The Quiet Mother

65

The weather was mild and Konrád watched the tourists admiring the Sun Voyager sculpture standing down by the sea, on its eternal voyage out to the stars.

His mobile rang. It was Marta.

‘He’ll probably never fully recover,’ she said. ‘Bernódus. She managed to damage some nerves.’

‘I got there too late,’ Konrád said, as if it were a cliché.

‘You should have kept in better touch with me,’ said Marta, yet not in any sort of accusatory tone. ‘The wife has been telling us about her difficult home life with him. Violence. Oppression. He threatened to kill her if she left him. The whole package. The daughter says she hadn’t known all of it. Just some things. She thought he was getting much better. One big game of concealment and co-dependence. She herself has asked for a DNA test and wants to find out if she and Daníel were siblings.’

Konrád remained silent on the phone.

‘You’re not really bothered about them, are you?’ said Marta.

‘No.’

‘You’re thinking about Daníel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could this have happened anywhere besides Iceland?’

‘I don’t know.’

They said their goodbyes shortly afterwards and Konrád looked in the direction of the eternal voyage, and then at the pavement. He hadn’t had much of a chance recently to think about the window of a smokehouse. He’d figured out several years ago, after the Butchers’ Association buildings were replaced by newer ones, that in the place where his feet now rested, the smoking kilns had once stood and his father had bled out. He tried to envision where the window had been and if it had played any part when his father was attacked. Whether the murderer had hidden in the smokehouse or entered the building through the window during his escape.

He was pondering these things when his mobile phone rang again. It was Eygló. They’d talked about Regína and her daughter and Daníel, and Eygló recalled how she’d once visited their home along with a psychic healer, and how that visit had been the impetus for her not to pursue medium work.

‘Do you still have that music box of yours?’ she asked after they’d talked for a while.

Konrád was holding it in his hand.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Eygló wanted to talk about their fathers, but sensed that he was distracted and said she would talk to him another time.

Konrád stuck his phone in his pocket and walked back towards his car. He continued looking at the Sun Voyager, sailing into eternity. The artwork conveyed a feeling of freedom that he liked. He walked past a rubbish bin and for a moment stopped and considered the object in his hand, before tossing it in the bin and continuing on his way, slightly lighter of step.