Voices Read Online Free PDF Page B

back down on the edge of the bed. Eva Lind and Sindri Snaer were the fruit of a failed marriage that had come to an end more than two decades ago. Erlendur had had virtually no contact with his children after the divorce. His ex-wife, Halldóra, made sure of that. She felt betrayed and used the children to get her own back on him. Erlendur resigned himself to it. Ever since, he had regretted not insisting on his right to see his children. Regretted leaving it all up to Halldóra. When they grew older they tracked him down for themselves. His daughter was doing drugs by then. His son had already been through rehab for alcoholism.
He knew what Eva meant when she said she didn't know whether she could hold out. She had not been through treatment. Not been to any institution for help with her problem. She had tackled it herself, alone. Had always been reticent, spiteful and headstrong when the question of her lifestyle arose. Even when pregnant she had not managed to kick the drug habit. She made attempts, and gave up for a while, but lacked the resolve to quit for good. She tried, and Erlendur knew that she did so in complete earnestness, but it was too much and she always slipped back into her old ways. He didn't know what made her so dependent on drugs that she gave them priority over everything else in life. Didn't know the root of her self-destruction, but realised that in some way he had failed her. That in some way he was also to blame for the situation she was in.
*
He had sat by Eva's bedside at the hospital when she was in a coma, talking to her because the doctor said she might hear his voice and even sense his presence. A few days later she came round and the first thing she asked was to see her father. She was so frail that she could hardly speak. When he visited her she was asleep and he sat beside her and waited for her to wake up.
At last, when she opened her eyes and saw him, she seemed to try to smile, but she started to cry and he stood up and hugged her. She trembled in his arms and he tried to calm her, laid her back on the pillow and wiped the tears from her eyes.
'Where have you been all these long days?' he said, stroking her cheek and trying to give a smile of encouragement.
'Where's the baby?' she asked.
'Didn't they tell you what happened?'
'I lost it. They didn't tell me where it is. I haven't been allowed to see it. They don't trust me ...'
'I came very close to losing you.'
'Where is it?'
Erlendur had been to see the baby when it lay still-born in the operating theatre, a little girl who might have been given the name Audur.
'Do you want to see the baby?' he asked.
'Forgive me,' Eva said in a low voice.
'For what?'
The way I am. The way the baby...'
'I don't need to forgive the way you are, Eva. You shouldn't apologise for the way you are.'
'Yes, I should.'
'Your fate isn't in your own hands alone.'
'Would you...?'
Eva Lind stopped talking and lay on the bed, exhausted. Erlendur waited in silence while she mustered her strength. A long time passed. Eventually she looked at her father.
'Will you help me bury her?' she said.
'Of course,' he said.
'I want to see her,' Eva said.
'Do you think...?'
'I want to see her,' she repeated. 'Please. Let me see her.'
After a moment's hesitation Erlendur went to the mortuary and came back with the body of the girl whom in his mind he called Audur because he did not want her to be anonymous. He carried the body along the hospital corridor in a white towel because Eva was too weak to move, and he brought it to her in intensive care. Eva held her baby, looked at it, then looked up at her father.
'It's my fault,' she said in a low voice.
Erlendur thought she was about to burst into tears and was surprised when she did not. There was an air of calm about her that veiled the repulsion she felt towards herself.
'Feel free to have a cry,' he said.
Eva looked at him.
'I don't deserve to cry,' she said.
She sat in a wheelchair in Fossvogur cemetery and watched the vicar