Strange Shores

26

Erlendur left Egilsstadir towards evening. He was impatient to confront Ezra with Hrund’s claims about his affair with Matthildur but decided it was rather late to pay him a visit and resolved to wait until the following morning. The question preoccupying him was whether Jakob had learned of their secret and, if so, how he had reacted. Had he found out before Matthildur went missing or had he remained in ignorance? Years later Ezra had told Hrund’s mother the story of their relationship, but only after much pleading. Could he have told anyone else? Who else was in the know? Erlendur felt a certain trepidation, guessing that Ezra was unlikely to be cooperative. But he knew his insatiable craving for answers would overwhelm his doubts.

He stopped at the petrol station in Eskifjördur, where he bought a sandwich, filled his Thermos with coffee and topped up his supply of cigarettes. Then, on an impulse, he left the car where it was parked and strolled over to the graveyard which he had often visited on his trips here. It was situated on a slope on the outskirts of the village: an oasis of silence, enclosed by a handsome stone wall. Now, in the twilight, a thin dusting of snow lay on the ground but the grave inscriptions were still legible. As always he admired the austere, orderly beauty of the place, the hushed atmosphere, filled with the spirits of the departed.

Many years after that journey east with his father’s coffin, his mother had passed away after a short spell in hospital. He had been at her bedside; had not left it since the day she was admitted. They had hardly spoken, but towards the end she sensed his presence and it was enough. She had always talked of being buried beside her husband Sveinn, in the plot that awaited her in Eskifjördur. So Erlendur had flown out with the coffin and, repeating his father’s last journey, his mother was transported over the final stretch by lorry. The roads had improved little in the intervening years and by some extraordinary stroke of fate it was the same driver that had transported Sveinn to his last resting place. He was no less talkative now.

‘Didn’t you have your mother with you last time?’ the driver asked. He was a brash, thoughtless man; all his actions were accompanied by the maximum noise and fuss. They had been lifting the coffin onto the back of the lorry when he made this remark.

‘Yes,’ Erlendur had replied. ‘This time too.’

‘Eh?’ The driver looked puzzled.

Erlendur maintained a stubborn silence until the penny finally dropped.

‘You mean. .?’ he asked, embarrassed and unable to complete the question. He drove much more considerately over the rough gravel roads than before, and they sat without speaking for most of the way.

The vicar who conducted the service was a genial man. Erlendur had never met him but they had discussed the main events of his mother’s life over the phone. There were few mourners in church — just a handful of people who had known his parents or else distant relatives who were virtual strangers to Erlendur.

At last the coffin was lowered with slow ceremony into the ground.

‘Make sure you take care of yourself,’ his mother had said. She had been delirious until then, failing to recognise him: this was a brief moment of lucidity.

Erlendur had nodded.

‘You don’t look after yourself properly.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he had said.

‘Goodbye. . my darling boy. .’

She had fallen asleep with these words on her lips, only to wake up again shortly afterwards. Seeing Erlendur sitting at her side, she had tried to smile, then asked if he had found his brother.

‘Bury him with us. . if you find him.’

Less than a minute later she was gone.

He walked without haste across the small cemetery, leaving a trail of footprints in the soft snow. The headstone he had raised over his parents’ grave was carved from basalt, its polished face inscribed with their names and dates. Beneath was a simple prayer or plea, depending on your point of view, for mercy: ‘Rest in peace’. Erlendur still kept the old cross that had once marked his father’s grave at his flat in Reykjavík. He had no idea how to dispose of it. Even after all these years he had never been able to bring himself to do so.

Lichen had grown on the headstone before him, birds had perched there, it had been weathered by northerly gales and caressed by southerly breezes to a worn, blurred grey. Time spares no one and nothing, thought Erlendur, running a hand over the ice-cold basalt. The stone would always bind him to this place.

He had transported it here from Reykjavík in his own car, following the unmetalled roads all the way east. It had taken him two days, with an overnight stay in the northern town of Akureyri. As it had always been his intention to erect a joint memorial to both his parents, he had never put up a temporary cross over his mother’s grave. He had nothing but his own dilatoriness to blame for the shameful length of time that elapsed before guilt finally drove him to contact a stonemason. But there was a reason for his negligence. Deep down, he dreaded returning; the emotions his old home stirred up were too painful. When he did eventually brace himself to make the journey, however, it was as if he had broken a spell and since then he had visited at regular intervals, for shorter or longer periods. He had accepted now that he could never flee his past.

He had tried in vain for years to recall memories of their life before tragedy had struck. But after Bergur vanished the past had been obliterated, as if their life had not really begun until then. As the days turned into years, however, his recollections of the time before the disaster began to return with increasing frequency. Some were fleeting snapshots that he had difficulty pinning to a specific time or context. Others were clearer. Occasions like Christmas: his father wearing an Icelandic Yule hat; the tree they had decorated together; listening to a radio serial on a winter’s evening. The images glimmered before his mind’s eye like the dim flickering of a candle. An excursion to Akureyri. A boat trip to the island of Papey; his fear of the water. Summer days. Sitting on a horse; his mother’s hand on the leading rein. The hay harvest. Men drinking coffee and smoking outside the house. He and Bergur playing in the sweet-scented hay in the barn.

Some of these memories aroused a sensation of profound loss that would return again and again to haunt him. As he stood by his parents’ grave, he heard the far-off notes of a mournful refrain that he recognised as his father’s violin, and saw his mother standing in the sitting-room doorway, her eyes half closed. A long summer’s day behind them, their faces ruddy from the sun, the boys nodding off on the sofa. His father’s hands moving with such sensitivity over the instrument. She tilted her head as she listened, her eyes on her husband.

‘Play something cheerful now,’ she said.

‘The boys are falling asleep,’ he protested.

‘You can play quietly.’

Changing tempo, he embarked on a muted rendition of a spirited waltz. She listened smiling from the door, then went over and pulled him to his feet. He laid the violin aside and they danced together in the quiet room.

Bergur was dead to the world beside him, but Erlendur woke him so they could surreptitiously watch their parents treading the steps in silence, wrapped in each other’s arms. They were conversing in whispers so as not to disturb the boys and his mother smothered a giggle. She found it easy to laugh. Bergur took after her. They were alike in so many ways; the same features, the same generous smile. Bergur was invariably sunny-tempered, unlike his brother who was inclined to be irritable, overbearing and demanding. Smiling did not come easily to him either; he took after his father in looks and temperament.

The memory was accompanied by the summery scent of newly mown grass and a sultry Icelandic heatwave. Earlier that day he and Bergur had been playing down by the river, walking along its bank and dipping their hands in the water to splash its refreshing coolness on their faces.

It was the last summer the four of them spent together.

Erlendur caressed the weathered basalt. An icy breath of wind stole down the slope and pierced his padded jacket. He glanced up at the mountains, pulling his coat more tightly around him, then hurried back to the petrol station. The weather forecast had predicted a drop in temperature for the east of Iceland, and the bitter gust was confirmation that it had arrived, sweeping down from the mountains like an ill omen.