The Perfect Landscape Read Online Free PDF

looking forward to meeting her, and also Laufey and a few others who were all good friends at secondary school; it’s been a long time since the five of them have caught up. She makes up her mind to get in touch with them all as soon as possible. The next news item is about finding funds to build an earthquake museum at Kopasker, a small village in the north of the country. Hanna reaches out and turns the radio off. They’ve arrived.
    They park the car at the bottom of the hill, where the conifers appear dark green in the damp air. At the top, the old water tanks, which used to house the city’s hot water supply, now stand empty. On top of them sits an expensive restaurant with a shiny glass roof, whose glistening silver-gray reflects the pewter sky. A footpath of red gravel leads from the parking lot to the edge of the trees. The grass on either side is a yellowy gray after the winter, scattered with puddles. Steinn walks on ahead, his step calm and confident.
    When they reach the trees it’s like entering another world, timeless and free from the everyday laws of this gloomy January day. The noise of the city dies away. Steinn swings his ski pole; the red of his jacket and the silver stick stand out among the dark conifers. For a second Hanna sees in her mind’s eye the painting by Renaissance artist Paolo Uccello,
The Hunt in the Forest
. In this picture men are dressed in red and, either on foot or on horseback, are chasing hares in a dark forest. Some hold white spears, slicing the dark background like the white hunting dogs leaping across the canvas. Uccello’s aim in this painting was to demonstrate how convincingly he could portray perspective, which was a novelty at the time. Paolo Uccellocan also be translated as Paul the Bird as
uccello
is Italian for
bird
. He was given this nickname because he was fascinated by animals, and especially birds. Steinn is maybe a bit like that, Hanna muses, an eccentric withdrawn from his surroundings. She pictures him sitting at home poring over chemistry books.
    On they go in the half-light, barely able to make out anything before them. Under the trees the ground is covered in dry humus and littered with pine needles and cones; the lowest branches have lost their needles. The walk has a hypnotic effect on Hanna, as if she’s slipped into a dream and is following the rhythmical tapping of Steinn’s stick like a metronome. Then they hear a rustle and she sees something scuttle past in the dusk. Steinn stops suddenly and puts his finger to his lips. For a moment they both stand stock-still, hardly daring to breathe. Out of the gloom two white rabbits stare at them before turning tail, two gray shadows disappearing into the darkness. Unlike the scene in Paul the Bird’s painting, it is peaceful here, no hunters shouting and calling, no dogs barking or hooves pounding. Ahead is a hint of daylight, and the path opens out into a clearing.
    Here they are met by a memorial to a Norwegian entrepreneur in forestry, his bronze bust crowning a concrete pillar with an inscription on a metal plaque. But the statue is now unrecognizable. Someone has sprayed it with an array of colored paints so that the bronze can no longer be seen. The same is true of the pillar that, quite apart from damage arising from the damp and from moss, has also been liberally spray-painted; the inscription on the plaque is illegible. Broken glass lies scattered all around, as if some people got together with glass bottles for a smash party. There’s more broken glass on the statue itself.
    They stand there lost for words, taking in this excessive and incomprehensible vandalism, which isn’t sloppy and crude but somehow carefully executed. For a moment Steinn covers his eyes with his hand as if in pain.
    “We had a call about this this morning,” he says slowly. “We don’t know when it happened—someone who was out walking here over the weekend tipped us off.”
    “This is a job for the street-cleaning