‘None that you won’t find immoral and dangerously heretical,’ she whispers, wondering if there is a single tale from the harem that would not put her on course for re-education.
‘I am warned and my spirit is on guard,’ Ólafur says, very solemnly, and squeezes her hand.
Hoping that Gísli isn’t listening, she chooses Sympathy the Learned, since they might as well begin with an impossibly clever slave-girl routing the men. She is careful to remove all mention of Allah, the Koran, the ruling Caliph, Sympathy’s breasts (which, as the papery aunt told it, were like pomegranates separated by a valley of delights) and her navel (carved so deep it would have held an ounce of nutmeg butter – a picture nobody else in the harem ever seemed to find astonishing).
‘Young Abu al-Husn was his father’s joy and the light of his eyes,’ she begins, lying back against the cold wall with her hand still inside Ólafur’s. ‘When the old man felt that his debt was about to be paid to, er, God, he called his son to him, saying: “My child, I must prepare myself to stand before the Master. I leave you great riches, fields and farms, which should last your lifetime and the lifetime of your children’s children. Enjoy it without excess, thanking the great giver and being mindful of him all your days.”
‘With that the merchant died, and his son shut himself away with his grief. But all too soon his friends led him away from his sorrow. “Have done with tears,” they said. “Make the most of your riches and your youth.”
‘So Abu al-Husn forgot the counsels of his father. He satisfied every caprice of his nature, frequenting singers and musicians, eating enormous quantities of chicken every day, unsealing old jars of strong wine, and hearing ever about him the chinking of goblets. He exhausted all he could exhaust and spent all he could spend, until he awoke one morning to find that there remained of his possessions only a single slave-girl.’
Ólafur is listening. Sometimes she has to stop while he coughs and then she strokes his forehead until he has breath again and nods for her to go on. This one remaining slave, she tells him, was the supreme marvel of all women.
‘She was called Sympathy. She was as upright as the letter alif. That’s the first letter in the Arabic alphabet, Ólafur, and it stands straight as a blade of grass. And her figure was so slim that she might defy the sun to cast a shadow by her. The colouring of her face was a wonder and its expression was filled with blessing.’
‘Just like yours, my love,’ wheezes Ólafur, who has recovered the knack of laughing at her.
‘“When I dance and sing,” Sympathy told Harun al-Rashid, the (shall we say) leading official, “those who see and hear me are damned by my beauty. When I walk in my perfumed clothing, balanced upon my feet, I kill. When I wink, I pierce. When I shake my bracelets, I make blind. When I move my bottom, I overthrow.”’
‘Ásta, stop.’ Ólafur clutches his chest. ‘If you make me laugh I’ll only cough. Come closer. I am not too old, nor too ill, to be overthrown a little myself.’
Night after night, lying by Ólafur’s side, Ásta recounts the tales she learned from Husna and the papery aunt. One evening his breathing is so sore and anxious that she takes him right into the roof garden itself.
‘You should not be up here, Ólafur, when the women are telling their stories under the stars but, see, they don’t notice you. Close your eyes and just breathe in that jasmine. Breathe it deep. That’s right, my dearest, that’s the way to do it, nice and slow. Can you smell the perfume? Now let the velvet night caress your cheek. Do you feel it on your skin, soft and warm? And look about you. There are women you won’t recognise here, but see who sits beside me with her legs crossed, rapt in the story. It’s your little Marta, grown since you saw her last. Can you see her pearly skin and those freckles on her nose and the calm, serious eyes? She doesn’t move in the slightest, but only listens. Just imagine how our Helga would be shuffling and looking everywhere. Marta’s stillness draws you to her. Look. She has seen you now. Do you see? And she’s smiling.’
When Ásta looks at Ólafur next he has fallen asleep, his breathing sweet and steady, his cheek wet.
Thus does Ásta Thorsteinsdóttir discover there is more than one way to make a bed of stories.
Ólafur no longer has the strength to cough, and his chest rattles so loud it is setting the whole room on edge. Even the children are subdued. Inga has taken to loud bursts of sobbing, the latest of which prompted Thorgerdur to give her a good shake and hiss in her ear that he wasn’t dead yet and could she not try a hymn instead? Gísli has been to sit on Ólafur’s bed to pray aloud, emerging a little red about the eyes himself.
Ólafur lies still and mute as a statue behind the sagging curtain. His eyes are shut, but Ásta has a feeling he can still hear. She takes Gísli’s place on the edge of the bed and envelops his right hand in both of hers.
‘Ólafur minn, I want to tell you about a … well, I was going to say a vision of mine.’
It is so dim behind the curtain that she can’t be sure, but it seems to her that his lips twitched.
‘Oh, all right, then. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe I’ll just say a story. Anyway, it’s a picture that has come to me as clear as an Oddrún dream – and I fancy more reliable.’
Another shadow of a twitch.
‘You are in it, Ólafur, and in such a beautiful place. Perhaps it’s Torfastadir. Remember how you described it to me in the pasha’s prison, with Hekla dusted in snow? Only this is summer. The grass around you is vivid green and it’s studded all over with tiny white flowers, and the clear, Icelandic light has washed everything clean and fresh. There are horses grazing in the meadow, and you are walking past them towards the far river. You stop to let the dark brown one nuzzle your hand – his name is Skími – but you mustn’t linger long, because you have someone to meet beyond the river.
‘“Welcome,” says the man when you reach him at last. He is wearing a long cloak. Not a white cloak, Ólafur. I hope you are taking in this point. There is nothing white in the slightest about this man. His cloak is orange as the sun. “I have been waiting for you, Ólafur Egilsson,” he says.
‘You know him at once, although you can’t remember when you met. You feel as if you have always known him. Together you begin to walk towards the distant sea.
‘After you have gone a while in silence, the man turns to you and says, “Why do you sorrow still, Ólafur Egilsson? Your pain is over now. I am taking you home.”
‘“I fear I will miss my children,” you say, hanging your head. “I am not even sure I’ll see my wife again in the place we are going.”’
There is a faint quiver within her cupped hands, a leaf stirred by the lightest breath of wind. She knew Ólafur was listening.
‘“I see,” says the man. “Then let me show you something.”
‘He leads you along a small path and you arrive soon at a gate. Are you listening, Ólafur? “Don’t go in,” says the man in orange, putting a hand on your arm as you reach for the latch (which is a clever one that pulls the gate shut again by itself – you’ll love it, Ólafur, when you get a chance to practise). “It is not time to meet them yet,” says the man, “but you may look.”
‘You peer over the gate into a garden. It has clouds of starred jasmine trailing over the walls, and vines with plump purple grapes twined around the archways, and from somewhere nearby you catch a whiff of mint. And then you see him, standing by a knobbly palm tree. He is older than you remember and his hair is burned fair with the sun and he’s tall as you are, his body nicely caught up with his arms. He looks up from his book and smiles and waves.
‘Then a girl catches your attention. She is sitting on the grass sewing, deep in concentration, until she feels your gaze upon her. “Pabbi,” she cries, “look who is with me.”
‘And you notice beside her a laughing young woman with curly red hair, surrounded by little children. Their attention is occupied by a boy with a wide smile whom you recognise at once, though you knew him only as a baby. He is ca
pering about on the grass to make the children laugh. “Pabbi,” he shouts when he sees you, “I’m going to sea.”
‘You look at them one by one. Then you look back at the man and he shrugs – as if to say, all that worrying, what was it about?
‘Then you look again, for someone is missing. And that is when you see me. Yes, Ólafur, even I am there in the garden, sitting quietly in the corner with my hands around my knees, watching them all proudly. “I will be with you later,” I shout over. “Keep the bed warm.”
‘You turn back to the man in orange, feeling that your heart will burst with happiness.
‘“Come now and rest, Ólafur Egilsson, in the place where you are known,” he says, putting an arm around you. “The others will join you later.”
‘Then the pair of you set off back down the path towards the sea.’
On the other side of the curtain the room has fallen quiet. Honestly, if she had realised how well a vision goes down, she would have thought to have one sooner.
Ólafur’s eyes flicker open. They find her and they thank her. To die known, to die beloved, to die certain: no man can ask for more. Perhaps, she thinks, raising his bunched fingers to her lips and kissing them one by one, this was Oddrún Pálsdóttir’s gift to them both.
Ásta slips into the bed beside him. As the hours pass, she listens to each slow breath and the empty air between. When she wakes next morning, her face pressed to his cold cheek, she is alone.
39
The woman steps cautiously from the boat, holding her skirts away from the creeping tide and thanking the fisherman for his trouble.
‘It was none,’ he replies. ‘I am only glad I was able to persuade you. I’ll be here again tomorrow to row you back, as long as the weather holds. The sea can be chancy at this time of year. Do not, I pray you, return alone.’
The woman takes a moment to press her boisterous hair back under the wool cap. It blows straight out again. ‘How is she?’
‘More peaceful now that Ólafur is buried, I would say. A winter death is always difficult. His body lay wrapped in the storeroom for weeks, resting between one sack of meal and one of salt, until the earth was soft enough to lay him to rest. She worried that he was lonely.’
The woman bows her head for a moment and he looks at her fondly. It was brave of her to come with him. It is not every woman who will follow a big-bearded stranger when he turns up at her door saying he has a horse to spare and a boat waiting. But even as a young girl she never feared adventure, this one. She left her children with her husband (as shocked and protesting as any man would be) and set off on the journey to her mother.
‘We don’t have much time,’ she says, gathering herself. ‘I must go to Ofanleiti at once. I hope I can remember the way.’
‘You’ll remember the way, Helga,’ says the fisherman.
There is a moment, one delirious moment just after her daughter has erupted into the room and is flinging herself towards her, when Ásta is convinced that Helga has flown straight from Ólafur’s garden to meet her in heaven. Obviously her own arrival there is another pleasant surprise and it is most gratifying to have got at least one story right.
Then Helga is in her arms.
‘Mamma,’ she cries, hot-faced from the hill, hair as exuberantly awry as ever, ‘I’ve come to fetch you home.’
When it is time for the household to settle to sleep for the night, mother and daughter squeeze together into Ásta’s slim bed. There they lie looking at each other in the sunlight still filtering late in the evening through the cloudy pane.
Then Ásta has to devour her all over again. Nose and cheeks, forehead and ears, the finger Helga sliced the top of with a forbidden knife when she was small, the soft place on her neck where she always squealed to be touched, the thick red curls that are darker now than they used to be and smell of rank smoke. Twelve years of kisses, twelve years of hunger.
And when Helga asks her mother, giggling, if she remembers how old she is, Ásta says, ‘But you’re still my child. I can’t tell you what it is to have a child.’
Then Helga lays a cheek against her mother’s and Ásta wraps an arm around her waist. And both of them are glad to be no stouter or they would be on the floor.
‘By the way, Helga,’ Ásta murmurs in her ear, ‘can I ask when you last washed your hair? There’s no need to flare your nostrils like that, my darling. I just wondered.’
And together they drift to sleep.
1669
From Snjallsteinshöfdi in the district of Landsveit you can see right out to the islands on a fine day. The grass grows flat for miles towards the sea, which is further away than it seems. Ásta never tires of watching the horses running there in the wind: dark brown and grey, piebald and fawn, one near as white as a Moor’s burnous.
She has lived more years than even Ólafur managed and would not object now to a long sleep. She knows where she will lie. Helga has shown her the place, at the foot of a quiet slope within sight of the farmhouse, with icy Eyjafjallajökull to the east. The graveyard faces south, south to where Egill is, south to where Marta went, south to where Jón will be breasting the waves at the helm of his ship. Unless, of course, one or other of them has made it to heaven before her, which is always possible and will be lovely.
But Helga is here. Darling Helga, who has put up with her for thirty years and never sat through a story yet. She is quick and impatient, with an exhaustingly restless eye on the work to be done next. True heir of Margrét, Ásta smiles to think: however did she produce her?
She has not told Helga all that happened in the years she spent far from Iceland. Helga is warm and loving, but she has neither Ólafur’s curiosity nor Marta’s delicate understanding. Perhaps it has been for the best, since there are griefs that lie too deep for stories. For those who want to know what it is for human beings to be stolen and traded and lose their children, there is always Ólafur’s book, which has been much copied and passed around. By now others may have written their own accounts of captivity. Men, of course. They will all be men. Does it matter that nobody will know how it was to be a woman?
Once she lies in the quiet earth, Ásta Thorsteinsdóttir, the woman who came back, will become the wife of a pastor again. Nobody will know she had a mind as interesting as his and experiences no man would think to record. Nobody will know how she questioned and puzzled and wondered about what lies around and beyond the lives we so agonisingly lead. Nobody will know that she longed to make a poem like Egill Skallagrímsson and compose a saga that would lose people in their imagination four centuries hence. Nobody will know how she put her lips just below the cheekbone of a slave-trading Moor, where his skin was smooth as the breast of a young gull, and told him that she loved him.
She does occasionally mention that she knew a sealwoman once, who left her a gift that helped her to see. ‘And I don’t mean spectacles,’ she will laugh when her great-grandchildren stare. They like to hear how Oddrún Pálsdóttir lost her skin under the midnight sun and lived on Heimaey telling dreams until she was an old woman. ‘That was before the pirates came,’ Ásta will say. Then the youngsters clutch each other and shiver, because every child knows about the pirates and every adult worries that the sails of an Algerine galleon will appear again one day off the shores of Iceland.
As age has loosened her tongue, Ásta has lost any qualms about telling people she was once kissed by an elfman. ‘Just here,’ she will say, ‘light as a snowflake,’ and tap a forehead more papery than the old aunt’s ever was. The elfman lived in a rock near Ofanleiti, she tells them with a dreamy look, and he knew her better than she knew herself.
Poor old Ásta, people say, exchanging a significant glance. She was always one to see things.
Author’s Note
Tyrkjaránið
The Turkish Raid, or Tyrkjaránið was one of the most traumatic events in the history of Iceland. Within a matter of days in the summer of 1627, corsairs from Algiers and from Salé in Morocco raided a number of
coastal regions, killing dozens and carrying at least four hundred people back to North Africa, where they were sold into slavery.
Iceland’s experience was far from unique: several Mediterranean states (no slouches in the piracy business themselves) lost many thousands of their citizens to the thriving slave-economy of Algiers. It was a time when slavery was being practised across the world and the mass transport of Africans to the New World was just beginning: the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. In Algiers there were captives from all over England (four hundred listed in 1669), from Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Most of those were snatched at sea, although a raid on Baltimore in West Cork in 1631, also led by the corsair admiral Murat Reis, carried off one hundred and seven men, women and children from their homes in an attack very similar to the one on Iceland. Ransoms were being raised for hostages right across Europe, with religious orders in Italy, Spain and France doing much of the fundraising and negotiating, while English governments preferred to explore military options.
But relative to its size, Iceland, the furthest north the corsairs reached, was hit particularly hard. To lose four hundred people out of a population of around forty thousand – including most of the island of Heimaey – is by any standards a stupendous national tragedy, particularly for what was at the time the poorest country in Europe. That may be one reason why Iceland has kept painfully in its collective psyche what has largely faded from the memory of other affected nations. It may also be down to the Icelandic compulsion to write. Voluminous historical narratives were written afterwards and copied by hand. It was felt important that the nation’s great trauma should be understood and never forgotten.
I came upon The Travels of Reverend Ólafur Egilsson in the English translation by Karl Smári Hreinsson and Adam Nichols some years ago. The original manuscript is lost, but nearly forty somewhat differentiated copies survive. Confusingly narrated in places and packed with biblical references, it describes the raid on the Westman Islands, the four weeks the author spent captive in Algiers and his journey to Denmark in pursuit of a ransom from the king. Under the dense religious language (wholly of its time but laborious for a modern reader) can be glimpsed a man who loved his family and was distressed at losing them, a scrupulous reporter, a clergyman who found his own sorrows near intolerable and the effort to contextualise them within his faith agonising. He mentions an eleven-year-old son, a younger un-named child, and a boy born on the ship who was named after Ólafur’s murdered fellow priest. Other than Egill being the first choice of the pasha and perhaps subsequently going to Tunis, the children’s fates are not known. There was also a wife. ‘My dear wife,’ Ólafur calls her. She occasionally floats into focus in his account and that of others – a detail here, a line there – and then away again.
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