Kalmann E-Book

Joachim Schmidt

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Kalmann is the self-appointed Sheriff of Raufarhöfn. Day by day, he treks the wide plains which surround the almost deserted village, hunts Arctic foxes and lays bait in the sea — to catch the gigantic Greenland sharks he turns into the Icelandic fermented delicacy, hákarl. There is nothing anyone need worry about. Kalmann has everything under control. Inside his head, however, the wheels sometimes spin backwards. One winter, after he discovers a pool of blood in the snow, the swiftly unfolding events threaten to overwhelm him. But he knows that his native wisdom and pure-hearted courage will see him through. There really is no need to worry. How can anything go wrong with Kalmann in charge? He knows everything a man needs to know about life – well almost.

Leseprobe

Joachim B. Schmidt, born in 1981, emigrated from Switzerland to Iceland in 2007. He is the author of several novels and short stories and is also a journalist and columnist. Joachim, who is Swiss and Icelandic, lives in Reykjavík with his wife and their two children.

Foreign-language rights to Kalmann have been sold in nine countries so far.

For Kristín Elva

Langar nætur, ljósa kalda dagahef ég leitað, það er mannsins saga.

Through my long nights,through bleak days of worry,I keep searching.It’s the human story.

JÓNAS FRIĐRIK GUĐNASON,ljóđskáld

1

SNOW

If only Grandfather had been with me. He always knew what to do. I stumbled across the endless Melrakkaslétta plain, hungry, exhausted and smeared in blood, and wondered what he would have done. Perhaps he would simply have filled his pipe and let the pool of blood disappear beneath the falling snow, watching calmly, to make sure no one else would find it.

Whenever a problem arose, he would fill his pipe, and as soon as our minds were woozy with the sweet smoke, things wouldn’t seem so bad any more. Perhaps Grandfather would have decided not to tell anyone about it. He would have gone home and not given it another thought. Because snow is snow, and blood is blood. And if someone vanishes without a trace, it’s first and foremost their problem. Next to the entrance to our little house, Grandfather would have tapped his pipe against the sole of his boot, the embers would have faded into the snow, and that would have been the end of that.

But I was completely alone up there, Grandfather was 131 kilometres away, and it was a long time since he’d been able to roam the snowy hinterland of the Melrakkaslétta. So there wasn’t any pipe smoke either, and because it was snowing, and absolutely everything was white apart from the red pool of blood, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard, I felt as though I were the last person in the entire world. And when you’re the last person in the entire world, being able to tell someone else about it makes you happy. So that’s why I told after all, and that’s how the problems started.

Grandfather was a hunter and a shark catcher. Not any more, though. Now he spent his days sitting in an armchair in the nursing home in Húsavík, staring out of the window – yet without seeing, because when I asked if he was looking at something in particular, he either didn’t answer, or mumbled and gave me a strange look, as though I were interrupting him. His facial expression was usually morose nowadays, the corners of his mouth pointed downwards and his lips were pressed together, so that you couldn’t even tell he was missing four teeth at the top, the front ones. He couldn’t bite anyone now. Sometimes he asked me what I was doing here, and he asked in a curt way, and I would explain that my name was Kalmann, that I was his grandson and had come to visit him, like every week. So no reason to worry. But Grandfather gave me these distrustful looks and then stared back out of the window, completely sullen. He didn’t believe me. Then I didn’t say anything more, because Grandfather had the expression of someone who had just had their pipe confiscated, and for that reason it was better I said nothing.

A nurse had told me to be patient with Grandfather, as though he were a small, sulky child. I would have to explain things to him again and again, she said, that was completely normal and how life was, because those who are lucky enough to reach an advanced age become, in a certain sense, little children again, and need help with eating, getting dressed, doing up shoelaces and so on. Some even need nappies again! Everything starts to go backwards. Like a boomerang. I know what that is. It’s a weapon made of wood that you fling into the air, then it arcs around and flies back, cutting off your head if you don’t pay damn good attention.

I wondered how things would be for me if I reached Grandfather’s age. Because things with me had never really gone forwards. They suspected that the wheels in my head ran backwards. That happened sometimes. Or that I’d never progressed beyond the level of a six-year-old. I wasn’t fussed. Or that my head contains nothing but fish soup, or that it’s hollow, like a buoy. Or that my wires aren’t connected properly. Or that I have the IQ of a sheep. And yet sheep can’t do an IQ test. “Run, Forrest, run!” they used to shout during sports lessons, laughing themselves silly. That’s from this movie where the hero is mentally disabled but can run fast and play ping-pong well.

I can’t run fast, I can’t play ping-pong, and back then I didn’t even know what an IQ was. Grandfather knew, but he said it was just a number used to separate people into black and white, a unit of measurement like time or money, a capitalist invention, even though we’re all equal, and then I lost track of what he was saying, and Grandfather explained that only Today counts, the Here, the Now. Me, here with him. Nothing more. I understood that. He asked what I would do if I was out at sea and storm clouds gathered. The answer was simple: Sail back to the harbour as quickly as possible. He asked what I would wear if it was raining. Easy: Rain clothes. What I would do if someone had fallen from a horse and wasn’t moving. Child’s play: Get help. Grandfather was satisfied with my answers and said I was clearly of firm mind.

I agreed.

But sometimes I didn’t get what people meant. It happened. And on those occasions, I preferred to say nothing. There was little point. No one could explain things like Grandfather.

Luckily, I then got a computer with an internet connection, and all at once I knew a lot more than I used to. Because the internet knows everything. It knows when your birthday is and whether you’ve forgotten your mother’s. It even knows when you last went to the toilet or rubbed one out. At least that’s what Nói, my best friend, said when the thing with the Quota King happened. But exactly what it was that was wrong in my head – that, no one could explain to me. A medical bungle, my mother once said, back when she still lived in Raufarhöfn. It just slipped out, probably when I shot and dissected Elínborg’s cat because I’d learned how from Grandfather and wanted to practise. My mother got very angry, because Elínborg complained to her and threatened to call the police, and when my mother got angry, she stopped speaking and did something instead, like taking out the rubbish. Open the lid of the outside container, heave in the bag and slam it shut – and open it again and slam it again. Bang!

But anyone who believes I had a difficult childhood because there’s fish soup in my head is plain wrong. Grandfather took over the thinking for me. He looked out for me. But that was back then.

Now Grandfather looks at me with dull, watery eyes and remembers nothing. And maybe I’ll disappear too, when Grandfather’s no longer here, be buried with him, like a Viking chief’s horse. That’s what they used to do, the Vikings; bury the horse with the chief. They belonged together. So the Viking chief would be able to ride across the bridge of Bifröst to Valhalla. That’s quite an entrance!

But the thought made me nervous. Being buried, I mean. Trapped beneath the coffin lid. You’d get claustrophobic, and then you’d be better off dead. That’s why I usually didn’t stay long in the care home. In Húsavík I could at least get something decent to eat. Sölvi’s filling station cafe had the best burgers for 1,845 krona. I always had the right change, always, and Sölvi knew that too, he no longer even bothered to count the coins. But sometimes I didn’t enjoy the burger because I was sad that Grandfather no longer knew who I was. And if he no longer knew, how on earth was I supposed to?

I had Grandfather to thank for everything. My life. If he hadn’t been there, my mother would have stuck me in a home for the mentally disabled, where I would’ve been abused and raped. I would be living in Reykjavík now, lonely and neglected. In Reykjavík the traffic is chaotic, and the air is dirty, and the people are stressed. Ugh, yuck, that’s not for me. I had Grandfather to thank that I was somebody, here, in Raufarhöfn. He had shown me everything, taught me everything a person needs to know to survive. He took me hunting and out to sea, even though I wasn’t much help in the beginning. Out hunting in particular I was like the village idiot, stumbling and wheezing, and Grandfather told me I was tripping over my own feet, that I had to lift them up when the ground was uneven. So I started to do that, but only ever for a few paces, then I would forget again and stumble over the next grassy mound, and sometimes I fell flat on my face with such a loud crash – I was fat, after all – that the snow grouse flew away, startled, and the Arctic foxes took to their heels before we’d even caught sight of them. But anyone thinking this would anger Grandfather couldn’t be more wrong. Because Grandfather didn’t get angry. On the contrary. He merely laughed and helped me to my feet, brushed the dirt from my clothes and told me to be brave. “Don’t lose heart, buddy!” he’d say. And I soon got used to the uneven terrain, and before long I wasn’t so fat any more. I could stand upright on the small cutter, too, and not fall even when the boat swayed from side to side. I started to enjoy bracing my knees against the waves, and didn’t even need to concentrate on it any more, but did it automatically, programming the motion into my knees, and out hunting I lifted my feet and no longer scared away prey, which meant we sometimes marched back to the village with two snow grouse or a mink dangling from one of our belts. Sometimes even an Arctic fox. I was so proud! And to make sure everyone saw, we would do a couple of laps through Raufarhöfn. Laps of honour. And the people would wave and shout out praise. You can get used to that kind of thing. Praise.

It’s a drug, said Nói, my best friend, back when he was still my best friend. I should handle praise with caution and not get used to it, he told me. Nói was a computer genius, but his body gave him problems. He said he was my opposite, my counterpart, my opponent, and I had no idea what he meant by that. He said that if we were one person, we would be unbeatable. It was a shame he lived in Reykjavík.

And then the thing with Róbert McKenzie happened – he was the Quota King around here – and that was the beginning of the end, and no one likes it when things end. That’s why people prefer to think back to the past, to when something has just begun and the ending is still far away.

The days with Grandfather out at sea and on the Melrakkaslétta were the best of my life. Sometimes I was allowed to shoot with Grandfather’s shotgun, which now belongs to me. He taught me how to be a good marksman, how to aim, how to pull the trigger very gently, without shaking. When I aimed at a target during a practice run, he placed a tiny stone on top of the barrel, and I had to pull the trigger without the stone falling off. It’s harder than you might think, because you have to pull, not press! Only once I could do that was I allowed to shoot for real. But under no circumstances was my mother to find out, that’s what Grandfather and I had agreed, because my mother thought firearms were too dangerous for me. But she found out anyway when I shot Elínborg’s cat right behind our house. That was stupid of me. Someone heard the gunshot and told my mother over at the cold-storage warehouse. She came straight home from work and was hopping mad, even though she’d been annoyed by the cat a few times in the past when it had shat in our potato beds. She got really, really angry, my mother, and maybe she felt offended too, because she said it was time to give it to me straight. And she did. I was different to other people, she shouted, tapping her finger against her temple. I was slower upstairs, and that’s why she didn’t want me running around Raufarhöfn with a gun, shooting animals, it would cause trouble in the village – and she was right about that, because Elínborg wasn’t someone to be messed with; she immediately called the police.

But my mother shouldn’t have said it like that. Because when someone yells at me, even if that someone is my own mother, I lose it. My mind switches off. And when I lose it, fists start to fly. My fists. Usually against myself. Which isn’t so bad. But sometimes against others too, if they get in the way. That’s worse, but I don’t do it intentionally, and afterwards I can barely remember it. It’s as though the needle on a record has skipped forwards. And that’s why my mother tried to calm me down, assuring me that she trusted me completely to go around with a gun, that of course I was a good shot, which Grandfather could no doubt confirm. He merely shook his head at all the arguing and sent the police away again. He wasn’t in the least bit angry that I had shot Elínborg’s cat. He said my mother was exaggerating, that I wasn’t that goddamn different, and in fact it was barely worth mentioning, because there were far greater idiots out there, it wasn’t about school grades but how a person acts towards others, what kind of human being they are, and so on. And he gave an example, which he was good at, because it’s important to give examples so everyone understands what you mean. He told us about this athlete who lived in America and who was good-looking and nice and even became an actor, but then he killed his wife because he was jealous. Just because of that. Jealousy. Bang! End of story. And that’s why I was a better person than this famous athlete. But my mother said he could stick his athlete where the sun didn’t shine, because Elínborg’s cat probably didn’t give a damn about that, but Elínborg did give a damn that I’d killed her cat, and so did the police and so did the school board. That’s how it was, she said to Grandfather, certain behaviour, a certain level of achievement was expected, so he’d better hurry up and arrive in the twentieth century before it came to an end, and he had to stop taking sides, she was my mother, after all, and had the last word where my upbringing was concerned. But Grandfather put his foot down. Because he could get pretty angry too, when he wanted to, and he loudly reminded her that he was her father, that we were living in his house, under his roof, with his rules, and that he had the goddamn last word. And what’s more, he spent more time with me than she did. When he said this my mother’s words got stuck in her throat. She stormed out to do something. To take out the rubbish, maybe. And then I broke something, although I can’t remember what it was. But something definitely broke. I have this clear picture in my mind, a scrap of memory: Grandfather, sitting astride me with a bright red face, pinning my arms to the floor, calling out desperately for my mother and yelling at me to calm the hell down.

I shot my first Arctic fox when I was eleven. Foxes are considered pests, even though they were here before the Vikings. You’re allowed to shoot them, foxes. It actually happened very quickly, and I was so surprised I didn’t even have time to get nervous. We were walking cross-country when one appeared in front of us, poking its head out from behind a grassy mound, spotting us but unable to find a hiding place in a hurry. Grandfather pushed the shotgun into my hand without saying a word. He just squinted at the fox, which stared back at him in shock, and I understood. I took aim, the fox made a run for it, but I kept it in my sights, the tip of my finger on the trigger, then pulled ever so gently until it went off. I didn’t even notice the kickback from the butt. My heart beat faster. The fox keeled over, then did a somersault, and its legs twitched as though it still wanted to run away. But it no longer could.

I felt strange. Grandfather still didn’t say a word, but he clapped me contentedly on the shoulder, and then we watched the animal die. It didn’t take long before it stopped twitching and lay there, its fur soaked with the thick blood gushing out of its snout. To begin with its ribcage quickly rose and fell, but then its breathing became slower, jerkier, until eventually the fox lay there motionless. I felt sorry for it, but when I received the 5,000 krona at the community office, I suddenly knew what a vocation was. A vocation is when you come to something as though you’ve been called to it.

Grandfather didn’t have much longer to live. Every time I said goodbye to him, I was perhaps seeing him for the last time. That’s what one of the nurses had told me. And she had also said I would feel very sad when it happened, but that this was completely normal, as was crying, so there was no reason to worry. Nói once explained to me that my grandfather had taken on the role of father for me, something my mother would definitely have disputed. But Nói was right; my name was Kalmann Óđinsson, after all, after Grandfather, whose first name was Óđinn, and not after my actual father, who my mother sometimes referred to as the Sperm Donor.

Quentin Boatwright. That was his name, her sperm donor. And if I’d been given his name, I would have been called Kalmann Quentinsson. But that didn’t work, because this name and the letter Q didn’t exist in Iceland. Just like my father. He didn’t exist here either. If I had lived in America, I would have been called Kalmann Boatwright. The names there are just plain wrong.

If I had children someday, I wanted to be there for them, like Grandfather was for me. I would tell them all the things Grandfather had told me. I would teach my children how to hunt, how to stalk Arctic foxes, spot snow grouse in the snow or catch Greenland shark. I would show them how to provide for themselves. Regardless of whether I had a girl or a boy. But if you want children, you need a woman. There’s no other way. That’s nature.

I was thirty-three years old already, with another few weeks to go until my thirty-fourth birthday. I urgently needed a wife. But I could forget that, because here in Raufarhöfn there weren’t any women who would want someone like me. The range of women here was about as extensive as the vegetables on offer in the village store. Apart from carrots, potatoes, a couple of shrivelled bell peppers and some brown salad leaves, there was nothing. And the possibility that my future wife would stumble by chance into Raufarhöfn, 609 kilometres’ drive from Reykjavík, was pretty slim.

My mother always said: “When you reach the end of the world, turn left!” I found that funny, but she never laughed. And she never made jokes; usually she was too tired from the long hours in the cold-storage warehouse. She told me I couldn’t eat Cocoa Puffs every day, because I would get even fatter and have no chance of finding a wife. But my mother was no longer here, and nor was Grandfather, so I could eat Cocoa Puffs all day long if I wanted and no one would complain. But I only ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast, and sometimes in the evening, while watching The Bachelor. Never for lunch. That was my rule.

People need rules in life, that’s important, because otherwise there would be anarchy, and anarchy is when there are no police and no rules and everyone does whatever they want. Like setting fire to a house, for example. Just like that, for no reason. No one works, no one repairs faulty appliances like washing machines, or ships’ engines, satellite dishes and microwaves. And then you end up sitting with an empty plate in front of a blank TV screen in a burned-down house, and people are killing each other over a chicken wing or Cocoa Puffs. But I could have survived something like that, because I could defend myself. I knew how to process Greenland shark so the meat was edible. And I could pluck a snow grouse. My grandfather’s house was big enough, and perhaps then a woman would want to live with me, because here in Raufarhöfn anarchy wouldn’t be so bad, simply because we would be far away from it. My wife would have to be younger than me, because we would need to have a lot of children to ensure mankind’s survival. We would have sex practically every night. Perhaps even twice a day! And we wouldn’t hear about the riots in Reykjavík, because the TV would no longer work. What’s more, there hadn’t been any police in Raufarhöfn since the financial crisis, and in that sense we already had anarchy. It was just that people hadn’t realized it yet.

2

BLOOD

Grandfather made the best hákarl on the entire island. I make the second best. I know that because a number of people have told me, for example Magnús Magnússon, the sheep farmer from Hólmaendar, who gets his hákarl directly from me and is good at playing the accordion. He says it every time: “Kalmann minn,” he says, “your grandfather made the best hákarl in all of Iceland. But yours is almost as good!” And that was of course logical, because I learned from the best.

If only Grandfather had been with me when the thing with Róbert McKenzie happened. Grandfather would have known what to do. And to be completely honest, I was a bit mad at him for having left me alone in this mess. I wished I hadn’t even gone fox hunting that day. I wished Róbert had vanished like a ship on the horizon. Because there are no tracks on the ocean. The sea always looks as though it has never been touched by anyone, apart from the wind. Isn’t it strange that only air can leave tracks on the water?

Why did it have to be me who passed by the spot near the Arctic Henge monument? I was only tracking an Arctic fox, who I had named Schwarzkopf, like the shampoo. He was a badly behaved fox, a young male, who had ventured right up to the houses looking for something to eat. Perhaps that was why I liked him. And if it had been up to me, I wouldn’t have shot him. I had a secret pact with him. But Hafdís had asked me to teach the fox a lesson, and everyone knows what that means, and if the school principal – who is also on the town council – asks you for a favour, you don’t just say no. In addition, Hafdís was a very beautiful woman, even though she wasn’t young any more and had three grown-up children. Sometimes I wondered what Hafdís was even doing here in Raufarhöfn. Because she looked like a TV presenter. She told me that the little guy was lurking dangerously close to the town hall, and when people shooed him away, he sometimes headed off towards Vogar. I would be able to recognize him by his dark fur and even darker head, she told me.

So he had blue fur. That’s what went through my mind, because at this point in time he would still have had white flecks in his winter coat if it had changed colour. Hafdís didn’t know much about animals, even though she was the school principal. But I didn’t say anything, because you’re not supposed to lecture a school principal. She wouldn’t allow it, anyway.

Schwarzkopf was an Arctic fox with blue fur, then. That’s what you call it, even though the fur isn’t blue at all. It’s brown, grey or dark grey. The blue fox’s fur doesn’t change colour with the seasons, because it mostly stays close to the coast. It’s the best camouflage among the black rocks, dulse and driftwood. White fur would stand out, because there’s usually no snow on the beach, and that’s why the Icelandic foxes don’t need white fur like the foxes in Siberia or in Greenland, where everything is so beautifully white.

I could have explained all this to Hafdís, but I didn’t. I just tapped my index finger on the rim of my cowboy hat – that’s how people in America say “Okey-dokey”, and my hat is from there – and picked up the trail behind the town hall, clambering up the slope and looking down over the whole village stretching out before me: the more recent wooden quarter with the school and sports hall to my right, the harbour and church to my left. The Kottjörn pond was still covered with a slushy layer of ice, but I wouldn’t have dared venture out on it anyway. I walked along the edge of the slope until I was level with the school building, climbed back down, went past the school and the empty camping ground, then further on to the coast and along the shoreline to the Vogar bay. Apart from a few eiders, lesser black-backed gulls and kittiwakes that were sitting on the water doing nothing, I didn’t see any animals. I imagined how I would scare the living daylights out of Schwarzkopf. Secretly, though, I hoped the fox would be trusting, so I could befriend him and keep him as a pet. That’s a thing, you know. In Russia, for example. I reckon if I’d had a tamed fox as a pet, I would have had more luck with women.

Schwarzkopf could have done with a white winter coat that day, because it was snowing like mad; thick, heavy flakes that even settled on the pebbled beach. The water looked dull and grey, almost motionless; the weather was calm. Apart from the falling snow, it was so quiet that I couldn’t help but sing a little song, because the snow swallowed the sound and no one could hear me.

I liked singing. No one knew that. Schwarzkopf did, perhaps; he must’ve heard me and hidden, because I didn’t catch a glimpse of him that whole day, even though I spent hours on end tramping around out there, along the entire bay, into the Melrakkaslétta, up to the Glápavötn lakes and zigzagging over to the Arctic Henge, the half-finished stone circle which Róbert McKenzie had had built a few years previously. I wasn’t even expecting to encounter any animals, because the weather was unsuitable, the visibility poor. I didn’t even see any snow grouse. But it was no longer as cold as in winter, it was only around zero degrees. The March brightness was pleasant. And besides, I had promised Hafdís, and if you make a promise to the school principal, you keep it.

People always imagine hunting to be so thrilling, they imagine you reading the tracks, holding your nose to the wind, straining your senses, then ambushing the animals and chasing after them. That’s nonsense. You spend most of the time sitting on the cold ground, hoping something will appear in front of the barrel of your gun. For that you need a good dose of patience, “a hunter’s most important virtue”, as my grandfather always said. He was like a mentor. A mentor is a teacher, but one who doesn’t make you do exams.

On that day, though, I didn’t feel like sitting on the cold ground, because I suspected Schwarzkopf was listening to my singing in his warm den and covering his ears. I wonder why I chose to go up to the henge that particular day. Why hadn’t I just headed off home? That would have been better. Because up there, right by the monument, was where I stumbled across the blood. And there was a lot of it. It’s actually astounding how much blood there is inside a human being.

The pool of blood glistened red and dark in the white snow. The snowflakes fell relentlessly, melting into it. I was hot and sweaty from walking, but because I had suddenly come to a halt and was staring motionless at the blood, I began to shake. Exhaustion spread within me. My limbs felt as heavy as lead, as though I had just done something strenuous. I thought of Grandfather as I watched the blood soak up the snowflakes, until the redness paled beneath the freshly fallen snow. I must have stood there for a long while, but eventually I returned to reality, stiff with cold, and awoke as though from a dream. I looked around and wasn’t even sure where I was at first, until I recognized the stone blocks of the henge and remembered Schwarzkopf. Had he smelled the blood? Perhaps I could lie in wait for him here.

Naturally I took a closer look at the whole mess. I noticed some footprints, but they were very faint because of the fresh snow. The indentations led away from the pool of blood towards the village, down to the harbour, where they disappeared in the snow flurries. All of a sudden, I was no longer sure whether they were my footprints or somebody else’s. Or were there two sets? More than one person? Which direction had I come from? Where had I been going? I looked around me in all directions. I was utterly alone. The snowflakes falling around me without pause were disorienting. When everything is white, white up above, white below and white all around, it confuses the senses. Perhaps the footprints weren’t prints at all but merely indentations in the ground, between the mounds of grass, and I thought: it could even be a polar bear.

Polar bears are rarely encountered in Iceland, but are dangerous nonetheless. Very dangerous. If they come close, it means they’re incredibly hungry. But I was too exhausted to worry. I’d had enough. I wanted to go home. I wanted to lie down on the couch, perhaps chat with Nói. The pool of blood was barely visible now. If it carried on snowing like this, it would soon be gone. That was good.

I trudged back towards the village, dropped in at the school to see Hafdís and told her I hadn’t been able to track down Schwarzkopf.

“Schwarzkopf?” she asked, clapping her laptop shut. I blushed. I hadn’t wanted her to find out the name. That was between me and the fox. So I said nothing and stared down at the floor. “Have you named him? Like the shampoo?” Hafdís smiled. She got up from her desk and stepped towards me, grabbed both my hands, lifted them a little and studied them. “Your hands are all red!” she exclaimed in shock. “Is that blood? Did you hurt yourself?”

I pulled my hands away, only now noticing that they were bloodied yet dry.

“Not mine,” I said. I remembered I had put my hand into the blood. Had I fallen over?

“Not yours?”

“I found a pool of blood, up by the Arctic Henge,” I blurted out, wondering whether Grandfather would have wanted me to talk about it. Perhaps I should have lied, but you’re only allowed to lie if you want to protect someone, like a friend or a girlfriend.

“Blood?”

I shrugged. “Just blood. That’s all. No reason to worry.”

“Are you quite sure you haven’t hurt yourself?”

“Completely sure,” I said.

We both studied my hands more closely and didn’t find any wounds, but they were a little swollen from the cold.

“Blood.” Hafdís was deep in thought. “From an animal?”

“Possibly,” I said, then added a “definitely”.

Hafdís frowned, shook her head and muttered: “Some hunter you are!”

I grinned. I liked it when people called me a hunter.

Hafdís let me go, and I went home. After thoroughly washing my hands, I decided to spend the rest of the day watching TV. It was only three o’clock, but I liked watching Dr Phil, because this shrink could genuinely read people’s minds! When the people on there did a lie detector test, Dr Phil was never surprised by the results, because he knew precisely what games were being played. There were men who were in love with their sisters or who were older than me but still living with their mothers, and didn’t want to move out, and the mothers then complained to Dr Phil. And there were women who had affairs and even had children with other men and didn’t admit it, even though a DNA test proved the opposite. Once there was a white woman and a white man, and the woman had a black baby but denied having fucked a black man. And her husband even believed her, he said he trusted and loved her, that he’d go to the ends of the Earth with her. But Dr Phil saw through the woman’s bullshit and swore at her until they were all crying and then the black baby had neither a black nor a white father. And then the audience clapped and cheered and Dr Phil’s wife accompanied her husband out of the studio and praised him, even though you couldn’t hear what she was saying. But she was always thrilled with his show. I’d have liked a wife just like that, but younger.

I heated up a frozen pizza in the microwave and spent the whole evening watching TV until I fell asleep on the couch. I was so tired that I even forgot to call Nói on Messenger.

The next morning, I looked out of the window and everything was white. The sea was deep blue, almost black, everything completely normal, so no reason to worry. The snow must have stopped during the night, because it didn’t look as though more would be falling from the sky.

I wrapped up warm and went down to the harbour. There were lots of old warehouses and fish-processing halls down here, buildings that had been erected in the fifties and sixties and which were now crumbling: the British barracks and workers’ quarters, the massive fish oil tanks. Everything was empty. I was allowed to use the Miami building for free, the part at the back at least, not that the rest of the building was being used by anyone else. The building was called that because its first owner Baldur had had a few palm trees painted on the facade, which you could no longer see, and the palms reminded people of Miami, where there are proper palm trees.

Inside the building it was dark and damp. A big building, sad at the absence of people. Melt- and rainwater dripped through numerous spots on the roof, and that was why I only used the part which stayed dry, right at the back.

Years ago, there was a herring boom in Raufarhöfn. People even came here from Reykjavík, because there was a lot of work for both men and women. But the space in the residential buildings wasn’t enough, even though bunk beds were piled up to the ceilings. Before the hotel was a hotel, it was accommodation for workers. The shack diagonally opposite the old post house served as living quarters for the young female workers. The British barracks were accommodation too. Quite simply, a lot of hands were needed up here. Back then the village still had a cinema, a theatre club and dancing. The harbour master Sæmundur sometimes told me about it. At the events on weekends there were so many mariners and dockers that they wouldn’t fit in the ballroom, which meant that no one could dance because the men and women were herded in there like sheep in a stall. In 1966, Hljómar even came to Raufarhöfn, and so that everyone got to see them, they played three concerts in one day!

But that was back then. Today, all the inhabitants of Raufarhöfn sometimes gather in the town hall, for example at the Þorrablót midwinter festival, and even then, the hall is only ever half-full.

The fishers fished all the herring that was to be found in Iceland’s coastal waters, and once all the herring near the coast was gone, they tried to track down schools of fish by plane, really far out. The boats would often be out for a whole day to get to the schools of herring, and once those were gone too, the fish were simply gone, and the people moved back to Reykjavík and did something different. Then things calmed down in Raufarhöfn. There was enough room to dance again, admittedly, but those who had stayed behind only wanted to drink. That was when people realized they could catch and eat other fish too, not only herring, but also lumpfish, shellfish, pollock, ling, catfish and mackerel. And that’s how the industry got going here in Raufarhöfn again, until the catch quota system was introduced by the politicians and the quota was almost entirely withdrawn from Raufarhöfn. Now the processing halls lay idle, and every third house stood empty. By now there was just one man who had a decent catch quota, though not a large one: Róbert McKenzie. Siggi caught cod for him from time to time with the manual winch, Einar with the longline vessel. And Júniús and Flóki as well, who were father and son and who everyone simply called Jú-Jú – that’s short for Júniús and Junior – caught the fish with nets. They were the most hard-working out of everyone, and were usually out on the water and barely seen around the village. Sometimes they landed seven tonnes in one day! But I didn’t care about that. I was the only one here who caught shark, so I was completely independent of the catch quotas. And that’s why I was allowed to use the empty Miami building, where the scraps from processing the herring, fish heads and things like that used to be rendered and made into fishmeal. You could still smell it. This was where I kept my vats and tubs in which I left the shark meat soaking in brine for a few days, assuming I didn’t process them right away at the harbour. This was where I stored my bait, where I had my work desk, my corrugated iron refrigerator that hummed like mad when the wind blew, my knives, and the tools I needed for Petra. My boat. She was getting on a bit now. Grandfather had left all this to me – apart from the refrigerator; I’d got that from Magga.

I set to work on Petra. She needed an oil change. Sæmundur came over, watched me for a while, then climbed into the boat with me and helped, even though I could manage it alone. At one point he came so close that my face accidentally touched his hair. That tickled. Sæmundur had hair almost everywhere, not a proper beard exactly, but he was always unshaven and had messy hair on his head, untameable nose hair, bushy eyebrows, hairy forearms and hair on the backs of his hands too, and only a few white strands, even though he was very old already.

“Don’t stare at me like that!” He laughed suddenly. “You’re making me feel awkward!”

I laughed too. But when I put the funnel in the oil tank and Sæmundur carefully glugged oil into the tank, we were very focused. And perhaps that’s why Sæmundur became all thoughtful, perhaps he simply wanted to get something off his chest, because he said:

“Róbert, Róbert. Just like that, poof, vanished. Our very own hotel owner. Our Quota King, ladies and gentlemen!” Sæmundur put down the oil canister and shook his head. “There’ll be a proper hoo-ha, you mark my words. No more peace and quiet!”

That was the first time I heard that Róbert McKenzie was missing. And the news shouldn’t have surprised me, given that I’d found an enormous pool of blood right by the Arctic Henge the day before, and he was the one who’d had it built, after all. But somehow I was so thrown that I didn’t tell Sæmundur about it. Sæmundur was still puzzling over where Róbert might be, for example in some brothel in Amsterdam or a rehab clinic in Florida. I didn’t say a word, and once I was done with my work, I went straight home, because I felt as though I were hiding something, as though I had done something stupid, and that as soon as I told people about it, I really would be connected with Róbert’s disappearance. But it was too late now anyway, Hafdís knew about the pool of blood, and that’s how all the trouble started, and why I tried not to give it any more thought. If you’re the person who finds a dead body or its remains, even if it’s just a drop of blood, you’re connected to it. You’re part of the story then, you’re written into the history books. And that’s what I wanted to prevent, simply by saying nothing. But when a woman from the police called me on my phone and asked me to come down to the schoolhouse so she could have a chat with me, I got nervous, I felt guilty, even though I hadn’t broken any laws and hadn’t killed anyone. Regardless. I braced myself for trouble.

3

BIRNA

Barely an hour later, I was standing in front of the schoolhouse. In full gear. That was the only way I felt complete. That was just my way. Cowboy hat, sheriff’s badge and Mauser. Even if people sometimes laughed at me for it. The gear gave me protection. And I was in dire need of it if I wanted to go into the schoolhouse. I had to gather all my courage. The schoolhouse’s grey facade, and the police car in front of it, even the playground and the three bicycles, scared me. Sigfús, who used to be the school principal, had once said at the start of the school year, in front of all the pupils, that knowledge was a backpack you carry around with you your entire life. Admittedly I hadn’t learned much in school, but I was still lugging my school backpack around with me. It weighed down heavily, and became even heavier the closer I got to the schoolhouse. This building had swallowed me until I was fourteen years old. After that, luckily, I didn’t have to go to school any more. There was no reason to worry, though. It could have been worse. I just didn’t have any friends, which was a shame, because all the other children did. I always sat in the back row, alone, at a two-person desk. If someone was being noisy or hadn’t done their homework, they had to sit next to me for a lesson. And it was only ever boys. They would hold their noses, because I usually had a few cubes of hákarl in a small plastic container in my trouser pocket. Grandfather’s hákarl. My supplies. That was all well and good, but the lid sometimes fell off, and I would only notice once I put my fingers into my sticky trouser pocket, and then some people would notice the smell.

After that, Principal Sigfús said I was no longer allowed to take hákarl into school, but he left it at that; he didn’t want to pick a fight with Grandfather, who was armed. And Grandfather knew very well that Sigfús couldn’t forbid anyone from taking snacks into school, because Grandfather knew the law. And besides, the farmers’ children smelled of sheep, he said, and the shipowners’ children of money. That sounded plausible to me, but I could never smell either sheep or money in the schoolroom. Nor the hákarl either. Perhaps you get used to it and don’t notice. So why all the fuss?

Once I stored a little jar of hákarl in my desk. And the next day it was gone. Someone had stolen it! I didn’t dare tell the teacher, but I did tell Grandfather, and he only said that in future I shouldn’t store any more hákarl in my desk. But I found that a little unfair. Because I had assumed Grandfather was on my side. I was angry and disappointed, and kept having all these thoughts, I really stewed over it, wondering who could have stolen the hákarl and how I would get my revenge if I tracked down the thief, so much so that I barely followed lessons for two whole days, all I did was sit there and try to solve the case. I imagined how I would corner the thief and clamp their head beneath the lid of the desk in order to force a confession.