‘The Danish prime minister and the rest of her government are cowards for not wanting to reconcile,’ Hammond said angrily.
‘What is there to reconcile?’ Espersen said. ‘If it were up to me, Denmark would be running absolutely everything up here. It’s grotesque that we send you billions of kroner every year and yet we don’t have any say at all in what you do with the money. We would never put up with it in any other part of Denmark if it had the world’s highest suicide rate or every third girl there were sexually abused.’
‘And that’s exactly the kind of rhetoric we’ve come to expect from the Danish People’s Party,’ Hammond sneered. ‘You’re reductive and racist.’
‘Being against raping children wasn’t racist the last time I looked,’ Espersen said.
Matthew turned down the volume and the voices faded away. He didn’t need to listen to Hammond and Espersen to know what they were saying. He had heard it all before. He grabbed his laptop.
The first of three planned political debates between Aleqa Hammond and Søren Espersen kicked off with the subject of the reconciliation commission, but was soon hijacked and led to sharp exchanges between the Greenlandic prime minister and the Danish People’s Party’s deputy leader and Greenland spokesperson…
Less than twenty minutes later his summary was ready, and the very same second that a disgusted-looking Hammond shook hands with Espersen, Matthew sent the text off to the translator so it could be uploaded in Danish and Greenlandic simultaneously on Sermitsiaq’s website.
Less than five years ago, when Matthew had completed his degree in journalism, he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that he would end up here in Nuuk writing about reconciliation. His dreams had been bigger. He’d always seen himself chasing scoops. He wanted more, though. He had loved Tine, loved the idea of having a family. Emily. The car crash had put an abrupt end to that dream—and if he couldn’t be with Tine, with their baby, the rest made no sense.
He flopped back on the sofa. The screams from his nightmare echoed in his thoughts. His fingers could still remember the curve of her stomach. He rubbed his eyes. It was late, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep much more tonight. The town wouldn’t get fully dark. The fog would probably lift. He pulled his laptop bag closer and stuck his hand into one of the pockets, where his fingers found a handful of old photographs. He studied them one by one and then arranged them on the sofa next to him.
All the photographs were dog-eared from constant handling. He’d had some of them since he was a child. Those of his father were the oldest. They had been taken at the US air base in Thule, in northwest Greenland, and his father wore a uniform in all of them except the one where he was sitting with Matthew’s mother in what looked like a military mess hall. His father was smiling. They were both smiling. His mother with her big belly. One of the pictures wasn’t a photograph but a postcard sent from Nuuk in August 1990. I’m not able to come to Denmark as soon as planned, it said. Sorry, love you both.
Matthew traced each letter with his finger. Those words were the only thing he had left of his father. The postcard had arrived a few months after Matthew and his mother had moved back to Denmark.
The last picture slipping through his fingers was that of Tine. Tine sitting down, watching him with a broad smile. She was smiling because they had learned that very same day that they were going to have a daughter. They had even seen their baby girl on the monitor at the prenatal clinic. We’ll name her Emily, Tine had said. Emily. And when she gets a bit bigger than my stomach, I’ll read Wuthering Heights to her. He had loved Tine. And she had loved him.
THE MAN FROM THE ICE
2
The powerful helicopter rotors whirled the snow on the ice cap around the few men already present on the ice. The snow became a tornado of furious glass shards, and Matthew watched as the men raised their hands to their faces to shield themselves. Not that it would do them much good; once roused, the ice and the snow had a knack of finding their way into every nook and cranny. Nor did it help that the sun was high in the sky, and caught the thousands of tiny ice crystals in the dual fire of its rays and the reflection from the ice cap beneath them.
‘Can you see anything?’ a voice in front of him called out.
‘Only some men,’ Matthew shouted back, squinting and holding up his hand to shade his face from the sunlight. His fingers were trembling as usual, and he clenched his fist, pressing it against his forehead as he shut his eyes for a moment.
The huge Sikorsky helicopter flicked its tail and slowly turned on its own axis before starting its descent to the thick layer of compacted snow and ice. The sunlight was replaced by shade, and Matthew caught a brief glimpse of his pale face and blond hair reflected in the window.
The photographer sitting next to him leaned out so far that he risked plummeting to the ice. Matthew wondered why anyone would be mad enough to open the door before the helicopter had landed.
‘There!’ The photographer interrupted Matthew’s catastrophising and quickly raised his camera to his face. ‘Look! Over there!’
Matthew took a firm hold of the strap by his seat and leaned towards the photographer’s shoulder, trying to follow the angle of the camera lens. Not many metres left to go now. The snow was being blown far away by the force of the downdraft from the blades, making the area immediately below them entirely smooth. Matthew’s other hand brushed his jeans pocket, checking that he had remembered his cigarettes and lighter.
The men on the ice grew bigger, big enough for Matthew to see their squinting eyes and brown faces.
He had only been in Nuuk for a few months, and he had been sent to cover this story purely because there had been no one else in the office that morning when the editor called. You need to be at the airport in half an hour. Some hunters have found a dead body that’s been there so long it’s been mummified. It might be a man from the Viking age. This is huge, I’m telling you. Huge!
Shortly after his arrival in Nuuk, Matthew had been given the obligatory city tour, and had been shown the Inuit mummies at the museum in Kolonihavnen. It was rare for new mummies to be discovered these days, though, and this one, of Nordic appearance rather than Inuit, would be unique. It would be the first time a well-preserved Norseman had ever been found, and historians and archaeologists already had high hopes that this mummy would teach them more about the everyday life of the Norsemen.
Matthew had read that the Norsemen had disappeared leaving practically no trace after inhabiting Greenland for more than four hundred years—a disappearance shrouded in mystery, as it seemed odd that such an established population would vanish so suddenly. Norsemen had also settled in Iceland and on the Faroe Islands, where their descendants still lived to this day, while in Greenland there was a gap from approximately 1400 to 1721, when the Dano-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede came in search of the Norsemen, found the old settlements abandoned, and so instead started his mission to convert the Inuit and laid the foundations for the Danish colonisation of modern Greenland.
Now a Viking had emerged from the ice. No one could as yet fathom what he had been doing so far out there in the white loneliness, but he was real, and it was him they had flown out there to see.
The editor’s words kept going round in Matthew’s mind: We want to break this story. No one else. It’s our news and our scoop, and we want the credit, understand? You can write in English, can’t you?