Silence of the Grave

20

Elinborg got a call from Sigurdur Oli when she reached her office. He told her that Benjamin was probably not the father of the child his fiancee had been expecting, which brought their engagement to an end. Plus Solveig’s father had hanged himself after his daughter disappeared, and not before as her sister Bara had at first said.

Elinborg called in at the National Statistics Office and browsed through the death certificates before driving up to Grafarvogur. She didn’t like being lied to, especially by condescending posh women.

Bara listened to Elinborg recount what Elsa had said about the unidentified father of Solveig’s child and she remained as stony faced as ever.

“Have you heard this before?” Elinborg asked.

“That my sister was a whore? No, I haven’t heard that before and I don’t understand why you’re serving it up to me now. After all these years. I don’t understand it. You ought to let my sister rest in peace. She doesn’t deserve being gossiped about. Where did this… this Elsa woman get her story from?”

“From her mother,” Elinborg said.

“And she heard it from Benjamin?”

“Yes. He didn’t tell anyone about it until he was on his deathbed.”

“Did you find a lock of her hair at his house?”

“We did, as it happens.”

“And you’ll send it for tests with the bones?”

“I expect so.”

“So you think he killed her. That Benjamin, that weed, killed his fiancee. I think it’s ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. It’s beyond me how you can believe it.”

Bara stopped talking and grew thoughtful.

“Will it be in the papers?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Elinborg said. “The bones have been given a lot of publicity.”

“That my sister was murdered, I mean?”

“If that’s the conclusion we come to. Do you know who could have been the father of her child?”

“Benjamin was the only one.”

“Was there never mention of anyone else? Didn’t your sister talk to you about any other man?”

Bara shook her head.

“My sister was not a tart.”

Elinborg cleared her throat.

“You told me your father committed suicide some time before your sister disappeared.”

They fleetingly looked each other in the eye.

“I think you should be leaving now,” Bara said, standing up.

“I wasn’t the one who started talking about your father. I checked his death certificate at the National Statistics Office. Unlike some people, the Statistics Office rarely tells lies.”

“I have nothing more to say to you,” Bara said, but without her earlier arrogance.

“I don’t think you would have mentioned him unless you wanted to talk about him. Deep down inside.”

“Bloody rubbish!” she spat out. “Are you playing the psychologist now?”

“He died six months after your sister went missing. His death certificate doesn’t specify that he killed himself. No cause of death is given. Probably too posh to use the word suicide. Died suddenly at his home, it says.”

Bara turned her back on Elinborg.

“Is there any chance that you could start telling me the truth?” Elinborg said, standing up as well. “What did your father have to do with it? Why did you mention him? Who got Solveig pregnant? Was it him?”

She received no response. The silence between them was almost tangible. Elinborg looked around the spacious lounge, at all the beautiful articles, the paintings of her and her husband, the expensive furniture, the black pianoforte, a prominently placed photograph of Bara with the leader of the Progressive Party. What an empty life, she thought.

“Doesn’t every family have its secrets?” Bara said eventually, her back still turned on Elinborg.

“I imagine so,” Elinborg said.

“It wasn’t my father,” Bara said reluctantly. “I don’t know why I lied to you about his death. It just slipped out. If you want to play the psychologist you can say that deep down inside I wanted to confess everything to you. That I’d kept silent for so long that when you started talking about Solveig the floodgates opened. I don’t know.”

“Who was it then?”

“His nephew,” Bara said. “His brother’s son, from Fljot. It happened on one of her summer visits.”

“How did your family find out?”

“She was completely different when she came back. Mum… our mother noticed immediately, and of course it would have been impossible to conceal for long.”

“Did she tell your mother what happened?”

“Yes. Our father went up north. I don’t know any more about that. By the time he came back, the boy had been sent abroad. So the local people said. Grandfather ran a large farm. There were only two brothers. My father moved south here, set up a business and became wealthy. A pillar of society.”

“What happened to the nephew?”

“Nothing. Solveig said he’d had his way with her. Raped her. My parents didn’t know what to do, they didn’t want to press charges with all the legal fuss and gossip it would bring. The boy came back several years later and settled here in Reykjavik. Had a family. He died about 2,0 years ago.”

“What about Solveig and the baby?”

“Solveig was ordered to have an abortion but she refused. Refused to get rid of the baby. Then one day she disappeared.”

Bara turned round to face Elinborg.

“You could say it destroyed us, that summer trip to Fljot. Destroyed us as a family. It has certainly shaped my whole life. Covering up. Family pride. It was taboo. We could never mention it. My mother made sure of that. I know that she talked to Benjamin, later. Explained the matter to him. That made Solveig’s death nobody’s business but her own. Solveig’s, that is. Her secret, her choice. We were all right. We were pure and respectable. She went mad and threw herself into the sea.”

Elinborg looked at Bara and suddenly felt pity for the lie that she had been forced to live.

“She did it by herself,” Bara went on. “Nothing to do with us. It was her business.”

Elinborg nodded.

“She’s not lying up there on the hill,” Bara said. “She’s lying on the bottom of the sea and she’s been there for more than 60 terrible years.”

Erlendur sat down beside Eva Lind after talking to her doctor, who said the same as before: her condition was unchanged, only time could tell the outcome. He sat at his daughter’s bedside, wondering what to talk to her about this time, but could not make up his mind.

Time went by. The intensive care ward was quiet. Occasionally a doctor walked past the door, or a nurse in soft white shoes that squeaked against the linoleum.

That squeaking.

Erlendur watched his daughter and, almost automatically, started to talk to her in a low voice, telling her about a missing person that he had puzzled over for a long time and perhaps, even after all those years, had yet to understand fully.

He started telling her about a young boy who moved to Reykjavik with his parents, but always missed his countryside home. The boy was too young to understand why they had moved to the city, which at that time was not a city, but a large town by the sea. Later he realised that the decision was a combination of many factors.

His new home felt strange from the start. He had been brought up in simple rural life and isolation — with warm summers, harsh winters and tales about his family who had lived in the countryside all around, most of them crofters and desperately poor for centuries. Those people were his heroes. He heard about them in stories of everyday life that had been told for years and decades, accounts of hazardous journeys or disasters, or tales that were so hilarious that the storytellers would gasp for breath through their laughter or burst into fits of coughing that left them curled up, spluttering and shaking from sheer joy. All these stories were about people he had lived with and known, or those who had lived in the countryside, generation after generation: uncles and nieces, grandmothers and great-grand-mothers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers way back in time. He knew all these characters from stories, even those who were long dead and buried in the little cemetery beside the parish church: midwives who waded icy glacial rivers to help women in childbirth; farmers who heroically rescued their flocks in raging storms; farmhands who froze to death on their way to the sheepcote; drunken clergymen, ghosts and monsters; tales of lives that were part of his own life.

He brought all these tales with him when his parents moved to the city. They bought a wartime bathhouse built by the British military on the outskirts of the city, and converted it into a tiny house because that was all they could afford. Urban life did not suit his father, who had a weak heart and died not long after he moved. His mother sold the bathhouse, bought a cramped little basement flat not far from the harbour and worked in a fish factory. The son did not know what to do when he finished his compulsory schooling. Did manual labour. Building sites. Fishing boats. Saw a vacancy advertised with the police force.

He no longer heard any tales, and they became lost to him. All his people were gone, forgotten and buried in deserted rural areas. He, in turn, drifted through a city that he had no business being in. Knew that he was not the urban type. Could not really tell what he was. But he never lost his yearning for a different life, felt rootless and uncomfortable, and sensed how his last links with the past evaporated when his mother died.

He went to dancehalls. At one of them, Glaumbaer, he met a woman. He had known others, but never for more than casual meetings. This one was different, more steadfast, and he felt that she took control of him. Everything happened too quickly for him to grasp. She made demands of him which he fulfilled without any particular motivation and before he knew it, he had married her and they had a daughter. They rented a small flat. She had big plans for their future and talked about having more children and buying an apartment, quick and tense with a tone of expectation in her voice as if she saw her life on a safe track that nothing would ever overshadow. He looked at her and it dawned on him that he did not really know this woman at all.

They had another child and she became increasingly aware of how distant he was. When their baby son entered the world he was only moderately happy to be a father again and had already begun mentioning that he wanted to put an end to all this, he wanted to leave. She felt it. She asked whether there was another woman, but he just stared blankly without the question even registering. He had never contemplated it. “There must be another woman,” she said. “It’s not that,” he said, and started to explain to her his feelings and his thoughts, but she did not want to hear. She had two children by him and he could not seriously be talking about leaving her. Them. His children.

His children. Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer. Pet names that she chose for them. He did not regard them as part of him. Lacked all paternal feeling, but recognised the responsibility he bore. His duty towards them, which had absolutely nothing to do with their mother or his relationship with her. He said he wanted to provide for the children and divorce amicably. She said there would be nothing amicable about it, as she picked up Eva Lind and clutched her. His impression was that she would use the children to keep hold of him, and that only strengthened the resolution that he could not live with this woman. It had all been one huge mistake from the outset and he should have acted long ago. He had no idea what he had been thinking all that time, but now it had to come to an end.

He tried to get her to agree to him having the children for part of the week or month, but she flatly refused and told him that he would never see them again if he left her. She would see to that.

And then he disappeared. Disappeared out of the life of the little girl of two who was in her nappy and holding a dummy as she watched him walk out of the door. A little, white dummy that squeaked when she bit it.

“We’re going about this the wrong way,” Erlendur said.

That squeaking.

He bowed his head. He thought the nurse was walking past the door again.

“I don’t know what became of that man,” Erlendur said in a barely audible voice, looking at his daughter’s face, which was more peaceful than he had ever seen it. The outlines clearer. Looked at the equipment that was keeping her alive. Then looked back down at the floor.

A long time passed in this way until he stood up, bent over Eva Lind and kissed her on the forehead.

“He disappeared and I think he’s still lost and has been for a long time, and I’m not certain he’ll ever be found. It’s not your fault. It happened before you came into the world. I think he’s looking for himself, but he doesn’t know why or exactly what he’s searching for, and obviously he’ll never find it.”

Erlendur looked down at Eva Lind.

“Unless you help him.”

Her face like a cold mask in the lamplight from the table next to her bed.

“I know you’re searching for him and I know that if there’s anyone who can find him, it’s you.”

He turned away from her, poised to leave, when he saw his ex-wife standing in the doorway. He did not know how long she had been standing there. Did not know how much she had heard of what he had told Eva Lind. She was wearing the same brown coat as before, on top of a jogging suit, but now she wore stilettos too, an outfit which made her look ridiculous. Erlendur had barely seen her for more than two decades, and he noticed how she had aged during that time, how her facial features had lost their sharpness, her cheeks fattened and a double chin started to form.

“That was a repulsive lie you told Eva Lind about the abortion.” Erlendur seethed with rage.

“Leave me alone,” Halldora said. Her voice had aged too. Grown hoarse. Smoking too much. Too long.

“What other lies did you tell the kids?”

“Get out,” she said, moving away from the door so that he could get past.

“Halldora…”

“Get out,” she repeated. “Just go and leave me in peace.”

“We both wanted the children.”

“Don’t you regret it?” she said.

Erlendur didn’t follow.

“Do you think they had any business coming into this world?”

“What happened?” Erlendur said. “What made you like this?”

“Get out,” she said. “You’re good at leaving. So leave! Leave me in peace with her.”

Erlendur stared at her.

“Halldora…”

“Leave, I said.” She raised her voice. “Get out of here. This minute. Leave! I don’t want you around! I never want to see you again!”

Erlendur walked past her and out of the room, and she closed the door behind him.