The Quiet Mother

27

Eygló asked if Konrád was interested in coming with her to the cemetery, but he said he didn’t have time, so she headed there by herself after their meeting in the city centre. It was growing dark and the traffic was becoming heavier when she parked her car on a side street. The sky was overcast and a fine drizzle settled onto her clothes and face as she trod slowly between old graves and moss-grown memorials. She was careful not to step on any of the graves, but inched her way between them, reading the headstones and taking note of the dates. She came to the cemetery often and spent quiet time there, although its serenity was becoming rarer as more and more tourists spent less time downtown and started visiting it in their constant search for something different.

Eygló walked slowly around the cemetery. She’d often encountered people who believed firmly in the afterlife and felt they’d received confirmation of it in various ways. Engilbert was one of them and she grew up with that belief. Her father was convinced of the existence of a realm where souls of the deceased gathered when they escaped from their earthly bodies and could then, via special powers, come back into contact with the mortal world. He said he had plenty of evidence for it from his job. Eygló herself had experienced many things that were incomprehensible to her, even if she’d always had doubts about what her dad and the old mediums called the etheric realm. She had no fixed ideas about what forces were at work when her perception reached beyond the ordinary. They were as mysterious to her as when she began seeing the uncanny and unexplained as a child.

Eygló moved slowly past the Sturla tomb, which had been renovated recently, and, before long, stood at Málfríður’s grave. The old woman lay next to her husband and was the only one who’d been buried in the cemetery this year, not counting the urns that were buried in older graves. The number of people who had reserved spaces in the city’s oldest cemetery was decreasing greatly. Eygló would have liked to be buried there, but it was impossible. At one time she’d half jokingly offered to pay Málfríður for her burial plot. Her joke had fallen flat.

The few graves made nowadays in the cemetery were dug by hand, just as was done when the place was first put into use in 1838. Eygló inhaled the aroma of the fresh soil on top of Málfríður’s grave and squeezed a handful of it in her palm. There was no memorial over the grave. That would come later.

‘She’s in a good place,’ Eygló heard behind her, and when she turned to see who it was, she saw Málfríður’s friend, the same one who’d been sitting at her bedside when Eygló visited her last. She remembered Málfríður calling the woman Hulda. She was wearing the same green coat, with a veil tied around her head. She had slipped up beside Eygló and was gazing at the new grave, her expression gentle as the drizzle.

‘Could I have seen you with her the day she died?’ Eygló asked.

‘I wanted to be with her when she said goodbye.’

‘I’m sure she appreciated it,’ said Eygló.

The woman looked down at the dark soil.

‘What she was looking for, she has now...’

Eygló didn’t hear the end of the sentence. A man came walking down the cemetery path and called to her in English, asking if she knew where the grave of President Jón Sigurðsson could be found. Eygló didn’t understand him at first. She thought his accent was Scandinavian, but replied in her broken English, directing him further east, in the direction of Suðurgata Road, to where the stone column rose over the president’s grave. The man thanked her and went on his way and when Eygló returned to Málfríður’s grave, the woman in the green coat was gone. Eygló looked around. She would have liked to say goodbye to her, but it was too late. The half-finished sentence hung in the air and Eygló wondered what she’d been going to say.

She stood at the grave for some time before continuing her walk through the cemetery. She had other business there. She generally felt good in the peacefulness of cemeteries, but not this time. She’d gone online and found directions to the plot and had no problem finding it. She was surprised that the headstone wasn’t taken better care of. Grass and weeds grew wild inside a low stone wall that demarcated the three graves. The top of the wall had crumbled in places and the headstone was leaning back and to the side and was badly weathered. There was barely a trace of the gilding that had once lifted the names of the dead. The third name had been added many years after the other two, when the family was finally reunited in the soil.

Eygló read the names and dates before laying her hand on the stone and saying a short prayer. ‘Forgive us our debts,’ she whispered. Her father had taken advantage of Stella’s plight. Although she could barely believe it, he appeared to have abused a gullible innocent in partnership with a criminal in order to get a few krónur off her. Eygló was filled with sadness when she thought of Stella and her son, and about her father. As a child, Eygló had a much closer relationship with Engilbert than with her mother. She and her father were of the same make, and when something was wrong, she turned to him and found warmth, comfort and above all understanding of her sensitivity. But everyone has his own demons. Eygló knew that he was a weak man and struggled with all sorts of problems. She didn’t know all the stories, but feared that some were similar to the ones she’d heard from Stella’s great-nephew.

And forgive us our debts. The headstone was cold and hard and coarse to the touch, and the ground had sagged beneath its weight, as if it could no longer bear the sorrow it harboured.

That evening, Eygló did something she hadn’t done in a long time. She was distracted and had no idea why it happened, but suddenly she was sitting at the piano at home. It stood in a corner of the living room, a Danish heirloom from her father’s family that had mainly been decoration. It had been in storage at her aunt’s, and Eygló took it when her aunt died. Four sturdy, resourceful men had been needed to move it to its place in Fossvogur. They thought it weighed no less than three hundred kilos, and had never encountered anything like it.

Eygló didn’t play the instrument, but at one point, when she took a few piano lessons, she summoned a piano tuner who said it was hardly worth his bother, its inner workings were in such bad shape. The piano tuner thought that it had been built in Denmark around the turn of the century, 1900, and said that it was a completely outdated, useless thing and went on about how seriously off-key it was. Eygló didn’t understand what he was talking about. The instrument’s wood was also badly damaged, making it utterly futile to tune it. On the other hand, its exterior was in decent shape and beautiful, with flowery decorations, and looked good in the living room. He said he knew that many people were proud of such heirlooms, but used them solely to adorn their living rooms.

And there she sat at the old piano, without knowing why. Maybe she’d heard a piano being played in one of the flats on Ljósavallagata Street, where she’d parked her car when visiting the cemetery. Maybe it was a piano concerto on the afternoon radio that she’d forgotten. She lifted the heavy lid and ran her fingers over the yellowed ivory, and noticed that one key was stuck. She tried to free it but couldn’t, no matter what. She didn’t remember the key being like that the last time she opened the piano, and wondered how this could have happened. She rarely had visitors and she knew for sure that none of them had touched the piano.

Nevertheless, it was as if someone had struck the key with such force that now it wouldn’t come unstuck. Perplexed, Eygló shut the piano, but couldn’t find any answers. Her pondering gave her a bad feeling that pursued her into sleep, and late in the night, Engilbert visited her in a dream. It was an ugly vision. He was hunched over the instrument, as drenched as when they found him and pulled him out of the harbour. The water dripped from him to the floor and seaweed was tangled in his salty hair. His back was turned to her and he didn’t look up, but had opened the piano’s lid and was playing the same false note over and over again, as if in a rage.

When Eygló woke up the next morning, she went hesitantly to the living room and knew that what she’d seen that night hadn’t necessarily been a dream.