‘Goddamn the man!’ mutters Guðmundur as he puts on his robe, but he can’t find his slippers anywhere, so he runs barefoot up to the bridge.
‘Hello!’ he calls as he storms into the bridge, but there is no answer. He walks straight to the dead man’s bell and pushes the button, at which the light stops flashing and the bell goes silent.
‘What in the fucking fires of hell!’ Guðmundur roars, so furious that his face has gone red, his hands are shaking and his tongue is dry in his mouth.
He looks over the instruments to check the ship’s speed and direction. They’re on the right course, the main engines are turning over at full speed, there are no warning lights on – but what’s this?
The radar screen is as black as the night outside.
‘What the…!’ Guðmundur breathes hard through his nose. He taps the screen, pushes all the buttons and turns the brightness knob as far as it will go clockwise, but all for nothing. Instead of a ray of light going circle after circle around the image of the ship with a green blur in its wake, he can see only dark glass with grains of dust and fingerprints on it.
‘I am completely…’ Guðmundur stops and smoothes his damp palm over his head, then he tears his staring eyes off the darkened radar screen and turns them to the GPS navigation device, which is about the size of an alarm clock and displays the exact position of the ship in red letters on a black screen:
55°N 32°W
‘Well, at least we’ve got…’ Guðmundur falls silent as the red letters disappear from the black screen of the GPS device.
His heart skips a beat. He taps the instrument, turns the knobs to left and right, pulls the cord, flicks his nail at the screen, but the letters don’t return.
‘JÓNAS!’ screams Guðmundur and beats the instrument panel with his clenched fist, but there is no answer.
Guðmundur takes a deep breath and tries to calm himself; he rolls his head back and forth and silently counts up to fifty. He steps across to port and pours inky coffee into his mug, splashes some milk in it and sits down in the captain’s chair. He rocks back and forth, drumming his fingers on the chair’s arm while he sips the thickened coffee.
‘Goddammit! I’ll have to call somebody out to relieve me,’ he says to himself after a while. He gets out of the chair, then stops to listen as a door opens and someone enters the bridge. Someone who stops to catch his breath by the map room, sneezes like a dog and then snorts something out of his nose.
‘Who’s there?’ the captain asks frostily as he takes two steps forward, a murderous glint in his staring eyes.
XVI
04:17
Jónas opens the door to the platform behind the wheelhouse, but screws up his eyes and steps back when the wind and rain hit him. He grabs the doorframe with his left hand, holds the doorknob tightly with his right, steps over the threshold, out onto the platform and, on the third try, manages to slam the door behind him.
It’s a little better standing on the iron platform outside than in the draught that’s formed in the doorway, but it’s still quite hard for Jónas to keep his feet. He’s forced to let go of the cold, wet railing so he can tighten his parka hood. Then he loses his balance, falls flat on his back, slamming the back of his head against the wheelhouse.
‘Holy Mary, mother of…’ Jónas moans, rolling over onto his hands and knees. Through the X-pattern of the iron platform he can see the iron stairs winding all the way down to B-deck, and from the corner of his eye he sees the stern, poised like a lid above the cauldron-like sea.
Jónas scrambles to his feet holding fast to the railing and climbs up the top stair, which leads onto the roof of the bridge. It’s a completely level green-painted iron roof, surrounded by the same kind of railing as the platform behind the wheelhouse.
At the back of the roof, directly above the stairs, is a twelve-metre-high radar and lighting mast with two radar scanners and three aerials for cellular and radio telephones, as well as the mandatory lights. Further up the mast, which is triangular and narrows towards the top, are two railed platforms; the lower one is quite roomy but the upper one is only half the size. Jónas makes his slow and cautious way up a vertical iron ladder on the mast, doing his best not to look down. This far above sea level, the ship’s movements are fully exaggerated – Jónas is swinging back and forth so fast that his stomach lurches and heat streams into his head. The sideways movements pull so hard that he almost loses his grip on the rain-slick iron and when the ship pitches into troughs between the waves it feels as if his flesh is pulling on his bones and all his blood is flowing into his legs.
Jónas climbs all the way up to the lower platform but decides not to try to climb onto it. The rain smacks against him like a wet cloth and the wind tosses him back and forth, tears at his soaking parka, thrusts water into his nose and eyes. His trousers stick to his thighs, his shoes are full of water, his hands are red and his fingers stiff as thick rubber hoses.
In front of him are two horizontal iron tubes; from their ends insulated wires wind upwards and connect to such things as the foghorn, the little blinking red lights on the mast, the radar scanners turning circle after circle in the wind, and the aerials, long needles reaching into the black heavens. Jónas locks his left arm around the mast’s frame and pulls big, yellow-handled wire-cutters out of his right parka pocket.
He wants to clip apart only the aerials, but doesn’t know which wires lead to them, so he has to clip all the wires to be sure, although the ship can’t really do without its radar. The wires are both rigid and wet; the wire-cutters are stiff and slippery in his cold hand. Jónas screws up his eyes in concentration. He mustn’t drop the cutters, and he mustn’t lose his hold on the mast. One by one the wires slip apart; the fingers of his left hand slip on the wet iron; he’s blinded by the rain but finally all the wires have been cut. They dangle there like licorice straws with a copper filling.
Jónas slides the cutters back into his parka pocket and climbs down the steep ladder. When his shoe soles touch the roof of the bridge a foolish feeling of happiness washes over him. But he’s not finished yet: he still has to cut the wire that leads down from the satellite receiver at the front end of the roof on the port side, a white dome standing on a narrow pole. It’s about the size of the body section of a large snowman. Jónas stands still, holding onto the mast while he recovers from his climb. To his right is the ship’s funnel, a square chimney out of which protrude four curved exhaust pipes. The black smoke merges with the darkness and disappears into the night, but off and on it blows in Jónas’s face, causing him to lose his breath and cough in the sour and irritating fuel oil soot.
There are a few protrusions on the roof of the bridge, besides the satellite receiver. There’s a searchlight on its stand, towards the front on the starboard side, and in the middle a magnetic compass on a six-foot platform, wrapped in green canvas. But the roof is mostly bare – just the green-painted metal, covered with slimy salt, soot, oil spills and running water.
The ship is lifted slowly onto the crest of a wave, listing a bit to port; in front of it clouds drift to the east and suddenly Jónas catches a glimpse of something that shines like gold in the sky.
It’s a new moon that looks like a cradle, resting on top of the churning clouds.
Jónas gazes at the moon, heedless for just a moment. He lets go of the mast to shield his eyes from the wind and then the ship dips and rights itself. The wind hits Jónas in the back; he loses his balance, is thrown forward and slides at full speed across the roof on his belly until he comes to a stop up against the railings at the front of the bridge.