The Draining Lake - By Arnaldur Indridason Page 0,5

since the early decades of the twentieth century. Politics was a constant topic of discussion at home; they particularly despised the American base at Keflavík which the Icelandic capitalist class cheerfully accepted. It was Icelandic capitalists who benefited the most from the military.

Then there was the company he kept, his friends from similar backgrounds. They could be very radical and some were eloquent speakers. He remembered the political meetings well. Remembered the passion. The fervent debates. He attended the meetings with his friends who, like him, were finding their feet in the party's youth movement; he listened to their leader's thunderous haranguing of the rich who exploited the proletariat, and the American forces who had them in their pocket. He had heard this repeated over and again with the same unwavering and heartfelt conviction. Everything he heard inspired him, because he had been raised as an Icelandic nationalist and hardline socialist who never doubted his views for one moment. He knew the truth was on his side.

A recurrent theme at their meetings was the American presence at Keflavík and the tricks that Icelandic money-grubbers had pulled to allow a foreign military base to be established on Icelandic soil. He knew how the country had been sold to the Americans for the capitalists to grow fat on, like parasites. As a teenager, he was outside Parliament House when the ruling class's lackeys stormed out of it with tear gas and truncheons and beat up those protesting against Iceland's entry into NATO. The traitors are lapdogs of US imperialism! We're under the jackboot of American capitalism! The young socialists had no shortage of slogans.

He belonged to the oppressed masses himself. He was swept along by the fervour and the eloquence and the just notion that all men should be equal. The bosses should work alongside the labourers in the factory. Down with the class system! He had a genuine and steadfast faith in socialism. He felt the need to serve the cause, to persuade others and to fight for all the underprivileged, the workers and the oppressed.

Arise ye workers from your slumbers ...

He took full part in discussions at the meetings and read what the youth movement recommended. There was plenty to be found in libraries and bookshops. He wanted to leave his mark. In his heart he knew that he was right. Much of what he had heard from the young socialist movement filled him with a sense of justice.

Gradually he learned the answers to questions about dialectical materialism, the class struggle as the vehicle of history, about capitalism and the proletariat, and he trained himself to garnish his vocabulary with phrases from the great revolutionary thinkers as he read more and became increasingly inspired. Before long he had surpassed his comrades in Marxist theory and rhetoric and caught the eye of the youth-movement leaders. Elections to party posts and the drafting of resolutions were important activities and he was asked whether he wanted to join the party council. He was then eighteen. They had founded a society at his school called 'The Red Flag'. His father decided that he should have the benefit of an education, the only one of the four children. For that, he was forever grateful to his father.

In spite of everything.

The youth movement published a broadsheet and held regular meetings. The chairman was even invited to Moscow and came back full of tales about the workers' state. Such magnificent development. People were so happy. Their every need catered for. The cooperatives and centralised economy promised unprecedented progress. Post-war reconstruction outstripped all expectations. Factories sprouted up, owned and run by the state, by the people themselves. New residential districts were being built in the suburbs. All medical services were free. Everything they had read, everything they had heard, was true. Every word of it. O, what times!

Others had been to the Soviet Union and described a different experience. The young socialists remained unmoved. The critics were servants of capitalism. They had betrayed the cause, the struggle for a fair society.

The Red Flag meetings were well attended and they managed to draft in more and more members. He was unanimously elected chairman of the society and was soon noticed by the Socialist Party's top brass. In his final year at school it was clear that he was future leadership material.

He turned from the window and walked over to the photograph hanging above the piano, taken at the school-leaving ceremony. He looked at the faces under the traditional white