The Journey Home: A Novel

by Olaf Olafsson

  “You’re the eldest,” she says, when I dare to raise my voice in protest. “We all have to do things we don’t want to.”

  I used to look after Jorunn when she was younger and now I’m stuck with Kari. It isn’t that I’m not fond of him, but it’s so tiring having him tagging along wherever I go. Worse still, he’s becoming a real nuisance. He kept hammering on our bedroom door yesterday when Jorunn and I were trying to talk, banging and screaming so loud that the maids could hear him all the way down in the basement: “I want my picture! ” he kept screeching, “I want my picture.” There’s a picture of a railway train hanging above Jorunn’s bed. “I want to come in and see my picture!”

  I’m uneasy, anxious because Father has gone to visit a patient in the next village and I have the feeling that Mother is about to give birth. I watched him riding down the hill, his horses’ hooves kicking up clouds of dust from the parched earth—it can’t have rained for nearly three weeks. He has his own private route, which the horses know as well as he does, following the old riverbed to the end, then the track below the red hummocks until he disappears among them, heading for the sandy barrens to the east.

  But this time it seems as if the earth has swallowed him up without warning and I’m filled with fear. I run after him, holding my hand over my eyes to shield them from the sun but it’s too late. He’s gone. I pause to catch my breath and try to imagine him smiling and talking to his horses or the clouds. I grow a little calmer with this thought and decide to turn back up the slope.

  “What’s the matter, Disa?” asks Jorunn when I suggest going down to the jetty with Kari.

  “Nothing,” I answer. “Let’s go and see if we can spot any seals.”

  We dawdle past the Co-op, which is shut till three, past the old drying frames and fishing boats pulled up beside them. Dawdle, because I keep thinking I hear Mother calling. Each time it happens I stop dead and look over my shoulder. Then we carry on.

  The jetty is deserted. Sometimes you’d think no one lived in this village but ghosts. We walk out to the end to look at the jellyfish and shoals of fry, then I sit down with Kari on a big rock on the shore while Joka (that’s my sister’s nickname) plays ducks and drakes. She’s got the knack and I sit preoccupied, watching her and the sunbeams dancing from ripple to ripple out in the bay. Father will be home by six o’clock, if all goes well.

  I’m supposed to fetch the cows home at five o’clock and make sure I get Kari back in good time. When I open the front door, one of the maids comes downstairs and tells me that Mother has gone to lie down. “It’s just starting,” she says.

  She takes Jorunn and Kari into the kitchen, asking me to look in on Mother before setting off to fetch the cows. The other maid is up there with her. I climb the stairs reluctantly, longing more than anything else to run outside, away from the house, far, far away until it’s all over.

  At first Mother doesn’t notice me standing silent and motionless in the doorway. I can see the suffering in her face and the sweat on her brow: she doubles up every now and then and the maid wipes her neck, chest and forehead. I know she’ll start crying out soon. Suddenly she notices me and beckons. She smiles, but her smile is strange and stops short of her eyes. Giving me a kiss, she says, “Aren’t you going to fetch the cows, dear?” Then hugs me, repeating over and over again, “My big girl, my big girl . . .” But her embrace becomes uncomfortably tight when the contractions rack her body and I hurry out as soon as she has released me.

  The cows are in their usual place on the other side of the heathery ridge and give me a friendly greeting. I’m in no hurry to get home, and confide in them on the way back that I’m never going to have children. Never, ever. They nod in sympathy. As we make our slow way up the cattle trod, I see to my great relief that Father is home.

  Joka, Kari and I eat in the kitchen with the maids but Father stays upstairs with Mother. I pick at my food, keeping an ear open for signs from upstairs but all is still quiet. After we’ve eaten, Kari goes to bed, while Jorunn and I go out into the cowshed with one of the maids. She asks me to pop back to the house to fetch a broom she’s forgotten and just as I’m bending down to pick up the brush, the first cry reaches me from the window above my head.

  The suffering in the cry is indescribable and I take to my heels. “Where are you going?” calls Jorunn after me, but gets no answer, and I can feel her eyes pursuing me until I disappear down the hill. Even then I can’t stop but keep running as fast as my legs will carry me, over the old riverbed, skirting the edge of the marsh and the little stream, all the way to the spring under the crags. This is my refuge whenever I need to be alone.

  Flinging myself flat on my face, I weep as if the world had ended, before finally getting hold of myself and rolling over onto my back, where I lie staring up at the evening sky and listening to the purling of the stream. The breeze ruffles the grass and the feel of it on my cheek gradually calms me down. I’m never going to have children. Never.

  After a while the sky begins to sink toward me and I watch as it comes down to earth and covers me. A quick shudder runs through my body, followed by a sense of well-being.

  I must have fallen asleep, as the next thing I remember is Father kissing me.

  “I thought I’d find you here, Disa,” he says, taking me in his arms. “You’ve got a little sister.”

  He sets off home with me. The sky is back in its place, the setting sun flushing and setting fire to a few fine-weather clouds. Yet suddenly it seems menacing. Trembling, I bury my face in Father’s neck and burst into tears. “I don’t want a sister,” I cry, “I don’t want her, I don’t want to go home, I want to be left alone.” I struggle in his arms, beating at him incessantly. He just hugs me closer without speaking. I go on and on until it’s as if I’m delirious, feverish. I’ve lost control. I hear myself rambling on about an apple I had seen down on the shore that morning, a red apple I pretend I’d spotted in a cleft between two rocks but forgotten to bring with me. I say I want to go and fetch the apple, I don’t want to go home, I never want to go back again, I don’t care about anything except the apple down on the shore, shining red between two black rocks. “I forgot the apple,” I weep, “I forgot it . . .”

  He gets me undressed and sits on the edge of my bed until I have dropped off. When I wake up next morning there is a shiny red glass apple on my bedside table.

  In the relentless winter rain the world seems somehow diminished. The fields become sullen and gray, merging with the brook, until the bridge appears to serve no purpose, at least from a distance. I sometimes go for a walk on days like this to make sure that the brook is still in its place, its babbling unsilenced, for after a long wet spell my ears become dulled by the drumming of the rain.

  Once I reach the bridge I can see the barn beside Old Marshall’s cottage. There aren’t many horses, we’ve only kept three for the last few seasons, but he’s fond of them and I find their presence comforting. I sometimes go down there and think back to the days of the tuberculosis epidemic when Jorunn and I had to sleep out in the barn.

  My sister Bjork was no more than a year old when she got tuberculosis. She came down with it first, Kari a week later. Jorunn and I both escaped and were made to sleep out in the barn so we wouldn’t be infected. Kari gradually got better and made a full recovery in the end. I begged Father more than once to be allowed to sit with Bjork during her last days but he wouldn’t be moved. I was upset for a long time afterward that I hadn’t been allowed to see her before she died.

  It was at the beginning of November. I don’t remember the funeral, though I’ve been told that both Jorunn and I were there to see her off. But I do remember blaming myself for her death. “I don’t want a sister,” I had said to Father. That much I remembered from my delirium. “I don’t want her.”

  As I approach, the horses turn their heads in my direction and watch me walking to the door of the barn. I think I can see the whites of their eyes ahead. I’m just about to open the door when I sudde
nly remember an important task awaiting my attention back in the kitchen. I turn round and hasten toward the bridge.

  Over the years, there has been an ever-growing list of places of which I find myself saying, “I really must come back here one day.” It might be a restaurant with a view of a harbor or a clearing in a wood, or perhaps a village up in the mountains or a white beach by the sea. “I really must come back here one day,” I say to myself and may even scribble something in my notebook as a reminder. And yet, all things considered, the likelihood that I will ever be able to revisit old haunts grows less with every day that passes.

  To avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to make it clear that this fact does not weigh on me. But we’ve just passed a conservatory, which reminded me of a couple of greenhouses a short way from our cottage where Jakob used to buy me flowers. It seemed that whenever we took a stroll over the fields, we’d end up at these greenhouses, as if by chance, and Jakob would say, “Wait a minute,” when he caught sight of them, and I would pretend not to know what he had in mind and he would pretend he believed that I had no idea he’d gone in to buy me a bunch of flowers. “Surprise!” he’d say as he presented me with the bouquet, and with an expression of wide-eyed astonishment, I would exclaim, “Oh!” before kissing him and flinging my arms around him.

  I believe I’ve more or less stopped feeling sad at these memories of places from my past, as there’s really no point in regretting the transitoriness of life. There’s nothing one can do about it as far as I know, so I just concentrate on remembering the flowers Jakob used to give me, red tulips and white violets, his smile and his hands, sunburned and strong, yet so careful and gentle. I think about these things until the sense of loss begins to creep up on me and I have to take myself firmly in hand.

  The cottage where Jakob and I lived is not far from Ditton Hall, half-an-hour’s drive at most. But I have never seen any reason to go back there.

  I think men fear death more than women do.

  I’m not afraid of the end myself. Come what may, I’ll know very little about it. After death there will be nothing waiting for me but a void. That is to say, I don’t expect there to be anything on the other side, not even the equivalent of darkness, just nothingness, nothing at all. Of course, no one would be more delighted than me if the Almighty were to send me a brochure from heaven (I’m less interested in the alternative destination at this point), illustrated with beautiful pictures and detailed descriptions of the delights in store for us, the Chosen Ones. But as I’ve never received any such message, either by post or in a dream, I suppose I’ll have to resign myself to the idea that death will be followed by Nothing.

  A few weeks ago there was an outbreak of influenza here, the usual sort with a runny nose and cough, which sent a lot of people to bed. I escaped at first but Anthony was laid low. “Let me be laid low instead of him,” I prayed to the Almighty, who is always forgetting to send me that brochure, because I wouldn’t have minded a chance to lie in bed with a good book and a cup of tea while Anthony and the others fussed around me. But, of course, my prayers weren’t answered any more than they had been the previous day.

  So Anthony took to his bed and thought he was dying. The first day he was torn between the hope that this was just a twenty-four-hour bug and the fear that he had contracted a deadly disease. He took his temperature hourly and as the day went on and his fever continued to rise, the battle between hope and fear ended in a clear victory for the latter. I could read in his expression that he had already begun a mental inventory of all the things he would miss: the shy, fragile rays of sun entering the garden on a spring morning, a partridge served on a blue dish with figs and leeks, a glass of wine, a book. When I looked in on him that evening, I saw that he had been weeping.

  It doesn’t matter what Dr. Yardley says, Anthony thinks he knows better. “I can feel it in my bones,” he tells me, “I’m going. This time there’s no question. Disa,” he says feebly. “You know I’ve made a will, don’t you . . . ?” And I can’t suppress a laugh as I sit on the edge of his bed, can’t help myself, because it’s hilarious to see him so sorry for himself. Once he’s on the mend, his feelings are mixed. He is mentally exhausted by all the worrying but also rather sheepish, though naturally he’s happy to have been restored to the land of the living.

  Once, I did something I shouldn’t have done. I don’t know why; I’m not normally given to practical jokes and he didn’t deserve it. But everything had gone wrong in the kitchen that day, the lamb I’d ordered was substandard and the vegetables I’d been waiting for turned out to be unusable. I was fed up with this endless drudgery and had asked myself many times that day what on earth I was doing trying to run a halfway decent restaurant in such a desert of taste and refinement. Anthony tried as ever to make things better by saying: “These things happen. You’ve been through this sort of thing before. Don’t let it bother you, dear.”

  Unable to bear the kitchen a minute longer, I went upstairs to calm down. He followed to comfort me and decided to change his shirt while he was there. When he emerged bare-chested from our bathroom, I noticed that he looked concerned:

  “There’s a spot on my back,” he said.

  “The birthmark?” I asked.

  “It seems bigger now. And the edges are not regular. Disa, can you please take a look. I hope . . .”

  I had no patience for this. Instead of calming him down as I’m used to, I made an offhand remark:

  “Maybe you’re right.”

  This was not a nice thing to do. He hurried back into the bathroom and twisted and turned in front of the mirror in his attempts to get a glimpse of the spot which was actually nothing but a harmless birthmark.

  “Do you think so?” he asked. “Do you really think it’s changed?”

  At that point I told him that it hadn’t changed at all. He didn’t believe me, thinking I was just trying to reassure him. But when I explained that I’d just been annoyed, he didn’t know how to react. He was as confused as a child who discovers that its mother has played a trick on it. And can’t understand why she did it. Can’t understand.

  I apologized. He smiled awkwardly. As we walked downstairs hand in hand, I could feel the vulnerability flowing from his palm.

  My eyes begin involuntarily to follow the telegraph poles that line the road and then curve away to the west over the gently sloping pastures and low rolling hills, before finally vanishing into the distance. The Jaguar is comfortable. The driver has been telling me about his children, a son and a daughter. I close my eyes but can still see the poles. It is as if I am floating down a smooth-flowing river somewhere between sleeping and waking, then suddenly start up to find myself sitting beside my sister Joka in a bus bound for Reykjavik, the capital. We’re on our way to enroll at the Commercial College and haven’t stopped talking for a moment since we left Akureyri, the largest town in north Iceland. But now we lean back in our seats for a while and look out of the window.

  On a low knoll ahead of us stand the ruins of a farmhouse. By the door sits an old man chewing a straw, while closer to the road sheep are grazing. They raise their heads one after another as we draw near, but the old man continues to stare out over the calm, autumn gray waters of the bay. To the left rise steep mountains, their scree-strewn slopes interspersed with patches of heather. They are haunted by elves and trolls, as are the glaciers beyond them. At the bottom of the bay, on the other hand, lie my forefathers, my grandfather and uncle who lost their lives shark-fishing in winter. Grandfather used to sell shark liver oil to the Danes and Mother would play with gold coins when she was a child. I’ve already begun to miss her.

  The moor rises ahead and it’s relaxing to watch the telegraph poles bounding past, though the jolting on these rough tracks is at times almost unbearable. When the road is at its best the poles remind me of a procession of people, straight-backed and solemn.

  An old school friend of Father’s, Vilhjalmur Borg, a lawyer at the Supreme Court, has arranged for us to ha
ve food and lodging at a guesthouse at Gardastraeti 9. It’s run by a Danish woman called Mrs. Olsen.

  I mean to study hard for the entrance exam and Father has coached us as well as he can. Although there’s a year between us, Jorunn and I will both begin in the first year this autumn. Father and Mother have always sent us to school together. Of course, I wanted to go to the high school but Mother said it wasn’t practical for girls. And that was that.

  Jorunn has dropped off and her head is resting on my shoulder. I lean against her and close my eyes.

  3

  9 Gardast.

  September 21, 1934

  Dearest Mother,

  The letter we wrote you yesterday went with the ship but time was so short that we didn’t manage to send Kari’s shoes. They cost 19.50 kronur. We couldn’t find any we liked for less. Unfortunately, it looks as if there won’t be any sales this autumn, of shoes or anything else. Joka and I played whist yesterday with Ella, who works as a maid for Mrs. Olsen, and Mina, Mrs. Olsen’s cousin. Mina is tiny and very hard of hearing and always waits at table and makes a fuss of people while they’re eating. When we’d finished our game, we all headed to Mrs. Hansen’s—she’s Mrs. Olsen’s sister. She’s a widow too and lives with her daughter. We really enjoyed our visit, but on the way home we got caught in a downpour.

  Joka forgot to tell you in yesterday’s letter who lives next door to us. A maid who works for the senior physician. She boards here with the couple’s foster daughter. On the other side of us are two German women and a little boy. There are two dentists who take their meals here, two Danish men and a Danishgirl, a German man and an Icelandic girl. Then there are two office girls, two seamstresses and another man, but I don’t know what he does. Everyone agrees that we’ve been lucky to get all this for 100 kronur a month.

  With love from,

  Your daughter Disa

  P.S. Mrs. Olsen is a really good cook. I’ve learned a lot from her already in these few weeks since we came south to Reykjavik. Last Sunday we roasted a rack of lamb in the oven. We made a good stock and put red-currant jelly in the sauce. It was absolutely delicious and Mrs. Olsen explained to me that the trick is not to leave the meat too long in the oven. When we took it out it was pink in the middle and melted in the mouth.