Walking Into the Night (7 page)

20

Kristjan slept badly. The spring night was awake outside his window and he could hear his parents tossing and turning in the room next door. He knew his father wasn’t asleep. He had seen Elisabet only twice since he came home; though no one had said in so many words that they were not meant to see each other until the wedding, he knew that this was the intention.

He got out of bed. The pale night sapped all color from the earth, even more thoroughly than the dusk, dulling everything. The blue was drained from the sky and the white church on the far side of the lake was invisible in the bleached pallor. He had to strain his eyes to pick it out. Two more days.

Two more days, and the fetters were already beginning to tighten. The filaments spun from the deceptive freedom of the open countryside and the smiles of people he did not trust. In the mornings he read aloud from the papers to his parents. They sat opposite him in silence, saying nothing when he forgot himself and stopped reading to stare into space, waiting patiently, staring into space with him.

This coming Saturday, at two o’clock, Elisabet Thorstensen and Kristjan
Benediktsson are to be married in Reykjavik Cathedral. Elisabet is the only daughter
of Henrik Thorstensen, of Eyrarbakki, and his late wife Margret Thorstensen. Kristjan is the son of Benedikt Arnason, fisherman, from Patreksfjordur, and his wife
Helga Eymundardottir. The bride is a pianist; the bridegroom is a graduate of
Copenhagen Commercial College.

When he was a boy he would sometimes climb the mountain behind the village by himself. The wind would chase him, smoothing the grass before his feet, and birds would glide above his head. As he climbed, the tussocky slope grew stonier with every step until halfway up he came to a patch of green strewn with white and yellow flowers. He knelt, pulled one of them up by the root, and poked it into the front of his sweater. Then he scrambled up onto a large rock under a crag and turned to face the village below and the horizon at the rim of the ocean.

“I’ll show you!”

The village shrank beneath his gaze—the jetty a splinter in the sea, the houses like pebbles in his palm—his kingdom, until the mountain called in reply:

“What?”

His voice broke as he shouted from the rock:

“I can fly!”

He knew he could. He knew he had the strength and the determination. He took to the air, above the abyss, the precipice; the birds heeding his command and raising him towards the sky, the rocks echoing his voice, the sun watching from above.

Then all of a sudden he fell.

21

A sweet smell of alcohol clung to Elisabet’s father when he and his daughter came to visit shortly after midday on the Friday before the wedding. He was singing as he approached the house by the lake and suddenly gave his daughter a smacking kiss on the cheek for no apparent reason, twirling her in a circle and shouting as he opened the garden gate:

“Open up, Tomas, and welcome your brother-in-law!” Elisabet’s uncle was startled and Kristjan heard him say to his wife:

“Your brother’s here. Were you expecting him?”

Without waiting for anyone to come to the door, her father opened it himself and breezed into the front room.

“Now, how about a coffee at Hotel Iceland? While it’s still dry. That was a hell of a downpour this morning.”

He refused to take off his coat and sit down in the parlor, saying if he did they’d never set off.

“You and your wife should do a bit of sightseeing while you’re in town,” he said to Kristjan’s father. “It wouldn’t make any sense to come all this way from the West Fjords and not visit some of the better establishments. So let’s go now, let’s get moving!”

He spoke loudly. His brother-in-law tried to avoid going with them, asking whether he and his wife wouldn’t be in the way.

“We’ve just
had
coffee,” said his wife.

“Come on,” said Elisabet’s father. “It’s not every day that you’re invited out.”

He went back out onto the steps, taking off his hat and looking up at the sky, brandishing his walking stick in the air.

“No, damn it,” he said as if to himself. “I refuse to believe it’ll still be raining tomorrow.”

Elisabet went straight out into the garden to pick some daisies. She returned with a bunch just as the others were putting on their coats.

“I’ll put them in a vase for you, Gudrun,” she said.

“Aren’t you coming with us?” asked her aunt.

“No, I’m staying behind with Kristjan.”

Her aunt looked at her brother.

“They could do with some time together,” he said. “What with the wedding tomorrow . . . There’s a lot to think about.”

Tomas closed the garden gate carefully behind him, with its number seven woven into the midst of the decorative ironwork, gold-painted and trustworthy. Kristjan had seen the maid polishing it twice since he arrived.

Elisabet waved them goodbye, then closed the door. Kristjan was standing in the shadows in the front room. She handed him the daisies. A sunbeam found its way through the round pane of glass in the front door and fell between them; a butterfly danced in the light.

“Look!” she said.

She took off her coat and laid it over a chair in the front room. Somewhere in the house a clock chimed, but she didn’t notice. The silence was overwhelming. Finally she went over and put her arms around him.

He stood rigid, staring in front of him, his hands at his sides. Gradually, however, he moved, dropping the daisies, slowly lifting his hands and laying them on her shoulders. She felt them tremble.

“Come here,” she said and led him into the parlor. “Come here . . .”

She walked ahead of him; when they crossed the threshold he took her in his arms and carried her to the sofa where her aunt like to sit. He laid her down gently, then loosened his suspenders.

Above the sofa there were photographs of the family: the aunt beside a round table; her husband posing, pipe in hand; their grown-up children; distant relatives. When he lowered himself on top of her he found he was eye to eye with her aunt.

A smell of cigar smoke hung in the room, the light was gray, a cloud covering the sun. His frantic movements didn’t seem to surprise her.

“Let it all out,” she whispered to him soothingly. “Oh yes, my love . . .”

A sharp spasm shook his body; he raised himself off her and knelt by the sofa.

“There,” she said, “there. You feel better now, don’t you?”

He looked down, didn’t answer her immediately.

“What about you?”

“Of course, darling. It’s enough for me that you’re here.”

When she stroked his cheek he found that one of her hands was balled. He looked up.

She smiled.

“The butterfly,” she said. “It flew to me and settled on my palm. Poor little thing . . . I held it so it wouldn’t be hurt. I’ll let it go now.”

She stood up, taking care not to close her fist, letting the air in through her fingers. He rose too and watched her walk out into the hallway.

When she opened the front door the sun broke free of the clouds. The butterfly fluttered away on its paper-thin wings, was transformed into a spark of light, and vanished. As she turned round, he emerged from the parlor. She went to him, forgetting to shut the front door.

The daisies lay scattered on the floor between them in a splash of sunlight. He watched her tiptoe among them as if she were walking on blazing water.

22

The rain began just after first light.

He was awakened by the first drops as they vanished into the reddening sea of leaves outside, only a few at first, then a deluge. A squall swept the hillside but the bells remained silent in their towers; he concluded that the wind must be from the north. The leaves swirled in the gust, red and yellow; raindrops streamed down the windowpanes.

He turned his head on the soft pillow and rubbed his eyes. The leaves looked like goldfish swimming in an aquarium.

Summer was over but he didn’t miss it. The Chief and Miss Davies, who had been away since the beginning of spring, finally returned yesterday. The construction on the hill had been suspended for months; the summer days succeeded one another in a torpor of heat and drought. The workmen’s huts stood empty except for the one where the men responsible for maintenance and repairs lodged. Kristjan and the head gardener had been commended for managing to keep everything going with only half the staff, but neither was flattered by the praise.

It was a Thursday in June when Kristjan had dismissed his staff; the head gardener had thinned out his workforce the day before. It rained on both days, and when Kristjan opened the window the following morning the warmth was gone from the air.

In late June they were paid a visit by representatives of the people now overseeing the Chief’s property, to supervise crating up the works of art and antiques and transporting them to the docks. They swaggered around, talking loudly, so that no one could fail to realize that it was they and not the Chief who made the decisions now about what was to be sold and what could remain in the castle. When Kristjan found them in Miss Davies’ bedroom, rummaging in her drawers, he had to fight to keep control of his temper.

The Chief rang Kristjan daily to remind him that they mustn’t take anything but the things he had agreed to put up at auction, mainly mail-shirts, suits of armor, swords, spears, and shields, which were still in storage in the warehouse down by the harbor, never having made it up the hill. But the list also included ancient Greek vases and several statues, as well as a church ceiling which the Chief had bought at the sale of the Count of Almenas’s possessions in the winter of 1927.

For two days in a row an echo could be heard from the tennis court:
puck, puck,
punctuating the silence. On the first day, Kristjan took cold drinks of lemonade and soda out to them on the court, making three journeys with glasses and jugs on a silver tray, as he was accustomed to doing for the Chief. But he didn’t like the way they looked at him—“those boys,” as he called them when he drank tea with the head gardener that afternoon; he got the sense they were sizing up the glasses, tray, and jugs as if calculating what they had cost and what could be got for them now. He suspected they were wondering whether he himself wasn’t superfluous, too.

The following day he stayed in the kitchen when he heard them going out to the courts and let them go thirsty. He had locked the silver tray away in a cupboard because it was one of the Chief’s favorites. He thought it was safer.

He relaxed when he watched them drive away shortly before sundown. A golden light still played around the buildings at the top of the hill, but the lower slopes were already in shadow. The car vanished into the darkness. He did not say goodbye to them, but ordered a houseboy to help them with their baggage.

The only point of contention was the silver: the French silver service, which was on the boys’ list but not on the one the Chief had sent Kristjan. It may not have been the finest silver in the house, but the Chief always gave orders that it should be used when there were fewer than ten for dinner. And when he and Miss Davies dined alone, they invariably used the French service. Kristjan had objected at first, showing the boys his list and pointing out that there was no mention of a silver service, but when they started asking him about his own arrangements, how long he’d been there, how much he was paid, claiming they hadn’t seen his name on the payroll, he fell silent.

Instead of phoning the Chief to let him know, he summoned the assistant waiters and kitchen maids, asking them to polish the silver and wrap it in cloths before it was packed in a crate. He kept a close eye on their work, telling himself that the silver would fetch a better price if they did a good job on it.

When the Chief and Miss Davies arrived yesterday, there had been a brief letup in the rain. Kristjan saw the car stop a little way from the house and the Chief step out into the clear afternoon light. The car continued on its way but the old man stood still for a while, gazing out to sea, then turned and strode up the hill. Instead of coming directly inside, he walked along the terraces and through the gardens, examining the flowers and shrubs, and pausing for a long moment by the fountain outside Casa del Sol, before sitting down on a bench in the colonnade to the west of the main building. Kristjan had to move to another window to see him, as his view was blocked by an apple tree. He watched him for a long time in the green light of the garden. The Chief sat, staring into the distance.

In the evening they ate a clear vegetable bouillon, followed by quails with figs and raspberries, then cheese, pears, and apples. Kristjan had been looking forward to serving them and was cheered by the delicious smell of the birds and the figs that had been roasted to perfect tenderness inside them.

“Why haven’t you put out the French silver?” asked the Chief as Kristjan served the soup.

It was as if he missed his footing. He didn’t answer immediately, but placed the bowls on the table in front of them, took the napkins out of their rings, and laid them on their laps.

“This is just as pretty, dear,” said Miss Davies. “My, but I’m hungry.”

Kristjan finally stammered that the French silver had been sent to the auction house. But he omitted to mention that he hadn’t dared argue with the boys for fear that it might bring about his own downfall.

“It’s not going to the Gimbel auction?” asked the Chief. “I don’t believe it. I’ll buy it back myself.”

“What delicious soup,” said Miss Davies.

“I won’t let these sons of bitches walk all over me. My silver. You know it wasn’t on the list.”

“It was on their list.”

“We both know, Christian, that it was not on the list I sent you and asked you to follow in every detail. It was not on that list.”

“Dear,” said Miss Davies, “let’s not get excited about some old knives and forks.”

The Chief pushed his bowl away.

“I’ve lost my appetite. You go and get that silver back, Christian. Every single piece of it. You’d better bring it back from that auction.”

The rain streamed down the windowpanes. When the wind blew, the goldfish darted to and fro outside the glass. Between the gusts they rested. He closed his eyes again and watched them swim to him beneath the invisible waves.

How was he going to get the silver back?