And the Wind Sees All

by Guđmundur Andri Thorsson

  And now he’s back on his feet and has started tucking in his shirt, pacing the floor. This is what he does: he’ll suddenly stand up, kill the conversation by completely changing the subject, start fiddling with his phone while people are talking to him. Some people think it’s a sign of great energy and busyness, but Anna knows it’s just lack of discipline, an inability to finish anything, whether at home or elsewhere. She’d pinned all her hopes on their daughter; she knew that Helga was different from Jói, more like her, and she’d been so happy when Jói, after discussing it with her and his mother, Lára, decided to hand over the business to Helga. In those days they sometimes talked to each other like proper people, and they agreed that Helga was the right person to take the business in a new direction, and he said as much to Óli, so Sigga had told her. Then came the collapse. It was all a misunderstanding, a bubble, a web of lies. And even though on the surface everything seemed unchanged and they had plenty of money – thanks to Sigga, she knows that he has enough cash stashed away in secret accounts – Jói doesn’t do anything except sit and contemplate his navel, waiting for permission to take back control of the Valeyri Fish Factory, the place where he has known everything since he was nine years old and where he can take on any job and knows how everything should be and not be. While he waits for a decision from the resolution committee in the south, he exhausts himself pacing the floor and tucking in his shirt, committing sins and confessing them to Óli when in his cups.

  There’s unrest in the air. Upstairs, the phone is ringing. And yet Óli still hasn’t quite finished telling his story about that band on YouTube. It seems to have ground to a halt and Sigga starts to shuffle her feet. She was about to go to the kitchen, to fetch the snack they were going to have before the concert, a salad of cold trout with dill sauce, easily digested, but now the phone has started ringing and she also thinks that maybe Óli needs to finish this YouTube story first, except maybe the story is finished, because he’s stopped talking in mid-sentence and is waving his arms about as if trying to remember something, and saying so strangely, ‘I think… I…?’ In a week’s time, it’ll be forty years since he proposed to her. It was on one of those September evenings that sometimes happen in May, when greyness covers everything as if by some unknown law of nature. They’d only recently arrived from the south, after their last winter in high school. They drove into the valley, as courting couples here in Valeyri do, and he switched off the engine at the head of the valley, as you do, and sat at the wheel for a while before abruptly turning to her and saying, ‘Shall we get married?’

  Now and again, but only as needed, the perfectly calibrated wipers slid across the windscreen. And at that moment, popping the question, he too was perfectly calibrated and successful. She naturally didn’t have to think about it and said yes straight away. She’s never regretted it; their life together has been orderly and successful, with rough patches smoothed away promptly – apart from Jói’s constant troubles. Then again, they’d actually created a greater empathy between them. He was not very interested in gardening or carpentry or DIY, but he was a kind soul; he went out into the street with the children when they were learning to ride a bicycle, running up and down for an hour steadying their bikes, even though they had long since got the hang of it and people were looking out of their windows, laughing at Óli Smartypants.

  He was still like that, and she knew that he’d helped a lot of people at the bank, and that it wasn’t his fault how it had all turned out. Actually, sometimes it was almost as if nothing had changed, even though the bank had gone bust. At least, he was still working there as he’d always done and they still had more than enough for themselves and the children. Which was just as well, because Einar’s singing lessons in Vienna weren’t exactly cheap and Alda had taken out a foreign currency loan (which became a nightmare when the krona devalued) to pay for that house of hers in Hafnarfjörður. She knew that Óli sometimes got upset – as she also did – about Alda and Einar having both gone away. He found it hard not to see them every day. And the grandchildren – he never talked about how rarely he got to see them, never mentioned how different things were for Jói and Anna, whose daughter, Helga, was always around and often popped in with her kids. But then she had a business here with her dad, and it wasn’t surprising that she came so often – for a time, that is; the visits were, of course, not so frequent now.

  The villagers still call Jói ‘Jói Lára Lár’, after his mother. When he took over the Valeyri Fish Factory from her, he had his own ideas about modernizing the company, which he felt had become old-fashioned and too tied to its original production values. As luck would have it, Helga had just graduated from Reykjavík University with top marks in Business Studies, and had written a dissertation on investment engineering entitled ‘Optimal Utilization of Fishing Quota Rights and Blue-Ocean Opportunities for Investment in Emerging Industries’. She’d taken a job at the bank, where she set up a group that worked on restructuring company policy.

  Jói felt that it was very appropriate for Helga to take over the company and to run it as her grandmother Lára had done, not least because they both had useless husbands: Jói’s father had been a bedridden drunk for decades, while Helga’s husband was a cute footballer who specialized in diving to win free kicks and penalties. Helga and her mates began by leveraging the quota to obtain immense loans from the bank, because they said that it would cost more not to take out loans, and by doing this they were able to maximize returns on the quota – Get the cash off the silo and down onto the conveyor belt, as Helga put it and Jói never tired of repeating.

  Company policy was scientifically worked out, using all kinds of mathematical models, and they invested in a variety of attractive emerging ventures, besides which Jói was given the opportunity to buy into companies that particularly interested him. What did he get for his pennies? He got a car dealership in Reykjavík; a football team with a very expensive trainer from Scotland and twenty-eight players from a mix of countries; a high-tech company with grandiose plans to cultivate enzymes from thermophilic microbes which were supposed to smooth out all wrinkles. He sat in endless meetings and didn’t understand a word. The money flew away and Jói kept dashing from one place to another, trying to keep up with all the goings-on in his life. Before, he had only been in charge of the fish factory, and had been faithful in a few ways: had shown up at eight o’clock every morning and kept an eye on all that happened there, from every single cod fillet to the extramarital affair between the foreman in reception and the woman in accounting. Now he was running around after his business affairs like a maniac, always in Reykjavík, unfaithful in a multitude of ways.

  This was during the years in which all who wanted to believe were allowed to believe what they wanted and all who wanted to lie could lie as much as they pleased. There was only one condition: unqualified success. There was a universal public agreement that there has to be unqualified success, whatever the cost. Maybe when Jói woke up in the middle of the night with pangs of anxiety in his belly he didn’t believe that he was successful, or didn’t understand what success actually was, and maybe he knew deep down that he wasn’t really suited to running a football team or car dealership, let alone some enzyme company, even if he did have a good degree from a Danish technical college and knew, for instance, everything about how to build a house – but he always managed to get back to sleep, because he firmly believed that nothing would happen to him. He believed that someone was watching over him. He said as much to Óli, who told Sigga, who told Anna. He believed that he would always get away with everything. That’s how it had always been and he felt that it was because of his grandmother in heaven rather than his mother on earth, who always took care of paying for everything, or his wife, who put up with his excesses.

  He believed that someone was watching over him. Yesterday he sat in Óli’s office, and this time it was Óli who talked and Jói who listened. The bank’s resolution committee in Reykjavík had informally communicated its
decision to Óli. The debts were to be more or less written off – they would be absorbed by the black hole that swallowed all Icelanders’ debts – and the family would regain the majority share in the Valeyri Fish Factory and would be able to go back to running the company as they’d always done.

  He embraced his friend, didn’t say a word, fiercely tucked his shirt in and marched out, making straight for his car. He drove, weeping, to the head of the valley. He got out and felt the breeze on his cheeks and sat down in the moss where he and Anna had made love for the first time, at the age of fifteen that summer night on a woollen rug in the colours of the Icelandic flag, after which they’d shared a Benson & Hedges he’d nicked from his mum. He thought about that moment.

  He thought about himself and Anna. He thought about all the sorrow he had caused her, the silence, the coldness, the misery. He went back to the car, reached into the glove compartment and fished out the packet of cigarettes he’d kept there, untouched, for the last five years, took one out and lit it with the car’s lighter. Once again he sat down in the moss. He thought that he mustn’t take Anna for granted. He thanked his grandmother in heaven for her guidance and promised her that for the rest of his life he would be a worthy husband to Anna and regain her respect. The cigarette made him feel dizzy and tasted weirdly bad, and he promised himself – and his grandmother in heaven – to begin a new life with Anna by telling her that he’d started smoking again. All secrets would now be banished from their lives. Still whimpering, he solemnly rose, got into the car and drove off slowly and deliberately towards Valeyri, like a man in control of his life. On the way back he called his mother. She’d already heard the news and snorted inscrutably. When he arrived home he found that Anna had gone to bed. He stayed in the living room for a long time, clutching a glass of whisky, listening to the clinking of the ice cubes. Then he went upstairs to sleep. A new day dawned with a new silence.

  His friend Óli had gone straight home after their talk, asked Sigga to come into the bedroom, told her of his conversation with Jói and, as always, asked her not to tell anybody about this – especially not Anna. She had promised not to, but as soon as he was asleep she had put on her jogging gear and gone over to Anna’s, and as they walked hand in hand through the village, the very bestest friends in the whole wide world, she had told her that everything would be as it had always been.

  There’s unrest in the air. Upstairs, the phone is ringing. Jói has stood up. He strides across the room towards his friend, tucking his shirt into his trousers. He looks worried. Sigga is shuffling her feet as if unsure whether to go and answer the phone, fetch their pre-concert snack from the kitchen or listen to Óli’s story about those Czech Dixieland players. She looks at her husband, confused. Anna sits on the sofa, her legs crossed, looking straight into Óli’s eyes. She’s stopped thinking about Jói, she sees only Óli, who looks straight into her eyes, with a look that tells her he has always had eyes only for her and her alone, and says in a strange voice, ‘I think… I…?’ and then drops his glass, which shatters into a thousand crystal fragments on the wooden floor as he grabs his chest and sinks to the floor saying hoarsely, ‘I think that… that something… I’m…’

  Sonata for Harmonica in C Major

  Gunnar has never forgotten that morning in downtown Reykjavík, when they were teenagers. It was five or six o’clock in the morning; they had been at a party; they’d drifted around the Thingholt area as if lost – this street, that street – until they came to Amtmannsstígur, where they suddenly stopped as if they’d found the place that doesn’t exist, the place where time doesn’t exist. Although he doesn’t talk about it, Gunnar has never forgotten that morning; the houses and gardens and cars were bathed in the morning sun, and he took his harmonica out and said, ‘Wait, listen,’ and began to improvise a tune. Between in-breaths, without breaking its flow, he said, ‘This is for you!’ Tall, slim and serious, she stood motionless and pigeon-toed, watching him. Though there wasn’t a breath of wind, she pushed a lock of hair behind her ear and wrapped her parka, that green parka, around herself and crossed her arms against an imagined chill. Meanwhile the street slept: the people in the houses, the birds on the roofs, the cats under the cars. Then he saw that one of the cats had woken up and was now standing in front of him, looking at him accusingly. He brought the tune to an end with a jaunty glissando, put the harmonica back in his pocket and drew her towards him; she put her arms around his neck and they kissed in this secret place on Amtmannsstígur, the place that didn’t exist. It was a morning kiss. It was a night kiss. It was their first kiss and their last kiss, their best kiss and their only kiss.

  Even though they had kissed each other often.

  ‘Remind me, how long were we together?’ he says suddenly.

  He’s making coffee and, although his back is turned, senses how she freezes. He immediately regrets the question. He worries that it sounded too brusque, too flippant, but he doesn’t know how to soften it, doesn’t know how to approach her any more – doesn’t know what she thinks. He concentrates on the coffee, making sure that the boiled water infuses all the grounds in the filter, he’d learned that from his dad – doing it all properly – and is aware that the tip of his tongue is sticking out of the corner of his mouth, like when he was a boy and had to make a flask of coffee for his dad and take it to him in the garage when he was ashore. Dad would glance up briefly from his work, pour himself a cup and say to him, ‘Just a tick,’ before taking a sip, nodding his approval and saying, ‘You’re getting there, son.’ This morning he had looked at himself in the mirror and felt eleven years old. But he isn’t eleven. He has just turned fifty. He celebrated his birthday with a few friends and colleagues, heartily and at length, and they sang, For he’s a jolly good fellow. She hadn’t been there.

  Turning around, he sees that she’s looking out of the window at Kata Choir cycling past, wearing a white dress with blue polka dots. She herself is in a blue jumper. After all those years abroad she probably feels the cold, despite the sun. But it’s loose-fitting and he can see her collarbones. Her hair no longer falls in soft waves down to the small of her back, but is short and dyed a dark brown, making her face look harder, more tired. But she still has a big nose; still has that little wrinkle in the centre of her forehead, sitting there like a link between the halves of her brain; still has a long, soft chin that he longs to caress; still has blue eyes that can transport him anywhere on earth. She doesn’t reply, doesn’t say anything, just watches the woman on the bike – almost perplexed. Maybe she doesn’t know the answer any more than he does and needs to think about it, or maybe she thinks that he doesn’t remember that they’d been together four years, three months, five days and thirty-six minutes. Not counting the teenage years.

  Maybe she feels that he shouldn’t barge so clumsily into their sanctuary.

  He has no idea what she thinks.

  Maybe she feels that they’re not the same as they used to be. They’d found each other when they were teenagers and together listened to music that her cousin in Reykjavík sent her from the record shops. It was important music, hard music, full of screeching guitars and scraggy synthesizers and agony. They sat silently and tried to understand this desolate, metallic sound from the greyness of big cities where everybody was unemployed. In Valeyri there was plenty of work, as his father never tired of telling his brother when he complained that there was nothing here. These thin, nasal voices brought to Iceland on the wings of civilization strangely suited the drizzle, the bad temper, the isolation, the doggedness. The records spun on the turntable in his bedroom like seductive black holes and the two of them watched, mesmerized, until they came to an end, the crackle stopped and the arm clicked back automatically onto its rest, and they would sit together for a while, silently contemplating themselves and their life. His mother was in the kitchen, silently contemplating her dishcloths and her despair, while his brother sat in his room banging away with a sawn-off shotgun on his games console, although he was tw
o years older and should have been either on his way down south to high school or at sea.

  She only had to appear at the end of the football pitch, motionless and pigeon-toed, for him to make an excuse and go over to her, even if it was looking like he was about to score a goal – he gave up everything for her. Her parents gave her an electric guitar with a small amplifier for Christmas; his brother gave him his old guitar, in which he’d lost interest, some kind of a child’s guitar from Korea that kept going out of tune, which meant that he constantly had to fiddle with the pegs.

  They sat in his room composing their own songs, cross-legged and facing each other. As quickly as the tunes came to them, they learned to play them on their guitars, copying each other’s grips and competing to find the barre chords. Over their strumming, she sang songs and tuneless strains about the wind and about the absolutely-nothing-at-all that she experienced here, the stench, the mist and all the rubbish. He followed and embellished, and was quick to find the rhythm because it was the rhythm of her mind. They were songs of melancholy. But one was different from all the others. She improvised it on the day before one Christmas Eve, when his dad was even worse than usual, blind drunk on the living-room sofa and bellowing at the world. Because she’d just learned the C minor grip it came out gentle and wistful, and she sang it in a clear and beautiful voice.

  It was called ‘It’ll All Be All Right’. The lyrics went like this:

  It’ll all be all right – it won’t go wrong

  It’ll all be all right – just sing this song

  I told you so, I told you so.

  It’s all all right – it’s all on song

  All, all, all right – just sing along.