“Let’s not argue,” she said.

“No,” he said, putting some money on the table. “Let’s get going.”

On the way out, Ilona tugged lightly at his arm and he looked at her. She was trying to communicate something by her expression. Then she nodded furtively towards the bar.

“There he is,” she said.

He looked over and saw the man Ilona had said she thought was pursuing her. Dressed in an overcoat, he sipped his beer and acted as if they were not there. It was the same man from outside Thomaskirche.

“I’ll have a word with him,” he said.

“No,” Ilona said. “Don’t. Let’s go.”

A few days later he saw Hannes sitting at his table in the library, and sat down beside him. Hannes went on writing in pencil in his exercise book without looking up.

“Is she winding you up?” Hannes asked, still writing in the book.

“Who?”

“Ilona.”

“Do you know Ilona?”

“I know who she is,” Hannes said, and looked up. He was wearing a thick scarf and fingerless gloves.

“Do you know about us?” he asked.

“Everything gets around,” Hannes said. “Ilona’s from Hungary so she’s not as green as us.”

“As green as us?”

“Forget it,” Hannes said, burying his head back in his exercise book.

He reached across the table and snatched the book away. Hannes looked up in surprise and tried to grab the book back, but it was out of his reach.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Why are you behaving like this?”

Hannes looked at the book that Tomas was holding, then stared at him.

“I don’t want to get involved in what’s going on here, I just want to go home and forget it,” he said. “It’s completely absurd. I hadn’t been here as long as you when I got sick of it.”

“But you’re still here.”

“It’s a good university. And it took me a while to understand all the lies and lose my patience with them.”

“What is it that I can’t see?” he asked, fearing the answer. “What have you discovered? What am I missing?”

Hannes stared him in the eye, looked around the library and then at the book that Tomas was still holding, then back into his eyes.

“Just carry on,” he said. “Stick to your convictions. Don’t go off the tracks. Believe me, you won’t gain anything by it. If you’re comfortable with it, then it’s all right. Don’t delve any deeper. You can’t imagine what you might find.”

Hannes held out his hand for his exercise book.

“Believe me,” he said. “Forget it.”

“And Ilona?” he said.

“Forget her too,” Hannes said.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Why do you talk in riddles?”

“Leave me alone,” Hannes said. “Just leave me alone.”

Three days later he was in a forest outside the city. He and Emil had enrolled in the Gesellschaft fur Sport und Technik. It advertised itself as an all-round sports club that offered horse riding, rally driving and much more. Students were encouraged to take part in club activities, just like the volunteer work organised by the FDJ. It involved a week’s harvesting in the autumn, one day a term or in the vacations clearing air-raid rubble, factory work, coal production or the like. Attendance was voluntary, but anyone who did not enrol was liable to be punished.

He was pondering this arrangement while standing in the forest with Emil and his other comrades, a week’s camp in front of them which, as it turned out, largely involved military training.

Such was life in Leipzig. Very little was exactly what it seemed. Foreign students were under surveillance and took care not to say anything in public that might offend their hosts. They were taught socialist values at compulsory meetings and voluntary work was voluntary in name only.

As time went by they grew accustomed to all this and referred to it as “the charade’. He believed the present situation would be temporary. Others were not so optimistic. He laughed to himself when he found out that the sports and technology club was merely a thinly veiled military unit. Emil was not so amused. He saw nothing funny in it and, unlike the others, never called it “the charade’. Nothing about Leipzig struck him as funny. They were lying stretched out in their tent on their first night with their new companions. All evening Emil had talked with fervour about a socialist state in Iceland.

“All that injustice in such a tiny country where everyone could so easily be equal,” Emil said. “I want to change that.”

“Would you want a socialist state like this one?” Tomas asked.

“Why not?”

“With all the trappings? The surveillance? The paranoia? Restrictions on freedom of expression? The charade?”

“Is she starting to get through to you?”

“Who?”

“Ilona.”

“What do you mean, get through to me?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know Ilona?”

“Not at all,” Emil said.

“You’ve had girlfriends too. Hrafnhildur told me about one from the Red Cloister.”

“That’s nothing,” Emil said.

“No, quite.”

“Maybe you’ll tell me more about Ilona sometime,” Emil said.

“She’s not as orthodox as we are. She sees problems with this system and wants to put them right. It’s exactly the same situation here as in Hungary, except that young people there are doing something about it. Fighting the charade.”

“Fighting the charade!” Emil snarled. “Fucking bollocks. Look at the way people live back in Iceland. Shivering in old American Nissen huts. Children are starving. People can hardly clothe themselves. And all the time the bloated elite gets richer and richer. Isn’t that a charade? Who cares if you need to keep people under surveillance and restrict freedom of speech for a while? Eradicating injustice can mean making sacrifices. Who cares?”

They stopped talking. Silence had descended on the camp and it was pitch black.

“I’d do anything for the Icelandic revolution,” Emil said. “Anything to eradicate injustice.”

He stood at the window watching the sunbeams and a distant rainbow and smiled to himself when he remembered the sports club. He could see Ilona laughing at the smoked-lamb feast and thought about the soft kiss that he could still feel on his lips, the star of love and the young man grieving, deep in his dark valley.

14

The Foreign Ministry’s officials were more than willing to assist the police. Sigurdur Oli and Elinborg were having a meeting with the under-secretary, a smooth man Sigurdur Oli’s age. They were acquaintances from their student years in America and reminisced about their time there. The under-secretary said the ministry had been surprised by the police request and he wanted to know why they required information about the former employees of foreign embassies in Reykjavik. They were as silent as the grave. Just a routine investigation, Elinborg said, and smiled.

“And we’re not talking about all the embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said, smiling too. “Just old Warsaw Pact countries.”

The under-secretary looked at them in turn.

“Are you talking about the ex-communist countries?” he asked, his curiosity clearly in no way satisfied. “Why just them? What about them?”

“Just a routine investigation,” Elinborg repeated.

She was in an unusually good mood. The book launch had been a huge success and she was still over the moon about a review that had appeared in the largest-circulation newspaper praising her book, the recipes and photographs, which concluded by saying that hopefully this would not be the last to be heard from Elinborg, the detective-cum-gourmet.

“The communist states,” the under-secretary said thoughtfully. “What was it that you found in the lake?”

“We don’t know yet whether it’s linked to any embassies,” Sigurdur Oli said.

“I suppose you should come with me,” the under-secretary said, standing up. “Let’s talk to the director general if he’s in.”