The Hitchhiker Read online

  Believe it or not, I was convinced this holiday would save my marriage.

  Tiddo and his wife, Isa, have drifted apart. They don’t make love anymore. Tiddo even finds their thirteen-year-old son, Jonathan, a stranger—quiet, distant and forever drawing monstrous creatures in his sketchbook.

  Desperate to keep his family together, Tiddo plans a holiday to Iceland, travelling the tourist circuit in a rented campervan. On their trip, they pick up a hitchhiker named Svein, who is tall and handsome, and covered in tattoos of ancient runes. When Svein offers to guide them off the beaten track, Tiddo is conflicted. Does Svein pose a threat or offer salvation?

  This psychological thriller unfolds like a fever dream amid the breathtaking beauty of Iceland, but the environment turns out to be as unforgiving as each decision Tiddo makes. Taut and compelling, The Hitchhiker is the story of a man who goes to great lengths to save what he has already lost.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  PART I THE RING ROAD

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  PART II THE HIGHLANDS

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  No one understands the heart. Least of all the bleak mountains which rule like heathen gods over this narrow strip of shore by the ice-cold sea-green fjord and are enveloped in mists or whirling storms.

  Halldór Laxness, Salka Valka

  (Translated by F. H. Lyon)

  The black country has been shorn bare by wind and a thousand winters. There is nothing to entice living creatures; even the dead rocks wish they were somewhere else. Astronauts spent a week there practising for the first moon landing. It’s easy to believe the moon looks like Askja, dusty and lifeless. But only because you haven’t seen Öskjuvatn yet, the crater lake, hidden by a ridge and so magnificent the pure thrill of it gives you a completely different idea: that nothing is impossible, not even consolation or redemption in a desert of ash. Öskjuvatn, grey as lead. But if the clouds open, you’ve suddenly got the sky at your feet. And the most unimaginable thing is this: there’s a road, a two-hundred-kilometre track that has you convinced after just the first kilometre that an army of malicious but meticulous demons and trolls maintain it at exactly this level of disaster, assuming the road is even visible and not covered by snow or transformed into a rushing nameless river.

  That’s what the hitchhiker told me about Askja. It sounded kind of pompous, as if he was reciting a passage from an old-fashioned travel guide, but he said it with enthusiasm, without faltering, no crib notes anywhere.

  1

  IT WAS GOING to be the trip of a lifetime: touring Iceland in a campervan. As long as I’ve known Isa, she’s wanted to go there. Before, we couldn’t afford it; after Jonathan’s birth we found a short holiday at home in the Netherlands expensive enough. Now we had the money, Jonathan was old enough and I…well, I had my reasons too. Believe it or not, I was convinced this holiday would save my marriage.

  The day of our departure I dropped by to see my mother. She’d called the night before to tell me there was something she wanted to give me before we left. ‘You don’t have to give me anything,’ I said. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she replied. ‘But it’ll be a shame if you can’t make it.’ It was a half-hour drive to the town I grew up in, and our flight to Keflavík didn’t leave till five, so I told her I’d be able to.

  I pulled up in front of my mother’s around ten. She wasn’t sitting in her regular spot, her reading chair by the window. That meant she was in the kitchen making coffee.

  My visits to my mother follow a fixed pattern. She always gives me a cup of coffee with a splash of milk in it; she knows I don’t take sugar. The fact that I’ve been drinking it black, without any greasy milk, for a few years now is something I once, for no good reason, kept quiet about, and once you’ve started keeping something quiet it’s not easy to suddenly bring it up.

  Over the coffee, she’ll ask about Jonathan first. When is he going to come visit again? She’ll let my evasive answer go. She’ll ask about Isa, always in relation to her work. ‘Is Isa doing well… at work?’ That’s because Isa is more or less the same thing as her work. Nothing like me: I work at an office, just three days a week. I am not my job. In fact, I’m everything but my job. If somebody asks me how I’m going, I usually change the subject to Isa in the same sentence, how she’s going. She’s a molecular biologist and does research into protein synthesis. She used to research the cultivation of cyanobacteria for biofuel. Yes, my wife is someone you can be proud of. But just because I don’t have such high demands and only want a simple life with my family, it doesn’t mean I don’t have any dreams or don’t know what it is to be passionate about something—which is what people often think when you’ve settled for spending a few days a week in an office. I just don’t push as hard and keep things to myself.

  All the neighbours’ windows were closed, no bikes out the front, no toys in the yard. In July this place was like a ghost town, strangely empty and as sterile as a film set that will be repopulated after the tea break by actors who look like your neighbours. The house keys were in my pocket because this was the house I grew up in.

  ‘Hello!’ I called, not loudly, because it had never been a house people shouted in. As always, I took off my shoes on the doormat and walked through to the living room. I couldn’t smell any coffee, which struck me as strange. I didn’t find my mother in either the living room or the kitchen. She would sometimes have a nap around noon, but quarter past ten seemed early—and she was expecting me. Still, she was old enough to dispense with the usual routine of my visits if she felt like it. If she was resting, I’d let her rest and take off again.

  ‘Hello, Mum!’ I called. It echoed through the kitchen. A shock of recognition: it sounded just like it used to when I got home from school, came in through the back door, took off my shoes and called out. The synthetic carpet under my feet felt familiar as I walked through the living room in my socks.

  I mustn’t have been paying attention a minute ago: I now saw a large brown envelope on the coffee table, ‘For Tiddo and Isa’ written on it in my mother’s hand—strong, forward-sloping letters. I picked up the envelope, which felt heavy, tore it open and pulled out a wad of money. Fifty-euro notes. There was a postcard, too, with a photo of a spouting geyser. Where did she get that from? Written on the back: ‘Iceland is very expensive. Make the trip memorable. The journey of your life! Love, Mum.’ I counted the notes—twenty—slipped the money back in and walked to the hall, holding the envelope.

  At the bottom of the stairs I called out once more. ‘Mum!’ No reaction. She’d gone out to do some shopping, of course. She’d run out of coffee and only just noticed. I went back to the living room and sat down on the couch across from her reading chair. I hated it when she gave me money, as it always felt like being paid for my love and dedication. Paid in advance, not to put too fine a point on it. I loved my mother because I knew that considerations like that would never enter her head. She is a good person.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that, Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, son, just let me.’

  ‘It’s a lot of money.’

  ‘As long as I can still do it, I like to.’

  I pulled the notes back out of the envelope, flicked through them and reread the postcard. The journey of your life.

  ‘Where’s this card from, Mum?’

  I looked at the empty chair.

  ‘Sometimes I think,’ I went on, ‘that you’ve already been to all the places I’m going to, secretly, to make sure it’s fun and safe and not too expensive.’

  I put the money away again and fiddled with the envelope a little. Where had she got to? I couldn’t stay much longer. I had to help Isa with the suitcases, get Jonathan moving. A man can’t save his marriage with trips alone; you have to do little chores too. I went to check my phone to see if they’d tried to contact me, or to call Isa to tell her I was waiting for my mother, but the moment I touched my pocket I remembered I’d left it on the charger at home.

  My mother had completely forgotten I was coming, of course. The envelope had been on the table since yesterday and she’d gone out for a coffee with a neighbour or an old lady from church. No, I really couldn’t wait any longer. I’d just have to leave a message. I couldn’t see any paper anywhere, but I could always write on the back of the envelope. I started searching for a pen or a pencil: on the side tables and the windowsills first. Then I opened the cupboard that I knew was full of plates, cups and bowls. Finally, the kitchen drawers
. Nothing.

  ‘I’ll call you, Mum,’ I said out loud to drive my guilt feelings back into their cage. ‘This afternoon.’

  A few moments later I was driving down the road.

  When I got home there were two cases next to each other in the hall. Isa was coming downstairs with the third.

  ‘Yours weighs 12.5 kilos,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know if you’ve packed everything.’

  I breathed in, cleared my throat, breathed again. She was already hurrying back upstairs. Halfway up, she turned.

  ‘You should have a good think about which shoes you want to take. We’re going to wear our hiking boots. That’ll save space in the suitcase.’

  ‘Yes, definitely, good idea,’ I said. She was already upstairs.

  ‘Jonathan,’ I heard from above. ‘Jona!’ I couldn’t make out the rest of what Isa said to him. A little later Jonathan came downstairs with a gloomy expression. I was still in the hall, trying to think about shoes but thinking about the envelope instead.

  ‘Hiya,’ I said.

  He started rummaging through the coats on the hooks.

  ‘And your rain pants, Jonathan, have you got them too?’ Isa called down. ‘Oh, Tiddo, how was your mother?’

  Jonathan was standing there with a crumpled pair of rain pants pinched between his thumb and index finger, looking at them as if he’d found a dead fish. I put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Is she okay?’ Isa called. She must have thought I hadn’t heard her. Her face appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘No?’

  ‘Yes. She’s fine. Getting a bit old. A little forgetful. That’s all.’

  I was holding the envelope behind my back. It’s extraordinary: as observant as Isa is, it doesn’t occur to her that someone who’s holding something behind their back might have something to hide.

  2

  KILOMETRES ABOVE THE bad weather, we flew through the kind of blue sky that gets boring so fast on plane trips. Jonathan was scratching away in his sketchbook. People often praise him for his drawings or, no, not so much for the drawings themselves as for drawing instead of gaming or scrolling on a smartphone. I don’t see it that way. It’s not difficult to appreciate the unusual and so-called interesting behaviour of children you don’t have anything to do with. When it comes to your own son, you’d prefer him to act more or less the same as other boys his age, so he doesn’t get a reputation for being weird and end up socially isolated. I couldn’t see what he was drawing now; usually it was monsters and fantasy creatures.

  Isa had closed her eyes. I was in the aisle seat and browsing through a guidebook without taking any of it in. Instead I kept thinking about the brown envelope I had slipped deep into my suitcase. My mother knew very well that things hadn’t been going well between Isa and me these past few years. I’d never told her, but it was obvious she could tell. Isa was slipping away from me or, rather, what we used to have together was slipping away from me. She herself was, in her modest way, still glorious.

  The most beautiful thing about Isa is her eyes. Not just her greyish-blue eyes by themselves, but her eyelids too, her eyelashes and her eyebrows, which are like soft, perfectly straight brushstrokes that make her cool irises as melancholy as a Raphael Madonna’s. Your appreciation of beauty develops as you age, but for me Isa has stayed just as beautiful as before—‘before’ being more or less the period before Jonathan was born. Back then, like all young couples we made love almost every day, half dazed and without the slightest inkling it would ever end. After twenty years you really don’t need to lose yourself in each other anymore. It wouldn’t even be possible, all that groping, stroking and licking the whole day long, endlessly digging into each other’s past, feasting on each other’s soul. It takes oceans of time and, though I can look back on it wistfully, it’s really not necessary anymore. The question is, can you still get to know each other better, or is your relationship defined after a certain number of years not so much by what you share as by what you’ve kept secret?

  I didn’t need to go back to before. I wanted to know Isa’s new secrets. I would forgive every one of her lapses with a browbeaten university colleague. How delicious that would be! I yearned for something I could magnanimously forgive her for. Not that I wouldn’t give anything for a single stroke, lick or grope, one minute of blissfully digging into her soul. I would even kill for a fun conversation or a hearty laugh. Isa is the love of my life and you only get one of them. What my mother wanted to tell me was written on that card in no uncertain terms: don’t give up, hold tight to what you’ve got.

  Fine, Mum, if you say so.

  Oh, and Tiddo, dear…

  Yes, Mum?

  Spend that money. Iceland is terribly expensive. And then the three of you can think of me for a moment.

  I already think of you, even without money.

  The pilot announced that we’d started our descent to Keflavík. We dived out of the deceptive sunlight and into a grey bank of cloud, on our way to a strange world.

  3

  I HAD NEVER driven a campervan before. My God, what a monster! It looked brand new as well. I now had to steer this snow-white carriage around the country and deliver it back undamaged—which seemed like an impossible task. To be honest, I would have been glad to see a few scratches here and there before I started.

  The girl from the rental company explained everything in lilting English while I stared at her beautiful but rather large face—she looked like a radiant milkmaid in the style of Vermeer. Her eyes were as blue as a sunlit fjord and her accent made everything she said sound like a poem. Isa is more beautiful, I thought, because to play it safe I always made sure to think that when looking at women, their faces and eyes.

  I nodded at everything the girl said, more to get it over with than to show that I’d understood it all. I didn’t need to commit it to memory either, because I had Isa, who never forgot anything; I could count on that. She asked a few questions about the fuel consumption, the gas and the electricity. The girl gave her the keys—either this was a highly emancipated country or Isa had once again given the impression of being smarter and more competent. The girl hadn’t looked me in the eyes once, and I wondered if this was an Icelandic custom.

  Jonathan stood there the whole time as if waiting for a bus. His dark hair was getting long and it swept down over his eyebrows. Cool hair atop a childish face with an endearingly vague jaw. Nice enough looking, but not especially handsome, though boys his age hardly ever are. Still, nice. The kind of boy you look at but don’t see. You have hopes of course, constantly, all kinds of hopes. You have expectations you never express. Jonathan was a tad peculiar, that was undeniable. Sometimes I think I’ve fathomed strangers like the girl from the car-rental company better in five minutes than my own son in thirteen years. He’s slowly becoming a stranger to me. Time is moving us towards estrangement and nothing can be done about it, not by me and not by him. I walked over to him, wrapped an arm around his neck and pulled his head towards me. Something midway between an attack and an embrace, as if I couldn’t choose. He didn’t let out a peep, just submitted.

  ‘Who is this stranger?’ I asked. ‘What’s he doing here? Ha-ha-ha.’

  It wasn’t a laugh; I actually said ‘ha-ha-ha’. You can try to explain why you do things like that but, God, you’d make your life a misery. You do something stupid, and then you keep it up to avoid losing face even more. That’s it, isn’t it? So I held on tight. Jonathan’s hair tickling under my arm and making me realise I’d left my jumper at the office. I shouldn’t have left it there. Iceland knows no mercy for people who forget their jumpers. I wondered if Isa would find it strange if I phoned my mother right away.

  ‘Will you drive first?’ Isa asked.

  ‘Ergh, ergh,’ Jonathan groaned in my headlock.

  ‘Tiddo!’

  When Isa says my name it often makes me feel like a child, rarely a man, never a lover. I let go of Jonathan, who stumbled forwards, dropping his sketchbook.

  ‘Sure, I’ll drive, no problem.’

  I gave Jonathan a thump on the shoulder by way of reconciliation. He picked up the sketchbook and put it in his coat pocket. My breathing was fast and shallow, as if I was at risk of suffocating. Maybe the air was thinner at a latitude of sixty-six degrees north.