The Flatey Enigma (5 page)

Kjartan had gotten his appetite back and ate well. In fact, he’d never eaten puffin before and preferred it to the taste of the seal meat he’d had earlier that day. The news ended and Grímur turned off the radio.

“That’s politics for you,” he said. “You’re better off being neutral when those superpowers are at each other’s throats. But here in Iceland it’s the Progressive Party you should be voting for,” he said to Kjartan. “Young people tend to turn to socialism if someone doesn’t set them straight. And the Conservatives are even worse.”

Högni responded with an indulgent smile and gave Kjartan a furtive wink.

“I think Khrushchev is just a Progressist,” said Högni. “There aren’t any real communists left anymore, not since Comrade Stalin died.”

“He’s only kidding,” Grímur said to Kjartan. “Högni is the biggest Progressive I know. He just hasn’t realized it himself yet. It’s the same story with a lot of people who waste their time trying to vote for other parties. Don’t let it sway you, lad.”

That was the end of the political debate, and the men walked out of the house with coffee in their glasses.

The sun was setting in the sky in the west, and there was a chill in the air.

“How many days do you reckon that man survived on that island?” Kjartan asked.

“Difficult to say,” Grímur answered. “Maybe a few.”

Högni sipped on his coffee and said, “There was once a woman who tended to her animals in the winter on a remote island out there in Skardsströnd. There were two laborers with her, a man and a woman. The man had run out of tobacco after the long period of isolation, and the girl had some boyfriend on the mainland. So they wanted the old woman to allow them to go home, but she wouldn’t let them until they tricked her by extinguishing the fire in the hut. That way she had to send them to the mainland to fetch more fire. But when they left her, there was a cold northern wind one night, and the sea froze over so that the old bag couldn’t be reached for the next eight weeks. She had something to eat on the island, even though it was raw, and she got a tiny bit of warmth from the animals, but she was always considered a bit weird after that.”

Högni gave Kjartan a meaningful look.

“But the man in Ketilsey had neither food nor heat,” said Kjartan.

“You’re right there, lad,” Grímur answered with a grave air. “I just hope the poor wretch didn’t have to suffer long.”

They walked inside, and the district officer showed Kjartan the old typewriter on the small standing writing table in the living room. It seemed to be in reasonable condition, and Kjartan placed two sheets in it with a carbon sheet in between and rolled it into place. He recalled the doctor’s words from memory and then started to type. He was accustomed to using a typewriter and wrote texts with relative ease. The opening read as follows: “Notice to the inhabitants of the district of Flatey. The remains of a man’s body were found on Ketilsey.”

Once the description of the man’s clothes had been written, he added the words of Jón Finnsson that had been found in the deceased’s cardigan pocket. Finally, he wrote: “If anyone can provide any information on the man’s journey to Ketilsey or knows of a missing person, they are asked to contact Grímur Einarsson, the district administrative officer of Flatey.”

“…the characters in the sagas contained in the
Flatey Book
are not my favorite people. If its accounts are accurate, these were some of the worst rogues, and few of them were honorable leaders. Ólaf Tryggvason’s and Ólaf Haraldsson’s relentless endeavors to convert the Norse to Christianity are of little credit to their religion. It can also be argued that the Viking raids delayed the advance of civilization in northern Europe for centuries. It is, however, the Icelandic record keepers that I admire. The people who passed the sagas down from one generation to the next, first orally and then from one vellum sheet to another. There are countless phrases in the
Flatey Book
that have now become sayings that are quoted over and over again, without anyone being remotely aware of their origin. Sayings such as ‘No one can stand against great odds,’ ‘Ale is another man,’ and ‘The one who yields is generally the wisest.’ These are all sayings that Icelanders have become accustomed to using without thinking particularly about their origin. Few contemporary authors exhibit this kind of insight…”

T
he 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.

Thormódur Krákur 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.

Gudrídur, 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 Gudrídur only put them in when she really needed them at meals.

“The food smells great,” said Thormódur Krákur 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, Thormódur Krákur 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. Gudrídur 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.

Thormódur Krákur 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. Gudrídur 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.”

Thormódur Krákur 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 Gudrídur 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 Thormódur Krákur 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.

Thormódur Krákur 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 Gudrídur 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 Hávarsson and his namesake, Thormódur, Kolbrún’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 Högni greeted him on his way from the district officer’s house to the school. They chatted for a while, and then Thormódur Krákur 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 Vídidalstunga, and then another twelve went into the additional material, which was written in Reykhólar 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…”

K
jartan 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,” Ingibjörg said when she noticed Kjartan had come out.

“Good morning.”

“We still have dry weather.”

“Hmm, yeah.”

Ingibjörg 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 Grímur anyway?” Kjartan asked.

“They went out at the crack of dawn to check on the seal nets. They should be back by noon.”

“Right.”

“Grímur put up your notice before he left.”

“Good.”

“And the telephone exchange will open at ten so you can ring your boss, the district magistrate.”

She turned to the girl. “Thanks for your help, Rosa darling. Run along and play now.”

The girl put the can down and skipped away.

Ingibjörg disappeared into the house with the empty washing basket in her hands.

Kjartan sat on an old whale bone that lay by the gable of the house and sipped on his coffee. Visibility was good in the clear weather, and he felt he could see a white painted house on the mainland to the north, although it could also have been the remains of some snow.

The screeching of cliff birds reached him from Hafnarey and fused with the surrounding bleating of sheep. The salted scent of the sea lingered in the breeze.

Ingibjörg came out again and had removed her apron now, put on a tasseled cap, and draped a knitted shawl over her shoulders.

“I’ll walk you down to the telephone exchange now,” she said cheerfully.

They followed the path to the road and headed down toward the village. Ingibjörg walked a lot slower than what he was used to and occasionally halted completely to look at something or chat with the people they bumped into. He waited patiently and responded to the greetings of the people Ingibjörg introduced him to. But he was slightly unnerved by the way people brazenly stared at him as soon as they started nattering with the district officer’s wife.

Finally they reached the co-operative building. There was a space on one of the store’s doors that was obviously regularly used as a notice board. Some rusty old drawing pins were stuck to it, and a notice advertising the Whitsunday mass next week had recently been put up. Beside it was the notice that Kjartan had typed and stuck up with four new drawing pins. Ingibjörg paused to read it and nodded with a smile, as if to confirm it was all in good order.

The telephone exchange was in a one-story building above a stone basement, directly opposite the co-op.

White letters on a blue sign over the door read
Post & Telegraph Office
, and inside there was a small hall, with coat hangers and a small bench, that led into a small reception room. A few gray radio receivers hung on one wall, while on the other there was a cabinet full of compartments for the sorting of mail. A bulky safe stood on a plinth in one corner.

A small, delicate woman welcomed them with a smile. She was wearing trousers and a sweater, with long hair woven into a thick braid.

“This is Stína; she’s the head of the telephone exchange and the post office,” Ingibjörg said to Kjartan. Then she explained the reason for their visit: “The assistant magistrate needs to phone his superiors. Are you open yet, Stína?”

Ingibjörg sat in front of the desk and signaled Kjartan to join her.

“I’m just opening now. I just have to turn on the generator and switch on the exchange,” Stína answered, slipping on some old work gloves and disappearing behind the door.

“That’s the only electricity we have here,” Ingibjörg explained a bit further, “the energy this generator produces. There’s actually another generator in the fish factory for the fish processing, but it’s rarely used.”

Within a few moments they heard the muffled murmur of an engine and the smiling lady reappeared. She slipped on a bulky set of black headphones with an attached microphone and turned on the contraption by flicking a few switches. She waited a moment for the lamps to warm up and then said loudly and clearly: “Stykkishólmur, Stykkishólmur, Flatey radio calling.” She repeated this several times.

She then put down the headphones and said, “Stykkishólmur will answer in a moment. He sometimes likes to keep you waiting, just to give people the impression that he’s really busy.”

She turned out to be right. A blast of static soon erupted, and a male voice answered through the speaker on the wall: “Flatey radio, Stykkishólmur answering.”

“Good morning, Stykkishólmur. We have a call for the district magistrate in Patreksfjördur.”

“One moment,” the voice answered, followed by a silence. Stína and Ingibjörg solemnly waited without saying a word.

Kjartan looked out the window facing the village and saw two men standing by the notice in the co-op store. They seemed to be reading it with great interest and then stuck their heads together and looked in the direction of the telephone exchange.

“Flatey radio, Stykkishólmur. We have the district magistrate of Patreksfjördur on the line.”

“Go ahead,” Stína said, pointing at a black receiver on the desk in front of Kjartan.

He picked up the phone. “Hello, hello. Kjartan in Flatey here.”

The voice at the other end of the line was faint. “Yes, hello, how’s the investigation going?”

“We’ve recovered the body,” Kjartan answered, “but we still haven’t identified it yet. It seems likely that he was alive when he reached the island but then died of fatigue. He seems to have been lying there for several months after he died.”

There was a brief silence, after which the magistrate said, “That’s odd. Doesn’t anyone know who he is?”

“No. The body is unrecognizable.”

There was another brief silence while the magistrate evaluated the situation.

“Right then, so you’ll have to send the body to Reykjavik,” he then said.

“Yes. The casket will be traveling on the mail boat tomorrow.”

“Good.”

“Should I come home today?”

“Today? No, hang on there for a bit and talk to some of the islanders. There must be some way of finding out who took that man to the island.”

Kjartan wasn’t happy. “I’m not used to this kind of investigative work,” he said.

“No, but you’ll have to do for now. I’m not going to call in the police from Reykjavik if we can solve this in the district ourselves. District Officer Grímur will help you with your inquiries.”

“Right then, but what about the notarizations I was supposed to work on?”

“They can wait another two or three days. Don’t you worry about them; just concentrate on this. Be in touch tomorrow. Good-bye and best of luck.”

The phone call ended, and Stína let Stykkishólmur know that was enough for now.

Kjartan handed her a copy of the notice and asked her to read it out over the radio to the other islands.

“Skáleyjar, Svefneyjar, Látur,” she called into the mouthpiece. “Flatey radio calling.”

She repeated this three times until the islands answered, each in turn. She had started to read out the notice as they were walking outside.

“Grímur will be back at lunchtime and you can talk to him about how to proceed,” Ingibjörg said when they were standing outside the telephone exchange. Then she added: “Maybe you should take a walk while you’re waiting for Grímur. Take a look around the island. Visitors normally like to go up to Lundaberg to look at the birds.” She gave him directions.

Kjartan nodded approvingly, and Ingibjörg said good-bye and walked toward her house at an even slower pace than before. Kjartan started his tour by taking a look around the village. The doors of the co-op were open, but there were no customers to be seen inside. A handcart loaded with several bags of cement was parked in front of the warehouse. The muffled murmur of the generator resounded from the basement, and the sound of a radio voice could be heard coming from the house next door. These sounds blended with the screeches of the birds on the rocks of Hafnarey.

An elderly woman in a canvas apron was spreading eiderdown on a concrete step above the pier, and an old man was painting a small boat that lay upturned on the edge of the cove. A face was watching him through the priest’s house’s window.

Kjartan sauntered off, following a narrow gravel path that meandered between the houses. There was a strong smell of chicken shit in the air that fused with the scent of the vegetation that had started to flourish nicely in the sunshine, sheltered by the walls of the houses. Garden dock, angelica, and long grass thrived on the fertilizer the hens dropped behind them wherever they went.

Thormódur Krákur stood in front of an open shed dressed in his work clothes, and some eiderdown had been left out to dry on a white piece of sailcloth at his feet. When he saw Kjartan, he greeted him heartily: “Good morning, Assistant Magistrate. Where are you off to today?”

Kjartan considered telling him not to call him Assistant Magistrate but then decided not to bother.

“I’m just taking a look around,” he answered.

“Good idea,” said Thormódur Krákur. “Can I offer you some fermented shark?”

“No thanks.”

“How about some freshly laid arctic tern eggs then?”

“No thank you, I’m not hungry.”

“As you wish then. Any news about that Ketilsey fellow?”

“No, nothing new.”

“No, huh? Ah well. This doesn’t bode well. I’ve had some bad dreams lately.”

“Dreams?”

“Yes, I’m considered to be a bit of a visionary dreamer, my friend. Not that I’m particularly apt at deciphering what they mean, but there are some old women around here who can decipher them if the descriptions are clear enough.”

Thormódur Krákur broke into a broad smile that exposed his crooked teeth.

“Sometimes the signs are so obscure that no one recognizes the context until afterwards,” he added.

“What were the dreams about?” Kjartan asked.

Thormódur Krákur blew his nose into his red snuff handkerchief and walked into the shed. “They were bad dreams, my friend, bad dreams. Many of them would have been better off left undreamt,” he said, beckoning Kjartan to follow him through the door. Kjartan had to stoop to get through the entrance, but as soon as he smelled the stench inside, he almost felt like turning around again. A variety of seasoned foods were stored there, some of it hanging from the turf ceiling or immersed in barrels in salt or sour whey. A number of hens dwelt at the other end of the shed, which was partitioned off with wire netting.

Thormódur Krákur sat on a box, reached out for a large wooden frame, and placed it on his knees. It was a harp-like contraption that was stringed lengthwise through perforations in the wood, with one-centimeter gaps between each string. There were two wooden barrels on either side of him.

“I dreamt I was making hay out in Langey and spending the night in a tent,” said the deacon. “It was incredibly cold and shivery on the island, and I couldn’t find any way to warm up, no matter how hard I swung the scythe.”

Thormódur Krákur grabbed a pile of rough, uncleaned eiderdown from one of the barrels and placed it on the frame. Then he started shaking the down and stroking the strings, loosening the dirt, which fell to the floor.

“Then I saw a raven,” he continued, “that came flying and perched right over my tent, which was just a few yards away. I was going to shoo him away, but then I couldn’t walk because my legs were as heavy as lead. Then another raven appeared and sat beside the other one, and they were both sitting on the top of the tent when I woke up. I dreamed that every night for the whole of Eastertide. I call that the Langey dream.”

Thormódur Krákur grew quiet, threw the roughly cleaned down into the empty barrel, and picked up a new bundle to clean.