One of the first things she did after they moved to the hill was to get the redcurrant bushes. Finding it a barren place, she planted the bushes on the south side of the house. They were supposed to mark one end of the garden that she planned to cultivate. She wanted to plant more bushes, but he thought it was a waste of time and forbade her to do it.
She lay motionless on the floor, waiting for him to calm down or go into town to meet his friends. Sometimes he went to Reykjavik and did not come back until the next morning. Her face was ablaze with pain and she felt the same burning in her chest as when he had broken her ribs two years before. She knew that it was not the potatoes. Any more than the stain he noticed on his freshly washed shirt. Any more than the dress she sewed for herself, but that he thought was tarty and ripped to shreds. Any more than the children crying at night, for which he blamed her. “A hopeless mother! Make them shut up or I’ll kill them!” She knew he was capable of that. Knew that he could go that far.
The boys darted out of the kitchen when they saw him attack their mother, but Mikkelina stayed put as usual. She could hardly move unassisted. There was a divan in the kitchen where she slept and spent all the day as well because that was the easiest place to keep an eye on her. Generally she kept still after he came in, and when he started thrashing her mother she would pull the blanket over her head with her good hand, as if trying to make herself disappear.
She did not see what happened. Did not want to see. Through the blanket she heard him shouting and her mother shrieking in pain, and she shuddered when she heard her smash into the wall and slump to the floor. Huddled up under her blanket, she started to recite silently to herself:
When she stopped, it was quiet again in the kitchen. For a long while the girl did not dare to pull the blanket away. She peeped out from beneath it, warily, but could not see him. Down the passage she saw the front door open. He must have gone out. The girl sat up and saw her mother lying on the floor. She threw off her blanket, crawled down from her sleeping place and pulled her way across the floor and under the table to her mother, who was still lying hunched up and motionless.
Mikkelina snuggled up to her mother. The girl was thin as a rake and weak, and found the hard floor difficult to crawl across. Normally, if she needed to move, her brothers or mother carried her. He never did. He had repeatedly threatened to “kill that moron”. “Strangle that monster on that disgusting bed! That cripple!”
Her mother did not move. She felt Mikkelina touch her back and then stroke her head. The pain in her ribcage did not let up and her nose was still bleeding. She didn’t know whether she had fainted. She had thought he was still in the kitchen, but since Mikkelina was up and about that was out of the question. Mikkelina feared her stepfather more than anything else in her life.
Gingerly her mother straightened herself, moaning with pain and clutching the side he had kicked. He must have broken her ribs. She rolled over onto her back and looked at Mikkelina. The girl had been crying and she wore a terrified expression. Shocked at the sight of her mother’s bloody face, she burst into tears again.
“It’s all right, Mikkelina,” her mother sighed. “We’ll be all right.”
Slowly and with great difficulty she got to her feet, supporting herself against the table.
“We’ll survive.”
She stroked her side and felt the pain piercing her like a sword.
“Where are the boys?” she asked, looking down at Mikkelina on the floor. Mikkelina pointed to the door and made a noise that conveyed agitation and terror. Her mother had always treated her like a normal child. Her stepfather never called her anything but “the moron”, or worse. Mikkelina had contracted meningitis at the age of three and wasn’t expected to live. For days the girl had been at death’s door at Landakot hospital, which was run by nuns, and her mother was not allowed to be with her no matter how she pleaded and cried outside the ward. When Mikkelina’s fever died down she had lost all power of movement in her right arm and her legs, and also in her facial muscles, which gave her a crooked expression, one eye half-closed and her mouth so twisted that she could not help dribbling.
The boys knew they were incapable of defending their mother: the younger one was seven and the older one twelve. By now they knew their father’s state of mind when he attacked her, all the invective he used to work himself up to it and then the rage that seized him when he screamed curses at her. Then they would flee the scene. Simon, the older one, went first. He would grab his brother and snatch him away too, pulling him along like a frightened lamb, petrified that their father would turn his wrath upon them.
One day he would be able to take Mikkelina with them.
And one day he would be able to defend his mother.
The terrified brothers ran out of the house and headed for the redcurrant bushes. It was autumn and the bushes were in bloom, with thick foliage and little red berries swollen with juice that burst in their hands when they picked them to fill tins and jars that their mother had given them.
They threw themselves to the ground on the other side of the bushes, listening to their father’s curses and oaths and the sound of breaking plates and their mother’s screams. The younger boy covered his ears, but Simon looked in through the kitchen window that cast its yellowish glow out into the twilight, and he forced himself to listen to her howls.
He had stopped covering his ears. He had to listen if he was to do what he needed to do.
10
Elsa was not exaggerating about the cellar in Benjamin’s house. It was packed with junk and for a moment Erlendur found the prospect too daunting. He wondered about calling in Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli, but decided to keep that on hold. The cellar measured about 90 square metres and was partitioned off into a number of different-sized rooms, with no doors or windows, full of boxes and more boxes, some labelled, but most not. There were cardboard boxes that once contained wine bottles and cigarettes, and wooden crates, in all conceivable sizes and filled with an endless assortment of rubbish. In the cellar were also old cupboards, chests, suitcases and sundry items that had accumulated over a long time: dusty bicycles, lawn mowers, an old barbecue grill.
“You can rummage through that as you please,” Elsa said when she followed him down. “If there’s anything I can help you with, just call me.” She half pitied this frowning detective who seemed somewhat absent-minded, shabbily dressed in his tatty cardigan under an old jacket with worn patches on the elbows. She sensed a certain sorrow about him when she talked to him and looked him in the eye.
Erlendur gave a vague smile and thanked her. Two hours later he found the first documents from Benjamin Knudsen the merchant. He had an awful time working through the cellar. Everything was disorganised. Old and more recent junk was mixed up in huge piles that he had to examine and move in order to make progress into the heap. However, the further he slowly made his way across the floor, the older the rubbish seemed to be that he was sorting through. He felt like having a coffee and a cigarette and he wondered whether to pester Elsa or go out for a break and find a cafe.
Eva Lind never left his thoughts. He had his mobile on him and was expecting a call from the hospital at any moment. His conscience plagued him for not being with her. Maybe he should take a few days off, sit beside his daughter and talk to her as the doctor had urged him to. Be with her instead of leaving her in intensive care, unconscious, with no family or comforting words, all by herself. But he knew he could never sit idly waiting by her bedside. Work was a form of salvation. He needed it to occupy his mind. Prevent himself from thinking the worst. The unthinkable.