Hrafn.

Hrafn got the route nobody wanted and he's held onto it for six years. He leaves the Seyðisfjörður office while it's still dark, does the village on foot — the street painted in colors that runs down to the blue church, the corrugated-iron houses, the mailboxes that open upward — and then takes the van and heads into the valley. The farms along the Fjarðará, the houses of Vestdalur, and right at the top the Fjarðarheiði pass, six hundred meters of nothing, the only road connecting the fjord to the rest of the island. In winter the pass closes. Sometimes for a day, sometimes for three weeks. When it opens, he goes up. He says it like it's nothing, shrugging inside his grey work jacket: þetta reddast, it'll sort itself out. In his mouth it isn't optimism, it's arithmetic. If not today, tomorrow; if not tomorrow, Thursday. He learns the forecast by heart at six in the morning and checks his tires twice before setting off, every day, even in June. He doesn't talk about that. About the pass in general, he doesn't talk much.

The mailboxes in the valley freeze shut from the inside. Not the lock — the opening, the slot, the metal sealing itself after a night of rain and wind. The first time it happened to him he spent ten minutes wrestling with a letter and ran late for everything after. The next day he went down to his father's garage, grabbed a rod, put it to the blowtorch and bent it until it looked right. Out came an ugly, crooked iron hook with a loop at the end, and it worked on the first try. It's lived in the right-hand pocket of his coat ever since, and it's opened half the valley. He doesn't lend it out. When a mailbox gives way on the first try and that short click of metal peeling apart sounds out, Hrafn gets a moment of good humor he doesn't mention to anyone, because there's no way to explain it without it sounding ridiculous. At the pool, once or twice, he's come close. He's kept quiet. His thing is the small stuff that works: the hook, the van with two hundred thousand kilometers on it, the route done in the exact order he always does it.

There's a thermos of coffee behind the third post past the bridge. A pair of dry gloves in the gap in the wall at the farm below. A wrench under a particular rock at kilometer six, a rock with nothing special about it that he'd pick out of a thousand. It isn't foresight out of a manual — it's just how he is. He leaves things along the route and knows exactly where they are months later, and if someone sees him leave one, he comes back another day and moves it, without quite knowing why he does it. It's the same with the houses. Number thirty-one has had the blue door and the crooked mailbox since before he was born. He knows the surname that lives behind every door in the village and every farm in the valley, knows who's moved three weeks before word gets round at the shop, and remembers perfectly the one who shut the door in his face when he was eighteen. The office stopped giving him route lists a long time ago. His sister Elín points at any house from the bus and he gives the surname before he even looks. They laugh both times: her because she finds it funny, him because he doesn't see what's strange about it.

His father, Bjarni, opened that pass twenty winters running with the snowplough. One bad night he took Hrafn up with him, at eight years old, sitting in the seat beside him and gripping the door handle. The headlights lit up nothing, just snow blowing sideways through the beam, and every so often a roadside marker would appear and vanish again. It was the first time he saw the whole route from up above, and also the first time he understood that a road is a place and not a line. His father didn't explain a thing in the two hours it took them to reach the top. He drove watching the edge and chewing gum, and every so often cracked the window an inch to listen to the wind before rolling it back up. Today Bjarni's had a ruined back for years and welds other people's odd jobs in the garage with the radio on, and still checks the forecast at six out of habit. When Hrafn gets back from his route, the two of them stand in the garage doorway and talk about road conditions, whether they've salted it, whether the wind was coming from the north. They never talk about anything else. Both of them understand perfectly that they're talking about everything else.

His grandmother, amma Guðrún, lives two streets down and used to sing him, as a boy, the old song about the one who slept in the crack of the cliff, the one the houses of the east used to sing when bad weather set in. He learned it whole before he could read and still hums it badly in the van without noticing. Amma Guðrún is one of those who remember the rooftops full: when so many of their own would gather at the docks and the slaughterhouse that there wasn't room for one more, and you could hear them from the road. Now you can count them. The ravens of the east are still a large people on a world scale — they live from the desert to the ice, and on the island they see out the whole winter when almost everyone else leaves — but here their numbers are falling, and they're still huntable year-round, by law, because someone decided long ago they were to blame for the lambs. In Hrafn's house that isn't told as a tragedy. It's told the way you'd tell what the weather used to be like. But it explains fairly well why nobody in that kitchen quite trusts a door that opens.

He was nineteen when the hillside came down on the village after days of rain and the whole place had to be evacuated. His house held. The one two streets down didn't. For weeks he delivered the mail to people sleeping in other people's houses, and without meaning to, he built up in his head a complete map of who was in whose bed, a map that still hasn't quite left him. Things turned up out of the mud. They appeared in the street, in the ditch, among the rubble as it was cleared out: a loose earring, a key, a little plastic soldier, a ring with no name inside it. Whatever someone claimed got given back: there was a table in the school gym with everything laid out on it and a list, and people came by to look. After a month the table was cleared away and what was left stayed left. Whatever nobody claimed, he took home and put in an old baking tray in the corrugated-iron shed out back. Back then he still said it out loud, «until the owner turns up». He said it for a year or two. Then he stopped saying it, and the tray kept filling up all the same, no longer with things from the mud, but with whatever the road leaves him every week.

There's quite a lot there now. They're arranged by stretch: the village on one side, the valley in the middle, the pass at the far end, and within each stretch by kilometer. Nobody's arranged them that way. Nobody knows they're arranged that way. The tray is a big baking tray, and it's gotten too small: there's now a biscuit tin on the bench too, and a glass jar of screws that aren't screws. Ask him about any one of them and Hrafn will tell you which bend it came from, what month, and who was living in the nearest house at the time, and often he'll also tell you who he thinks lost it. And he doesn't give it back. Six years have gone by, and the idea of knocking on a door with an earring in his hand and explaining why he has it feels more distant and more ridiculous every year. He doesn't throw anything away either. He earns his living delivering things that aren't his, goes up the pass with the mail when the forecast is frightening so nobody goes without what's theirs, and keeps a shed full of other people's objects he has no intention of moving. Both things are true at once. He's never once put them side by side.

Salka works shifts at the fjord fish farm's hatchery station and comes home smelling of cold water and feed. They met at the village pool, which is where everyone here meets everyone, sitting on the warm edge. She asked him why he was always watching the door and he didn't know what to say, and they stayed two hours. They've been together four years. They live in the house up the street, the one with the shed, cheap rent because the hillside looms over it; when it rains hard for several days running, neither of them says anything, but both of them look out the kitchen window at the same spot on the mountain. He leaves before dawn; she starts in the afternoon. They overlap at noon, twenty minutes, eating standing up with the weather report on the radio, her still in her boots and him without taking off his coat. Salka has opened the shed. She's seen the tray. Once she moved an earring two spots to the left to see if he'd notice, and that same evening he asked her, from the doorway, if she'd touched anything. They didn't talk about it then and they haven't talked about it since. It's the one quiet pact they have, and it works.

In winter Hrafn is whole. He gets up before dawn, fixes leaks, changes tires, goes up the pass with the van loaded and comes back in a good mood; in summer, with the sun up at three in the morning and the village full of outsiders, he sleeps badly and argues over nothing. He blames it on the noise. A few months ago he was offered the permanent posting at the big office in Egilsstaðir, on the other side of the pass: better pay, a counter, heating, no snow and no route. He said he'd think about it. He still hasn't answered, and the office doesn't ask as often anymore. His brother Ari moved down to Reykjavik at twenty and calls at Christmas; of the eleven in his year, three are left in the fjord. He knows what this is called. What he can't say is why he can't leave, and the closest he's come to explaining it was one afternoon in the garage, with his father, talking about something else entirely: that over there everything would be fine, but he wouldn't know where anything was.