Heaven and Hell (3 page)

When are we going?

Most likely the moon was formed at the same time as the Earth, but it could be that the Earth captured it in its gravitational field and now it hangs over the boy, it is made of rock, dead stone.

When never came. But the flu came, as always. They caught the black cough and died two days apart, the sister first.
Where are you, God?
was life’s final question, his mother just barely managed to scribble,
live!
following that question:
live!
Your loving mother.
The final letter, the final sentence, the final word.

The boy lifts the whey keg into the boat, how much can the human heart endure?

The boat is fully loaded.

Einar, Gvendur, and Árni have put stones into the boat so it lies better in the sea, they make the sign of the cross over each stone. The heart of a grown man is the size of a clenched fist. The heart is a hollow muscle that pumps blood through the body’s blood vessels, the arteries, veins, and capillaries that are nearly four hundred thousand kilometers long, reach the moon and just a touch out into the black space beyond it, it must be lonely there. Andrea stands between the boat and the hut, looking at them, her veins reach to the moon. The clock approaches three and they may not push out from the landing any earlier, there are laws, we’ll follow the laws, especially those that make a bit of sense. Gvendur and Einar are already in the boat, seated on the fore thwart, only powerful and durable oarsmen sit there, the others take their places along the planking and wait for the trumpet to sound. Not, however, the one that old books and fairy tales say signals the Last Day, when we will all be called before the Great Judge, no, they simply wait for the trumpet that Benedikt will raise to his lips below the main huts when the clock strikes precisely three. Benedikt has huge lungs and can blow hard, the signal to go carries to the brothers’ huts even in a sharp headwind. The first winter after the rules prohibiting sea voyages before three in the morning took effect, Benedikt had simply blown quickly and unwaveringly, his only goal to hit a great note that carried far and proved the strength of his lungs, then he threw down the trumpet and joined the great race to be the first to go. But now, two years later, he has himself an old trumpet, bought from an English sea captain, and blows not simply to blow but emphasizes tenderness instead and tries to change the dark night sky into one of the melodies he heard from the merchant Snorri here in the Village, and Benedikt doesn’t throw the trumpet into the boat and bring it with him on the voyage—lashing wind and rain, Snorri pointed out, are very bad for the instrument and can spoil its sound—instead hands it to the Custodian waiting by his boat. Surrounding Benedikt are nearly sixty boats and almost three hundred men waiting for the signal to go, mostly sixereens, two men in each boat, four to the sides and every muscle taut. But it doesn’t cross anyone’s mind to leave before Benedikt lowers the trumpet from his lips, he is one of the better-known skippers here, a hero, has saved men’s lives, always fishes well, and no one is even half a match for him in pushing through the breakers to land, everyone heeds him and the Custodian waits patiently on the foreshore after being handed the instrument, even though the cold sea wets her sometimes and both her feet are well into their fifties.

Andrea stands below the two huts.

Waits to hear the signal; to see her men rush off as if fleeing the destruction of the world. Afterward she goes in, tidies up, and tries to read a bit in another book that Bárður got from the blind sea captain who lives with Geirþrúður,
Niels Juel, Denmark’s Greatest Naval Hero
. Why is he called a hero? What has he fished? Has he fought for his life in an open cockleshell the size of a coffin, perhaps in a northerly gale when the land has disappeared, the sky as well, the howling of the wind on the verge of blowing your head off your shoulders?

Now he’ll blow, mutters Árni so quietly that the word is lost in the beard covering the lower part of his face, he holds onto the boat with both hands, every muscle taut. Einar squeezes his oar, Gvendur stares cheerfully into space, it’s good just to exist. The boy looks at Einar over the gunwale, if any man could be a taut string at this moment it’s Einar, Gvendur like a giant next to the string, a gentle, contented, submissive giant. They both work as farmhands for Pétur and have done so for a good ten years, although Pétur sometimes gets the feeling that the giant first heeds Einar and then him. Right, the bastard should start blowing any minute now, murmurs Árni again, slightly louder this time. Benedikt stands with legs spread in the middle of his boat about two kilometers from the brothers’ huts, raises his trumpet to his lips, fills his lungs with dark night air and blows.

The note resounds above nearly three hundred skin-clad and impatient fishermen below the main huts, and carries far into the still night air. Andrea stretches, turns her head to hear better. Pétur, Árni, and Einar have grown impatient, cursing Benedikt under their breath, while Bárður and the boy listen, try to learn the melody, its essence, something to improvise on during the long voyage and the life that will hopefully be longer yet. The giant Gvendur even closes his eyes furtively for a moment, music usually reminds him of something good and beautiful, and he feels it most when he’s alone. He is, however, half afraid that Einar will see him, he certainly isn’t happy about men closing their eyes while they’re awake and Gvendur isn’t one to offend Einar knowingly, life is tough enough as it is.

Right! shouts Árni when the sound dies out, and they push with all their might, as one man. The boat creeps off down the landing, the boy lets go, grabs the rollers that come out from under the keel, runs with them to the front of the boat and lays them in front of the prow. He’s quick, we’ll give him that, can run fast and so far in one shot that it’s questionable whether the country would be large enough if he wanted to run somewhere at full tilt. The prow slips into the sea. Árni and Pétur are the last ones into the boat, they jump aboard out of the sea and then the rowing begins. Bárður and the boy share a thwart in the middle, the energy flows through their veins, they clench their teeth, six oars, the sea is quiet, no resistance, neither wind nor waves, the boat dashes forward, but when they have rowed for just under a minute and have torn themselves completely away from land, are on the sea, they pull in the oars, Pétur takes off his sou’wester, his woolen cap underneath it, takes that off as well, and recites the Seafarer’s Prayer, the other five bow their heads with their sou’westers in their hands. The boat rises and falls, just like the throng of boats below the main huts, a scant minute after the great outburst released by Benedikt’s note, when nearly three hundred men rushed shouting and screaming with just under sixty boats into the sea, but now the boats rise and fall in silence while the skippers pray. The voices ascend to Heaven with their message, their request, and it is simple: help us!

The sea is cold and sometimes dark. It is a gigantic creature that never rests, and here no one can swim, except for Jónas, who works in the summers at the Norwegian whaling station, the Norwegians taught him how to swim, he is called either the Cod or the Seawolf, the latter more fitting, considering his appearance. Most of us have grown up here by the sea and have lived scarcely a day without hearing it, and the men pursued seamanship from the age of thirteen, that’s the way it’s been for a thousand years, yet no one knows how to swim except Jónas, because he kisses up to the Norwegians. Still, we know a few other things, we know how to pray, know how to make the sign of the cross, we cross ourselves as soon as we wake, when we put on our waterproofs, we cross the fishing equipment, the bait, we cross each action, the thwarts upon which we sit we entrust to you, Lord, protect us with your loving kindness, silence the winds, still the waves that can become so terrifying. We place all of our trust in you, Lord, who are the beginning of all things and the end, because those who end up in the sea sink like stones and drown, even in dead calm and such a short distance from land that people standing with their feet firmly on the blessed Earth can see their expressions, their last ones before the sea claims their lives, or bodies, those heavy loads. We trust in you, Lord, who created us in your image, created the birds with wings so they could fly in the sky and remind us of freedom, created the fish with fins and tails so they could swim in the depths we fear. We can of course all learn to swim like Jónas, but Lord, would we not then be expressing our lack of faith in you, as if we thought ourselves capable of correcting something in creation? Besides, the sea is very cold, no man swims long in it, no, we trust no one but you, Lord, and your son, Jesus, who could swim no more than we, nor had any need to, he simply walked on the water. Imagine it, if we had the true faith and could thus walk upon the sea, simply stroll out to the fishing grounds, haul in fish, and then home again, perhaps just two together, carrying one handbarrow. Amen, says Pétur, and they all throw on their sou’westers, saving their woolen caps for later, the night is mild, silent night, holy night, the sou’wester is enough, its brim reaches down to the shoulders, and now they row in the Lord’s name, put their backs into it, the Devil with it! No, not the Devil, we let that black name slip out by accident, didn’t mean anything by it, we’ll cross our tongues for safety’s sake. The oars nearly bend beneath the exertion, twelve highly trained arms, taut muscles, considerable strength combined, but there the fjord opens into the Polar Sea and we are nothing in the face of it, have nothing but faith in the mercy of the Lord, and perhaps a minuscule amount of ingenuity, courage, longing for life. The boat rushes on. Einar’s eyes gleam, his anger has changed into pure energy that fills his entire body, every cell, and spreads out into his oar, Gvendur has to pull hard to keep up with him. For a long time no one thinks anything and they do not look at anything, they just row with all their might, their entire being goes into rowing, the land draws further away, they come further out onto the sea.

They recede into the distance.

Andrea still stands in the same place and watches as they diminish. Their facial expressions are erased, she watches until they’ve become as one body taking the boat out to sea, into the night, in the direction of the fish that swim in the deep and simply enjoy existence. Andrea watches them, asks God to protect them, not to forsake them. She waits to return to the hut until she sees the throng of boats from the main huts round the cliff. It’s pleasant to stand alone in the night, just above the foreshore, and see nearly sixty boats appear in the calm, see all of these men apply all of their strength to be the first to reach the fishing grounds and get to choose the best place, see them apply their utmost powers, which are however almost nothing in comparison with the sea, the fury of the wind, the wrath of the heavens, we trust in you, Lord, and your son, Jesus. She makes the sign of the cross, turns and notices her brother-in-law, Guðmundur. The brothers may no longer be speaking to each other, but they pay close attention to each other’s activities. Then she wasn’t alone, it was just a trick of the mind. Reality is complicated like that, because Andrea was completely alone in her thoughts and senses and her existence was based entirely on these, while several meters above her Guðmundur had been standing, watching the same thing as she was. Her anger flares but evaporates just as quickly, why should she get angry, Andrea thinks, completely surprised at herself, and she walks off in the direction of the hut, various tasks await her there and the Danish naval hero, if he weren’t just another damned blatherer, another politician, did you know that incredibly few people can bear to wield power without remaining untarnished? Andrea makes a game of moving closer to Guðmundur than she has to, looks directly at him, greets him, says something about the weather. Guðmundur is a serious man, strict, and existence is of course no joke, there he actually has something, and besides, existence is never as barren of jokes as when he has just got up, Andrea knows this and that is precisely why it’s so enjoyable to move so unnecessarily close to him, to be unnecessarily cheerful, almost as if life were full of coltish pleasure this night. Guðmundur gives her a stern look in return, almost scandalized, and Andrea reins in her smile. The world has so many puzzles. How can such a stern and serious man have such a beaming and happy daughter? There’s a great deal I don’t understand, Andrea thinks, and decides that when Guðmundur and his men are gone, likely after two hours, and she has finished her chores, she will saunter over and let the girl have Bríet’s lecture on women’s liberation that Bárður and the boy had given her earlier that winter; the booklet would rub Guðmundur the wrong way, and it will hardly ease his discomfort that it was bound together with
A Carpenter’s Quire
by Jón Bernharðsson; Guðmundur takes great pleasure in carpentry. Andrea trills as she steps into the hut, she starts to whistle a variation on the melody Benedikt blew at them, but in the doorway she remembers the heat and the scent that streamed up from Bárður’s collar, she closes the door on the night and her thoughts roam far and wide.

III

Guðmundur doesn’t watch her but hears the door close. He
looks out at the sea, the dark sea, and sniffs the air, a bit uncertain about the weather forecast, doesn’t it seem as if there’s a whiff of northeasterly behind the mountain, a sharp, even murderous wind direction? He doesn’t move, the boats recede, they’ve started to vanish into the dark blue night, have started to spread out over the deep that opens up between the shores, between the mountains that rise precipitous and ancient. Guðmundur has a huge beard, it covers the entire lower part of his face, we never saw these men’s chins, if one of them made the mistake of shaving, it would look as if he’d had a horrendous accident, a part of his personality cut off, nothing but half a man remaining. He stands motionless for a long time. Many minutes pass. It’s healthy for a person to stand alone in the night, he or she becomes one with the tranquillity and discovers a kind of peace, which can however change without warning into painful isolation. It’s still quite dark but there’s a hint of a gleam in the east, so weak it’s almost an illusion. But this gleam, imagined or not, dissolves Guðmundur’s uncertainty, he is able to read the clouds over the white beach on the opposite side of the fjord, vague in the twilight, what his nose and ears couldn’t tell him, that a northeasterly was on its way, likely gale-force, but would hardly reach them before midday. If they rushed to set out within the hour, they should be able to return before the sea could harm them, before the surf became murderous. He shudders, turns swiftly and takes long strides to his hut. These are such quick and unexpected movements in the calm that had befallen the night after the rush to launch the boats that they seem even to disturb the air surrounding the huts, as if causing it to quiver slightly, and Andrea looks up as she cleans the floor in the loft. Guðmundur tears open the door to the hut and shouts, rise and shine! we’re rowing! He has a strong, sonorous voice and his men wake up immediately. They’re out of bed before they can even blink, some still half asleep when their feet touch the floor. Guðrún lies in bed a few moments more, counting to a hundred, life is cozier under the cover than on the floor among the men, grunting in their coarse wool, yawning away their sleep and dreams, immediately eager to launch out onto the sea, to meet freedom and the fish.

Guðmundur’s men are quick to come outside. They turn the boat over, almost a full meter longer than Pétur’s boat, load it, don’t forget to make the sign of the cross over everything they touch. They have rowed together for twenty years, started young fishing for shark during the years when no laws controlled deep-sea fishing and they could fish whenever it suited them, often during the blackest of midwinter days, when the darkness was so dense that one could draw a knife and carve one’s initials into it and then the night would carry your name into morning. Some nights they lay for hours at a time above the sharks, in biting frost, far out at sea, and then it was as if the night would never pass and the east was heavy with darkness. The shark is always hungry and swallows everything, once Guðmundur’s men found a dog in a shark’s belly, the shark had eaten it the day before in a fjord fifty kilometers away, the dog had swum after its master’s yawl, happy, tongue dangling, then it yelped suddenly and was gone, that’s how dangerous it is to know how to swim.

Andrea cleans the floor in the loft, she thinks about the six men out on the sea in their yawl, she thinks about the moment with Pétur in the salting house the day before and then suddenly becomes so sad that she stands up, has a drop of coffee, sits down on the boy’s bed, sighs quietly and reflexively strokes the cover of the book Bárður was reading. She reads the title out loud, opens the book and sees the letter Bárður had stuck into the middle of it, maybe to use as a bookmark. It is to Sigríður, three densely written pages. Andrea reads the first lines, which are burning hot with love, but is a little ashamed of herself, or just enough to stop reading. She closes the book again, looks to one side and sees Bárður’s waterproof, and it’s as if something cold touches her.