The Knock at Hvammur

For eleven years I worked nights at the small hospital in Hvammur, a fishing town on a fjord in the Westfjords with one road in and, in winter, sometimes no road out, and in those eleven years I learned that the dying do not fear the same things the living fear, they fear being alone in the last minute more than they fear the minute itself, and so I sat with a great many of them, more than I could count now, and most of what I know about the dark I learned sitting in those rooms with the lights turned low so the machines wouldn't glare.

There was a woman, Sólveig, whose husband Björn had drowned off the Deildarás in 1974, a storm that took three boats and eleven men in one night, and she used to tell me, in the years before her own death, that every year on the anniversary, the ninth of November, something knocked twice on her kitchen window at exactly ten past eleven, which was the hour the coastguard radio had gone silent that night, and she said it so plainly, over tea, the way you'd mention a neighbour's habit, that I never once thought to disbelieve her, not because I believed in ghosts, I want to be honest about that, I did not and do not, but because grief makes its own weather in a house and I had sat in enough houses to know the sound of it.

I want to say that this is a story about Sólveig, and for a long time I thought it was, I told it that way at dinners, the fisherman's widow and her yearly knock, a sad small story with a shape you could hold in your hand, and then Sólveig died in the spring of 2009, in the hospital, in my care, on a Tuesday with nothing remarkable about it, and I was glad, if that is the right word, that she went quietly, and I thought the story had ended with her, the way stories about the dead usually end when the person who told them is gone.

That November, the ninth, I was on the overnight shift, alone at the desk except for one patient down the hall, an old man named Tryggvi who was sleeping, and outside a wind was coming off the water the way it does in Hvammur in November, not loud so much as constant, a pressure against the glass rather than a sound, and I remember I was doing the medication log, I remember the exact page, because at ten past eleven something knocked twice on the window behind the nurses' station, which faces the fjord, which is on the second floor, which no one can reach from the outside without a ladder that was not there.

I did not go to the window immediately. I want that on record, because I think it matters, I think the true shape of fear is not the jump but the sitting still, the several seconds in which you do the arithmetic of a locked door and a fjord wind and a second-floor window and find that none of it adds up to an explanation, and you keep filling in the medication log because your hand has decided to keep moving even though the rest of you has not decided anything at all.

When I did go to the window there was nothing, of course there was nothing, there was the black water and the lights of two boats a long way out and my own reflection looking thinner than I feel, and I want to tell this honestly, so I will say that I do not think Björn Sólveigsson knocked on a hospital window thirty-five years after his boat went down, I am a rational woman, I nursed for thirty-five years and I have seen exactly how much of the body is machinery and how little is mystery, and yet I have also sat with enough of the dying to know that the last thing many of them ask for is not to be alone, and I have wondered, more times than I have told anyone, whether some sounds are not messages from the dead but the shape grief leaves behind after the person who carried it is gone, a groove worn into a place, a habit the house or the water or the year itself has picked up the way a person picks up a way of speaking from someone they loved.

I went back to Tryggvi's room after that, because it is what I do, because there is always another room, and he was awake, looking at the ceiling, and he said, without my asking, my wife used to say the ravens knock like that before someone dies, and I said nothing, because there was nothing useful to say, and I sat with him until his breathing changed at half past four, and he was the last patient I ever lost on a night shift before my own retirement, and I have not heard the knock since, not once, in the eleven Novembers since, though I still, every ninth of November, find some reason to be near a window at ten past eleven, not because I expect anything, but because I think some part of me is still keeping the watch that Sólveig kept, and that Björn, whoever or whatever he was, is owed at least that much continuity, someone listening, even if there is nothing left to hear.

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