Walking Into the Night (6 page)

16

I was just trying to remember what you were wearing the first time we met. I’m sitting in the kitchen, letting my mind wander, having filed the bills away in the drawer and prepared the shopping list for next week. A moment’s quiet in the house. Outside on the terrace a squirrel has just climbed down from a tree and scampered across the path with an acorn in its mouth.

It was a cold autumn day and leaves were blowing along the street outside—Skindergade, if I remember right, Universitets Café—and I closed the door for you because you had your hands full of sheet music and had dropped a brown glove as you came in. I remember stooping to pick up the glove and dusting down my white waiter’s apron before showing you to a table. You didn’t take off your coat, which was brown with a fur collar, because you seemed chilled, but ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich, asking as I turned away:

“You’re not Icelandic, are you?”

Though I’d been looking you over, I’d never have guessed that we were compatriots. There was no telling from your accent that you were Icelandic—your Danish was impeccable—and from your appearance, the brown eyes and dark wavy hair, you might have been from the south—Spain, Italy, Greece. I’d been covertly watching you, lurking by the kitchen door and gazing at the back of your neck and your right cheek when you turned your head to look at the book you’d opened on the table in front of you. It grew dark outside and shortly afterwards the pattering of rain began. When the gray light illuminated your cheek, I felt as if I were looking at a statue.

“You’re not Icelandic, are you?”

I was taken aback. I had little contact with the other Icelanders here. Most young men my age had come to study, they were the sons of rich families or scholarship boys. I had nothing in common with them. I was neither and had come to Copenhagen with no firm plans, hoping for the best, empty-handed after earning my passage as a fisherman for almost a year. My family didn’t have much, though I never lacked for anything when I was growing up. Yet as I stood in the kitchen doorway I felt I had to make excuses for my situation. Perhaps I should say it differently: I felt I had to invent a suitable explanation to account for my being a waiter. But you didn’t ask any questions and it wasn’t until later, when I couldn’t help myself, that I told you I was studying at the Commercial College in Copenhagen.

I’m still surprised at how inferior I felt when I stood there. I had always found it easy to attract women, but you were different. They were mostly working girls, fun-loving but uneducated— like me. But you, you were from a different world. And yet I found myself falling towards you.

I was only nine when I started working on the boats. I’d begged my father to take me with him when I was younger but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. I was always restless, always eager to be on the move. “He’s a born fisherman,” my uncle used to say, and I was proud. But I never had any aspirations to own a boat myself, I didn’t want to have to worry about the responsibility.

When we met, I had just spent several days working on a picture of an eagle. I had paint on my fingers and you asked me what I’d been up to. You seemed interested when I mentioned the birds and asked when I had first started drawing them. I told you how once when I was a boy I had seen an eagle swoop in from the sea and circle over a flock of eider ducks that dived to escape him. I told you how the eagle waited while the ducks popped their heads up for air and then dived again and again. He waited patiently until they tired. Then he dropped, wings aloft, talons driving down, and took one as it dived. As I watched him flapping away down the fjord, I was rooted to the spot. The shadow of his wings on the flat surface of the sea. Death in his talons.

You listened in silence.

I stood by the window in your room, looking out at the empty streets. Saturday morning. Footsteps on the floor upstairs: the neighbors were awake. I had lit the stove but my breath still formed mist in the air after the chill of the night. You got out of bed and joined me. Your fingers were cold when you ran them along the scar on my back. Beginning at the top—with your forefinger, I thought—you traced slowly down my back. Stopped, then continued under my arm and round onto my chest.

“How old were you?”

“I was eight.”

You came closer. I felt your breath on my back before your lips touched the scar. The finger continued on its journey. It was as if you were exploring a map and had stopped on the boundary between the familiar and the unknown. You lifted my arm and inserted your head underneath, kissing me on the chest and looking up into my face. I thought I saw curiosity in your eyes.

Once outside, I walked across the street and looked up at your window. You waved to me, wrapped in a white sheet. The wind had picked up and was blowing winter over the city. I wound my scarf round my neck.

Before saying goodbye, I had told you about my studies at the Commercial College. I’d had the story prepared for days, but you never asked. You didn’t ask about anything. And that was the worst. I felt as if you were trying to spare my feelings. As if you saw through everything already.

I said I was taking business courses. On Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays from three till six. I had six months left till I graduated. I was getting on well. I was waiting on tables to make a little extra.

While I was speaking, you sat up in bed and turned towards me. Your breasts were like pears, white and beautiful, the nipples hard in the morning chill. Fingers long and delicate. When you touched me, I was in your power.

Did you know then that this story was a lie? Did you know that I cleaned the classrooms on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays? The graduation certificate I brought home to Iceland before we married was a forgery. You had it framed and hung it above my desk in the office at home.

Has completed his studies in Accounting, Commodities, Invoicing, and General Economics with the highest marks.

I had bought the textbooks and studied alone in the library when I’d finished cleaning, but I couldn’t afford to attend courses.

I never corrected these lies. By the time I wanted to, it was too late.

When did you find out?

17

A golden plover awoke in the marshes, flying through the spring night like a black thread through a white blanket.

Had she been awakened by the swish of the bird’s wings or was she dreaming? Elisabet climbed out of bed. As she turned the door handle and stepped out onto the landing, the dining-room clock struck three faint chimes. Someone had forgotten to close a window at the end of the hallway. When she shut the window she noticed the fog out in the bay. As she was about to return to her room, she again heard the sound which had awakened her. Unable to work out immediately where it was coming from, she paused and looked alternately down the stairs and along the hallway to the other bedroom wing.

The curtains over the window she had shut were now still, the embroidered carriages awaiting their passengers, the teams hanging their heads in neat rows, their reins slack.

Silence. She waited, and as she did so her eyes fell on the portrait of her mother that hung on the wall by the stairs. Lately she had been wondering whether she had ever missed her. She’d been a child of three when she died, too young for such feelings.

She turned abruptly and headed along to the other wing. The sound became increasingly clear, though she still couldn’t work out what it was—breathing? Rattling? Whispering? She walked towards it with slow, even steps.

When an icy draft swept along the floor, she stopped for a second, as if she had stepped into water. She bent automatically to dry her toes but her fingers encountered nothing but cold.

Am I dreaming, she asked herself?

She hesitated outside her father’s bedroom. The door was not closed but stood a little ajar, admitting a thin crack of light which stretched across the floor and up to his bed. She gave the door a light push.

He was moving slowly between her legs, slowly and steadily like the pendulum in the dining-room clock downstairs. “Oh yes,” she heard him say, “oh yes.” He was wearing a white night-shirt but Katrin’s bare arms were pink in the dawn light when she put them round his back.

She pulled the door quietly to and tiptoed swiftly back to her own room. Lying down with eyes closed, she wondered why it was that this sight should not have bothered her in the least.

18

I came to Iceland a week before the wedding.

The fog lifted suddenly as we approached the south coast. Without warning, the mountains appeared above our heads, a patch of sunshine on their slopes.

It was raining out in the bay, a dense, unremitting drizzle; birds mewed above us.

I didn’t feel as if I were coming home. When I left, I was nothing. Now I felt myself shrinking again.

I saw the rivers meandering over the sands and vanishing into the sea, the glaciers beyond them hidden in blue mist. A white ribbon of cloud hung from a black peak by the shore, gilded now and then by the morning sun, but never for long. Except for a green streak here and there among the roots of the mountains, all was white, gray, and black.

Perhaps I hadn’t had enough sleep.

The great open spaces before me and the cold silence of the sands awoke no feeling of freedom in my breast. Rather it was as if I were gradually being bound with invisible fetters, until I wanted to scream at the barren wasteland. In Copenhagen I woke a free man in the mornings, sometimes at the side of a girl whom I’d danced with till dawn, at other times alone. Then I’d lie still in bed for a few minutes before getting up, listening to a horse pulling a cart down the cobbled street, the fishmonger across the road bearing the wet, glittering night’s catch into his shop, the people downstairs getting out of bed, opening the window onto the street, coughing, saying: “Well, better get moving.”

I was part of this life, in the midst of it, and no one doubted my right to be there, no one asked who I was, no one looked askance at me. I smiled at people and they smiled back, some even turned round in the street and said to themselves or their companion: “That was a handsome young man.” I was hardworking, with the sense to put money aside; I was the owner of two smart suits, one blue, the other brown, as well as hats, overcoats, three pairs of good shoes, and an umbrella, though I used it rarely. I had dined at Vivex more than once and knew important people who would invite me to their houses because they enjoyed my company. I was popular everywhere and had no enemies.

I owned two good suits, but it was my bad luck to meet you in my waiter’s apron.

As we sailed farther west there were boats drawn up on the gravel bank, fish-drying frames on the windblown shingle, the doors of a timber shack on the beach half-open, cold darkness within. Slowly we approached land. I could now see turf huts scattered here and there, sheep grazing in a dun field, dark clouds on the hills above. I already regretted having come back.

But you were waiting. You were waiting for me beyond the fog; a distant smile, cold yet warm; eyes that seemed full of kindness—or was it pity? Not contempt but pity. It’s worse.

I knew you, but didn’t know you. In your presence I never knew which leg to stand on. Yet I couldn’t stay away.

19

You greeted me on the quay, your father hanging back a little. I saw him watching us, a little embarrassed perhaps, and though I took you in my arms, I didn’t hold you as tightly as I wanted to.

I had met your father several months before when he came to Copenhagen on business. He had been very pleasant when you introduced us, without a trace of arrogance or suspicion. He had taken an interest in my “studies”—rather too much interest, it seemed to me at first, but then I recovered—and told me about his business trips. He had just come from Spain, where he had started selling fish, and had been impressed by the country and its people. Later on, when I had taken over the company and went there on my first trip, I was surprised he hadn’t sold more, as he had formed good contacts. But that’s another story . . .

Now he greeted me politely but had less to say for himself than in Copenhagen. He had a cold and kept blowing his nose into a red handkerchief.

I was pretty sure that you were happy to see me. But your thoughts seemed miles away at times, even during those first steps up the jetty, as I was getting used to having land under my feet again. Your hand grew limp in mine, a mist passed across your eyes, and your mouth smiled its half-smile—you were gone. Where, I never knew. Neither then nor later.

I felt as if I were holding hands with a woman in a fairy tale, until you leaned against me and whispered in my ear:

“I’m so happy you’re home.”

I walked up the jetty with my head held high and the sun at my side.

I didn’t know in advance that I would be staying with your uncle and aunt in Reykjavik until the wedding. They lived down by the lake in the center of town and I had the basement to myself. My mother and father slept in the room next to mine when they came south. The house had thin walls.

I don’t know who felt more uncomfortable, your relatives being stuck with us or us being stuck with them. On the first day, our hostess probably felt she couldn’t avoid inviting us to join them at tea, when their friends came for a visit, but during the following days I suspect she postponed any such gatherings until we had left so she wouldn’t have to repeat the offer.

I had bought new outfits for my parents in Copenhagen but neither Mother’s black dress with its white collar nor my father’s gray suit could prevent them from looking out of place among the family and their visitors in that red, mahogany parlor. I couldn’t help noticing their discomfort; father rocked to and fro, as was his habit when nervous, while mother looked alternately down at her hands or at me in the hope of support.

The arrogance of those people. The silent contempt. I could tell your aunt thought she could see right through me; she did nothing to hide her opinion that I wasn’t good enough for you. But she said nothing to my face; she didn’t need to.

Why did your father arrange for us to stay with them rather than some other relatives in town? I still wonder what motivated him; he must have had his reasons.

The suit I’d bought my father was a size too big. I hadn’t expected him to have shrunk like that. While I puffed at the cigar that your uncle had offered me and listened to my father’s awkward attempts at conversation with him and his wife, I suddenly recalled a midwinter afternoon at home when Mother and I were waiting for Father’s boat to appear out on the fjord. The dusk swiftly deepened to pitch blackness, a squall of snow battering the windowpanes. But no one came round the spit of land and she held me and comforted me until I fell asleep, exhausted in her arms.

When a work-calloused hand stroked my cheek in the middle of the night, cold and hard from the sea, I half-woke, feeling such profound relief that I wept in my sleep.

And now there he sat, opposite me in that red mahogany parlor. Cigar smoke between us, the lake smooth as a mirror outside the window, no danger anywhere. I looked at his hands and remembered feeling them wet on my cheek, smelled the oars they had gripped and tasted salt on my lips. Thought about the danger he risked. For a bucket of fish? No, for me.

I concentrated on such thoughts to deflect the arrogant contempt which hung over me thicker than the cigar smoke, but it didn’t work. I was ashamed of my parents and hated myself for it.

When my father died he was buried in the suit I’d bought him. He outlived my mother by only six months. I looked at him in his coffin and thought about those days before our wedding.

He died in winter.

A few years after we married, when your uncle got into financial difficulties and his wife approached you for help, you asked whether we could assist them, so I summoned him to my office the following day.

I kept him waiting outside my office for over half an hour. The time passed slowly but I tried to enjoy it. When he finally came in I pretended to be ignorant of his affairs, forcing him to spell out how he’d got into his present predicament before he could reveal his errand and ask me for a loan. I said I’d have to think about it and told him to return the following day. Then I lent him a quarter of what he had asked for because that way I knew I’d have him in my power.

He was dependent on my help for years and I always kept him waiting before admitting him to my office. My secretary would bring him a cup of coffee. I myself couldn’t work, knowing he was there on the other side of the wall. I might open a book but would put it down after flipping through a few pages, and get up and stand by the window, staring at the harbor, where workers were loading cargo, or out to sea, where a boat was leaving port, or at Mount Esja, white on a cold autumn morning. I would stand motionless, concentrating on the image I kept in mind of my father, sitting in that cluttered parlor with your relatives, old and dejected, so strangely small and dim that I had to concentrate to catch sight of him in my memory.

I tried to convince myself that I was avenging him. But maybe I was just attempting to establish who had the upper hand.

My secretary knocked at the door. She had begun to feel very uncomfortable. “One moment,” I called. “I’m just finishing up here . . .”

I don’t know whether I ever really managed to convince myself. But one thing is sure: I never felt the anticipated pleasure when I finally opened the door and greeted him.