The Flatey Enigma (2 page)

T
he mail boat sailed from Stykkishólmur to the island of Flatey once a week, on Saturdays, and then traveled on to Bardaströnd north of Breidafjördur. The wharf was in Brjánslækur, and it was there that the few farmers who inhabited the roadless fjords to the east of it came to collect their mail. Transport was limited in these parts, and the vast differences between the tides made sea travel there very difficult.

Once a road had been built over Kleifaheidi, there was far greater access to Patreksfjördur in the west and the villages to the north of it. A growing number of passengers started to travel on the mail boat, which increased its transportation of goods.

The boat followed the same route back from Brjánslækur, stopping off in Flatey on the way and terminating its journey in Stykkishólmur. The whole trip took an entire day, and it was often in the small hours that the boat was finally tied to the wharf of its home harbor.

Life was fairly uneventful in Brjánslækur when there was no mail boat on the way. On this particular Thursday, however, a young stranger stood on the wharf, watching an open motorboat approaching the shore, long in the distance from the south. The man was dressed in a coat tied with a belt at the waist. He was of average height, slim, and sported a conspicuous scar on his forehead. He squinted his gray eyes at the glaring sunlight, as if he were unaccustomed to light, and the cool breeze ruffled his thick, dark hair. A metallic oblong box with handles on the side lay at his feet.

The man stood alone on the wharf, watched from a short distance away by two old men under a shed who were intrigued by this unusual guest. A small truck was driving up the road, away from the wharf, and it soon vanished from sight to the west in a cloud of dust.

This was clearly an alien environment to the young man, and he anxiously scanned the broad fjord and islands in the distance. Two ravens hovered high above his head, croaking at each other. Down on the sea, some arctic terns fluttered and screeched. These riotous birds brought back memories, and they weren’t good ones either, so he instinctively blocked his ears with his hands and closed his eyes a moment—until he realized that it was pointless trying to shut them off like that and decided to shrug off the feeling. He dug his hands deep into his pockets and clenched his fists.

The boat was pulling into shore now. The engine had been turned off, and the vessel was being steered toward the wharf. The stranger caught the rope tossed to him by the men on the boat and held onto it as the two men climbed onto the edge of the wharf.

“Hello there,” said the man who stepped up first—a vigorous man in his sixties, chubby, with a round, ruddy face, a collar of white beard that lined his big cheeks, and a stubby nose. He was wearing thigh-high boots, an old woolen pinstriped cardigan, and a black cap on his head.

“I’m Ellidagrímur Einarsson, administrative officer of the district of Flatey; call me Grímur. I guess you must be the district magistrate’s representative from Patreksfjördur?”

“Yes, I’m Kjartan,” the man who had been waiting on the pier answered, taking the hand the officer was holding out to him. It felt thick and the skin was rough, but it was a warm and firm handshake.

“This is Högni, our teacher from the Flatey primary school and our church organist,” said the local officer, indicating his partner, a tall, spare man in neat blue overalls and high Wellingtons. “Högni works with me during the seal-hunting season in the spring and helps out with the hay when the harvesting starts,” the officer added.

Högni gave the young man an equally vigorous handshake. He had a large gray moustache, well-groomed to the sides, but otherwise clean-shaven cheeks. The teacher seemed to be of the same age of his companion but bore his age well. A bright peaked cap perched over the back of his head.

The local officer observed the district magistrate’s man for a moment and took out a tin of snuff.

“So you’ve only just started to work for the magistrate, have you?” he asked, offering Kjartan some snuff.

“Yes, I took the coaster to Patreksfjördur the day before yesterday,” said Kjartan, declining the offer with a wave of his hand.

“And they’ve thrown you straight into the deep end!” Grímur grinned roguishly, handing Högni the tin of snuff.

“Yes, this isn’t exactly the kind of assignment I was expecting. They told me working for the district magistrate would be a clerical job, and that I’d be dealing with notarizations and things like that.”

“So this isn’t a long-term career move then?” Grímur asked.

“No, just until the autumn.”

“Are you training to become a district magistrate?”

“No, I just graduated in law this summer, and I wasn’t planning on any district commissioning job.”

“So what are you going to do then?”

“Well, I might be able to join a lawyer’s practice in the fall, so one of my tutors got me this summer job. I’d like to work in property law in the future, so it’ll be good experience for me to audit some mortgage pledges this summer.”

The local officer glanced at the box that lay at their feet. “Right then, let’s just get this box on board and pick up the corpse. But let’s stop off in Flatey to grab a bite to eat from my wife, Imba, on the way. She should have some lunch ready by one if I know her right.”

“Have you identified the deceased yet?” Kjartan asked. He was hoping for a yes to make his job a little bit easier, but his wish wasn’t to be granted.

“No, we haven’t,” Grímur answered. “The only thing that Valdi from Ystakot could tell us was that his boy found a dead man in Ketilsey and nothing more. Those lads sure talk a lot, not that they ever make much sense, and they normally repeat everything twice. As far as I can make out, though, the poor wretch had been dead for some time. Might have been shipwrecked or something in the winter and got washed up by the spring tide. As far as I can tell, it’s basically just a heap of bones, and our job is just to collect them, though I guess we better be prepared for anything. Then we’ve got to log it all and file a report, of course. You must be pretty good at that.”

Kjartan couldn’t remember any part of his law education that covered chores of this kind, but he imagined he’d be able to throw something down on paper. He instinctively dug his hand into his coat pocket and fished out a notebook and pen. He tested the pen on a blank sheet, and it seemed to be working. The islanders watched with interest.

“Yes, I can write the report,” said Kjartan awkwardly, shoving the notebook back into his pocket again.

The islanders stepped down onto the boat and grabbed the box that Kjartan eased over the side of the wharf. A small suitcase was passed down in the same way, and then finally Kjartan himself, once he had loosened the moorings. Högni tied the box tightly to the thwart with some old string while Grímur cranked the engine. Throwing the engine into reverse, they backed away from the wharf until they were out in the open sea. Then they pressed forward, heading south at full speed.

She browsed through some pages of the Munksgaard edition of the
Flatey Book.
Occasionally, she would stop and read a sentence out loud. Every page of the book contained a facsimile photograph of a vellum leaf from the original manuscript. The images were clear and legible, even though the full coloring of the original was missing. The pages were white and well preserved.

She finally closed the book, then opened it again to the front page and started to tell the story in a low, confident, and unwavering voice: “The
Book of Flatey
contains a variety of writings: it starts with the Eddic and the Hyndla poems, the tales of King Sigurdur Slefa, and genealogies. All of these writings were probably set down at the end of the book but then moved to the front of the manuscript before it was bound. The history of Eirik Vidförull starts to take off on the fourth page, followed by the saga of the mighty King Ólaf Tryggvason. Ólaf ruled Norway from 995 to 1000, and his story forms a large part of the manuscript and is interwoven with many other accounts and tales, such as the Jomsvikings saga, the sagas of the Faroe Islands, sagas of the Orkneys, sagas of the Greenlanders, and many more…”

A
s soon as they had passed the skerry by Brjánslækur, Högni moved to the bow and lay down on a canvas bag that was spread over a pile of nets. He drew his peaked cap over his eyes, crossed his arms over his chest, and stretched out his legs. Kjartan sat on the thwart opposite Grímur, who was steering. The engine growled noisily, and the conversation was spasmodic.

“Not the most comfortable place to sleep,” Kjartan said when Högni had settled down.

“The man’s tired,” Grímur answered, “and he likes to have a lie down on sea trips. The working hours in the hunting season are long, and he isn’t used to hard labor. He’s a boarder at my wife Imba’s place and pays for it by working for me in the summer.”

“Is he a bachelor then?”

“He’s a widower; his wife died a few years ago. He sleeps in the school building and has two meals a day at our place.”

The boat sailed smoothly along its journey. Grímur kept a sharp eye on the course he was steering because in many places their sailing path was strewn with rocks and reefs.

Kjartan felt he needed to keep the conversation going, without quite knowing where to start. He gazed across the bay. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be islands big and small.

“I’ve never been to Breidafjördur before,” he said. And then, just for the sake of it, he added: “It must be true what they say then, that the islands in this fjord are countless?”

Grímur smiled and seemed to be willing to participate in the conversation. “They’re certainly not easy to count with any exactitude,” he answered, “and first you’ve got to decide on what you call an island. If we define an island as a piece of land that’s surrounded by sea at high tide and has some vegetation on it, then maybe we can count them. By that criteria, there are about three thousand islands that have been counted in the whole fjord. But then you’ve got the barren skerries that no one’s been able to count with any certainty, so they can be considered to be countless.”

Kjartan nodded, trying to strike an interested air.

Grímur pointed at an island that rose high out of the sea: “That’s Hergilsey, which was recently abandoned by the last farmer. It’s named after Hergil Hnapprass. Have you read Gísli’s saga?”

“Yes, but not recently,” Kjartan answered.

“Hergil’s son was Ingjaldur, a farmer in Hergilsey. The story goes that he sheltered the outlawed Gísli Súrsson. When Börkur Digri was going to kill Ingjaldur to punish him for hiding the convict, Ingjaldur the old uttered the following words…”

Grímur took a deep breath, altered his voice, and declaimed: “
My clothes are rags anyway, so little do I care if I won’t be able to wear them down any further
.”

Grímur grinned and then added: “The people of Breidafjördur weren’t bothered by trivialities.”

Kjartan nodded and attempted a smile.

Grímur carried on pointing at the islands as they sailed, naming them and recounting their histories. To the west there was the skerry of Oddbjarnarsker, which had important fishing grounds that the poor traveled to in the days of the famine to survive. Then there were the isles of Skeley, Langey, Feigsey, and Sýrey. Each place name had its own story.

Högni woke up from his nap, moved over to them, and contributed his own anecdotes. As Flatey appeared on the horizon, he said, “One Christmastime, just before the turn of the century, a ship was sailing from the mainland with wood cuttings they were supposed to sell in Flatey as firewood. There were six men on board, but they ran into bad weather and got lost on the way. They finally reached the island of Feigsey, but the boat was wrecked.”

Högni pointed Feigsey out to Kjartan and then continued: “The men were there for days on end, cold and without any food, but they could see people walking between the houses in Flatey when there was light during the day. Finally, their shouts were heard and they were rescued. They all survived the ordeal, which was quite a feat, because they’d had no food apart from a small ration of butter. A few decades ago a foreign freighter sank in the fjord here. It was carrying a cargo of telephone poles and barrels of thick motor lubricant. A rescue was launched, and some of the goods floated to shore. The men didn’t really like the taste of what they took to be foreign butter, but it seemed to last forever.”

Grímur laughed loudly at the story, even though he had definitely heard it often before and, in fact, had been one of the men who had tasted the motor grease.

Their chatter made time pass quickly, and they soon neared their destination.

As they drew closer, Kjartan was surprised to see how many houses there were on Flatey. First the church appeared, shimmering in a haze, since it stood at the top of the island, painted in white with a red roof. Then the village gradually started to take shape. The sun glared on the multicolored gables of the houses, and in many places laundry flapped on clotheslines.

Grímur slowed down the engine as they passed a small isle with high bird cliffs covered in white shells on its northern side but a well-sheltered bay that faced Flatey on its southern side. The strait between the island was no more than a hundred meters wide.

“We call that islet Hafnarey,” Grímur announced. “Scientists say it’s an ancient volcanic crater.” He still needed to raise his voice because the screeching of the birds had now taken over from the noise produced by the boat’s engine.

They sailed slowly into the strait and approached a small, dilapidated concrete pier below the village. Some kids were watching them with natural interest.

“This is called Eyjólfur’s pier. The new pier is over by the fish factory at the southern end of the island,” said Grímur. He steered the boat toward the mooring buoy floating in the strait and grabbed it with a short hook as they passed it. Högni tied the boat’s stern to the anchored buoy and then moved to the bow to be ready for when they reached the pier. Kjartan sat on the thwart beside the casket and felt an urge to help them, but the crew seemed to be doing a good job and he would have undoubtedly just been in their way. Högni hopped onto the step below the pier with the rope and held the boat while Kjartan and Grímur clambered out after him. Högni then released the hawser and allowed the anchored buoy to drag the boat away from the pier again.

He scolded the children as he tightened the knot: “I strictly forbid you to go on that boat.” Then, to drive the point home, he added, “District Officer Grímur will stick you in that casket if you disobey!”

The kids recoiled slightly at the sound of this threat and stuck their heads together. A short and stocky man, dressed in dark Sunday clothes with a black hat and silver walking stick poised in his hand, elbowed his way through the throng of children and greeted Kjartan.

“Thormódur Krákur, I’m the deacon and the island’s eiderdown tradesman,” he introduced himself in a loud voice, tilting on his toes and rocking to and fro.

“I’m Kjartan…the district magistrate’s assistant,” the new arrival said, hesitantly.

Thormódur Krákur bowed deeply. “Welcome to the district of Flatey, my good sir and officer. This is hardly the most felicitous of occasions, of course, but we islanders always welcome visitors from our most distinguished magistrature.”

“Thank you,” said Kjartan, transfixed by the medal that dangled from a threadbare ribbon on the deacon’s lapel.

Thormódur Krákur continued with his speech but lowered his voice now: “The church will, of course, be open for you when you return with the deceased. I’ll come down with a handcart to transport the casket when you arrive. Our pastor will find some appropriate words.”

“Yes…thank you,” said Kjartan. He hadn’t really thought about that aspect of the job. The district magistrate had only instructed him to collect the body from the island and to send it on the mail boat to Reykjavik, which was expected in two days’ time, and then write a report. After that his job was supposed to be done.

“But wouldn’t it be possible to get a car for the casket?” Kjartan asked.

“The only possibility then would be to use the van from the fish factory, but it hasn’t been started yet this spring. Krákur’s cart is perfectly adequate,” Grímur answered.

The deacon tilted on his toes again and said, “Yes, my cart is always used by the church for funerals here on Flatey.”

“Very well,” said Kjartan. “Thank you for taking care of that.”

Grímur wavered impatiently. “My wife, Imba, is ready with the lunch,” he said. “Let’s not keep her waiting.”

They walked across the village with Thormódur Krákur leading the way. Shouldering his walking stick like a rifle, he swung his other arm to the beat of a military march. Women were tending to their clotheslines in front of several houses and curiously observed the men as they walked by. Thormódur Krákur outlined the lay of the land for Kjartan in a lofty voice and pointed with his free hand: “That’s the warehouse over there, and there’s the telephone exchange, and there’s the co-operative store,” he announced, “and this is where our blessed priest lives, Reverend Hannes, and that’s Gudjón’s boy there tentering the seal fur.”

They walked past three furs that had been stretched on the gable with the furry side facing the wall, and a young man was nailing up the fourth.

“And this is the cove and sea wall that was built and paid for in silver.” Thormódur Krákur pointed at a long wall of piled stones that enclosed a narrow cove. They were being followed by a coil-tailed black dog, and a pack of cackling multicolored hens stepped out of their way on the road.

“And that up there is our church and graveyard, and behind the church there’s the oldest library building in Iceland. It’s not very big, but it contains various gems if you take a look. Even a perfect replica of the
Book of Flatey
, the most famous manuscript in Nordic history, the
Codex Flateyensis
, printed and bound by Munksgaard in Copenhagen and bequeathed to the library of Flatey as a gift to celebrate its hundredth anniversary.”

The district officer’s house was painted in white with a green roof and stood on the edge of the slope overlooking the village. The name of the house,
BAKKI
, was painted in big black letters on a sign over the door. Thormódur Krákur escorted the men to the entrance and then took off his hat to say good-bye with a handshake.

“I’ll be at your disposal then when you come back,” he said finally, tilting on his toes again. He then swirled on his heels and solemnly walked down to the village.

“Does the deacon always dress like that?” Kjartan asked Grímur as he watched the man walk away.

“No. Only on mass days and when he’s receiving dignitaries,” the district officer answered.

“He considers me to be a dignitary then, since this is hardly a mass day,” said Kjartan awkwardly.

Grímur laughed. “Yes, my friend. Krákur has a deep reverence for authority figures, especially if they happen to be from the magistrate’s office.”

“What’s that medal on his chest for?”

“That’s the medal of honor from the parliamentary celebrations of 1930. Krákur received it for making a down quilt for the Danish king,” Grímur answered.

“You’ve got to give it to him, though,” Högni added, “he handles eiderdown better than most.”

The mistress of the household welcomed them and ushered them into the living room where a small table had been laid for three.

“I’m Ingibjörg. I hope you’ll be comfortable with us,” she said when Kjartan greeted her and introduced himself. She was a thickset woman with a conspicuous birthmark on her right cheek, and she was dressed in traditional Icelandic clothes and a striped apron.

“I take it the magistrate’s assistant will eat fresh seal meat, will he not?” Grímur asked as soon as he sat down.

Full of trepidation, Kjartan eyed several pieces of fat black meat steaming on a platter.

“Yes, maybe a little,” he finally answered.

Högni also took a seat, since the woman of the house didn’t seem to be expected to sit with them. She placed glasses on the table and a jug of water.

“We eat a lot of seal pup during the hunting season,” said Grímur, stabbing a large piece. “And potatoes, too, if they’re available.”

Kjartan carved a tiny slice off one of the pieces and placed it on his plate. Then he stretched out for a potato.

The lady of the house reentered with a small simmering pot.

“Here’s the melted sheep’s fat. It’s nice on top,” said Grímur.

Kjartan could only bring himself to taste a morsel of the meat and then finished the potato.

Högni eyed him inquisitively and then said with a full mouth, “I once knew a man who wouldn’t eat seal or sea raven either, but the funny thing was that he ate poultry and liked that.”

Högni turned back to his plate and skillfully shoveled food into his mouth without soiling his distinguished moustache.

The lady of the house followed what was going on at the table from the kitchen doorway.

“Don’t you like it, lad?” she asked when it was clear that Kjartan wasn’t going to be having any seconds.

“I don’t have much appetite after the crossing,” he answered, taking a sip of water, although he felt that it, too, had a bizarre taste.

“You poor thing, what was I thinking? Let me see if I can find something gentler on the stomach after your sea journey.” She vanished into the kitchen.

Grímur pointed through the west window of the living room.

“That’s the doctor’s house out there. We have a woman doctor now, and her name is Jóhanna. She lives there with her father, an old man, bedridden but very learned. He’s far gone with cancer, poor man. Some people say he came here to die. Not the worst place to do that. It’s a shorter distance to heaven from here, I mean. Our Jóhanna likes to keep to herself a bit, but she’s a fine doctor. Behind the doctor’s house there’s our new fish factory. You can’t see it from here. And beyond that there’s the croft of Ystakot. It was the last croft to be built with turf walls on this island. That’s where the clan who found the body live. There’s no farming for them there, apart from their potato patch, but they go to Ketilsey and the skerries around there. They just about scrape by; it’s a long way to go, and there aren’t many eggs to be found. But they catch some seal and puffin there, too. They also do some line fishing and work at the fish factory when it’s in operation.”