by Sjón
The assembled children are as quiet as can be expected. A three-year-old boy sits on the floor with legs crossed, cheeks resting in his hands, dozing. Small scuffles can be heard among the girls. The youngest children grizzle and sigh without restraint.
A murmur passes through the group.
Light bulbs descend from the darkness above them, one at a time, until they are all hanging at the same height over the platform. Then they come on, red, green, yellow and blue.
The children do not speak. Those capable of standing straighten up and tidy their clothes. But none of them move from their place.
Twelve boys and two girls now enter. The girls and one of the boys are being pushed in wheelchairs by the three eldest boys. The stagehands help to lift them up on to the platform and they each hobble to their places where they take up position and gaze out over the auditorium.
Boy: 8 February 1962 –✝10 January 1968
Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝18 February 1968
Boy: 7 September 1962 –✝30 September 1968
Boy: 24 August 1962 –✝8 April 1969
Boy: 22 November 1962 –✝12 May 1969
Boy: 23 December 1962 –✝26 December 1969
Boy: 24 March 1962 –✝1 October 1970
Boy: 22 February 1962 –✝17 November 1970
Girl: 7 August 1962 –✝29 January 1971
Boy: 14 March 1962 –✝10 March 1971
Boy: 16 April 1962 –✝4 April 1971
Boy: 19 June 1962 –✝10 October 1971
Boy: 15 December 1962 –✝26 December 1971
Boy: 17 June 1962 –✝12 March 1972
Four of the new arrivals show on their bodies the signs of having been hit by a car, two of having drowned, four of having died in their sickbeds, one of having burned to death in a house-fire, and three hang back so the cause of death is unclear.
The oldest boy steps forward. He speaks clearly, if a little slowly and slightly too loudly, as he is making an effort to articulate:
— The reaper cuts his swathe. He points to the promising corn. He points to the flushing rosebuds.
The other thirteen children hold up their arms and start waving them as if swaying before a warm breeze. The girls put their wrists together, forming flowers with their hands; the boys spread out their fingers to form ears of corn.
The oldest boy:
— He says: ‘You, you, you, you – and you.’
The children point out into the auditorium, repeating the oldest boy’s last words:
— You, you, you, you – and you!
The oldest boy starts swinging his arms, imitating a man cutting with a scythe.
— He swings the scythe until it sings.
The thirteen children copy the oldest boy’s movements, repeating his words:
— The scythe sings!
Some of the younger children start swinging their arms and swaying from their hips, as if acting out a story through dance. They point to one another, murmuring:
— You, you, you, you …
The oldest boy:
— The man sings with his scythe, sings the reaper’s song that only they know and no one else will ever hear …
The thirteen children and the oldest boy now chime in with the younger ones:
— You, you, you, you and you!
The thirteen children and the oldest boy keep repeating the word ‘you’, lowering their voices until it is no more than a whisper and finally fades out.
— We ran in front of cars, we were found in pits full of water, we were burned inside huts, we were found at the bottom of swimming pools, we were incurable. We disappeared from our homes; no longer flung our arms round our parents’ necks; our tears and laughter were silenced, our chairs empty at mealtimes, our beds empty at night. We disappeared from the gaggle of our brothers, sisters and cousins; we were no longer there in the playgrounds with our friends; in the classrooms with the other children.
They fall abruptly silent.
The silence is broken by the oldest boy who takes a deep breath, inflating his little chest, then rises up on tiptoe, holding his head high, and declaims in a glad voice:
— Then, at the end of time, a young man with flowing hair and beard, clad in a shining robe, will appear at the harvest in the Vale of Tears, announcing that he has come from his father and telling the reaper that the day that dawned when the sun of death first rose over Paradise is turned now to evening.
The thirteen children lower their hands and the younger ones copy them.
The oldest boy:
— Cain’s work is done. He hands the young man his scythe and walks away.
The children start walking on the spot, briskly, the stage floor booming with their footsteps.
The oldest boy:
— The young man drives the scythe into the ground. It puts down roots, the shaft sprouts branches, the iron straightens out until it points heavenwards. The scythe becomes a spear, becomes the tree of life. And the man who lifted the curse from Cain and freed him from his forced labour, walks along the swath, pointing to the fallen corn, pointing to the fallen roses.
The oldest boy and the thirteen children point to one another – and to the younger children:
— He says: ‘You, you, you, you and you!’
The children, both large and small, raise their arms, very slowly, like shoots growing from the soil, forming flowers and ears of corn with their fingers and palms. And chant in chorus:
— We lived on in our siblings born the year after our deaths and given our names. We lived on in the christening gowns donated to churches in our memory. We lived on in the photographs crowding the walls of our closest family members, or our grandparents’ dressing tables. We lived on in the reports of accidents on the front, back and middle pages of the newspapers, in death notices, in obituaries, cut out and kept, yellowing, between the pages of photo albums and Bibles.
Dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962, we await you here.
10
Aleta places a steaming cup of coffee on the sofa table. Jósef Loewe stirs and stretches with a suppressed groan of pain, then notices the coffee. Leaning forwards, he takes careful hold of the cup and raises it to his lips, sipping the coffee she made while he was napping. It’s sickly sweet, just as he likes it, with a splash of brandy, just as he likes it. His hands shake, he can’t keep his lips shaped to the rim of the cup and the coffee dribbles out of the corners of his mouth, which is not just as he likes it.
He had been chipper that morning. His tongue had run away with him as it had on Aleta’s previous visits. He had talked for nearly four hours, getting as far as the conception of the 1962 generation after a long prologue, related in exhaustive detail and with many digressions, on more tapes that she can bring herself to count.
The story he had told her – as far as she could grasp its thread – was of how the Jewish alchemist Leo Loewe, his father, had come to Iceland with the Godafoss at the end of the Second World War, having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp, more dead than alive, with the sole possession he had managed to rescue from the disaster, a hatbox containing the light of his life, the figure of a baby boy moulded from cold clay, which turned out to be Jósef himself – shaped, according to his father, by the hands of his ‘mother’, the kindly, talkative chambermaid Marie-Sophie X, while she was nursing him, a broken-armed fugitive, for the few days he had spent hidden in a secret compartment between the rooms of the Gasthof Vrieslander in the small town of Kükenstadt in Lower Saxony, the act of creation reaching its climax when the child opened his eyes and saw the girl see the fact, before which two frames of film had been placed in his eye sockets, one showing the Führer in full rant, the other showing him surprised at having spilt gravy down his tie – yes, Jósef, who’d had to wait twenty-one years, moistened and massaged with goat’s milk every day, to be wakened to life, until finally Leo, aided by his two assistants, the Soviet spy Mikhail Pushkin and the American theologian and wrestler Anthony Theophrastus Athaniu
s Brown, after pursuing the twin brothers Már C. and Hrafn W. Karlsson (one a Freemason and stamp collector, the other a parliamentary attendant, both former champion athletes and deckhands with the Icelandic Steam Ship Company), had succeeded in recovering from the wisdom tooth of Már, or rather Hrafn (who in the heat of the moment had turned into a werewolf), the gold filling made from the ring the brothers had stolen from Leo long ago on the voyage to Iceland, which was essential for making the magic seal that he then pressed into the clay between the boy’s solar plexus and pubic bone, in place of a navel, wakening him to life on the morning of Monday, 27 August in the oft-mentioned year.
This lengthy speech had been Jósef Loewe’s response to the first four questions on the form:
a) Name:
____________________
b) Date of birth:
____________________
c) Place of birth:
____________________
d) Parents (origin/education/occupation):
____________________
____________________
She had listened patiently, encouragingly – and he had grown increasingly animated the closer the story came to the present – but now that the time had come for him to answer the other eleven questions, the most important items on the CoDex geneticists’ list, and talk about himself, it was as if all the wind had been knocked from his sails. He tired more easily and his illness seemed to tighten its grip.
Aleta reaches over the table and, taking the cup from Jósef with one hand, dries the dribble from his chin with the other, then licks the coffee off her blue fingernails.
‘Do you want to call it a day?’
He shakes his head.
‘No, but I wish you’d stop licking your fingers.’
She pouts and inserts her index finger in her mouth.
Jósef looks away.
‘In front of me, at least.’
Aleta whips her finger out with a loud pop.
‘I looked you up in the Book of Icelanders…’
She gives him a challenging look.
‘Yes, I did. I’ve got an Icelandic social security number, I’ve got access like the rest of you. In fact, thanks to the study, I’ve got enhanced access.’
Jósef jerks his head.
‘So what? I’ve got nothing to hide.’
‘It says there that your mother was born in Reykjavík in March 1927 and died in December 1962…’
Aleta hesitates a moment before going on:
‘Her name was Brynhildur Helgadóttir.’
The blood drains from Jósef’s face.
* * *
THE SAGA OF BRYNHILDUR HELGADÓTTIR – PART ONE
When Brynhildur Helgadóttir died of exposure near the Kleppur Mental Hospital, on 16 December 1962, her last coherent thought was:
I’m not bloody dying here in the mud by the loony bin.
Five hours earlier Brynhildur had come to her senses in a windowless basement as far west as you could go in the west end. She was lying on her back on a nylon-covered straw mattress that had been laid on top of a stack of beer crates and securely wedged into the coldest corner of a storeroom. Her head was turned away from the wall, the left side of her face glued to the nylon by whatever it was that had leaked from her mouth and nose while she was unconscious. She ran her tongue over her swollen lips. Where the corner of her mouth made contact with the mattress cover she felt a thick congealed lump that tasted both bitter and sweet. There was a deep gash in her cheek. With the tip of her tongue she could jiggle two of the molars in her upper jaw. Someone had given her a socking great punch in the face.
She freed her cheek from the nylon by making a slow ‘no’ movement, listening to the crackling as the contact broke between the artificial fibres and her dried bodily fluids. There was the thudding of footsteps upstairs, the echo of a dance tune, a crash of breaking glass, shrill laughter.
Brynhildur rose on her elbow, slid her legs over the side of the mattress and sat up stiffly. Judging by the way her body ached, she must have got into a hell of a fight with the person who knocked her out, either yesterday or the night before – she couldn’t remember which. Her head began to throb with regular hammer blows that intensified when she tilted it over on the painful side, escaping from inside her skull to pound at the roots of her hair.
Holding her head steady by dint of fixing her gaze straight ahead, she wiped the blood and vomit from her face, then rubbed her hand clean on the tatty blue-checked blanket that covered her from groin to knee. It seemed to have been tossed over her as an afterthought since it wasn’t large or thick enough to provide adequate protection for an adult and apart from her bra, which had been dragged down to her navel, Brynhildur was naked.
The door stood ajar. Light was spilling from the passage beyond the laundry. The faint illumination was enough to reveal a short-necked red-wine bottle and a single, fur-lined woman’s boot lying on the dark grey stone floor by the makeshift bed. An outsize boot. It was hers.
She pulled up her bra and fumbled on the mattress for her dress, knickers and socks but they weren’t there. Although her eyes were adjusting now to the gloom, she couldn’t see them anywhere. There was nothing in the room but herself on the mattress, the scrap of blanket, the empty bottle and the boot, aside from what appeared to be human excrement in a pool of urine by the door. She hoped that wasn’t hers.
Brynhildur wrapped the blanket around herself as far as it would go and stood up.
Rocked by dizziness, she toppled forward on to her knees. After taking a moment to recover, she steadied herself with a hand on the wall opposite and started to get up again, more slowly than before, pausing briefly to clasp the boot between two fingers, then heaved it and herself up off the storeroom floor.
She staggered into the laundry and over to the sink where fillets of stockfish were soaking in grey liquid. Turning on the tap, she washed her hands and face as best she could, rinsed out her mouth, spitting red on to the fish, then gulped down the icy water until she retched, though this did nothing to quench her thirst.
The household’s washing hung from a line across the room: a mature woman’s underwear, two pairs of men’s trousers, a couple of white cotton shirts and one with stripes, nylon stockings, a sleeveless dress, long-johns, woollen socks, a pair of boy’s dungarees and a teenage girl’s skirt.
Brynhildur helped herself to the clothes that fitted her, not caring that they were all men’s garments; the others were many sizes too small. She pulled on trousers, shirt and socks, and grabbed a cardigan that was hanging on a nearby peg. Out in the lit passage she spotted the other boot, which gave her hope that her coat might still be hanging in the cloakroom upstairs.
Having pulled on her boots, she began slowly to climb the stairs, pain shooting through her at every step. As well as the pounding in her head she now became aware of a burning soreness between her legs and whenever her body bent as she climbed, it felt as if a dagger were being stabbed between the ribs below her right shoulder-blade – the post-mortem four days later would reveal that she had two cracked ribs.
The din of the party grew louder the closer she got to the dark hardwood door at the top of the steps, where the light drew a gleam from a brass knob.
The first thing Brynhildur saw when she entered the hall was a man with his back to her. He was standing in front of the mirror, adjusting a mustard-yellow bowtie. In the mirror she saw herself come in, saw herself take the final step out of the gloom into the warm, brightly lit hall, saw the man notice her materialising behind him.
He let go of the bowtie and turned. It took him a moment to work out that the newcomer was a large, red-haired woman in men’s clothes, but when he realised who she was, he smiled and shoved his hands in his pockets. A wince twitched his smile as his right hand entered his pocket, and just before it vanished from sight Brynhildur clocked the swollen, bleeding knuckles. He was the man who had punched her in the face.
She tottered as if he had struck her again.
>
His smile grew.
— So you’re awake?
He took a step towards her.
— I was just going to pay you another visit.
Brynhildur felt her stomach clench, felt the acid fear rising in her gullet, spreading through her chest, and for a moment it seemed as if the draught from the cellar would draw her inexorably back down the steps, tear off her boots, strip her in the laundry, drag her into the storeroom, fling her down on the chilly nylon mattress, anoint her head and body with vomit, blood and semen, and snuff out her consciousness.
— Hey, Biddí …
There, in the sitting-room doorway, was the woman who had brought Brynhildur to the party and left her as a deposit with their host in return for being left unmolested herself while enjoying his hospitality, booze and cigarettes: Jóhanna Andrésar, her childhood friend; Hanna from Lokastígur.
— Where’ve you been?
Hanna held out a hand clutching a glass half full of red wine, a smoking cigarette clamped between her fingers, and, pointing at Brynhildur, started cackling uncontrollably.
— What’s going on?
The smile left their host’s face as he turned to Hanna and snapped:
— You said she – your friend here – was fun …
Hanna leaned against the doorpost, holding her glass to her face, and cackled helplessly into the back of her hand, punctuating the thin coil of smoke with her gusts of laughter.
— I’m going to piss my pants. Just look at yourself!
Brynhildur studied her own reflection in the mirror. There wasn’t much left of her face, which people sometimes said had a look of Hedy Lamarr, except the eyes. It was the last time she ever saw herself.
Turning in the doorway, Hanna shrieked over the noise of the party:
— Come and see, Biddí’s doing a number!
From the room behind her came shouts of ‘whee’ and ‘whoo’ and ‘wow’ and ‘whoa’. Brynhildur heard as furniture was pushed aside and someone bumped into the gramophone stand, sending the needle screeching across Twist Night with the Svavar Gests Band, as the party guests struggled to their feet and trooped into the hall to see the number Hanna had promised them.
