And even though the revenue from fishing doesn’t all end up here – who knows, maybe only a tiny part of it does – Lára Lár and latterly her son, Jói, have always taken great care to ensure that their crews include local seamen, and have kept fish processing going all year round – running at a great loss, of course, and out of pure altruism.
Lalli Puffin, on the other hand, is Valeyri’s representative to the rest of the world. The tourists who flock here think that he is ‘the Boss’. He actually thinks that himself.
For a long time, he did seem to be all things to all people, or at least many things to many people, because most of his enterprises turned out to be ill-judged. He started up a car dealership, a fashion boutique, a bookshop, a video-hire place and a cake shop. All came to nothing. He imported a Danish dance teacher, a Hungarian music teacher, a fly-tying expert from Hafnarfjörður and a baker from Hornafjörður. All vanished without trace.
Every morning he wakes up with the memory of Emilía in his head; he feels her hands, her deep voice, her hair, her smile, her scent, her touch, her youth – and his own youth. He has been with her all night and, half awake, he can still see her. Her hands, when she stopped salting the fish for a moment to take her gloves off and wearily rearrange her headscarf. Her eyes, as she suddenly looked up and met his gaze – eyes that were ice-blue.
That summer long ago, everything had been so blue in the light of the sun. When it rained, the drops were huge and saturated with energy. When the wind blew, it was full of promise. Every morning he woke up happy, eager to go down to the quayside to supervise the herring-salting. His father, Lalli Lár, was having an operation in Reykjavík, and his mother and sister, Lára, had gone with him; Jakobína was with her sister in Vopnafjörður. He was in charge of everything.
Sometimes Emilía would be working at the centre of the quay, sometimes at one end or the other, but he always located her and didn’t let her out of his sight for the rest of the day, although he avoided looking at her directly. He strutted around trying to look authoritative but also kind; he tried to come across as a wise superior. Sometimes of an evening he saw her out walking with a coarse-looking man, presumably her husband. He discovered that his name was Sigurður and that he worked on a herring boat. Lalli longed to send Sigurður’s boat to the Greenland fishing grounds, like dispatching troops to the Eastern Front, as it were. But he couldn’t; apart from what Lalli Lár, his father, had ordained, it was the skippers themselves who made the decisions. Still, Lalli was drawn to Emilía, like a moon to a planet.
That summer, the herring flooded in. Everybody worked all the time, full of excitement and chatter. Nobody slept. Day and night were blindingly bright, with not a moment’s silence: unending shouts and cries, music, laughing, moaning, weeping, the clattering of machines, chitchat, constant buzz and frenzy. The herring flooded in and the women could hardly keep up with the salting; the whole place teemed and after work couples would disappear into the Láfalaut hollow, which was sufficiently out of sight for them to do whatever they did undisturbed. Colours were intense, joy was palpable, tempers bubbled and surged. Lalli felt as if all of Valeyri’s economy throbbed between his legs.
Those hands. She sat by herself in the village hall, with those white hands in her lap, watching people dance while an overexcited accordion player squeezed away at his instrument, half-crazy with fatigue and amphetamines. She was wearing a blue dress. He sat down next to her and asked if he could buy her a drink. She said no. He asked if he could ask her to dance. She said no. He asked if she minded if he had a small glass of something and whether he could sit by her. Silent, she looked at him with her ice-blue eyes and then turned her head away without answering, but he could see a hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. Then they were silent.
Warmth emanated from her, and although she responded to most of his approaches with a demure ‘no’, she did not get up and leave; she even seemed happy for him to stay there. So he introduced himself properly and began to tell her of his interest in gardening and poetry. He paused, then stroked his sideburns and asked, ‘What about you?’ She said she was married, her husband was on a herring boat, his name was Sigurður and he was six foot seven inches tall and correspondingly strong. And completely lost it when drunk. He said, ‘In that case, better look out,’ but he had already established that the man was at sea. She watched the accordion player wheezing away at ‘The Hreðavatn Waltz’ while everybody whirled around the dance floor, tired and excited. She smiled listlessly. He offered her a cigarette; she accepted, inhaled the smoke with relish, then turned and blew it straight into his face.
They were silent, smoking. Kalli Skjól and his friend Gúndi came and sat next to them and began to tell stories of the old vicar and Halvorsen the chemist. Talk moved on to the fishing, new cars, tractors and haymaking in the valley. Lost in thought, Lalli sipped his schnapps and contributed the odd comment to the conversation, all the while intensely conscious of her presence next to him. Every morning when he wakes, he can feel it. Every morning he remembers that evening. Something from it always comes to him when he is half-awake – how they sat like this and their bodies engaged in still, silent conversation. And then everybody went out into the dazzling clamorous light, and they walked hand in hand along the path back to his home and she wanted to and they closed the door and kissed. Her belly naked and warm against his. Her scent like the perfume of the sea, her deep voice, those hands. The trips during the following weeks, when they drove up to the head of the valley and laid a woollen rug in the colours of the Icelandic flag on the ground and made love. Now he wanders around the streets with his mind full of Emilía and the great herring summer he spent with her – lost in thought and in her.
He is about to bump into his sister, here on the corner. They haven’t spoken for years, they don’t meet at social gatherings, they always find out if the other one will be there and stay away if the answer is yes.
Maybe Lára never liked him, right from the beginning, and simply put up with having to keep an eye on him in those early years. She didn’t like his way of doing things. How he ran the shop, embarked on all sorts of ill-thought-out enterprises on a whim, brought in all sorts of idiots who had no place here. She saw no future in the shop, and invited him to come and join her in the fish factory and then buy into one of the big supermarkets in Reykjavík and negotiate for them to open a branch here. He ignored her completely, said he knew what he was doing, he liked doing it, it was in his blood and he had to do things his own way. When the quota system was set up, he said he didn’t believe for one minute that it would last, and when she repeated her offer of a share in the Valeyri Fish Factory and tried to explain to him what a goldmine the quota system would turn out to be, he said he preferred to rely on the shop and the abattoir. Whereupon she shook her head in disapproval, her lips pinched in scorn. She was a pillar of this community, though she had very little contact with the actual villagers. There were many who had never seen her and had no idea what she looked like, and many of those she had encountered had forgotten what she looked like: mousy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, thin lips, a rather pretty face with a small chin. Despite everything, she and Lalli continued to meet and disagree. She felt responsible for looking out for her irresponsible little brother, if only for the sake of Jakobína, her one friend and the only person she could talk to about her husband, who spent every day drunk and insensible, a luckless intellectual.
He should have been a better husband. But he could have been worse too, like that man of Lára’s, whatever his name was, what a boozer. Such are his daily thoughts as he reflects on the past during his circuit past this house and that, down this street and that, and then this one again and down another, so this simple huddle of houses gradually turns into the maze of his loneliness.
It wasn’t that he was unkind; he always tried to meet Jakobína’s wishes, all the ones he was capable of meeting. He travelled abroad with her every year, to Denmark and Italy, accompanying her everywhere. Onc
e there, she would sit unspeaking from morning to evening, her expressionless face carefully sunscreened and turned to the sun, while he scavenged the town for stuff to sell in his shop. They made love once a month, and that was all very amicable but they never had a child. He bought her a car and a sofa and all kinds of chairs and cushions, and all the clothes, all the books and records she fancied. He paid for her evening classes, some of which he tried to set up himself, with mixed success; she enjoyed these, and made suggestions for various arts and crafts items to sell in the shop. That went well.
When she got her thrombosis, he sat with her for days, reading to her from old chronicles of the region and from the book of poems by Guðmundur, the poet of poets. As he held her hand, he felt her life draining away and knew he had to focus completely on being by her, with her – whole and undivided. Emilía and Sigurður had long since left; she lived on only in his memories, in his blood and his dreams. Knowing that Jakobína was dying, he thought that he should do one decent thing in his life, since everything else he had done had been such a failure and he had turned out to be so useless when anything depended on him. He decided he must confess his sins to his wife, unburden himself, in the hope that before she passed away they would once more become as one before God. He sat at her bedside, held her hand and told her about the summer when the herring flooded in and everyone went crazy with activity, joy and desire – he too. He described Emilía, and although he tried not to show his emotion, it got the better of him and his voice quivered with suppressed passion. He told Jakobína that Emilía had come to him once, after he had ended their relationship, with the news that their affair had borne fruit, that she was pregnant and that he now had a choice whether to live in a loveless marriage or build a family around his little child. She herself wanted to leave Sigurður because he was a bad man. But Lalli had told her to go, never to return, because he loved his wife. The herring had also gone, the sun had departed and the joy had died away. He never saw Emilía again, except in his dreams. She vanished, he said, with a gesture expressing her disappearance. When he looked up at his wife, she was no longer feeble. Nor was she stricken with grief. Her face white with fury, she hissed, ‘Get out!’
Thus he lost his wife. She immediately sent for her sister-in-law, Lára, and the two of them stayed locked in the bedroom for some time, before Lára had her moved to a hospital, where she later died. He was never allowed to see her again.
She vanished, he said with a gesture.
One day there were new people living in Brimnes, and he never found out what had happened to Sigurður and Emilía. He thought about it every day – even expecting a visit from some young person saying: You are my father. But it never happened. He imagined they’d moved to America, or even Australia, as many did during those years after the herring had gone. There’s a flower that grows in Melbourne, he sometimes sang to himself. But he couldn’t be sure. They disappeared so suddenly and so utterly.
All these secrets in one village. Even where he’s going now might be a secret. He can’t remember at all who he was going to see. Was he going to see Kalli Skjól and borrow a bit of chicken wire from him, to stick in that gutter where the starlings are making themselves far too much at home…? Or was he maybe on his way to see Fríða? Yes – that was it, wasn’t it? Wasn’t he about to ask Fríða to cut his hair? Where would he be without Fríða?
He is becoming a bit forgetful.
There is so much he cannot remember. He forgets straight away whether he is going this way or that, wants to have a word with this person or that, but every morning when he is still only half-awake he remembers Emilía, what she was like and the times they had together – and then immediately remembers that he is a useless good-for-nothing. He knows she is dead. His dreams tell him that. Nothing in his life has been a success. Everything has faded and withered in his hands.
Deep in thought, he turns a corner, not noticing until it’s too late that he is about to bump into a woman walking towards him. He looks at her kindly. She has white hair, horn-rimmed glasses, thin lips, a rather pretty face with a small chin, and she stares at him, panic-stricken. His face lights up in a broad smile, and he opens his arms towards her and says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear, how stupid of me, what was I thinking?’
…and Slides along the Spit
I was in a forest, following a footpath marked out by white stones. I realized that I was on some kind of a journey, that a destination awaited me, though I knew not where, when or how. Part of me understood, however, that I wasn’t actually in this forest, that it was only my mind that was there. In reality, I lay in a bed in the Vífilsstaðir TB clinic. I was delirious – I was already at my journey’s end. The same part of me knew that Katrín was sitting beside me, reading, knitting or holding my hand, as she had done ever since my sickness had returned some months before. She had moved south as soon as I fell ill, rented a room in Reykjavík with her mother, and came out here every day to be with me, to support me, her poet, her poet of poets.
I lay on my own. Motes of dust speckled the rays of sunlight that shone through the window. A little angel sat on the windowsill bathed in light, silent and sad, dangling his slender legs. Then I found myself in the forest again, following a footpath marked out by white stones. Now and then thick branches brushed against me, heavy with rain. I walked for ever. It was dark. From time to time I would come to a bright clearing, but there was nothing there. And I knew that I wasn’t there, but here.
Katrín sat by my bed, occasionally reading to me from old Valeyri chronicles, or from anthologies by my favourite poets, Jónas Hallgrímsson, Steingrímur Thorsteinsson and Matthías Jochumsson, or poems by my friends – but never my poems, which I had asked her not to read. She didn’t see my poems until long afterwards. Sometimes I wrote a poem after she left, if I was conscious and felt up to it. I wrote in a brown notebook that I kept under my pillow. I wrote things like Life is the path that leads to death. Inspired by nightmares, my poems were about ogres in dark ravines and young girls who encounter them and come to harm. They were about Katrín.
Often, my friend Lalli came and sat with me and talked about his pet subjects: haymaking, fishing and other such things. This cheered me.
Again I was in a forest, following a footpath marked out by white stones. It seemed to have rained recently. I thrust the sodden branches aside. I saw the path winding its way further into the darkness. I walked on. I knew I wasn’t really in the forest, it was just my mind that was there, I was dreaming, I was drowsing – and yet not. My conscious self was awake, and I saw that Katrín wasn’t in her usual place by my bed, that the chair was empty and had been so for some time, for several weeks. The sun’s rays shone in through the window. I saw motes of dust. An angel dangled his legs from the windowsill and gazed at me with sadness. I closed my eyes and disappeared once more into the heart of the forest. I came to a bright clearing where a grey horse stood. I approached it slowly, gently, talked soothingly to it; I felt that it would guide me to my journey’s end, but it started in alarm the moment I reached it and made off into the trees. I followed, eventually reaching a thundering waterfall. From the darkest depths I heard moaning. I sat on a rock, exhausted, felt the mist from the falls on my cheek, looked into the whirlpool, stroked the rock’s covering of lichen, felt its roughness. I stood up and moved on. I walked barefoot across scree towards a mountainside. Everything was so bright.
I opened my eyes. I lay in the Vífilsstaðir TB clinic, alone in the ward, nothing but absence in my embrace. My conscious self was awake and I knew that Katrín’s usual chair had been empty for some time. My friend Lalli came from time to time and chatted about his pet subjects, haymaking, fishing and other such things, and as he was leaving he told me that Katrín wouldn’t be coming any more. She was no longer my girl. Who, then, would guide me through this dark forest of my mind? Who would stroke my hair, support me in my suffering and care for me, her poet of poets? I shut my eyes and found myself once more in a forest, followi
ng a footpath marked out by white stones. I thrust the sodden branches aside. Twigs crackled under my feet and I knew my conscious self was awake, that I was conscious, that I was on a journey – that some kind of journey’s end soon awaited me, because life is the path that leads to death.
I had seen into Katrín’s soul. When I had been haymaking during those long summer days in the valley back home, when I climbed Mount Svarri and looked out over the spit and into the valley trying to make a decision, when I was in a cramped cubbyhole in Reykjavík studying Latin, half-starving, and when I had tossed and turned in bed at night, planning my life – and now as I walked along this path with these twigs crackling under my feet – the sparkle in her eyes was always with me.
I walked on, out of the forest, until I reached an opening, a grey rock. I felt the wind in my hair and on my cheeks, the white sun flowed between my palms – ahead of me the ocean, as smooth as glass and deep blue – I opened my eyes and saw motes of dust, and Katrín’s chair, empty for months. The little angel was gone from the white-painted windowsill. I closed my eyes and looked around this cold, grey rock. I was out in the open. I opened my eyes again and saw that the little angel was standing at my bedside, gazing at me with compassion. I wanted to confess my sins to him, but during my short life I had travelled but infrequently, had met few people, not thought a lot, not achieved much. My life had taken place in the written word and in thoughts. I was merely a consciousness. I closed my eyes but still saw the angel. He was completely white and on his forehead was a tiny horn that I hadn’t noticed before. He beckoned for me to follow him. I rose from my bed and we walked together, out through the window, into the mist.
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