On the day of her
departure she woke up in the early hours, as she had every morning
since her escape from the glacier, feeling cold and empty, as if
something inside her had died.
She had neither heard
nor seen anything of Carr or his henchmen since her conversation
with him on board the plane in the last year of the old millennium,
but there were times when she was assailed by an overwhelming
conviction that she was being followed or that someone had been in
the flat or rifled through her files at the office. That she was
not alone. She had no idea who Carr and Miller were, or what
organisation they belonged to, and made no attempt to find out.
Indeed she was careful to do nothing that could risk connecting her
to the plane on the glacier.
An intense paranoia
filled her. She was convinced now that there had been a link
between her turning on the light in her flat the morning she woke
up on the sofa and the phone call she had received with the warning
not to cross Carr. Someone, or more than one person, had been
watching her windows and knew when she woke up and switched on the
light. Sometimes when she entered her flat she sensed a presence
that made her profoundly uneasy. Yet she never received another
phone call.
She adopted a new way
of life. She never left the city and abandoned foreign travel. Any
relationships were short-lived, never intended to last. She did not
have children. Not even among her tiny circle of friends did she
confide in anyone about what had really happened on the glacier.
Shortly after the millennium her father died, going to his grave
with nothing but the vaguest idea of what his children had gone
through. As she had planned, she left the ministry to open her own
practice, and led a quiet, solitary sort of existence, though she
and Elías remained close and Júlíus was a frequent visitor. They
spent hours discussing what had happened on the glacier, but never
more than that.
Hardly a day passed
when she did not recall the camp, the plane, the swastika, the
bodies in the tent, Ratoff, or the secret knowledge she possessed.
The years passed, but however hard she tried she could not quite
forget the island called Borne off the southern tip of Argentina.
She tried to block the memory, to convince herself that the matter
was over and had nothing to do with her, but it had its claws in
her and in fact it developed into a mild obsession as time went by.
As if the affair were somehow unfinished.
What convinced her
was the thought that Steve had died because of this knowledge. He
was in her mind every day and she relived his death over and over
again, during her waking hours or in her dreams. He had left a void
in her life that would never heal, nor would she have it any other
way. But if the matter ended like this, he would have lost his life
for nothing, and that she found unbearable.
It was a ship’s
captain who first made her consider the possibility seriously. He
engaged her to handle his divorce and a sort of friendship had
developed between them. He was captain of a merchant vessel and
once confided in Kristín that he had helped a young Icelandic woman
flee her husband with her two children by smuggling her from
Portugal to Iceland. Kristín could have chosen an easier way and
flown to Argentina via Spain or Italy, but she did not dare. Did
not dare risk the surveillance cameras, the passenger lists,
passport control.
Even after taking the
decision she did nothing precipitate. She tried as far as possible
always to use cash, never credit or debit cards for transactions,
to avoid places with CCTV, including some streets in the city
centre where the police had installed cameras, and never used the
internet at home. She fled from every aspect of the surveillance
society.
She went about it as
if she were organising a long holiday. The island existed, after
all; she had located it with the help of the British Royal
Geographical Society, whose website she visited at the National
Library. Their information about the island was mainly of
geographical interest, although it included a brief description of
its history and the coordinates for its exact location. She
considered flying to South America via Europe, or travelling there
via a variety of other routes but none of these had the same
attraction of invisibility.
When her friend the
captain told her one day that he would shortly be sailing to Mexico
to deliver an Icelandic trawler to its new owner, she decided to
enlist his help. Initially he refused because she would not explain
why she wanted to stow away on board his ship and slip ashore
unseen in Mexico. The captain was not unaccustomed to taking
passengers – there were always people who were afraid of flying and
preferred to sail on merchant ships – but he wanted nothing to do
with anything illegal.
She never knew why he
changed his mind but one day he came and agreed he would help her,
if that was what she wanted. She had asked it as a favour of a
friend, he said, and who was he to deny her?
Until the very last
minute she dithered about whether to go. In the end, however, she
reasoned that she was approaching forty and would never make the
trip if not now. The only person she told was her brother Elías.
She did not want to get Júlíus involved, the way she had with
Steve. She could manage her brother, but Júlíus was another
matter.
The ship sailed early
in the morning. She stood on deck, watching the land sink below the
horizon. It was summer and her face was warmed by the sun which had
already been up for several hours. The voyage was uneventful and
when the ship docked at a small town on the east coast of Mexico,
she managed to slip ashore without passing through customs or
immigration. She had enjoyed long conversations with the captain
during the voyage and they parted on good terms.
She selected a
reliable car, paid for it in cash, and drove south through Mexico
like any other tourist, sleeping at motels, seeing the historical
sites, lingering here and there to enjoy the scenery, to savour the
national cuisine and hospitality. During the journey she felt more
relaxed than she had allowed herself to feel in a long time. It was
delightful to be abroad again.
Several days later
she reached Buenos Aires. Evening had fallen by the time she drove
into the capital city. She found herself a room at a reasonably
priced hotel and purchased a detailed road map on which she marked
out the route south. She was confident that she was not being
followed, that she had managed to make it to Argentina
unremarked.
Two days later she
set off from Buenos Aires. She sold the car and made the first leg
of the journey by plane, landing that afternoon at Comodoro
Rívadavía in the middle of Patagonia. There she bought a bus ticket
and calculated that the journey to the south of the country would
take a further three days. The route ran for the most part along
the coast. She stayed the first night at Caleta Olivia, travelling
the next day through the farming settlements of Fitzroy and
Jaramillo, from where she headed due south across the Rio Chico and
by ferry across the Magellan Straits to the town of San Sebastián
in Puerto Harberton, a town of about 15,000 people just north of
the Chilean border.
She arrived towards
evening and took a room at a small hotel. The following day she
walked down to the harbour and found a sailor who spoke a little
English. He was in his fifties, bearded and toothless, and reminded
her pleasingly of an Icelandic fisherman. She asked about the
island and he nodded, waving his arm in a wide arc. It was a long
way out, she gathered. They negotiated a fee and agreed to meet
early next morning to sail out to the island.
She spent the day
strolling around the town, browsing the shops and the market.
Noticing other tourists, she did her best to mingle. Although it
was out of season, she had met countless travellers on her journey
through the country; no matter how small the backwater, they could
be found examining wares and lounging in cafés.
The fisherman was
waiting for her down by the harbour next morning and as they sailed
out in his little boat the day was perfectly calm, the air warm on
her skin. She paid half the fare in advance; he would get the rest
when they returned, as they had agreed. She tried to question him
about the island’s history but he seemed completely uninterested,
saying dismissively that he knew nothing about Borne, that there
was nothing to know.
They chugged along at
a comfortable speed past rocks, islets and archipelagos for about
five hours until finally he nudged her and pointed ahead. She
watched the island rise out of the sea, surrounded by a few smaller
skerries. It reminded Kristín of the rugged Icelandic island of
Drangey, not as high but at least three times larger, an
inhospitable rock supporting some vegetation but no bird life at
all. It was enveloped by silence. They sailed round the island
until the fisherman thought he spied a place where Kristín could
clamber up the cliffs. He intended to stay behind in the
boat.
In the event it was
not a difficult climb; a gravel path led from the beach to the
cliffs where there was a fairly easy incline to the top. On
reaching the plateau, she saw some ruins in the middle of the
island and headed that way. As she got closer she observed
tumbledown wooden walls, a beaten-earth floor and a doorstep. She
made a circuit of them, noticing something that reminded her of an
old kitchen hearth. The island had indeed been occupied in earlier
centuries.
She walked among the
remains, searching carefully for any clue that might support her
suspicions. But in vain; there was simply nothing there. She was
surprised to find that this prompted no sense of disappointment in
her, despite the journey halfway round the world. Afterwards she
walked the length of the island to the brink of the precipice and
gazed at the waves breaking on the cliffs while the sea breeze
caressed her face. For the first time in years she felt a weight
lift off her chest.
Turning round, she
retraced her steps through the ruins. A short distance beyond them,
on the way back to the waiting boat, she tripped on a rock lying
buried in the long grass. She glanced down and was about to carry
on – the fisherman would be wanting to leave – when she noticed its
shape. It was no ordinary rock. It was thin, about half a metre
long, square at the bottom and rounded at the top. She looked down
at it in puzzlement, before crouching and trying to turn it over.
It was heavy but with some effort she managed to raise it on its
edge, then let it fall back on to the other side.
Squinting down at the
stone, and rubbing at the accumulated dirt with her finger, she
made out a crude carved inscription:
BLONDI
1947