“And she disappeared?”
“She was never seen again after she said goodbye to him. When she didn’t return home that evening they started looking for her and Benjamin wholeheartedly took part in the search. But she was never found.”
“What about the father of her child?” Sigurdur Oli asked again. “Who was he?”
“She didn’t tell Benjamin. She left without ever letting him know. That’s what he told my mother, at least. If he did know, he certainly never told her.”
“Who could it have been?”
“Could have been?” Elsa repeated. “It doesn’t matter who it could have been. The only important thing is who it was.”
“Do you mean the father was involved in her disappearance?”
“What do you think?” Elsa asked.
“You and your mother never suspected anyone?”
“No, no one. Nor did Benjamin, as far as I know.”
“Could he have fabricated the whole story?”
“I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think Benjamin told a lie in his life.”
“I mean, to detract attention from himself.”
“I’m not aware that he ever came under any suspicion, and it was quite a long time later that he told my mother all this. It was just before he died.”
“He never stopped thinking about her.”
“That’s what my mother said.”
Sigurdur Oli thought for a moment.
“Could the shame have led her to suicide?”
“Definitely. She not only betrayed Benjamin, she was pregnant and refused to say whose child it was.”
“Elinborg, the woman I work with, talked to her sister. She said their father committed suicide. Hanged himself. That it was tough for Solveig because they were particularly close.”
“Tough for Solveig?”
“Yes.”
“That’s odd!”
“How so?”
“He did hang himself, but it could hardly have upset Solveig.”
“What do you mean?”
“They said he was driven to it by grief.”
“Grief?”
“Yes, that’s the impression I got.”
“Grief over what?”
“His daughter’s disappearance,” Elsa said. “He hanged himself after she went missing.”
17
At long last, Erlendur found something to talk to his daughter about. He had done a lot of research at the National Library, gathering information from newspapers and journals that were published in Reykjavik in 1910, the year that Halley’s comet passed the Earth with its tail supposedly full of cyanide. He obtained special permission to browse through the papers instead of running them through the microfilm reader. He loved poring over old newspapers and journals, hearing them rustle and inhaling the scent of yellowed paper, experiencing the atmosphere of the time they preserved on their crisp pages, then, now and for ever.
Evening had set in when he sat down at Eva Lind’s bedside and began telling her about the discovery of the skeleton in Grafarholt. He told her about how the archaeologists demarcated small areas above the site of the bones, and about Skarphedinn with his fangs which prevented him from closing his mouth completely. He told her about the redcurrant bushes and Robert’s strange description of the crooked, green lady. He told her about Benjamin Knudsen and his fiancee, who vanished one day, and the effect her disappearance had on her lover as a young man, and he told her about Hoskuldur, who had rented the chalet during the war, and of Benjamin’s mention of the woman who lived on the hill and who had been conceived in the gas tank the night that everyone thought the world would be destroyed.
“It was the year Mark Twain died,” Erlendur said.
Halley’s comet was heading towards Earth at an unimaginable speed with its tail full of poisonous gases. Even if the Earth escaped being smashed to smithereens in a collision, people believed, it would pass through the comet’s tail and all life would perish; those who feared the worst imagined themselves consumed by fire and acid. Panic broke out, not only in Iceland but all over the world. In Austria, in Trieste and Dalmatia, people sold all they owned for next to nothing, to go on a spree for the short time they assumed they had left to live. In Switzerland, the young ladies’ finishing schools stood empty because families thought they should be together when the comet destroyed Earth. Clergymen were instructed to talk about astronomy in laymen’s terms to allay people’s fears.
In Reykjavik, it was claimed that women took to their beds from fear of doomsday and many seriously believed that, as one of the papers phrased it, “the cold spring that year was caused by the comet”. Old people talked of how terrible the weather had been the last time the comet approached Earth.
Around that time, in Reykjavik, gas was hailed as the key to the future. Gas lamps were widely used in the city, although not so extensively as to provide proper street lighting, but people lit their homes with gas as well. The next step planned was to erect a modern gasworks on the outskirts of town to meet the population’s entire gas requirement for decades to come. The Mayor of Reykjavik negotiated with a German firm, and Carl Franke, an engineer, duly arrived in Iceland from Bremen and with a team of experts began building the Reykjavik Gasworks. It was opened in the autumn of 1910.
The tank itself was a huge contraption, with a volume of 1500 cubic metres, and was known as the “bell jar” because it floated in water, rising or sinking according to how much gas it contained. Never having beheld such a spectacle, people flocked to watch its construction.
When the tank was nearing completion, a group of people assembled inside it on the night of May 18. They believed that the tank was the only place in Iceland to offer any hope of protection from the comet’s poisonous gases. Word spread that there was a party in the tank and people swarmed to take part in a night of wild abandon before doomsday.
Accounts of what went on in the tank that night spread like wildfire for the next few days. It was claimed that drunken revellers held an orgy till dawn, until it was obvious that the Earth would not perish, neither in a collision with Halley’s comet nor in the hellfire of its tail.
It was also rumoured that a number of babies were conceived in the tank that night, and Erlendur wondered whether one of them might have met her fate in Grafarholt many years later and been buried there.
“The Gasworks manager’s office still stands,” he told Eva Lind, unaware whether she could hear him or not. “But apart from that, all sign of the Gasworks has gone. In the end, the power source of the future turned out to be electricity, not gas. The Gasworks was on Raudararstigur, where Hlemmur bus station is now, and it still performed a useful function despite being a thing of the past; in biting frost and bad weather, homeless people would go inside to warm themselves by the burners, especially at night, and it was often crowded in the tank house in the darkest part of winter.”
Eva Lind made no movement while Erlendur told his story. Nor did he expect her to; he did not expect miracles.
“The Gasworks was built on a plot of land called Elsumyrarblettur,” he continued, smiling at the irony of Providence. “Elsumyrarblettur stood undeveloped for years after the Gasworks was demolished and the tank was removed. Then a block of offices was built on the site, opposite the bus station. That block now houses the Reykjavik police force. My office is there. Precisely where the tank once stood.”
Erlendur paused.
“We’re all waiting for the end of the world,” he said. “Whether it’s a comet or something else. We all have our private doomsday. Some bring it upon themselves. Others avoid it. Most of us fear it, show it respect. Not you. You could never show respect for anything. And you don’t fear your own little doomsday.”