When that happened, a certain joy reigned in the household.
On his trips to Reykjavik, Simon discovered an aspect of Grimur that he took a while to assimilate and never wholly understood. At home, Grimur was surly and violent. Hated being spoken to. Foul-mouthed if he did speak, and coarse in the way he belittled his children and their mother; he made them serve his every need and woe betide any shirker. But in dealing with everyone else, the monster seemed to shed its skin and become almost human. On Simon’s first trips to town he expected Grimur to act the way he always behaved at home, snarling abuse or swinging punches. He feared this, but it never happened. On the contrary. All of a sudden Grimur wanted to please everyone. He chattered away merrily to the merchant and bowed and scraped to people who entered the shop. He addressed them formally, even smiled. Shook their hands. Sometimes when Grimur bumped into people he knew he would break into guffaws — not the strange, dry and raucous laugh that he occasionally let out when he was vilifying his wife. When people pointed to Simon, Grimur put his hand on the boy’s head and said yes, he was his son, grown so big. Simon ducked at first as if expecting a blow, and Grimur joked about it.
It took Simon a long time to grasp this incomprehensible duplicity on Grimur’s part. His father’s new countenance was unrecognisable. He could not understand how Grimur could be one person at home and a completely different man the moment he left the house. Simon could not fathom how he could be sycophantic and subservient and bow politely, when at home he ruled as the ultimate dispenser of life and death. When Simon discussed this with his mother she shook her head wearily and told him, as always, to be wary of Grimur. Be wary of provoking him. No matter whether it was Simon, Tomas or Mikkelina who sparked him off, or whether it was something that had happened when Grimur was away and which threw him into a rage, he almost invariably attacked their mother.
Months would sometimes pass between assaults, even a whole year, but they never stopped altogether and were sometimes quite frequent. A matter of weeks. The intensity of his fury varied. Sometimes a single punch out of the blue, sometimes he would fly into an uncontrollable rage, knock their mother to the ground and kick her mercilessly.
And it was not only physical violence that weighed down upon the family and home. The language he used was like a lash across the face. Denigrating remarks about Mikkelina, that crippled moron. The sarcastic tirade that Tomas suffered for not being able to stop wetting the bed at night. When Simon acted like a lazy bastard. And all that their mother was forced to hear and they tried to close their ears to.
Grimur didn’t care if his children saw him beating up their mother or humiliating her with words that stabbed like stilettos.
The rest of the time, he paid them virtually no attention. Normally acted as though they did not exist. Very occasionally he played cards with the boys and even allowed Tomas to win. Sometimes, on Sundays, they all walked to Reykjavik and he would buy sweets for the boys. Very seldom Mikkelina was allowed to go with them and Grimur arranged a ride in the coal lorry so they did not need to carry her down from the hill. On these trips — which were few and far between — Simon felt his father was almost human. Almost like a father.
On the rare occasions when Simon saw his father as something other than a tyrant, he was mysterious and unfathomable. He sat at the kitchen table once, drinking coffee and watching Tomas playing on the floor, and he stroked the surface of the table with the flat of his hand and asked Simon, who was about to sneak out through the kitchen, to bring him another cup. And while Simon poured the coffee for him, he said:
“It makes me furious thinking about it.”
Simon stopped, holding the coffee jug in both hands, and stood still beside him.
“Makes me furious,” he said, still stroking the surface of the table.
Simon backed slowly away and put the jug down on the stove plate.
Looking at Tomas playing on the floor, Grimur said: “It makes me furious to think I couldn’t have been much older than him.”
Simon had never imagined his father as ever being any younger than he was then, or that he had ever been different. Now, suddenly, he became a child like Tomas, and a completely new side to his father’s character was revealed.
“You and Tomas are friends, aren’t you?”
Simon nodded.
“Aren’t you?” he repeated, and Simon said yes.
His father went on stroking the table.
“We were friends too.”
Then he fell silent.
“That woman,” Grimur said eventually. “I was sent there. The same age as Tomas. Spent years there.”
He fell silent again.
“And her husband.”
He stopped rubbing the table with his hand and clenched his fist.
“That fucking bastard. That bloody fucking bastard.”
Simon slowly retreated. Then his father seemed to regain his calm.
“I don’t understand it myself,” he said. “And I can’t control it.”
He finished his coffee, stood up, went into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. On his way, he picked up Tomas from the floor and took him with him.
Simon sensed a change in his mother as the years went by and as he grew up, matured and acquired a sense of responsibility. It was not as fast a change as when Grimur was suddenly transformed and became almost human; on the contrary, his mother changed gradually and subtly, over a long period, many years, and he realised the meaning behind it, with a sensitivity denied to most. He had a growing sense that this change in her was dangerous, no less dangerous than Grimur, and that inexplicably it would be his responsibility to intervene before it was too late. Mikkelina was too weak and Tomas was too small. He alone could help her.
Simon had trouble understanding this change or what it meant, but he became more intensely aware of it than ever around the time that Mikkelina shouted out her first word. Mikkelina’s progress pleased her mother immeasurably. For a moment it was as if her gloom had been swept away, she smiled and hugged the girl and the two boys, and for the next weeks and months she helped Mikkelina to learn to talk, delighting in her slightest advances.
But it was not long before their mother was back in her old routine, as if the gloom that had lifted from her returned with greater intensity than ever. Sometimes she sat on the side of the bed, staring into space for hours, after cleaning every speck of dust from the little house. Glared in silent misery with half-closed eyes, her expression so infinitely sad, alone in the world. Once, when Grimur had punched her in the face and stormed out, Simon found her holding the carving knife, with the palm of her hand turned up, stroking the blade slowly across her wrist. When she noticed him she gave a wry smile and put the knife back in the drawer.
“What are you doing with that knife?” Simon asked.
“Checking that it’s sharp. He likes the knives to be kept sharp.”
“He’s completely different in town,” Simon said. “He’s not nasty then.”
“I know.”
“He’s happy then, and he smiles.”
“Yes.”
“Why isn’t he like that at home? To us?”
“I don’t know. He doesn’t feel well.”
“I wish he was different. I wish he was dead.”
His mother looked at him.
“None of that. Don’t talk like him. You mustn’t think like that. You’re not like him and you never will be. Neither you nor Tomas. Never. Do you hear? I forbid you to think like that. You mustn’t.”
Simon looked at his mother.
“Tell me about Mikkelina’s dad,” he said. Simon had sometimes heard her talking about him to Mikkelina and tried to imagine what her world would have been like had he not died and left her. Imagined himself as that man’s son in a family where his father was not a monster but a friend and companion who loved his children.