Far North - Michael Ridpath [3]
They had finished a bottle of red wine and were on to the brandy.
Harpa played up to Sindri; she was flattered by the attention and what he said was interesting. But it was Björn she was most aware of. He sat coolly listening to Sindri, calm, composed and furious. He wasn’t trying any of the classic male competition for her attention, but she did catch him shooting the occasional glance at her.
She was enjoying herself. For a moment she felt guilty about leaving Markús, but her mother would be very happy looking after him. She was always telling Harpa to stop moping around, to get out more and meet a man. She was right. Since Gabríel Örn had betrayed her, Harpa had spent nearly all her time cooped up in her little house in Seltjarnarnes.
‘I know I don’t look like it,’ Sindri was saying, ‘but I am a farmer. Or at least my family are farmers. Until the bank forces them to sell up, that is.’
‘What happened?’ Harpa asked.
‘Everyone’s getting squeezed,’ Sindri said. ‘Even the farmers. My brother, who runs the farm now, can’t make his payments. So it’s finito.’ Sindri made a throat-cutting sign with his forefinger. ‘Just like that. A farm that has been around for generations, that was mentioned in the Book of Settlements, is destroyed. It breaks my heart.’
It was Harpa’s understanding that farms were one of the few sectors of the economy actually doing well with the fall of the króna, but she didn’t want to contradict Sindri in full flow.
He turned to her. ‘It is the farmers who are the real soul of Iceland. Like Bjartur there.’ He pointed to the painting of the peasant carrying the girl. ‘I did that, you know.’
‘It’s good,’ said Harpa. And it was. You could tell the brush-strokes were by an amateur, but the painting managed to portray nobility in a harsh but beautiful landscape.
‘The farmers and the fishermen,’ Sindri went on, taking the compliment in his stride. ‘Men who will work hard in tough conditions, who save, who fight to earn a living on the fells or on the waves. And not just men, women. We have the toughest, most independent women in the world. We have needed them to survive. And now these bankers, these lawyers, these politicians, all they know how to do is spend and borrow, spend and borrow. The kids of today don’t know how to do real work, what it’s like to tramp over the fells in a howling gale looking for lost sheep.’
‘Some of us do,’ said Frikki. ‘Until two weeks ago I spent all my waking life in a hellhole of a kitchen producing food for these guys to eat. And the prices they would pay! Ten thousand krónur for some swordfish flown in from the Pacific when we have perfectly good fish of our own all around us.’
‘Sorry, Frikki,’ Sindri said. ‘You are right, not everyone has forgotten. There are many of us perfectly good Icelanders still willing and able to do real jobs. We have always been here. It’s just no one has listened to us.’
Harpa wondered whether Sindri had ever done a ‘real job’ since he had left the farm. But he had a point. He was just the kind of guy she would have dismissed with contempt as an ignorant idealist a couple of months before, but now she thought he had a point.
‘What chance have I of finding a real job?’ Frikki asked. ‘There’s nothing out there.’
‘What about you, Björn?’ Sindri asked.
‘I’m a fisherman,’ Björn said. ‘From Grundarfjördur. I rode down here on my motorbike this morning for the demonstration. And I agree with you, Sindri. I go out as often as my quota will allow, and I still can’t earn enough to pay off my debts. There are many like me. The banks told us to borrow in foreign currencies because the interest rates were lower. And now they say that not only have my own debts doubled because of the collapse of the króna, but I have to pay off all the money the banks borrowed