‘Don’t you dare say that you did this for me or my dad. When Dad says you should look after me, he means keeping other boys away!’ Now Júlía’s voice had risen to a yell, with all the power her lungs could put into it. ‘Why do you think we came here from Syria? To be somewhere people argue normally or go downtown with a placard if they’re pissed off about something. We fled Syria to escape from people like you. To get away from bombs.’

101

‘Come in,’ Anton’s father said. ‘Anton’s out so I’ll have a look in his room. Do you remember what the backpack looks like?’ he asked, his foot on the first step of the stairs.

‘It’s black, with a Puma logo, as far as I remember,’ Sonja said, looking around.

It was a beautiful house, with an old-fashioned interior, panelling halfway up each wall and white window frames. She heard Anton’s father upstairs in the bedroom and took a couple of steps into the living room, looking around her. The furniture was all antique, beautifully made and polished, and family photographs stood on the mantelpiece. She moved closer to the row of pictures and peered at one of them. In it a young man in a traditional woollen sweater stood on a quay, a big ship behind him. She recognised the look of the man, but decided she had to be wrong. Glancing over the other pictures, she noticed another that attracted her attention: a family sitting on a sofa. It had to have been taken at Christmas, as on the table in front of them was an Advent wreath with four flickering candles. Anton’s father sat on the sofa and next to him was a woman who had to be his wife, as between them sat a little boy, presumably Anton, of around two years old. Next to the couple were two girls in their teens, an adult woman, and then him. Sonja leaned closer and squinted at the picture, hoping to see him more clearly. It was quite an old picture and he had changed, but there was no doubt who it was.

‘Is that Húni Thór?’ she asked as Anton’s father came into the living room, Tómas’s backpack in his hand.

‘I should say so!’ he said. ‘He’s my sister’s boy. You know him?’

‘Slightly,’ Sonja said. ‘That’s to say our paths crossed a long time ago. And I used to see him on TV sometimes when he was in parliament.’

Anton’s father took the picture down from the mantelpiece.

‘That’s my sister,’ he said, pointing at the woman next to Húni Thór in the picture. ‘She was a single parent with the two girls and him, and the boy was out of control. So I more or less took him under my wing and made a man of him. Pushed him through navigation college and then helped him find his feet in business.’ There was a note of pride in his voice. ‘This is him with the first boat he skippered,’ he added, pointing at the picture Sonja had noticed first.