“How do you know what happened? How did you dig that up? Who have you been talking to?”
“We’re gathering information. People from Hafnarfjordur remember it well. You weren’t totally indifferent to him then. When you were children.”
Stefania remained silent.
“The whole thing was a nightmare,” she said at last. “A terrible nightmare.”
In their house in Hafnarfjordur they spent the whole day excitedly looking forward to when he would sing at the cinema. She woke up early, made breakfast and thought about her mother, feeling that she had assumed that role in the household and was proud of it. Her father mentioned how helpful she was at looking after the two of them after her mother died. How grown-up and responsible she was in everything she did. Normally he never said anything about her. Ignored her. Always had.
She missed her mother. One of the last things her mother said to her in hospital was that now she would need to look after her father and brother. She must not let them down. “Promise me that,” her mother said. “It won’t always be easy. It hasn’t always been easy. Your father can be so stubborn and strict and I don’t know whether Gudlaugur can take it. But if it ever comes to that you must stand with him, Gudlaugur, promise me that too,” her mother said, and she nodded and promised that too. And they held hands until her mother fell asleep, and then she stroked her hair and kissed her on the forehead.
Two days later she was dead.
“We’ll let Gudlaugur sleep a little bit longer,” her father said when he came down into the kitchen. “It’s an important day for him.”
An important day for him.
She did not recall any day being important for her. Everything revolved around him. His singing. The recording sessions. The two records that had been released. The invitation to tour Scandinavia. The concerts in Hafnarfjordur. The concert tonight. His voice. His singing practice when she had to sneak around the house so as not to disturb them as he stood by the piano and his father played the accompaniment, instructing and encouraging him and showing him love and understanding if he felt he did well, but being strict and firm if he did not think he concentrated enough. Sometimes he lost his temper and scolded him. Sometimes he hugged him and said he was wonderful.
If only she had received a fraction of the attention lavished on him and the encouragement that he was given every day for having that beautiful voice. She felt unimportant, devoid of any talent that could attract her father’s attention. He sometimes said it was a shame that she did not have a voice. He regarded teaching her to sing as a hopeless task, but she knew that wasn’t the case. She knew that he could not be bothered to expend his energy on her, because she did not have a special voice. She lacked her brother’s gift. She could sing in a choir and hammer out a tune on the piano, but both her father, and the piano teacher he sent her to because he did not have the time to attend to her himself, talked about her lack of musical talent
Her brother, on the other hand, had a wonderful voice and a profound feeling for music, but was still just a normal boy like she was a normal girl. She did not know what it was that distinguished them from each other. He was no different from her. To some extent she was in charge of his upbringing, especially after their mother fell ill. He obeyed her, did what she told him and respected her. Similarly, she loved him, but also felt jealous of the praise he earned. She was afraid of that feeling and mentioned it to no one.
She heard Gudlaugur coming down the stairs, and then he appeared in the kitchen and sat down beside their father.
“Just like Mum,” he said as he watched his sister pour coffee into their father’s cup.
He often talked about their mother and she knew he missed her terribly. He had turned to her when something went wrong, when the boys bullied him or their father lost his temper, or simply when he needed someone to hold him without it being a special reward for a good performance.
Expectation and excitement reigned in the house all day and had reached an almost unbearable pitch when towards evening they put on their best clothes and set off for the cinema. The two of them accompanied Gudlaugur backstage, their father greeted the choirmaster, and then they crept out into the auditorium as it began to fill up. The lights in the auditorium dimmed. The curtain rose. Quite big for his age, handsome and peculiarly determined as he stood on stage, Gudlaugur finally began to sing in his melancholy boy soprano.
She held her breath and closed her eyes.
The next thing she knew was her father grabbing her by the arm so tightly that it hurt, and hearing him moan: “Oh my God!”
She opened her eyes and saw her father’s face, pale as death, and when she looked up at the stage she saw Gudlaugur trying to sing, but something had happened to his voice. It was like yodelling. She rose to her feet, looked all around the auditorium behind her and saw that people had started to smile and some were laughing. She ran up onto the stage to her brother and tried to lead him away. The choirmaster came to her assistance and eventually they managed to take him backstage. She saw her father standing rigid in the front row, staring up at her like the god of thunder.
When she lay in bed that evening and thought back to that terrible moment her heart missed a beat, not from fear or horror at what had happened or how her brother must have felt, but from a mysterious glee for which she had no explanation and which she repressed like an evil crime.
“Did you have a guilty conscience about those thoughts?” Erlendur asked.
“They were completely alien to me,” Stefania said. “I’d never thought anything like that before.”
“I don’t suppose there’s anything abnormal about gloating over other people’s misfortunes,” Erlendur said. “Even people close to us. It may be an instinct, a kind of defence mechanism for dealing with shock.”
“I shouldn’t be telling you this in such detail,” Stefania said. “It doesn’t paint a very appealing picture of me. And you may be right. We all suffered shock. An enormous shock, as you can imagine.”
“What was their relationship like after this happened?” Erlendur asked. “Gudlaugur and his father.”
Stefania ignored his question.
“Do you know what it’s like not to be the favourite?” she asked instead. “What it’s like just being ordinary and never earning any particular attention. It’s like you don’t exist. You’re taken for granted, not favoured or shown any special care. And all the time someone you consider your equal is championed like the chosen one, born to bring infinite joy to his parents and the whole world. You watch it day after day, week after week and year after year and it never ceases, if anything it increases over the years, almost … almost worship.”
She looked up at Erlendur.
“It can only spawn jealousy,” she said. “Anything else would not be human. And instead of suppressing it the next thing you know is that you’re nourished by it, because in some odd way it makes you feel better.”
“Is that the explanation for gloating over your brother’s misfortune?”
“I don’t know,” Stefania said. “I couldn’t control that feeling. It hit me like a slap in the face and I trembled and shivered and tried to get rid of it, but it wouldn’t go. I didn’t think that could happen.”
They fell silent.
“You envied your brother,” Erlendur said then.
“Maybe I did, for a while. Later I began to pity him.”
“And eventually hate him.”
She looked at Erlendur.
“What do you know about hate?” she said.