Heaven and Hell (7 page)

VI

Those who live in this valley see only a piece of the sky.
Their horizon is mountains and dreams.

The boy knows this valley, and knows that whoever follows it and then threads his way along a particular path between the mountainsides cut by ravines and crosses two plateaus comes down into the valley that Bárður had called his district and one farm in the valley his home. The boy doesn’t head toward home, how is it possible to head toward a place that doesn’t exist, not even in our heads? He doesn’t call the valley his district, although he’d slept and awakened there for most of his life, and no farm his home. Some need to live a long time to have the place that releases these big words,
at home
, from the fetters of language, and more and more die without having found it. He intends never to return to the district that contains the better part of his youth, the dreams that never came true and the regret for the life he never got to live, that contains the people he had lived with since his father drowned and came into possession of his dark abode in the sea, the people he grew up with, fell asleep apart from and woke up among, not bad people, no, no, but he simply never got rid of the feeling that the farm and the valley were little more than stopping places for the night. One needs a place to sit down for a moment, linger while the body grows and the mind becomes large enough to deal with the world on its own. Otherwise it’s a beautiful district, unusually grassy and spacious, a considerable stretch to the sea from several farms and from the doorsteps of some of them not even a glimpse of it, which is unusual here, how is it possible to live without having the sea before one’s eyes? The sea is the wellspring of life, in it dwells the rhythm of death, and now the boy heads away from this, as far away as he can get, even if only for one night or two, just come so far that he no longer senses the sea.

He trudges into the valley and Bárður is dead.

Read a poem and froze to death because of it.

Some poems take us places where no words reach, no thought, they take you up to the core itself, life stops for one moment and becomes beautiful, it becomes clear with regret and happiness. Some poems change the day, the night, your life. Some poems make you forget, forget the sadness, the hopelessness, you forget your waterproof, the frost comes to you, says, got you, and you’re dead. The one who dies is changed immediately into the past. It doesn’t matter how important a person was, how much kindness and strength of will that person had and how life was inconceivable without him or her: death says, got you, life vanishes in a second and the person is changed into the past. Everything connected to that person becomes a memory you struggle to retain, and it is treachery to forget that. Forget how he drank coffee. Forget how he laughed. How he looked up. But still you forget. Life demands that you do. You forget slowly but surely, and it can be so painful that it pierces the heart.

It’s an effort to wade through the snow.

The boy walks straight ahead, thinks that he does.

He walks and walks and walks, the snowfall is dense and swirling, visibility only a few meters, he stops once to eat, then starts walking again and it starts to grow dim, he sees and senses how the daylight is dwindling between snowflakes, how the wind is darkening. The only sensible thing to do would be to find a farm and ask for shelter, but he trudges on, caring not a whit for sensibility, only half caring whether he survives the night or not. Yet. He has this book on his back,
Paradise Lost
, and one should return one’s books. It’s likely the reason why Andrea ordered him to take the book with him, she knows him and this peculiar love of his for books. The boy suddenly feels warm inside when he thinks about Andrea, but the warmth cools quickly because Bárður froze to death, and right next to him. It’s also dark, from the evening, the dense snowfall and the gathering drifts.

As a matter of fact the visibility does not decrease significantly with the onset of evening, yet darkness is always darkness, and evening is always evening. And the evening becomes night that settles on the eyes, sifts its way through the cornea, fills the optic nerve; slowly but surely this walking boy is filled with night. He wants most to lie down, just where he’s standing, relieve himself of his burden, lie down on his back with his eyes open, the world darkens except for the snowflakes nearest to him, they are white, cut like angels’ wings. The snow would cover him, he would die into the whiteness. It’s very tempting, the boy says to himself, out loud or silently, he has long since stopped making the distinction; whoever walks for a long time and alone in a ceaseless snowfall comes little by little to the feeling that he has left the world, walks in no man’s land, the surety of life leaves him. Then it stops snowing. It sounds incredible, but it always stops snowing in the end, and then he stands perhaps in front of a farm, the storm and the night had completely cut all human ties. Very tempting, the boy says to himself, to stop this tiring hike, lie down, sleep, yes, and then die. Of course it would be good to die, no more trouble, sorrow conquered, regret conquered. It’s also so short between life and death, actually just one piece of clothing, one waterproof.

First there’s life, then there’s death:

I live, she lives, they live, he dies.

But if I die here, then the book I’m supposed to return will be damaged and I would disappoint some people, the old sea captain, whom I otherwise couldn’t care less about, Andrea and Bárður. Bárður is of course dead but not his presence: it has never been stronger. Yes, first I return the book, then I can walk off into the wilderness and the snow can cover me, thinks the boy, but he knows that then he will have to choose the place for this carefully. It’s easy to let oneself be covered with snow, easy to die, but let’s not forget that the night and the snowfall deceive, the boy thinks he lies down far from all human habitation, in the wilderness, but is then perhaps on a slope above a little farm, the snow melts after days or weeks, he appears dead beneath it, and a little girl or little boy comes across the corpse damaged by weather and insects, both eyes taken by the ravens, empty, dark holes, and he or she will never get over seeing such a thing. Dying has its responsibilities. Dammit, then I’ll go on, thinks the boy, disappointed, or says it out loud, and trudges forward, wades through the snow, senses with his feet whether the land is rising or falling, turns away from the slope and tries thereby to keep himself more or less in the middle of the valley. But the night becomes heavier and the snow becomes ever more difficult to cross, until finally he has no idea whether he is heading up or down, but still he walks southward, this he feels from the wind that presses constantly on his back, at some point however he needs to turn east to make it up to the heath and then the plateau. This is just so difficult. His feet have started to whimper with fatigue, best to rest. The boy feels his way forward, searching for a crag or rock large enough to shelter him from the northerly, which is cold and would have no trouble turning him to ice. He finds shelter, starts to pack the snow around him, keeps on until he has made a kind of wall and partial roof, in fact it’s more of a snow hole than a house, but he is no longer out in the wind and the snowfall and he is so tired. His fatigue is enormously heavy. It fills every cell, every thought. Probably twenty-four hours since he opened his eyes, since he woke to Pétur’s voice and into the world in which Bárður was alive, how many years ago was it actually, he thinks, and the wind blows outside. The boy’s face is stiff from the cold, the ice covering his sweater starts to thaw, he’s drenched and his face is wet, difficult to say whether he cries in his sleep or while awake, there isn’t always shelter in dreams, sometimes not at all. But be careful, boy, not to sleep too long or too soundly, because whoever sleeps soundly in such a snow hole, in such dark weather, never wakes again in this life. Then spring comes and a little girl goes to pick flowers above her farm but finds you and you’re no flower, you’re just a rotting body and the source of nightmares.

Hell Is Not Knowing Whether We Are Alive or Dead

The Boy, the Village, and the Profane Trinity

I

The boy did not fall asleep in the snow hole. All the same,
sleep offered to take him in its downy-soft arms, to ease the fatigue that was so heavy that each of his eyelids weighed at least half a kilogram, sleep was actually an offer he could not refuse, but he tore himself away from its succor, tried to keep himself awake by thinking of Bárður, because sorrow has deprived so many of sleep. He also thought about Andrea, who had allowed him to set out into this snowstorm, or rather, in into it. If he fell asleep here in this hole, if he gave in to the soothing voice of sleep, he would not reawaken, at least not in this life.

It was thus conscientiousness that kept sleep and death from the boy. He needed to return a book, he could not let down Andrea, could not let down Bárður, his memory, could not let down his mother and his sister who never got to grow up and died before her childish admiration for her brothers behind the mountain managed to fade, to fall asleep here would be to let them all down, and thus he pulled himself up from the hole.

Stood up quickly and was once again in the dense snowfall, the night and the frost-hardened world.

He gasped for breath because of the storm and started off.

He hikes up from the valley. Up onto the heath and the plateau into which it turns, barren and nearly level: the glacier planed off the top of the mountain ages ago. The boy has the arctic wind mostly at his back and the night surrounds him, it is within the snowfall, within the white snowflakes. The boy has never before come so high, never made it so close to the sky and at the same time never been as far from it. He inches forward, abandoned by all but God, and there is no God. It’s so cold. His head is frozen and his brain has changed into an expansive tundra, hoarfrosted and frozen earth as far as the eye can see, completely lifeless on the surface, but underneath are hidden weak embers, memories, faces, sentences, nothing is sweet to me, without thee. These embers could conceivably melt the hoarfrost, call to birds, waken the fragrance of blossoms. But up here on the plateau nothing is fragrant, there are just the frost and the night, he walks on, time passes, morning comes. And the morning passes as well. He no longer sustains a thought, his feet keep going like a machine, which is very good, yet he must be careful because everything ends, even plateaus, and in some places they end abruptly, simply cease to exist, and the dizzying fall begins.

It is actually amazing that he did not walk off the edge and plunge to his death. As indifferent as he was, giddy from the frost, fatigue, numbed by sorrow. But perhaps he senses a slight change in the air, some can feel it when the ground ends and the sky begins. He hesitates, walks cautiously, feels his way, a long time passes, then finally he finds a passable way down. Certainly not the best, scrapes his skin on rocks, falls, hurts himself, but he is alive and it is seldom possible to ask for more. He has come down into the valley, Tungudalur. Where we go in the summers when the sun is warm in the sky, the grass is green and things such as flowers exist, we even go in large groups with picnic lunches, smiles, and happiness, call it an excursion to the forest since there is a decent stretch of trees in Tungudalur, an accumulation of gnarled birches. The stoutest branches easily hold birds but not people, the boy leans momentarily against a tree, he has put the plateau behind him, overtaken day and night, sleep and death. He walks down the valley and heads toward us, toward the Village, and it is the first day of April.

Words vary.

Some are bright, others dark;
April
, for instance, is a bright word. The days grow longer, their brightness comes like a spear-thrust into the darkness. One morning we wake and the plover has arrived, the sun has come closer, the grass appears from beneath the snow and turns green, the fishing boats are launched after having slept throughthe long winter and dreamt of the sea. The word
April
is composed of light, birdsong, and eager anticipation. April is the most hopeful of months.

But, God help us, how incredibly long it still seems to the greenness as the boy plods down Tungudalur, his packed lunch long gone and with the expansive tundra in his head, stiff extremities and a terribly heavy burden on his back, a book that killed his best, no, his one friend. It was such a short time since they had walked together out of the Village, side by side, the boy whimpers a bit as he walks, although he scarcely has the energy to do so, it is afternoon and the snow has stopped falling from the sky. The boy walks along the beach wherever possible, otherwise on the tussocky moorland that lies between the mountains and the beach, several dozen meters wide at best. He stops at a little river and regards the iron pipe that Friðrik, the Factor at Tryggvi’s Shop, the Village’s largest shop, had installed in it; a long pipe and a large trestle, half buried in the ground, under one of its ends, the water runs pure and clear there and never freezes. Friðrik’s men row daily across the Lagoon to fetch water for the shop and the boats when they’re ready to go. Of course the Village does not lack wells, but the water in them is not particularly good, blended with seawater and sometimes filth, some people think it’s fun to throw rubbish into the wells and even to piss in them, some people are so strange it’s as if the Devil has bitten them in the ass. The boy gulps down ice-cold water. He looks out over the Lagoon and at the old Danish trading houses on the Point, the oldest buildings in the Village, from the early eighteenth century. Two storehouses, now used for the same purpose by Tryggvi’s Shop, and the Factor’s house, which has been used in recent years as the residence of the shop’s head assistant. The house is very haunted; the assistant and his wife are the only ones who have stayed there for more than one year, some say it’s only because the couple lack the imagination to perceive the haunting. The boy squints to see the buildings better, they are dark, it’s as though the air is hazy, it’s bright enough but difficult to see fine details from a distance. He resumes walking. The water has done him good, given him the strength to move his feet, and it’s also good not to have to wade through the snow, the beach is empty and quite easy to traverse, not covered with large rocks and uneven as it is around the fishing station, where it is shaped by the vehemence of the ocean. Then he recalls how it was only forty-eight hours ago that they sat together on the bed, read, and waited for Árni. He is so overcome that he walks up the mountainside, sits down between two large rocks and stares out with empty eyes while the afternoon air grows heavier and turns into evening around him.

Why go on?

And what is he doing here?

Shouldn’t he have stayed on at the fishing station, to keep an eye on the dead body and then bring it to its home, what were friends for, and shouldn’t friendship overcome the grave and death? He sighs because he has betrayed everything. He sits there for a long time and it starts to snow again. Would it snow over the valley where so many people think about Bárður, or is there a moon in the sky, wading in clouds, and has Bárður’s betrothed come out to gaze at it? Bárður always went out at eight to gaze at the moon and at the same time she stood outside the farmhouse and watched as well, there were mountains and distances between them but their eyes met on the moon, precisely as the eyes of lovers have done since the beginning of time, and that is why the moon was placed in the sky.

The boy has started walking again. He threads his way along the beach until he comes to the church, where he has to turn and wade through the snow again. He leans for a moment against the churchyard wall and looks out into the snowfall that hides the Village, catches a faint glimpse of the houses next to the church, dim lights in one or two windows, many people having presumably gone to bed, but not sleeping as soundly as those behind him. He can still make out the path of the priest, Reverend Þorvaldur, from the church and down to his street. The boy threads the path, it makes the going easier, but not by much. The street where the Café is located is covered with snow, and Þorvaldur’s path dwindles there and disappears. The boy stands in the middle of the street, snow falls on him, his left foot weighs a hundred kilograms, his right foot three hundred, and there is far too much snow between him and the Café. He could just stand there in the same place until morning in the hope that Lúlli and Oddur would come along here to cut a path with their shovels, but that isn’t what he does, doesn’t know that Lúlli and Oddur exist, even less that they work in the winters shoveling the streets of the Village, so incredibly lucky to have steady jobs from September until May, goddamn dogs, why does luck stick to some and not others? There are eight houses on the street, all stately. The boy wades through snowdrifts and approaches the houses and Geirþrúður’s café. The life he has lived until now is past, before him is utter uncertainty, and the only certain thing is that he plans to return the book and report the news of Bárður’s death, announce that the only thing that mattered is gone and will never return. Then why continue to live, why, he mumbles to the snowflakes, which do not reply, they are just white and fall silently to the ground. Now I’ll go in and return the book, thanks for the loan, this is magnificent writing, nothing is sweet to me, without thee, it killed my best friend, the only good thing that was possible to find in this damned life, that is to say, thanks for the loan, and then he would say goodbye, or no, forget that, just turn on his heel and walk back out, struggle down to the hotel, the World’s End Hotel, take a basement room, pay later or, in other words, never, because tomorrow or tomorrow evening he is going to kill himself. This suddenly comes to him, the solution appears, just like that. Kill himself, then all the uncertainty is behind him. He thought of thanking God, but something held him back. Bárður had told him about Suicide Cliff: he would go there, easy as air to walk off it, the sea would take care of the rest, it knows how to drown people, is highly trained, the boy would go immediately if he weren’t so damned tired and horribly hungry, and then he also needs to return a book. He wades through the final meters of snow, slowly, with difficulty.

No one is out and about in the entire Village except for this boy, who is too tired and hungry to die.