Season of the Witch

by Thorarinsson, Arni

  Or something. A bit too romantic, maybe. But something other than driving all the way to Reydargerdi. Maybe even just getting to know the route from my new home to my new workplace.

  “I knew you were difficult, but I won’t put up with this bullshit. You get over to the east with Jóa, and by dinnertime tomorrow I want an article with interviews and photos, and a mood piece, for Monday’s paper. You can’t do that by phone.”

  I know he’s right. “Well, since you ask so nicely,” I say. “But I’ll have to send the article in on Monday morning. It will take eight or nine hours just to drive there and back.”

  The news editor laughs. “Buddy! We’re a high-tech modern media company. You can take your laptop, write the piece at Reydargerdi, send it in with the photos, and then set off back to Akureyri.”

  The fucking slave driver is right again. Apart from the modern technology stuff, I’m having trouble getting used to the new press time of the newspaper, 9:00 a.m. instead of 11:00. “As in the neighboring countries” was the phrase Hannes used: always a favorite with those who want to justify some pointless change. In the case of the Afternoon News it means that the paper is put to bed the evening before, with hardly a chance of getting a new story on the front page in the morning. It also means that the name of the Afternoon News now makes no sense at all.

  “OK. But then you’ll have to allow me a bit more time after the weekend on the story about the high school students’ production of Loftur the Sorcerer at Hólar. The first performance is on Holy Thursday.”

  “Hahahaha! Nice one!” Trausti Löve howls with laughter so the restaurant echoes with it. “Schoolkids performing What’s-His-Face the Sorcerer! Oh, yeah, you can have plenty of time for a big news story like that. Of course! Why not? Ahahahahahaha!”

  I don’t let him throw me. “And I want some time to investigate the growing market in illegal drugs here in the north, as I told you before.” He says nothing. Probably not listening. But I hear him laughing with a woman, who’s suggesting he ought to be out of range, except hers.

  “Everything all right then, buddy?” says Trausti cheerfully when he comes back on the line.

  “I have a right to days off, like other people. Like you, for instance.”

  “Whatever,” he says. “Whatever.”

  After Jóa and I have ordered a pizza and watched the weekly satirical news show—which I sometimes think is closer to the truth than the “real” news—we turn in to our separate bedrooms around ten. And I go to sleep, with my lorikeet by my side.

  Don’t get me wrong about the lorikeet.

  Ásbjörn had managed to arrange inexpensive furnished accommodations for me, the intrepid Akureyri reporter for the Afternoon News, in a row house in Hlídar, one of the new districts beyond the Glerá River. It’s a lot bigger than my little basement pad back in Reykjavík—really quite luxurious. The kitchen is on the right of the entrance hall, then there’s a large living/dining room with a TV and sound system, and, on the left, three bedrooms and a bathroom. Jóa has made herself at home in the first bedroom, and I’m in the back one. I envisage Gunnsa having the middle room. I can’t begin to say how much I’m looking forward to her visit over Easter. Sometimes I think Gunnsa’s more grown-up than her old dad. And one thing’s for sure: if I’d had her scary experiences on our beach vacation last summer, I certainly wouldn’t be as well balanced as she is now. I just don’t know where she gets her mental strength. Definitely not from me, and hardly from her mother, Gulla. Sometimes it seems that genes simply mutate, through the grace of God.

  But my accommodations aren’t a bed of roses.

  The apartment belongs to an old friend of Ásbjörn’s who has gone abroad for postgraduate study. The advantage of this arrangement is that the apartment has everything you could possibly need in a home. But the disadvantage is that it has more than you could possibly need in a home. Never mind the cupboard in the middle bedroom crammed with broken toys, the piles of garments in my bedroom cabinets, and the no-smoking rule—which I was quick to violate. And never mind the shelves laden with glass geese, porcelain angels, and pottery cats, which I have clumsily knocked over, breaking necks and amputating wings and tails, and then inexpertly tried to glue back together. Never mind all that. No, it’s the yellow lorikeet that shares my room. This little creature, which is the size of my hand, is alive and kicking. It lives in a gilded cage on a small table in one corner of the room. I have been entrusted with the important task of keeping this bundle of fluff in the land of the living. I’m required to feed it morning seed and evening seed, seed bars and seed clusters; give it fresh water regularly; and change the sand in the bottom of the cage. I’m even supposed to give the bird a bath in the sink now and then. In addition, several times a week I must close all windows and other exits, open the cage, and allow the bird to fly around the apartment at will, so that it will feel for a while as if it’s actually free. In the life of this little bird, I am cast in the role of God Almighty. It’s not a role I relish, maintaining such delusions. I have enough trouble maintaining the idea that I’m free myself.

  Truth be told, I’m a little annoyed with Ásbjörn for foisting this responsibility upon me. When I suggested that maybe he and his wife could take the bird in, he snapped back: “It’s that parrot’s home. Do you want it to die of culture shock? And how on earth do you think Pal would react? You should just be grateful I took all the potted plants that have to be watered.”

  Hadn’t thought of that. It crossed my mind to ask whether the relationship between the parrot and Pal might be something like the relationship between him and me. But that would get me nowhere.

  Instead I have to follow the instructions on the daily checklist and listen to the bird chirping and whistling all day long and occasionally angrily shrieking with a noise like a machine gun.

  I don’t know whether my unwelcome roommate is male or female, or what its name is. But as I am forced into the role of God, I’ve decided the bird is a girl, named Polly. I felt a little better once that decision had been made.

  Maybe Gunnsa will enjoy taking care of the bird when she comes to visit me.

  Anyway, that’s the whole story about the lorikeet.

  The early morning silence between Jóa and me gradually wears off as the sun rises. It’s a dry, relatively warm day.

  “Yeah, apparently they’re planning some kind of industrial production there. The raw material will be unhealthy people, and the end product will be healthy ones,” I remark in answer to Jóa’s question about the future of the community around Lake Mývatn since the mining of silica from the lake floor came to an end.

  We’ve driven across the Víkurskard pass, past Ljósavatn Lake and Godafoss Falls, over the Reykjaheidi moors, and up Reykja-dalur valley. We’re leaving the Mývatn district to cross the mountain wilderness to Egilsstadir. Jóa points her finger at the map to guide me. I can find my way around all the bars in Reykjavík with my eyes closed, but all these place names simply confuse me.

  “Well, well,” says Jóa. “Environmentally friendly industry replacing pollution. Isn’t that what they call it? Being green instead of destroying nature?”

  I nod as I drive. “They’re just as likely to go for an aluminum plant or steelworks or some such infernal monstrosity. That crowd in Reydargerdi had ideas about regenerating the local economy by some kind of nature resort for tourists. I went there last winter on another story, or maybe in the end it was the same story. I met the mayor and the leader of the council, and they said they had high hopes of attracting investors to their nature resort scheme, along with the pillar of the local community, Ásgrímur Pétursson. The development was supposed to be built on his family’s land. And what came out of it?”

  Jóa seems to be waiting for me to answer my own question. I recall reading the Afternoon News a few months later on a plane to a sunny destination with Gunnsa. Banner headline: CONTRACT COMPLETED! “A thousand new jobs in two years,” the finance minister at the time, Ólafur Hinri
ksson, was quoted as saying, as he rejoiced over successful negotiations with Industria, an American conglomerate, to build an aluminum smelter in the East Fjords, along with the necessary hydroelectric development to power the plant. By a typical Icelandic coincidence, Ólafur happens to be married to Ásgrímur Pétursson’s daughter—but that, of course, has nothing to do with anything.

  “So the outcome is the same as ever,” I continue to expound to Jóa. “Reydargerdi and the nearby communities are being overwhelmed by foreign laborers who come to Iceland for the thousands of jobs building hydro plants and factories, which are beneath the dignity of Icelanders themselves.”

  “But things are booming over there, aren’t they?” Jóa interjects.

  “A boom tends to entail a bust, though, doesn’t it?”

  “Come on, you know what I mean. That region was in terminal decline. You couldn’t depend on the fisheries anymore, and people were leaving in droves. And now investment capital is pouring in.”

  “But is this really the end of the population drain?” I object, probably more to keep the conversation going than because I actually disagree with her. “Isn’t it simply a question of foreigners coming in to replace the Icelanders who’ve left for the capital?”

  “Have you got something against foreigners?”

  “Not at all,” I hasten to reply, recalling the arguments I had put to Trausti Löve on the phone. “All I mean is that a new regional imbalance takes over from the old one. So do we want a regional imbalance here in Iceland, or a global one?”

  It’s not so very long since I had an encounter with bigots, and it opened my eyes to my own prejudices. My new insight into my own position led me to a better understanding of where other people stand. I’m doing my best to grow up, but I take care not to rush the process.

  Jóa seems to be reading my mind. “Is Gunnsa’s black boyfriend still around?”

  “Raggi? Oh, yes. Thank goodness. He’s a fine young man.”

  “But it was a shock at first, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep, a serial shock,” I admit ruefully. “First that my little Gunnsa was a fourteen-year-old adolescent. Then that she, as an adolescent, had started smoking. Then that she had a boyfriend. And finally that he was black. How much more could I be expected to take?”

  “And then you had a crush on Rúna, his mom?”

  I don’t know what to say. “Yeah…something like that. I don’t know…”

  “So is it over?”

  “Mind your own business! I don’t know. I suppose so. I haven’t spoken to Rúna for a while. I’ve found it hard to settle things in my mind. I’m still growing up.”

  So much for growing up.

  “You can’t have been that into her. When you can’t make up your mind, that’s usually what it’s about.”

  “Maybe that’s it. Perhaps somewhere in my unconscious I had a midlife fantasy of a nice little nuclear family. A bit unconventional and cobbled together, but a nuclear family all the same.”

  We don’t speak for a while. There isn’t much traffic on the mountain road. The landscape through the car windshield grows gradually more monotonous, reminiscent of a velvety black carpet with specks of dust here and there.

  “Are you seeing anyone at the moment?” I ask.

  “Not at this precise moment,” replies Jóa, firmly ending that line of conversation.

  I switch the radio on. On Channel 1 a church service is in progress. The pastor proclaims:

  Today is Palm Sunday. And who was feted with palm leaves on this day, more than two thousand years ago? Jesus rode into Jerusalem as the triumphant Messiah. All around him people waved their palm leaves, giving him a hero’s welcome. But a week later that had all changed, and the crowds encircled him shouting, “Crucify him!”

  He goes on expatiating about Christ’s final days in this life, which we recall now, during the most important week of the church year.

  Holy Week is not a period of self-indulgence and gluttony, but of prayer and penitence. We are called to join Christ on his final journey and share his pain, for suffering is part of human life. And his story assures us that suffering is not pointless—not his, not our own. Jesus said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And those words have meaning for all of us sinners—not only for those who crucified Christ at Golgotha. And also the words that, if we wish to be disciples of Christ, we too must shoulder his cross and follow every day in his footsteps. The cross of suffering is an indispensable aspect of the life of all Christians. The events of Holy Week serve to help us understand the suffering in our own lives…

  “Thanks for that contribution, Einar.” Jóa reaches out to turn the radio off. “I think that’s enough suffering for now.”

  The first time I went to Reydargerdi, it was the middle of winter; the sun vanished from the sky shortly after midday, as if a light had been switched off. The little village by the sea huddled in the freezing whiteness, threatened by the snow-laden mountain slopes above. Paths had been trodden in the snow between buildings, and I saw the occasional person out and about. At the hotel, I was the only guest.

  Now, as then, Hotel Reydargerdi reminds me strongly of a 1960s school building. But the array of national flags on flagpoles at the entrance, which limply drooped on my last visit, now flutter proudly.

  The old concrete building that houses the municipal offices, across the main road from the hotel, and the plain boxy structure where Ásgrímur Pétursson runs his business, have both had a facelift: a paint job and repairs. The place is humming with life: cars, heavy machinery. Meaning: money. So this is what an Icelandic hamlet in the back of beyond, with a population numbering in the hundreds, looks like after an Extreme Makeover.

  It’s nearly one o’clock. “Since when do a journalist and a photographer get sent on a five-hour drive across moor and mountain just to cover a drunken weekend brawl?” I ask Jóa when I have squeezed the car into the hotel’s packed parking lot.

  “Since yesterday,” she replies.

  “And the only difference,” I continue, “between this weekend brawl and the ones that have taken place in Iceland every weekend for decades, or maybe centuries, is that this time the fighting is between groups who speak different languages or have skins of different colors or eyes that look different. What the hell is happening?”

  “I think your argument may be a tiny bit contradictory, dear boy,” says Jóa as she steps out of the car toting her camera bag and adjusting her dirty-blond ponytail.

  I turn the engine off and open my door. “Surely that comes as no surprise?” I ask with an injured look. “I can’t keep up with all the contradictions that are constantly being forced upon me. And there were enough of them to begin with.”

  Reydargerdi Police Station occupies one end of the ground floor of the municipal offices. Access is from the far end. The “station” apparently comprises a shabby reception desk and two offices. Somewhere beyond them, I suppose there must be some cells. After all, what’s a police station without cells?

  The beautification of the village has not yet reached in here. Gray paint is peeling off the walls, which are cracked and dented, as if they might have been kicked by a horse. Nor, apparently, has it had any effect on Chief of Police Höskuldur Pétursson, who offers us a seat in an office that’s about twice the size of my little closet in Akureyri. Höskuldur is a squat man in his late fifties, with bristling gray hair and a general grayness about him. Below his heavy-lidded eyes are deeply marked circles, dark as bruises against his square, good-humored countenance. There’s something familiar about that face.

  I start my tape recorder.

  “Well, yes, it’s been quite a difficult weekend,” he sighs, “but nothing to make a big fuss about. Just people out having fun, really.”

  “Where was this?”

  “At the new bar, Reydin, just down the road here.”

  I restrain myself from making a silly remark about Rage at Reydin. But it will do for a headline.


  “So the village has a bar now?”

  Höskuldur becomes animated: “Oh, yes, indeed. And another one’s due to open soon. The hotel simply can’t cope with all the new customers who are coming in.”

  “Well, that’s excellent news,” I comment. “But how did this ‘fun’ start, if that’s what you call the fight?”

  “Well, it’s never easy to say how these things start. It’s easier to say how they end. They end up here. With us.” His chuckle is strained.

  “So who was fighting?”

  “That’s not easy to say either. When you have a free-for-all, it’s not easy to say who’s fighting and who’s not.”

  There’s a lot here that’s not easy to say.

  “Were they locals?”

  Höskuldur shrugs his beefy shoulders. “It’s not easy to say these days who’s a local and who isn’t.”

  Yawn. I glance at Jóa, who’s sitting in the corner with a wry expression on her face. She starts taking pictures of the chief, who responds by sitting up straight in his chair and assuming a serious expression.

  “I see,” I lie. “Was anyone seriously hurt?”

  “One fractured hand, one concussion, two black eyes, one nasty kick to the groin, a selection of abrasions and bruises. That’s about it, in the end.”

  “So nobody was armed? No knives, broken bottles, anything like that?”

  He leans back in his chair. Jóa has put her camera down.

  “Oh, yes, now you mention it. A few cuts here and there. A few stitches here and there.”

  “What about arrests?”

  “Just some guests we put up here for the night.”

  “Last night and the night before?”

  “Five the night before last. Two last night. Nothing more than that.”