Viktor Ingolfsson - The Flatey Enigma

“Tell me about the Flatey Book,” he asked.

She pondered a moment. “Do you want to hear the long story or the short one?” she finally asked.

“The longer story if you have the time.”

She gazed through the window where the sun was setting behind the mountains in the northwest and said in a soft voice, “I’ve got plenty of time now.”

She then started to tell the story, talking relentlessly for hours. Kjartan listened intently, and they both became oblivious to the passage of time.

Finally, the story ended, and Johanna silently leafed through the Munksgaard edition. Kjartan was also silent and pensive. Then he took out the sheet that Reverend Hannes had given him with Gaston Lund’s answers to the Flatey enigma.

“Do you know the story of the Flatey enigma?” he asked.

Johanna nodded. “I’ve read the questions. My father spent hours grappling with it.”

“Was he able to solve the riddle?”

“He’d figured out the key to the solution. I don’t know if anyone else got as far as he did, since living here gave him daily access to the clues in the library. He knew that the answers to the first thirty-nine questions were useless until the answer to the fortieth question was found. There was no other way of verifying the answers. He overexerted himself the night he unraveled the clue and collapsed by this table here. I found him really ill on the floor. Thormodur Krakur helped me to get him home on his cart. My father never got back on his feet to be able to complete the task after that, and he didn’t want me to finish it. His notes have been waiting here ever since.” Johanna pulled a ring binder off one of the shelves.

“I’ve got a copy of the professor’s answers here,” Kjartan said. “Can you help me to understand the questions and answers?”

“Yes, probably,” she said pensively. “I can try.”

Johanna leafed through the Munksgaard book until she found the loose sheets with the Flatey enigma. She placed them to the side where she could see them and also took a sheet out of her father’s folder. Then she read out the questions one after another, checked the answers that her father had guessed, and looked up the relevant chapters in the Munksgaard book with her nimble fingers. She knew all these pages so well and found the right chapters in the bat of an eyelid. Running her finger over the text, she occasionally read a few lines out loud, but she generally just gave Kjartan an overview of what the chapter was about. Kjartan limited himself to a silent nod whenever Gaston Lund’s answers were the same as those of Bjorn Snorri, but otherwise he read out the alternative answer. In this manner they went though each of the forty questions, one after another…

Question nineteen: Cannot be hidden from. First letter. Thormodur walked up to the cook and grabbed a haggis, broke it in two, and ate half. The cook said, “The king’s men have poor manners, and he wouldn’t be too happy about this if he knew what you were doing.”

Thormodur answered, “We often act against the king’s wishes. Sometimes he knows it, sometimes he doesn’t.”

The cook said, “It cannot be hidden from Christ.”

“I guess not,” said Thormodur, “but if half a haggis is to be the only thing that stands between me and Christ, we would be quite satisfied.”

The answer is “Christ,” and the first letter is c.

Monday, June 6, 1960

It was raining. The nocturnal eastern wind had subsided at dawn, but the downpour persisted as the islanders gathered for their morning chores. The sheep had taken shelter under the gables of the houses in the village during the night. Ewes lay about pensively chewing the cud, while the lambs slept off the troublesome night. The farmers examined the sky and forecast more of the same weather.

Grimur had no nets in the sea and therefore took it easy for most of the morning. The nets had all been taken up before the day of the mass, so there was no hurry to go out to sea. The seal pups could play undisturbed on the furious surf by the skerries that day.

Kjartan was upstairs in the loft and seemed to be sleeping. Grimur had gone to bed early the night before and had not heard the guest come in, although he saw his wet overcoat in the hall. Let him rest, the district officer thought to himself as he was drinking his morning coffee. He didn’t really know where the investigation was supposed to go from here. The most sensible thing was probably to request some assistance from Reykjavik.

Ingibjorg sat in the living room, listening to music on the radio as she knitted a sock out of a ball of coarse wool. Hogni popped by and accepted a cup of coffee, but then he headed home when Grimur told him their sea trip was on hold. It looked as if they were in for an uneventful day.

Grimur went into the shed, milked the cows, and led them out to the field. There were three of them, two of which he owned himself and one which he fed for Sigurbjorn. In exchange the Svalbardi farmer housed a few sheep for him.

Thormodur Krakur was busy doing something in front of his old barn. He started the day early and had obviously taken his cattle to the pastures ages ago. Grimur walked over to him and said hello.

“What are you making there, Krakur?” he then asked.

“Can’t you see? A new lid for the well. You’ve been hassling me about it for long enough,” Thormodur Krakur answered, brandishing his hammer. He was in a bad mood.

Grimur examined the work. It was true that he’d told Thormodur Krakur several times that the lid to the well needed mending. The wood was starting to rot, and it could be hazardous to step on it. Thormodur Krakur had found material to make the lid from some boat wreckage lying on the southern shore.

“That’ll make a great lid, Krakur, my friend,” said the district officer, but then he left when he realized that Thormodur Krakur wouldn’t be answering him.

Grimur let the cows roam freely in the field while he was shoveling the dung channel, but then he led them to the pastures further out on the island. They were lazy in the wet weather and moved slowly. Little Rosa from Radagerdi was also out with her father’s cows.

“Grimur, Grimur,” she said breathlessly when they met. “Svenni says there’s a red angel in the churchyard. Do you think that’s true?”

“There are certainly many angels in the churchyard, Rosa dear,” Grimur answered, “and who knows, some of them might be red.”

“Yeah, but you can’t see them normally. Svenni says that you can see this one very clearly.”

“When did little Svenni see this angel?”

“Earlier on. He slipped into the churchyard to gather some tern eggs. I met him when he came running back. He was so petrified that he ran straight home. Maybe the angel appeared to stop Svenni stealing the eggs from the churchyard.”

“Do you really think God would send an angel down to us just because someone was pilfering a few tern eggs in the corner of a garden?” Grimur asked.

“The priest says we’re not allowed to take any eggs out of the churchyard. It’s sacred. You can’t even pick sheep sorrel there,” Rosa said gravely.

They ushered the cows through the gate into the outer pastures and then closed it with a sliding hinge bar.

“Off you go now, and eat well,” Grimur said to the cattle as he left.

“Shall we go take a look at this angel, Grimur?” Rosa asked.

Grimur smiled at her. “Sure, we can pass the churchyard on the way back, even if it’s raining a bit,” he said. “It’s not every day that you get a chance to meet a real angel.”

They sauntered back and turned right along the road to follow a narrow track toward the churchyard. Everything seemed normal. The fences that lined the graves and tombstones were surrounded by dense clusters of tall yellow grass from last fall, and the wet ironwork glistened in the drizzle. There was some commotion among the arctic terns that nested in the southern part of the cemetery. They were screeching noisily over one of the graves, and Grimur thought he spotted something new by the tombstone.