He begins to feel afraid now and Beggi senses it. ‘Will we be all right, Lendi?’ he asks. He has to shout into his older brother’s ear.
‘It’s all right,’ Erlendur reassures him. ‘We’ll be home soon.’
He takes off one of his own gloves, intending to give it to Beggi, but fumbles and drops it, and it disappears in the storm. Beggi takes hold of his hand.
Erlendur doesn’t have a clue where he is going. He hopes he is heading downhill but is too disorientated to be certain. He tries to persuade himself that the weather will improve once they get low enough. Beggi keeps tripping over in the snow, slowing them down, but it doesn’t cross Erlendur’s mind to let go of his hand. Their fingers are numb with cold, yet Erlendur takes care not to lose his grip on his brother.
The blizzard pummels them from all sides, buffeting them to and fro, knocking them down into the snow and making it ever harder to stand up again. They can’t even see their hands in front of their faces and before long both boys are exhausted and freezing. Erlendur keeps hoping they will bump into their father, but in vain, and they are making no progress in descending to the farmlands.
Then it happens. He can no longer feel Beggi’s hand in his own frozen one, as if they had been parted some time ago without his noticing. His fingers are locked in the grip he had on his brother, but he is holding thin air. Turning round, he tries to run back but stumbles into a drift. Rising, he yells Beggi’s name over and over, but is knocked down again, still shouting and screaming. He is weeping now and the tears freeze on his cheeks.
Utterly bewildered, he squats in the snow, overwhelmed with fear for himself, for his father but most of all for Beggi. He feels it is somehow his fault that Beggi ever came with them on this journey, and can’t shake off the thought that if he hadn’t interfered, Beggi would have stayed at home.
The roar of the storm has intensified by the time Erlendur gets up on hands and knees and begins to crawl, rather than walk, confused and aimless. He has read about people caught in bad weather and knows that an important survival technique is to dig yourself into a drift and wait for the worst to pass. And you must on no account fall asleep in the snow because if you do you may never wake up again. But he can’t bear to abandon his search for Beggi. He hopes fervently that Beggi has managed to get down from the moors and is on his way home or even now in their mother’s arms. When he reaches Bakkasel, no doubt Beggi will come to meet him with their father, and everything will be all right when their mother flings her arms around him. He’s worried about her, knowing she must be desperately anxious.
He has lost all sense of time. It feels as if night fell hours ago. His strength is rapidly flagging. Yet refusing to give up, he toils on through the falling snow, half crawling, half walking, in the feeble hope that he is heading in the right direction. The cold pierces his clothes but his teeth have ceased their chattering and the involuntary shivering that had seized his whole body has also stopped by the time he finally topples headlong and doesn’t move again.
He falls asleep the moment he hits the snow.
The last thing he remembers is Beggi battling through the storm, placing all his trust in his big brother.
‘Don’t lose me,’ Beggi had shouted. ‘You mustn’t lose me.’
‘It’ll be all right,’ he had said in reply.
It’ll be all right.
55
On his last morning at Bakkasel he woke up after a bad night’s sleep, unable to feel his extremities, so he hurried out to the car and switched on the heater. He had brought the Thermos and cigarettes with him and once he had warmed up a little, he poured coffee into the lid of the flask and lit up. He stayed there until he had got the blood back into his limbs. The box containing the bones lay beside him on the passenger seat. Daníel had given it to him in parting, saying he had no idea what to do with all his father’s junk and repeating that it would be best to set fire to the garage. Erlendur had thanked him and brought the bones back to the croft.
Judging by the label on the lid, Daníel senior had stumbled upon them while walking across the north flank of Hardskafi, a considerable distance from the spot where Erlendur had been found in a state close to death. Bergur must have strayed further north than anyone would have believed possible — assuming these were his brother’s remains. But they weren’t necessarily proof that he died on the mountain. The remains could have arrived there in the mouth of a fox, for example. The bones themselves couldn’t tell Erlendur much, lying in a cardboard box in a garage in Seydisfjördur, but it was enough. He was convinced they were the chin and cheekbone of a child, and immediately felt a powerful intuition that they could only belong to his brother.
During the night he had considered sending them off for tests. He could have them dated and get an expert opinion on how long they had been at the mercy of the elements. But the process would take time and it was uncertain what the results would show. He came to the conclusion that he didn’t need the help of science. He was sure in his own mind, and soon an idea began to form about what he should do with the bones.
Having finished the coffee and smoked two cigarettes, Erlendur started the car and drove slowly away from Bakkasel along the track to the Eskifjördur road, then headed in the direction of the village. Turning off just before it, he parked by the gate of the graveyard. Once there he remained in the car for a while with the engine running, still savouring the blast of warm air from the heater. He picked up the box, opened it and inspected the two bones. If there had been any more, surely Daníel would have picked them up too? Erlendur had been plagued by such questions all night. He knew he would have to climb the north flank of the mountain, not necessarily in search of further remains, as he had no idea where the bones had been found or how they had got there. No, he must go there for other reasons.
He stepped out of the car, box in hand, and fetched the spade from the boot. He wouldn’t need to dig nearly as deep this time, merely scratch the surface of his mother’s grave.
He found his parents’ plot and stood there in the raw air, thinking about the years that had passed since the accident, since they had lived in the east. His mother had coped well with the bustle and traffic when they moved to Reykjavík, but his father had never been happy, finding the city brash, noisy and alien. At the time new suburbs had been springing up almost overnight. These were now old and established, yet districts were forever being added to the city to cater for incomers from the countryside, who didn’t all adapt easily to their new circumstances. And so the years passed, time crawling on inexorably into a future that no one from the obsolete past would recognise.
Like his father, Erlendur had never settled into the new environment, never understood what he was doing there or adjusted properly. All he knew was that somewhere on his journey through life time had come to a standstill, and he had never managed to wind the mechanism up again. When he stood there with the bones in his hands, he had experienced no elation, no sense that his suffering was at last over and he had received answers to the questions that had dogged him ever since his brother’s disappearance. Any hope of happiness was long forgotten.
Erlendur raised his eyes to the mountains. Snow was falling on their slopes.
He shifted his gaze to the cemetery, to the rows of headstones and crosses. Born. Died. Buried. Beloved wife. Blessed be your memory. Rest in peace. Death above and all around.
Death in a small box.
Looking again at the bones, he knew in his heart that he had recovered two tiny fragments of his brother’s remains. For years he had been trying to envisage how he would react if he ever found himself in this position. Now an answer of sorts was at hand. But he felt numb. Empty. These little fragments of bone couldn’t satisfy his questions. It was impossible to say exactly where his brother had died and it would always be a mystery how his bones had ended up on the northern slopes of Hardskafi. Nothing would alter the fact that he had died in a blizzard at the age of eight. The discovery of his bones brought Erlendur no fresh insights. It was merely confirmation of what he already knew. After all these years, however, it did bring some small sense of closure, however paltry. What remained was a feeling of emptiness more desolate than anything he had ever experienced.