“This is an excellent restaurant,” I remark as she swallows. “Original and imaginative.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” says Jóa, who is digging into a plate of lobster tails. “Just as good as down south.”
Heida looks from one of us to the other, as if we were two-year-olds. “How can you possibly imagine that originality and imagination in cuisine are the sole province of the Greater Reykjavík Area? They have edible food in places like Paris and Barcelona, don’t they?”
Jóa and I exchange an embarrassed glance. We have nothing to say. We’ve both dressed in our best—which, oddly enough, means we’re wearing almost identical outfits. Black suits, white shirts. She is wearing a tie, I am not. Jóa’s dirty-blond hair is still in a short ponytail, framing her bright, honest face, free of makeup.
“We have all the same crimes as down south,” answers Heida. “Just on a smaller scale. Burglary, robbery, fights, rape, assaults, especially on weekends. Manslaughter or murder—but only rarely. Prostitution, but on a small scale. Most crime here is connected with drug abuse, and that’s rising fast. Young people today see nothing wrong with popping an E-pill or two, or snorting coke or speed when they go out.”
“There hasn’t been much about that in the police reports since I got here,” I comment.
“As you may remember, a group was formed to combat violent crime when people felt things were getting out of hand. It’s had some impact. And hopefully led to a change of attitude.”
“That sounds like wishful thinking to me,” I reply. “To the criminal element, a change of attitude simply means they have to alter their tactics.”
“We have Special Branch officers deputed by the National Commissioner of Police, under the command of the chief of police here in Akureyri,” she adds. “They’re supposed to deal with the most difficult cases.”
“Yes, including the matter of the big industrial development projects here in the east? I think I heard something about action against organized crime in that context.”
“That’s right. But we’ve seen no sign of that here in Akureyri. Not so far as I know.”
“Are there drug gangs here?” I ask. The halibut is long gone.
She nods her red locks. “Yes, but only a few. Sad to say, groups of youths rampage around the streets—maybe ten or fifteen of them—waving baseball bats and knives and even occasionally loaded guns. They collect drug debts by intimidation. A lot of people have been injured, and there has been an increase in suicides. It’s just a question of time when they stop posturing and actually kill someone. The older generation is just beginning to see what’s happening. But I’m not sure the parents really know what their kids get up to. And the police haven’t managed to control the problem. The rate of drug-related crime is rising one hundred percent from year to year. Far too many young people—including those from so-called good homes, who are in school or well-paid work—take drugs for granted as part of their weekend fun. Just like us with a beer or a glass of wine. Some of them have been using for years.” She falls silent and observes me for a moment. “Have you never drunk alcohol?”
“What? Oh, yes. I have been known to take a drink, quite often,” I smile. “And in some quantity.”
“He’s taking a break,” Jóa interjects. “Well, he had a great choice: the whiskey or the work.”
“Yes, wonderful choice,” I say. “I’m doing an experiment to see how long I can remain drunk by nature.”
They share a bottle of white wine. I stick to Coke—with a capital C—and find myself gazing longingly at their glasses. Heida’s glass, anyway.
“Everything in the bigger communities is also found in smaller places,” I remark, because I can’t think of anything more original to say. “Just scaled down. Miniaturized. It’s true of the squares, the banks, crime, and drugs. Just think how the influx of people into Reydargerdi will increase the problems there: drugs, prostitution, violence. I spoke to the chief of police there the other day. He preferred to call them ‘tasks’ rather than problems.”
“Yes, I read your article,” says Heida. “It sounded like a complex business arrangement rather than a complex social dynamic.”
“And now they’re talking about heavy industry here in Eyjafjördur,” says Jóa.
“Or Húsavík,” Heida replies. “Or Skagafjördur.”
“Isn’t that a recipe for disaster?” Jóa asks.
“Where people see a prospect of profit, greed will always win out,” I remark. “They forget everything else when they see a fast buck. Nature? To hell with it!”
“I heard somewhere that a person who thinks money can’t buy happiness just doesn’t know where to go shopping!” quips the local editor.
“And should read the ads more carefully.”
“But who can be against better quality of life? Nobody says no to higher pay or lower taxes.”
“But you can sacrifice one kind of quality of life by accepting another. It’s a question of values surely?” I protest.
“No doubt,” replies the editor. “And we’ll never achieve a consensus on those values. Or any other value judgments.”
“Don’t you find it difficult to address these issues in your paper? In such a small community, don’t you have to keep everybody’s goodwill? Avoid offending the authorities and advertisers with uncomfortable truths?”
“I tread carefully,” she gravely replies. “The paper is my living. And it has two other salaried staff. I’ve been doing this for six years, and it demands a certain skill.”
It demands responsibility, without falsifying reality, I think to myself. I light a cigarette, and the minute I exhale my first puff of smoke a woman at the next table ambushes me.
“You can’t smoke here. You’ll have to go into the bar.”
She gives me a look, as if I’m a filthy, disgusting, dangerous terrorist with a nuclear warhead in my mouth. I look around. No one else is smoking. As so often in recent times, I feel like a most-wanted outlaw, on the run with my weapons of mass destruction.
“Sorry,” I say to the woman. “I didn’t realize. I didn’t mean to commit a crime against humanity.”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane, voices are wailing in the bar.
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done…
It’s a trawler crew, ashore and looking for some fun after a fishing trip, a Dylan aficionado among them.
At another table, one man yawns mightily as his companion attempts to entertain him with comic verses. And here is an extended family celebrating the patriarch’s eightieth birthday. A young couple sits silently at a corner table. She is pregnant, he is blind drunk. What kind of a life will that child have? I think as we take a seat at a small table.
I’ve treated Jóa and Heida to coffee and brandy and indulge myself in a cigarette. The editor of the Akureyri Post has generously imparted to us her knowledge of the vibrant social life of the town, the expansion of the university, high school, and technical high school, the construction of more student accommodations, improvements to the local theater, the high hopes of a director at the Akureyri Theater Company, record attendance at the swimming pool, increased tourism, a new preschool, large-scale construction, and a conference on renewal in the town center, which has been in decline as shopping malls have been built in the suburbs. It all sounds exactly the same as the news down south. Same situation. Same thought processes. Strong international ties.
At the end of the lecture, I ask her: “Do you know anything about the people involved in the accident on the Jökulsá River?”
“I don’t know them personally,” answers Heida, sipping at her brandy. “The Yumm candy factory goes way back. It belongs to the family of the woman who died, but it’s been run for years by her husband, Ásgeir Eyvindarson. He used to be on the town council for the Center Party, and he was an alternate member of parliament.”
“Good people?”
“So far as I know. I think I heard som
ething about her being in poor health. Ásdís Björk.”
“Are you from Akureyri?”
“Yes,” she replies. “But I left after high school. I needed a change of scenery.”
I light another cigarette and look around me at the people in the bar. “Akureyri people have a reputation of being distant with outsiders, or even hostile. I don’t get it. They don’t strike me as any different from other people I’ve dealt with.”
“I think we’ve improved,” she smiles. “But it’s better to keep a low profile and not do anything to stick out. It’s safer. And certainly not offend the townspeople’s sense of decorum by driving around in a rusty or dirty car and parking it in the street. That will get you nasty looks.”
So now I know where we stand, my car and I, in the eyes of our new neighbors.
It’s nearly eleven when we emerge into Strandgata. After a warm day, a chilly breeze is blowing. Heida shivers.
“Well, I’m off. Thanks for an enjoyable evening.”
I find it hard to conceal my disappointment. “Pleasure’s mine,” I manage to say and reach out to shake her hand. “I hope we’ll meet again soon.”
“Yes indeed,” she says with a smile. “I’d like that.”
She and Jóa shake hands and exchange a nod. Heida waves good-bye and crosses the street to the taxi parked on the corner.
Jóa and I share a look. “Now what?” I ask. “Can I buy you a drink somewhere?”
She thinks about it as she pulls on a blue parka over her black suit. “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”
“Come on, Jóa. The night is young.”
“Yeah, but we’re a little older.”
I haven’t brought a coat, and I feel the chill. “You! You’re hardly thirty!”
“I’d rather go for a walk.”
“Do you really mean it? You’re going to leave me here, all by myself in a strange town?” I try to appear cheerful, but I’m already dreading being alone.
“You’re a big boy, Einar. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
As she walks off in the direction of Town Hall Square, she calls back over her shoulder: “Thanks for dinner!”
Det var ingentin g, I think in Danish: You’re welcome. No doubt Gunnsa is strolling now on that other Town Hall Square, in Copenhagen, with Raggi and his mom and some goddamned guy.
It’s a still, calm evening down by the fjord. Mass migration has not yet begun from parties, restaurants, and cafés to the nightspots of Akureyri. But the traffic is increasing; as in any small town, young people are cruising in their cars, to see and be seen.
So I don’t have to fight my way through any crowds as I enter a spacious bar that is happily free of the latest in cool modern design. Ornamented with flashing fairy lights and prints of central European forests and mountains, the décor is completed with frilly pink curtains at the windows. I stand alone at the very long bar, draw my weapon, light the fuse, and order a coffee. A few people sit grouped around the room. On the dance floor are two girls dancing to a Beatles song performed by a four-man combo on the stage at the end of the bar.
A bad little kid moved into my neighborhood,
He won’t do nothing right, just sitting down and
Looks so good…
At the bar I am joined by two couples, somewhat the worse for wear.
One couple—the man grossly fat, in a gray jacket several sizes too small, the woman wearing furs, swaying on her stiletto heels—are in the middle of a fight.
“You! Master Electrician Helgi Hámundarson! You’re just a big fat zero!” the woman screeches at the man, probably for the thousandth time.
Master Electrician Helgi Hámundarson turns a deaf ear, no doubt for the thousandth time. He’s got what matters: a double vodka and Coke.
The woman turns to me: “Have you any idea how much I hate this man?” she asks, looking right through me.
“No, actually, I don’t,” I mumble into my coffee cup.
She neither sees me nor hears me. “Even if you enjoy a sausage now and then, that doesn’t mean you want the whole pig!” she remarks to no one in particular. Clutching a large glass of green liqueur, she totters over to the other woman, who is sitting at a table with a pint of beer.
The two men stand together next to me and share a toast. Master Electrician Helgi Hámundarson says to his companion, “Have you heard the latest pickup line?”
“Don’t suppose so,” slurs the other man.
“You say to the woman: Do you like to smoke after sex?
“And she answers: Yes, I do, actually.
“Then you say: Then I’ll have to remember to buy a packet of cigarettes.”
They laugh themselves breathless. The invisible man, the Big Fat Zero, takes his leave. I’m thinking: I wonder if these people have children? How do they feel? What can they be like?
Driving home along Strandgata, I think I catch a glimpse of Agnar Hansen, with his blond ponytail, in the back of one of the cars cruising around the town center. But I’m not certain.
A man who had no shoes felt sorry for himself until he met a man who had no feet.
I wake up with that idea in my head, without knowing where it came from. It’s 6:30 a.m. I dozed off over a local TV station, which was showing on a continuous loop a segment in which town officials and representatives of the ski area express their concern that their advertising campaign about plenty of snow for skiers over Easter is simply melting away into thin air, due to the unseasonably high temperatures.
Before that I’d watched Chinatown for the tenth time. I’ve always liked it, especially the scene where Polanski, playing the little rat of a crook, inserts the point of his knife into Jack Nicholson’s nostril, asking: You know what happens to nosy fellows?
When I arrived home at about one in the morning, Jóa’s bedroom door was closed. I blocked all exits, went into my own room, and opened Polly’s cage. Then I sat on the sofa in the living room with a Coke and a bag of chips and switched the TV on. A few minutes later the bird came flying into the living room and perched on the curtain rail. Polly sat there for a while, singing and squawking. I was biting into a chip when she suddenly took to the air, swooped down on me, and settled on the back of my white shirt collar. She sat there, nibbling at the chips I offered her from time to time and occasionally pecking gently at my neck. Now, when I wake up, she has returned to her cage, where she is perched with her head beneath one wing. I close the cage door as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the only lady in my life. Then I start scraping the bird droppings off my shirt.
Peace still reigns when I wake up again just before midday on Holy Thursday. I feel rested and find myself surprisingly cheerful. Behind her bars, Polly coos and cackles when I bring her breakfast seed. Outside, the sun is shining, and out in the gardens children are playing ball. I go into the kitchen, put the kettle on, light a cigarette, and turn the radio on. The twelve o’clock news offers slim pickings, except for an announcement that catches my attention:
Skarphédinn Valgardsson, a student at Akureyri High School, is requested to get in touch with Örvar Páll or Ágústa at once. Phone numbers…
I met him, I think to myself. I go into the hall, where the special Easter edition of the Afternoon News has been thrust through the door. I flick through until I find my article, under the headline:
MAKE MY WILL THY WILL
According to a new Loftur the Sorcerer from Akureyri, Jóhann Sigurjónsson’s classic play is as relevant today as it ever was. Students at the high school premiere the play this evening in its historical setting, Hólar in Hjaltadalur.
Is the last part of the intro about to be proved wrong?
“My desires are powerful and boundless. And in the beginning was desire. Desires are the souls of men.”
Skarphédinn Valgardsson, nineteen-year-old student at Akureyri High School, spoke the words, written over a century ago by playwright Jóhann Sigurjónsson, with such passion and conviction that I almost felt he was articulating his own though
ts.
“Take Loftur’s dialogue with the blind man in the first act,” Skarphédinn had remarked during our interview in the lobby of the gym at Hólar College. “The blind man says he has prayed over and over again for the merciful hand of God to lift the darkness from his eyes. Loftur replies: Indeed I know that human desires can work miracles. They have done so in the past and still do so today. And I agree. If we know what we want, we can achieve our own miracles. And when the blind man says, a bit later, I wished, until it led me into sin. When I gave up my wishing, my soul could finally be at peace, he has been led by his perception of sin into giving up. He gained peace for his soul by giving up and accepting his fate.”
“But,” I had dared to ask, being quite unaccustomed to such high-flown literary debate, “Loftur makes a pact with the devil in order to fulfill his desires. Do you maintain that he was justified in doing that?”
Skarphédinn smiled at me. “Well, initially Loftur wants the devil to make his desires his own, in order to get what he wants. But later he wants to escape from the devil’s control and be free. It’s a matter of opinion, of course, how literally the pact should be interpreted. You can see it as a pact between a man and himself or between different aspects of himself.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
After a brief pause for thought, he replied: “I just keep the options open. I feel it’s up to the audience to decide for themselves—like so much else in the play. And in life. I play this character, and I do my best to portray him. I’m not about to sit in moral judgment over him.”
“He comes to a bad end.”
“Yes, well, that’s the playwright’s choice. He’s in charge of what he puts down on paper, so he adds a moral dimension—perhaps he was bowing to the straitlaced standards of his time. I don’t know. The theme is an ancient one. Faust, Nietzsche, the idea of the Übermensch to whom the usual rules of human behavior don’t apply. In the play, Loftur says, shortly before his demise: He who never commits any sin is not a human being. In sin lies a mystical joy. All good deeds are nothing but an attempt to reproduce that joy. In sin, one becomes one’s true self. Sin is the wellspring of all new things. I’m quite sure that the playwright was expressing his own view and reflecting his own experience. He puts them forward in contrast with other, opposing views, which were also his, and were in conflict with them. A dramatic tension between opposite extremes, which are all given the opportunity to prove themselves in the play—and that’s what makes it such a powerful work.”
Season of the Witch Page 7
