The Quiet Mother

19

The man pulled open the garage door and Konrád saw what he meant when he said that the photograph collection was a mess and the garage cluttered. He hadn’t lied when he said that the collection was extensive; after all, it spanned his father’s nearly half-century career, and it would take many years to go through it, sort the photos and put them in order. He had applied for grants to do so after his father died, but had been denied every time. The garage was no storage space for historical relics of this sort. Some had even been damaged because the garage had leaked for a time, and water had twice flooded the floor where cardboard boxes held thousands of negatives and photographs. The man was most worried about it all catching fire, because as everyone knows, photographic film, which most people no longer used, was one of the most flammable materials imaginable.

His father had paid little attention to organising the photo collection. His great interest was taking photos, but he cared less about preserving them. For most of his life, he’d been a freelance newspaper and magazine photographer. Every now and then he’d taken a job with a newspaper, had worked for several years for an afternoon paper and a few more for one of the morning papers. In those days, numerous papers were published that were connected to political parties, and that had long since disappeared into oblivion. He’d never liked political journalism.

The man pushed a box that was up against the garage door and said that his father had witnessed numerous important events in the life of the nation. He’d also been there when celebrities visited the country: Lyndon B. Johnson, Reagan and Gorbachev, Benny Goodman, Helen Keller, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. He’d never said much about his work, although sometimes, if he was in high spirits, he recounted how Keller ran her hands over his face and said it was rough but kind.

‘And he was always listening in on the police frequencies,’ said the man. ‘It’s one of the very first memories I have of him. Sitting in his car with a couple of cameras and the radio buzzes and some notification is sent over the airwaves and he says he needs to pop out but will be right back.’

‘He usually got there before us,’ said Konrád, who remembered the photographer well, a rather serious man, thin and tall, with one camera around his neck and another in his hands. ‘He always made sure not to get in the way or interfere with the work of the police, whether the subject was a car accident, a burglary or, on occasion, a murder scene.’

Konrád had explained to the man what he was after, without mentioning that he was personally connected to the case. He’d only said that he retired after working for many years on the police force and had little to occupy him, and this old case had been on his mind for a long time. He’d visited the descendants of another photographer who had showed up at the slaughterhouse that night, but to no avail. The man’s earliest negatives and photos were lost. The paper that he’d been working for had merged with another, and then both were combined with yet another that finally went bankrupt. Its photo collection had been sold in several parts and some of it simply thrown away. Konrád hadn’t felt like tracking down what remained.

‘Listen,’ said the man, looking over the garage, ‘all the oldest stuff is in the boxes there in the back, with the material getting younger the closer you get to the door. Or at least that was the thinking. Some of it’s in envelopes, labelled and dated, and some have been printed, but most of it’s just loose negatives. Endless negatives. He was actually more organised the first years, so you could be lucky.’

‘Did your dad ever talk about that incident, about what he saw at the slaughterhouse?’ Konrád asked.

‘No, I don’t remember that,’ the man said thoughtfully. ‘He spoke very little about what he was working on, but my mother said he was sometimes saddened by what he saw through his lens. Especially when it was a serious car accident. That was long before seat belts were mandatory, of course. He found them the most difficult. The car accidents.’

They started at the back of the garage, where Konrád saw that there were photos and negatives in large brown envelopes that were dated to the start of the 1950s. One of them was dated 1954. It contained two developed rolls of film and three photographs of a new petrol station just outside Reykjavík, probably on its opening day. Cars at the pumps, men in hats and women in dresses with handbags on their arms sauntering in the sunshine.

After about an hour of searching, Konrád and the photographer’s son had made it to the 1960s. There were strong fluorescent lights in the garage’s ceiling, and they had straightened up and peered into the light through a myriad of negatives bearing images of long-forgotten people and events. Konrád was grateful for the man’s patience, for being more than willing to help find the right negatives and showing this hunt of his a great deal of understanding. He had said that Konrád’s visit would give him a welcome opportunity to get a grip on his father’s photograph collection, which, for the most part, he’d left untouched until now.

After another hour they took a break and the man went and made coffee, returning with two cups of the steaming-hot beverage and a cruller for each of them. They chatted about this and that at the garage door, and it turned out that the man worked as a bricklayer and had to take it easy after minor surgery on his knee. He said he’d considered handing over his father’s photographs to a museum; the National Museum, maybe. Much of the material they’d already looked at might seem useless, but it still had historical value. Konrád had been thinking the same thing when he looked through the photos and held the negatives up to the light. They showed Reykjavík’s rapid development at the time when the city was spilling outwards into its modern-day suburbs. They showed fashion, entertainment, sports matches, the cars of the day, women and men at their daily tasks, human life that had disappeared into silence and oblivion.

The man finished his coffee, looked at his watch, and said he had to do a few things in the house, but invited Konrád to continue searching the collection. Konrád thanked him again for his understanding and carried on delving, while making sure to put everything back in its place. The sun was setting by the time he’d dug down to a cardboard box on the floor in one corner of the garage. The bottom of the box was damaged, clearly having been subjected to water, and tore apart easily when Konrád tried to lift it. The contents spilled onto the floor at his feet: loose negatives, a few empty film canisters and old, brittle paper sachets and envelopes holding more negatives and photographs. Konrád cursed silently. All of it was unmarked and he went conscientiously through the material, held negatives up to the garage’s lights and tried to get a grasp of the subject. One envelope was bigger and thicker than the others and as soon as Konrád opened it and took out the photos he realised he’d finally hit on the right box.

The photos were black and white and some were dull and even out of focus, taken with flashbulbs, but Konrád immediately recognised the subject: the bleak surroundings, the walls of the slaughterhouse, the gate to the lot, Skúlagata, the shoreline below it. He saw the police officers and their cars and scattered bystanders watching from a reasonable distance. He didn’t recognise any of these photos from the newspapers published at the time of the murder or from the police reports. This was new material for him, and when he went carefully through the photos, one by one, an old, uneasy feeling from a long-past night crept up on him.

At the bottom of the stack, Konrád found a photo of his father’s body. It was taken a moment before the body was transported away from the scene, and over it hung a gloom, as if it were a war photo. The ambulance was parked close by, with its back doors open. Men were bent over the body, just about to lift it onto a stretcher. Lying there in the street, it was covered with a blanket apart from one hand that stuck out from beneath it, and Konrád stared at the cold hand that a few hours before had been his father’s clenched fist, which he’d aimed at his son in a hateful rage.