Silence of the Grave (17 page)

The three other soldiers stood motionless in the doorway while Grímur's assailant stood over him and shouted at him something the Icelanders did not understand. Simon could not believe his eyes. He looked at Tómas, transfixed on what was happening, and then at Mikkelína, who stared in horror at Grímur lying on the floor. He looked over at their mother and saw tears in her eyes.

Grímur was off his guard. When they heard two jeeps pull up outside the house the mother had hurried into the passage so that no one would see her. The sight of her with her black eye and burst lip. Grímur had not even stood up from the table, as if he had no worries that what he was doing with the pilferers from the depot would ever be discovered. He was expecting his soldier friends with a batch of merchandise that they planned to store in the house and that evening they were going into town to sell some of the booty. Grímur had plenty of money and had started talking about moving away from the hill, buying a flat, and even talked of buying a car, but only when he was in particularly high spirits.

The soldiers led Grímur out. Put him in one of the jeeps and drove him away. Their leader, the one who knocked Grímur to the floor without the slightest effort – who just walked up to him and hit him as if he did not know how strong Grímur was – said something to their mother and then said goodbye, not with a salute, but with a handshake, and got into the other jeep.

Silence soon returned to the little house. Their mother remained standing in the passage as if the intrusion was beyond her comprehension. She stroked her eye gingerly, fixated on something only she could see. They had never seen Grímur lying on the floor. They had never seen him knocked flat. Never heard anyone shout at him. Never seen him so helpless. They could not fathom what had happened. How it could happen. Why Grímur did not attack the soldiers and beat them to pulp. The children looked at each other. Inside the house, the silence was stifling. They looked at their mother as a strange noise was heard. It came from Mikkelína. She was squatting on her bed and they heard the noise again, and saw that she was beginning to giggle, and the giggling built up into a snigger which she tried to repress at first, but could not, and she erupted into laughter. Simon smiled and started laughing too, and Tómas followed suit, and before long all three were howling with uncontrollable spasms that echoed around the house and carried out onto the hill in the fine spring weather.

Two hours later a military truck pulled up and emptied the house of all the booty that Grímur and his colleagues had stashed indoors. The boys watched the truck drive away, and they ran over the hill and saw it go back to the depot where it was unloaded.

Simon did not know exactly what had happened and he was not sure that his mother did either, but Grímur had received a prison sentence and would not come home for the next few months. At first life continued as normal on the hill. They didn't seem to take in that Grímur was no longer around. At least, not for the time being. Their mother went about her chores as she always had, and had no qualms about using Grímur's ill-gotten gains to provide for herself and her children. Later she found herself a job on the Gufunes farm, about half an hour's walk from the house.

Weather permitting, the boys carried Mikkelína out into the sunshine. Sometimes they took her along when they went fishing in Reynisvatn. If they caught enough trout their mother would fry it in a pan and make a delicious meal. Gradually they were liberated from the grip that Grímur still exerted over them even while he was away. It was easier to wake up in the mornings, the day rushed past care free, and the evenings passed in an unfamiliar calm which was so comfortable that they stayed up well into the night, talking and playing, until they couldn't keep their eyes open.

Grímur's absence, however, had the greatest effect on their mother. One day, when she had finally realised that he would not be coming back in the immediate future, she washed every inch of their double bed. She aired the mattresses in the yard and beat the dust and dirt out of them. Then she took out the quilts and beat them too, changed the bed linen, bathed her children in turn with green soap and hot water from a big tub that she put on the kitchen floor, and ended by carefully washing her own hair and her face – which still bore the marks from Grímur's last assault – and her whole body. Hesitantly she picked up a mirror and looked into it. She stroked her eye and lip. She had grown thinner and her expression was tougher, her teeth protruding a little, her eyes sunk deep and her nose, which had been broken once, had an almost imperceptible curve.

Towards midnight she took all her children into her bed and the four of them slept there together. After that the children slept in the big bed with their mother, Mikkelína by herself on her right and the two boys on her left, happy.

She never visited Grímur in prison. They never mentioned his name all the time he was away.

One morning, shortly after Grímur had been led away, Dave the soldier strolled over the hill with his fishing rod, walked past their house and winked at Simon, who was standing in front of the house, and continued all the way to Hafravatn. Símon set off in pursuit, lying down at a suitable distance to spy on him. Dave spent the day by the lake, relaxed as ever, without apparently minding whether he caught any fish or not. He landed three.

When evening set in he went back up the hill and stopped by their house with his three fish tied together by their tails with a piece of string. Dave was unsure of himself, or so it appeared to Simon, who had run back home to watch him through the kitchen window, where he made sure that Dave could not see him. At last the soldier made up his mind, walked over to the house and knocked on the door.

Simon had told his mother about the soldier, the same one who had given them the trout before, and she went out and glanced around for him, went back in, looked in the mirror and tidied her hair. She seemed to sense that he would drop in on his way back to the barracks. She was ready to greet him when he did.

She opened the door and Dave smiled, said something she didn't understand and handed her the fish. She took them and invited him inside. He entered the house and stood awkwardly in the kitchen. Nodded to the boys and to Mikkelína, who stretched and strained for a better look at this soldier who had come all that way just to stand in their kitchen in his uniform with a funny hat shaped like an upturned boat, which he suddenly remembered he had forgotten to take off when he came inside and snatched from his head in embarrassment. He was of medium height, certainly older than 30, slim with nicely shaped hands, which fiddled with the upturned boat, twisting it as if they were wringing out the washing.

She gestured to him to sit at the kitchen table, and he sat with the boys beside him while their mother made coffee, real coffee from the depot, coffee that Grímur had stolen and the soldiers had not discovered. Dave knew Simon's name, and found out that Tómas was called Tómas, which was easy for him to pronounce. Mikkelína's name amused him and he said it over and again in such a funny way that they all laughed. He said his name was Dave Welch, from a place called Brooklyn in America. He told them he was a private. They had no idea what he was talking about.

"A private," he repeated, but they just stared at him.

He drank his coffee and seemed very pleased with it. The mother sat facing him at the other end of the table.

"I understand your husband is in jail," he said. "For stealing."

He got no response.

With a glance at the children he took a piece of paper out of his breast pocket and twiddled it between his fingers as if uncertain what to do. Then he passed the note across the table to their mother. She picked it up, unfolded it and read what it said. She looked at him in astonishment, then back at the note. Then she folded up the note and put it in the pocket of her apron.

Tómas managed to make Dave understand that he ought to have another try at saying Mikkelína's name, and when he did they all started laughing again, and Mikkelína crinkled up her face in sheer joy.

Dave Welch visited their house regularly all that summer and made friends with the children and their mother. He fished in the two lakes and gave his catches to them, and he brought them little things from the depot that came in useful. He played with the children, who took a special delight in having him there, and he always carried his notebook in his pocket to make himself understood in Icelandic. They rolled around laughing when he spluttered out a phrase in Icelandic. His serious expression was completely at odds with what he said, and the way he said it sounded like a three-year-old child talking.

But he was a quick learner and it soon became easier for them to understand him and for him to know what they were talking about. The boys showed him the best places to fish and walked proudly with him over the hill and around the lake, and they learned English words from him and American songs that they had heard before from the depot.

He formed a special relationship with Mikkelína. Before long he had won her over entirely, and would carry her outside in good weather and test what she was capable of achieving. His approach was similar to her mother's: moving her arms and legs for her, supporting her while she walked, helping her with all kinds of exercises. One day he brought over an army doctor to look at Mikkelína. The doctor shone a torch into her eyes and down her throat, moved her head round and felt her neck and down her spine. He had wooden blocks of different shapes with him, and made her fit them into matching holes. That took her no time at all. He was told that she had fallen ill at the age of three and understood what people said to her, but could barely speak a word herself. That she could read and that her mother was teaching her to write. The doctor nodded as if he understood, a meaningful expression on his face. He had a long talk with Dave after the examination and when he left Dave managed to make them understand that Mikkelína's mind was completely healthy. They already knew that. But then he said that, with time, the proper exercises and a lot of effort, Mikkelína would be able to walk unaided.

"Walk!" Her mother slumped onto her chair.

"And even speak normally," Dave added. "Perhaps. Has she never been to a doctor before?"

"All this is beyond me," she said sadly.

"She's okay," Dave said. "Just give her time."

Their mother had ceased to hear what he was saying.

"He's a terrible man," she said all of a sudden, and her children pricked up their ears, because they had never heard her talk about Grímur the way she did that day. "A terrible man," she continued. "A wretched little creature that doesn't deserve to live. I don't know why they're allowed to live. I don't understand. Why they're allowed to do what they please. What makes people like that? What is it that turns him into a monster? Why does he behave like an animal year after year, attacking his children and humiliating them, attacking me and beating me until I want to die and think about how to . . ."

She heaved a deep sigh and went to sit beside Mikkelína.

"It makes you feel ashamed for being the victim of a man like that, you disappear into total loneliness and bar everyone from entering your world, even your own children, because you don't want anyone to set foot in there, least of all them. And you sit bracing yourself for the next attack that comes out of the blue and is full of hatred for something or other, you don't know what, and you spend your whole life waiting for the next attack, when is it coming, how bad will it be, what's the reason, how can I avoid it? The more I do to please him, the more I repulse him. The more submissiveness and fear I show, the more he loathes me. And if I resist, all the more reason for him to beat the living daylights out of me. There's no way to do the right thing. None.

"Until all you think about is how to get it over with. It doesn't matter how. Just get it over with."

A deathly silence fell. Mikkelína lay motionless in her bed and the boys had inched closer to their mother. They listened, dumbstruck, to every word. Never before had she opened a window into the torment that she had grappled with for so long that she had forgotten everything else.

"It'll be okay," Dave said.

"I'll help you," Simon said in a serious voice.

She looked at him.

"I know, Simon," she said. "I always have known, my poor Simon."

The days went by and Dave devoted all his spare time to the family on the hill and spent longer and longer with the children's mother, either indoors or walking around Reynisvatn and over to Hafravatn. The boys wanted to see more of him, but he had stopped going fishing with them and had less time for Mikkelína. But they did not mind. They noticed the change in their mother, they associated it with Dave and were happy for her.

One beautiful autumn day, almost half a year after Grímur was marched away from the hill in the arms of the military police, Simon saw Dave and his mother in the distance, walking towards the house. They were walking close together and for all he could see they were holding hands. As they drew closer they stopped holding hands and moved apart, and Simon realised they did not want to be seen.

"What are you and Dave going to do?" Simon asked his mother one evening that autumn, after dusk had fallen on the hill. They sat in the kitchen. Tómas and Mikkelína were playing cards. Dave had spent the day with them then gone back to the depot. The question had been in the air all summer. The children had discussed it amongst themselves and imagined all kinds of situations that ended with Dave becoming a father to them and expelling Grímur from their sight for ever.