Arnaldur Indridason - Voices

There was a knock on the door, and he turned off the video and opened for Eva Lind.

“Were you asleep?” she asked, squeezing past him. “What are these tapes?”

“They’re to do with the case,” Erlendur said.

“Getting anywhere?”

“No. Nowhere.”

“Did you talk to Stina?”

“Stina?”

“The one I told you about. Stina! You were asking about tarts and the hotels.”

“No, I haven’t spoken to her. Tell me something else, do you know a girl of your age called Osp who works at this hotel? You have a similar attitude to life.”

“Meaning?” Eva Lind offered her father a cigarette, gave him a light and flopped down onto the bed. Erlendur sat at the desk and looked out through the window into the pitch-black night. Two days to Christmas, he thought. Then we’ll be back to normal.

“Pretty negative,” he said.

“Do you reckon I’m really negative?” Eva Lind said.

Erlendur said nothing, and Eva snorted, sending billows of smoke out through her nose.

“And what, you’re the picture of happiness?”

Erlendur smiled.

“I don’t know any Osp,” Eva said. “What’s she got to do with it?”

“She has nothing to do with it,” Erlendur said. “At least I don’t think so. She found the body and seems to know a few things about what goes on in this place. Quite a smart girl. A survivor, with a mouth on her. Reminds me a bit of you.”

“I don’t know her,” Eva said. Then she fell silent and stared at nothing, and he looked at her and said nothing either, and time went by. Sometimes they had nothing to say to each other. Sometimes they argued furiously. They never made small talk. Never talked about the weather or prices in the shops, politics, sport or clothes, or whatever it was that people spent their time discussing, which they both regarded as idle chatter. Only the two of them, their past and present, the family that was never a family because Erlendur walked out on it, the tragic circumstances of Eva and her brother Sindri, their mother’s malice towards Erlendur — that was all that mattered, their topic of conversation that coloured all contact between them.

“What do you want for Christmas?” Erlendur suddenly broke the silence.

“For Christmas?” Eva said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“You must want something.”

“What did you get for Christmas? When you were a boy?”

Erlendur thought. He remembered some mittens.

“Little things,” he said.

“I always thought Mum gave Sindri better presents than me,” Eva Lind said. “Then she stopped giving me presents. Said I sold them to buy dope. She gave me a ring once and I sold it. Did your brother get better presents than you?”

Erlendur felt the way she cautiously probed him. Usually she went straight to the point and shocked him with her candour. At other times, much less frequently, she seemed to want to be delicate.

When Eva was in intensive care after her miscarriage, in a coma, the doctor told Erlendur to try to be with her as much as possible and talk to her all the same. One topic that Erlendur talked about to Eva was his brother’s disappearance and how he himself was rescued from the moor. When Eva regained consciousness and moved in with him he asked her whether she remembered what he had said to her, but she did not recall a word. Her curiosity was aroused and she pressed him until he repeated what he had told her, what he had never told anyone about before and no one knew about. He had never talked to her about his past and Eva, who never tired of calling him to account, felt that she moved a little closer to him, felt she knew her father a fraction better, although she also knew that she was a long way from understanding him fully. One question that haunted Eva made her angry and spiteful towards him, and shaped their relationship more than anything else. Divorces were common, she realised that. Couples were always getting divorced and some divorces were worse than others, when the partners never spoke again. Aware of this, she did not question it. But she was totally incapable of fathoming why Erlendur divorced his children too. Why he took no interest in them after he left. Why he continually neglected them until Eva herself sought him out and found him alone in a dark block of flats. She had discussed all this with her father, who so far could provide no answers to her questions.

“Better presents?” he said. “It was all the same. Really just like in the old Christmas rhyme: a candle and a pack of cards. Sometimes we would have liked something more exciting, but our family was poor. Everyone was poor in those days”

“What about after he died? Your brother.”

Erlendur said nothing.

“Erlendur?” Eva said.

“Christmas disappeared with him,” Erlendur said.

The birth of the Saviour was not celebrated after his brother died. More than a month had elapsed since his disappearance and there was no joy in the home, no presents and no visitors. It was a custom for Erlendur’s mother’s family to visit them on Christmas Eve when they would all sing Christmas carols. It was a small house and everyone sat close together, emanating warmth and light. His mother refused all visitors that Christmas. His father had sunk into a deep depression and spent most days in bed. He took no part in the search for his son, as if he knew it was futile, as if he knew he had failed; his son was dead and he could do nothing about it, nor anyone ever, and that it was his fault and no one else’s.

His mother was indefatigable. She made sure that Erlendur was nursed properly. She urged on the search party and took part herself. She was the last to come down from the moors when darkness fell and searching became futile, exhausted, and was the first to set off back into the highlands when it grew light again. After it became obvious that her son must be dead she kept on searching just as energetically. It was not until winter had set in completely, the snows were so deep and the weather so treacherous that she was forced to give up. Forced to face up to the fact that the boy had died in the wilds and she would have to wait until spring to look for his earthly remains. She turned towards the mountains every day, sometimes cursing. “May the trolls eat you who took my boy!”

The thought of his dead body lying up there was unbearable to Erlendur, who began seeing him in nightmares from which he awoke screaming and crying, fighting the blizzard, submerged in the snow, his little back turned against the howling wind and death by his side.

Erlendur did not understand how his father could sit motionless at home while all the others were hard at work. The incident seemed to break him completely, turn him into a zombie, and Erlendur thought about the power of grief, because his father was a strong, vigorous man. The loss of his son gradually drained him of the will to live and he never recovered.

Later, when it was all over, his parents argued for the first and only time about what happened, and Erlendur found out that their mother had not wanted their father to go up onto the moors that day, but he did not listen to her. “Well,” she said, “since you’re going anyway, leave the boys at home.” He paid no heed.

And Christmas was never the same again. His parents reached some kind of accord as time went by. She never mentioned that he had ignored her wishes. He never mentioned that he had been seized by stubbornness at hearing her tell him not to go and not to take the boys. There was nothing wrong with the weather and he felt she was meddling. They chose never to talk about what happened between them, as if breaking the silence would leave nothing to keep them together. It was in this silence that Erlendur tackled the guilt that swamped him at being the one who survived.