The third painting had stayed longer in Charlotte's suitcase. She was already pregnant with Tryggvi when she hung it in the corner, away from the sun's rays. It depicted a market place crowded with carts and peddlers. A figure ran toward the viewer. On its white cloak was a red dot. Each painting was signed. Max.
The old woman plucked a loop of wool from her needle. She gestured with
her chin to a small table covered with an embroidered doily. On it was a glass of water that contained two scarlet, whitespotted mushrooms. The stalks of the umbrella-like heads were snow white.
"Berserker mushroom—found it this morning," she said.
Charlotte saw the gleam in her eye and wondered if she'd sliced a bit of it into her chamomile tea. Hadn't the mushrooms' muskarin and atropin inspired a hallucinatory courage in the Vikings, helped them rip out the hearts of their enemies? Trying occasionally to dose down her own dreams with the mushroom, Charlotte had created bloody nightmares instead. In the kitchen she reached for her apron and tied it so that the threadbare section was on her side, not over her belly.
Clicking her needles, the old woman sang.
Covered with old and gray moss
Grass and green heather grow into our wound.
The Deepest Landscape Painting
That summer Charlotte had wanted to get back on the boat and return to the ruins of Berlin. But she'd smiled tightly at the other women, then boarded the dusty little bus.
The bus ascended hills, crossed heaths, then ground its gears descending back onto the sands. Charlotte saw how the rain transformed the moss from gray to green. All around her the women chattered in German.
Farmers in Iceland seek strong women who can cook and do farm work.
Like meat needs salt, she'd told her mother. It had to be better than Berlin.
As the bus rattled along the gravel road, she looked for faces in the moss and in the wildflower clusters. The tundra painter had taught her to look for human beings in the grazing land that fingered its way up the side of the mountain, to imagine the shape of bodies in the brown and gold lichens, to see profiles carved in the rock. In her suitcase, she had his book, picked up at a bookstall on the Potsdamer Platz. His wildflowers, lichens, rocks, moss-covered lava made her hungry for this place.
She touched the card in her pocket. It bore the name of her farm, Dark Castle.
The driver stopped.
Sheep's Hollow.
Silence. Each woman checked her card. The dust billowed through the half-open windows, and Charlotte felt the grit in her teeth. Finally, a short, broad-shouldered woman waved her card.
"It's me."
Applause as if the woman had set a new record on the pole vault. From her window, Charlotte watched the lone figure pick her way along the path.
Gisela sat next to her. She was a brunette from Berlin with curls parted and pinned back. Her face dimpled when she laughed in a way that men probably liked. She was from the Wedding district of Berlin, the place where Max had looked for trouble and found it.
"Mine's called Stony Hill," Gisela confided.
On the ship, crossing the Atlantic, the two women had walked the deck together, holding their coat collars high at the neck against the North Atlantic wind. Each day as the ship drew closer to the island, Gisela added details to the hair color of her future five children.
As the bus bounced over the ruts in the road, Gisela leaned against her.
"Remember what I said about a husband?"
Charlotte registered mock surprise.
"I want one," Gisela said. Chirpy as a shopper, she recited her list.
"And three boys and two girls, just like my mother had."
Would it work for her too? Could new humans replace old ones? Charlotte was still pondering these things when the driver stopped and called out the label for her fate.
Dark Castle.
Gisela followed her out.
"You'll write me?" she asked, lips trembling.
Charlotte nodded, watched her only friend on the island disappear inside the bus.
Mountains, meadows, and ocean rolled toward the horizon. The same wind that flattened the grass tingled on Charlotte's cheekbones. Rocks with jagged features, like those of bigboned people, studded the foot of the hillside.
She ran her hands over her hips and looked up at this new sky. She was thirty-nine years old and still alive, a solitary figure in the deepest landscape painting she'd ever seen.
Up ahead, high on the hillside against a gloomy purple mountain, stood a liver-colored farmhouse. She picked up her suitcase, bulging with sweaters knitted by her mother, and walked up the gravel road. Stones stung her feet through the thin shoe soles. As she drew closer to the farmhouse, a small dog with a curled tail burst out of the bright green grass.
At the window, a pale figure lifted a curtain. The door opened, and a man with thick brown hair appeared on the steps. He extended a calloused hand and rolled out the r's of his name.
"Ragnar."
She said her own name slowly, wishing she could explain how her mother had named her after Sophie Charlotte, the elector of Brandenburg's beloved wife who had died young. Usually, the explanation helped her get to know people. But her dictionary was at the bottom of her suitcase.
The dark hallway smelled of sheep's wool and rain gear. She slipped off her gritty shoes and left them next to the pile of rubber footwear. Above the door to the kitchen hung a driftwood painting of a three-gabled farmhouse. Ragnar padded across the floorboards in his socks. Looking too big to be indoors, he said things she barely understood.
Wife's dead. No children.
In the awkward silence, she heard the rub of cloth against the wooden wall. A third person was breathing in the dark hall.
"My mother," Ragnar said.
An old woman with narrow shoulders offered, and quickly withdrew, a slender parched hand, then moved along the wall into the kitchen, her sheepskin shoes swishing over the floor. Ragnar picked up Charlotte's suitcase. She followed him into a small bedroom, dark but for the light from the small window. A chest of drawers stood against the window. A child-sized chair separated the two beds. On it stood a candle next to a book. Egilssaga. She and the old woman would take turns undressing in the narrow space.
When he set the suitcase down on the bed, the comforter made a sound like a person exhaling. At the foot of the bed was a wooden box full of uncarded wool. A carved plank bore words about God's eternal embrace. It hung on the paneled wall above the bed. Making rocking gestures with his arms, Ragnar explained.
From my father's boat. Dead.
Everyone but the three of them seemed to be dead.
The floorboards were splintered and the window casement warped. Above the old woman's bed hung a small oil painting of a farm with a chlorophyll-green home field, next to it a photograph of an ancestor with a stiff priest's ruff.
"Coffee?" he asked.
When she nodded, he looked relieved. Through the thin walls,