Gudny translated Sunee’s words, her eyes on Erlendur.
“I don’t want to worry him too much,” Sunee said. “It will make it harder for him to get to heaven. It will be harder if he has to swim through my tears.”
They talked of the future. Niran had expressed a wish to return home to Thailand after he had served his sentence but Sunee was not sure he meant it. She herself intended to remain in Iceland, as did her brother. And of course there was Johann. Sunee said that he was a good man. He had been hesitant to go public about his relationship with her at first because she was from Thailand; he was new to this sort of thing and wasn’t sure how his family would react, so he wanted to take it slowly. All that was past now.
Erlendur told Sunee about the two boys who had been messing about after school, carrying a knife; how Elias had crossed their path by chance and they had attacked him for no real reason. They had intended to play with him, frighten him. “You never know what brainless idiots like that are capable of,” he said. “Elias was unlucky to bump into them.”
Sunee’s face was unreadable. She listened to Erlendur’s explanation of why she had lost her son and her face displayed blank incomprehension.
“Why Elias?” she said.
“Because he was there,” Erlendur said. “No other reason.”
They sat in silence for a long time until eventually Erlendur mentioned the sentence that he had found in Elias’s exercise book about the trees and the forest. Did she know what had been on his mind when he asked how many trees it took to make a forest?
Sunee did not know what he was talking about. The exercise book was on the desk and he showed her what Elias had written. How many trees does it take to make a forest?
Sunee smiled for the first time in ages.
“His Thai name Aran,” she said.
“Yes, Gudny told me. What does Aran mean?”
“Forest,” Sunee said. Aran mean forest”
Erlendur made the sign of the cross over Marion Briem’s grave. Then he turned into the wind that bit his face, tore at his hair and pierced his clothes. His thoughts flew home to his books about torment and death in merciless winter storms. Those were stories that he could understand; they kept alight the embers of old feelings in his breast, of regret and grief and loss. He bowed his head into the wind. As so often before at this darkest time of the year he wondered how people had survived for hundreds of years in a country with such a harsh climate.
The frost tightened its grip as evening fell, whipped up by the chill Arctic wind that blasted in from the sea and south over the desolate winter landscape. It plunged down from Mount Skardsheidi, past Mount Esja and ravaged its way over the lowlands where the settlement spread out, a glittering winter city on the northernmost shores of the world. The wind howled and shrieked between the buildings and down the empty streets. The city lay lifeless, as if in the grip of a plague. People stayed inside their houses. They locked their doors, closed their windows and pulled the curtains, hoping against hope that the cold spell would soon be over.