CHAPTER 8
The deacon’s house was located in the island’s interior, a small low cottage. Even though the man was not tall, he still had to stoop to get through the doorway, once he had parked his cart by the gable of the building. The place comprised a small hallway sectioned off by a partition of rough crate planks, a kitchen, and one room, which served both as a living room and bedroom. Pink floral wallpaper adorned the walls, and the ceiling was of dark wood.
Thormodur Krakur removed his Sunday best clothes, folded them neatly, and placed them in a green painted chest that stood at the foot of the bed. He then put on his work clothes: old gray overalls, woolen socks, and frayed rubber shoes.
Gudridur, his wife, was boiling fermented ray and potatoes. She was a stout woman and even shorter than her husband. Because of her bad legs, she sat on a bench by the cooker and used both hands to shift her body to and fro. Her false teeth soaked in a glass of water on the kitchen table. They were a little too big, so Gudridur only put them in when she really needed them at meals.
“The food smells great,” said Thormodur Krakur as he sauntered into the kitchen and they sat at the table. They folded their hands as the husband intoned, “We thank you, our Lord and Savior, for this meal we are about to receive, in Jesus’ name, amen.”
As they were eating, Thormodur Krakur described the transportation of the corpse to his wife. Even though he hadn’t actually looked into the casket himself, he could quote the words of the district officer and embellish the story with a few imaginative touches of his own. The topic did nothing to dampen their appetite, and the pieces of ray were rapidly devoured with smacking lips. Gudridur pounded her fish and potatoes into a mush, because even though she had put her teeth in, she found it awkward to chew with them.
Thormodur Krakur waxed lyrical about the Ketilsey mystery in a long monologue. He couldn’t recall any other event of this kind on the islands over the decades. Shipwrecks and sea accidents had been an inevitable part of the islanders’ lives in his youth, but for a stranger to be stranded out on an island like that was completely new to him. Gudridur concurred with a string of exclamations and finally asked, “Do you think you’d be able to communicate with your late foster father if we took out the Ouija board? Maybe he’d have a message from that stranger.”
Thormodur Krakur shook his head. “No, not straightaway. My foster father is so unsociable. He’d never deliver a message just like that. Maybe he’ll appear to me in a dream soon and give me some sign. Then we’ll see. The danger with people who perish in a horrific way like that is that they can be troubled spirits.”
The meal was over, and Gudridur cleared the table and placed the dishes in the sink. It was a time- consuming task because she had to sit on the bench and shift back and forward, using her hands. Then she put some coffee beans into the grinder, while Thormodur Krakur fetched a pile of books in the living room. The pile was carefully wrapped in old newspapers and tied with string. He cautiously unwrapped the books and placed them on the kitchen table. The first book on the top of the pile was an old Bible, below which were four hefty tomes of the Flatey Book, volumes one, two, three, and four, printed in 1944.
Thormodur Krakur lit a stubbed candle and opened the Bible where a bookmark had been placed. He read a short passage from the fourth book of Genesis out loud, while Gudridur put on the coffee, and then closed the Bible again and took out the second volume of the Flatey Book. He opened it at a bookmark in the middle of the Foster Brothers’ saga and, as they drank their coffee, read a long chapter about Thorgeir Havarsson and his namesake, Thormodur, Kolbrun’s poet. When he had finished reading, he put the books back in their place. Then he went outside again to complete the day’s work. The animals still needed to be tended to before nightfall.
He fetched the cows in the field and milked them in the shed. Little Nonni from Ystakot came to collect the half pot of milk his family bought from them every day, and Hogni greeted him on his way from the district officer’s house to the school. They chatted for a while, and then Thormodur Krakur filled several buckets of water from the well by the shed and emptied them into the cows’ trough. Finally, he prepared for bed, and it was long past midnight when he turned in.
“…The Flatey Book is the largest vellum manuscript known to have been written in Iceland. It contains a total of 225 sheets and therefore 450 pages. The book is so large that only two sheets could be obtained from each calfskin, and therefore 113 calfskins went into the making of the book. Of these, 101 went into the main section, which was written in Vididalstunga, and then another twelve went into the additional material, which was written in Reykholar nine decades later. This double-fold sheet is called a folio, but if the calfskin is folded in four it is known as a quarto. The sheets are about forty-two centimeters long and twenty-nine centimeters wide. The preparation of the skin used in the Flatey Book required a great deal of labor, tanning, shaving, and scraping for it to be turned into usable vellum. It can therefore be said that the book is the work of many hands. There are no accounts of this work, so the methods used are unknown. The technique used was probably similar to the one applied to tanning on the mainland, although less lime was probably used…”
CHAPTER 9
Friday, June 3, 1960
Kjartan woke up to repeated cockcrows from the village below. It took him some time to remember where he was and identify the sound. The bed lay under a sloping ceiling, and opposite the headrest a color photograph had been blue-tacked to the wall. The picture was probably of a Norwegian fjord with a big modern ferry set against a backdrop of forested hills and cliffs.
He heard the cockcrow again and knew it was time to get up, but he was paralyzed by a heavy sense of dread. It was a familiar feeling that sometimes hit him at the beginning of a day, particularly when he was forced to venture into the unknown. But he tried to bite the bullet and shake it off. His shyness and social phobias were the two things that plagued him the most in life. He therefore did his utmost to avoid situations that brought him into too much contact with strangers. But now that he’d been saddled with this assignment that took him from one stranger to another, he had no say in the matter.
Three fat bluebottles buzzed against the windowpane by the top of his bed. He stood up and gazed through the glass. Two kids were rounding up a black sheep and a lamb in a field on the western side of the island. They were within earshot, and their voices could be heard calling when the ewe turned against them and refused to be led. The sky was slightly overcast but sunny.
Kjartan got dressed and climbed down the almost vertical staircase from the loft. A strong fragrance of coffee wafted through the kitchen, and the mistress of the household was hanging up washing on the line in the level yard in front of the house. She was dressed in the same woolen clothes she’d worn the day before and was wearing her striped apron. A girl of about eight years of age stood by her side and handed her pegs, which she fished out of an old can of paint.
Kjartan grabbed the pot of coffee on the stove and poured himself a cup. He then walked outside and looked down at the village. The tide was coming in, and the cluster of houses were reflected in the sea that was filling the cove below the embankment. A number of inhabitants could be seen wandering between the houses, and no one seemed to be in a hurry. Those whose paths crossed paused to chat, both young and old. It was more the hens that seemed to be in a hurry as they darted between the gardens of the houses. Despite the sunshine, there was a breeze and it was quite chilly.
“Good morning, young man,” Ingibjorg said when she noticed Kjartan had come out.
“Good morning.”
“We still have dry weather.”
“Hmm, yeah.”
Ingibjorg finished hanging up the last garment.
“We’re still far from the haymaking season, of course, but it would be good to be able to dry the eiderdown in the sunshine,” she said.
“Hmm, really? Where is Grimur anyway?” Kjartan asked.
“They went out at the crack of dawn to check on the seal nets. They should be back by noon.”
