I told you so, I told you so,
I told you so, I told you so.
She was major and he was minor. She was pigeon-toed and straight-backed, he was always going out of tune. She had brown hair, with a beautiful lustre that she achieved with daily use of the right conditioner. He had blond curls that grew in all directions, making him look ever more harmless the longer he grew his hair, even though his intention was the exact opposite. She was plucky and bold, but he felt the world was continually trying to bring them down. Nobody understood them. They drifted round the village, hand in hand, long-haired, dressed in black and, when she felt like it (which was often), wearing the same make-up. There was a rumour going round that they were smoking pot, but they didn’t even know what that looked like. It was the music and the loneliness, the boredom and the longing to get away, that made them different from the others and affected how they behaved, talked, dressed. Sometimes they lay fully clothed in each other’s arms with the remorseless rock music pounding over them like a sermon. Sometimes they stroked each other’s hair, cheeks, necks, foreheads and backs. Sometimes they kissed, tasting and caressing each other. She said she loved him. He closed his eyes, clasped her ever more tightly to him, running his hands urgently down her spine. All around them the kids had begun sleeping with each other, they knew, but their love was different. They were different. Nobody understood them. They planned to go away as soon as they could, to where the music was, the clothes, the style, all the words and voices – south, where civilization’s migratory birds spread their wings.
One morning he came out of his room and found his brother hanging from a beam in the living room. His brother was seventeen years old and had finally decided what to do with his life: end it. That evening, while his mother was on the phone to his dad out at sea, they lay arm in arm against the tall, grey acoustic panel he’d set up in his room, speaking in whispers. She told him how her stepfather constantly tried to press up against her while pretending to reach for something behind her, how he hovered around while she got undressed in the evening or had a bath; how disgusting and repulsive he was, and that she couldn’t even tell her mother about it but had to get away before he got any worse. He told her about his brother, who had always been apathetic and depressed, and glued to his games console; and about his dad, how controlling and aggressive he was, his devastating boozing when ashore, drunk and ranting at the supper table; and about the relentless unhappiness in this home that had finally ended in a knot tightened around a throat. Together, they tried to find ten reasons that made life worth living. They presented their pain to each other, they took that pain and scrutinized it together and took care that it didn’t burn them. They brought it into the light so that it would go away. They saw how ugly it was and small. But it didn’t go away.
They were sixteen and nobody understood them. It was only a matter of time before they would leave this place to go and do something worthwhile, meet people who weren’t idiots. She drifted around wearing jumpers and shirts that had belonged to her father, who had died when she was five. He wore a duffel coat and black T-shirts with Japanese cartoon figures grinding their teeth. Sometimes they wore each other’s clothes, and when she felt like it (which was often) she would put black eye make-up on them both and they would go outside like that and walk hand in hand down to the harbour and back. Then they were invincible.
‘Remind me, how long were we together?’
Maybe this sounds, Gunnar thinks, as if I’m just chatting about something that doesn’t really matter that much.
Maybe it sounded as if everything was all right.
Maybe it sounded as if he hadn’t fallen from a height of 6,000 feet without a parachute and crashed brutally onto the rocks below when she dumped him.
Maybe it sounded as if she hadn’t ripped both his arms off when she left him, hadn’t pulled his hair out and torn off his scalp, hadn’t taken his heart and stamped on it and cast it to the bottom of the ocean and left him on the outermost promontory of Grímsey with open wounds for the ravens to feast on.
She sits opposite him, gazing out of the window. They haven’t seen each other for thirty years – since she went abroad and left him here embracing her absence and all the words she’d given him. She didn’t come back, for her it was enough to write him a letter, such a sweet letter. She sits here with him in the kitchen and once again it feels like the blue colour of the corner cupboard is there purely because her eyes are blue. It’s as if the kitchen once again took its shape from her presence, its light from her smile. She has tucked one leg under the other, like she used to do, and she’s watching Kata Choir cycle past.
‘Who’s that?’ she finally asks, ignoring his question. ‘On the bike over there?’
He’s relieved that she’s acting as if nothing happened and almost babbles as he starts telling her all the village gossip that they’d so heartily detested back in the day.
‘Kalli Skjól – Uncle Kalli – was at a conference in Reykjavík a few years back representing the Valeyri Trade Union – that’s just him and Sidda, remember – and found himself in some pole-dancing club with a bunch of union mates…’
‘You know, I don’t think I want to hear this.’
‘No, wait. He sits down with some fat trade unionists to watch naked birds dance and stuff like that, but then one of the dancers sits down next to him and they start talking. And you know what Kalli is like, more than anything he’s a decent chap and a car mechanic, he can’t stand problems, and it’s like when he’s fixing a car, he needs to solve them. He sees she’s not very happy and he gets this utterly unbelievable story out of her. She used to be a clarinettist, in Czechoslovakia or somewhere, and was going home after rehearsal one day when she was literally kidnapped by gangsters – right by her own front door – and taken to somewhere in the middle of nowhere where she was stuffed full of drugs and kept prisoner for weeks and raped over and over by those bastards. After a while, they gave her a red suitcase with some of her clothes and her clarinet inside. How they got hold of her clothes, who knows. And they gave her another jab and she woke up in a whorehouse somewhere in Europe, her passport stolen – and her self-respect and her future basically. And that’s how she ended up in Iceland. She told Kalli all this, and he was so upset that he phoned Óli the bank manager the following day and persuaded him to pay for her release. He went back to the club and got the owner to sell him her contract and then brought her here to conduct the choir, play the church organ and teach music to the kids. He and Sidda have looked after her and protected her ever since. A great story, don’t you think?’
She keeps watching the woman on the bike till she passes out of sight. She smiles dully.
‘Yeah, sure. Why are you telling me this?’
‘Um, I don’t really know.’
‘She probably slept with him, yeah?’
‘No, you really think that?’
‘Oh, Gunnar, you’re always so naive!’
She smiles as she says this, and there is a hint of fondness in her voice; he reacts as if he’s never heard anybody pay him a greater compliment. He pours her a cup of coffee and offers her a tray of Danish pastries that he bought at the bakery earlier, after she rang to say she was on her way. He pours himself a cup and now there’s a new tone to his voice, no longer cheerful and impersonal but quiet and confidential: ‘So, how have you been all these years?’
All these years. They went to high school in Reykjavík together, renting a room from her aunt, who lived in a three-bedroom flat in a block in Sólheimar. The aunt provided their meals and treated them as if they were her own children, always trying to get them to have their hair cut or buy new clothes, to read this or that book, watch more edifying films, do something improving. They were a bit embarrassed by all the attention, but also liked it, and for a while they almost became twelve-year-olds. Every morning they took the bus to school and sat in lessons together, and in the evenings they watched TV with the aunt, who had thoughtfully cooked them
meatballs or fried fish. Sometimes she would rent films by Fellini or Bergman or Woody Allen, which they watched with her. Sometimes they retreated to his room and set up the grey acoustic panel and lay there in each other’s arms, whispering about themselves and the world.
Gradually, they began to notice that the world was not some solid, undivided slab of stone standing in their way, but rather a fusion of countless ideas and experiences, of people, colours and forms in a million different nuances and hues. She would still occasionally visit him in his room with her guitar, and they would sit cross-legged facing each other and make music together, she on her electric guitar and he on his scruffy old Korean instrument that kept losing pitch, and when he tweaked it back into tune that too became part of the music. But now the lyrics were about strange women they had seen on the bus, about trees and about snowmen. At school she always wore a green parka she’d bought in a charity shop, while he went around in a black duffel coat and let his blond hair grow into ever newer and more intricate – and innocent – curls. When they started drinking, the alcohol confused and disinhibited them, they argued, trying to tear their pain off each other. They would run away into the night, somewhere out into the city, until they fell asleep, exhausted, in strange places, sometimes together, sometimes apart. The next night they would lie in each other’s arms in his room once again, caressing each other and humming softly. Days passed – months, years.
One evening, the school gave a concert; they took part, she with her electric guitar and he with his battered, out-of-tune twanger, and she sang her song about how everything was going to be all right. Afterwards people crowded round, telling them how fantastic they were; from then on, they became a regular feature of such musical evenings, the song became their year’s signature tune and everybody wanted to be their friend. They welcomed that and became popular because they were both sweet-tempered and fun to be with. Every summer, they went back home and worked in the fish factory to earn money, even though their parents paid her aunt for their board and lodging. These holidays always brought them closer, because they knew the world in Valeyri. They recognized all the foibles of the local weather, the lives of the people, the mountain, the valley, the sea. Sometimes they went for a drive to the head of the valley and made love there on a woollen rug the colours of the Icelandic flag; but other than that, those summer months revolved around fish. And at the end it was always a relief to get back south to the aunt, who welcomed them by roasting a leg of lamb and renting Fanny and Alexander.
One day he came out of a physics lesson and saw her talking to a bunch of girls, and although he was her boyfriend and they were always together, for some reason he hesitated before joining the group. When he asked her about them that evening, she said that they were just a fun crowd. The next day he saw her talking to the girls again, only now some boys had joined in. She was laughing, but when her eyes met his, hers said that this was not the right moment to join the group. They still went to the same classes, but she didn’t always sit next to him, and gradually they stopped being together as much as before. Sometimes she dressed in a white blouse and wore perfume. Sometimes he sat alone with her aunt drinking tea, watching Inspector Morse and eating crackers with jam. Spring had arrived by the time they finally went to a party together to meet her girlfriends, and they both drank too much, became agitated and started arguing about their pain, before storming off separately, aimlessly, into the night. The girls manged to bring her back and gathered protectively around her, while he wandered around in the Reykjavík night and was once more alone in the world. He returned to the Sólheimar flat early in the morning to find that she wasn’t there. Maybe she was with her friends. Maybe she wasn’t. They spoke the following day and promised each other that they would never quarrel again. A promise that they kept.
They graduated that spring. He had his hair cut and let her aunt buy him a new suit, and then their parents arrived in Reykjavík to join the celebrations. His dad got drunk and disappeared for some days, so the celebrating turned into worrying. And yet on graduation day the sun shone, they both wore the traditional white student caps, and they went to have their photo taken with their arms around each other. Gunnar still has the picture, framed, here in the living room of his summer house.
After graduation, he went back home to the fish factory, while she remained in Reykjavík, where her aunt had found her a job in a shop. They spoke on the phone every evening, giving each other words that served as provisions for their journeys into loneliness. She said she loved him. She said she couldn’t live without him. She said she cried herself to sleep every night. He said, ‘Yes, I know. Yes, me too.’ He often gazed at Svarri, the mountain that overlooks the village, thinking that the shape of it reflected some feeling in him – perhaps the feeling of being left behind. He longed to give this feeling a musical form; he felt that this form lived inside him. When he told her about it, she said, ‘Yes, absolutely. I know.’ He finally came to Reykjavík on Midsummer Day, and they went to a party at her girlfriends’ place in the west end of town. They had too much to drink, but sat opposite each other all evening with their legs crossed and their pain between them, she with her electric guitar and the little amplifier and he with the scruffy old guitar from Korea that kept going out of tune so he was continually having to fiddle with the pegs, and she sang: It’ll all be all right – it won’t go wrong / It’ll all be all right – just sing this song / I told you so, I told you so. Her friends watched and listened. He, on the other hand, had no one in the world to turn to except her. Towards morning, they wandered around the Thingholt area as if lost – which they weren’t – and when they got to Amtmannsstígur it was as if they’d found the place that doesn’t exist. The place where time doesn’t exist. He’ll remember that morning for ever.
A week later she went abroad to study, leaving him with all the words she had said to him. He remembers them all.
‘I’ve been fine,’ she says. ‘I came to bury my mum. Did you know that she died?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry for you.’
‘What about you?’
‘I come here sometimes in the summer, to the old house, just to keep an eye on the place. It’s all I have, apart from some dump in Reykjavík. How about you?’
‘I got married. Got a husband. And you?’
‘No, I’m on my own. I teach music. You?’
She smiles and puts down her half-eaten Danish pastry.
‘Yeah, me too. D’you want to know more about me?’
‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’
‘Good idea,’ he says nervously.
They get up, slip into their coats, and he holds the door open for her, putting his free hand into his jacket pocket. Where he keeps his harmonica.
Now All Is Still
The evening can come now, Sidda thinks. Back at home, there’s fish soup cooling slowly in an enormous pan, ready for the party; she has hoovered, washed the floors, made the beds, and everything is in its place in cupboards. And now there’ll be the concert, where Kalli will sing the solo from Night – that slow, beautiful song that always makes her think of a bird gliding just above the sea late at night. Nobody sings it like he does. Nobody sings as smoothly as he does.
He sang it when they met for the first time, many years ago, at a dance in the Súlnasalur at Hótel Saga. Binni Frank’s band was playing, and a bunch of trade unionists had turned up after a Labour Federation meeting, and were sitting round a table talking loudly, laughing and drinking vodka and ginger ale. Kalli was out on the dance floor the whole time, in his shirtsleeves, his jacket on the back of a chair somewhere, swinging the women to and fro, happily jiving, and you couldn’t tell whether he was maybe married to one of them. But then he spotted her, a wallflower propping up the bar, watching the dancing, watching him, wanting to leave but not gone yet, not really knowing what she was doing there; her sister and her husband had persuaded her to come, but they’d long since left. He was
in mid-jive, flushed and sweaty in his white shirt, having swung his partners to and fro, his broad back damp with sweat and his sturdy chest bursting with lust for life. He knew all the dances, new and old – pure energy and joy. He walked over to her through the din and smoky gloom, picked up a couple of tall glasses from the bar, filled them with water, and handed her one. Clinking glasses, he said, ‘Cheers, sweetheart, here’s to life,’ and gulped down his drink.
Tonight they will dance themselves silly. Óli from the bank will play his accordion – not too quickly or he’ll mess it up – Kalli says he’s the only man he knows who has to have sheet music to play ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm’ – Teddi will be on guitar and skipper Guðjón on snare drum, and Kata Choir will play bass guitar, the one that Kalli has somewhere in his barn, buried beneath all the junk, complete with leads and amplifier and everything. That’s the full line-up of the Óli Smartypants Dance Band. They’ll play anything people ask for and more, and everybody will sing and dance, Kalli louder and for longer than anybody, and the whole house will reverberate with song and happiness. The neighbours might start complaining around three o’clock, but they’ll be invited to join them. And so will anyone else who’d like to come.
Sidda smiles to herself. Which is good, because Andrés is in the middle of one of his stories, and he’ll be hurt if no one smiles. She has been sitting here sipping Fríða’s dandelion wine, listening to that story about Halvorsen the chemist and his silly way of talking that the men here never tire of. She feels completely alone. Sometimes when she’s not with Kalli she becomes aware that she isn’t from round here. In spite of all these years. And there is this woman visiting Andrés and Fríða who keeps going on about a dead child she dreamed about last night or saw in the house. She’s fair-haired, a bit full of figure, and there is something in her eyes that suggests that she isn’t all right. It’s uncomfortable. She’s probably a drinker. She’s bringing unrest.
And the Wind Sees All Page 10