The Ice Lands, page 23
After walking for a long time in the dark, Hrafn felt the air stir; a fresh breeze was wafting towards him from one of the side tunnels, and the floor become smooth then started to slope upwards.
He made his way to the surface and gradually it grew light. When his eyes had become accustomed to the glare, he stepped out onto the sand at the foot of the hills from which they had first spotted the barrage. In the distance, he could see the cowshed and the barn, and beyond them the house.
As he made his way towards the house, he was no longer sure about anything that had happened: he imagined Vigdís still waiting for him by the fence on the barrage, or even better: letting herself be lured inside, struggling as a hairy paw covered her face, forcing her into submission. Who?
Who put the photograph in the mound, stuffed a sheep up the chimney, cut their own fingers off in the barrage, drove a car into a house?
He started to run slowly, and the closer he got the more he felt as if something were pulling him along, that he could run as fast and as far as he wished. He leapt into the air wielding an invisible axe, buried it in someone’s temple, stepping sideways to muddle his tracks, leapt brandishing the axe so it came down on his enemy’s head, cleaving it asunder; then all at once he paused, watching the axe slice through the head and body before plunging into the ground, where he left it.
The old couple were standing in front of the barn, as if they had been expecting him. The man was grinning like a halfwit, but the old woman’s face was expressionless. Hrafn walked up to her, shaking his finger in her face, and told her he would hold them responsible for anything that might happen to Vigdís, whom he referred to as ‘my wife’.
He laughed as he turned to the old man:
‘As for you, smiley face, where’s your wife?’ he demanded, remembering Anna and Vigdís’s theory about incest. ‘Who was in the secret room in the study? Where is the child?’
They didn’t reply. Hrafn told them he knew how to make them talk. He strode over to the silver-grey barrel containing the moonshine and tipped it over. The spigot snapped off, and the clear liquid flowed out of the barn door where the old woman was standing. The old man had disappeared.
‘No more smiley face!’ said Hrafn, and saw the old woman cast a sidelong glance towards the cowshed.
‘Has he gone to hide in the stalls with the invisible cows?’
The old woman remained silent, and Hrafn seized her by the shoulder, dragged her over to the pool of liquid and stood her in the middle of it. Then he took out his lighter and lit a cigarette.
‘What have you done?’ whispered the old woman, who didn’t seem afraid of him. ‘Where are your friends?’
‘I’m the one asking the questions,’ he told her, and she shook her head. ‘Don’t shake your head at me!’ he yelled, waving his cigarette at her. He demanded to know about the barrage, the village, Vigdís and Egill, and what had befallen Anna, heard himself ask all those questions, and felt as if he was getting closer to the heart of the matter, although he wasn’t sure how. ‘We’re not alone up here, are we? Who else is out there?’
‘There’s nothing out there,’ said the old woman, and carried on shaking her head. ‘It’s here.’
She reached out her hand, placing her palm against Hrafn’s chest and patting it gently. Hrafn seized her wrist, twisting her to the ground.
‘Look at the photograph,’ she said, without moving from the pool.
The liquid had stopped flowing out of the barrel and yet the pool was getting bigger.
‘What photograph?’
‘The one in your pocket. Of your wife.’
Hrafn reached into his back pocket and pulled out the photograph of Vigdís. Rising from her head were two faint lines that seemed to grow thicker and whiter by the minute and resembled animal horns. Her face had changed too; her eyes were open, but only the whites were showing, and her mouth gaped as she tore bright red strips of skin from her breasts.
‘What is this?’ he asked, tearing his eyes from the photograph. ‘What are you doing to her?’
‘We’ve done nothing,’ said the woman, and her smile broadened as if she could sense his uncertainty.
He crouched over her, took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke in her face.
‘I’m going to set fire to you. What do you say to that, you old witch? Then I’ll set fire to your old man, the hay and the house. There’ll be nothing left, no sign of anyone having been here.’
Hrafn looked up and saw the old man emerge from the cowshed. He was clutching a long, sharp scythe. His smile had disappeared, and the rash on his face formed a triangle from the bridge of his nose to the corners of his mouth, the flesh beneath glistening pink as if the skin had started to peel away.
‘And what have we here?’ said Hrafn, standing up straight. ‘You found your scythe and you’re off to reap? Where’s your field?’
The old man swung the scythe with short, sharp movements. He took a step closer, and swung it again, releasing his grip from the middle of the pole and holding the end of it so that the scythe almost touched the back of Hrafn’s head, grazing his neck as it swung the other way.
Hrafn flicked the ash from his cigarette and tossed it into the pool where the old woman was sitting. He wheeled round, heard an explosion like a sheet flapping in the wind, and ran away from the barn, feeling the heat on his back, as the old woman started wailing.
‘Are you angry about something, old man?’ he shouted over his shoulder, laughing at the old man, who was tottering after him, rather slowly, still wielding the scythe.
When Hrafn was halfway to the house he paused, hearing the crackle of burning timber from the barn as the flames licked through the doors. Close by he saw the streetlamp and beneath it three holes in the sand, long and deep as graves.
The old woman’s cries fell silent, and were succeeded by the high-pitched yelp of foxes flowing out of the barn, no longer just two, but a whole horde, hundreds or thousands of the creatures. They spread across the sand like a dark-red flame, past the old man, and round the corner of the house just as Hrafn ran into the yard. They nipped at his ankles, leapt yelping on to his back, digging in their claws, crawled up onto his shoulders, and sank their sharp little teeth deep into his flesh. He fell to his knees, and crawled on all fours up the steps to the house. Blood spurted from his neck and face, and trickled down the steps. He dragged himself the rest of the way, opened the front door a crack, and forced himself through before closing it behind him.
35
DIMENSIONS IN THIS WORLD
Hrafn
He leaned his back against the door, catching his breath, fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette, and lit one.
‘Anna,’ he cried. ‘I’m home!’
He raised his arm and slid one of the bolts across.
There was a thud on the door as the scythe pierced the wood, narrowly missing his head. Hrafn rolled away from the door, stood up and discovered that not only was the floor covered in blood, but it was also dripping from the ceiling and streaming down the walls. The scythe appeared like a long, sharp beak, in and out, in and out, and sporadic yelps came from behind the door.
He penetrated deeper into the house and saw Anna sprawled on the floor in the kitchen. She seemed to sense his movement when he stepped into the room, and she curled up in a ball.
He slumped onto a chair and sighed, rubbing his face with his hands to try to rid himself of the exhaustion overwhelming him.
‘I’m going to give you some tablets, Anna dear. To stop the pain,’ he said, no longer recognizing his own voice. ‘Then I’m going to fetch some wire cutters for the fence. Vigdís is at the barrage. I’m afraid it’s too late, I don’t believe this any more . . . It’s all gone, dear Anna. Yet there never was anything, and now it’s gone . . . Nothing’s gone.’
He dropped his cigarette on the floor and crushed it underfoot.
There are dimensions in this world that we cannot see.
He stamped his foot on the floor a few times, causing Anna to curl up even tighter.
‘I don’t know, Anna . . . Have you heard the story about Jonas Whalesnatch? One day, some men were walking along the shore in the Westfjords when they came across an enormous beached whale. They all clambered on top of the animal, when a man called Jonas suddenly disappeared inside it until only his head and shoulders were sticking out. He had stepped straight into the whale’s snatch, and it was all the others could do to pull him out again. From that day on, he was known to everyone as Jonas Whalesnatch.’
Hrafn stood up, closed the kitchen door, walked over to the window and looked out at the shining white landscape. He had never had any real knowledge of himself, only that he was alone. They all were. They saw themselves in everything, and yet found themselves in nothing.
The photograph Vigdís had knocked off the wall lay on the windowsill, together with a few shards of glass and a broken picture frame. The woman in the photograph was beautiful, but her eyes were dull. She feared the man next to her, but compensated for it with shopping trips to New York and London, babysitters, friends and an occasional love affair; too fragile to care for anyone but herself, she was still a teenager, her face a mask that concealed nothing. And the old man was a crazed rat who dragged around his pus-filled scrotum, and required nothing from society save a bullet in the head.
His parents.
They were to blame, for all of it. Others were to blame.
He stooped over Anna, lifted her writhing to her feet and laid her on the kitchen table. She lashed out with her stumps, and the gauze on her hands started to come undone. He fetched the tablets, ground some into a powder and told her to stop struggling, although he doubted she could hear anything. He tied her hands behind her back with some strips of her T-shirt, forcing her jaw closed until she had swallowed the powder, and afterwards her mouth opened so wide he could see into her throat. After she had calmed down and her muscles relaxed, he examined her bloody stumps: her fingers had been cut off with clean, precise incisions. He stroked her warm, moist belly, running his fingers gently over her wounds, which were more swollen and bruised than before, and sensed how she at once welcomed and recoiled from his touch. Her body was moist and open, every last pore gaping like a tiny mouth, her breath came in short gasps, and she gave off a thick, warm odour, of mud and blood. He stroked her breasts, gazing down at her crotch and the mound of downy blonde hair, and felt her respond to his caresses as she came out in goosebumps, lifting slightly off the table then arching her back abruptly, as though convulsing.
Outside the house, the yelping had become a deafening babble. The kitchen walls were turning red, as blood started to stream down them, oozing out of the pot on the stove. Casting about for a better place to hide, Hrafn saw a door in the wall that he hadn’t noticed before. He opened it, and found himself confronted by a narrow staircase leading to the cellar. The stairs were steep, with lots of shallow steps – either that or the staircase was longer than it appeared. He lit a candle stub he found in the kitchen and made his way gingerly down the staircase.
At the bottom was a corridor running the length of the house. On either side were rooms, and at the far end a door, exactly the same as on the top floor. The first room was filled with crumbling cardboard boxes that spilled their contents onto the floor: photographs of carcasses strewn across the sand, a two-headed calf, a tethered sheep eating its own entrails, a fox with a shaved torso and a bird strapped to its head. In the next room, bright red and green plants gave off a sickly smell like rotting fruit, and perched on their fronds were birds with huge beaks and tiny slits for eyes. The room reverberated with a sound like people cheering at a match or rain pounding on a rooftop.
Hrafn was no longer sure where he was. A few planks of wood, mouldering in the dank cellar, were nailed clumsily across the door at the far end of the corridor. A rhythmical drone reached him from within. Stretching out his hand, he began to tear away the planks, felt them crumble between his fingers, and opened the door. The draught that blew back into the room snuffed out his candle and the droning stopped.
He peered into the dark interior, where someone lay on a bed. The curtains were drawn across the windows, and through them he glimpsed the courtyard at Hraunbær where he could hear the creak of the swing. Daylight tried to penetrate the room but couldn’t, because it was too far away. A thick, acrid smell pervaded the room, and in the gloom a red ember glowed, as from a cigarette. Someone murmured something, and then the door closed behind him. Next to the wall, a lamp went on, revealing the figure of a man who sat up in bed, and started to speak in strange, hushed tones. His eyes were two slits in an oversized head swivelling on his shoulders, his curly black hair rose like smoke into the air, his body was withered and his skin sagged so that the flesh beneath showed.
Hrafn turned towards the door and pulled the handle, but the door was locked from the outside. His body was starting to feel numb and heavy, and something inside him snapped; he felt the tears streaming down his cheeks and heard himself call out for help, for his mother, saying he wanted to go home, but he couldn’t move, and felt the void inside him grow bigger until it swallowed everything. He was floating in the air, looking down on the shadow moving over him, as though looking down on a tiny house from a rain cloud; he could hear the rain beating on the roof and saw it sparkle as it fell through the darkness. After that there was nothing to say – or at least he didn’t know how to say it.
Later he was at home in Selás. He lay in bed gazing out of the window at a tree he had never noticed before. The branches were black and shiny.
His dad walked through the door; he was angry and started to scold him. They went into the bathroom, where his dad washed off the blood running down his legs. Afterwards they talked about what had happened, his dad dressed him in his pyjamas and he got back into bed. The light made the room blindingly white. His dad sat on the floor at the edge of his bed and wept. Hrafn looked away from him at the tree outside the window. Its branches swayed back and forth in the wind, faster and faster until everything went dark and was obliterated.
NATURE
36
Vigdís
First there was darkness, and then a line appeared separating the sky from the earth, a dark grey band that slowly pulled apart. The wind dropped, the grains of sand settled close to one another, and for a while the earth seemed to take on a darker hue. At the same time, a deep silence descended over the world, not of tense expectation, but more like what lingers after a door has been slammed so hard the room shakes. Listening closely, one could hear a murmur or drone amid the silence, something so insistent and heavy with despair that matter seemed unable to contain it, and the senses furled out towards the edges, where it flowed like a raging river over the rock of the world.
Her face was the first thing to emerge, shiny and dirty, as if she were peering through a hole in the darkness. The rest of her body followed, moving jerkily across the sand, as though it were a question of chance whether her feet went in the same direction. She didn’t look down, but instead stared straight ahead to where the outline of the glacier touched the sky. The summit glowed, although the earth below remained in darkness, and she reached out her hand as though wanting to caress it.
There was a flapping sound in the air, and a pair of swans flew overhead, craning their necks and beating their wings before disappearing into the glacier. The world was flat and smooth, swamp-like, but still she went on walking. She couldn’t remember when she had got undressed. A pair of white antlers sprouted from her head, branching gracefully, meekly, into the air, looking as if they’d been polished. She couldn’t remember when she had got undressed.
The sun floated across the sky and Vigdís followed. When she stepped on the ground a fine, shimmering dust swirled up into the air, trailed in the wake of a car that had come to a halt near to her. She was surrounded by people, and a voice on a radio was calling for help, she could smell petrol, and felt something pressing down on her head as if she were wearing a bulky helmet. She was lifted up, a mask placed over her face, and she soared high above a white immensity, which was the glacier or what had once been her life.
Looking back, she was astonished at how hard she had struggled in life, how seriously she had taken all her suffering and joys. Why? She was haunted by images of the past that had caused her so much pain, but she took them less personally now and no longer allowed them to weigh her down. Above her all was still. Her breathing was slow and deep. Everything that had once been her was fading, and the notion of individuals seemed increasingly absurd. Where did this endless defensiveness against the world come from?
She saw cities, houses, all those boxes lining the streets, which people spent their lives filling with joy, regret, sorrow, objects, everything but themselves; because there was no other way. The way lay outwards and from there inwards, and that was why matter existed: to cut oneself loose, go to extremes, shake off one’s self, with everything that was in bottles and tins, on screens and wheels; things that glittered and moved, other people’s bodies, music, ideas, words – imaginary closed pockets forming a seamless whole.
‘Nature,’ she said as she glanced about her, sitting in a white bed while someone shone a pen in her eyes. Her chest was bandaged in gauze up to her neck. Once more she swooped down over the glacier and saw a man with a gleaming white crown; he reached out to catch hold of her but she evaded him, flowing away like a stream. Something inside her had changed, become simpler.
She woke up in bed with a start, breathing rapidly, and saw that her wrists were fastened to the sides of the bed. All night she had been adrift on the sands. ‘Where are your friends?’ asked a man in a suit, who was sitting beside her, and he showed her pictures of a jeep that had been driven into a rock, of police tape surrounding the rock, of a man on all fours shovelling sand into his mouth.
