23

It was approaching 10 p.m., the temperature was dropping on the hill and Erlendur asked Mikkelina whether they ought not to get in his car. Or they could talk some more tomorrow. It was late and…

“Let’s get in your car,” she said, and set off. She moved slowly and lurched to one side with every step that she took with her club foot. Erlendur walked just ahead of her and showed her to his car, opened the door and helped her in. Then he walked round the front of the car. He couldn’t work out how Mikkelina had got to the hill. She didn’t seem to have driven.

“Did you take a taxi here?” he asked as he sat down behind the wheel. He started the engine, which was still hot, and they soon warmed up.

“Simon gave me a lift,” she said. “He’ll be back to collect me soon.”

“We’ve tried to gather information about the people who lived on the hill — I presume it’s your family — and some of what we’ve heard, mostly from old people, sounds strange. One story is about the Gasworks by Hlemmur.”

“He teased her about the Gasworks,” Mikkelina said, “but I don’t think she was the product of some doomsday orgy there as he said. It could just as easily have been him. I think that insult was levelled at him once, he might even have been teased about it, maybe when he was younger, maybe later, and he transferred it to her.”

“So you think your father was one of the Gasworks kids?”

“He wasn’t my father,” Mikkelina said. “My father was lost at sea. He was a fisherman and my mother loved him. That was my only consolation in life when I was a child. That he was not my father. He hated me in particular. The cripple. Because of my condition. I had an illness at the age of three that left me paralysed and I lost my power of speech. He thought I was retarded, but my mind was normal. I never had any therapy, which people take for granted nowadays. And I never told anyone, because I lived forever in fear of that man. It’s not unusual for children who experience a trauma to become reticent and even dumb. I presume that happened to me. It wasn’t until later that I learned to walk and started talking and got an education. I’ve got a degree now. In psychology.”

She paused.

“I’ve found out who his parents were,” she went on. “I’ve searched. To understand what happened and why. I tried to dig up something about his childhood. He worked as a farmhand here and there, the last place was in Kjos around the time he met Mum. The part of his upbringing that interests me most was in Myrarsysla, at a little croft called Melur. It doesn’t exist any more. The couple who lived there had three children of their own and the parish council paid them to take others into their home. There were still paupers in the countryside at that time. The couple had a reputation for treating the poor children badly. People on neighbouring farms talked about it. His foster parents were taken to court after a child in their care died from malnutrition and neglect. An autopsy was performed on the farm under very primitive conditions, even by the standards of the time. It was a boy of eight. They took a door off its hinges and conducted the autopsy on that. Rinsed his innards in the brook on the farm. Discovered he was subjected to ‘unnecessarily harsh treatment’, as they used to call it, but they couldn’t prove that he’d died from it. He would have seen it all. Perhaps they were friends. He was in care at Melur around the same time. He’s mentioned in the case documents: undernourished with injuries on his back and legs.”

She paused.

“I’m not trying to justify what he did to us and the way he treated us,” she said. “There’s no justification for that. But I wanted to know who he was.”

She stopped again.

“And your mother?” Erlendur asked, though he sensed that Mikkelina intended to tell him everything she considered important and would go about it her own way. He did not want to put pressure on her. She had to tell the story at her own pace.

“She was unlucky,” Mikkelina said forthrightly, as if this was the only sensible conclusion to draw. “She was unlucky to end up with that man. It’s as simple as that. She had no family, but by and large she had a decent upbringing in Reykjavik and was a maid in a respectable household when she met him. I haven’t managed to find out who her parents were. If it ever was written down, the papers are lost.”

Mikkelina looked at Erlendur.

“But she found true love before it was too late. He entered her life at the right moment, I think.”

“Who? Who entered her life?”

“And Simon. My brother. We didn’t realise how he felt. The strain he was under for all those years. I felt the treatment that my stepfather dished out to my mother and I suffered for her, but I was tougher than Simon. Poor, poor Simon. And then Tomas. There was too much of his father in him. Too much hatred.”

“Sorry, you’ve lost me. Who entered your mother’s life?”

“He was from New York. An American. From Brooklyn.”

Erlendur nodded.

“Mum needed love, some kind of love, admiration, recognition that she existed, that she was a human being. Dave restored her self-respect, made her human again. We always used to wonder why he spent so much time with Mum. What he saw in her when no one else would even look at her apart from my stepfather, and then only to beat her up. Then he told Mum why he wanted to help her. He said he sensed it the moment he saw her the first time he brought over some trout; he used to go fishing in Reynisvatn. He recognised all the signs of domestic violence. He could see it in her eyes, in her face, her movements. In an instant he knew her entire history.”

Mikkelina paused and looked across the hill to the bushes.

“Dave was familiar with it. He was brought up with it just like Simon, Tomas and me. His father was never charged and never sentenced, and never punished for beating his wife until her dying day. They lived in awful poverty, she contracted TB and died. His father beat her up just before she passed away. Dave was a teenager then, but he was no match for his father. He left home the day of his mother’s death and never went back. Joined the army a few years later. Before the war broke out. They sent him to Reykjavik during the war, up here where he walked inside a shack and saw his mother’s face again.”

They sat in silence.

“By then he was big enough to do something about it,” Mikkelina said.

A car drove slowly past them and stopped by the foundations of the house. The driver stepped out and looked around towards the redcurrant bushes.

“Simon’s come to fetch me,” Mikkelina said. “It’s late. Do you mind if we continue tomorrow? You can call on me at home if you want.”

She opened the car door and called out to the man, who turned round.

“Do you know who’s buried there?” Erlendur asked.

“Tomorrow,” Mikkelina said. “We’ll talk tomorrow. There’s no rush,” she said. “No rush about anything.”

The man had walked over to the car by now to help Mikkelina.

“Thank you, Simon,” she said and got out of the car. Erlendur stretched over the seat to take a better look at him. Then he opened his door and got out.

“That can’t be Simon,” he said to Mikkelina, looking at the man who was supporting her. He could not have been older than 35.

“What?” Mikkelina said.

“Wasn’t Simon your brother?” Erlendur asked, looking at the man.

“Yes,” Mikkelina said, then seemed to understand Erlendur’s bewilderment. “Oh, he’s not that Simon,” she said with a smile. “This is my son, whom I named after him.”