“I still need to learn that all weather serves its purpose,” said Johanna.
They stood there in silence until Thorolfur came out and told Johanna that the interview could resume. She took a deep breath and walked back in.
Thorolfur asked Grimur to look for Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant, and to summon him for the final interview. Then he went back into the classroom and sat opposite Johanna.
“We just got a message from Reykjavik,” he said. “We sent them a list of all the people who were on the island and compared it with a list of all the names that cropped up in their investigation into Bryngeir down south, and it turns out that your name pops up.”
“That’s not unlikely.”
“When did you first meet Bryngeir?”
“In my second year at high school.”
“How did you meet?”
Johanna thought a moment and finally said, “I wrote an essay about the Tale of Sarcastic Halli in the Flatey Book. I sometimes used the Flatey Book as assignment material in high school when I was lazy. I knew the material so well, having listened to my father’s countless lectures about it in five different languages over the years, so I could write pretty good essays on the subject quite fast. I got good grades for this assignment, and it appeared in the school magazine. Bryngeir was taking his finals that year and was really into Icelandic philology. He was reading the printed edition of the Flatey Book every night at the time and felt the urge to meet me after reading my essay. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it because I was engaged to Einar Fridriksson, whom I mentioned earlier. I’d met Einar in Copenhagen when I was fifteen years old and he was seventeen. We were good friends back then and later developed a crush on each other when we got a bit older. His parents were studying and working in Denmark. As I told you, they moved back to Iceland at the same time as my dad and I did. At that time Einar was in his last year at the high school, in the same class as Bryngeir.”
“You mentioned he died?”
“Yes, he died in a horrible accident.”
“What happened?”
“Einar was invited to join a weird students’ cultural club called the Jomsviking Society. It was a semi-secret club for snobby, vain young men. New members were initiated into the society through some ridiculous ritual, and there was a terrible accident at it and Einar died.”
“What kind of accident?”
“The initiation involved a reenactment of the execution of the Jomsvikings after their defeat in battle against Earl Hakon. The members acted out the scene from the saga, reciting the dialogue between the Jomsvikings and the earl’s men like in a play. The initiate had to kneel under a sword, which was then dropped. Naturally, he was supposed to move his head out of the way at the last second, just like Sveinn Buason did in the story. It was a perfectly harmless game, even though the sword was sharp and heavy. On this occasion, however, they were unusually drunk. Something went wrong, and the sword landed on Einar’s head.”
“Who was it that swung the sword?” Thorolfur asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”
Johanna stared at the policeman for a long moment without betraying any emotion and then finally said, “It was Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant in Patreksfjordur.”
Thorolfur broke into a numb smile. “Yes, it was Kjartan, and he was convicted of manslaughter and spent a few years in prison. It must have been a tough experience for him to meet you here again. The man who killed your boyfriend?”
Johanna sank into a long silence.
“Yes, it was difficult, but not in the way you imagine,” she finally said.
“In what way then?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I love long stories.”
“Very well then, you’ll get a long story. I was devastated when Einar died. He was a particularly bright and good young man. I’m not just saying that because of our teenage romance. Now that I’m an adult I can still recall our time together and our nightlong conversations. I’ve missed him every day since I lost him.”
Johanna fell into a long silence and didn’t continue with her story again until Thorolfur signaled her to do so with a faint nod.
“Anyway, there was a funeral and a police investigation and finally a court case, and Kjartan was convicted. It gave me some outlet to be able to hate him, and I was pleased when he got his prison sentence. Of course, my studies went down the drain during that period, but I still managed to drag myself to school most days. It was then that Bryngeir took it upon himself to console me. I found him to be more considerate than I’d initially expected, and I was vulnerable to someone who seemed to really care for me. I got little support from my father at that time. The only job he could get was teaching in a secondary school, which of course was a total waste of his education and talents, so he got depressed and drank a lot. Bryngeir passed his school exams and started studying literature at university in the fall. I continued in the high school and we became an item that winter. Then we rented a small basement apartment in the west of Reykjavik and started living together. It lasted for four years and almost finished me off before it ended.”
“How’s that?” Thorolfur asked.
“After I moved in with Bryngeir, he soon started to control my life every minute of the day. I had to be at school during school hours and focus on nothing else but my homework and domestic chores when he didn’t need me for sex or whatever else popped into his mind. I wasn’t allowed to meet anyone else unless he was present. I wasn’t allowed to hold any opinions unless he approved them. I couldn’t make any decision regarding my life without him having the last word on it. When I got my high school exams, he decided I should study medicine because I was good at studying and it would be a good source of income for the home once I’d become a brain surgeon. He never laid a finger on me, but he could play me like a musical instrument with his words. With just a few sentences he could make me feel like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and then with a few extra words he sent me crashing into hell again. The latter tended to be the norm, because he drank a lot, made a mess of our finances, and blamed me for every misfortune. All of a sudden the strings of the instrument snapped, and I had a nervous breakdown in the middle of a class in my second year at med school. I was taken to hospital and put into the psychiatric ward. An unusually perceptive psychologist realized what the situation was in our very first session and made me realize the relationship was life-threatening. I went straight home to Dad from the hospital. He shook himself out of his self-pity and started to take care of me. Bryngeir tried everything to win me back again, but I had regained my senses after four years of unconsciousness. Finally, after many weeks, he seemed to accept that our relationship was over and allowed me into the house to collect my clothes and textbooks. Naturally, I was slightly wary of him because he had threatened me with all kinds of awful things, but I was sure he wouldn’t lay a finger on me and thought that I was by now immune to him hurting me with his words, after my therapy with the psychologist. I therefore went to the meeting on my own. That was a big mistake.”
Johanna picked up a glass of water, lifted it to her lips, and held it there for a long moment without drinking. Finally, she took a small sip and carefully put the glass down again.
“When I’d finished packing my things into the case and was on my way out, Bryngeir asked me to hang on a moment and talk to him. He said he wanted to tell me about when he saw me for the first time. He’d read my article about the ambiguous Sarcastic Halli in the school magazine, as I’ve already mentioned. It was some kind of sexual turn-on for him to think that an eighteen-year-old high school girl could have written a text like that. He tracked me down at the school and decided on first sight that I had to be his. The fact that I had a boyfriend spoiled his plans a bit, but he found a way around it. He saw to it that Einar was invited to join the Jomsviking Society, and when the initiation meeting came up, he gave out loads of alcohol. So the kids were all extremely drunk by the time it was Einar’s turn to kneel under the sword. Bryngeir waited, prepared, behind his back, and just as Einar was about to dodge the swing of Kjartan’s sword, as was the tradition, Bryngeir kneed him and pushed him back under the blow. Einar died instantly, and the second half of the plan with me was easy once the boyfriend was no longer in the way. This is something Bryngeir just wanted to tell me for the fun of it, as a farewell gift, and even though I thought I was ready for anything, I couldn’t handle it. I tried going to the police, but I was just being hysterical in their opinion, and Bryngeir convinced them that I was just trying to wreak revenge on him for having broken up our relationship. It was his word against mine, and he was always very persuasive with everyone he was talking to. I should probably count myself lucky that I wasn’t charged and convicted for perjury. I can’t describe how I felt after that. Every single memory of our four-year relationship felt like a hideous rape. I went back to the psychologist again, and through years of therapy, he managed to teach me a way to free myself of the torment. The wound is obviously still there, but I don’t allow it to take a grip on me anymore and ruin my life.”