“Turning to look over his shoulder, the boy examines the store from roof to ground, at which point his eye alights on the sailors. One of them, a muscular fellow with a blond mustache, catches sight of him as well.
On the steps the minister brings his speech to a close.
And as the swallowtail flag of the new sovereign state of Iceland is hoisted up the lofty pole by the Government House and the Islands Falk fires a twenty-one-gun salute in its honor, the eyes of boy and sailor meet.”
“By the dim illumination of a reading lamp on a small desk, the boy makes out a chair and bookcase, artfully fitted into the space; walls lined with tight ranks of pictures featuring timeless motifs—Adonis and Pan, satyrs and shepherds, Saint Sebastian—and, at the edge of the pool of light, a divan bed containing a shadowy figure under a thick quilt.
The boy recognizes the man. One of his first gentlemen—the kindest of all until he met the foreigner—from whom he no longer demands payment. And who, after their last meeting, had gazed deep into his eyes and said with a catch in his voice:
‘Had we but another world and time
Our passionate embraces were no crime.’”
“The boy hasn’t set foot on the school grounds since he left as age twelve, at the bottom of his class.
Before he knows it, he is standing at the foot of the high wall along Laufasvegur, in the ‘invisible spot’ that used to be his refuge during break, where he could watch his fellow pupils from a safe distance—for it had dawned on him that the choice was his; that it was he who declined to take part in the other’s children’s games before they had a chance to leave him out. The day has yet to come when he will voluntarily mingle with his contemporaries.
Now here he is, back in his old lookout, and despite the appalling state of affairs, he is, as he was then, unmoved by the scenes unfolding before his eyes.”
“He had no inkling that when the pestilence took hold that Reykjavik would empty and convey the impression that nothing was happening at all; that the town would become an abandoned set that he, Mani Steinn, could envisage as the backdrop for whatever sensational plot he cared to devise, or, more accurately, for the kind of sinister events that in a film would be staged in this sort of village of the damned—for these days the real stories are being acted out behind closed doors. And they are darker than a youthful man can begin to imagine.”
