The Shadow District

12

As Konrád sat beside Vigga’s bed waiting for her to wake up, his thoughts drifted back to the little street where he grew up: Skuggasund. Even in his earliest memories, the war had been over for several years, though the prosperity that it brought was still very much in evidence. But the years that followed had been tough. The Shadow District used to be its own little world, with its shops and businesses, large and small. It was intersected from west to east by Lindargata, bracketed by high culture at one end and the meat-packing trade at the other. At the western end, the National Theatre turned its back to the street as if it were too grand for the neighbourhood. It was flanked by the National Library, for those who thirsted after knowledge, and the High Court, for those who had strayed from the path of virtue. At the eastern end, the autumn lambs would fall eerily silent at the gates of the abattoir. Between these poles, the properties ranged from shacks clad in corrugated iron to modern houses built of concrete, with two or even three storeys; some well maintained, others dilapidated, their small back gardens facing south into the sun. It was here, in one of the poorest basement slums, that Konrád had grown up.

The inhabitants, an assortment of labourers, artisans and toffs, got on with their lives in relative harmony. There were drinkers and teetotallers. Those who went to church on Sundays a little the worse for wear and celebrated the word of God with a twinge of conscience, chiming in wholeheartedly when the minister intoned: ‘... and forgive us our trespasses’. And those who donned their fedoras and strolled through town with their lady wives — showing off a new coat perhaps — removing their hats and decorously greeting others of their kind. While their wives gazed into shop windows, exclaiming over a beautiful dress or tasteful hat direct from Copenhagen or London, the men would squint out to sea with narrowed eyes, keeping track of the ships, or they would follow the progress of a magnificent new automobile, gliding down Austurstræti like a glittering dream. At noon the savoury smell of roasting meat would waft into every corner of the house, and the afternoon would pass in a satisfied doze until coffee time. That was how Sundays used to be. And there was always some hungover bloke standing at a window wearing nothing but a vest, trying to recruit a boy to run down to the shop and fetch him a cold Pilsner, yelling after him ‘Keep the change!’

It was all so vivid to Konrád that he would often revisit it in his mind. Unusually for the time, his mother had worked outside the home and been the one to put food on the table. His father, on the other hand, rarely held down a job, and was involved in all kinds of dodgy schemes, most of them illegal. As Konrád got older he discovered that petty crimes and lawbreaking were his father’s daily bread. His parents didn’t have a large family to provide for, just him and his sister Elísabet. Konrád recalled the visitors who used to come to their home: relatives from the north, friends of his mother, his father’s more dubious associates. The heyday of the fraudulent seances had been before he was born, but he remembered his dad’s tales about the meetings held in their little flat. His father never adopted the role of medium himself, freely admitting that he was a lousy actor. The psychics, sometimes male, sometimes female, used to warm up by asking if the names Gudrún or Sigurdur — some of the most common in the country — meant anything to those present; if anyone was familiar with a painting of Mount Esja or knew why a smell of mothballs should suddenly assail the medium’s senses.

At the height of these seances, the sitting-room tables would levitate and the chairs shift as if by magic; a rumbling would be heard, and the most extraordinary details would surface from the past. The sitters latched on to these purported connections to the deceased, their hearts gladdened that life had conquered death and that death was only a door to another, better world. Of course, the entire thing was a hoax cooked up by Konrád’s father and his associates. They used to toy with the feelings of the bereaved, merely for the sake of swindling a few krónur out of them. When, years later, these shameless deceptions came up in conversation, Konrád’s father showed no sign of contrition. He’d spotting an opening, he said, when the Icelandic Society for Psychical Research was at the height of its popularity in the late thirties and forties. The society had gained particular fame as a result of two incidents. One was the disinterment and reburial in Skagafjördur of the remains of Solveig of Miklabær, an eighteenth-century woman, the subject of a celebrated ghost story; the other was the extraordinary peregrinations undertaken by the bones of the beloved nineteenth-century poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, all the way from the Danish capital Copenhagen to his birthplace of Hraun in Öxnadalur, before finally coming to rest at the ancient assembly site of Thingvellir. Their spirits had allegedly made contact at seances organised by the society, and it seemed only right to comply with their desire for reburial. In such a heady atmosphere, Konrád’s father’s psychic agency had prospered. Some of the mediums he worked with genuinely believed they had the gift but just needed a little leg-up to get things going. Others were simply good actors, sensitive to the reactions and body language of the credulous, and ingenious at extracting information from them.

Hearing a faint moan from Vigga, Konrád took the liberty of lifting the duvet from her face. There she lay, all sunken cheeks and toothless jaw, her wrinkled skin as dry as parchment, grey tufts of hair plastered to her skull. Her eyes opened a fraction.

‘Vigga?’ whispered Konrád. ‘Can you hear me?’

No reaction.

‘Vigga?’ he said again, louder this time.

The old woman didn’t move a muscle, merely stared dimly into space.

‘I don’t know if you remember me. My name’s Konrád and I used to live near you in the Shadow District.’

She didn’t stir, and he lapsed into silence. The girl who looked after Vigga had told him she was only occasionally compos mentis. The girl didn’t think she had long to live, but admitted that she would have said the same several years ago too, adding that she was an amazingly tough old bird.

‘I wanted to know if a man came to see you recently. His name was Stefán, Stefán Thórdarson.’

Vigga blinked.

‘Do you remember him at all?’ Konrád waited for a reaction but none came. ‘He may have been calling himself Thorson,’ he added, in the faint hope that the old woman could hear him.

This seemed to do the trick. Slowly Vigga turned her head and regarded him with colourless eyes.

‘Thorson,’ repeated Konrád. ‘Do you know him?’

The old woman stared at him without speaking.

‘Did he come here to see you a week or two ago?’

Vigga didn’t respond but nor did she take her eyes off Konrád.

‘Thorson’s dead,’ he continued. ‘I thought you’d want to know that if you were friends with him. You may have heard already. I gather he came here to visit you recently.’

Vigga’s gaze was unwavering.

‘I don’t know if you remember me. I grew up in the Shadow District, not far from where you lived. My name’s Konrád.’

‘H...?’ Vigga tried to whisper, but it came out so quietly that Konrád couldn’t catch it.

‘What did you say?’

‘H... ow?’

‘How? Do you mean how did he die? Well, it was rather a bad business actually. He was smothered. Very probably murdered.’

Vigga grimaced. ‘Mur... dered?’ she whispered weakly, almost voicelessly.

‘We don’t know who did it,’ said Konrád. ‘He lived alone, and he was found dead. I understand he came here shortly before he died, so I wanted to ask how you knew him.’

‘He... came...’ Vigga’s eyes closed.

‘I found some cuttings in his flat — newspaper cuttings about a girl who was found dead behind the National Theatre during the war,’ Konrád continued. ‘The girl had been strangled. Do you know why he kept those cuttings? Did he come to see you about the case? Or for a completely different reason? How did you two know each other anyway? How did you know Stefán Thórdarson?’

Konrád kept up a flow of questions but Vigga no longer seemed able to hear him.

‘Why did he visit you, Vigga? Why did he visit you just before he died?’

The old woman had fallen asleep again. Konrád restrained the urge to try to wake her and instead sat quietly and patiently by her bed, remembering that Vigga hadn’t always been in a foul mood, cursing the local children. Once, when Konrád was seven, he had plucked up the courage to knock on her door early one Sunday morning. He was selling stamps for the Scouts and had knocked on almost all the doors in the neighbourhood except hers. He’d had scant success — had in fact only sold one measly stamp — but then perhaps he had set off a little too early in his excitement and woken his prospective customers, who didn’t hesitate to let him know what they thought about that. He hadn’t intended to risk approaching Vigga’s lair, as he had always avoided her like the plague, but for some reason he forgot his cowardice and before he knew it he had rapped on her door. A long time seemed to pass and he was on the point of running away while he still could when the door opened and there stood Vigga, glaring down at him.

‘What do you want, boy?’ she had asked, scanning the street for more little pests waiting to torment her. There were none to be seen.

‘I... I... I’m selling stamps,’ Konrád stammered.

‘Stamps? What are you on about?’

‘Scout... Scout stamps.’

‘After my money are you? A little scamp like you? Want to come in?’

Konrád hesitated, then told the truth: ‘No.’

Vigga regarded him stormily for a moment and Konrád thought he should perhaps have said ‘no, thank you’ and was about to correct himself when she began to emit a rumbling noise which became a full-blown guffaw. She laughed so hard she had to lean against the door.

Konrád had turned, ready to flee down the steps, when her laughter subsided.

‘There, there, I’ll buy some stamps from you, boy,’ said Vigga. ‘Wait a minute while I fetch my purse.’

She bought three Scout stamps on the understanding that he would never knock on her door or show his face there again, for any reason whatsoever.

Konrád studied the old woman under the duvet, still hearing the echo of her laughter on that long-ago Sunday morning. Without warning she opened her eyes and looked at him.

‘Th... orson?’ Her whisper was barely audible.

‘Do you remember him?’

‘Is it... you... Thorson?’

Konrád didn’t know what to say. Did she really think he was Thorson? ‘I’m not him if...’

Vigga closed her eyes again.

‘Do you know if he was asking questions about that girl who was found behind the National Theatre?’

No response.

‘Do you have any idea why Thorson held on to cuttings about the case for all these years?’

There was no point asking. Vigga had dozed off again. After sitting beside her for a while longer, Konrád rose to leave. He stroked the old woman’s cheek gently. Once she had terrified him, but no longer. There was an air of tranquillity about her. He was on his way out of the room when he thought he heard her voice behind him.

Konrád turned. ‘Did you say something?’

Vigga opened her mouth but barely had the strength to articulate the words. ‘Thorson? Is that... you... back again?’

‘Is everything all right, Vigga?’

‘Have you come... about that girl?’

‘Yes,’ said Konrád, thinking he might as well go along with it.

‘... not... just her...’

‘What did you say?’

‘... there was... another one,’ croaked Vigga from under the duvet, her voice hoarse and threadbare with age. ‘Another one who disappeared... and the huldufólk... the huldufólk...’

‘Another girl?’ Konrád leaned closer to hear. ‘Who do you mean?’

‘... never... found her... never found her bones...’