Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

Katrín nodded, smiling. ‘Delicious. I wonder if we should add a cafeteria to this guesthouse idea.’

Garðar hobbled in. ‘My feet are killing me. These shoes are rubbish. No wonder they were on sale.’

‘You’ve got to break in walking shoes before you go climbing mountains, you idiot.’ Líf shook her head. ‘Even I knew that.’ She handed Putti a little slice of liver sausage, which he took in his mouth and carried to a corner before lying down and tucking into it.

‘Now you tell me.’ Gingerly, Garðar sat down on a worn chair and the women watched nervously to see whether the rickety thing would support him. They exchanged a smile when he didn’t fall to the floor.

A tired-looking kettle belonging to the former owner stood on a plate on an old-fashioned wood stove. ‘I wonder if it’s possible to burn angelica in this contraption?’ said Katrín, opening the hatch beneath the plate. She stared into the black emptiness, which smelled of ashes. ‘I could really do with a coffee, but we probably shouldn’t be using up our firewood for that.’

‘I don’t really know. Maybe if you squash it down.’ Garðar stretched out his bare feet and wiggled his toes. ‘Maybe it would burn up too fast to get the pot boiling. We can always try.’ He spread butter on a slice of bread. ‘But there’s no way I’m getting back into those shoes to collect fuel. Not now.’ He stared at a patch of floor at the back of the kitchen. ‘What’s that on the floor there?’

They looked at the spot that had attracted his attention and Líf shrugged. ‘A stain, that’s all. This is an old house, remember?’ A large, irregular blemish coloured the wooden floor where it joined the wall.

‘But the floor is new. The previous owner laid this parquet, since the old floor was probably in such bad shape it was unsalvageable. It’s not completely finished, though.’ Garðar frowned. ‘Yet another thing we need to fix. Maybe we’ll put a border over it.’

Katrín looked away from the stain, uninterested for the moment in further repairs. ‘I’ll go. I want coffee more than something to eat.’ She pulled her long, thick jumper tighter around herself. ‘There’s angelica all over the place here, so it won’t take me any time at all.’ She grabbed the kettle to take with her. There was actually still water in the tub they’d filled the night before and carried together up to the house, but it was better to rinse out the kettle before they started using it. Just in case, she asked Garðar to look inside it and check whether there was a dead mouse or something equally disgusting in there.

Katrín walked down the dark, narrow hallway to the back door. The sun was still hanging in the sky but it seemed to have grown colder outside, probably because the wind had picked up. She considered simply abandoning the expedition, but her longing for coffee won out.

It was even colder at the stream. Her fingers stung as she dipped the kettle repeatedly into the stream. She squatted with one foot on a stone in the middle of the stream and the other on the sodden bank. She could easily lose her balance and fall backwards into the water, and that thought alone was enough for her to pronounce the kettle clean enough. She filled it, at the same time admiring the beauty of the water flowing past her. It was impossible to imagine anything purer than its sparkling surface, as if the stream were made of liquid precious metal. She saw her reflection in the bubbling water and thanked God for its ripples; she wasn’t particularly keen to admire the paint splotches on her face and in her hair. When the kettle was full, Katrín straightened up. As she concentrated on not spilling it, she thought she saw, reflected in the water, someone standing behind her.

‘Líf? Garðar?’ Katrín turned her head carefully so as not to lose her balance, but could see only the long slope that the stream bisected on its way out to sea. She shook her head; what nonsense. Of course Líf was still in the kitchen looking for the ham and Garðar was barefoot, lamenting his chafed heel. Besides, he wasn’t stupid enough to try to scare her again. She looked back down into the stream and saw the same as before: her own distorted, crooked outline, but also the silhouette of someone right behind her. There was no way of discerning what was causing this illusion. She looked back behind her but there was nothing more to see than the first time. It must be the sun messing with her perception in some strange way that she was too tired to understand. Maybe it was something in the stream and not behind her; some pebbles on the bottom or vegetation moving around. She dragged herself away from the riddle; she would never get her coffee if she kept this up.

On returning to the house she put the kettle down gently on the crooked porch so as not to tip it over, then turned to the angelica in the tangle of faded vegetation around the house. As she uprooted the first dried-up plant she suddenly recalled a student who had said goodbye to her rather dolefully at the end of the last school day before the winter break. The boy was small for his age and had a difficult time in class. He was an extremely attractive child, with a bright complexion and wide eyes, and when he came into the classroom, dressed in his winter coat with a too-large rucksack on his narrow back, it was precisely his eyes that captured her attention. From them shone a sadness that seemed so profound it surely couldn’t be connected to the uneventful school day. ‘Don’t go, Katrín.’ She’d put her pen down on top of the clumsy alphabet in the workbook she was going over, and gave him a friendly smile. ‘What do you mean? I’m not going home straight away. I still have a bit of work to do.’ The boy stood there, his small hands clutching the shoulder straps of his rucksack. ‘Don’t go to the bad place. You won’t come back.’ Katrín had wondered whether he was ill and delirious, but his pale cheeks didn’t suggest that he had a temperature. ‘I’m not going to a bad place, not at all! I don’t like bad places, I only go to places where everything is nice.’ The boy had stood there, rooted to the spot, half opening his mouth to reveal the two pearly-white, over-sized adult incisors in his upper jaw. Then he repeated, with the same sadness in his voice: ‘Don’t go to the house. You won’t come back.’ After this he had turned on his heel and left the room, before Katrín could think of anything clever to say. It was long after he’d closed the door behind him that she realized she hadn’t once mentioned the trip she had planned to the class. Perhaps this brief but peculiar conversation had had more of an effect on her than she was willing to admit, and perhaps it was also the reason why she was having such a hard time adjusting to the place.

Katrín focused on the angelica. She wasn’t going to let her imagination run wild. This was Garðar’s dream, at least for the moment, and there was no need to upset either him or herself with any silliness. She tore out one dead plant after another, filling her arms in no time. It wouldn’t amount to much if they packed it down, though, so she put the pile next to the kettle and began pulling out more. She moved further and further from the house, following what appeared to be a path leading through the brush. She’d gathered quite a bit more when something white caught her attention at the bottom of a deep hollow. The undergrowth in the hollow was even denser than everywhere else and to get a better look Katrín had to bend down and push the withered grasses and dead weeds aside. Suddenly she jerked back, dropping the angelica she’d already gathered. What the hell..? ‘Garðar! Líf!’ she called. ‘Come here! You’ve got to see this!’

‘I need to discuss this later, Sara.’ Freyr wanted more than anything to hang up, to pretend the connection was bad. He’d been paged to the duty station and the last thing he needed on a long workday was to have to talk to his ex. Least of all there, with people coming and going all around him. There was no denying that the topic would cause anyone within earshot to listen harder. For the moment no one was about but him, and he had every intention of ending the conversation before the next person walked in. ‘You know how I feel about taking calls during working hours.’ He could have added that he found her calls horrendous at any time of day, but she was fragile and he preferred not to say goodbye to her when she was in an agitated state.