And the Wind Sees All

by Guđmundur Andri Thorsson

  And here comes Kata on her bike. She raises her hand and waves to them. Sidda waves back and shouts, ‘Hi, Kata! See you later!’

  Now the evening can come, with fish soup and happiness. The house will be filled with choir and merriment. They’ll sing until dawn, dance and stamp their feet and be happy. She can taste the soup: fennel, white wine, garlic, tomatoes, saffron, halibut, haddock, trout – all kinds of flavours. Later, they will add the shellfish and bake the bread she’s kneaded. At some point just before the concert she will catch Kalli at the fridge, eating butter with a spoon – to get the extra richness. As if he needed it, he, the epitome of energy and joy.

  She’s looking forward to the evening. And the very best bit will be the concert, when the choir hums as one, Kata plays those strong, slow, low notes of the intro on the piano, and Kalli steps forward to sing: Now all is still within the dale…

  What she’d first noticed about him at that dance in the Súlnasalur ballroom was his arms lifted up high as he danced, the damp circles in his armpits, his puffed-out chest, his back so broad, his embrace so generous. And when he spotted her, the wallflower, he stopped dancing, his grin disappeared and he just looked at her until his face lit up in a smile. And then suddenly he was there, raising a glass of water to her and showering her with questions about herself and her parents and work and colleagues – whether she was spoken for. And yet he wore a ring. She’d noticed that straight away. He invited her to come and sit with the union guys and she accepted. He offered her a cigarette and then he offered her a vodka and tonic. She accepted it all.

  And suddenly he was singing to her: Where, O my sweetheart, say where have you been? / You know that I love you, fair maid of my dreams.

  Sidda had never been called the fair maid of someone’s dreams before.

  Once she’s added the shellfish the soup will be perfect, and she’s looking forward to dishing it out at the party and seeing the sparkle in people’s eyes as the night wears on. There will be plenty of white wine and red wine and dandelion wine. Sveinsína will lend a hand, as she usually does, and Guðjón and Teddi will bring the snare drum and the guitar. Kata Choir will borrow the bass guitar from Kalli and Óli from the bank will play the accordion; they’ll start the usual routine with Kata’s song, of course. They always start with that one, and everyone will join in with gusto. Some of the guests will hang about on the fringes, comparing notes about children and grandchildren and maybe ancient liaisons; a couple may creep into the laundry room to let love unfold – all those village secrets. Some will stay in the kitchen listening to Andrés telling the story of Halvorsen the chemist and Lárentíus the sheriff and the funny way they spoke. But most people will go into the living room to dance and sing with the Óli Smartypants Dance Band: She wore a siiiingle wedddiiing riiiiing! They’ll laugh and howl and cry, drink and dance. They will be full of passion. That’s what the choir parties are always like, especially the ones here at Skjól, and they always give Sidda an intense feeling of belonging. This is where her friends and community are, in spite of everything, even though she sometimes feels completely alone when Kalli isn’t with her. It’s always been just the two of them.

  Over the universal stillness shines the sun, dancing in the dandelion wine; a gentle gust ripples through the grass and a wagtail flits away to wherever wagtails go in the evening when they are tired. She is looking forward to the evening, the fish soup, the singing and dancing, the company, the friendship and joy. Most of all she’s looking forward to the choir humming in unison as quietly as Kata Choir can get them to, and the sombre but gentle piano intro that she always thinks sounds like the dance of a melancholic seal, and Kalli stepping forward to sing the solo. Then all goes quiet, and the lights dim, and the song takes flight, soars like a bird gliding above the shoreline. Wearing his white shirt, Kalli raises his arms like he always does, living the song; he raises his eyebrows, embraces the audience and the whole community, his expression open-hearted as always – and then that velvet voice floats over them: Now all is still within the dale…

  In a World of His Own

  When Lalli goes about the village, he struts and darts his eyes around like an inquisitive puffin. The villagers are all familiar with his distinctive waddle and smile to themselves when they see him. He isn’t only called Lalli Puffin. Kalli sometimes refers to him as ‘His Absent-Mindedness’. And here he is now, strutting as ever along Strandgata, catching the buzz from the garden party at the end of the street, where Andrés from the museum and Fríða live. That is exactly where he’s heading: he needs to ask Fríða to work at the Puffin tonight, despite having originally given her the evening off. But his head is stuffed with umpteen thoughts, and he’s gone down one street after another, paused, looked around, turned. It’s taken him quite a while to get here. There’s a staffing problem, and Fríða needs to come and fill in for the girl who was supposed to fill in for her. She vanished into thin air, disappeared, went somewhere. Or did he maybe forget to tell her? He can’t remember. In any case, somebody will have to take the orders and keep that chef from down south on the straight and narrow and away from the vermouth. He can’t do that himself; he would immediately forget everything on his way to the kitchen.

  He is becoming forgetful.

  He has been famous for his absent-mindedness for years, and many are the funny stories about him forgetting this or that – even himself, sometimes – but lately this has become more than simple forgetfulness. He actually seems to get so distracted that he can’t find the way back to himself.

  They don’t call him Puffin out of malice. Most people here are fond of him, so it isn’t one of those nicknames, so common in small communities, intended to remind people of the worst moment of their life, never allowing them to escape from it. Lalli just happens to be a little bit like a puffin. He still has his ginger hair, even in his late seventies, and it still sticks out in all directions like a mass of raised swords because of some kind of gel he uses. He is small – he says that he is ‘of almost average height’ – and struts about with his chest puffed out, mouth open, cheerfully darting his eyes around. All that’s missing is the stripy nose.

  He is the definitive village man, but with the manners of a man of the world; a true-blue conservative who always attends Independence Party conferences, but also a staunch opponent of the quota system they introduced. He’s used to people doing as he says, but very friendly; he greets everyone he meets with a jolly smile, sometimes calling them ‘my dear’, like a very unassuming king addressing his subjects, especially those he doesn’t recognize.

  He is becoming a bit forgetful.

  Just at this moment, he doesn’t remember why he’s on his way to Fríða’s. He’s been strutting back and forth around the village and has come full circle. He stands and looks musingly at the village hall. He’s sure that it’ll come back to him as soon as he sees Fríða. She has such a positive effect on him. He’s sure that everything will come back to him one fine day.

  He does, however, remember the interview he did on the radio today about this evening’s Valeyri Choir concert. He replays it over and over in his head. He was really good. The chirpy radio lady asked him where the name ‘Valeyri’ came from. He explained, as he always does when asked this question, that ‘Val’ has the same root as valmenni, the Icelandic word for a good chap, a sterling character, so ‘Valeyri’ simply means a sterling sandbank or spit of land, which it is indeed, a sterling place inhabited by sterling characters. That made the radio lady laugh.

  He sees Kata Choir arriving on her bike at the village hall and disappearing inside with her backpack over her shoulder. He remembers it all now: he is on his way to Fríða’s, to ask her to fill in at the Puffin tonight. That’s it! Of course it has come back to him. There it was. There’s a concert later at the village hall. That girl Kata is the conductor of the choir – Kata, the one on the bike just now. A good-looking girl. And a good name. Katrín means ‘the pure one’. His mother was also called Katrín. Th
at’s how everything comes back to you, if you just stay calm. And now he remembers too that the last time he’d explained Valeyri’s name Andrés from the museum had ticked him off and said that was utter nonsense, it had originally been Hvaleyri (‘Whale Spit’) and then the H had dropped off. But that skipper fellow – the one who’s crazy about birds – married to that woman who is Kalli’s sister – had protested, saying that the name came about because falcons, valir, had once been common here and the spit had taken its name from them. Valeyri.

  Lalli thinks that actually he should be the one to decide this. He thinks that his explanation is by far the most credible, and perfect for promoting the place as a tourist destination. He once used The Sterling Sandbank in a brochure with a lovely picture of a puffin which he’d taken himself.

  He still feels it’s more or less up to him to run the place, that he’s responsible for it all, even though he’s no longer involved in anything apart from his shop and running the restaurant.

  He tells everyone that the village was founded by his grandfather Lárus Halldórsson, who came here from the east of Iceland. But according to the local history that Andrés is writing, the community came into being during the last decades of the nineteenth century, based on fishing, trade and butchery, and Lárus Halldórsson was merely one of the many who’d settled here – although he certainly prospered, specializing in trading and providing services to farmers. And his son Lárus – Lalli Lár – who was all things to all men well into the 1970s, is to most people, of course, the true father of the village. He was ‘the Boss’.

  Lalli Puffin has never quite managed to be ‘the Boss’. He is, however, pleased with his interview with the jolly radio lady, not least for having emphasized that there was plenty to do here, plenty of work and plenty of people. A community of nearly a thousand souls was damned good – and everybody in work, all really industrious, whether they came from Poland or Reykjavík or simply from here. He is pleased with the way things have gone here and feels that to an extent it’s due to him.

  He wanders off again, into the housing developments, never properly planned, that just grew outwards from the harbour, germinated like the seeds of the dandelion clock that fall where the soil is right. Despite the lack of planning, the area has expanded like ripples from a pebble thrown into water. The newest houses are furthest away from the harbour and closest to the mountain, Svarri. Before he knows it, Lalli has arrived at the outermost semicircle where the flat-roofs are, the ones he doesn’t think look like houses at all. In fact, nobody refers to these boxes as houses – these blocks of flats and car repair workshops and warehouses that seem to be saying: Look somewhere else, if you want to see something beautiful. We are not houses, we are containers for activity, and thus testimony to prudence and diligence, because the ugly is always cheap and the cheap is always ugly, and the more expensive something is, the more attractive it is, and the more attractive it is the more, much more, expensive it is. And now he suddenly finds himself at the petrol station, with the teenagers who hang out there looking up and staring at him – wary, but also open and ready to experience something new in this place where they feel like nothing at all. He walks gravely past their tables, past a table where an old-timer sits with a plate of deep-fried chicken nuggets and a pilsner. Lalli returns his familiar greeting with a hearty, ‘Well, hello, my dear chap!’ and hurries into the loo, where he sits down for a while without lowering his trousers, catching his breath before emerging and leaving with an air of having completed important business.

  He turns back towards the harbour. The first two semicircles he passes contain the villas. These belong to the people who, given their status, should really have settled in the innermost semicircle, where he lives, but regarded its prefabricated Norwegian houses as uninhabitable, rotten hovels. This is where the skippers and tradesmen, foremen in the refrigeration plant, office managers, store managers and seamen live. These are the pillars of society – and their homes reflect that fact, observing the inviolable rule about the correlation between beauty, size and cost. They are concrete, two-storey buildings, with all kinds of projections and Roman arches, standing gloomily on plots sporting vast green lawns centred around garden gnomes that try to look as if they belong there, with water dribbling from feeble fountains designed by experts from Reykjavík.

  Lalli Puffin would probably not say this out loud to anybody, apart from Fríða at the Puffin – to whom he has said it frequently – but he is proud of himself for not having moved to higher ground, for remaining in the centre of the village. His sister, Lára Lár, on the other hand, owns the largest of the villas. After their parents, Lalli Lár and Katrín, had passed away, the siblings had split the family enterprises between them: she took over the Valeyri Fish Factory and the trawler, he took over the commercial business and the abattoir. Everything she touched thrived. In his hands, everything withered. Before long, Lára began to criticize the way her brother ran things and voiced doubts about some of his business ventures. He tolerated it all because Lára was his very own sister, five years older than him, and he had always felt that his main duty in life was to do as she said. But now they haven’t spoken for at least twenty years. And they’ve developed a knack for not encountering each other in the village, as if they have a built-in radar that keeps them apart.

  That radar is actually about to malfunction, like everything else in Lalli’s life. Lára is on the point of coming round the corner and bumping into him.

  The old Norwegian prefabs often feature on postcards, and people come from Reykjavík expressly to admire them and imagine for a brief moment what life in a village such as this would be like, and to visualize themselves in a village like this, and how great it would be to discover what it’s like to live in a place where the most important thing that happens is that the vicar’s daughter falls in love with the doctor’s son and the shopkeeper’s son falls in love with the barber’s son. And then the tourists visit Lalli at the Puffin for a meal of cod with garlic and fennel and white wine, thinking that he is ‘the Boss’.

  Perhaps he is. But life itself is outside – economic life, that is: the abattoir, which the valley farmers still use, though Lalli had to sell it to pay off his debts and which is now part of a chain of abattoirs; the refrigeration plant, which is always in work because the trawler Lárus Halldórsson VA regularly lands its catch there; the warehouses and other buildings of the Valeyri Fish Factory. And all round the inner semicircle, side by side with the prefabs, are homes that the early settlers built themselves; the families that have grown up, lived and worked there, generation after generation, are often nicknamed after their houses (Klumba, Brimnes, Skjól…), or have the house names tacked onto their own like surnames. Lalli Puffin struts around looking at these houses, sometimes remembering things about them and sometimes not… You can see that the people built them themselves – some of them are comically lopsided but inspired by beautiful thoughts; others are not comical but parsimoniously beautiful; others are beautiful because of their history. Some are ugly because their lack of maintenance testifies to sloth and apathy; and some are ugly because of something that has happened there. Some of them have been renovated by the younger generation, others are derelict or have been demolished and replaced with boxlike non-houses.

  All these old houses have souls.

  Lalli Puffin lives in the heart of the village, over the old shop which he still runs with astonishing lethargy. People go to the Bónus supermarket to do their real shopping and then pop into Lalli’s out of kindness to buy an ancient stock cube or dried-out cigarettes, which he still sells singly even though that’s against the law. In Lalli’s hands the shop is gradually disintegrating, like all his other businesses, whether inherited from his parents or started up by himself. There is in fact hardly anything on offer there any more, apart from Lalli himself. Milk was the first to disappear from the shelves, then the vacuum-packed meat, the eggs, the bread – all the fresh produce. He still has packet soup, tinned peas
, baking powder, cardamom drops, Angel Delight, KitKats in the old wrappers, Matchbox cars and shabby dolls. Kalli says that going to his shop is like going to a séance.

  Lalli lives there on his own. His wife, Jakobína, died many years ago.

  Next to Lalli’s shop is the old village hall, with its imposing sign in old-fashioned lettering – THE VALEYRI VILLAGE HALL – in which they used to show films, stage plays directed by theatre people from Reykjavík, have meetings, concerts – and the dances. Now part of the building is occupied by the Puffin restaurant, which Fríða runs although Lalli is technically the owner. But tonight it’s the venue for the Valeyri Choir’s performance.

  The village has its own history, its characters, its legends. The characters and legends have long since gone and all that is left are people and events. The villagers are nonetheless proud of the place, especially the ones who have moved away but flock back every summer to their forebears’ quaint houses and this strange reality that lives on somewhere in their blood – the men stop shaving, put on ugly jumpers and trundle down to the harbour, hands buried deep in their pockets, while the women plait their hair and start knitting and baking, in between reading Danish fashion magazines from the 1950s that they’ve dug out of a cupboard.

  Reverend Sæmundur sometimes says in his sermons that the village is ‘beyond the world and all the perils thereof’. Smyrill the poet, on the other hand, always says in his yearly address to the Fishermen’s Festival that the village is the world itself in a nutshell. Neither is true. The world is blessed with a million nuances of human life and nature that cannot be found here in Valeyri. And, as attested to by the rooftop satellite dishes, the SUVs on the streets, the graffiti on the buildings, the young people’s wanderlust, the Polish migrant workers and the Asian women in the fish factory who keep the local economy going, Valeyri is immeasurably far from being ‘beyond the world’ or not needing it at all. The world buys the fish that is caught by the ships registered here.