Ashes to Dust (11 page)

‘That’s why I stopped going out
to sea,’ he said, smiling ruefully. ‘You can’t tread the
waves very well with a gammy leg.’ He slapped the top of his thigh.

‘And did you go straight from that to
working here?’ asked Thóra as they made their way up to the second
floor.

‘No, my dear,’ replied Kjartan,
stepping up one more stair with great effort. ‘I’ve done this and
that from the time I became a landlubber. I’ve only been here for five
years.’

‘And you can’t get an office on
the ground floor?’ she exclaimed, surprised that a partially handicapped
man should be forced to hobble up the stairs.

‘Yes, I’m sure I could,’
replied Kjartan. ‘But I don’t care about that. This bother with the
stairs is worth it.’ He opened the door to a small office. ‘I have
to have a sea view,’ he said, and pointed out of the window to where the
harbour and Heimaklettur Peak appeared. ‘I’m like a puffin. I
can’t take off unless I’ve got the sea in my sight.’ He waved
his hand around the room. ‘I’d get nothing done.’

It seemed to Thóra from the piles and
scraps of paper covering the room that the man’s accomplishments were
scarcely exemplary, despite his view of the sea. ‘I live by the sea, too,
and I know the feeling,’ she said, lifting a strange- looking device from
the nearest chair. ‘Can I put this somewhere else?’ she asked,
looking around to find a secure place. Although it looked like it might be a
piece of junk, it could just as easily have been valuable,
hence
its place on a chair rather than on the floor like most other things in the
office.

‘Just throw it on the floor,’
replied Kjartan as he took his own seat. Thóra placed the object down
carefully and sat in the chair. Bella pulled another chair over to
Kjartan’s desk and also sat, after removing a plastic bag that appeared
to contain some glasses or cups. She put the bag down quite roughly, and
Thóra had to wait until the glasses stopped clinking before she started
to speak. ‘I hope we’re not dragging you away from home to
meet us,’ she said. ‘Markus said that you would be here, but since
it’s Sunday I wasn’t sure.’

‘My dear, don’t worry about
it,’ replied Kjartan. ‘I needed to work this weekend. There’s
only the two of us here trying to catch up with everything because of the
reports that need to be done this week. Yet another ridiculous inspection is
about to begin.’

Thóra relaxed a bit, but at the same
time sympathized with the man, who certainly appeared to have a lot of work to
do, considering the condition of the office. ‘Okay, good,’ she
said, then turned to the matter at hand. ‘Markus has perhaps explained to
you my business, which is to say, I am assisting him in a case that appears to
be connected to the eruption,’ she began. ‘He told me that you knew
everything about everything.’ She added quickly, hopefully:
‘and everyone
… ?’

‘Is that what they say?’ said
Kjartan, with a pleased smirk. ‘I don’t know about that, but I am
familiar with this case of Markus’s.’ He did not take his eyes off
Thóra. ‘This is a small place. Every single person here knows
pretty much everything about the discovery of the bodies, both what’s
been written about in the papers and the aspects that aren’t being
discussed in public.’

Thóra smiled reluctantly. It was to be
expected. The Westmann Islands were inhabited by nearly four thousand people in
approximately thirteen square kilometres, so the story must have circulated
very quickly. Now she just had to hope that the same had occurred with the
story behind the corpses. ‘What exactly happened here in the Islands the
night of the eruption, and the day before Markus’s home was buried by
ash? Markus has told me what he remembers, but naturally he was just a
teenager, so he was sent to the mainland straight away that night. I understand
that he didn’t return to the Islands until some time had passed, and by
then his house was gone.’

‘I suppose you’re hoping to hear
that someone besides Markus went down into the basement?’ asked Kjartan.
He rocked back and forth on his office chair, which creaked.

‘I’m interested in knowing
whether it might be at all possible to rule out such a thing,’ answered
Thóra cautiously. She had to be careful not to let the old man turn the
meeting into an opportunity to satisfy his own curiosity. ‘If you could
perhaps explain to me how all this happened, and try to remember anything that
might be important for Markus’s case?’

‘I don’t know whether what I
remember could help Markus in any way.’ Kjartan leaned forward quickly.
His chair creaked again. ‘I would hope so — I like the boy. His
father and I were great friends. He was never called anything other than
“Krusi krona” here in the old days, since he used to go on and on
about money.’

Thóra smiled. It had been decades
since Markus had been a boy, but in the mind of this man he seemed to have
stayed at that age. ‘Still, it would be good to hear your side of the story.
One never knows what details will be revealed,’ she said. ‘How did
it start? As far as I know, the eruption began without warning.’

Now it was Kjartan’s turn to smile.
‘The eruption on Surtsey was a clear warning, in my opinion.’ He
reached out to the wall behind him and took down a framed map of the Islands.
The map was faded and dusty; Kjartan blew most of the dust off, then pointed at
Surtsey and ran his finger along the islands that lined up in a horseshoe from
Surtsey to Heimaey itself. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to realize
that the volcanic belt is located here. It isn’t a great distance,’
he said, placing his little finger on Heimaey and his thumb on Surtsey.
‘About thirteen, fourteen nautical miles.’
He
laid the map on the desk in front of him. ‘The Surtsey eruption began in
1963, and Eldfell blew in 1973. Ten years is a short time on the scale of
geological history.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Thóra.
‘But it’s still quite a long time for human beings. So the
inhabitants of the Westmann Islands stopped worrying about eruptions sometime
after the upheaval on Surtsey ended?’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’
said Kjartan. ‘Actually the only warning that people got was several
small earthquakes the evening before the eruption started. No one paid much
attention to them, since people thought the tremors came from the area
where they’d recently finished constructing the Búrfell power
plant. Now I’m no specialist in quakes, but I was told that one of the
three seismographs set up to record the movements of the earth’s
crust was broken, making it impossible to determine their epicentre with any
great precision. Not a single person put two and two together when they felt
the tremors.’ Kjartan paused. ‘There were actually various other
signs that no one paid any attention to,’ he added, avoiding her eyes.
‘A woman who lived on the edge of town, at the place where the eruption
began, was amazed to see that the elves were packing up and moving out two days
before it started.’

‘Elves?’ repeated Thóra
carefully. ‘I see.’ She decided to keep her opinion to herself
where elves were concerned.

‘Yes, and several days earlier, a
little girl told her parents that an eruption was about to happen at the place
where the fissure was formed.’ Kjartan shrugged. ‘There are other
stories like this, about unexplained events just prior to the disaster, but one
never knows how much store to set by them. An amateur painter, for example, did
a painting of the area showing the volcano and lava before these events
occurred. I actually believe that some people can somehow sense catastrophes
before they happen — just as animals seem to. However, I’m not one
of them.’

Thóra silently thanked God for that
small mercy. ‘Then the eruption started in the middle of the
night?’

‘Yes,’ said Kjartan, seemingly
relieved that Thóra didn’t want to talk about the supernatural.
‘The fissure opened at two o’clock in the morning and started
spewing lava. It wasn’t more than two hundred metres from the nearest farm,
so it’s a miracle that everyone was saved.’

‘People must have been
terrified,’ said Thóra. ‘I’ve never been near an
eruption, but the noise must have been incredible.’

‘It might be hard to believe, but there
wasn’t that much noise,’ he replied. ‘Most of those who lived
nearest the site were woken by the noise, but many people who lived farther
away had to be woken up. Police cars, fire engines and other vehicles drove
around the streets of the town with their sirens on, to warn people. A little
later the decision was made to evacuate the Islands, and people were asked to
go down to the harbour. Most people didn’t need to be told twice, and for
some reason most of them had flocked down there anyway. A few people, however,
had to be persuaded to leave.’

‘Didn’t they realize the danger
they were in?’ asked Thóra. ‘I’d have thought a
spouting volcano in your back garden might be pretty persuasive.’

‘Of course it was the middle of the
night, and people were still a bit sleepy. Some people thought there was a
fire; the first person to see the eruption called the police and reported one.
He was the farmer in Kirkjubasr, and the fissure went through his farm. Just
over two kilometres long, if you can imagine it.’ Kjartan appeared almost
proud that this hadn’t simply been a little tourist eruption. ‘Now,
others thought that some sort of war had broken out. The Cold War was in full
force by then - as was the Cod War, of course. And keep in mind that the
present-day landscape is deceiving and you can’t really tell what
happened from how it looks now.

The Eldfell cone didn’t exist at that
time - it was formed in the eruption. It was just flat land, and suddenly a row
of lava spouts appeared out of the earth. From a distance they could very well
have appeared to be burning buildings, or a big grass fire. And of course,
everyone reacts differently in a crisis
.‘
Kjartan smiled to himself, remembering. ’I ended up talking a woman out
of her house, which was very close to the fissure vent. She had got up and
started making pancakes! We had a hell of a job persuading her to put down her
pan
.‘

Thóra laughed. She noticed that Bella
was sitting there as if fossilized; she’d not moved a muscle since
sitting down. Thóra didn’t know whether that was good or bad;
either the girl was paying rapt attention, or she was miles away. ‘But in
the end you got everyone off the Islands?’

‘Yes, we did. We managed to get
everyone up and on the move in about an hour, and people made their own way
down to the harbour. The weather had been unfit for sailing the day before, so
the entire fishing fleet was in the port. Otherwise enormous carnage would have
occurred, since it was only a short time from the start of the eruption until
red-hot ash and debris started raining over the town. Tephra, it’s
called. That made everything much more dangerous.’ Kjartan leaned back.
‘Those of us on the rescue crews really had to run for it. It looked as
if the lava would close the harbour, since the fissure reached all the way down
to the seaward approach at Ystaklettur Cliff. We were in a really tight spot -
we needed to get five thousand people out of there. Not to mention the sheep
and chickens.’

‘Sheep and chickens?’ echoed
Thóra. ‘You sent farm animals to the mainland by boat? What about
the dogs and cats?’

She hadn’t thought about that.
Naturally there had been other living things on the island besides people.

‘Dog ownership was forbidden at the
time, but most of the cats were left behind. There was no chance to round them
all up. Most of them died as the eruption went on, from the toxic fumes. The
sheep, on the other hand, were sent immediately to the mainland on
helicopters from the American base, while the chickens were transported by
ship,’ replied Kjartan. He stopped suddenly. ‘Even though I watched
my own house disappear beneath the lava, the hardest part of the eruption was
when the cows from Kirkjubaer were led down to the harbour to be slaughtered.
It was horrific. The farm was the first building to disappear, since the
volcano was on that farmer’s land, and he was quite old and in no position
to start farming again. There was no other option, but it was pitiful. Natural
disasters affect animals terribly, and to make matters worse I think the cows
sensed that this trip down to the harbour would be their last.’ He
cleared his throat. ‘The farmer went to the mainland the next morning by
plane. Everything that he owned fitted into a little box that he held in his
lap the whole way.’

Thóra pushed the image out of her mind
- Markus’s box was enough for her. ‘In other words, everyone
abandoned the town?’ she asked.

‘Somewhere between two and three
hundred men remained behind to try to salvage whatever they could. Everyone
else - among them the women and children, of course - was sent to the mainland.
It was God’s mercy that the fleet was in the harbour. It would not have
gone so well if the boats had been out fishing, I can tell you that.’
Kjartan looked out for a moment over the harbour before turning back to the two
women. ‘People were piled up on board the boats and packed in everywhere
they could fit. The seasickness was awful. It’s no fun to be tossed about
on the waves, surrounded by the stink of fish, if you’re not used to it.
Not to mention if you’re sleep-deprived and suffering from shock.’
Bella obviously was listening, because out of the corner of her eye
Thóra saw her grimace. ‘Were there any other boats in the harbour
apart from the ones from the Westmann Islands?’ she asked.
‘Foreign vessels, for example?’