Yrsa Sigurdardóttir - The Day Is Dark

It must have been odd not to be able to count on regular shipments except over the summer. The residents had to make arrangements for the winter at the end of that season. Thóra would have liked to see her own shopping list if she’d lived under these conditions. The hut that housed the generator was in view, but she did not see any of the men that had gone there armed with torches and a toolkit. The wind was starting to stir up the snow and Thóra shivered at the thought of having to go outside. She turned around.

‘How did it all work here, then?’ she asked. ‘It’s an unusual set-up, to say the least.’

‘I actually just made short trips here,’ replied Eyjólfur off-handedly. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck it out if I’d had to be here longer than a week.’ The answer hardly came as a surprise, since the computer expert was young and doubtless had a decent social life outside of work. Everything here must have centred on daily work tasks.

Friðrikka shrugged and looked down at her toes. ‘It was all right. You had to get used to it, but on the whole it was fine.’ She drew a breath through her nose. ‘Naturally it’s not easy living where you work and associating only with your co-workers, but once you’ve got used to it it’s no problem. The salary was good and made up for the isolation. I’m single and childless, so it was okay really.’

‘But still, you gave it up.’ said Thóra. ‘May I ask why?’ Eyjólfur suddenly became very interested in a little refrigerator and bent down to inspect it.

‘The atmosphere changed, you might say,’ replied the woman, pushing a red lock of hair that had fallen onto her cheek back behind her ear. ‘When we came here about a year ago everything was done professionally and all of our interactions were normal, but the group’s spirits deteriorated quickly. In the end I couldn’t bear the idea of being here any longer.’ She flushed, but then stuck out her chin and continued, focused: ‘I wasn’t even surprised when I was contacted and told that something had come up here. It was inevitable.’ She looked away from Thóra. ‘There was – and probably still is – a curse on this place.’ She added quickly, ‘And I’m not alone in that view, if that’s what you think.’

‘It must be okay to have a Coke,’ said Eyjólfur loudly, standing up with a can in his hand. ‘I’m dying of thirst and this fridge is full of drinks. The Coke can hardly be poisoned.’ Thóra wasn’t going to let him get away with changing the subject.

‘Do you agree?’ she asked, as he flicked open the can and swigged from it. ‘Do you think there’s a curse on this place?’ She choked down her own overwhelming desire for a Coke. They needn’t both become ill; it was better to wait and see whether he lost consciousness before she yielded to the temptation. She wondered whether a Coke could be counted as one of the doctor’s potentially contaminated canned goods.

Eyjólfur took another gulp and sighed happily before replying. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ He looked at Friðrikka as he spoke. ‘ Places aren’t good or bad. At most, you can only describe the people who live in them that way.’ He tipped the can as if toasting the geologist. ‘Don’t you think so?’

Friðrikka did not reply immediately, but looked disdainfully away from the grinning man and stared at the wall. ‘Doesn’t matter, because in the end it’s all the same. Maybe it was just all of you and what went on here that made the place bad.’

‘Could you be a little clearer?’ asked Thóra. She was in no condition to read between the lines. Maybe what had happened here was unconnected with recent events; perhaps it had simply been typical work stuff, like an extramarital affair or some other gossip, but it still wouldn’t hurt to know what they were talking about.

‘For God’s sake, it was a lot of fuss over nothing,’ replied Eyjólfur. ‘Friðrikka simply gave up and quit. She didn’t have the nerve for it, or the sense of humour you need under these conditions. There’s nothing wrong with the place itself, although the work arrangements were pretty fucked-up. This kind of workplace isn’t for everyone.’

He was hardly one to talk. By his own account he had only come here for a week at a time while others stayed for lengthy periods. However, Thóra decided to say nothing, to protect Friðrikka. The geologist might turn out to be a crybaby who had convinced herself everything was intolerable in order to justify her leaving. Thóra could find this out later if necessary. She looked outside once more. ‘There’s smoke coming from the chimney on the roof,’ she said. ‘That must be a good thing.’

Friðrikka peered out and nodded. ‘It looks like the generator is running again,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately it’s probably too late for the showers and water, but who knows. Hopefully it was shut off intentionally and the water drained from the system. Either way, it’ll be nice not to have to sleep in here on the floor.’

‘Why shouldn’t the showers be working? They don’t run on electricity,’ said Thóra grumpily. It was bad enough not being able to have a coffee or an ice-cold Coke. Bella’s expression suggested that she felt the same.

‘If the camp has been without heat long enough for the water to freeze in the pipes, most of the lines are probably broken,’ said Friðrikka. ‘Unless they left the taps trickling, but I didn’t notice that when we had our look around.’ Thóra said nothing, hoping they had simply overlooked this during their inspection of the site. But she didn’t hold out much hope. They would probably have heard the water running in the oppressive silence.

‘Fuck,’ said Eyjólfur, seemingly just as pissed off as Thóra. He didn’t elaborate, but took another huge gulp of Coke. He reached for the tap on the sink next to the coffeemaker and sighed in relief when water ran out of it in a dense jet. ‘Well, at least we can flush the toilet in this building.’

‘I guess I should go out and help them turn the lights on and get everything working,’ said Friðrikka. ‘I know where everything is, so we’d get it done faster.’ Thóra wondered for a moment whether she should be lazy and lag behind, but she pushed away the thought. They would all have to contribute.

The hunter Igimaq watched the four people emerge from the big building. Three females and one male, all dressed in colourful outdoor clothing that contrasted with the environment. Despite their thick clothing and their distance from him, the man realized at the same moment that all the women were too tall for his taste, and two of them too thin. The man was no good either: he was scrawny and weak-looking, though he was not exactly a runt. It was like that with all Westerners. Their worship of skinny physiques was the best example of how they had broken all ties with nature. Despite their winter clothing, those three women would freeze to death in no time if they were forced to fend for themselves without the food and shelter they took for granted. They probably ate meat, but would puke if he took them hunting and showed them how such food was acquired. That was in the unlikely event that he would manage to catch anything with them or their ilk tagging along. They couldn’t even see him right now, even though he did nothing to conceal himself. He simply stood still and allowed the blowing snow to play about his warmly dressed body. His hood shielded his eyes, but he still had to squint from time to time in the strongest gusts. He watched them walk over to the other big building, where others were standing, from the look of them two men and a woman. They spoke together briefly, but he could not make out the words and would not have understood them anyway. He did understand Danish, although he had difficulty expressing himself in that language; not because he didn’t know the words, but rather because they were not sufficiently descriptive for what lay in his heart. It was a language that had developed under different circumstances than Greenlandic, based on an easier struggle for life and different values. The faint sound of the people’s conversation died out and he watched the group enter the building. Shortly afterwards, one light after another went on inside it. He continued to stand there, expressionless, though he felt uneasy. This couldn’t end well.