Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was

x

In the five days that have passed since the first influenza fatality, the cinemas have become ever quieter, yet the townspeople have stubbornly continued to attend. Especially the young, whose response to the fear of contagion is to cluster together while the adults stay at home. Besides, it is warmer in the cinemas than in most of their homes, now that the coal shortage and the high price of paraffin have begun to bite, and coziest of all packed into the seats farthest from the auditorium doors.

But as the flu takes its toll on the musicians — not only those whose livelihood it is to accompany the films but also the ones immediately recruited to fill their places on an assortment of the unlikeliest instruments — the silence grows.

By the time Miss Inga María Waagfjörd, guitar player and chanteuse, slumps unconscious from the piano stool during the second episode of The Golden Reel at the New Cinema, the epidemic has snatched away the last person in Reykjavík capable of picking out a tune.

The following evening there is an attempt at the Old Cinema to screen the Italian smuggling tale Anger without any musical accompaniment. It is a disaster.

It takes less than half an hour for the audience to lose interest in the events on screen. When the only sounds accompanying the pictures are the coughing and throat-clearing supplied by the cinemagoers themselves, together with those emanating from the projectionist’s booth — the growling of the motor that powers the projector and the whispering of the film as it unwinds from the top reel, is pulled through the light beam, and threads onto the lower with a slightly hoarser whisper — it becomes apparent just how silent these films really are.

The actors’ movements seem clumsy, the pace too slow for the melodramatic plot, and the cuts between scenes confusing. It makes no difference how brilliantly the great diva Francesca Bertini performs the role of Elena the mountain maid in this third installment of The Seven Deadly Sins, which she both produces and stars in — she cannot hold the audience’s attention; it would take more than that to compete with the silence and the reality beyond the timber walls.

In the quiet gloom, beneath the hissing, flickering light, members of the audience begin to murmur about the situation in the town. In an undertone at first, but soon at normal pitch. Others join in, and before long the screening has turned into a public meeting at which stories are swapped about the nature of the epidemic.

All are agreed that the information supplied by the surgeon general fails to convey the truth about the terrible symptoms of the disease, which are quite unlike any the townspeople have experienced before. The body temperature soars so fast, for example, that by the first or second day the patient is helpless with delirium — and then there is the bleeding.

The projectionist’s silhouette appears in the aperture.

The projector beam is switched off.

Lights come on in the wall lamps.

The young people glance around, and only now does it dawn on them how many members of the audience have been taken ill: every other face is chalk-white; lips are blue, foreheads glazed with sweat, nostrils red, eyes sunken and wet.

Silence falls on the gathering.

Moving cautiously, the cinemagoers begin to ease themselves out of the rows of seats, pick their way up the aisle, and vanish noiselessly from the hall.

The final picture show is over.

The boy had already left some time before.

xi

Reykjavík has undergone a transformation.

An ominous hush lies over the busiest, most bustling part of town. No hoofbeats, no rattling of cart wheels or rumble of automobiles, no roar of motorcycles or ringing of bicycle bells. No rasp of sawing from the carpenters’ workshops, or clanging from the forges, or slamming of warehouse doors. No gossiping voices of washerwomen on their way to the hot springs, no shouts of dockworkers unloading the ships, or cries of newspaper hawkers on the main street. No smell of fresh bread from the bakeries, or waft of roasting meat from the restaurants.

The doors of the shops neither open nor close — no one goes in, no one comes out — no one hurries home from work or goes to work at all.

No one says good morning. No one says good night.

* * *

The cathedral bell doesn’t toll the quarter hour, or even the hours themselves. Though the hands stand at eight minutes past three, it’s hard to guess whether this refers to day or night. A gloomy pall of cloud shrouds both sun and moon. A deathly quiet reigns in the afternoon as if it were the darkest hour before dawn. Or not quite …

From the long, low shed by the harbor the sounds of banging and planing can be heard, though each hammer blow and bout of sawing is so muffled and muted to the ear that it seems almost to apologize for disturbing the silence. It is here that the coffins are being made.

Four more have died of the influenza: a thirty-five-year-old grocer, a girl in her teens, a woman of twenty-eight and the child she was carrying. And a third of the townspeople have taken to their beds, gravely ill.

By the end of the working day the undertaker has received five new orders for coffins — and two more will await him at home.

* * *

The streets yawn, empty of people, except for glimpses here and there of the odd shadowy figure out and about. These are the old women, bundled up in black clothes, wearing shawl upon shawl to keep out the chill. They have given room to so many ailments in their day that the scourge now making a meal of their descendants can find no morsel worth having on their worn-out old bones.

If word gets around that someone has a drop of lamp oil, cough syrup, or vinegar to spare; if it is rumored that oats, rice, soap, or dried stewing vegetables will be sold at the Thomsen’s Magasin warehouse door for half an hour at eleven; if news spreads that a packet of salt fish failed to make it onto the ship or a sack containing a handful of sprouting potatoes has been left sitting around open and unattended, an old biddy will layer up in skirt upon skirt and two pairs of mittens, and hobble off into town for the sake of posterity.

They come face-to-face in courtyards, side streets, alleyways, and gardens — stooping figures — acknowledging one another with sidelong glances and twitching lips.

* * *

The boy is also on the prowl in the deserted center of town.

He’d had no inkling that when the pestilence took hold Reykjavík would empty and convey the impression that nothing was happening at all; that the town would become an abandoned set that he, Máni Steinn, could envisage as the backdrop for whatever sensational plot he cared to devise, or, more accurately, for the kind of sinister events that in a film would be staged in this sort of village of the damned — for these days the real stories are being acted out behind closed doors. And they are darker than a youthful mind can begin to imagine.

The boy pauses.

A cry is heard from the undertaker’s house.

xii

The old lady’s attic has little in the way of heating. Owing to the shortage of coal, she’s fallen back on two paraffin stoves that she doesn’t dare to leave burning at night for fear of fire. A faint warmth filters up from the floors below, but it’s much feebler than the heat she’s used to receiving secondhand from the landlord and his household over the winter months — for the socialist and other important folk are feeling the pinch too — no one can be found to stoke their boiler any longer.

To combat the cold the old lady spends her days in bed, kitted out in balaclava and mittens, under a heap of eiderdowns, blankets, and overcoats that she gets the boy to pile over her before he leaves the house. There she lies right around the clock, reading the papers by day, dozing by night, rising only to cook the boy his porridge in the mornings and his fish tail and potatoes at night, to wring out his clothes and her own, to iron and darn, mop the damp from the floors and walls, and puff her way through thirty cigarettes.

And since the young mistress and her elder daughter fell ill, the old lady has been popping downstairs to cook for the landlord and his younger children; to nurse the patients, wash their clothes, and boil their compresses and rags.

Never in all her born days can the old lady recall spending so much time lounging around in bed.

* * *

There’s the boy now, climbing the ladder to the attic.

A sequence that he has been trying to shake off for the last hour keeps repeating itself over and over in his mind:

A horse-drawn carriage careers at breakneck speed down the slope of Bakarabrekka, over the bridge, and into Lækjartorg Square. The dwarfish driver is bound to the box with a broad leather strap. His head is encased in a black turban, the long end muffling his face; his gleaming black eyes flick to and fro beneath immensely bushy brows. He brandishes his whip like a madman, raining down the lash on the horses’ flanks, and they stretch out their necks at a gallop, snorting till they foam at the bits.

On the roof of the carriage stands a female figure in a long cloak that flaps in the wind like a huge bat spreading its wings. With the razor-sharp, nine-inch claws on her half-human hands, the creature rips open the carriage roof, sending splinters of wood flying like hail into the louring black night.

Two men are sitting inside, one young, the other older. Overcome with terror, the older man cowers against the younger.

The boy appears in the opening at the top of the ladder.

Only once he has emerged onto the landing does he mentally pause the footage, freezing it on a tight frame of the older man’s fleshy hand clutching at the younger man’s thigh. The thick fingers dig into the pale-colored trouser material, the middle one sporting a gold ring embellished with a large gem.

The boy looks across the attic.

A candle is burning on the stool beside the old lady’s bed: she’s awake, then.

Becoming aware of him, she sits up.

The boy freezes in his tracks.

Before his eyes, sixty years fall away from the old lady. Her features are softened by the yellow glow of the guttering flame and the rust-brown balaclava frames them like a loose fall of hair.

She takes on the appearance of a woman the boy has not seen for many a long year, becoming the living image of her youngest sister’s granddaughter.

The boy sinks to the floor with a groan.

— Mother …