Silence of the Grave

28

“Do you want to meet Simon?” Mikkelina asked. Her eyes were moist with tears.

“Simon?” Erlendur said, not knowing what she meant. Then he remembered. The man who had collected her from the hill. “You mean your son?”

“No, not my son, my brother,” Mikkelina said. “My brother Simon.”

“Is he alive?”

“Yes, he’s alive.”

“Then we have to talk to him,” Erlendur said.

“You won’t get much out of him,” Mikkelina smiled. “But let’s go and see him anyway. He enjoys visits.”

“Aren’t you going to finish your story?” Elinborg asked. “What kind of a beast was that man? I don’t believe it. Someone behaving that way.”

Erlendur looked towards her.

“I’ll tell you on the way,” Mikkelina said. “Let’s go and see Simon.”

“Simon!” their mother shouted.

“Leave Mum alone,” Simon screamed in a quavering voice, and before they knew it he had plunged the scissors into Grimur’s chest.

Simon pulled back his hand and saw that the scissors had gone in up to the handle. He looked in disbelief at his son, as if he did not fully realise what had happened. He looked down at the scissors, but seemed incapable of moving. He looked again at Simon.

“Are you killing me?” Grimur groaned and fell to his knees. Blood pumped out from the scissor-wound onto the floor, and slowly he slumped backwards and slammed against the wall.

Their mother clutched the baby in silent terror. Mikkelina lay motionless by her side. Tomas was still standing where he had dropped the porridge. Simon began shivering, standing beside his mother. Grimur did not move.

Everything went silent.

Until their mother let out a piercing, anguished howl.

Mikkelina paused.

“I don’t know whether the baby was stillborn or whether Mum squeezed it so hard that it suffocated in her arms. It was quite premature. She was expecting the baby in the spring, but it was still late winter when it was born. We never heard it make a sound. Mum didn’t clear its throat and she held it with its face buried in her clothes, for fear of him. For fear that he would take it from her.”

At Mikkelina’s instruction, Erlendur pulled over near a plain-looking detached house.

“Would he have died that spring?” Erlendur asked. “Her husband? Was she counting on that?”

“I don’t think so,” Mikkelina said. “She’d been poisoning him for three months. It wasn’t enough.”

Erlendur stopped in the drive and switched off the engine.

“Have you heard of hebephrenia?” she asked, opening the car door.

Their mother stared at the dead baby in her arms, rocked it frantically back and forth and sobbed and cried out.

Seemingly impervious to her, Simon stared at his father’s body as if he could not believe what he saw. A puddle of blood was beginning to form under him. Simon was shaking like a leaf.

Mikkelina tried to console her mother, but it was impossible. Tomas walked past them into the bedroom and closed the door without saying a word. Without any change of expression.

A good while passed.

Eventually Mikkelina managed to calm her mother. When she came to her senses and stopped crying, she took a good look around. She saw Grimur lying in his own blood, saw Simon trembling beside her, saw the look of anguish on Mikkelina’s face. Then she started to wash her baby in the hot water that Simon had brought her, cleaning it meticulously with slow, careful movements. She seemed to know what to do without thinking about the details. She put the baby down, stood up and hugged Simon, who was rooted to the spot, and he stopped trembling and broke instead into heavy sobs. She led him to a chair and made him sit down, facing away from the body. Then went over to Grimur, pulled the scissors out of the wound and threw them in the sink.

Then she sat down on a chair, exhausted after the birth.

She talked to Simon about what they needed to do and she gave instructions to Mikkelina too. They rolled Grimur onto a blanket and pulled his body to the front door. She went outside with Simon and they walked a good way from the house, where he started to dig a hole. The rain, which had stopped during the day, began again — cold, heavy winter rain. The ground was only partially frozen. Simon loosened the soil with a pickaxe, and after he had dug for two hours, they fetched the body and lugged it to the grave. They dragged the blanket over the hole, the body fell in and they tugged the blanket back up from under it. The corpse lodged in the grave with the left hand sticking up in the air, but neither Simon nor his mother could bring themselves to move it.

Their mother plodded back to the house and fetched the baby, carried it out into the cold rain and laid it down with Grimur’s body.

She was about to make the sign of the cross over the grave, but stopped.

“He doesn’t exist,” she said.

Then she started shovelling earth over the bodies. Simon stood by the grave watching the wet, dark soil slam down onto the corpses and saw how they gradually disappeared beneath it. Mikkelina had begun to tidy up in the kitchen. Tomas was nowhere to be seen.

A thick layer of mud was in the grave when Simon suddenly had the impression that Grimur twitched. With a shudder he looked at his mother, who had not noticed anything, then he stared down into the grave and to his horror he saw the face, half-covered with dirt, move.

The eyes opened.

Simon froze.

Grimur stared up at him from the grave.

Simon let out a mighty scream and his mother stopped shovelling. She looked at Simon, then down into the grave, and saw that Grimur was still alive. She stood on the edge of the grave. As the rain beat down on them it cleared the mud from Grimur’s face. For a moment they looked each other in the eye, then Grimur’s lips moved.

“Please!”

His eyes closed again.

She looked at Simon. Down into the grave. Back at Simon. Then took the shovel and went on filling the hole as if nothing had happened. Grimur disappeared from sight, buried beneath the soil.

“Mum,” Simon wailed.

“Go to the house, Simon,” she said. “It’s over. Go to the house and help Mikkelina. Please, Simon. Go to the house.”

Simon looked at his mother, who was bent over, holding the shovel, drenched by the cold rain, as she finished filling the hole. Then he walked away without saying another word.

“Tomas possibly thought that it was all his fault,” Mikkelina said. “He never mentioned it and refused to talk to us. Went completely into his shell. When Mum shouted and he dropped the bowl on the floor, it set off a sequence of events that changed our lives and led to his father’s death.”

They were in a tidy sitting room waiting for Simon. He had gone out for a stroll around the neighbourhood, they were told, but would be back any minute.

“Really nice people here,” Mikkelina said. “No one could treat him better.”

“Did nobody ever miss Grimur, or…?” Elinborg said.

“Mum cleaned the house from top to bottom and four days later she reported that her husband had set off on foot over Hellisheidi moor for Selfoss, but that she had not heard from him since. No one knew she had been pregnant, or at least she was never asked about it. Search parties were sent out onto the moor, but of course his body was never found.”

“What business was he supposed to have in Selfoss?”

“Mum never needed to go into that,” Mikkelina said. “She was never asked for an explanation of his travels. He was an ex-convict. A thief. What did they care about what he was doing in Selfoss? He didn’t matter to them. Not in the least. There was plenty else to think about. The day that Mum reported him missing, some American soldiers shot an Icelander dead.”

Mikkelina half-smiled.

“Several days went by. They turned into weeks. He never showed up. Written off. Lost. Just your ordinary Icelandic missing person.”

She sighed.

“It was Simon that Mum wept for the most.”

When it was all over, the house seemed eerily silent.

Their mother sat at the kitchen table, still soaking from the downpour, staring into space with her dirty hands on the table and paying no attention to her children. Mikkelina sat beside her, stroking her hands. Tomas was still in the bedroom and did not come out. Simon stood in the kitchen and looked out at the rain, tears running down his cheeks. He looked at his mother and Mikkelina and back out of the window where the outlines of the redcurrant bushes could be seen. Then he went out.

He was wet, cold and shivering from the rain when he walked over to the bushes, stopped by them and stroked the bare branches. He looked up into the sky, his face towards the rain. The sky was black and rolls of thunder rumbled in the distance.

“I know,” Simon said. “There was nothing else to be done.” He paused and bowed his head, the rain pounding down on him. “It’s been so hard. It’s been so hard and so bad for so long. I don’t know why he was like that. I don’t know why I had to kill him.”

“Who are you talking to, Simon?” his mother asked. She had followed him outside, and she put her arm around him.

“I’m a murderer,” Simon said. “I killed him.”

“Not in my eyes, Simon. You can never be a murderer in my eyes. Any more than I am. Maybe it was a fate he brought upon himself. The worst thing that can happen is if you suffer because of what he was like, now that he’s dead.”

“I killed him, Mum.”

“Because there was nothing else you could do. You must understand that, Simon.”

“But I feel so terrible.”

“I know, Simon. I know.”

“I don’t feel well. I never have, Mum.”

She looked at the bushes.

“There’ll be berries on the bushes in the autumn and everything will be okay then. You hear that, Simon. Everything will be okay then.”