The Ice Lands, page 18
‘We were both drunk. Later that night I moved into the apartment block on Hringbraut where my dope dealer lived with two other guys . . . I started dealing grass, which I told you about before, then I progressed to speed. I dug up hidden packages of the drug and processed it for sale.’
‘You told me about the grass, not about the other—’
‘I was used to having money, you understand. I was brought up with money . . . When the cops started to tap my phone and follow me around town – which they did within a matter of months – I stopped dealing. For a while I managed a discotheque on Hafnarstræti, which was a front for laundering money, among other things.’
‘What about Egill?’
‘He didn’t get dragged into any of that. He lived with his parents and was busy going to school, doing his homework. So he couldn’t get away on weekdays, but we used to go out at weekends and have a good time . . . After I left home, Egill was my only link to the past, like a connecting thread. I trusted him. Then he began to change, and I had the impression that he saw a difference between us, that he felt superior.’
‘What gave you that impression?’
‘Some of the things he said, the looks he gave me . . . At first I assumed it was the drugs, and I didn’t react. Yet I noticed how he always encouraged me to consume more while he held back; he never did anything to prevent me from sabotaging my own life, no matter what I did . . . Not that I wanted any guidance. But to feed off others, to thrive on their misfortune – that’s something else . . . I was always more popular, wittier. I made friends easily, and was a quick learner. Egill had never really applied himself to anything, but I already noticed a change in him in our second year, before I dropped out of school. He was different when he came back after the Christmas holidays, as if he had decided that his time had come. It was apparent in everything he did: what he talked about, the way he greeted people in the corridors, the clothes he wore, the books he read by authors with more letters after their names than in them, books on group psychology, management techniques, body language and advertising. He also drank less, went to speed-reading classes, public speaking courses, started talking about “the Chicago School”, and attending young conservative meetings at Heimdallur, where he made new friends. After I left, he put himself forward as head of the students’ union, and was elected secretary or some bullshit position like that.’
‘Isn’t it normal to change, especially in junior college? People experiment with different things, try to work out what role they want to play in life . . .’
‘Of course. And Egill gave a fine performance – only the script was written by a totally different person, no one I recognized. The polite word for it would be ambition; Egill had discovered the social climber in himself, and I found that hard to ignore. The way he saw it, what existed between us wasn’t brotherliness, or the desire to help one another, or stand together. No, we were in competition, not just with each other and everyone else, but also with ourselves.’
‘Did anyone else notice this change?’
Vigdís sounded sceptical, which irritated him.
‘Not to the extent I did. I was his only childhood friend, apart from a few mutual acquaintances, none of whom really knew him. I’m not exaggerating . . . As you know, I have nothing against being competitive; only I realized how far Egill was prepared to go. Once I lost my temper, I yelled at him, scolded him, told him I missed the old Egill. He responded by sulking for a week – or maybe he was writing new scenes for his character, new postures. Around that time I met the girl I spoke to you about once, the one Egill mentioned during the quarrel.’
‘The girl you were in love with?’
Hrafn nodded.
‘In my own warped way. I never understood what she saw in me, but I truly wanted to live up to that image. She didn’t take drugs, she was different from all the other people around me: kind, light-hearted, gorgeous to look at – all that. I started to use her as a reason to get out of my mess, to become a better man. I confided all this to Egill. He said he had never heard me talk that way before, congratulated me, embraced me.
‘A month later, the day after the girl told me she wanted to split up – she said she couldn’t go out with a drug dealer on principle – I had a call from Egill. He wanted us to meet up. While we were strolling round Tjörnin, the way we did sometimes, Egill told me that he and the girl were in love, that they had spent a lot of time together while I was working, looking after the bar or whatever. They were ashamed, but they hadn’t set out to cheat on me – it had happened when they were drinking, and I needed to understand that he wished everything could be different, but unfortunately it wasn’t.
‘I listened to him telling me how sorry he was, but I didn’t believe him – I’m not sure he believed himself. He barely tried to pretend, spoke like someone carrying out a damage-limitation exercise, attempting to save all our faces, or possibly our future relations. He was clearly expecting a knee-jerk response – an emotional outburst, a punch in the face, or worse – but I got the impression it didn’t matter to him either way . . . And the thing that really hurt was that Egill showed absolutely no remorse. On the contrary, he seemed to think he had the right to take her away from me, because my life was a dirty, ugly mess and I was heading for the abyss, because I didn’t know how to appreciate her, and my feelings didn’t matter, if indeed I had any feelings. With the girl gone, his worthless friend could go back to taking drugs, and in no time at all he would have forgotten everything.
‘That’s what he said, or what I heard him say, and in the middle of his speech I walked away. He called after me, but I didn’t turn around. I walked out to Vatnsmýri and lay down beside the pond outside the Nordic House. There was a frost, and the grass was white, the stars twinkled in the sky – all terribly dramatic . . . Then I snorted a line and regretted having run away. I went and stood outside Egill’s place for an hour, not knowing whether I was spying or planning to do something to him. In the end I went to a party at a friend’s house that went on for a month or more, and by the time I sobered up I had forgotten the girl’s name.’
They came to the hill that they had walked up the first day in search of a mobile signal, and stopped to drink water. It occurred to Hrafn that the hill was man-made, like the smaller one at its base, and those near the container village, and possibly all the hills around there – born in the earth’s entrails from rock that was smashed, ground up and then transported to the surface in trucks. And did that change anything? Wasn’t our entire awareness man-made?
He took out his bottle and squirted some water into his mouth. The door in the hill was still locked. Smiling at Vigdís, he asked:
‘Do you think that’s enough?’
‘What?’
‘Enough of a justification?’
‘You needn’t justify yourself to me,’ replied Vigdís, but he could tell she didn’t mean it. ‘Were they together for long, Egill and the girl?’
‘A couple of months. The time it took me to sink into my personal hell, so to speak . . . With hindsight, I realized I had seen something rotten in him, a coldness, a cruelty that I couldn’t understand. But I tried not to dwell on it.’
‘When you came to see me at my practice, you told me you had never slept with the girl – is that true?’
He nodded. ‘Probably, although I expect we fooled around.’
‘Do you think Egill slept with her?’
‘Of course. Egill can’t be with a woman for more than an hour without at least propositioning her. And if he gets nothing he slinks off, like a dog. They were together until he grew bored of her, after finding out everything he could about me, I imagine.’
‘About you?’
‘My attempts.’
‘How significant is that?’
‘I don’t know . . . Very.’
‘Why has this come up now?’
Hrafn shrugged, squirted some more water into his mouth and tried to recall the events that had led up to the quarrel in the warehouse, but all he could remember were the bones, which he couldn’t tell Vigdís about.
‘Because there’s so much space up here, maybe?’ He grinned, then they both laughed and he knew that she had forgiven him. Which was good.
The wind continued to pick up, and not long after they walked away from the hill, the sands seemed to rise as one from the earth. All around them, it grew dark and Hrafn hurriedly wrapped his scarf around his nose and mouth, and saw Vigdís do the same out of the corner of his eye. Instead of blindly following the compass, they decided to head south-west to the ravine and then follow it to the barrage. Vigdís led the way because she was wearing sunglasses and could see better. When they reached the ravine they noticed that the river was much higher than the day before.
They could see better at the edge of the ravine, and the sand didn’t sting their eyes as much, because less of it blew out over the water. Hrafn scanned the ground for tracks (he had to amuse himself somehow) and they pressed on, even though he wasn’t sure that this was such a good idea. There wasn’t much room for error, and one mistake could be fatal – for example, if they assumed that the wind would die down by evening and it didn’t, or that it wouldn’t change into a northerly one as it got colder, or turn into a downpour or even a sleet storm. They knew nothing.
The ravine curved southwards in a long, sweeping arc. Hrafn took the binoculars, but could see no sign of the barrage. They carried on along the ravine until they stumbled on two rucksacks, next to a path in the rock wall that descended into the water. They opened the rucksacks to make sure they belonged to Egill and Anna. Egill’s was crammed with whisky bottles.
Vigdís ripped off her scarf and sunglasses, raised her arms in despair and gabbled something that Hrafn couldn’t hear. She was extremely agitated, and he found it painful to watch her. The howling wind made communication difficult. Hrafn pretended not to notice the path into the ravine; he had no inclination to go down there. Vigdís pressed herself against him and shouted:
‘. . . down there?’
She screwed up her face, jabbing her finger towards the path. At the bottom was the roaring river. Hrafn took off his rucksack and put it next to the others, walked gingerly towards the path and thought about Egill’s bottles, his own inertia, and the invisible glacier which melted, flowing grey and swollen into the world. Finally he indicated that he would go down alone, and ordered her to wait.
‘You’ll see me!’ he shouted, implying that he wouldn’t leave her sight, then he set off hurriedly down the path.
It was calm in the ravine although the noise was deafening; the river had risen almost to the edge of the path and was swelling by the minute. Hrafn reached the end of the path, where a huge pipe vanished into the earth. There were two sets of footprints below the pipe, and in the mud inside it. The prints went in but didn’t come out again.
26
‘ANYONE ELSE?’
Vigdís
She watched Hrafn descend the path. She had been in tighter spots than this, and yet she no longer trusted her responses to anything; if Anna fell, all bloody, from the sky, or emerged giggling from her rucksack, or if Egill appeared trotting across the sands on a goat, she might respond in a myriad different ways to all those things.
Hrafn stood at the bottom of the path with the grey meltwater above his head, or so it appeared, staring at the rock wall. She kept expecting to see Anna or Egill at any moment, but nothing happened; no one stepped out of the rock laughing, or popped their head out of the water and winked. Hrafn turned around and made his way back up the path towards her. She looked at him questioningly, but he shook his head. His face was wet with spray from the river.
He slipped on his rucksack, and they brought their faces close together, noses touching as they struggled to hear one another. Hrafn said he had seen no sign of the others down there, and they agreed that Anna and Egill must have turned around and walked back to the house, either because they had forgotten something, or more likely because Anna had talked some sense into Egill and they had decided they should all travel together. They had left their rucksacks behind because they assumed they would be coming back the same way.
Vigdís moved their rucksacks further away from the edge, in case the wind changed, and she and Hrafn walked back the way they had come, along the ravine.
She had to admit their theory wasn’t watertight. For example, Egill would never have veered away from the ravine – his cowardliness made him cautious – and if visibility had worsened, he would have followed the ravine to the bridge, which he knew was only a short walk from the house. Their paths would have crossed.
How well did she really know Egill and Anna? She had been to dinner at their place a few times, had got tipsy one evening and felt Egill’s persistent gaze, and Hrafn’s silence in the car on the way home.
Her first encounter with Egill, unbeknownst to her, had been through one of his agents, ‘someone at the bank’, who had once called her father, claiming to be looking after the interests of the bank’s ‘valued customers’. The agent informed her father that in real terms his non-index-linked account had been losing money over the years, and advised him to make the most out of his capital by purchasing shares in deCODE Genetics. After Vigdís’s mother died, her father had received a big lump sum from the insurance company, but apart from buying her a car, Vigdís wasn’t aware that he’d spent any of it – he scarcely used up all his wages. Without asking her – or anyone else, apparently, except for the pigs at the bank – her father invested the remainder of the money in the shares, and the day after deCODE Genetics was floated on the stock market, the money disappeared, every last penny. Later, Hrafn had told her how Egill had made his first millions by engineering a marketing campaign to sell shares in Dr Kari Stefánsson’s company (which had exceeded all expectations), the consequences of which she worked out for herself. And yet she never said anything, either to Egill or to Hrafn; she was waiting for the right moment, or she was simply unsure what the appropriate response should be.
Didn’t one’s friends, in some sense, provide an insight into one’s own inner life? On at least one occasion she had glimpsed a level of intimacy between Hrafn and Egill that had made her jealous. They had known each other since they were children, and whatever people might say, that created a bond.
They reached the bridge. It was hanging down into the ravine, which meant that Egill must have loosened the ropes the day before. Good, thought Vigdís, there was a reason why the bridge was like that. The sand blotted out the village.
From the bridge they headed due north, the wind behind them, but the visibility was worse than the day before, and they could only see a few metres ahead. She timed their walk, and kept checking the compass. If they didn’t manage to locate the house within half an hour, they would walk in an ever-decreasing circle, and at the very worst would end up back at the ravine, where they would have to start again. The sand raged all around them, swelling like dark clouds dragged across the Earth’s surface from south to north, and who was to say that one winter’s day in January the wind wouldn’t change, blowing all the grains of sand back where they came from.
‘Calm down, calm down,’ she murmured inside her hood. She couldn’t tell whether the noise from the wind was loud or soft. She thought it must be very loud. Gradually the droning and whistling seemed to be inside her too, in her bones and muscles, in her tiny brain – that smooth grey mass which she was carrying across the sands. For a while, she had the impression that they were walking on a storm-tossed sea; the sands undulated, and she became dizzy from the continuous drone of the wind in her ears. Grit plugged her nose and gathered at the corners of her eyes and mouth.
Vigdís strode ahead, setting the pace, with Hrafn close behind. Soon they made out the shape of the house through the dust. There was no one in the yard and no faces at the window.
‘They’re not here,’ Vigdís murmured to herself. She clasped the handrail to steady herself, before climbing the steps and opening the front door. In the hallway she removed the scarf from around her face, took off her sunglasses and called out to see if anyone was at home. She went upstairs and took a look around. Egill and Anna’s room was empty, and there was no sign of them having stopped off on their way somewhere else.
‘There’s no one here,’ she said as she walked into the front room, where Hrafn sat smoking. ‘Something must have happened to them. They turned back to fetch us and got lost out on the sands. How could Egill be so stupid?’
‘People are always appearing and disappearing up here,’ said Hrafn, examining the books on the shelves. ‘Like the village and the barrage – first there was nothing, then they appeared, and now there’s nothing again.’
‘Whatever. We have to wait here,’ she said, lighting a cigarette. ‘If they don’t show up soon, or after the wind dies down, we’ll set off on our own.’
Hrafn nodded and flicked through a book he had just plucked from the shelf. He was uncharacteristically silent, and was avoiding her gaze the way he did when he was ashamed about something.
‘Otherwise, is everything OK?’ she added. ‘I trust you, my love . . . You aren’t hiding anything from me, are you?’
‘Of course not. ‘He shook his head. ‘I tell you everything I know.’
She looked at the picture on the wall, the one Anna referred to as the picture of the beautiful people. It was hard to believe they had been sitting here only yesterday evening, clinking glasses, speculating about this and that. The things they had been puzzling over last night seemed trivial, as nothing compared to their current situation.
Before she knew it, Vigdís had pointed out the photograph to Hrafn and was explaining to him Anna’s theory about the woman in the picture not being Ása, but rather the old man’s lover, who was also his sister – or at least, there was good reason to believe that she was, and that they had had a child together, who had been imprisoned in a secret room in the old man’s study upstairs and cut out of the photograph.
