Heaven and Hell Read Free Page B

Árni, he must be coming, Árni never fails.
    I need to get going, says Árni to Sesselja.
    Don’t let the sea swallow you up, she pleads. He laughs, puts on his boots and says, are you crazy, woman, I won’t drown while I’m wearing American boots!
    Many astounding things happen.
    Nowadays Árni hikes in dry clothing over wet heaths and meadows, over moors and streams, without getting his socks wet; this most resembles magic. Árni bought American boots just over a year ago, made a special trip down to the next fjord in order to do so, rowed out to a smack and bought the boots as well as chocolate bars for the kids and Sesselja, the youngest started to cry when he finished his chocolate and was completely inconsolable. What is sweet through and through often makes us sad in the end. American halibut fishermen come here in March or April, catch halibut off Greenland but outfit their ships from here, buy provisions and salt from us and pay cash, they sell us rifles, knives, biscuits, but nothing comes even halfway close to the rubber boots. American rubber boots are more expensive than an accordion, their price practically amounts to the yearly wage of a female farm laborer, they are so expensive that Árni needed months on end of denying himself brennivín and tobacco to save enough to afford them. But they’re worth it, Árni says, and wades through moors, he walks over streams but always has dry feet, trudges on, in wet and snow with bone-dry feet and the rubber boots certainly the best thing that has ever come from the American empire, they knock everything else sideways, and now you understand why it would have been unforgivable to drown in them. Unforgivable carelessness, Árni says, and kisses Sesselja and kisses the children and they kiss him, it’s a thousand times better to kiss and be kissed than to fish in open cockleshells far out upon the sea. His wife watches him leave, don’t let him drown, she whispers, doesn’t want the children to hear, doesn’t want to scare them; nor do we need to raise our voices when we pray for what is most important. She goes in, reads the letter again and now dares to have a better look at the words that have been crossed out, just something the boy was unhappy with, Árni had said, she peers at them for a long time and then manages to read them. There you are, Pétur says, because Árni has arrived in dry socks, they can go and bait the lines, will likely row out to fish tonight.

II
    It’s different sleeping on the open sea than here in the Vi llage, at the head of the fjord, between high mountains, actually at the bottom of the world, and the sea sometimes becomes so passive that we go down to the foreshore to stroke it, but it’s never passive beyond the huts, nothing seems able to ease the sea’s swell, not even the still nights, the star-strewn sky. The sea floods into the dreams of those who sleep on the open sea, their consciousness is filled with fish and drowned companions who wave sadly with fins in place of hands.
    Pétur always wakes up first. He is also the skipper and wakes when everything is still dark, barely after two a.m., but he never looks at the clock, and anyway it’s kept downstairs, under some rubbish. Pétur goes out, looks up at the sky, and the density of the darkness tells him the time. He fumbles for his clothing, the stove doesn’t burn at night and the cold of March has sifted its way through the thin walls. Andrea breathes heavily by his side, sleeps soundly, she is at the bottom of her dreams, Einar snores and clenches his fists in his sleep, Árni sleeps head-to-toe with him, the boy and Bárður do not move, the giant Gvendur so incredibly lucky to have his own bed yet it’s too small for him, you’re two sizes too big for the world, Bárður said once, and Gvendur became so sad that he needed to step away for a moment. Pétur puts on his sweater, his pants, totters down and out into the night, a slow, gentle breeze from the east and