The Perfect Landscape (10 page)

“We’ll find a way that’s acceptable to all,” she says at last, looking straight at Haraldur, who looks back at her angrily. In the end, he cannot keep silent.

“Junk in the garage!” He looks at Jon and Hanna as if these words say it all, turns on his heel, and storms out. Agusta looks at Hanna.

“Should I go after him?” she asks with a worried look, but Hanna shakes her head.

“He’ll come around,” she says and smiles at Leifur. “He’ll see the light yet.”

Leifur does not smile back. They are not on the same side. But Hanna sees the oppositions the exhibition will revolve around, and that pleases her. This incident confirms where these two are coming from, and that is no surprise to Hanna.
It will be difficult to bridge the gap between these artists, but she is convinced that it will work, from the point of view of their artwork at least, although it is unlikely that it will spark a friendship between Leifur and Haraldur.

Closing the computer that has been sitting open on the floor all the while, Anselma finally begins speaking in a nasal voice. From her experience with Dutch and German artists Hanna knows that the time has come to discuss the practicalities.

“How is it with the town council?” asks Anselma in her slightly broken Icelandic. “Isn’t there yet another new committee for culture?”

In the past year or so the civic authorities have repeatedly changed and so has the personnel on the various municipal bodies as a result. Hanna hears the familiar tone of resignation in Anselma’s voice, the weariness of someone who constantly sees problems instead of possibilities, but she doesn’t let it get to her. Anselma doesn’t know it yet, but thanks to her job in Amsterdam, Hanna is a past master at sitting on committees and fighting her corner. Anselma will soon come to realize this. Mentally moving into the resting position, Hanna smiles at her; she will take this parry lightly. There’s an almost tangible release of tension from the room following Haraldur’s exit, and she becomes even more determined to have him involved, come what may.

E-mails have been flying back and forth between Hanna and her friends since she arrived in the country. Yet they still have not found an evening that suits them all, so they’ve settled on meeting for lunch today instead. Even then, only three of them, Hanna, Gudny, and Laufey, are able to make it to the vegetarian restaurant downtown.

That morning Hanna goes to the national library in search of information on Christian Holst’s art collection, the butcher who owned
The Birches
for so many years. She does not find anything about Holst but discovers a number of things about Elisabeth Hansen, the Danish art collector whose paintings were the jewel in Holst’s collection.

Reading the description of Elisabeth Hansen, with her red hair and lively manner, Hanna is reminded of a letter by Gudrun Johannsdottir that she found in the gallery’s archives. It was written in 1939 to a good friend of Gudrun’s who was living in Italy at the time. In the letter Gudrun describes the evening she and her friend Sigfus Gunnarsson visited Elisabeth
Hansen. Elisabeth used to hold an open house one evening a week with free food. These events were frequented by Danish abstract painters, some of whom later became part of the CoBrA movement. Sigfus was among them, and Elisabeth made him very welcome but cold-shouldered Gudrun all evening.

Gudrun mentions in the letter that Sigfus had sold a painting to Elisabeth that same evening. Where might this picture be and what sort of painting was it? Hanna thinks to herself, huddled over the books. If Sigfus had sold Elisabeth a painting then it probably went to the butcher, as he bought up virtually her whole collection.

After a bit of searching Hanna finally turns up something about the butcher in a book about Danish abstract painters. It emerges that at the end of his life, Christian Holst gave nearly all his CoBrA paintings to an art gallery on Jutland. Maybe Sigfus’s painting ended up there as well, muses Hanna, jotting down the gallery’s name. It would be interesting to find a painting by Sigfus Gunnarsson, unknown in Iceland until now, somewhere on the Jutland countryside in Denmark.

Hanna keeps on looking but does not find anything further about the butcher, and as she walks downtown to her lunch date, she is still no nearer the truth about
The Birches
. Mr. Jensen at the auction house hasn’t gotten back in touch, which is no more than she expected.

She feels she is just not getting anywhere. The joint exhibition venture has also come to a halt. Haraldur is not answering his phone, neither Leifur nor Anselma can give her a clear idea of what they are going to display, and Jon has gone back home to Antwerp. The article Hanna intended to write for the booklet is not coming together either; it is as if everything is frozen
over, just like nature. After a mild and rainy January, winter has set in with snow and frost. Not beautiful, still winter days as in Holland; here there’s been low pressure, gales, whirling snowstorms, and drifting snow all around.

Hanna is late getting to the restaurant, but she is still the first one there. She smiles to herself, glad to be back home, where it is quite natural to be a bit unpunctual. The restaurant only serves healthy vegetarian dishes, and she reads the menu with mistrust. Having lived with Frederico for years, her taste in food has become rather Italian, and she is not keen on superhealthy food. In the end she orders vegetable lasagna just as Gudny arrives at the table, and she orders the same without asking what it is. She is out of breath and explains she is late because the road across the moor was in a bad state.

“I took my own car. I’m more at ease in a Jeep out in the country,” she says. “Then I parked the car outside the parliament building and got caught up in a snowstorm walking across here!” She brushes the snow from her blonde highlights; any hairstyle she may have had has now been blown away.

“But it was fun over at the prison,” she says, laughing. “An amazing woman has taken over there.” Gudny is referring to the new prison chief who has revamped operations. “She’s really giving these men an opportunity,” she says. “We were also talking about the young ones; a case came up the other day about a youngster who wanted to go to prison rather than to a young offenders’ institution out in the countryside.”

Smiling, covered in snow, and rosy-cheeked, she shakes her head in surprise. Hanna looks at her fondly, at her big smile. Hearing her familiar, lively laughter, Hanna is pleased to see her friend again, and her concerns about
The Birches
and the
disagreement between the artists pale in significance compared to all that Gudny has to deal with in her job as minister of justice. Gudny makes light of it and praises her colleagues. The signs of weariness are not lost on Hanna, but she sees that Gudny is enjoying her work and she’s glad for her. Gudny always wanted to go far.

By the time Laufey arrives, they have already begun eating, and, again, Hanna feels how important their friendship is to her. She does not have much contact with her family now that her parents have died; she never was close to her half brothers and sisters. It is her friends who are her link between the past and the present, between her life before she moved abroad and her life now. They have known one another for about twenty years, some of them for longer. The bonds of friendship have not broken even though they seldom meet.

“They’ve both grown taller than me,” Laufey is saying proudly of her two sons. She is sitting in a thick padded anorak with an African band wrapped around her head as always, and she seems untouched by age. They talk about their children; Gudny answers her phone. It’s hectic in the restaurant; people are coming and going and they each keep glancing up at the clock. There is more stress here than in Amsterdam, despite the lack of punctuality. Gudny is talking to someone on the phone about a group of youngsters who were arrested downtown in a derelict house recently. Hanna hears what she is saying without eavesdropping, but when Gudny mentions graffiti, Hanna is all ears. When Gudny hangs up, Hanna tells her how some of the city’s outdoor artworks have been vandalized.

“I think I know which kids we’re talking about, Hanna,” replies Gudny with her mouth full. The phone rings again, but
she turns it to silent and slips it into her bag. “Now I can eat in peace for a moment,” she says with a broad grin.

“Do you really think it’s them?” asks Hanna, surprised. “The ones you were talking about, who were arrested?”

Gudny swallows and nods. “Exactly. They’re a small gang, maybe four to six kids, one is only thirteen. They’ve been graffitiing on walls in derelict buildings in town, both inside and out. There’s very little we can do about it. The police take them down to the station, either call the child social work team or their parents, take a statement from them, and then their parents fetch them or the police drive them home. I think the thirteen-year-old is on the child protection register, probably has an impossible home situation, the poor thing.”

“Isn’t it possible to do something for these kids? Give them some walls to spray as they please or something?” Hanna asks, but Gudny shakes her head.

“We’ve tried all that long ago. It makes no difference—problem kids just aren’t interested. That is, part of this graffiti culture is the excitement of doing something forbidden. Although they do sometimes get punished, for example, one lad was made to clean up the wall of a house he’d spray-painted.”

“I see,” says Hanna. “Art students from the Academy paint on walls where it’s permitted. They know what they’re about, and they want to do something stunning.”

“Mmm,” replies Gudny, looking at the clock. Hanna does not mind.

“I feel sorry for these kids,” Hanna says. “I had it so good when I was a child. It would never have occurred to me to go and graffiti a wall.”

Laufey laughs. “I don’t suppose there was a lot of that in Leirhofn or Kopasker?” Hanna smiles back, recalling the little village in the north of the country where she was born and brought up.

“I was always happy at home in Leirhofn.” She stares pensively out of the window, at the drifting snow. “I remember my bedroom window so well. It faced out toward the mountains, and when I sat up in bed I could see right up their slopes. I never wanted to have curtains. The hillsides, the snow, and the crags were like a graphics painting in wintertime. And in the summers I looked right onto the hollows full of berries. And in the evenings...” Falling silent for a moment, Hanna slips back in time and pictures the rural area she was brought up in. “In the evenings the slopes were a reddish-pink. Those mountains were like a friendly giant’s embrace.”

“Weren’t you only a young girl when you moved?” Gudny has finished eating and signals to the waiter. Hanna notices that she gets immediate service. She also notices that people at nearby tables recognize who Gudny is, but no one has bothered them.

“The earthquake was in ’76. I was nine then.”

“Where were you when it happened?” asks Laufey. Hanna has never talked about that time, and she hesitates. She is not sure she wants to go over that day. She was about to mentally raise her sword in self-defense, look up at the clock, and mention something about time flying, but she changes her mind. Why should she not tell them what happened? It was so long ago. She still glances at the clock, as a precaution, so she can stop when she wants, make the time an excuse to go.

“I was in school.” She hesitates, the earthquake vivid before her even though it was over thirty years ago. “The walls and the
floor were like waves. It was as if a blow thundered down on the building. Books tumbled off their shelves. Somehow we all got out and no one was hurt.”

Hanna takes a sip of water. Gudny stops, her phone halfway out of her bag.

“Then they drove us home,” Hanna goes on. “You see, the school was in Kopasker and children from the surrounding farms were bused in. There were crevices in the road, deep fissures created by the earthquake.” Hanna does not mention the fear that reigned in the school bus, the silence; no one knew what things would be like at home, what awaited them.

“When I came home, I was so lucky—I immediately saw Mom in the doorway. None of our family was injured.” Hanna hesitates again; she feels that no words can express what happened that day. She has always thought that it was then that her parents decided to split up. But in fact it was not like that. The family moved to Akureyri; the divorce came later. But she cannot help herself. She has always thought that if the earthquake had not destroyed their house, if they had not had to move, then her life would have been different and better. But she does not say any of this.

“There was rice pudding all over the kitchen floor,” she says lightheartedly instead. “Rice pudding, raisins, and broken crockery. And the fridge and cooker that stood up against opposite walls had met in the middle of the room.” She smiles at Laufey. Gudny picks up her phone and checks her missed calls.

“Gudny,” says Hanna suddenly, without thinking, maybe because she wants to change the subject. “I would like to do something for these kids who are in trouble. Or for that young
lad—is it possible to help him in some way? Perhaps the gallery can do something, or the Annexe, possibly some project for youngsters? Make our town beautiful or something along those lines?” Hanna cannot stop thinking about this lad, the youngest member of the group. What sort of a life must he have if he is considered a case for the child protection register? Maybe his family split up like hers did and he doesn’t have a mother to give him the love and security that she enjoyed.

“I’ll look into it, Hanna,” says Gudny, smiling at her. Hanna senses that Gudny finds her overly sentimental, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t have to keep a professional distance when faced with the difficult lives of these youngsters. In her head she immediately starts on a letter to the mayor. The gallery needs extra funds this year because the cost of cleaning up the vandalism has run over budget. Working with the youth could be part of that package. She can see herself organizing something with Agusta, even though it would only be a Saturday afternoon, one weekend.