ha ha ha, tell me about it!’ and abruptly ended the call. He strode purposefully into the kitchen and took a can of beer out of the fridge. He fetched cigarettes from the cupboard, and put them and the beer on his desk in the living room. He paused to caress the cold, damp can before returning to the kitchen to get a wet cloth and a clean glass. He wiped the desk and emptied the overflowing ashtray into the bin, rinsed it and dried it with kitchen paper. He fetched a bottle of Gammel Dansk and a shot glass and placed them next to the beer. At the window he caught sight of Kata Choir going past on her bicycle, wearing a white dress with blue polka dots, as beautiful as the life force itself. He watched her until she disappeared from view like a light going out and then drew the curtains.
He thought that it would be a shame to miss the concert tonight. And then it occurred to him that this very thought showed that he wasn’t, after all, indifferent to everything. He sat down at the desk with the clean ashtray, the fresh packet of cigarettes and a lighter, the beer and the Gammel Dansk. He switched on the computer and slowly poured beer into the glass and spirit into the shot glass; took the first sip of beer before the froth had subsided, but to show self-control held off the Gammel Dansk for now; lit a cigarette, inhaled and slowly exhaled; took another sip, emptied the glass and refilled it. He opened his iTunes library, selected the Stones’ Let It Bleed and opened the internet browser. Strains of ‘Midnight Rambler’ filled the room and he felt a tingling in his loins.
He has arrived at the other side. In a parallel reality, a second life. At the table sits a blonde in a low-cut dress, whom he instantly nicknames Golden Miss although she’s given herself the pseudonym Iofel, and he sings to himself: The Golden Miss wants a big French kiss… There’s a bald, dark-skinned bloke with rings on every finger who calls himself Leonard and an older woman in a flowery dress; she played here all last night under the name Abba. Finally there’s a slimy character who reminds him a bit of his friend Dalmann from the Theology faculty, but this one calls himself Old Nick. He was here all last night too. They seem to come in a pair, Old Nick and Abba, and he imagines them as a long-married couple, rather respectable despite having come here to the online casino. He knows that they don’t like him staring at Golden Miss. ‘Ah, good afternoon! And how do you do, dear madam?’ he says loudly, in a deep, solemn voice, and immediately begins to jig in his seat in time with the Stones’ dirty blues. The Reverend Rock.
His pseudonym is Búft, after what his medieval namesake Sæmundur the Learned had called himself when, as the legend goes, he’d forgotten his name after three years of studying under the Devil in the Black School. Still, he’d managed to outwit Satan in the end and escape. Sæmundur thinks that adopting this name is scholarly and clever, and suggests that he’s perfectly capable of dealing with the dark forces, over there on the internet.
They don’t bet large sums. He imagines Iofel coming on to him. Golden Miss no coaxing needs, to share a smoke with Sæmi… His loins tingle. He feels the gambler in himself, the sinner. With each sip, with each drag, he feels his inner bastard spreading out like pins and needles, gradually taking over his whole being. He takes a swig, belches and grunts in time to the music. The dark bloke, Leonard, bluffs wildly and soon loses all credibility. Abba, the old woman, is keeping her powder dry, but Old Nick is unpredictable, despite looking like Dalmann, who was the very image of piety.
Reverend Búft empties his shot glass in one and pours himself another; he gets a fresh can of beer, lights another cigarette and gradually gets more and more engrossed in the game. Sometimes nothing happens for hours on end and then suddenly something does and you have to seize the moment. That’s the art of it. He recalls last night’s game. There were more people playing then and some had lost heavily. Not him, he knows what he’s doing. He’s no Reverend Daredevil, he’s Reverend Careful. A solid, respectable, reliable gambler.
Boring. Like Reverend Dalmann. Dullman. Should one be reverenddullmanly? Shouldn’t one bluff? Old Nick and Abba – they’re the key players – they were both with him last night and what did they see? Reverend Careful. And if he were unexpectedly to make a big bet, they would think that he really had something. He has two eights.
Reverend Bluff bets more than half of everything he owns.
Golden Miss folds, and he thinks he can feel her nylon-clad foot sliding gently up his calf and see her lips part for his benefit. The dark-skinned bloke folds. Old Nick folds. There’s a pause while he waits for the old woman to make up her mind. Then he gets a sign: she’ll see his hand.
She has two tens. He senses her invisible smirk and a belly laugh from Old Nick. The stockinged foot abandons his calf. The game continues and he manages to scrape together small amounts by becoming boring and earth-bound. All of a sudden he remembers his life on this side and decides to ring Sigga and Óli and call in sick – a virulent flu bug; he tries out his husky flu-voice: Na na na… Hello, how are you, Reverend Búft here… uh yes, had to take to my bed… tell me about it… He picks up the phone, presses the redial button and listens as it rings at the other end. The music throbs, but he doesn’t hear it. As he waits, he discards his hand and gets a new one. He tries to remember what he plans to say about the flu and the concert later and the mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And then, suddenly, he realizes that he’s holding four aces. A bright light flashes on inside him. He’s holding four aces. Stunned, he slowly puts the phone down. Four aces. That means he can win the pot. He can win fantastic sums. He’s bound to. He’s holding four aces. You can play poker every day for twenty years and never get four aces. It’s like seeing the Beatles in concert, the Fab Four, he thinks. This is the only chance he’ll get on this earth. He downs his beer, pours a Gammel Dansk, downs that and lights another cigarette, humming along to the chorus of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. He tried to bluff only a short time ago, so if he bets large again they’ll definitely think he’s gone off his head, is drunk or stuck in bluff mode, and they’ll all see him. He double-bluffs. He risks everything. He doesn’t hear the phone ringing, he doesn’t hear Jagger and the chorus… but Golden Miss’s gaze is almost tangible, and again the nylon-clad foot has begun to stroke his leg, this time travelling all the way up to his crotch. He’s on fire.
He risks everything. His month’s wages, the overdraft, the mortgage, the car, the Visa account, electricity, central heating, his life, health and happiness. If he wins now he may be saved. Then he can turn over a new leaf and become a new man. Though he knows deep inside that he’ll always come back here to look down from his life’s precipice into the abyss, because
here on the cliff’s edge he feels like a man. Here, he feels as if he’s living. Soaring.
Old Nick sees him. Abba too. He shows his cards and the pictures of Iofel and Leonard immediately disappear from the screen. The chorus drones on incessantly about getting what you want in this life. Búft gazes into the abyss. He’s on the edge of his life’s precipice.
He downs a beer and opens another can. The phone’s still ringing. The music pounds on.
Only three of them are left in the game. He examines their avatars while he waits. He blinks and they’ve changed. Before, Abba’s mouth had been puckered in disapproval, but not now. She’s no longer judging him. She’s wearing a white dress, and her hair is white and curves charmingly around her soft cheeks, not up in a tight bun as before – it looks a bit like a dove – and her smile is unbelievably peaceful, omniscient, as if she knows all his sins and peccadilloes, his innermost thoughts, delusions and dreams, knows him beyond word and deed, and can make him stir like grass in the breeze or send him off out into the world like seeds from a dandelion clock. Old Nick’s mouth is stuck in a rictus grin that grows ever more manic. Strands of grey hair are combed over his bald patch. He has a fat face with a double chin and a cold sore on his bottom lip; his skin looks as if he eats too many rubbishy sweets, drinks too much cheap wine from a box, smokes too much pot. He has a ring on the fourth finger of his right hand with a scrawl on it, some indecipherable squiggle. No, it’s a picture, a picture of a fly with wriggling feet. Rings with flies on them, black, green, red, on every finger. Reverend Sæmundur, his face distorted, raises his arms in a gesture of prayer as the music booms and his phone rings. His life is in their hands, everything depends on which way the game ends, here on his life’s precipice – this he realizes as the alcoholic haze briefly clears. Everything is at stake: he’s either lost or saved for ever.
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