The Blue Fox

II (8–9 January 1883)

The world opens its good eye a crack. A ptarmigan belches. The streams trickle under their glazing of ice, dreaming of spring when they’ll swell to a life-threatening force. Smoke curls up from mounds of snow here and there on the mountainsides — these are their farms.

Everything here is a uniform blue, apart from the glitter of the tops. It is winter in the Dale.

‘Hello, I’ve come to fetch the hemale horse, listen, I’m here to take the female porks, oh, er, no, er, you, no, hand over the heehaw forks…’

In the yard at Brekka a horse stands beneath a man, and it is the man who is babbling so inanely to himself. He’s a big fellow, probably turned forty; there’s grey in the pink beard which hangs untrimmed over his mouth and tumbles from his chin like an ice-bound cataract — yet he is bundled up in clothes like a child all set to spend the day in a snowdrift.

His breeches are hitched right up to his crotch, his coat is far too big or far too small, depending on how you look at it, and his knitted hat is tied so tightly under his chops that he cannot have done it himself; on his hands he wears three pairs of mittens, making it almost impossible for him to hold the reins of the hairy nag on which he sits.

This is the mare Rosa. She champs her bit impatiently. It is her legs that have carried them here. When you look back you can see her hoofprints running from the parsonage at Dalbotn, down over the fields, along the river, across the marshes, up the slopes, to the place where she is now standing, waiting to be relieved of her burden.

Ah, now the man clambers down from her back.

And his true shape is revealed: he is extraordinarily low-kneed, big-bellied, broad-shouldered and abnormally long-necked, and his left arm is quite a bit shorter than his right. He stamps his feet, beats his arms about himself, shakes his head and snorts.

The mare flicks her ears.

‘Sea-hail porpoise?’

The man scrapes the snow from the farm door with his stubby arm:

‘Can it be?’

He knocks on the door with his good hand and feels the blood rushing to his fist. It’s cold. Perhaps he’ll be invited inside?

The shadow of a man’s head appears in the frost-patterned parlour window, and a moment later the inner door can be heard opening, then the front door is thrust out hard. It clears away the pile that has collected outside overnight, and the cold visitor, retreating before it, falls over backwards, or would do if the snow allowed. When he is done falling, he sees that the man he has come to find is standing in the doorway: Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, the herbalist, farmer at Brekka, or the man who owns Abba. The visitor’s own name is Halfdan Atlason, ‘the Reverend Baldur’s eejit’.

Now he gulps like a fish but says not a word, for before he can recite his piece, Herb-Fridrik invites him to step inside.

And to that the eejit has no other answer than to do as he is asked.

They enter the kitchen.

‘Take off your things.’

Fridrik squats, opens the belly of the tiled stove and puts in more kindling. It blazes merrily.

It’s warm here, a good place to be.

The eejit bites his thumbs and tugs off his mittens before beginning with trembling hands to struggle with the tight knot on his hat strings. He’s in difficulties, but his host frees him from his prison. When Fridrik pulls off his guest’s coat a bitter stench is released. Fridrik backs away, nostrils flaring.

‘Coffee…’

It was always the same with the Dalbotn folk; they sweated coffee. The Reverend Baldur was too mean to give them anything to eat, pumping them instead from morning to night full of soot-black, stewed-to-pulp coffee grounds. Fridrik takes a firm hold of Halfdan’s hands; the tremor that shakes them is not a shiver of cold but a nervous disorder — from coffee consumption.

He releases the man’s paws and invites him to sit down. Taking a kettle from a peg, he fills it with melted snow and places it on the hotplate on top of the stove. He points to the kettle and says firmly:

‘Now, you keep an eye on the water; when the lid moves come and tell me. I’ll be in the parlour nailing down the coffin lid.’

The eejit nods and turns his eyes to the kettle. Herb-Fridrik brushes a hand over his shoulders as he leaves the kitchen. After a moment the sound of hammer blows comes from the next room.

The eejit stares at the kettle and stove in turn, but mostly at the stove. It is a widely famed wonder of technology that few have set eyes on. The metal pipe, which rises from the stove, runs up the wall into the parlour, and from there up to the sleeping loft, warming the house, before poking out through the turf-roof and releasing the smoke into the open air. But first and last it is the handpainted china tiles that enchant: brightly coloured flowers sprawl here and there about the body of the stove, nimbler than the eye can follow. Halfdan rocks in his seat as he traces one flower spray, which winds under this one and over that, all the way up to the kettle.

The kettle, yes, just so, he’s keeping an eye on it. The water spits as it jumps around between the bottom of the kettle and the glowing hotplate.

Fridrik the herbalist is the man who owns his Abba; that is, Hafdis Jonsdottir, Halfdan’s sweetheart. Fridrik and Abba live together, just the two of them, at Brekka — until she marries Halfdan, then she’ll come away with him. But where might she be today? He twists his elongated neck to peer over his right shoulder.

In the parlour Fridrik is hammering the last nail into the coffin lid. Halfdan calls in to him:

‘I-Hi’m here to fe-fetch the female corpse…’

The bleak wording takes Fridrik aback. That’s Parson Baldur talking through his manservant. The parsonage servants parroted the priest’s mode of speech like a parcel of hens. No doubt one might have called it laughable, had it not been all of a piece, all so ugly and vile.

‘I know, Halfdan old chap, I know…’

But he is even more startled by what the eejit says next:

‘Whe-here’s h-his A-Abba?’

The water boils and the kettle lid rattles — it sputters slightly at the rim.

‘B-boiling,’ sniffs Halfdan, and it is the first sound he has uttered since Herb-Fridrik told him that his sweetheart Abba was dead, that she was the female corpse the Reverend had sent him to fetch, and that today the coffin he saw there on the parlour table would be lowered into the ground in the churchyard at Dalbotn. The news so crushed Halfdan’s heart that he burst into a long, silent fit of weeping and the tears ran from his eyes and nose, while his ill-made body shook in the chair like a leaf quivering before an autumn gale, not knowing whether it will be torn from the bough that has fostered it all summer long or linger there — and wither; but neither fate is good.

While the man grieved for his sweetheart, Fridrik brought out the tea things: a fine hand-thrown English china pot, two bone-white porcelain cups and saucers, a silver-plated milk jug and sugar bowl, teaspoons and a strainer made of bamboo leaves. And finally a tea caddy made of planed, oiled oak, marked: ‘A. C. PERCH’S THEHANDEL.’

He takes the kettle from the hob and pours a little water into the teapot, letting it stand a while so the china warms through. Then he opens the tea caddy, measures four spoonfuls of leaves into the pot and pours boiling water over them. The heady fragrance of Darjeeling fills the kitchen, like the steam that rises from newly ploughed earth, and there is also a sweet hint, pregnant with sensuality — with memories of luxury — that only one of them has known: Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, the herbalist from Brekka in his European clothes; in long trousers and jacket, with a late Byronesque cravat round his neck.

Likewise the scent raises Halfdan’s spirits, causing him to forget his sorrow.

‘Wh-what’s that c-called?’

‘Tea.’

Fridrik pours the tea into the cups and slips the cosy over the English china pot. Halfdan takes his cup in both hands, raises it to his lips and sips the drink.

‘Tea?’

It’s strange that so good a drop should have such a small name. It should have been called Illustreret Tidende, that’s the grandest name the eejit knows:

‘I-is it Danish?’

‘No, it’s from the mountain Himalaya, which is so high that if you climbed our mountain thirteen times, you still wouldn’t have reached the top. Halfway up the slopes of the great mountain is the parish of Darjeeling. And when the birds in Darjeeling break into their dawn chorus, life quickens on the paths that link the teagardens to the villages: it’s the tea-pickers going to their work; they may be poorly dressed, yet some have silver rings in their noses.’

‘I-is it thrushes singing?’ asks the eejit.

‘No, it’s the song sparrow, and under its clear song you can hear the tapping of a woodpecker.’

‘N-no birds I know?’

‘I expect there are wagtails,’ answers Fridrik.

Halfdan nods and sips his tea. Meanwhile Fridrik twists up his moustache on the left-hand side and continues his tale:

‘At the garden gate they each take their basket and the day’s work begins. From then until suppertime the harvesters will pick the topmost leaves from every plant, and their fingertips will be the tea’s first staging post on the long journey that may end, for example, in the teapot here at Brekka.’

So this morning hour passes.

It is daylight when Fridrik and the eejit Halfdan come out of the farmhouse with the coffin between them. They carry it easily; the dead woman was not large and the coffin is no work of art, knocked together from scraps of timber found around the farm — but it’ll do and seems sound enough. The mare Rosa waits out in the yard, sated with hay. The men place the coffin on a sledge, lash it down good and hard, and fasten it either side of the saddle with long spars, which lie along the horse’s flanks and are tied firmly to the sledge.

After this is done, Fridrik takes an envelope from his jacket. He shows it to Halfdan and says:

‘You’re to give Reverend Baldur this letter as soon as the funeral is over. If he asks for it before, tell him I forgot to give it to you. Then you’re to remember it when he has finished the ceremony.’

He pushes the envelope deep into the eejit’s pocket, patting the pocket firmly:

‘When the funeral’s over…’

And they say goodbye, the man who owned Abba and her sweetheart — former sweetheart.

***

Brekka in the Dale, 8 January 1883

Dear Archdeacon Baldur Skuggason,

I enclose the sum of thirty-four crowns. It is payment for the funeral of the woman Hafdis Jonsdottir, and is to cover wages for yourself and six pallbearers, carriage of the coffin from the farm to the church, lying in state, three knells and payment for coffee, sugar and bread for yourself and the pallbearers, as well as any mourners who may attend.

I do not insist on any singing over the woman, nor any address or recital of ancestry. You are to be guided by your own taste and inclinations, or those of any congregation.

I have seen to the coffin and shroud myself, being familiar with the task from my student days in Copenhagen, as your brother Valdimar can attest.

I hope this now completes our business with regard to Hafdis Jonsdottir’s funeral service.

Your obedient servant,

Fridrik B. Fridjonsson

P.S. Last night I dreamt of a blue vixen. She ran along the screes, heading up the valley. She was as fat as butter, with a pelt of prodigious thickness.

F. B. F.

***

Now the foolish funeral procession lacks for nothing. It sets out from the yard, that is to say, it slides headlong down the slopes, until man, horse and corpse recover their equilibrium on the riverbank. One could skate along it up the valley, all the way to the church doors at Botn.

Herb-Fridrik goes into the house. He hopes that Halfdan, eejit that he is, won’t break open the coffin and peep inside on the way.

On Saturday 18 April 1868 a great cargo ship ran aground at Onglabrjotsnef on the Reykjanes peninsula, a black-tarred triple-master with three decks. The third mast had been chopped down, by which means the crew had saved themselves, and the ship was left unmanned, or so it was thought. The splendour of everything aboard this gigantic vessel was such an eye-opener that no one who hadn’t seen it for himself would have believed it.

The cabin on the top deck was so large that it could have housed an entire village. It was clear that the cabin had originally been highly decorated, but the gilding and paint had worn off, and all was now squalid inside. Once it had been divided up into smaller compartments but now the bulkheads had been removed and sordid pallets lay scattered hither and thither; it would have resembled a ghost ship, had it not been for the stench of urine. There were no sails, and the remaining tatters and cables were all rotten.

The bowsprit was broken and the figurehead degraded; it had been the image of a queen, but her face and breasts had been hacked away with the sharp point of a knife: clearly the ship had once, long ago, been the pride of her captain, but had later fallen into the hands of unscrupulous rogues.

It was hard to guess how long the ship had been at sea or when she had met with her fate. There were no logbooks and her name was almost entirely obliterated from bow and stern; though in one place the lettering ‘… Der Deck…’ was visible and in another ‘V… r… ec…’ — so people guessed she was Dutch in origin.

When this titanic ship ran aground the surf was too rough for putting to sea; any attempt at salvage or rescue was unthinkable. But when an opportunity finally arose, the men of Sudurnes flocked on board and set to in earnest. They broke up the top deck and discovered, to general rejoicing, that the ship was loaded entirely with fish-liver oil. It was stored in barrels of uniform size, stacked in rows, which were so well lashed down that they had to send out to seven parishes for crowbars to free them. This served well.

After three weeks’ work the men had unloaded the cargo from the upper deck on to shore; it amounted to nine hundred barrels of fish-liver oil.

Experiments with the oil proved that it was excellent lighting fuel, but it resembled nothing the people knew, either in smell or taste; though perhaps a faint hint of singed human hair accompanied the burning. Malicious tongues in other parts of the country might claim that the oil was plainly ‘human suet’, but they could keep their slander and envy — nothing detracted from the joy of the folk in the south-west over this windfall that the Almighty Lord had brought to their shore so unlooked for, and involving so little effort, loss of life or expense to themselves.

They now broke open the middle deck, which contained no fewer barrels of oil than the upper; and although the unloading was carried out with manly zeal, they seemed to make no impression. Then, one day, they became aware of life on board. Something moved in the dark corner by the stern, on the port side, accessible by a gangway running between the hull and the triple rows of barrels. There came a sound of sighing and moaning, accompanied by a metallic clanking.

These were uncanny sounds and men were filled with misgiving. Three stout fellows volunteered to enter the gloom and see what they should see. But just as they were preparing to pounce on the unlooked-for danger, a pathetic creature crept out from under the stack of barrels, and the men very nearly stabbed and crushed it to death with their crowbars, so great was their shock at the sight.

It was an adolescent girl. Her dark hair fell like a wild growth from her head, her skin was swollen and sore with filth; her nakedness was covered by nothing but a torn, stinking sack. There was an iron manacle around her left ankle, which chained her to one of the great ship’s timbers, and from her miserable couch it was not hard to guess what use the crew had made of her. Then there was a bundle that she held in a vice-like grip and would not be parted from.

‘Abba…’ she said, so emptily that they shuddered, but she could give no further account of herself, despite being questioned. The salvage men realised that she was a simpleton, and some thought she looked as if she was carrying. They brought the girl and bundle ashore and delivered them into the hands of the sheriff’s wife. There she was given food and allowed to sleep two nights in a bed before being dressed in fresh clothes and sent to Reykjavik.

The salvage team was still busy on the third Sunday in June when the mail ship Arkturux rounded the cape of Reykjanes. As she passed the wreck of the oil ship, the passengers gathered at the rail to gaze at the colossus that lay stranded in the bay.

The oil porters took a break from their work and waved to the passengers, who waved back blearily, newly emerged from three days’ filthy weather north of the Faroes.

Among the passengers was a tall young man. He had a brown-checked woollen blanket round his shoulders, a grey bowler hat on his head and a long-stemmed pipe in his mouth.

He was Fridrik B. Fridjonsson.

Herb-Fridrik fills his pipe and contemplates the bundle that sits on the parlour table where the coffin had rested an hour before. It is wrapped in black canvas and tied up with three-ply string — which has held up well despite not having been touched for over seventeen years — and measures some sixteen inches high, twelve inches long and exactly ten wide. Fridrik grasps the bundle firmly, raises it to head height and shakes it against his ear. The contents are fixed, weight around ten pounds, nothing rattles inside. Any more than it ever has.

Fridrik puts it back on the table and goes into the kitchen. He pokes a match into the stove and carries the flame to his pipe, lighting it with slow, deliberate sucks. The tobacco crackles, he draws the first smoke of the day deep into his lungs and announces to thin air as he exhales:

‘Umph belong Abba.’

‘Umph’ could mean so many things in Abba language: box, chest, casket, ark or trunk, for example.

Fridrik has long had his suspicions as to what the bundle contains — he has often handled it — but only today will his curiosity be satisfied.

***

Fridrik crossed paths with Hafdis three days after his arrival in Iceland. He was on his way home from a dinner engagement, a gargantuan coffee-drinking session and singsong at the home of his former tutor, Mr G—. He let his legs decide the route. They swiftly bore him up from Kvosin, out of town, south over the stony ground and down to the sea where he ran along the ocean shore, yelling to bright infinity:

‘I pay homage to you, ocean, o mirror of the free man!’

It was Midsummer’s Eve, flies were swinging on the stalks, a ringed plover piped and the rays of the midnight sun barred the grass.

In those days the capital was small enough that a sound-limbed man could walk around it in half an hour, so Fridrik was soon back where his evening stroll had started — on the track behind the house of the old, grey tutor, Mr G—. The cook’s son came out of the back door, taking care not to drop a tray bearing a tin cup, potato peelings, trout skin and a hunk of bread; leftovers from the feast earlier in the evening.

Fridrik paused when he saw the boy take this to a tumbledown shed, which leant up against another slightly larger outhouse in the back yard. There the boy opened a hatch and eased the tray inside. From the lean-to came a scrambling and snorting, a clatter and grunting. The boy snatched back his hand, slammed the hatch and hurried away, bumping straight into Fridrik who had entered through the gate.

‘What have you got there, a Danish merchant?’

He said this in a mock-serious tone to soften its severity. The youth gaped at Fridrik as if he were one of Baron Munchhausen’s moon men, then answered grumpily:

‘Oh, I reckon it’s that hussy what did away with her child last week.’

‘You don’t say?’

‘Yes, the one what was taken in the graveyard, burying the child’s corpse in Olafur “student” Jonsson’s grave.’

‘And why is she here?’

‘I ’spect the bailiff asked his cousin to hold her. They hardly dare put her in the gaol with the men, says Mother.’

‘And what’s to be done with her?’

‘Oh, I ’spect she’ll be sent to Copenhagen for punishment, and sold to the lowest bidder when she comes back. If she comes back.’

The lad darted a shifty glance around and pulled a small snuff horn from his pocket.

‘Anyhow, I’m not s’posed to talk about what I hear in the house…’

He raised the horn to one nostril and sniffed with all his might. With that the conversation was at an end. While the cook’s son struggled with his sneeze, Fridrik went over to the lean-to. Squatting down, he pulled the cover from the hatch and peered inside. It was dim but the summer night cast enough blue light through the roof slats for his eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom, and he made out the figure of a woman in one corner. It was the prisoner.

She sat on the earthen floor with her legs straight out in front of her, hunched over the tray like a rag doll. In one small hand she held a strip of potato peel that she was using to push together fish-skin and bread, which she then pinched, raised to her mouth and chewed conscientiously. She took a sip from the tin cup and heaved a sigh. At that point Fridrik felt he had seen more than enough of the unhappy creature. He fumbled for the cover to close the hatch, bumping his hand on the wall with a loud knock. The figure in the corner became aware of him. She looked up and met his eyes; she smiled and her smile doubled the happiness of the world.

But before he could nod in return, the smile vanished from her face and was at once replaced by a mask so tragic that Fridrik burst into tears.

***

Fridrik unties the knot, winds the string round the fingers of his left hand, slides the coil over his fingertips and slips it into his waistcoat pocket. He unwraps the canvas from the bundle. Two packages of equal size come to light, wrapped in waxed brown paper. He lays them side by side and opens them. The contents of each appear to be the same: black wooden tablets, twenty-four in each pile. He turns over the tablets like cards from a pack, and notes that they are painted black on one side, white on the other; not all of them, however, because in one pile some of the tablets are black and green, while in the other they are black and blue. He scratches his beard.

‘Well, Abba-di, it’s quite something, this picture puzzle that you’ve carried through life…’

And now a strange and intricate spectacle unfolds in the little parlour at Brekka in the Dale. The master of the house handles each piece of the puzzle with care, examining it from every angle; the green and blue faces have lettering on them — a sentence in Latin — which simplifies the game.

He begins the jigsaw.

Starting with the blue tablets.

Fridrik B. Fridjonsson studied natural history at the University of Copenhagen from 1862 to 1865. Like so many of his countrymen, he did not finish his degree, and for his last three years in Denmark he was a regular employee of the Elefant Pharmacy, then under the management of the pharmacist Ørnstrup, in Store kongsgade. There Fridrik worked his way up to the position of medical assistant, helping with the pharmacist’s catalogue of inebriants: ether, opium, laughing gas, fly agaric, belladonna, chloroform, mandragora, hashish and coca. In addition to being used for various cures, these substances were greatly favoured by the lotus-eaters of Copenhagen.

The lotus-eaters were a group who modelled their way of life on the poetry of French writers such as Baudelaire, de Nerval, Gautier and de Musset. They threw parties — which gave birth to many rumours, but few attended — at which narcotic plants bore away the guests swiftly and sweetly to new worlds, both in flesh and in spirit. Fridrik was a frequent guest at these gatherings, and once, when they stood up from their ether-driven roller-coasters, he announced to his travelling companions:

‘I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!’

‘Spoken like “en rigtig Islænding”, a true Icelander,’ said the Danes.

Fridrik’s trip to Iceland in the summer of 1868 was, on the other hand, a far more earthbound affair. He had come to sell up his parents’ farm following their deaths from pneumonia, nine days apart, that spring. There were no assets to speak of: the remote croft of Brekka, the cow Crooked Horn, a few scrawny ewes, a fiddle, a chessboard, a bookcase, his mother’s spinning wheel and the tom cat Little Frikki. So the plan was to make his stay brief; it wouldn’t take long to sell the livestock to the neighbours, pay off the debts, pack up the furnishings, hang the cat and burn the farm buildings which were crumbling into the hillside, to the best of Fridrik’s knowledge.

And this is what he would have done if the universe had not thrown up an unexpected riddle in a filthy outhouse one sunny night in June.

***

The wooden tablets play in Fridrik’s hands; what had looked like an incomprehensible puzzle now guides his fingers. It’s as if the riddle is solving itself by magic; without conscious intent the man lays one tablet against another and the moment their edges touch, one slides into the other’s groove and then will not be budged; and so on and on, until the blue tablets have formed a base, while the others are the walls and gable-ends of what resembles a long, quite deep, trough; white-walled within, black without.

And the sentence on the base resolves itself: ‘Omnia mutantur — nihil interit’. Fridrik laughs scornfully: ‘All things change — nothing perishes’. He can’t imagine what cunning craftsman could have given Hafdis this object, choosing for her a quotation from Ovid, no less.

There is a lowing from the back of the house.

The riddle-solver wakes from his thoughts; Crooked Horn the Second is demanding attention. Fridrik puts down the creation and hurries to the byre; he hasn’t yet got the hang of the new household arrangements at Brekka; the animals used to be Abba’s concern.

***

Twenty-riksdaler stipends to students at the University were encumbered with the task of accompanying friendless folk to the grave. Fridrik performed this dreary duty like anyone else, but as he was a hopeless bibliomaniac and forever in the red with Høst the bookseller, he welcomed the chance to take the night watch at the city mortuary. While there he took on yet another job — that of translating articles from foreign medical journals for a thick-witted but well-to-do pathological anatomy student from Christiania.

Fridrik sat many a night by a smoking lamp, translating into Danish descriptions of the latest methods of keeping us poor humans alive, while on pallets around him lay the corpses, beyond any aid, despite the encouraging news of advances in electrical cures.

In the third volume of London Hospital Reports, 1866, Fridrik read an article on the classification of idiots by J. Langdon H. Down, a London doctor. The article was an attempt to explain a phenomenon that had long puzzled people: the fact that white women sometimes gave birth to defective children of Asiatic stock. The doctor conjectured that the mother’s illness or a shock during pregnancy might have caused the child to be born prematurely. This could happen anywhere in the well-documented developmental stages of the foetus: fish — lizard — bird — dog — ape — Negro — yellow man — Indian — white man, but seemed most common at the seventh stage.

Down’s Mongoloid children had therefore not attained full development; they were doomed to be childish and meek all their lives. But like other members of inferior races, with kind treatment and patience they could be taught many useful skills.

In Iceland they were destroyed at birth.

Unlike other types of cretins, where it cannot be seen until too late that they do not have their full wits, no one could fail to see that a Down’s child was made according to a different recipe from the rest of us, even of different, alien ingredients: it had coarser hair, a yellowish complexion, stumpy body, flabby skin and eyes slanted like slits in a canvas.

No witnesses were needed; before the child could utter its first wail, the midwife would close its nose and mouth, thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.

The child was said to have been stillborn and its body was consigned to the nearest priest. He confirmed its nature, buried the poor creature and that was the end of the story.

But there were always some such unfortunate infants that managed to survive. It happened in godforsaken out-of-the-way places where there was no one to talk sense into the mothers who thought they could cope with the children, odd though they were. Then of course they got lost, wandering off in their ignorance, leaving their bones on mountain paths, turning up half-dead in the summer pastures or simply stumbling into the lives of strangers.

And as the poor wretches didn’t know who they were or where they had blown in from, the authorities would settle them on whichever farm they happened to have ended up at.

The farmers were greatly annoyed by these ‘gifts from heaven’, and the household found it degrading to have to share their sleeping quarters with a defective.

***

There was no question that the unfortunate girl imprisoned in the bailiff of Reykjavik’s kinsman’s back yard was one of those Asiatic innocents who owned nothing but the breath in her lungs.

Wiping the food off her hands, she embraced the young man’s head as he wept in the chicken-hatch, comforting him with the following words:

‘Furru amh-amh, furru amh-amh…’

Twilight deepens in the valley; the afternoon night begins its journey up the slopes. The darkness seems to flow from the open grave in the western corner of the churchyard at Botn, as if the shadow grows there first, before darkening the whole world. It’s a near thing with the light: four men appear in the church doorway with a coffin on their shoulders, the parson hard on their heels, followed by several of those black-clad crones who are never ill when there’s someone to be seen to the grave. The funeral cortège proceeds rapidly, as if in a dance, their short steps breaking into quick variations, for the churchyard path is as slippery as glass, although Halfdan Atlason had been sent to break up the surface while they sang over his lady friend in church. Now he stands by the lych-gate, tolling the funeral bell.

A gust carries the copper song down the valley into Fridrik’s parlour where he hears its echo — no, it’s the knowledge that Abba’s funeral is taking place at this moment that has rung the tiniest bell in his mind.

He’s putting the finishing touches on the puzzle’s companion piece; it’s the exact image of the other, except that its base is green, with a different Latin tag. This is also by the author of Metamorphoses, translating as: ‘The burden which is well borne becomes light’.

The moment Reverend Baldur’s pallbearers lower the coffin into the black grave at Botn, it not only becomes pitch black in the valley but light is shed on the contents of the parcel that Hafdis Jonsdottir brought with her north to the Dale, when Fridrik B. Fridjonsson, favourite student of a close kinsman of the bailiff, got her absolved from the charge of exposing her child, on the grounds of ignorance, and on condition that she would remain in his care for as long as she lived.

Yes, if the two halves of the puzzle were laid together they would form an artfully crafted, highly polished coffin.

***

When Fridrik B. Fridjonsson rode north with his peculiar maid-servant and settled on his father’s estate at Brekka, the parish of Dale was served by a burnt-out priest popularly known as ‘Reverend Jakob with the pupil’ Hallsson, who as a child had taken out one of his eyes with a fishhook.

This incompetent minister was so used to his parishioners’ boorishness — scuffles, belches, farts and heckling — that he affected not to hear when Abba chimed in with his altar service, which she did both loud and clear and never in tune. He was more worried that the precentor would drown in his neighbours’ spittle. This fellow, a farmer by the name of Gilli Sigurgillason from Barnahamrar, possessed a powerful voice and sang in fits and starts, gaping so wide at the high notes that you could see right down his gullet, and the congregation used to amuse themselves by lobbing wet plugs of tobacco into his mouth — many of them had become quite good shots.

Four years later Reverend Jakob died, greatly regretted by his flock; he was remembered as ugly and tedious, but good with children.

His successor was Reverend Baldur Skuggason, who introduced a new era in church manners to the Dale. Men sat quietly on the benches, holding their tongues while the parson preached the sermon, having learnt how he dealt with rowdies: he summoned them to meet him after the service, took them round the back of the church and beat the living daylights out of them. The women, meanwhile, turned holy from the first day and behaved as if they had never taken part in teasing ‘the reverend with the pupil’. They said it served the louts to whom they were married or betrothed right, they should have been thrashed long ago; for the new parson was a childless widower.

Gilli from Barnahamrar now sang louder than ever, at the speed of a piston, with mouth gaping wide. But Fridrik was asked to leave Abba at home: the word of God must reach the ears of the congregation ‘uninterrupted by the ravings of an idiot’, as Reverend Baldur put it after the first and only time Abba attended one of his services.

There was no shifting him from this position; he would not have her anywhere near him. And none of the newly civilised and well-thrashed parishioners would speak up for a simple woman who knew no greater happiness than to dress up in her Sunday best and attend church with other people.

After this, Fridrik and Hafdis had few dealings with the folk of Dale. Halfdan Atlason sneaked a visit to Abba when he could. But the parson of Botn took a wide detour when he met them on the road.

***

The churchyard at Botn stands on the banks of the River Botnsa. This is a middling-sized, smooth stream, of a good depth and high-banked, bordered by spongy patches of marsh, with plenty of good peat land and enough of that deceptive surface rust. After a winter of heavy snow the river runs wild, bursting its banks with such demonic force that the dirty-grey melt water surges out of its course, flooding the marshes and forming lakes in the graveyard, leaving the church stranded on an island in its midst. The water-ringed house of God remains cut off until the graveyard has swallowed enough of the mountain milk for the water to just cover a maiden’s ankle; by then the sanctified ground is drunk and wobbles underfoot until well into summer.

After such fits in the Botnsa, the riverbank gives way and the churchyard crumbles into the river. Then it is clear that nature has treated the dead with so little respect that all is reduced to a mush: teeth and coccyx, fingers and toes, adults and children, lower jawbones and scalps, buttocks here, a woman’s pelvis there, a vertebra from this century, a man’s paunch from the last but one.

No, one couldn’t exactly say that ‘the Lord’s garden’ here in the Dale was cultivated; and men had to be true neighbours to be willing to revisit their neighbours in this condition.

So it was that on Monday 8th January 1883, Reverend Baldur performed the funeral rites on the company that Herb-Fridrik considered worthy of those who could not bring themselves to allow a simpleton to sing out of key with her parish priest: a quilt cover stuffed with sixty-six pounds of cow dung, the skeleton of a decrepit ewe, an empty aquavit cask, some rotten barrel staves and a mouldy urine tub.

Abba deserved a different soul-mate, fairer earth.

Ghost-sun is a name given by poets to their friend the moon, and it is fitting tonight when its ashen light bathes the grove of trees that stand in the dip above the farmhouse at Brekka. This little copse was the loving creation of Abba and Fridrik, and few things made them more of a laughing stock in the Dale than its cultivation, though most of their endeavours met with ridicule.

The rowan draws shadow pictures on the snow crust; there’s a low soughing in the naked boughs and the odd twig still bears a cluster of dried berries that the birds overlooked last year.

Fridrik toils slowly up the slope; he has a woman’s body in his arms. In the middle of the grove is a freshly dug grave; on the edge of the grave stands an open coffin. The man approaches the coffin and lays the body inside. Then he hurries back, but the moon remains.

Hafdis is well equipped for her final journey. She’s dressed in her Sunday best and great care has been taken with every aspect of her costume: on her head sits a cap with a long tassel and an oft-twisted silver tube; around her neck is a violet silk scarf; her jacket is of English cloth and the embroidered borders of her bodice are visible beneath; her apron is sewn from rose damask and the buttons, cast in white silver, bear an elaborate ‘A’; her skirt is striped with cross-stitched velvet bands and her legs are encased in red socks and high black stockings; her shoes are of heather-coloured calfskin with white stitching; and on her hands she wears black mittens, with roses in four colours knitted on the backs.

Abba bought these rich clothes for herself, paying out of the wages she received for assisting with the unusual farming that is practised at Brekka; on the one hand the collecting of plants, on the other the creation of small books on Icelandic flora: ‘with fifty-seven genuine dried samples’, as was said of them in the article about Iceland in the Illustrierte Zeitung. These were the sorts of books romantic young men gave to their future brides, and the last pages were left empty for the composition of pretty poems.

Fridrik kneels beside the coffin, holding a different sort of book; it is thick and psalter-like, with the odd bird’s feather sticking out from between the pages. This is Abba’s bird book, in which she collected feathers with passion and exactitude. She glued them to the pages, and under her instruction Fridrik recorded the names and gender of the birds, and the provenance of the feathers. He had often wondered where Abba had picked up all her bird-lore, but there were no answers to be had from her, and when he tried to teach her more natural history, she thanked him politely, saying merely that she was interested in birds.

On the title page she herself had written: ‘BiRRds of tHE WOrld — AbbA fRom BreKKa’.

Fridrik places the book on Abba’s breast and lays her hands to rest in a cross on top. He inadvertently holds them tighter than intended and feels the small fingers through the mittens. This cheers him a little; these are the hands that comforted him after he lost his parents.

He kisses her brow.

He closes the coffin.

Fridrik finishes filling in the grave. He takes off his woollen cap, folds it and puts it in his jacket pocket. He pulls off his gloves and shoves them in his armpits.

He falls to his knees.

He bows his head.

He sighs sorrowfully.

Straightening up, he gazes down through the earth to where he pictures Abba’s face, and recites two verses for her. The first is an optimistic poem; a little bird rhyme of his own making:

A summer bird sang

On a sunny day:

Happiness led me,

O’er the airy way

My friend for to see.

The little bird sang

of its rowan tree.

The second is the introduction to a lost ballad. It tells of the equality that all living beings are ensured in death, without any need for revolution:

Earth fails,

All grows old and worn.

Flesh is dust — however it’s adorned.

Rising to his feet, he puts on his cap, reaches into his pocket for a little pipe made from a sheep’s leg bone and plays a tune from ‘The Death of the Nightingale’ by the late Franz Schubert, thus linking the two poetic fragments.

Then at last Fridrik’s eyes fill with tears: they set off down his cheeks but dry up halfway; it’s cold out. He bids farewell to Hafdis Jonsdottir with the same words as she took her leave of him:

‘Abba-ibo!’

***

Between the peaks to the west, there is a glimpse of the universe where three stars of the constellation Cygnus glitter.

Heavy banks of cloud overshadow the valley.

It snows until late in the morning.

The sky is clear and the first blush of day at its winter blackest. Fridrik B. Fridjonsson stands out in the yard at Brekka, hidden by the farmhouse door, smoking opium-moistened tobacco in his pipe.

Something brushes against his foot: the oldest tom cat in Northern Europe: Little Frikki. He’s cold after his feline ‘Winterreise’ and wants to be let in. His namesake obliges him.

Shortly afterwards he sees a man emerge from the farmhouse at Dalbotn. It’s Reverend Baldur Skuggason, like a little bump in the landscape. A tiny stick juts up from his left shoulder: his gun.

He slides down over the homefields, then sets a course north over the Asar for the cliffs at Bjarg.

Herb-Fridrik knocks out his pipe on the heel of his shoe.

And goes inside to sleep.