Silence of the Grave

27

The winter on the hill was long and tough.

The children’s mother kept on working at the Gufunes dairy and the boys took the school bus every morning. Grimur went back to delivering coal. After the racket was discovered, the army did not want to give him his old job again. The depot was closed and the barracks were moved en bloc down to Halogaland. Only the fencing and fence posts remained, and the concreted yard that had been in front of the barracks. The cannon was removed from the bunker. People said the war was nearing its end. The Germans were retreating in Russia and a major counter-offensive was said to be pending on the western front.

Grimur more or less ignored the children’s mother that winter. Hardly uttered a word, except to hurl abuse at her. They no longer shared a bed. The mother slept in Simon’s room, while Grimur wanted Tomas to stay in his. Everyone except Tomas noticed how her stomach slowly swelled during the winter until it protruded like a bitter-sweet memory of the events of the summer, and a terrifying reminder of what would happen if Grimur stuck to his threats.

She played down her condition as best she could. Grimur threatened her regularly. Said he would not let her keep the baby. He would kill it at birth. Said it would be a retard like Mikkelina and the best thing would be to kill it straight away. “Yank-fucker,” he said. But he did not physically assault her that winter. He kept a low profile, sneaking silently around her like a beast preparing to pounce on its prey.

She tried talking about a divorce, but Grimur laughed at her. She did not discuss her condition with the people at the dairy and concealed the fact that she was pregnant. Perhaps, right to the end, she thought that Grimur would recant, that his threats were empty, that when it came to the crunch he would not carry out his threats, that he would be like a father to the child in spite of everything.

In the end she resorted to desperate measures. Not to take vengeance on Grimur, although she had ample reason, but to protect herself and the child she was about to bear.

Mikkelina strongly sensed a growing tension between her mother and Grimur during that tough winter and also noticed a change in Simon that she found no less disturbing. He had always been fond of his mother, but now he hardly left her side from the time he came home from school and she finished work. He was more nervous after Grimur came back from prison on that cold autumn morning. As far as he could, he avoided his father and his anxiety about his mother haunted him more with each day that went by. Mikkelina heard him talking to himself sometimes and occasionally it sounded as if he was talking to someone she could not see who could not possibly be in their house: an imaginary person. Sometimes she heard him say out loud what he had to do to protect their mother and the child she would bear by his friend Dave. How it fell to him to guard her against Grimur. How the baby’s life depended on him. No one else was at hand. His friend Dave would never return.

Simon took Grimur’s threats very seriously. He firmly believed that he would not allow the baby to live. That Grimur would take it and they would never see it. Carry it off up the mountain and come back without it.

Tomas was silent as ever, but Mikkelina sensed a change in him as the winter wore on. Grimur allowed Tomas to spend the night in his room after he forbade the children’s mother to sleep in the double bed and forced her to sleep in Tomas’ bed, which was too small for her and uncomfortable. Mikkelina did not know what Grimur said to Tomas, but soon Tomas adopted a very different attitude towards her. He would not have anything to do with her and distanced himself from Simon as well, despite how close they had always been. Their mother tried to talk to Tomas, but he always backed away from her, angry, silent and helpless.

“Simon’s turning a bit funny,” Mikkelina heard Grimur say to Tomas once. “He’s going funny like your mother. Keep a watch out for him. Make sure you don’t get like him. Because then you’ll turn funny too.”

Once Mikkelina heard her mother talking to Grimur about the baby, the only time he allowed her to speak her mind, as far as she knew. Her mother’s stomach was bulging by then and he prohibited her to work at the dairy any longer.

“You give up your job and say you have to look after your family,” Mikkelina heard him order her.

“But you can say it’s yours,” her mother said.

Grimur laughed at her.

“You can.”

“Shut up.”

Mikkelina noticed that Simon was eavesdropping as well.

“You could easily say it’s your child,” their mother said in a soothing voice.

“Don’t try that,” Grimur said.

“No one needs to know anything. No one need find out.”

“It’s too late to try to put things right now. You should have thought of that when you were out on the moor with that fucking Yank.”

“Or I could have it adopted,” she said cautiously. “I’m not the first one this has happened to.”

“Sure you’re not,” Grimur said. “Half the bloody city’s been screwing them. But don’t think that makes you any better for it.”

“You’ll never need to see it. I’ll give it away as soon as it’s born and you won’t ever need to see it.”

“Everyone knows my wife shags Yanks,” Grimur says. “They all know you’ve been playing the field.”

“No one knows,” she said. “No one. There was no one who knew about me and Dave.”

“How do you think I knew about it, you twat? Because you told me? Don’t you think that kind of story gets around?”

“Yes, but no one knows he’s the father. No one knows.”

“Shut up,” Grimur said. “Shut up or…”

They all waited to see what that long winter would bring and what was in some terrible way inevitable. It began when Grimur slowly began to fall ill.

Mikkelina stared at Erlendur.

“She started to poison him that winter.”

“Poison?” Erlendur said.

“She didn’t know what she was doing.”

“How did she poison him?”

“Do you remember the Dukskot case in Reykjavik?”

“When a young woman killed her brother with rat poison? Yes, it was some time around the beginning of the last century.”

“Mum didn’t intend to kill him with it. She only wanted to make him ill. So she could have the baby and get it out of his way before he found out the baby was gone. The woman from Dukskot fed her brother rat poison. Put big doses in his curds, he even saw her do it but didn’t know what it was, and he managed to tell someone because he didn’t die until several days later. She gave him schnapps with his curds to take the taste away. At the inquest they found phosphorus in his body, which has a slow toxic effect. Our mother knew that story, it was a famous Reykjavik murder. She got hold of rat poison at the Gufunes dairy. Stole small doses which she put in his food. She used very little at a time so that he wouldn’t taste it or suspect anything. Instead of keeping the poison at home she brought back what she needed each time, but when she gave up her job at the dairy she took a large dose home and hid it. She had no idea what effect it would have on him or whether such small doses would even work at all, but after a while the effects seemed to come on. He got weaker, was often ill or tired, vomited. Couldn’t make it to work. Lay in bed suffering.”

“Did he never suspect anything?” Erlendur asked.

“Not until it was too late,” Mikkelina said. “He had no faith in doctors. And of course she didn’t encourage him to go for a check-up.”

“What about when he said they would take care of Dave? Did he ever mention that again?”

“No, never,” Mikkelina said. “He was just bluffing really. Saying things to scare her. He knew that she loved Dave.”

Erlendur and Elinborg were in Mikkelina’s sitting room, listening to her story. They had told her that it was a male skeleton underneath the baby in the grave in Grafarholt. Mikkelina shook her head; she could have told them that before had they not hurried away without saying why.

She wanted to know about the baby skeleton and when Erlendur asked whether she wanted to see it, she said no.

“But I’d like to know when you don’t need it any more,” she said. “It’s about time she was laid to rest in hallowed ground.”

“She?” Elinborg said.

“Yes. She,” Mikkelina said.

Sigurdur Oli told Elsa what the medical officer had discovered: the body in the grave could not be her uncle Benjamin’s fiancee. Elinborg phoned Solveig’s sister, Bara, to tell her the same news.

While Erlendur was setting off with Elinborg to see Mikkelina, Ed called on his mobile to let him know that he still had not managed to find out what became of Dave Welch; he did not know whether he was posted away from Iceland, or even when that might have been. He said he would go on searching.

Earlier that morning Erlendur had gone to intensive care to visit his daughter. Her condition was unchanged and Erlendur sat beside her for a good while, and resumed his tale about his brother who had frozen to death on the moors above Eskifjordur when Erlendur was ten. They were rounding up sheep with their father when the storm broke. The brothers lost sight of their father and soon afterwards of each other. Their father made it back to the farm, exhausted. Search parties were mounted.

“They found me by sheer chance,” Erlendur said. “I don’t know why. I had the presence of mind to dig a shelter for myself in a snowdrift. I was more dead than alive when they poked at the snow and the stick happened to touch my shoulder. We moved away. Couldn’t live there any more, knowing about him up on the moor. Tried to start a new life, in Reykjavik… In vain.”

At that moment a doctor looked in. He and Erlendur greeted each other and briefly discussed Eva Lind’s condition. Unchanged, the doctor said. No hint of a recovery or that she was regaining consciousness. They fell silent. Said goodbye. The doctor turned at the door.

“Don’t expect any miracles,’’ he said, and noticed a cold smile on Erlendur’s face.

Now Erlendur was sitting opposite Mikkelina, thinking about his daughter in her hospital bed and his brother lying in the snow. Mikkelina’s words trickled into his mind.

“My mother wasn’t a murderer,” she said.

Erlendur looked at her.

“She wasn’t a murderer,” Mikkelina repeated. “She thought she could save the baby. She feared for her child.”

She darted a glance at Elinborg.

“After all, he didn’t die,” she said. “He didn’t die from the poison.”

“But you said he didn’t suspect anything until it was too late,” Elinborg said.

“Yes,” Mikkelina said. “It was too late by then.”

The night that it happened, Grimur seemed more subdued after lying in bed all day racked with pain.

Their mother felt pains in her stomach and towards evening she had gone into labour with very rapid contractions. She knew it was too soon. The baby would be premature. She had the boys bring the mattresses from the beds in their room and from Mikkelina’s divan in the kitchen, spread them out on the kitchen floor, and around dinner time she lay down on them.

She told Simon and Mikkelina to have clean sheets and hot water ready to wash the baby. After having three children, she knew the procedures.

It was still winter and dark, but the weather had unexpectedly turned warmer and it had rained during the day; spring would soon arrive. Their mother had been outdoors that day clearing the beds around the redcurrant bushes and pruning dead branches. She said the berries would be good when she made jam that autumn. Simon did not let her out of his sight and went to the bushes with her. She tried to calm him down by saying that everything would be all right.

“Nothing will be all right,” Simon said, and repeated it: “Nothing will be all right. You mustn’t have that baby. You mustn’t. That’s what he says, and he’ll kill it. He says so. When’s the baby due?”

“Don’t you worry,” his mother said. “When the baby’s born I’ll take it to town and he’ll never see it. He’s ill and helpless. He lies in bed all day and can’t do anything.”

“But when’s the baby due?”

“It could be at any time,” his mother said soothingly. “Maybe sometime soon, then it’s over and done with. Don’t be afraid, Simon. You must be strong. For my sake, Simon.”

“Why don’t you go to hospital? Why don’t you leave here to have the baby?”

“He won’t let me,” she said. “He’d fetch me and order me to give birth at home. He doesn’t want anyone to find out. We’ll say we found it. Entrust it to the care of good people. That’s the way he wants it. Everything will be all right.”

“But he says he’ll kill it.”

“He won’t do that.”

“I’m so scared,” Simon said. “Why does it have to be like this? I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,” he repeated, and she could tell he was plagued by anxiety.

Now he stood looking down at his mother, who was lying on the mattresses in the kitchen. Apart from the double bedroom, that was the only place in the house large enough, and she began to strain in absolute silence. Tomas was in Grimur’s room. Simon had crept to the door and closed it.

Mikkelina lay by the side of her mother, who tried to make no noise at all. The door to the double bedroom opened, Tomas came out into the passage and went to the kitchen. Grimur was sitting on the edge of the bed, moaning. He had sent Tomas to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of porridge which he had not touched. Told him to help himself to it as well.

When Tomas walked past his mother, Simon and Mikkelina, he noticed that the baby’s head had appeared. Their mother pushed with all her might until the shoulders emerged as well.

Tomas took the bowl of porridge and a spoon, and suddenly his mother saw out of the corner of her eye that he was about to take a mouthful.

“Tomas! For God’s sake don’t touch that porridge!” she shouted in desperation.

A deathly silence descended upon the house and the children stared at their mother, who was sitting with the newborn baby in her arms and staring at Tomas, and he was so surprised that he dropped the bowl to the floor where it smashed to pieces.

The bed creaked.

Grimur came out into the passage and into the kitchen. He looked down at their mother and the newborn baby in her arms, a look of disgust on his face. He looked over to Tomas, then at the porridge on the floor.

“Can it be?” Grimur said in a low, astonished voice, as if he had suddenly found the answer to a riddle that had long been puzzling him. He looked back down at the children’s mother.

“Are you poisoning me?” he shouted.

The mother looked up at Grimur. Mikkelina and Simon did not dare look up. Tomas stood motionless over the porridge that had splashed across the floor.

“Didn’t I fucking suspect as much! All that lethargy. That pain. Sickness…”

Grimur looked around the kitchen. Then he jumped at the cupboards and jerked open the drawers. He went berserk. He swept the contents of the cupboards onto the floor. Picked up an old bag of cornmeal and hurled it at the wall. When it burst, he heard a glass jar drop out of it.

“Is this it?” he shouted, picking up the jar. “How long have you been doing this?” he hissed.

The children’s mother stared into his eyes. A candle was burning on the floor beside her. While he was searching for the poison she had hurriedly picked up a large pair of scissors that she had kept by her side to heat in the flame, then cut the umbilical cord and knotted it with shaking hands.

“Answer me!” Grimur screamed.

She did not need to answer. He could tell from her eyes. Her expression. Her obstinacy. How she had always, deep down inside, defied him, unflinching, no matter how often he thrashed her, he saw it in her silent dissent, the challenge glaring back at him with the soldier’s bloodstained bastard in her arms.

Saw it in the baby she hugged to her breast.

“Leave Mum alone,” Simon said in a low voice.

“Give it to me!” Grimur screamed. “Give me the baby, you fucking serpent!”

“Leave Mum alone,” Simon said, more loudly.

“Give it here!” Grimur screamed, “or I’ll kill you both. I’ll kill you all! Kill you! All!”

He foamed at the mouth with rage.

“You fucking whore! Are you trying to kill me? Do you reckon you can kill me?”

“Stop it!” Simon shouted.

The children’s mother clutched the baby tight with one arm, and groped for the scissors with the other, but she could not find them. She glanced away from Grimur and looked around for them in a frenzy, but they were gone.

Erlendur looked at Mikkelina.

“Who took the scissors?” he asked.

Mikkelina was standing by the window now. Erlendur and Elinborg exchanged glances. They were both thinking the same thing.

“Are you the only one left to tell what happened?” Erlendur asked.

“Yes,” Mikkelina said. “There’s no one else.”

“Who took the scissors?” Elinborg asked.