The Draining Lake

27

Rut Bernhards stood blinking at Sigurdur Oli and then at Elinborg, unable to understand how they could be from the police. Sigurdur Oli had to tell her three times before it sank in and she asked what they wanted. Elinborg explained. This was around ten o’clock in the morning. They were standing on the landing of a block of flats, not unlike Erlendur’s but dirtier, the carpet more worn and a stench of rising damp on every floor.

Rut was even more surprised once Elinborg had said her piece.

“Students in Leipzig?” she said. “What do you want to know about them? Why?”

“Maybe we could come in for a minute,” Elinborg said. “We won’t be long.”

Still very doubtful, Rut thought for a moment before opening the door to them. They entered a small hallway which led to the living room. There were bedrooms on the right-hand side and beside the living room was the kitchen. Rut offered them a seat and asked whether they wanted tea or the like, apologising because she had never spoken to the police before. They saw that she was very confused as she stood in the kitchen doorway. Elinborg thought she would come to her senses if she made some tea, so she accepted the offer, to Sigurdur Oli’s chagrin. He wasn’t interested in attending a tea party and gave Elinborg an expression to signal that. She just smiled back at him.

The day before, Sigurdur Oli had received yet another telephone call from the man who had lost his wife and daughter in a car crash. He and Bergthora had just come back from a visit to the doctor who told them that the pregnancy was progressing well, the foetus was flourishing and they had nothing to worry about. But the doctor’s words were not so reassuring. They had heard him talk that way before. They were sitting at home in the kitchen, cautiously discussing the future, when the telephone rang.

“I can’t talk to you now,” Sigurdur Oli said when he heard who was on the other end.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” the man said, polite as ever. His mood never changed, nor did the pitch of his voice; he spoke with the same calm tone, which Sigurdur Oli attributed to tranquillisers.

“No,” Sigurdur Oli said, “don’t disturb me again.”

“I just wanted to thank you,” the man said.

“There’s no need, I haven’t done anything,” Sigurdur Oli said. “You don’t need to thank me at all.”

“I think I’m gradually getting over it,” the man said.

“That’s good,” Sigurdur Oli said.

There was silence over the telephone.

“I miss her so terribly,” the man said eventually.

“Of course you do,” Sigurdur Oli said with a glance at Bergthora.

“I’m not going to give up. For their sake. I’ll try to put on a brave face.”

“That’s good.”

“Sorry to bother you. I don’t know why I’m always calling you. This will be the last time.”

“That’s okay.”

“I’ve got to keep going.”

Sigurdur Oli was about to say goodbye when he suddenly rang off.

“Is he okay?” Bergthora asked.

“I don’t know,” Sigurdur Oli said. “I hope so.”

Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg heard Rut making the tea in the kitchen, then she came out, holding cups and a sugar bowl, and asked whether they took milk. Elinborg repeated what she had said at the front door about their search for Icelandic students from Leipzig, adding that it was potentially connected — only potentially, she repeated — with a person who went missing in Reykjavik just before 1970.

Rut listened to her without answering until the kettle began to whistle in the kitchen. She left and returned with the tea and a few biscuits on a dish. Elinborg knew that she was past seventy and thought she had aged well. She was thin, of a similar height to her, her hair was dyed brown and her face was quite long with a serious expression underlined by wrinkles, but a pretty smile that she seemed to use sparingly.

“And you think this man studied in Leipzig?” she asked.

“We have no idea,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“What missing person are you talking about?” Rut asked. “I don’t remember anything from the news that…” Her expression turned thoughtful. “Except Kleifarvatn in the spring. Are you talking about the skeleton from Kleifarvatn?”

“It fits.” Elinborg smiled.

“Is it connected with Leipzig?”

“We don’t know,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“But you must know something if you came here to talk to an ex-student from Leipzig,” Rut said firmly.

“We have some clues,” Elinborg said. “They’re not convincing enough for us to say much about them, but we were hoping you might be able to assist us.”

“How does this link up with Leipzig?”

“The man doesn’t have to link up with Leipzig at all,” Sigurdur Oli said, in a slightly sharper tone than before. “You left after a year and a half,” he said to change the subject. “Didn’t you finish your course, or what?”

Without answering him, she poured the tea and added milk and sugar to her own. She stirred it with a little spoon, her thoughts elsewhere.

“Was it a man in the lake? You said “the man”.”

“Yes,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I understand that you’re a teacher,” Elinborg said.

“I went to teacher training college when I came back to Iceland,” Rut said. “My husband was a teacher too. Both primary school teachers. We’ve just got divorced. I’ve stopped teaching now. Retired. No need for me any more. It’s like you stop living when you stop working.”

She sipped her tea, and Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg did the same.

“I kept the flat,” she added.

“It’s always sad when…” Elinborg began, but Rut interrupted her as if to say that she was not asking for sympathy from a stranger.

“We were all socialists,” she said, looking at Sigurdur Oli. “All of us in Leipzig.”

She paused while her mind roamed back to the years when she was young with her whole life ahead of her.

“We had ideals,” she said, moving her gaze to Elinborg. “I don’t know if anyone has them any more. Young people, I mean. Genuine ideals for a better and fairer society. I don’t believe anyone thinks about that these days. Nowadays, everyone just thinks about getting rich. No one used to think about making money or owning anything. There wasn’t this relentless commercialism then. No one had anything, except perhaps beautiful ideals.”

“Built on lies,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Weren’t they? More or less?”

“I don’t know,” Rut said. “Built on lies? What’s a lie?”

“No,” Sigurdur Oli said in a peculiarly brash tone. “I mean that communism has been abandoned all over the world except where gross violations of human rights take place such as China and Cuba. Hardly anyone admits to having been a communist any more. It’s almost a term of abuse. So wasn’t it like that in the old days, or what?”

Elinborg glared at him, shocked. She could not believe that Sigurdur Oli was being rude to the woman. But she might have expected it. She knew that Sigurdur Oli voted conservative and had sometimes heard him talk about Icelandic communists as if they ought to do penance for defending a system they knew was useless and had ultimately offered nothing but dictatorship and repression. As if communists still had to settle accounts with the past because they should have known the truth all along and were responsible for the lies. Perhaps he found Rut an easier target than most. Perhaps he had run out of patience.

“You had to give up your studies,” Elinborg hurried to say, to steer the conversation into safer waters.

“To our way of thinking, there was nothing more noble,” Rut said, still staring at Sigurdur Oli. “And that hasn’t changed. The socialism we believed in then and believe in now remains the same, and it played a part in establishing the labour movement, ensuring a decent living wage and free hospitals to care for you and your family, educated you to become a police officer, set up the national insurance system, set up the welfare system. But that’s nothing compared with the implicit socialist values we all live by, you and me and her, so that society can function. It’s socialism that makes us into human beings. So don’t go making fun of me!”

“Are you absolutely sure that socialism actually established all this?” Sigurdur Oli said, refusing to budge. “As far as I recall it was the conservatives who set up the national insurance system.”

“Rubbish,” Rut said.

“And the Soviet system?” Sigurdur Oli said. “What about that lie?”

Rut did not reply.

“Why do you think you have some kind of score to settle with me?” she asked.

“I don’t have a score to settle with you,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“People may well have thought they had to be dogmatic,” Rut said. “It might have been necessary then. You could never understand that. Different times come along and attitudes change and people change. Nothing is permanent. I can’t understand this anger. Where does it come from?”

She looked at Sigurdur Oli.

“Where does this anger come from?” she repeated.

“I didn’t come here to argue,” Sigurdur Oli said. “That wasn’t the aim.”

“Do you remember anyone from Leipzig by the name of Lothar?” Elinborg asked awkwardly. She was hoping that Sigurdur Oli would invent some excuse to go out to the car, but he sat fast by her side, his eyes fixed on Rut. “Lothar Weiser,” she added.

“Lothar?” Rut said. “Yes, but not so well. He spoke Icelandic.”

“I gathered that,” Elinborg said. “So you remember him?”

“Only vaguely,” Rut said. “He sometimes came for dinner with us at the dormitory. But I never got to know him especially well. I was always homesick and… the conditions weren’t that special, bad housing and… I… it didn’t suit me.”

“No, obviously things weren’t in very good shape after the war,” Elinborg said.

“It was just awful,” Rut said. “West Germany was redeveloping ten times as fast, with the west’s backing. In East Germany, things happened slowly, or not at all.”

“We understand that his role was to get students to work for him,” Sigurdur Oli said. “Or monitor them somehow. Were you ever aware of that?”

“They watched us,” Rut said. “We knew that and everyone else knew that. It was called interactive surveillance, another term for spying. People were supposed to come forward of their own accord and report anything that offended their socialist principles. We didn’t, of course. None of us. I never noticed Lothar trying to enlist us. All the foreign students had a liaison they could turn to but who also watched them. Lothar was one of them.”

“Do you still keep in touch with your student friends from Leipzig?” Elinborg asked.

“No,” Rut said. “It’s a long time since I saw any of them. We don’t keep in contact, or if they do, I don’t know about it. I left the party when I came back. Or maybe I didn’t leave, I just lost interest. It’s probably called withdrawing.”

“We have the names of some other students from the time you were there: Karl, Hrafnhildur, Emil, Tomas, Hannes…”

“Hannes was expelled,” Rut interjected. “I was told he stopped going to lectures and the Day of the Republic parades and generally didn’t fit in. We were supposed to take part in all that. And we did socialist work in the summer. On farms and in the coal mines. As I understand it Hannes didn’t like what he saw and heard. He wanted to finish his course but wasn’t allowed to. Maybe you should talk to him. If he’s still alive, I don’t know.”

She looked at them.

“Was it him you found in the lake?” she said.

“No,” Elinborg said. “It’s not him. We understand he lives in Selfoss and runs a guest house there.”

“I remember that he wrote about his Leipzig experiences when he came back to Iceland, and they tore him to shreds for it. The party old guard. Denounced him as a traitor and liar. The conservatives welcomed him like a prodigal son and championed him. I can’t imagine he would have cared for that. I think he just wanted to tell the truth as he saw it, but of course there was a price to pay. I met him once a few years later and he looked awfully depressed. Maybe he thought I was still active in the party, but I wasn’t. You ought to talk to him. He might have known Lothar better. I was there such a short time.”

Back out in the car, Elinborg scolded Sigurdur Oli for allowing his political opinions to influence a police enquiry. He ought to keep his mouth shut and not attack people, she said, especially elderly women who lived by themselves.

“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” she said as they drove away from the block of flats. “I’ve never heard such crap. What were you thinking? I agree with what she asked you: where does all this anger come from?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Sigurdur Oli said. “My dad was a communist like that, never saw the light,” he added eventually. This was the first time that Elinborg had ever heard him mention his father.

Erlendur had just got back home when the telephone rang. It took him a while to realise which Benedikt Jonsson was on the other end, then suddenly he remembered. The one who had given Leopold a job with his company.

“Am I bothering you, phoning home like this?” Benedikt asked politely.

“No,” Erlendur said. “Is there something that…?”

“It was to do with that man.”

“Which man?”

“From the East German embassy or trade delegation or whatever it was,” Benedikt said. “The one who told me to hire Leopold and said the company in Germany would take action if I didn’t.”

“Yes,” Erlendur said. “The fat one. What about him?”

“As far as I recall,” Benedikt said, “he knew Icelandic. Actually, I think he spoke it pretty well.”