“Just think. After everything else, it was simply their own obsessions that killed them,” Hrefna said. “They both got hooked on an idea that couldn’t be brought to reality—the railroad for Jacob Senior and the family museum for Jacob Junior.”
They were quiet for a while, and then Jóhann said, “But the path they chose is so far from being a solution. It’s always those left behind that have to saddle the burdens and the pain.”
“Yes,” Hrefna replied. “I remember something Kirsten said to me: ‘The person who killed my father also took a large part of my brother’s life.’ Jacob Senior definitely made many bad decisions in life, but the way he chose to end it was the worst one of all. I’m sure that Jacob Junior would have turned into a very different man had he enjoyed the guidance of his father.”
Jóhann excused himself; he needed a nice hot shower as well. Afterward he put on a clean pair of pajamas and a thick robe, and they sat in the kitchen long into the night, eating a bit of smoked salmon on toast and finishing the bottle of white wine. They talked about everything except police work.
“Let’s go to bed,” Hrefna finally said.
They crawled into bed and she snuggled up against him. “This is good, but let’s not do anything more tonight. Too much has happened today, and I need to think a bit about Matthías and dear Halli.”
They fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
Jóhann woke up toward morning to the sound of a radio from the apartment above. He looked at the clock. It was just after six; that’s weird, he thought, the state radio station didn’t start broadcasting until seven o’clock, but he could clearly hear the voice of a familiar reporter.
He looked over at Hrefna and decided to stop thinking about the radio. Nothing else that might be happening in the world could spoil this moment. He kissed her gently on the cheek and fell back asleep again.
Diary XIX
July 8, 1945. Matthías arrives tomorrow.
The story told here is a novel (as Merriam-Webster has it, “an invented prose narrative of considerable length”); no characters that appear in the story are real, nor are they based on real persons. The events as described in the novel have not actually happened.
In writing the story, however, I have consulted a large body of source material, both published and unpublished, and in a few instances have copied sentences unaltered into the narrative, for which indulgence I should like to thank their authors.
The original of the poem quoted in chapter 46 is by Adalsteinn Ásberg Sigurdsson, and was written specifically for this novel at the request of the author. It has not been published anywhere else prior to this.
Before parting with my reader, I should like to explain what lies behind the final paragraph of the novel. On the night before Tuesday, January 23, 1973, an unexpected volcanic eruption began in the Westman Islands, just off the south coast of Iceland, and what Jóhann hears indistinctly is the Icelandic State Radio reporter’s account of that event.