The Quiet Mother

31

Konrád didn’t know any midwives, but his wife Erna had been a doctor and worked in hospitals and knew plenty of nurses and doctors. Konrád had got to know some of those people over the years. One of them was a woman named Svanhildur, who in several instances handled autopsies and had worked with Konrád when he was in CID. They’d become good friends, and quite a bit more than that. After Erna died, Svanhildur had contacted him several times to find out how he was doing, but he’d responded coolly, preferring to act as if nothing had happened between them. However, he’d had to go to her for information he needed and she’d always been warm, welcoming and helpful to him without expecting anything in return. At most, she asked if they could maybe talk to each other about what was important, and told him that he had no reason to avoid her.

After much thought and a few glasses of wine to help work up his nerve, he called Svanhildur late in the evening after returning from his visit to Pálmi. He came straight to the point, as per usual, and said that he wanted to know if she could help him track down a midwife who’d been active around 1970 and who might have had a reputation for her opposition to abortions –

‘Terminations of pregnancy,’ said Svanhildur.

‘Termi...?’

‘That’s what it’s called more often today.’

Svanhildur was immediately interested. If she was surprised to get a phone call from him so late in the evening, she didn’t show it. Nor did she say anything about him mumbling a bit on the phone. She asked what he was up to these days that involved midwives and he told her about his acquaintance with Valborg, whom he’d denied his help, and said that it troubled him a bit that he hadn’t helped her. He could certainly have done so, and shouldn’t have been so peevish and difficult when she told him what she was looking for. The next thing he knew, she’d been murdered in her own home, and he could possibly have prevented it if he’d only bothered to help her.

He blurted this all out and she sensed that he wasn’t feeling well, and had maybe lost control of his drinking.

‘Is that the woman in the block of flats?’ she asked. ‘Valborg?’

‘I could really have helped her,’ Konrád said. ‘I still don’t understand why I didn’t.’

‘No, but you couldn’t have prevented what happened,’ Svanhildur said. ‘You’re not a cop. You’re retired.’

‘But if it was related?’

‘What?’

‘She’d made enquiries about her child before she came to me. What if that’s what triggered all this?’

‘Do you have some reason for thinking that?’

‘No.’

‘Did you say she was a midwife? Or what do midwives have to do with this?’

‘Valborg was expecting a child that she wanted nothing to do with and got in touch with a midwife who delivered the baby and put it into someone else’s hands. Got rid of it. She came to me for help finding her child. It’s been almost fifty years since the child was born and the woman had no idea what became of it. She never saw it. It could have been a boy. Could have been a girl.’

‘And what, are you trying to find that person now? Isn’t it a bit too late?’

‘Yes. It’s damned late. But in any case, that midwife seemed to have known of foster parents who would provide a home for the child, and it was all done so that no one knew anything, apart, of course, from those who participated in it. She probably even forged the necessary papers. The foster parents could have said they’d adopted the child via the normal route or that it was their own. No one would have disputed that, certainly not at the time.’

‘Do you know why the woman didn’t want to have the baby?’

‘No, I’m working on that,’ Konrád said.

Both of them fell silent as they thought these things over, until Svanhildur couldn’t take it any more.

‘Did you call me just because of this, or...?’

‘It’s good to be able to talk to you about it,’ Konrád said. ‘It’s always been good to be able to talk to you.’

‘So are you done avoiding me? It’s been a long time. Ever since Erna died. It’s not like I want to reopen an old can of worms, but I think you would benefit from talking about what happened. About us. I know it would do you good. And I know that you feel bad about how it all turned out. Because we went behind her back. But I’ve told you before that she wouldn’t have been any better off knowing about us. Not at all.’

‘I would have liked it to have gone differently,’ said Konrád. ‘I shouldn’t have listened to you.’

‘You’re not blaming me for it?’

‘No, of course not, it’s no one’s fault when such things happen.’

‘When such things...?’

‘Worst is that... sometimes I’m haunted by doubts. That she knew about us but didn’t say anything. Knew about the adultery and was waiting for me to tell her everything. For me to come clean. I never did that, and it’s not a good thought.’

‘She knew nothing about us.’

‘I’m not sure. And it hurts. Besides the fact that she should have been told. She had every right. She had a good sense for such things and it may well be that she put two and two together but said nothing. Waited for me to come clean and ask for her forgiveness.’

‘You can’t agonise over this.’

‘No, but I do anyway.’

When they parted shortly afterwards, they said they should meet again soon, although without much conviction, and Svanhildur promised to enquire about midwives. Konrád opened a new bottle of red wine. It was called the Dead Arm. Erna had found it many years ago and given it to him because one of his arms was misshapen, weaker since birth, and withered; he didn’t have full use of it. Konrád had got into the habit of keeping his hand in his pocket when he spoke with strangers, as if to hide his disability. Not that he was ashamed of being disabled; he just didn’t want people to feel sorry for him. Didn’t want them to see any signs of weakness in him. He couldn’t stand the thought. Erna had never done so. Had never viewed the arm as anything but perfectly natural, and treated it with complete irreverence. In her mind, Konrád couldn’t be anything other than who he was, and to celebrate that, Erna found him this fitting wine.

Konrád smiled to himself at the thought and looked at the old wooden object of his father’s. He grabbed it and pondered it, as he’d done so many times before. He hardly remembered how the affair started. He was burned out at work after years of fruitless investigation into a disappearance that, much later, turned out to be a routine murder case. The body hadn’t been found because it was buried on Langjökull Glacier, of all places, and was discovered only by coincidence three decades later, mainly thanks to global warming.

Konrád had rarely been so down. The investigation of the case had been halted and he felt that he’d failed, and then year after year passed without him being able to pull himself up out of his melancholy and depression. And once when Erna was at a conference abroad, he went downtown with a few other police officers and met Svanhildur and some of her friends at a nightclub. She’d been divorced for two years and lived alone. Svanhildur invited him to her place to call a taxi and one thing led to another. They had a drink, he looked at her, and they ended up sleeping together for the first time. The next morning, he slunk out without saying goodbye. As if he’d never been there. As if it had never happened. He was good at that.

But it did happen, and was so surprisingly effortless. It required no preparation or lead-up, which surprised him most of all. And it should have ended there because he could have told Erna that he’d made a mistake that one time, and it would never happen again. He was prepared to do so and was waiting for Erna to come home when Svanhildur called him and asked if they could meet. Konrád refused at first, but then called her back and said he needed to talk to her. He was going to tell her that he had to come clean with Erna. They met at Svanhildur’s place. It went exactly the same as the first time.

They kept seeing each other every now and then for the next few years, but stopped when Erna fell ill. Konrád never told Erna what happened. He and Svanhildur had easily found time for their dalliance. Erna worked a lot in those years and Konrád himself was always ‘at work’. What was he looking for? What could he get from an affair with a divorced woman? What did it give him, when all was said and done? A change? Excitement? Did it take his mind off what was really eating away at him from the inside, which was that unsolvable case he had on his hands?

The thought that Erna had known about the lie without revealing that she did became unbearable to him over time.

Konrád knocked the wooden object against the edge of the table, and even harder the angrier he grew with himself. He knew that that peculiar object wasn’t the only thing his father had left behind. One thing was indifference. Another was negligence. Anger, as well. Konrád had grown up with anything but honesty in dealing with other people. His childhood was spent in the close company of subterfuge and fraud. He knew that there was a great deal true and correct in what Erna said about his past. When his peers were learning the commandment ‘thou shalt not steal’, he was helping his father move what he’d stolen from one location to another.

He didn’t always choose honesty if the other option was more profitable for him, and lies were his constant companions. Not necessarily lies that he told others, but ones that he told himself.

Konrád suddenly felt as if this object of his father’s was cursed. That everything that had gone wrong in his life was his father’s fault, and he flung it away. It hit the wall with a strange hollow sound from the past.