In memory of my father
Thor Vilhjálmsson (1925–2011)
MEIKE ZIERVOGEL
PEIRENE PRESS
Reading this book was like embarking on a gentle journey – with music in my ears and wind in my hair. Yes, there is some darkness in the tales, and not every character is happy. But the story is told with such empathy that I couldn’t help but smile and forgive the flaws that make us human.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
It Comes in off the Sea…
The Clarinet and the Double Bass
The Valeyri Waltz
When I’m Sixty-Four
The White and Wonderful Dimension
Evening Can Come
Flying and Falling
Off Sick
The Universal Stillness
Tales Never Told
Búft
Aroma of Ashes
Sonata for Harmonica in C Major
Now All Is Still
In a World of His Own
…and Slides along the Spit
Author
Translators
Copyright
It Comes in off the Sea…
The mist. It comes in off the sea and slides along the spit. Every summer’s day, it creeps up the fjord as evening approaches, noses around the slopes and foothills and slips into the village, where it curls around the boats in the harbour and licks the corners of the houses, before lifting itself just enough for me to be able to peep through people’s windows.
I see the secrets. I see people cooking, peeing, pottering or skulking about. Some weep, some listen, some stare. I see people silent, or screaming into their pillows. I see people throwing out rubbish and useless memories, and I don’t look away. I never look away. I see all.
Jósa is on her own, sipping lukewarm beer from a can as she scans her old school photos, to put them up on Facebook. Kalli is relaxing in the barn, following a wagtail with his eyes. Dr Jónas sits, head drooping. Lalli Puffin has gone for a walk and is about to bump into his sister, Lára, to whom he hasn’t spoken for years and years… And here’s Sveinsína, scratching herself between the shoulder blades with a wooden spoon; she is going to pop over to Jósa’s to celebrate the day. But by then I will have vanished with the grey mist.
We creep on around the corner of a house. The mist hurries ahead of me as if it should be somewhere else by now, impatient with my loitering. Yet we both linger by the red house with the grey roof, where the children are getting over their colds and little Una has at last stopped crying. The secrets of a village – not all of them are important. Still, we peep through windows like an inquisitive god who wants to reassure himself that daily life continues to take its course, even though he has bestowed free will unto man.
The mist. It comes in off the sea and slides along the spit. Accompanied by a chill, and welcomed by nobody. Nonetheless, as we approach Smyrill the poet feels inspired. He stands up from his toils and takes out his battered brown notebook, goes into the kitchen and gazes through the window into the blue yonder. Then he scribbles down some ideas for his cycle of poems Aroma of Ashes.
The mist. It comes in off the sea and slides along the spit, and the villagers see in it everything that is grey – the cold silence that sometimes creeps into life here, just as it has now draped Svarri, the mountain that stands guard over everything. And then evening comes. And then night. And with night comes the rain.
Passions wake and flowers die. People lose heart halfway up the hill as headlights disappear into the blackness. A candle flickers in the breeze. Moments remain in the mind, while days pass, weeks pass, months pass. Seasons and years pass. I see the blue of the April sky and the green of the grass in May. I see the beating of wings as the south draws near, hear a new resonance in the swishing of the grass. I see the red in the children’s cheeks in summer, after they’ve been outside playing all day. I see the autumn weather in closed faces. I sense the smell of winter, before death spreads across the land. Fuel pumps stand alone in snowdrifts. Boats creak against their moorings. The silence of the village during white, dark days. The silence of the mountain, the bleakness between the houses.
I have seen love awaken in a glance and die in deeds. I have seen an abandoned child stop crying. I have seen men drown and boys hang themselves. I have seen a pregnant woman with ice-blue eyes murdered and buried.
I too am long since dead. I should have been extinguished years back and perhaps have been, without having realized it yet. I am but a consciousness. I come in off the sea and slide along the spit, and soon I will have vanished with the mist. I am the afternoon breeze; I visit at around half past four and an hour later slip away to my dwelling, made of the past: of the grass that stirred a moment ago, the dandelion seeds that have floated to a new place, the folds of Kata’s dress as she cycles down Strandgata on her way to the village hall.
The Clarinet and the Double Bass
The babble of children at play mingles with the afternoon sun. The air is heavy with the smell of food, the clattering of a motorboat out at sea is echoed by lawnmowers in the gardens. Shore birds hover silently, waders skitter about, dandelion seeds drift to the ground. The afternoon pulsates and gives her rhythm and momentum and hope as she pedals through the village. The houses are watching her, but that’s all right. Old men with garden shears wave and call out ‘Hello, Kata!’, and that is good too. Children squeal and bounce on the trampolines that bulge next to every house, and shout ‘Hello’, and in the distance women kneel in flowerbeds and raise their soilcaked yellow gloves in greeting. Sidda, sitting in a group with Andrés and Fríða and others, also waves to her. And there’s the man from the bass section, nicknamed Árni Going Places, standing on the steps of the old doctor’s house with a pipe in his mouth and watching her. But he doesn’t wave.
In two minutes she will be at the village hall. The Valeyri Choir is giving a concert tonight, an ambitious programme: they will be singing Icelandic choral songs such as ‘Night’ and ‘Fair Little Friends’ and favourites such as ‘Be Ready When Springtime Calls’ and the Swedish folk song ‘Och jungfrun går i ringen’, but also ‘Locus iste’ by Bruckner and ‘Sicut locutus est’ from Bach’s Magnificat. Nothing must go wrong, it can’t turn into a shambles.
All those endless Monday evening rehearsals where she has patiently sat at the piano going over the different parts again and again – repeated ‘and again’ in Icelandic so broken that you couldn’t help but take notice of what she said. At times, with the Bach, it felt as if she was trying to juggle fifteen balls at once, and if one falls they all fall. At other times, it’s been hard to get the fifteen balls in the air at all. There they’ve sat, these eager musicians, Valeyri villagers from the fish factory, the hairdresser’s, the bank and the sea, from horse riding, unemployment and all the rest – each laden with a nickname and a history known to all, each labouring to synchronize their own locu-hu-hu-hu-tu-hus with all the others. But she has managed to get them to sing – loudly and firmly, and then ever so softly. She has felt that delicate sound between the palms of her hands. The Valeyri sound.
Now Kata plans to get there a bit early, before Sidda, Fríða and Anna arrive to set up the chairs. She wants to have a moment to herself, try out the piano, sit down somewhere, shut her eyes and feel a great, spacious C major chord resonate inside her. Then the others will come, smelling of horses and fish and earth and sun, weary from the day’s labours. They will put on the gowns that Sidda has made and which will transform them into musicians. Then Kata will ask them to stand in a tight circle in the dark changing room, hold hands and hum ‘Sleep, My Little Darling’. Afterwards they’ll walk into the ha
ll and arrange themselves on the platform the way they’ve practised. Kata will enter last, take a bow, turn to the choir, lift her hands and look into the eyes of each and every one of them. And then the choir will become one being. She’ll give the signal and they’ll begin to sing as one, create a new place: Locus iste a Deo factus est…
Everything is so bright. The evening is still to come and yet the day is gone. Existence pulsates at the edges. Kata is bare-legged and barefoot in her sandals, and she feels a little cool from the afternoon breeze that just passed by – not an uncomfortable coolness, rather an invigorating one, in the same way that the houses’ eyes are not staring but encouraging. Everything is singing in the bright light. The sun sings, the sea, fish, telegraph poles, cows, flies, horses, dogs, the old red bicycle Kalli and Sidda gave her. She feels the day will come when her brown hair will once again have its red lustre. Once again her eyes will sparkle. Once again she’ll sing inside herself as she plays the clarinet. Once again there will be life in her existence. Once again she will be loved.
She is wearing the white dress with blue polka dots she’d bought the day she was loved.
That day, she knew Andreas was going to propose to her in the evening, in the pavilion in the big park in the centre of Trnava. It’s her best dress, the only one she will ever have. She hasn’t taken it out since that evening. Carefully folded, it has waited inside her red suitcase in countless wardrobes for this June evening. It has accompanied her around the world on her travels through the labyrinths of purgatory. From her street in Trnava to Bratislava, to Prague, Cologne, Rotterdam, Moscow, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Reykjavík, it has stayed there in its patient folds, at the bottom of the red case beside her silent clarinet.
She would have been loved. After the rehearsal she was just going to slip back to her flat with her clarinet and change – put on the new dress – and Andreas was going to take his double bass home, and then they were going to meet at ten o’clock under the old poplar in the park, where they had always met after school, ever since they were youngsters: the clarinet and the double bass.
He would tell her that she gave meaning to his life. She would believe him. He would ask whether she felt ready to marry him and share her life with him. She would say yes, because she would believe him. And the evening would pass and the night, days and weeks, and within a few months they would be living together in the old town. He would play his double bass in the symphony orchestra and with the Trnava Stompers, the school jazz band they’d kept going, the old friends. She would play her clarinet in the orchestra and do a bit of teaching and would deliver mail in the mornings to supplement their income, as her mother had done before her. Days would pass, months. They would practise in separate rooms until lunchtime and then go out for a bite to eat because they couldn’t be bothered to cook just yet – not until the children arrived, one, two, three. Days would pass, months and years. Little by little they would have fewer idle hours in which to dream; little by little their tiny flat would grow too small for them, sometimes food would be scarce and sometimes she would find it difficult to practise the clarinet in the mornings because of the children, but she would nevertheless press on, because her mother would help her with the children so that she could keep her job with the orchestra. Andreas would manage it as well, despite drinking too much and coming home tipsy in the evenings after having played with the Trnava Stompers in bars all over town. He would say that she gave meaning to his life. And she would believe him. Life was like that, after all – this is how his father had been and her father and their grandfathers, these men were like that. The years would pass, grey days, weary moments. They would argue because too much money was spent on beer, because the small flat was too cramped, because he did not pay enough attention to the children. But that was how it would be. It would work and she would believe him. She would still keep the red tinge in her brown hair that was reflected in the sparkle of her brown eyes, and her radiant smile that Andreas always said gave him strength to wake up in the mornings. And he would always look just as handsome in his red jumpers. Even if his belly got bigger with every beer-filled evening with the Trnava Stompers. They would sometimes be merry on Sundays, the whole family, while lunch was cooking on the stove and the vacuum cleaner danced through the rooms. And they would have their own private moments, the two of them, during quiet walks in the old park, where they always sat under the old poplar as they had done when they were youngsters, and as they would also have done that evening when he would have asked her to marry him, and where in the future, holding hands, they would have sometimes had a sandwich that he would have smothered in much too much butter, and a spicy sausage. He would tell her that she gave him the strength to wake up in the mornings and she would believe him. The clarinet and the double bass. She would have been loved.
After the rehearsal she was just going to slip back to her flat with her clarinet and change – put on the new dress – and Andreas was going to take his double bass home, and then they were going to meet at ten o’clock under the old poplar in the park, where they had always met after school, ever since they were youngsters.
The Valeyri Waltz
Last night, once the sun had set and the wind abated, and the eider ducks had tucked their beaks under their wings, while a lone seagull soared towards its cliff, and the timeless waves burbled on seaweed and stones, and seals yawned peacefully on reefs, and the people slept and there was no one about except him and the sheep and a few mice and perhaps a woman out on a farm who couldn’t sleep, Smyrill the poet sensed how vast poetry is, how open the world, and how immeasurably far and high his own mind soared. He sensed restless creation within himself, the sky and the earth, the wind and the sun – the grace of it. He sensed, in the vaults of his mind, flickers of light come alive, flashing between eternities. He sat on a rock and with his eyes closed watched the pictures gliding across his mind. All kinds of people he had never seen and would never see, who had no meaning for him, slipped almost carelessly into his consciousness. He didn’t know where they came from, whether they existed, whether they had existed; he let them slip away again, unattended, and brought his senses back to the night, the sky, the sea, the rippling grass, the swish of the breeze and the birds. He heard a resonance. He sat on a rock and watched the sandpipers scamper along the seashore like words dropped by God. His mind was immeasurable and for everything that existed at this moment there was a response. He could perceive all that was happening. In his mind everything became poetry: the gliding of the seagull a sonnet, the pit-pat of the ringed plover a quick, free verse, the rippling of grass falling dactyls, the maroon sky a hexameter. He heard a resonance. When the sun had set and the wind abated, Smyrill the poet heard and sensed that the poem was on its way to call on him. It came in from the sea and slid along the spit, it was the most beautiful poem he had ever written. It was about the shoots, the buds and the joy. It was about all that must be. It was about the tide on the shore, he felt it turning with the poem. It was about the gliding of the birds, the grasses of the earth and the gurgling of the waves. It was about the shape of the conch shells and God’s living sleep. It was about the spirit that keeps vigil in the waves of the sea and makes the sandhopper hop, the bird soar and the bluebell droop. It was about the women who had touched him, softly and gently, with hands that cared and lips that opened and breasts that kept him warm during cold nights: it was about Unnur. It was about the power of grace. He heard a resonance. He worked quickly to carry the entire stream of his thoughts over into his little brown book, sensing and hearing that the poem was about to come to him – it would wing its way to him, the most beautiful poem he had ever written. He was both excited and calm, like an old hunter who knows that things can go either way but that the time for action is now. He sat on a rock and watched the sentences scamper along the shoreline, busily finding their place, trying to settle into the right molecular structure in order for a poem to emerge. He scribbled quickly. The words flowed from his pen, the letters formi
ng pictures that did not look like the words they referred to and yet were. He wrote ‘grass’, he wrote ‘sea’, he wrote ‘shore’. Writing these words, he created grass by a sea, on a shore. He wrote ‘hands’ and ‘mine’ and ‘open’. He wrote ‘bird’. He drew a bird. He watched the seagull glide about in the arc of a sonnet, the waves heavy with the ocean currents’ thousand-year schemes, the clouds that on the deep-blue sky suggested white yearning. He watched the wind, watched the grass waving in the wind, saw the wind in the grass. He put the pen down for a moment, while he waited for the poem to come to him in its right form with the right words in the right structure. He began again to write, quickly and indistinctly, the words creeping forward like flightless birds tied to the book. He wrote ‘her hair’ and ‘in a mountain cave alone’ and ‘in woods I watched at dead of night’. He wrote ‘Unnur’. He wrote ‘you’ and ‘from the south’ and ‘breathe’ and then he wrote ‘grass’ and ‘shore’ and ‘blue’ and ‘lands’. He wrote ‘be you’. He sat for a long time, continued to write and look inside himself at people who floated there promising nothing, continued to look at the sea and the sky and at his own sense of loss. He thought about what had happened to him during his time, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly. He thought about the people with whom he had made, then lost, connection – the tender women, the good friends. He wrote ‘grass’ and ‘shore’ and ‘sea’ and these words described everything he had lost. The sea was deep, the shore was deserted, the grass was long. The sea was loss, the shore was loneliness, the grass was pain. The sea was cold, the shore was rocky, the grass was rooted. The sea was here and there, the shore was here but not there, the grass would not be here and never there. He heard a resonance. The tide had turned.
And the Wind Sees All Page 1
