The Day is Dark

by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

  Thóra held out a printed photo of the two drillers, which they had made especially for this visit to the village. In the photo the men sat side by side in the camp’s cafeteria, wearing thick woollen jumpers, their faces red. In front of them on the table were two heaped-up plates of food. The hunters made no move to take the photo, so Thóra turned it towards them. ‘These two,’ she said, pointing with one finger above the heads of the men in the photo.

  The two Greenlanders looked at the photo with what at least appeared to be sincere interest. The one standing in the boat even moved closer to get a better look. Thóra extended the photo to him carefully until he took it. He looked over the photo without a word, nodded calmly and said something to his friend in Greenlandic. The friend took the picture and regarded it for a moment before returning it to Thóra. The image was now covered in blood but Thóra acted as if she didn’t notice, taking it back without any hint of hesitation. She suspected that the little sign of interest that the men had shown would disappear quickly if she frowned.

  The men looked at each other and then at them. Both shook their heads. ‘Not here,’ replied the one on the pier. His Danish seemed as good as Thóra’s high-school Danish.

  Finnbogi smiled from ear to ear over what he clearly considered an outstanding step in the right direction in their relations with the natives. ‘Can you refer us to someone in the village who might be able to assist us? Is there a police station here, municipal offices or a health clinic?’

  The men shook their heads again. ‘Not here,’ repeated the man on the pier.

  Thóra wasn’t sure whether the man still meant the drillers in the photo or whether he was saying that there were no public services in the village. She nudged Matthew with her elbow and asked him to show the men the objects that they’d brought with them: the drilled bone with the leather strap and the Tupilak figure. He pulled them out and showed them to the men – without handing them over. The men did nothing to hide their reactions. They started in surprise upon seeing the drilled bone and could not conceal their amazement. The Tupilak appeared not to surprise them at all, until they came nearer to get a better look at it. The man in the boat even clambered up onto the pier to get closer still, incredibly agile despite his thick clothing. Then they looked at each other inquisitively and exchanged a few incomprehensible words. The man who’d been on the pier at first then turned to Matthew and asked: ‘Where did you get this?’

  Since Matthew did not understand a word, the doctor interrupted. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Do you recognize this object?’

  ‘Where did you get this?’ repeated the hunter. His tone was determined and he continued to look stiffly at Matthew. ‘Where did you get it?’ He held out his hand, palm up. He wanted to hold the object. It was clear to all of them that if they gave it to him, they would not get it back. Thóra suddenly felt happy that the man who’d been standing in the boat was now on the pier, because there he was far from the knife that he’d set down.

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to get any help here,’ said the doctor suddenly but calmly in Icelandic, smiling at the men. ‘They don’t want to do anything for us and it’s unclear whether they speak any more Danish than what we’ve already heard.’

  Although Thóra had no desire whatsoever to stand there on the pier surrounded by cold fog any longer than necessary, she didn’t want to give up so easily. ‘On the ice. We found it on the ice.’

  The men stared at her. ‘Where? Where on the ice?’ asked the same man as before. He pointed up along the pier. ‘On land? On the sea?’ Thóra had so entirely lost her sense of direction that it took a great effort for her not to point out to sea. In her mind she tried to recall the position of the pier in relation to the foreshore and imagined the lie of the land on both sides of the hill when she had looked over both the work site and the village. ‘There,’ she said, pointing in what she thought was the right direction. ‘By the mountains.’ Her Danish didn’t allow her to provide a better description of the landscape around the drilling rig.

  At first the hunters said nothing and instead looked again at the objects, apparently frightened. They both took one step back. ‘Leave,’ said the one who spoke for both of them. ‘We are working.’ He waved both his hands to indicate that they should clear off. ‘Leave.’ The red flesh of the seal lying at his feet on the pier gleamed, and for the first time Thóra caught the body’s iron-like smell of blood, which overwhelmed the suddenly mild scent of the sea. He didn’t have to tell her twice, and she walked away. Matthew and Finnbogi followed and the doctor didn’t bother to say goodbye to the men, since it would have been a waste of time.

  As they walked back to land they heard the men speaking to each other, quickly and very animatedly. Their language was unlike any other that Thóra had heard and she had difficulty distinguishing where each word ended and the next began. There was no way to understand what they said to each other but she was relieved nonetheless that they did not simply watch silently as the three of them walked away, because if she could hear their distant voices she knew they weren’t running after them up the pier, brandishing their knives. She was enormously grateful when she got back into the car.

  ‘Greenlanders aren’t often like that, I can tell you.’ Finnbogi started the engine and turned the pickup truck around. ‘Generally, they’re extremely nice and can’t do enough for you. I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I’m just so surprised at all of this.’

  Matthew listened attentively, his expression revealing nothing other than that he highly doubted the doctor. ‘Hopefully we’ll meet someone friendlier in this strange village,’ he said. ‘We’d better go and see, although I don’t expect we’ll find anyone who can help us. Obviously, Friðrikka was right.’

  Thóra’s desire to suggest that they simply go back to camp and continue to investigate the computers was overwhelming, but instead she stared silently out of the window. She watched how the fog cleared almost completely the farther it drew from their sight. It was a short trip and soon the houses reappeared, lonely and abandoned, or so it seemed. Her attention was drawn particularly towards one of the houses, rather ugly and ramshackle. It looked to her as if something had moved in the window.

  Naruana let go of the curtain, closing the little gap through which he’d been watching the car drive through the village. He stood motionless, staring at the worn-out, mottled fabric on the curtain rod that was starting to come loose. It wouldn’t be long before it fell off, and he knew it would be left to lie there; no one, least of all him, would put it back up again. His life was in the same state as the house, and he was glad he’d come to live here; here nothing gave him any trouble. When he went to a place where everything was clean and beautiful on the surface he stuck out, and the ruin that he had become was even more obvious. He had tried to avoid this scenario, which is why he lived here, in the home of a woman who was only slightly behind him on the road to perdition, and if he left the house it was to be around people in the same boat as him. He did not love this woman; he didn’t even feel particularly fond of her. But neither did he hate or even dislike her. She was just there; she had inherited her mother’s house and could therefore provide him with both shelter and company in his drinking. Her feelings were just as absent. There was no affection, only practicality and loneliness.

  He had nowhere else to turn. He couldn’t imagine living with his mother, even though he fitted perfectly into the environment there. No, he couldn’t stand the sight of her, and the feeling was mutual. They had two things in common: they were both slaves to alcohol and they despised each other. Neither of them reminded the other of how life was before the alcohol took over completely, when it was still possible for them to enjoy pleasant moments without being drunk. Nor could he go and live with his father, who would kill him; there was no question about that. Fortunately, Naruana had seldom run into him in recent years, but when it happened, he found the old man’s overwhelming indifference suffocating. He looked down at his toes a
nd saw that they were dirty, which came as no surprise. They had looked like that since he could remember; the only difference was the nature of the dirt. The dirtiness of his youth had been natural dirt that had gathered on him outdoors. The grubbiness he saw now came from the filth that filled every corner of the house.

  So it was a strange coincidence that that morning he had spotted both his father and these outsiders, who until that point he had heard of but not seen. At least not that he recalled. He could very well have seen the group drive through the town before, but he would have been drunk and therefore unable to recall it. However, he thought this unlikely. He would have remembered it; not to have done so was impossible. This visit was such bad news that no amount of alcohol would have been able to erase it from his mind. He stared at the curtains and breathed deeply, suddenly seized with the desire to go out; find his old, worn-out work coverall, load his rifle and go hunting. For a moment he was filled with a sense of joy that he didn’t know he could still feel; his headache disappeared and the cut on the back of his hand stopped hurting, although it had been bothering him for days. Then he remembered that he had traded his treasured rifle for a case of beer, and as a result was no more on his way to a hunt than a weaponless girl. It was no wonder his father hated him so much – he had given him the rifle as a gift when Naruana turned sixteen, and the weapon had cost his father a considerable portion of his summer wages. Naruana hoped his father was unaware of the fate of the firearm, but part of him realized that the old man seemed to know everything and see everything even though he was nowhere near. Naruana could only hope that Igimaq didn’t know what his son had done, how low he had stooped. Hope that he hadn’t seen him as he stood there, his hands stained with the blood of a prey no hunter would boast about.

  His headache returned and his hand hurt even more than before.

  Chapter 13

  21 March 2008

  Thóra watched as Matthew and Dr Finnbogi walked up to yet another house, knocked on the door and waited patiently for someone to answer. No house had looked more like a public building than the others, so they had had to resort to simply going door to door. There was no one out on the streets to ask for information. At first Thóra had accompanied Matthew and Finnbogi, but when it seemed clear that their efforts would provide little or no result she decided instead to wait in the car and make an attempt to warm herself up. The humidity in the air as a result of the fog made it considerably colder. She was chilled to the bone and cursed herself for the stupidity of her packing as she sat there in her borrowed gloves and hat in the car’s back seat. She watched Matthew and Finnbogi fidget on the doorstep and make another attempt to get someone to answer. Then they knocked on the door so loudly that the noise carried all the way into the car. They waited a moment before moving on to the next house. A mist had started to form on the windows and Thóra reached out over the seat to wipe it off, so that she could keep better track of the two men’s movements. When she leaned back in her seat again she gripped her chest with both hands and let out a low cry. Someone was standing right next to the car, staring at her.

  She was an apparently young woman, although it was difficult to discern her age due to the fog on the window as well as her thick clothing. Her face was expressionless as she stared straight at Thóra, who fought to regulate her heart rate. The woman stood that way for several seconds, and when Thóra got sufficient hold of herself to roll down the window she continued to stand there like a statue. The only thing differentiating her from a shop-window mannequin was the occasional blink of her dark eyes. More than anything else Thóra wanted her to leave, but if she drove the woman away Matthew and Finnbogi would kill her, after they’d trudged through the village from end to end in search of residents to speak to.

  ‘Good day,’ said Thóra in Danish. ‘Can I help you?’ Her voice sounded shrill and she spoke unnecessarily loudly.

  At first the woman just stared back at her, causing Thóra to think that perhaps she did not speak Danish. Before Thóra could give English a try the woman opened her mouth and spoke. What could be seen of her face suggested that she was young, between twenty and thirty. Her face was strong and her high cheekbones were further emphasized by the redness of her cheeks. Her eyes were dark and clear, but the yellowish tinge to their whites ruined her otherwise healthy appearance. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ said the woman. A dull odour of alcohol was carried into the car on her breath, which formed thin white clouds in the cold air.

  ‘In the village?’ asked Thóra. ‘We just wanted to ask a few questions. There are two men lost, and they might possibly have come here.’

  ‘You should go home,’ said the woman, still staring at Thóra expressionlessly. ‘Back to your home. Wherever that is.’

  ‘We’re leaving soon.’ Thóra wished that she understood what was going on. Now her Danish would really be put to the test. She started speaking and although her vocabulary was childish she hoped that the gist of what she wanted to say came across. ‘Are you opposed to the project or did the employees of the Icelandic company do something to you?’

  The woman gave Thóra an inquisitive look, not unlike the one Thóra had just given her. ‘You’re staying in a bad place. No one should be there. Go home.’

  ‘How is it bad?’ Thóra pressed the button to roll the window all the way down. She did this without thinking, as if it were the windowpane separating them that made her unable to understand what the woman was talking about.

  ‘Bad.’ The woman appeared impatient, showing a reaction at last. ‘You don’t need to understand why. Just believe me. Take your friends and leave and don’t come back.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ Thóra wondered whether this strange conversation would be any easier if she stepped out of the car and they stood side by side.

  ‘You’ll have to pay me for more information.’ The woman had become stony faced again. Thóra did not know how she should answer. She had no money with her, apart from several hundred nearly worthless Icelandic krónur, which was probably fitting as she didn’t expect the information she was buying to be worth much. ‘I need to know more than that if I’m supposed to pay you.’ Hopefully Matthew or the doctor had some money with them. Matthew must have taken out some Danish currency, just in case. In most things he was the perfect opposite of Thóra, who trusted more often than not in God and luck.

  ‘You won’t get anyone else to talk to you. The people here don’t want anything to do with you.’ The woman’s eyes narrowed and she appeared lost in thought. ‘It’s not a good time for me – otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you. How much do I get for talking to you?’

  ‘That depends on what you can tell me.’ Thóra hoped that Matthew and the doctor wouldn’t come rushing up and scare the woman away. She had something to say and Thóra guessed that now she was trying to put a value on the information. ‘I’m mainly trying to find out about two men who disappeared from here recently.’

  The woman exhaled, once again emitting a sour odour of alcohol. ‘I know which men you’re talking about.’

  Thóra tried to conceal the excitement that gripped her. Was it conceivable that the men were here in the village? ‘Have you met them recently?’ The woman shook her head energetically. ‘Did they come here after the others went home?’

  ‘One of them,’ replied the woman. ‘The fat one. He came alone.’

  ‘When was that and what did he want?’ After blurting this out, Thóra went silent; she had to keep control of her questions even though others were springing to mind. Matthew and Finnbogi had the photo of the drillers, so she couldn’t ask the woman to point out the one she meant. If Thóra remembered correctly, Bjarki was much bigger than Dóri, but that was a moot point if only one of them had come to the village.

  The woman shrugged, causing her light blue jacket to lift slightly. It was so thick and stiff that it took a moment for the garment to sink back to its place. Until it did, the woman looked neckless. ‘I don’t know exactly when he arrived. I
t was more than a week ago. Maybe two. He wanted to make a call.’

  ‘A call?’ Thóra could not remember having read or heard of a phone call during the period the woman was talking about. The camp’s telephone connection had supposedly been cut off several days after the two drillers were left behind alone, and no one had mentioned that they’d made contact since then. ‘Do you know who he wanted to call?’