Walking Into the Night Read online

  Her father had forbidden her to go out alone while the ships were anchored in the bay. Enjoying the sea and shore from the parlor window, she didn’t mind, she didn’t particularly want to go out. She knew the reason for this ban, though she never told him that she knew. She had been about ten when it happened.

  She never knew the girl’s name. She was from the southwest, a fisherman’s daughter. It was her second summer loading cargo at Eyrarbakki. She had been stacking saltfish in the hold during the day and the men had been friendly and said something to her that she didn’t understand, so she just smiled because they had smiled at her. They appeared to be only a few years older than she was, of average height, one dark, the other fair.

  Most of the day had been overcast and still but in the evening the wind rose and it rained. She had finished her dinner and was on her way to the bunkhouse when she met them. They smiled. This time she didn’t smile back because something in their manner made her uneasy. They had been drinking. The fair one took a swig and offered her the bottle. She shook her head and tried to slip past them, along the path by the shore, past the pump-house. It was at that point that they seized her arm and dragged her inside.

  Later that evening when she sat in Elisabet’s father’s office she couldn’t for the life of her remember which of them had grabbed her first. She had been weeping but now sat silently, staring ahead with empty eyes. Her sister spoke for her and described the incident. She was a year or two older, and it had been her decision to come to the boss for help.

  He sat in his office chair, at first staring out of the window at the fog hovering along the shore and hiding the ships and the breakwater beyond them. It was only when he lowered his head that he realized his hands were clenched under the desk, the knuckles white. He loosened his grip.

  Elisabet was awakened by the commotion. She got out of bed and went downstairs in a white nightdress which covered her thin body down to her ankles. The office door was open a crack; she followed the sound, stopped outside.

  She saw her father stand up, go to the girl, and get down on his knees with difficulty before her, touching her hand gently. She could see his face, but only the back of the girl’s head. Her hair was tied in a bun. She had obviously washed up before coming to see him.

  “Could you describe them for me, dear?” she heard her father say.

  The girl nodded but remained silent. Her father waited, shifting his weight from left leg to right.

  “There, there, dear,” he said at last and took her hand.

  She started to sob but then spoke. She remembered the cold, damp, mossy walls, the lapping of the waves in the fog, the rocks on the shore which could be glimpsed from the pump-house door before the fog hid them again. She remembered the singing of the water, the taste of blood in her mouth. And her feet making wet marks in the grass when she finally stumbled home.

  Later that night, when her father had summoned the ship’s captain and the men had been brought ashore, Elisabet put on a blue cape and went outside. The wind had dropped. In the east there was a hint of red between the clouds. The sea was silent. She walked lightly down the path by the shore, not stopping until she came to the bunkhouse where the girl was staying.

  The girl’s eyes were open, the others slept. When she reached the girl she drew from her pocket the locket that she had brought with her. It had been her mother’s; there was a picture of a meadowsweet inside. She leaned down to the girl and laid it round her neck. Then slipped out.

  The next day the girl told her sister that an angel had visited her in the night.

  On the way home Elisabet stopped by the pump-house and went inside. Blue light filtered through a slit in the roof; she put out her hand so that the ray of light illuminated it, then closed her fist. The cold silence was broken only by the clear, pure voice of the water. Elisabet listened. When she was convinced that its song hadn’t changed, she went back out into the dawn light and headed for home.

  15

  She stood by the kitchen fire, warming herself. A platter on the table beside her held two freshly caught haddock, their scales glistening. She wished she could follow the advice of Mrs. Andersen, whom she had lodged with in Copenhagen, and fillet and fry them with mushrooms and parsley, but she didn’t know how. She moved closer to the flames, stretching out her hands and listening in silence to the crackling fire.

  She didn’t notice when Katrin crept in. Katrin had avoided her since she came home, as if shy of her. She stopped in the doorway and coughed. Elisabet turned round and smiled at her, then continued warming herself. She was still chilled after her walk along the shore.

  Katrin spoke softly, muttering into her chest:

  “Aren’t you going to finish embroidering the panel, then?”

  “What?”

  “The panel you were halfway through when you left for Copenhagen.”

  Katrin had had meningitis as a child and people who didn’t know her well said it showed. Elisabet never thought about it. She and Katrin had always been like family.

  Elisabet beckoned her over and shifted so that there was room for both of them in the warmth from the hearth.

  “That embroidery with the little castles. And deer and trees.”

  “Are there deer on it?”

  “Big deer. Almost as big as the castles.”

  Katrin stretched out her hands like Elisabet, though she had been warm all morning. Elisabet took them in her own hands and ran her fingers over them. They were rough.

  “Wouldn’t you like to finish the embroidery?” asked Elisabet.

  “Me? No, it’s yours.”

  “You can have it. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “Thank you, Lisa. I’m so happy you’re back.”

  Water trickled into the corner sink in a thin, faltering stream. Otherwise, all was quiet. Elisabet noticed a carpenter striding along the path outside, entering the storehouse by the garden wall and emerging with a couple of planks. He looked up at the sky. Life crawled forward. Nothing had changed. Almost nothing.

  “Two weeks,” said Katrin.

  “One week.”

  “Until you get married.”

  “Until he comes home.”

  Each day was like the next, the sea in the morning and the sea in the evening, wood in the stove when she awoke, the piano in the parlor, the wind in the birch scrub and the smell of burning kindling from the store where they smoked sheep’s heads. Her father asleep in his chair at the end of the day, a book in his lap, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, mouth open.

  “Lisa?” said Katrin softly.

  “Yes?”

  “When you’re married . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “. . . and your father is dead . . . You know how much I care about him . . .”

  It was on the tip of Elisabet’s tongue to say that her father was as strong as an ox, though he was getting on. He’s still very healthy, she was about to say, but didn’t.

  “. . . then what’ll happen to me?”

  “Katrin, dear Katrin. Please don’t worry. Father’s not about to go anywhere, but when it does happen, you’ll stay with me. Always. With us.”

  “Do you think he’ll have me? Your husband?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ve been so worried.”

  She leaned against Elisabet, resting her head on her shoulder.

  “Tell me about him . . .”

  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 b
rown 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.