I said nothing about the circumstances of Bæring’s death, just talked about rum and delirium. And there was no Sherlock Holmes in Ísafjördur. Everything was so conveniently primitive in those days. No combing the bay for guns or bloody stones. No one showing up with autopsy reports and demanding answers. People knew Bæring, where he came from, and what end he would come to. But whether I killed him or not, I’ll obviously never know. Whether he wasn’t a dying man already.
When does a woman kill a man and a man a woman?
I did go to Bolungarvík, to bury the bull, however. Even though the local priest was a renowned ‘burier,’ with an appetite for corpses, who believed it was his mission to dispatch as many of his parishioners to God’s kingdom as he possibly could, he also had a reputation for sitting up with the widows until all the bottles on the farm were empty, so I looked for someone else. There we sat around the white coffin, ten women and two boys. His crew from the Vesti sent a telegram. His daughter Lilja wept woefully. Haraldur sent condolences. My father wrote about him in the national paper, although he’d met him only twice. He and Mum took the boys south for a few weeks while I got on with my wailing.
In the end I had to get up because the summer was about to turn to autumn. Ólafur and Magnús came back west, and with their help I managed to make enough hay for the winter and the fifteen sheep, which became my salvation when school started and I was left alone again. Few things are as soothing to the soul as tending to animals.
Winter arrived, and life was blissfully simple. I always awoke at the crack of dawn and therefore always a few minutes later than the day before. I took care of the sheep, fed myself, grabbed a book. I dabbled in making blood sausage and cooked meat soup that lasted me ten days. I didn’t wash up for a whole month. By seven, six, five o’clock the light was gone and I kicked the generator on. In the evenings I’d lie in bed listening to the Reykjavík intellectuals on the radio talking about art or politics. But sometimes I just lay there and let my mind wander, back to Bob and his silly jokes, back to Amrum and my old house in Svefneyjar. Because of the murmur of the generator and the small size of the bedroom, I sometimes felt as if I were in the berth of a ship sailing into Iceland’s deepest fjord, seeking shelter from the polar winds.
The phone was kind enough to remain silent for weeks on end, although my dear Mum called a few times to see if I was capable of saying hello and to give me some news from the city. Our cousin Lone Bang had celebrated her eightieth birthday, but Dad’s siblings, those who were still alive, refused to turn up because she hadn’t invited him. Shortly after Grandma Georgia died in September 1958, the singer had decided to move to Iceland and currently lived in a Reykjavík basement with some actors where she honoured the president’s memory and taught singing to a young and precocious Björk, and was feted by the small city elite with their pursed lips and minuet steps. Well, what do you know?
By the end of October, I was out of cigarettes, and I had almost forgotten my old addiction when a carton finally arrived by bus a month later. It was then that I realised I had attained a new form of bliss: the simple life.
In the middle of the journey of my life, I had been granted a spiritual retreat. I was finally free of children and men and free of all the whips and lashes that accompany contemporary life. The only happy people in our cities are vagabonds and tramps.
Was I just a countrywoman at heart?
Then, one cold Tuesday in Advent, the generator broke down. I welcomed the silence, but the darkness surrounded the farm like an army, with consequences that took me totally by surprise: suddenly an old ghost raised his oily head. The boat engineer of my life wasn’t altogether dead. Within just a few hours I had plunged into the darkest inferno. I felt he’d come back, and I expected the barrel of a gun to come through the windows at any moment. I was terrified of the dark and lit candles in every corner. But couldn’t sleep. Although it was totally still and silent, my head was about to explode. It was as if all the rapes of the past years were assaulting me at once, like hundreds of pinkish pale bats beating me, both inside and outside, with their spiky wings, snapping at me with their small teeth. That odd couple, Pain and Humiliation, joined the mob, as did Rage against the betrayal of love, and together they whipped the giggling animals and the biting intensified. In the middle of this ordeal, I heard a crashing sound in the kitchen, a heavy thud. Was he inside? Was he back again? No, it was… it was a thud, it was the thud: suddenly a little girl appeared, my little girl, my beloved, dearest lovely child, who had died on a narrow street in another life. She appeared to me, over the end of the bed, hovering, with her golden locks all shiny and glowing in the candlelight, she was so beautiful, dressed in the same clothes she was on the day she died, and recited this poem:
My God, that voice, it was her, it was her, oh, my darling child, my angel, and so beautiful, so blond and blue eyed, Blómey, my Blómey. And yet so ghostly, so clearly pale and spectral, yes, almost as if she’d aged, a girl who had been three years old for thirty years, and she repeated her name, yes, she was saying her name, Bloway. And then she was gone.
All gone, Bloway.
I lay there stretched out in ecstasy. Hot water streamed under my skin, and I was filled with calm and peace, fell fast asleep half an hour later, and dreamed of beds of roses and gentle swings. She had never appeared to me before, and it was so good. She had saved me from madness. Oh my God, and I who had never believed in anything that hovers.
The next day, Jón arrived. I was fiddling with the sheep shed gate and felt my eyes water when I saw him walking over the blind hill, slightly curved. I was almost on the point of running up to embrace that wonderful man but felt it would be too unwestfjordian and waited for him by the gate. My eyes were completely dry by the time he reached me.
‘Good day.’
‘Hi.’
We stood under the drizzling snow for some moments. Across the bay, the ferry was on its way into the longest fjord in Iceland.
‘The generator’s gone?’ he asked finally, and he moved slowly towards the shed.
‘Yes. Did you hear it break down yesterday?’ I asked out of my anorak as I followed him.
He didn’t answer until two hours later, when the generator was working again and we were sitting in the kitchen.
‘No, I’ve lost almost all my hearing powers now.’
Bit by bit, I came back to my senses again. El hombre slowly faded in my mind, like a dirty heap of drift snow on the side of a mountain; in the end there was nothing left of it except its sandy coat in the green heather, and it still lies there today.
I stayed put for another three years. Haraldur had mostly vanished. By then he’d started a relationship with his serious wife, Thórdís Alva. They lived together in Reykjavík and phoned me at Christmas and Easter. Then there were the little kings, Ólafur and Magnús, who normally stayed with me over the summer, but for the rest of the time I was alone. I had nothing to give to them, poor little things, and looked after them like a wounded doctor after patients and just couldn’t wait to send them away again.
It was a mixture of solitary bliss, exile, and atonement. And my existence in this garage is no doubt some kind of prison sentence, too. If the judiciary system doesn’t nail you, then you’ve just got to take care of it yourself. Apart from that, I categorically deny being a murderer. I’m no bloody murderer. A person who has been killed a thousand times over is unable to kill.