Diary I
June 30, 1910. Today I graduated from high school. After the ceremony at the school, there was a coffee party on the lawn in front of the new house my father is having built on his lot next to Laufástún. Father gave me this book and suggested I should keep a diary. “There may come a time in your life when such a thing will prove very useful,” he said in the speech he gave in my honor. I shall try and follow his advice, but I stared at this sheet for a long time before putting pen to paper. How am I going to approach this task? Each written word is there to stay and I must, therefore, think and plan the sentences well. Perhaps that is the first lesson he hopes this task will teach me…
He no longer felt pain.
Forty-eight-year-old Jacob Kieler Junior sat, legs outstretched, on the floor in the main parlor of Birkihlíd, leaning crookedly against the doorpost that led to the lobby. The wound in his chest bled incessantly. His gray knitted vest was soaked with the blood that poured down his body, forming a pool on the wood floor beneath him. When Jacob moved the hand he was leaning on and it landed in the blood, he looked down in surprise. His breath rattled, and bloodstained froth was forming at the corners of his mouth. His expressionless face had become white and his gray eyes were half-closed.
He had fallen off the chair when the shot hit him. The pain had been unbearable at first, but as he crawled toward the telephone in the lobby to call for help, he became numb and lost the power of his legs.
The parlor, where Jacob now found himself, was a large room, more than a thousand square feet, with a high ceiling. In the middle of the floor to his left were three large, heavy, leather settees; to his right a bay with tall French windows and long, heavy drapes. He examined the German chandelier as if seeing it for the first time. There were twenty-eight bulbs in all. They were arranged in three wreaths, sixteen at the bottom, then eight, and finally four at the top. The light from each bulb was faint, allowing the chandelier’s skillful craftsmanship and gilding to show through.
He noticed the open office door at the far end of the parlor. The light had not been switched on in there, and intricate silhouettes appeared on the walls where the light from streetlamps and the night’s full moon shone through the windows between bare tree branches. Jacob could see the outline of the large desk in the pale light; it stood there, resolute, waiting patiently for a worthy master.
Through the office windows, he caught a glimpse of the house next door. It was completely dark and utterly silent.
Birkihlíd stands on a narrow street in Reykjavik’s old district, to the east of Hljómskáli Park. Early in the century, well-to-do citizens had built their mansions at a polite distance from each other, but more recent residents had added garages and other extensions so now it was all much more cramped. The road, which had originally been intended for pedestrians and horse carriages, had been made into a one-way street with closely packed parking bays on both sides. Trees had been planted next to the houses soon after they were built; they had thrived, growing over many decades, and now towered above the streetlamps. In the summer their leafy crowns obscured the houses and gardens, but at this time of year they stood bare.
Jacob looked through the open door into the dining room. The light was on in there, and he saw eleven high-backed chairs around the large table in the center. The twelfth chair was in the parlor, lying on its side in the middle of the floor. This bothered him. The chair should be in its place. Jacob tried to get to his feet. He wanted to put the chair back where it should be, but he had no feeling below his chest, and the only movement he could manage was a feeble twitching of the shoulders. The large clock that hung from the dining room wall gave a single chime, indicating half past one.
There was a fireplace in the center of the wall to his left, its surround built of slabs of quarried dolerite, set into the wall. The hearth was large and deep, and the floor in front of it was tiled with the same stone as the surround. The fire had not been lit, and the ashes were cold.
A grand piano commanded the space to the left of the fireplace, while on the wall to the right was the portrait of his mother, painted when she was just eighteen years old. She sat straight as an arrow and gazed to one side, an inscrutable expression on her face. What would happen to this picture now, he suddenly wondered, but his thoughts came and went, and this one went without resolution.
He looked over his shoulder into the lobby. There was the telephone on the table, and a small calendar hanging on the wall above it. The year was 1973—Wednesday, January 17. Would anybody remember to change the date in the morning? No, it didn’t matter anymore.