The Journey Home: A Novel (13 page)

I advised him to go back to sleep.

The next day I had the driver track down the men in the village. He took all their gear with him and a check for what we owed them. Though in fact I amused myself by subtracting the price of the bottle of Mouton which they had been so bold as to pilfer from me. I can confidently say that never before or since have they had to pay so much for a drink.

The Radstock police station is a poky little building beside the library. There is a small sign above the door and from a distance the picture looks like the spring and cogs of a clock mechanism. Those who approach closer will see, however, that the spring is the remains of a bouquet of flowers and the cogs are what is left of the “s” in Est. and the eights in 1888. Few people now remember that there was once a florist in this house but it has never occurred to the policemen to take down the sign. After all, their job is generally quiet: there’s little traffic and the townspeople are a peaceable lot, so it is perfectly appropriate—on most days—to receive visitors beneath a faded picture of flowers.

So it wasn’t surprising that they were wholly unprepared for the incident which I intend to recount here—indeed they were exceedingly relieved when Jakob and I appeared at the reception desk.

Anthony had sent a message to Jakob that morning asking him to come and meet him as quickly as he could get down to the police station. I joined him. We cycled as fast as we could but when we were almost there, I got a puncture in my front tire. I told Jakob to go on without me, pushed my bike into the town and went to get the puncture mended before trudging over to the police station. The day was overcast with a chilly breeze but I was sweaty from the cycle ride and not warmly dressed. I felt a chill.

Jakob was with Anthony and two policemen in a room off the reception area. The door was shut. The sergeant behind the desk was clearly very uncomfortable, fidgeting and repeating at regular intervals: “I’m sure there must be some mistake.” Then he looked at the clock on the wall and added: “They should be out soon.”

The clock ticked and from time to time somebody would pass and nod through the window or touch the brim of his hat. Otherwise, nothing happened until Jakob opened the door and beckoned me to come outside with him. Anthony remained sitting at a table in the room. He was deathly pale but still tried to give me a smile. He looked as if he had been crying.

“Someone is threatening to charge Anthony with indecent behavior,” explained Jakob when we were out in the street. “The father of some young man whom Anthony is supposed to have had a relationship with.”

“What?” I exclaimed.

“Slept with, Disa. He could get into a lot of trouble.”

At first I was completely bewildered but gradually the meaning filtered through to me.

Anthony had asked Jakob to talk to the young man’s father and try to come to an arrangement. The police didn’t know which way to turn and found this state of affairs extremely embarrassing.

“I’m going to meet the old man later today,” Jakob told me. “It should be interesting.”

The boy’s father turned out to be nothing more than a common thug who had threatened Anthony to extort money from him. The son sat at a distance while his father and Jakob argued, standing up every now and then when his father saw fit to hurl abuse at him or threaten him. The young man, who couldn’t have been more than about twenty, listened in silence but Jakob thought his eyes looked sly.

Naturally, the man’s demands were outrageous but after Jakob had twice stood up and threatened to walk out, they finally came to an agreement. According to this, father and son should receive one lump sum, a quarter of what the old man had originally demanded, and in return sign a statement to the effect that relations between Anthony and the young man had not been in any way immoral, so that the father and son would not dream of pressing charges against Mr. Anthony Lonsdale either then or at a later date.

Anthony wept when we handed over the signed statement. We were glad to have been of service to him, despite the disagreeable nature of the affair. However, I thought it best not to bother trying to sound him out on the subject of Miss Shirley Jones.

“In the sight of your Maker,” as Mother was in the habit of saying to us children when we did something to displease her. “Disa, don’t use such language. You sully your soul in the sight of your Maker. What behavior, children. What a way to behave in the sight of your Maker.”

That gaze never seemed far away when I was a child. Sometimes it dogged my heels or lay in wait, ever ready to be shocked by me. Or rather: ever hoping I would offend it.

When I was in my teens I began to regard it as arrogant and haughty, proud and even prudish. I sometimes saw its owner in my mind: an old man sitting on a bench throwing breadcrumbs to pigeons and starlings, taking offense when the birds fought over the crumbs at his feet.

As the years passed I thought of that gaze less often. I didn’t think much about death or the end either because I was carefree, both when Jorunn and I lived in Reykjavik and later when I sailed to England. Then the gaze of my Maker left me in peace, as did his justice—his justice which is nothing but punishment, his love which is nothing but contempt, his touch which is a blow, his mercy which is death. Then my Maker left me in peace and threw his breadcrumbs to other small birds, contentedly watching them at his feet. The days were bright and the nights warm as a cloak mantling the soul. No one reprimanded me and there was no shadow of a premonition on my mind.

“Mors est quies viatoris,” his clowns whisper to us, death is rest to the traveler. “Pie Iesu domine dona eis requiem.” Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest. Anthony weeps when he repeats these words in your church because he knows that he is not pleasing in your eyes. “Mors est quies,” but after life there is nothing, though your charlatans never tire of their salesmanship, forever tempting the gullible with the promise of eternity.

And so I was free from your kiss which burns and your sheltering hand which is always ready to strike, and so I was free until the day I rang Mother and told her that Jakob and I were engaged. That night your gaze chased me from dream to dream, accusatory, vengeful.

When I woke with a jolt in the middle of the night, weak with emotion, it stared into my face. I met the look and suddenly recognized it. In an instant the veil was stripped away. It was the gaze of my mother. That was what had pursued me all those years.

Self-pity doesn’t help anyone, nothing can be undone, nothing changed. The candle burns and its flame, slender and feeble, gropes for a purchase in the darkness before guttering and dying. We guess what lies behind the door but ask no questions. We take delight in a sunbeam on a windowpane and fear the night. Fate, we say, instead of looking into our own hearts.

I took a painkiller half an hour ago which is making it difficult to concentrate. My fingers are cramped round the medicine bottle but slide apart without my being able to control them. I can see the book
Help Yourself;
I know it’s this book, even though it’s a blur and I can’t read the letters.

In Bath, just by the Pulteney Bridge over the Avon, there was a little quay hung with pretty lanterns. There were also seats beside the lanterns where one could rest one’s tired legs; I remember that older people in particular used to sit there, people who had retired and perhaps had nothing else to do but watch the river flowing by. But I also have an impression of young people walking hand in hand along the quayside in the twilight, putting their heads together and whispering to one another. The young people didn’t mind when it rained, seeming when the first drops fell to enjoy the dash for cover under the leafy canopy of trees in the park.

After David had received confirmation that Jakob and his parents were in Buchenwald, I went alone to Somerset to fetch my belongings. They weren’t anything special, just clothes and books, and fitted easily into a couple of medium-sized suitcases. I left the rest behind so that Jakob and I could return for it later.

Anthony joined me in the evening and we went to Bath together just as the lamps were being lit. There were fewer people than usual down by the river, as there was a nippy wind coming off the water and the awnings hung forlornly over the seats, while the light from the lanterns didn’t seem as comforting as before. Anthony tried again to make me change my mind about going home to Iceland.

“You can live with me,” he said. “There’s enough room, after all. It won’t be long before he comes back.”

But his words were only wishful thinking, and the wind snatched them from his lips and blew them away before I was ready to answer. He knew I couldn’t stay there any longer. Everything reminded me of Jakob.

“Without him . . .” I began, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“You know you’re always welcome.”

“I’ll come when they let him go. Until then, I’ll stay in Iceland.”

“Then you’ll both come.”

“Then we’ll both come.”

The train to London rattled along as if nothing had happened, hooting now and then in the night as if to leave behind a memorial to something that would never return. I was too tired to sleep, too listless to feel any pain. Why did I let him go? Why didn’t I beg him to stay?

Fortunately, the train was nearly empty but I can still remember my compartment after all these years. Every tiny detail is engraved on my mind. I can even see the split seam in the seat in front of me, running right across the seat so that the stuffing bulged out in the middle. The seat was red.

When we arrived in London it was snowing. I was caught unprepared.

Did I expect to see him again? I don’t know, can’t work out when I gave up hope, don’t know whether I ever really succeeded in deceiving myself completely.

All people knew about Buchenwald then was that it was a prison camp. The truth about concentration camps came later. When I tried to imagine the prison camp I generally saw Jakob doing hard labor and convinced myself that he would be able to bear it as he was strong and healthy, both mentally and physically. Gradually, however, this image faded as rumors began to circulate, each more horrific than the last. But by then I was in Iceland and there is no point recalling them now when they are common knowledge.

We had a bad crossing home on the
Bruarfoss
and I spent most of the voyage lying below deck, throwing up. I kept seeing Jakob before me as he looked when we said good-bye at the airport. In my delirium he would sometimes change into a shadow and then I would jolt upright with the reek of wet clothing in my nostrils and a fog before my eyes. Father had promised to come to Reykjavik to meet me and I tried not to think of anything but his embrace and the smile of my sister Joka whom I had missed so much. From time to time I must have been delirious because the captain later said that he had been worried about me. On second thought, I believe the delirium did me good, deadening the suffering and making time pass more quickly.

I was bed-bound for a week after my homecoming. It was comforting staying with my sister Joka and her husband, Gunnar, and the chirping of Helga, their three-month-old daughter, cheered me up. Father spent the first days with me but then he had to go back up north to see his patients. Before he said good-bye, he arranged a job for me at number 56 Fjolugata with Bolli Haraldsson, the bank manager, and his wife, Gudrun. Gudrun was an invalid, he said, she suffered from depression which had grown worse since their son went abroad.

“She must be pretty frail,” he said. “They need a cook.”

“Will I be living in?”

“Just while you’re getting back into shape, Disa dear. Later you can always get a job with Sivertsen at Hotel Borg. When you feel up to it.”

He didn’t know Dr. Bolli himself but Vilhjalmur Borg spoke well of him, he said.

When I was back on my feet, I took up the habit of smoking cigarillos for comfort. I went for daily walks to regain my strength, sometimes to Mrs. Olsen, but more often down to the harbor to gaze out to sea. Most days were gray but once or twice the wintry sun shone in a cloudless sky and it was possible to look forward to seeing the moon in the evening. Cigarillos, ten to a packet. I restricted myself to smoking no more than five a day to give myself something to look forward to.

After a month had passed, I rang Father and told him that I was ready to start work. By the following day he had given notice of my arrival at number 56 Fjolugata.

Now we are sailing the waves which I used to gaze at from the harbor in the old days, when I would smoke cigarillos and blow the smoke out into the indifferent breeze. Mount Esja is drawing near and so are the cathedral, the Catholic church on the hill and the warehouses down by the harbor. I have a premonition of the smell of tar and sacking as we draw closer. The gulls soar around the ship as if they have received some secret intelligence of a catch. They have the sense to keep quiet about it.

My fellow passengers are mostly under the weather following last night’s revelry. A young man, who claims to be a great singer, won the bet despite the fact that fog hid the land from sight all night. At some time during the first watch he claimed that he could smell Iceland and the captain confirmed that land would have been sighted a few minutes earlier if there hadn’t been a fog. Hallgrimur Palsson celebrated. The singer belted out “Oh blessed art thou summer sun” and offered those still standing whiskey and gin. I slipped away to my cabin, climbed into bed and turned my face to the wall.

But now no one is singing; they are red of eye and pale of cheek. A man from first class who has been sleeping with a girl from second class for the whole trip, now pretends he doesn’t know her, as his wife is waiting for him on the docks with their two daughters. They are all wearing red hats and wave to the ship as we approach. He is a bit sheepish as he waves back. And the learned Dr. Palsson is silent at last as he greets his parents. Perhaps he now regrets not having taken my advice.