The Flight of Gemma Hardy_ A Novel - Margot Livesey [173]
Back at the house we drank a kind of tea made, Berglind said, from stinging plants. Kristjana patted the seat next to hers and I sat down. Berglind pulled up a chair, ready to translate.
“It was a long time ago,” Kristjana said. “You must forgive us if we have forgotten many things about your parents, or if the things we remember are small. But you have found us. You can come back again.”
“Please,” said Berglind.
“Tonight you will tell us what you have done since you left with your uncle. Tomorrow, when I have put my thoughts in order, Berglind will help me tell you what I can about your father and your mother. I think you will like to take notes. Perhaps—who knows?—you will remember something for yourself.”
As best I could, not mentioning either of my fiancés, I described what had happened since I left Iceland. Both Kristjana and Berglind said they were sorry to hear about my uncle’s death. “I only met him once,” said Kristjana, “but he was a good man.”
“And you are a wanderer,” said Berglind. “That I cannot imagine. I was born in this house and I know the names of the spiders who make their webs in the windows. I like having adventures—Gisli and I travel every summer—but then we come home.”
“I never meant,” I said, “to be a wanderer.”
The stories Kristjana told of my parents were, as she promised, quite ordinary. I had travelled eight hundred miles to learn that my mother liked custard, my father tied better knots than any other fisherman in the village, they had played backgammon and eaten smoked fish, one summer they had gone on an expedition to Blaa Ionid, the Blue Lagoon. “Agnes came back wishing that Stykkisholmur had a hot spring,” said Kristjana.
“I wish that too,” said Berglind.
Of course there were more stories about my father, whom Kristjana had known for so much longer. When he was a boy, she told me, he had a black and white dog called Smoke. He had begun to fish almost as soon as he could walk; like many fishermen, he had never learned to swim. Once he and Kristjana had played truant to climb Mount Helgafell. Ever since the sagas, Berglind explained, it had been a sacred place. If you climbed it from the west, in silence, and then descended to the east, without looking back, you would have three wishes granted. “They must be pure wishes, though,” she said. “Not for yourself.”
“But I tripped on a rock,” said Kristjana, “and broke my silence, and Einar looked back to see what had happened, so neither of us got our wishes.”
During the war Einar had moved to the city and become one of the hundreds of men employed in building the new docks for the British Navy. Then he had met Agnes. She didn’t know how: At a dance? In the street? “Ast,” she said, spreading her hands.
“Ast means love,” added Berglind. “It happens at the most inconvenient moments. No wonder people invented Cupid, running around with his bow and arrow.”
“They were soul mates,” I said.
Kristjana pursed her lips in a way that made me wonder if Berglind had translated correctly. When she spoke again it was haltingly, and Berglind’s English was slower too. “Maybe,” she said. “Einar told me several times they both wanted to give up. He thought your mother was a coward because she would not leave her parents. And my parents and I were not happy. We thought Agnes would bring heartache to Einar. How could a girl from a city live in our little village? But we were wrong. Everything that was hard—the darkness, no shops, fish, fish, fish—Agnes embraced. Once in winter she came to our house long before it got light. She made scones and eggs. We ate by candlelight, all of us talking and laughing. She told me she had never cared for Edinburgh, so many people pressed together, ignoring each other. Her only doubt was when she was expecting you. She persuaded