‘All I do is relay messages to you.’
‘Don’t you fall into a trance then?’ the woman wanted to know. Although she and her husband were no strangers to seances, they hadn’t encountered this psychic before.
‘No,’ the medium replied, ‘that’s not how it works. It’s more that the currents flow through me.’
The old man cupped a hand to his ear. ‘What’s that you say?’
‘I’m explaining how it works.’
‘They will be speaking Icelandic, won’t they?’ the old man bellowed.
The medium reassured him on this point and he began the seance by asking the sitters a series of questions. Names floated around the room, which they either did or didn’t recognise. If a name didn’t sound familiar to anyone, the medium was quick to move on to the next one. But if he received a positive answer from his audience, he would continue to question the spirit and describe any distinguishing features until a consensus was reached about who it could be. Once this was established, he would convey the message that all was well on the other side, and sometimes pass on thanks to somebody in the room. Some spirits, according to him, were accompanied by a sweet smell, others were associated with pieces of furniture, paintings or articles of clothing. The father and son recognised some of these, the old man others. Once the medium had taken his time in attending to them, he turned to Rósamunda’s parents.
‘I... it’s cold and dark here,’ he said, standing in front of them with half-closed eyes, his head tilted to one side. ‘Cold and dark and there’s a man standing... he’s standing in the cold and I... I think he’s got mittens on, it’s as if he’s got mittens on and he’s cold. Mittens knitted from two-ply yarn. Does that sound familiar at all?’
The couple didn’t immediately answer.
‘He’s... could he be wet from the sea?’ asked the psychic. ‘Could he be drenched with seawater?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman hesitantly. ‘If it’s him. Did you say two-ply yarn?’
‘The mittens,’ her husband added in explanation.
‘He says you were always good to him and he wants to thank you for all the coffee,’ said the medium, not letting himself get distracted. ‘I have the feeling his name might be Vilmundur or Vilhjálmur, something like that.’
‘Could it be Mundi?’ the woman said, her eyes on her husband.
‘I get the feeling he drowned,’ continued the medium. ‘That he’s dead. Am I right?’
‘He was lost in Faxaflói Bay,’ said the husband. ‘Off Akranes. There were three of them.’
‘I knitted those mittens for him,’ said the woman. ‘The poor, dear chap.’
‘I can see... it’s like a painting or maybe a view from a sunny house and there’s this strong smell of coffee. A beautiful house. And kleinur. Such a strong smell of coffee and something else too — cinnamon, from the doughnuts, something like that.’
‘Mundi often used to say how good my kleinur were,’ said the woman, nodding as if to confirm this to the father and son who were sitting quietly listening.
‘I sense that he’s in church and I think... I can hear music. Could that be right? Was there a lot of music around him?’
‘That could well be right; he used to play the organ,’ said Rósamunda’s father.
‘Thank you,’ said the medium. ‘He’s telling you not to worry about...’
He broke off and appeared to be listening intently for messages from the spirit world. A long time passed in absolute silence, as if the messages couldn’t get through. Then all of a sudden the medium took a step backwards and froze, as if riveted to the spot, his eyes still half-closed.
‘He says she’s with him. She... that you’ll know who she is.’
The woman gasped: ‘Our little girl!’
‘Can you see her?’ asked her husband eagerly.
‘He doesn’t want... says you’ll know what he means and that you’re not to worry.’
‘Our darling little girl,’ said the woman and began to cry. Her husband tried to comfort her.
The medium fell silent again and they didn’t dare interrupt, convinced that he was straining for messages from the depths of eternity, until finally Rósamunda’s father could hold back no longer.
‘Does she want to tell us who it was?’ he whispered.
The medium stood in the middle of the room, perfectly still, for what felt like an age. The sitters didn’t move a muscle. The eyes of father and son were fixed on him and the deaf old man was trying not to miss a thing. Rósamunda’s parents held hands.
‘Does she want to tell us who it was?’ the husband asked again.
The medium didn’t answer but remained silent and motionless, until he began shaking his head and pacing around the room, saying the connection had broken and he didn’t have the strength to continue.
The seance was over. The psychic sank into a chair as if exhausted and Konrád’s father brought him a drink of water. Rósamunda’s parents sat there dazed, as though they could hardly believe what had happened. It took a while for everyone to get their bearings again. They were all convinced that something important, something extraordinary, had occurred.
Konrád’s father pulled back the thick curtains to admit the light spring night, then went out to the kitchen and came back with coffee for the sitters and offered round some boiled sweets. The deaf old man poured the coffee into his saucer and drained it with loud slurps.
‘Odd about those mittens,’ remarked Rósamunda’s father. ‘That he should bring them up.’
‘I was telling the host only yesterday how fond Mundi was of my kleinur,’ said his wife. ‘And about the mittens. The two-ply ones.’
The father and son looked at them.
‘Did you tell him that?’ the widower asked, his eyes on Konrád’s father.
‘What was that? What did she tell him?’ shouted the old man.
‘I’m sure I did,’ said the woman. ‘I told him about Mundi and how he drowned.’
‘Did that seem wise to you?’
‘Wise? I don’t understand.’
Konrád sat at the kitchen table, watching the sun go down and recalling his father’s account of the incident. He remembered it vividly. He was eighteen when his father told him about the seance with the couple who had lost their daughter, and how he used to go about swindling a few krónur out of gullible types, many of whom were mourning the loss of a loved one. He had never spoken of it before, though he had often talked of the other dubious activities he had been mixed up in. But on this occasion he had been drunker than usual and mawkish with it, willing to open up to his son about some of the murkier episodes in his past.
‘It was laughably easy,’ he had said in his hoarse voice, smoking non-stop as he talked. ‘People were ready to swallow anything, and the more they paid, the more they’d lap it up. Damn it, the whole thing was a piece of cake.’
Konrád couldn’t detect any remorse in his father’s manner. He never made excuses for what he was or what he had done to others, but Konrád couldn’t stop himself from asking how he could stomach profiting from people’s misery like that.
‘If they want to be taken in, that’s not my problem,’ was all the answer Konrád got. ‘Mind you, he did have powers of some kind, the bloke who played the medium for the girl’s parents. We held a lot of seances together, him and me, and we weren’t found out because he did have a certain gift, I reckon, though he was a bloody amateur. I didn’t get everything from the woman — not the organ, for example — but maybe that was just luck. You needed a bit of luck to do it well. I’d tipped him off about the other stuff, like the mittens and how the bloke drowned, before they arrived. But when the father and son got wind of the fact that the woman had talked to me beforehand, they went mad and called the police, and that was that. A phoney medium exposed. And I was described as his accomplice.’ Konrád’s father burst out laughing. ‘Like I was his sidekick!’