by Stefan Mani
In the middle is another Steamship Company Dettifoss, launched in 1949 and sold abroad twenty years later.
And the third photo is the third Dettifoss, which came to harbour in 1970 and served the Steamship Company for nineteen years, until it too was sold in 1989.
‘Were you on the Dettifoss?’ Karl asks, nodding towards the black-and-white photos.
‘Yeah. Why?’ says the bartender suspiciously.
‘On the third one, was it?’ Karl asks with interest.
‘I was mate on the third one, yes,’ the bartender says, glancing at the top photo. ‘Second mate for a good while, but I was chief mate before they sold it.’
‘And then what?’ Karl sips his whiskey. ‘Did you leave the sea?’
‘What’s with all the questions?’ the bartender asks, looking accusingly at Karl, who shrugs innocently.
‘My old dad was a sailor too,’ says Karl after a short silence. ‘Mate, like you. Mostly on fishing vessels. Then he left the sea in 1970. Bought a stake in a fishing company and started working ashore.’
‘Good for him,’ mutters the bartender, wiping ash of the bar with a wet cloth. ‘But how about just paying your bill, mate, before I close up.’
‘But working ashore didn’t suit him,’ says Karl, his mind elsewhere, taking a short drag on his smoke. ‘And in early 1973 he went back to sea, after the company had virtually gone bankrupt.’
‘Listen, mate!’ says the bartender, putting his fists against the edge of the bar. ‘I don’t have time to listen to your dad’s life story. Not now!’
‘The boat he got a job on,’ says Karl calmly, putting out his cigarette in the ashtray, ‘was the Seventh Star from Keflavík.’
‘The Seventh Star?’ The bartender is all ears now. ‘What year did you say, 1973?’
‘Yep,’ answers Karl coolly, nodding.
‘Was he on board when they …?’ The bartender trails off, leaning closer to Karl.
‘When they left the Faroe Islands for Iceland on February eleventh, 1973?’ says Karl, a faraway look in his eyes as he focuses on nothing behind the bartender’s head. ‘Yeah. He was on board then. The boat had been under repair and they were in a hurry to get home and to the fishing grounds.’
‘I was on Dettifoss at the same time,’ says the bartender, opening wide his world-weary eyes. ‘We were on our way home from Leith in Scotland. I was up in the bridge when Captain Erlendur heard the emergency transmission. The Seventh Star was sunk by then, and the men were in the lifeboats.’
‘Is that true?’ Karl raises his eyebrows at the bartender, who wipes the sweat off his forehead.
‘Yeah. I’ll never forget it,’ says the bartender, lighting a cigarette. ‘After twenty minutes we heard the transmission again, but we couldn’t make out the words. We tried to locate the castaways, but the weather was bad that night. A major storm and ten lives in immediate danger. I’ll never forget that night. Never.’
‘They only found one man,’ says Karl, sighing. ‘One corpse, I mean.’
‘Yeah.’ The bartender pours himself a shot of whiskey and fills Karl’s glass up to the brim. ‘Nineteen days later. After one of the most extensive searches in the history of accidents at sea. Did it turn out to be …?’
‘Dad? No,’ Karl says with a shake of his head. ‘He was never found. May he rest in peace.’
‘Cheers, pal!’ says the bartender, lifting his glass. ‘Here’s to your dad!’
‘Yeah. Cheers!’ says Karl with a weak smile then they touch glasses and toss back the contents. Karl licks his lips and hopes the bartender won’t ask him any more about that famous accident, which Karl only knows about from stories his brother-in-law Jónas has told him several times, during their numerous drinking sessions over the past years.
‘So you’re a seaman yourself?’ says the bartender, taking a drag of his cigarette.
‘Yeah, I am,’ mutters Karl. ‘Against the will of my old man, who didn’t intend ever to go back to sea himself.’
‘That’s how it goes,’ murmurs the bartender, signalling to an impatient customer to wait. ‘Listen, pal. I’ll just keep your bill. You can just pay me next time you’re ashore. Okay?’
‘Thanks,’ says Karl, smiling crookedly as he sticks the Camels in an inside pocket of his jacket. ‘Could you maybe phone me a cab?’
‘That I’ll do!’ The bartender waves his callused seaman’s hand at Karl before turning to the last customer of the evening.
Karl walks to the exit, buttons up his duffel coat and turns up the collar before he walks out into the cold night.
‘Last call before closing!’ shouts the bartender and rings the old brass bell three times, so it resounds through the smoke-filled bar. Then the door closes behind Karl and the noisy hubbub immediately changes to a low rumble.
The taxi arrives and Karl asks the driver to take him to Mosfellsbær.
‘The street was Hjarðarland, didn’t you say?’ the driver asks after a while.
‘Huh? Yes,’ says Karl, opening his eyes. He had fallen asleep in the softness of the back seat, with his head to the side. The cab is warm and Karl feels a bit sick waking up like that.
‘Number what?’ says the driver, slowing down.
‘This is fine. I’ll get out here,’ says Karl after looking out the window and seeing his brother-in-law’s house across the street.
‘All right,’ says the driver as he parks the car and turns on the inside light. ‘That’ll be fourteen-hundred crowns.’
‘Keep the change,’ says Karl, handing the man everything he’s got.
‘Thanks.’ The driver takes the wrinkled bills. ‘And goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’ Karl closes the car door behind him.
His sister María’s house is dark and no-one answers the bell. Not even María. The garage is also dark, and Jónas’s Jeep doesn’t seem to be there.
‘Damn,’ says Karl under his breath, stepping down off the wheelbarrow he overturned by the garage to see in the window.
In front of the garage door is a white bag of rubbish that Karl picks up and shoves into the family garbage bin before strolling down to Highway One.
There aren’t many cars on the road and drops of freezing rain are falling from the pitch-black heavens. Karl just misses a couple of transport trucks, and during the two minutes he’s been huddled on the verge two saloon cars have shot past without even slowing down. The rain is getting denser and the cold drops slide in under the collar of his denim jacket, which is slowly getting soaked. Karl sets off walking east and turns around to stick his thumb in the air whenever he sees lights coming or hears an engine.
A seven-passenger taxi speeds past and then seems to slow down. Karl walks faster and waves at the taxi that lights up the dark of the Thingvellir turn-off with its bright red brakelights. He had seen a man’s face through the passenger window. A face that seemed familiar. And he thought the passenger also recognised him. Karl has no idea where they might have met and it doesn’t really matter. He runs after the taxi, which suddenly speeds up again and sails away into the rain-dark night.
Karl comes to a halt and catches his breath, freezing, wet and with a painful stitch in his chest from running.
The bar. That man had been in the bar earlier this evening. That guy in the taxi. The face in the car window.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ he mutters. He stands by the road sign for Thingvellir, hunched over with his hands on his wet knees, the taste of blood in his mouth.
That’s it, he thinks. I’ll never get to Grundartangi in time. The ship’s going to sail without me.
But then a cone of light appears on the bitumen, the deep roar of an engine approaches and wide radial tyres spurt water from under a silver Range Rover Vogue.
Karl straightens up, takes two steps onto the road, turns around, holds out his arm and points his blue-white thumb towards the sky.
The high-tech xenon lights blind him momentarily, then the big car kisses him on the cheek. Gives him a cold kiss
. Breaks bones, tears flesh and mangles organs. All in a fraction of a second. It throws him onto the verge and rolls him face down into the ditch, where he jerks convulsively, half submerged in the mud of a brown puddle. Paralysed with shock. Unconscious.
The growling Range Rover hurtles on into the night with a broken headlight, a cracked windscreen and a streak of blood running from its front fender up to the roof.
No light but the creamy yellow of the streetlights. No noise but the pounding of the rain.
Nothing to see but a human form in a ditch.
Shoes on the side of the road.
And drops of blood on the wet bitumen.
VI
In a windowless basement, a naked man lies on a leather-covered bench, his hands gripping a bar that rests in the notches of steel uprights half a metre above his face. He tenses his chest and back, pushes the soles of his feet against the floor, keeps his buttocks just touching the bench and lifts the bar up out of its notches. He stares with concentration at the middle of the bar, fills his lungs with air and holds his breath as he allows the bar to sink to his chest. When the cold steel touches his straining muscles he lifts the bar off his chest and breathes out as the weight rises past the most difficult point. This he repeats four more times, slowly and deliberately but with increasing effort, higher blood pressure and shorter breaths. Eventually the bar slams back into the steel notches, so that both floor and walls shudder from the weight.
The heat in the room increases with every passing minute and the stagnant air smells of sour sweat and acrid testosterone.
The man sits up on the bench, closes his blue eyes and rolls his head clockwise and counterclockwise while he catches his breath. Apart from a Gothic ‘S’ on his right pectoral muscle, his tanned body is without tattoos. The scars, on the other hand, are of every length and depth, and so numerous that no-one has ever tried to count them. The same is true of his abrasions, old burns and pits from healed boils. Most of these are from motorcycle and car accidents, but unconventional sports, countless fist fights and several knife- and gun-fights have also marked his flesh. Besides these surface blemishes there are adhesions, scars and knobs on his skeleton, which is held together with a dozen steel pins, steel wires and two joint replacements. All his body hair has been removed with creams and wax, except for the hair around his genitals, which has been trimmed to three millimetres with clippers. On his head the hair is of even length and hangs down his back, dyed raven black with decorative red and blue highlights. The man wears no jewellery on his hands, nor round his neck, but in his earlobes he wears thick rings of engraved silver. They are snakes that have been folded together with pliers so their tails disappear into their open mouths, and these handmade ear decorations give his healthy-looking and otherwise confidence-inspiring face a sinister look.
This is Jón Karl Esrason, the twenty-six-year-old son of a fisherman, who deals in odd jobs and various rackets. He has an elaborate rap sheet, covering over a decade, with over thirty charges and a dozen sentences making up his curriculum vitae.
‘Lilja?’ says Jón Karl as he walks barefoot along the carpeted corridor, without really expecting or waiting for an answer. He knows Lilja is at home. And he knows that she knows that he knows she’s at home. That’s why she doesn’t answer.
Jón Karl has now dressed in black athletic pants and pulled his hair back into an elastic band.
In the bright, roomy kitchen he mixes milk and a banana and strawberry-flavoured carbohydrate-and-protein powder in a large blender. He tosses a handful of vitamins and additives into his mouth and gulps down the tasty blend.
Jón Karl turns on the hot water tap in the kitchen sink, places the blender jug under the stream and looks out the window while it fills up. At the end of the street is the local school, beside which is a fenced basketball court where tall, spotty youths shoot at the netless basket way into the dark every evening. But now it’s night and the court is without life. No movement. Just darkness. And a tiny glow by the windscreen of a parked car, as if someone inside were smoking on the driver’s side.
Jón Karl moves fast and purposefully. He turns off the hot water and the kitchen lights. His pupils expand and so do his arteries, pectoral muscles and nostrils. He leans over the sink and lets the cold windowpane touch his right cheek and the curtain his left. In this position he stares sideways out the window without moving, like a lion sticking its nose through vegetation on the edge of the savannah. Now he can see better into the cold autumn night, deeply dark beyond the streetlights. There’s a black van parked at the end of the basketball court, half up on the pavement. It might, of course, be brown, blue or dark green, but in the night it’s black. There is, however, no glow to be seen inside the van – no movement, nothing. Had he been seeing things, or had whoever it was put out their smoke when he turned off the light? Is someone watching the house? Or is Jón Karl getting paranoid?
The laughter of two teenaged girls breaks the silence outside. They prance light-footed into his line of sight from the right, glide along the footpath on the other side of the street and cause Jón Karl to tear his intense gaze from the black van and direct his bestial attention to firm buttocks, slim legs and an innocent bearing.
He knows them, these two, both the individuals and their kind. They live in the next street to Jón Karl and his family; they live in the next street in all the neighbourhoods of all the cities in the world: not quite sixteen-year-old friends who have recently discovered drugs, head jobs and their own allure, and who exist in the wonderful delusion that youth is eternal, the shopping mall is the universe, their pussy is its centre and life is nothing but a pink bubblegum cloud they can keep blowing until it pops.
‘Little cunts,’ mutters Jón Karl, his breath clouding the window as the blood starts to flow into his member, which twists about like a snake in his sports pants until it finds the right pants leg.
Jón Karl pats his left pants pocket, finds a crumpled pack of cigarettes and pulls out the last one, which he lights and draws on until the ember crackles. He blows smoke through dilated nostrils and continues to stare at the girls while wondering what the hell he’s waiting for. Instead of still standing there staring out the window like an old lady, he should be at the wheel of the Range Rover already backed into the street. Accelerate once and a hundred metres later he would pull up beside the girls.
‘Where you off to, sweethearts?’
They might hesitate a bit, since their self-confidence is nothing but a shell made of fashionable clothes and make-up. They would glance at each other, giggle and blush, but before they could properly assess the situation Jón Karl would have ordered them into the car.
‘I’ll drop you off, sweethearts. Don’t be silly!’
Maybe they wouldn’t get in a car with a stranger, but Jón Karl is familiar to them. They’ve often seen him and they think he’s pretty cool, even though he’s awfully old and all that. And they’ve heard their parents talk about him. Talk badly about him. And a man that their parents hate and are frightened of – he just has to be really awesome! Even if he is maybe a dope dealer or a debt collector or a lowlife or something. And that’s a cool car. Expensive and cool. Not like the stupid saloon cars their parents drive.
They’d head for the city centre, where Jón Karl rents a top-floor flat in the seaside tower blocks. There he would coke up the party and fuck those fillies until the cum is leaking out of their tear-filled eyes.
So why hasn’t he got going? Getting too old? Tired? Can’t be bothered any more? Grown out of it?
‘Fuck!’
They have virtually disappeared into the blackness.
Jón Karl throws his cigarette into the sink and briefly turns on the tap. Then he glances quickly out the window, as if from a presentiment or just habit, and sees that the black van is no longer at the end of the basketball court.
The well-kept hairs on the back of Jón Karl’s neck stand up and his hands go cold. It’s as if the absence of this black van bothers h
im more than its presence did a moment earlier. Which may seem strange, even irrational, but isn’t that at all. A woman who sees a spider in her house is uncomfortable because the spider should not be there. Then, when the spider disappears, fear comes instead of discomfort, because the woman doesn’t know where the spider is, which means it may be anywhere, and that fact raises the disturbing question of what the spider is doing where nobody can see it. The spider that existed simply as an eight-legged bug in the informed world of conscious thought has become an intelligent monster in the darkness of the subconscious.
What black van was that? Who was in it? What were they doing? And now where is it?
‘Lilja!’
Jón Karl strides back to the living room, cracking the joints of his neck and fingers. ‘Stand up, woman! Take the girl, go to Mum’s and collect the case.’
‘What’s wrong? What case?’ says Lilja, standing up from the couch.
‘Mum knows what case,’ Jón says and pushes Lilja along, almost knocking her into the corridor.
‘Our child’s asleep, Jón!’ says Lilja, with a confused look at the father of her child, who is in a state she knows he won’t be shaken out of.
‘Listen to me,’ hisses Jón Karl, pushing her against the wall and holding her trapped while he is speaking. ‘Take the girl and go to Mum’s and collect the fucking case. Then come back and get me and we’ll all go up to Skorra Valley. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘Yes, I understand,’ says Lilja, looking away from his burning stare. ‘But why do we have to go up to Borgarfjörður? What’s wrong? What case are —’
‘No questions!’ says Jon Karl, letting her go. ‘Take the car and do as I say.’
‘Yes, I —’
‘And Lilja,’ says Jón Karl, his eyes turning flinty.
‘Yes?’ Lilja whispers, her stomach lurching.
‘If anything’s not right when you come to get me … if anything – just anything – is not as it should be … then you go without me up to Borgarfjörður and stay there until you hear from me. Do you understand?’
