Invisible Love (15 page)

Alba gazed at the teenager—his frail chest, his long arms, his tapering fingers—sitting cross-legged on the virgin wool rug: even though he played regularly, he didn't have the dexterity of those who are used to cards; he wasn't fast, wasn't precise, wasn't fond of those broad gestures that impress the girls; he handled the cards with composure.

She liked that about him. He never fell into the traps set for young people. With nonchalant grace, he avoided the usual effects, the vulgar desire to impress. He remained different. Even if he had been raised by the worst of crooks, he wouldn't have learned any bad ways.

She burst out laughing. “I wonder if either of us really likes this game.”

Intrigued, Jonas looked up again, making his head of blond hair shake.

“What if we discovered one day,” she went on, “that neither of us could stand old maid, Russian bank, or belote, but that we were pretending, just to keep each other happy?”

He laughed, then sighed. “Well, anything I did just to please you would please me, too.”

His words moved her. How handsome he was, with his well-defined lips, as red as his sweater . . .

“Me too,” Alba murmured, fighting her emotions.

Why weren't men like him? Pure, simple, attentive, generous, easy to love? Why did she get along better with her nephew—who was also her godson—than she did with her son or her husband? She shook her head to dismiss these thoughts and cried, “You're a sorcerer!”

“Me?”

“Or a magician.”

“Oh, yes? What tricks can I do?”

“Steal hearts,” she said, leaning forward and pinching his nose.

As she did so, she had the fleeting, unpleasant impression that she hadn't found the right tone, doubtless because she was forcing her smile or exaggerating her cheerfulness.

Jonas's eyes clouded over, and his face changed. Shifting his gaze to the window, he murmured, a bitter crease at the corner of his mouth, “Sometimes, I'd like to do that.”

She shuddered. What a fool she had been! She had just realized the incredible stupidity of her words. Steal hearts! The very words to avoid with a boy who . . .

She stood up, her temples throbbing, wanting nothing more than to run away.
Quick, create a diversion! Wipe out the gaffe. Don't let him think about his misfortunes . . .

She ran to the window. “I'm bored with cards! What would you say to a walk?”

He stared at her in surprise. “In the snow?”

“Yes.”

She was delighted at his surprise. In suggesting going out, she wasn't treating him like his cautious mother, who always kept him in the warm bosom of the house.

“Auntie, we're going to slip.”

“I hope so!”

“Hooray! I'm your man.”

As feverish as dogs being taken for a walk, Alba and Jonas looked through the closet in search of the appropriate gear, and, as soon as they had put on parkas, thick gloves, and fur-lined boots, they ran outside.

The cold greeted them, sharp and bracing, living up to their expectations.

Arm in arm, they advanced along the path.

It was a dazzling morning. The sun shone out of a clear blue sky. Around them, the snow had erased rocks, ponds, roads, and meadows; all was whiteness, from the cliffs to the hills, a whiteness in which a few houses were nestled, a whiteness interspersed here and there with copses of dwarf birches, a whiteness crisscrossed with streams like black stripes.

From below, the sea cast its breath up to them, a powerful smell of salt and seaweed, a smell that fed on the vastness.

Jonas quivered. “Do you think we're at the beginning of spring or the end of winter?”

“March 21 is only the middle of winter. The sun's higher but not the barometer. There are still frosts and snowfalls.”

“I'm crazy about my country!” Jonas cried.

Alba smiled. What point of comparison did he have, this boy who had never yet left his island? His enthusiasm expressed something else: the fact that he cherished life, that he enjoyed existing, even if, like the local climate, he went though some rough moments.

A cell phone rang. Jonas took a while to answer because of his gloves. It was his friend Ragnar.

Listening to him, he turned pale.

“What is it?” Alba asked anxiously.

“Eyjafjöll has erupted.”

“What? The volcano?”

“Last night . . . ”

Jonas resumed his conversation with Ragnar, listening to what the latter had to tell him. At that instant, Alba panicked. The “cabin”! The little house where she and her sister had spent their childhood was near Eyjafjöll. Had it been touched by the seismic shocks? By the jets of lava? By the showers of ash?

As Jonas watched her, she walked around in circles, crunching the hard snow, tormented by anxiety. For two centuries, the volcano had been dormant, and during that long sleep, generations of her family had lived in that wooden cabin with its roof of earth and grass . . . Of course, even in her mother's day, and then for her sister and her, the cabin had been just a holiday home, where they spent thirty days a year, far from the city, but those days were wonderful, filled with a sense of their past, the centuries-long history of the Ólafsdóttirs.

Jonas hung up and hastened to inform his aunt. “They've declared a state of emergency. There was an eruption at the Fimmvörðuháls pass. They're going to evacuate the inhabitants of the village of Fljótshlíð for fear of floods.”

“Floods?”

“Because of the heat of the lava, the compacted snow and blocks of ice will turn to water, Auntie.”

She could breathe more easily: the cabin wasn't anywhere near there!

In thinking that, she realized she hadn't spared a second's thought for the farmers. Because the house remained empty all through the year, she had stupidly generalized from her own case, neglecting the fact that other Icelanders who lived in the area would have their livelihoods endangered.

“Do they have any idea what's going to happen next?” she asked.

“The geologists say it may last a while.”

“I'm going there tomorrow.”

Energetically, she took Jonas's arm again, as if they were setting out on a journey.

For a few yards, the boy proceeded at her pace, then she sensed that his breathing had turned to panting and that he was holding her back.

She turned: Jonas's face was drained of color, his lips were pursed, and he was breathing grey steam into the air.

“Are you all right, Jonas?”

“You're too quick for me.”

He can't manage even as much as he used to,
she thought,
it's getting worse. Did I do something stupid by suggesting we go out? Katrin's right to keep him indoors. Let's go back quickly. Well, no, not quickly—as calmly as possible.

She had the impression that Jonas had heard her, because he calmed down and gripped her elbow. They walked back cautiously, with measured steps.

Once inside, Alba suggested hot chocolate. Over two steaming cups, sitting in the brushed steel kitchen, they resumed their chat.

“I shouldn't say this out loud,” Jonas declared, “but I love natural disasters.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I love the fact that nature's strong, that it humiliates us, that it reminds us of its power, that it puts us in our place.”

“Then welcome: Iceland is the country where you should have been born.”

“Do you think we choose, Auntie? Do you think our soul flies over the world, looks down, and then decides, ‘Oh, look, I'm going down there, to that piece of land, to that family, because they suit me'?”

“Some say so.”

“I'm sure of it. I got together with the angel who was taking care of me and we both thought that Mother and you were the only people capable of dealing with a burden like me.”

Alba blushed. She didn't know if she loved or hated what her nephew had just said, but it moved her deeply. In fact, Jonas had been disconcerting her ever since he had appeared, ever since, in the maternity ward, she had received him from the arms of an exhausted Katrin and he had looked up at her. From his first minute of life, the boy had decided that he would have two mothers, the Ólafsdóttir sisters. And neither had objected. Strangers were sometimes surprised that such a close bond should exist between nephew and aunt, godson and godmother, but as far as the three of them—Jonas, Katrin, and Alba—were concerned, this attachment was perfectly natural. When, eight months later, Alba had given birth to her own son, Thor, she had kept her role as second mother to Jonas.

A car horn sounded outside. They both frowned. Who could have come so early?

Katrin swept in, loud, red-cheeked, the many keys she always kept in her pockets jangling.

“My morning meeting was canceled, and the one after that, too, so I decided to come and see you both. I guess you know?”

“About Eyjafjöll?”

“It woke up after a hundred and eighty-seven years! How can anything wake up after sleeping for a hundred and eighty-seven years?”

“Or how can anything sleep for a hundred and eighty-seven years?” Jonas said.

The sisters looked at each other. Alba answered Katrin's question even before she had asked it. “I'll go tomorrow and see how things are, see if the cabin is in any danger.”

“Thanks, Alba. If the cabin . . . ”

Katrin fell silent, and Alba did not complete the sentence for her. They didn't dare admit to each other that if the house disappeared, it would be like a symbolic attack on their family. Already there were only the two sisters left, each had only given birth to one child, and Jonas had little chance of . . .

“Will you come with me to my room? I'd like to show you the new underwear I bought in Paris.”

Working for the International Committee of the Red Cross, Katrin traveled a lot, especially in Europe, from where she brought back gifts for her sister and her son.

“Oh, you two and your underwear!” Jonas grumbled. “That's really girls' stuff, that craze for lace . . . ”

“Wait another two years, Jonas, and you'll see that girls' underwear is boys' stuff too.”

They slipped upstairs to Katrin's room, opened the door, and sat down on the bed. Of course, Katrin had neither panties nor bra to unwrap. She had used their ritual code so that they could talk without being overheard.

“I'm very worried, Alba. Jonas had a whole bunch of tests at the hospital yesterday. This morning, I got an alarming report from Professor Gunnarsson: the cardiac malformation is getting worse. Jonas's heart could stop at any time.”

“I realize that. At the age of fifteen, he isn't even capable of doing as much as an old man!”

“Gunnarsson says he needs a transplant as soon as possible. Otherwise . . . ”

“Katrin, you've been going on and on about that for months! What can we do?”

“Jonas is on the waiting list but there are no donors. This is Iceland, a country with a population of three hundred thousand!”

“Yes, but the heart he gets doesn't necessarily have to be Icelandic. Remember what Professor Gunnarsson told us? That these days they can transport organs by plane . . . ”

“That's the theory; in practice, it's different. I made inquiries: organs travel inside a country or from one country to a neighboring one. Never from one continent to another. Let alone from the continent to a remote island in the middle of nowhere . . . Jonas is going to die, Alba, if we don't do something now. I wonder . . . ”

Alba realized that everything Katrin had been saying had been leading up to this. She knew her sister, knew how calculating she was. Good, kindhearted, well-intentioned, but calculating. Equipped with a strategist's brain, she conducted a private conversation as if it were a top-level professional meeting.

“Yes?” Alba insisted.

“We have to go to Europe. We have to take Jonas to Paris or Geneva. There are exponentially more chances of finding a compatible donor there.”

At that moment, Alba grasped what her sister was telling her and had been hiding from her. “We? Let's be clear about this. Us means Jonas, you . . . and me?”

“Of course.”

“You want me to come with you to Europe?”

“Yes, please. Just until Jonas gets his transplant. Because I'll still be traveling a lot.”

Alba glared at her. “You're not the only person with work to do! I may not be an important international official, but I still have to earn my living.”

“Alba, you're an artist, you're freer than I am. You can illustrate your children's books anywhere.”

“That's true. But are you aware that I have a husband?”

Katrin bowed her head.

Alba insisted, “And that I also have a son, a teenager, who in his way causes me as many worries as Jonas?”

Katrin kept her head bowed, then murmured in a tearful voice, her true voice, her fragile voice, quite unlike her normal, authoritative political voice, “I'm not asking you this out of selfishness, Alba, or to prove to myself that I'm more important than you. I'm asking you because I won't be able to do it on my own. I'm asking you to make the operation possible. I'm asking you because you have the solution. For Jonas, Alba, only for him.”

Alba thought of Jonas, and suddenly, the eternal conflict that opposed her to—and united her with—her beloved sister faded into the background. A sense of urgency made her throat tight. Jonas might die.

“I'll think about it.” Alba kissed her sister on the forehead and stood up. “I promise I'll think about it. If anything happened to our Jonas, I . . . ” Her voice trailed off, choked in her throat.

At that moment, Katrin knew that Alba had made up her mind.

 

*

 

“Have you noticed that I'm talking to you?”

Alba was standing in the doorway of the room, speaking to Thor, her fourteen-year-old son, who was staring at his computer without even glancing at his fingers as they moved rapidly, lightly, virtuosically, over the game console. Engaged in a virtual combat, he did not even seem to have noticed that his mother was there.