She runs an eye over the previous batch of skyr drying on the rack, checks that it has stopped its dripping and lifts the pail of whey from beneath it. Dare she confess any of this to a brisk woman whose answer to all that is hard in her own life has been to clamp her mouth in a line and set her arms to work and never think to dream of what cannot be?
She puts the pail down again.
‘Do you remember the wife of Njáll in the saga? When their sons’ enemies set the house ablaze, they offered the old couple the chance to leave and save their lives. Njáll refused, and so then did Bergthóra. “I was given to Njáll in marriage young,” she said (do you remember?), “and I promised him then that we would share the same fate.” And then she and Njáll went back inside, lay down on their bed with an oxhide to cover them and died together in the fire.’
Thorgerdur makes no comment, only beats the milk harder.
‘When I was a young wife to Ólafur and he was fit and handsome and full of such life and energy that I could barely keep up, we lay in bed side by side and I told him that was how I wanted to die too. We would go together, he and I. “Ásta mín,” he said – you can imagine how he would say it, very dry – “could you not provide for us a less painful way to meet our maker?” And I said, “It’s not the burning I want, as well you know”. I was probably giggling by then, because Ólafur could always make me laugh, “I just like to imagine us together to the end.” And he said, “Well, naturally”, or some such phrase, “and with you playing the role of heroine to the end, of course.” I could tell he was smiling in the darkness. “I’m touched, dearest,” he said. “But you must remember that Bergthóra was an old woman herself by then and you are much younger than me. You will find better things to do when I’m old than lie down and die with me under a smelly old hide.” And I laughed and said I would be with him to the end, whatever befell us, and what was wrong with a good oxhide? “Whatever is to come, Ólafur, we will share it,” I said to him. Those very words.
‘But Thorgerdur, we were not given the same fate to share. We were not allowed to keep growing together in the same earth. I turned my face to a different sun and put my roots into a different soil, and he – I know it sounds harsh, Thorgerdur, but he has begun to wither. Far from wanting to lie down and burn with Ólafur, I find I cannot bring myself to lie beside him at all.’
She looks at Thorgerdur in the shadows, challenging her to slap her down. ‘There, I’ve said it. Now you know the wickedness you are dealing with.’
Thorgerdur has listened without expression. There is none now as she rests her spoon and says sourly, ‘You think Gísli’s stale breath and thrusting haunches bring me to heaven on earth? You were always one to live in a saga, Ásta. It is nothing to do with age or a change of soil, but a matter only of the will. My father will not see many more summers. He needs you. It is all I wanted to say.’
35
The winter seems never to end. Sometimes Ásta thinks she will scream to wake one more day in darkness. Sometimes she does. She hurls herself out of the house and feels her way down the slope and across the lava field to the cliff edge and there she howls louder than the wind itself into the black sea. Ólafur watches her go with the troubled look that drives her to fury these days, a fury no more easily contained for having no focus and no excuse.
How could she have forgotten, how could she possibly not have remembered, what it is like to live for month after month with only a few watery hours of light a day, with cold that seeps into your bones and feet that are always wet? Is it conceivable that she never noticed before how foul the habits are here? Even Thorgerdur, waging doughty war on the dust as she may, stokes the fire with decayed puffin corpses and handfuls of dried sheep shit, using fingers she thinks nothing of sliding into the mouth of her babe to soothe him. Ólafur kneels to pray without a thought of washing. And what should he wash in anyway? What should she wash in herself, when there is no tiled fountain, no copper jug spilling water from a courtyard reservoir, no shiny brass tap in a scented bathhouse, but only a reeking well into which some fool has chucked a pile of rotting orange flippers?
Can she not have noticed how the turf walls bend in on you and bear down on you until you are desperate to break out and breathe again? Only there is no roof to escape to here but just gabled grass, and the wind would toss you off it anyway if it did not freeze you first. To think she spent more than thirty winters in a house like this, yet only now is oppressed by the way the stinking fulmar oil in the lamp mingles with the stench of the animals and the meat smoking over the kitchen fire and the ripe sealskin jackets on their hook, making her sick with longing for the tang of mint and cumin and an atrium open to the sky.
When the sun returns in the spring of 1638 Ásta feels like a small, hibernating creature rubbing a nightmare from its lids. The morning radiance sometimes blasts her eyes. Even when the sky is dull she can smell the earth in the drizzly air and it overwhelms her with nameless yearnings.
One April afternoon she pulls her shawl around her shoulders and slips from the house before Thorgerdur can raise a protest. Fleeing clouds are bringing spits of rain, but it is a joy to be outside. Gulls scream overhead to their nests in the crags, and she wonders if the puffins, too, are back. Such an ache she has to see these small birds again.
By the seafront she watches kittiwakes delivering stalks of grass and tangled wool to rocky crevices. Some, settled in their pairs, have already turned their pert backsides to the world. She would be content to do that. Alone and perhaps not so pert, let her only sit for the rest of her life staring at glistening black rock and shiny green moss, her back to the storms and the wind.
More kittiwakes are riding the waves on folded grey wings and inky tails. She searches for a black head among them, but can see none. Back she walks past the Há, where the sea comes crashing in on boulders emerald with slime. The cliff there is where young Erlendur Runólfsson fell when he was shot, the day the pirates came. Ásta looks up at it for a long time. Was the boy still alive to see the jagged waters rushing to meet him? Is there time to repent as death hurtles towards you, or is every last prayer snatched away as you fly?
The wind comes in spurts, lifting her skirts and spinning her about as she makes her way home. Go there, it commands, shoving her aside. No, I’ve changed my mind. Go there. Now rest awhile, but not for long, because I’ll be back – so it warns – and then I will remove you from the ground altogether and thrust you in a different direction, after which you will stagger to your feet and set your skirts straight and point your chin to the future, and then, of course, I might just come and knock you down again. You know how it is, the wind will say. You know how life is.
Nearing Ofanleiti she spots Magnús Birgisson on the summit of Helgafell, keeping a watch for the return of the pirate ships that every islander still dreads. She is sure it’s him building the cairn up there, tall as a rake. Why is Egill not with him? How can it be that one mother’s child is here piling stones on a mountain and another is lost, so deeply, darkly lost that, try though she might, there is no place to imagine him.
She finds Ólafur in the badstofa with the little table drawn up to the side of his bed and a book open on it. He looks up with a wary smile of greeting, before returning his concentration to the page. She is so irritated to find him reading calmly, careless of the storms beating in her own breast, that she has to fight the impulse to toss the book to the floor.
Hurling herself on to the bed opposite, she begins to tug off her damp socks. She thought it would ease in time, this irascible reaction to the very sight of him. But Ólafur is responsible for drawing her back to everything she is finding hard to live with and away from all she cannot be reconciled to living without. Nothing can change that. Nothing is easing.
Yet Ásta is not so lacking in insight as to believe it is Ólafur’s fault that a marriage between two hurt people after ten years apart has proved to be beyond redemption. He would have tried, no doubt, if she could have brought herself to let
him. Nor can she blame him for not understanding what it is to wake each morning to the stink of mouldering bird and feel yourself to be not only in the wrong place but, may God forgive her, the wrong marriage.
In her fairer moments, Ásta will concede that Ólafur is slower to judge than of old and takes care not to smoke out those sadnesses she would keep hidden. But the same cannot be said of the rest of the island.
Like those who arrived with her, she has returned to find herself a stranger. Ten years of island memories have been made without them, forged in a different kind of trauma from their own, causing a different kind of damage. The place even looks different from the one they remember. A new Landakirkja stands on the hill, the costs of the timber and furnishings borne mainly by the merchants. New trading houses have sprouted where the old people burned. The rebuilt crofts seem, like Ofanleiti, shabbier than they recall and the poverty drearier. Some homes are still empty, with roofs caved in and the wind weeping between the stones. New walls have been erected around the remaining ones such as would deter no janissary that Ásta ever laid eyes upon but which make people feel safer in their beds. New people have moved in from the mainland. There are new insecurities, new suspicions, hurtful whispers that began as soon as the rejoicing – muted from the start when it was realised how few were returned – had begun to ebb. Surely, people started to say, it will take more than a few classes in Denmark for folk who lived so long among the heathen to become pure of mind again? What practices have they condoned, what heresies do they harbour, what dangers are posed to Christian minds by their very presence among decent men and women?
Gudrídur Símonardóttir, whose reason for not returning to the island remained a secret for about half an hour after the return of her fellow hostages, is now derided as Turkish Gudda. It is the settled wisdom of the community that she was never any better than she should be anyway, and it is hardly more than she deserved that her poor drowned husband Eyjólfur, may God rest his soul, should have taken so many women into the croft at Stakkagerdi after she left and fathered those bairns of his by the various mothers. Nobody could be surprised that Gudda went bad, leading God’s anointed priest (well, near enough) into sin like that, blighting his prospects, and old enough to be his mother at that. Well, she has received her just deserts all right: a pauper in Keflavík and a lesson to every fallen woman.
Gudda’s salacious story has stirred up old memories of Anna Jasparsdóttir, whose father is forced once again to defend her Muslim marriage.
‘Do not blame her,’ Ásta hears Jaspar shout at the crone who spits at his feet on the path to the harbour. ‘How can you know what it was like unless you have walked in her shoes?’
Few are much inclined to spend time in the shoes of those who have come back. The island senses something different about the returned, as if they have been subtly re-formed while they were away and emerged in a shape that keeps slipping through the hands of their families and neighbours. The women especially have returned not as victims inviting sympathy but as people in command of themselves who stand in some indefinable way taller. They carry themselves as if, ludicrously, they know better than those who have nursed their own wounds on this island for ten years without questioning the true faith and going romping in heathen beds, as everyone knows those folk must have done. Even, whisper it, the Reverend Ólafur’s wife, who was caught (did you hear?) in a man’s bedroom at midnight. Caused a terrible fuss apparently. Mind you, Ásta has always been strong-willed and difficult for the reverend to handle. And doesn’t he look ill these days and no wonder? Look at her wandering aimlessly around the island, just the way old Oddrún Pálsdóttir used to but nowhere near as friendly. Barely gives you the time of day now, eyes burning as hot as that Einar Loftsson, who has been striding about as if he owns the place since the day he came back. Terrible what those savages did to his face, of course. You could push your whole fist into that hole, and not much left of his ears either if you ever see him without his cap on. Just goes to show, though. If you spend all those years among barbarians who can do a thing like that, one way or another you’re not going to come home unsullied, are you? Stands to reason.
Even Magnús’s mother Agnes, uncomfortable with the more vicious slurs on people who never asked to be taken captive, thinks they should at least make more of an effort to join in. As she mentions to her husband, who is trying to get to sleep and would rather she didn’t, ‘Ásta and Ólafur are not even, you know, living as husband and wife. That’s what Inga up at Ofanleiti says anyway. I know he’s getting on a bit, old Ólafur, but you have to ask why?
‘Do you really, my dear?’ her husband replies, patting her ample thigh and heaving himself on to his other side with a sigh.
Ásta tosses the first sock on to the earthen floor and sets to work peeling off the second. The moisture has dimpled her feet.
‘The air has brought colour to your cheeks, Ásta mín,’ Ólafur hazards, laying down his book and choosing a tone he judges neither too light nor too hearty, as one might select for a skittish horse. ‘Are you feeling better for the walk?’
‘I’m feeling perfectly well, thank you,’ she replies, picking bits of wool from between her toes. Why must she always sound like this? She tries again. ‘I was only looking to see if I could spy my first puffin. It’s early yet. I’ll look again in a few days.’
Taking encouragement from this expansive reply, Ólafur brightens. ‘Did you miss the birds when you were away?’
‘I did. At first.’ She has no desire to go there and gives her feet an ostentatious rub in the hope that he will take the hint.
He does not take the hint. Ólafur has been gathering his courage for just such a propitious moment and is not inclined to let it pass.
‘You have suffered much, Ásta,’ he begins carefully, ‘and I know there is nothing I can say that will suffice.’ When he rehearsed this speech in his head, it had been with Ásta looking straight at him, her gaze becoming ever softer, not picking stubbornly at her toes. ‘But’, he takes a breath and a rush at it, ‘can you find no solace in prayer? God has promised always to hear us.’
Ólafur, please, not this.
She scratches the rash between the smallest and the second smallest toe of her left foot with tense concentration. Ólafur’s speech is doomed. He knows it. But he continues to address her bent head, because he has started now and it is time.
‘This afternoon when you were out I was reviewing some examples from scripture.’ His hand falls on the book and his fingers begin a nervous thrumming. ‘Think of Moses, Ásta. His prayer was so strong that it parted the Red Sea. Or’ – tap, tap – ‘think of the three men, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, told of in the holy book of Daniel. Their prayers in the fiery furnace took the power from the flames themselves, did they not? And of course’ – tap – ‘one might consider—’
‘Ólafur,’ she interrupts, looking up at last and making an effort to keep her voice low, ‘it is very good to hear about the Red Sea, but you should know that God has not answered one of my prayers, not a single one, in nearly eleven years.’
The tapping stops. ‘God’s answer may not always be what we look for, but he does promise to hear us and console us,’ Ólafur says, very earnestly. He has said it before. He has said it on Sundays. God knows he has said it often enough to himself. It is the best he can do. His eyes are trying to seek her out, trying to know her, pleading to be known.
‘What is the point of being heard and not answered?’ she whips back with more passion than she intended. ‘Why does God make us suffer so? What are we punished for, exactly? And if I may mention another question that occurred when I was away, why does he give a mother a heart to love and then empty her arms child by child by child by child?’
Ólafur presses his forehead with two long fingers. ‘Children die all the time, Ásta. You know that as well as I do. We lost an infant ourselves only a few days old. We live in a world of suffering. And it’s why we look with such longing to the next one.’<
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He knows he sounds like a priest. That’s what she is thinking, isn’t it: that they used to be able to talk in a different way?
‘Let me ask you one thing in return,’ he says, trying again. ‘Do you imagine that this father here does not also think of his children every day? Especially the son he was never allowed to know. I can’t explain, even to myself, why that loss should hurt so much, but it does. Does it ever occur to you that it might be something to be grateful for, Ásta, that you had nine years to get to know our Jón Ólafsson and I but two weeks in the hold of a ship?’
Do not touch that nerve, Ólafur.
‘Grateful?’ I left him. I left my child. I left him alone. I left him forever. ‘Grateful for God’s great mercy in keeping me enslaved so much longer than you? Is that what you mean?’
Ólafur shakes his head slowly and looks at his hands.
‘Anyway you make my point for me. Why are we both made to suffer?’
‘He lays suffering upon us all,’ Ólafur begins, clambering back to the pulpit for safety, ‘so that his blessed name might be praised.’
Enough. She kicks her sodden socks out of the way and stands up. ‘Ólafur, just tell me this. Why should God’s name be praised for taking the birch to us?’
Ólafur looks anguished. ‘Ásta, this is blasphemy. Pray lower your voice.’
‘I don’t care who hears. Is it a crime to ask a question? Yes, I suppose it is. Didn’t you ever ask a question yourself, Ólafur? Not one? Then here is another from me. Report me for it, if you will. Why must I believe that a child who lisps innocent prayers to Allah is bound for hell? Why is my mind required to accept this?’
‘You go too far, Ásta.’ Ólafur’s voice is trembling. He stands up to face her, staggering a little, so that he has to lay a hand on the table.
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