Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “Did you know that it’s forbidden to harpoon a mother whale, which is why the lads only butcher the males?”

  He stubs out his cigar in the ashtray on the back of the seat.

  “Unless it’s by accident,” he adds.

  We drive past the military barracks and oil tanks of the American army and two armed soldiers standing on the road wave at us. The road twists on up the mountain and even more scree lies ahead. Finally a view of the capital across the strait opens up under a pink evening sky; perched on the peak of a barren mound of rock is a half-finished church dedicated to a poor author of psalms. The tower with its scaffolding can be seen all the way from Kjós.

  I close the book.

  On a side road down Mosfellsdalur, we meet a car and the coach driver suddenly slows down.

  “Isn’t that our Nobel Prize winner?” a man is heard asking as the passengers stir and peer through the muddy windows.

  “If that’s a four-door Buick Special model 1954, then it’s him all right,” says the driver. “Fantastic suspension and powerful heater,” he adds.

  “Doesn’t he have a green Lincoln now?” asks another man.

  The men aren’t so sure any more and even think they might have seen a woman at the wheel and children in the backseat.

  By then I had been sitting on the bus and chewing dust for eight hours.

  In the last hour:

  Reykjavík, foggy, slight drizzle

  I’m standing on the lot of the BSÍ coach terminal in Hafnarstræti and waiting for the driver to hand me my case along with my other parcels from the roof. Night is falling and the shops have closed, but I know that Snæbjörn Bookstore, which sells English books, is nearby. Feeling shivery after the journey, I adjust the scarf around my throat and button up my coat. My neighbour from the bus sidles up to me and tells me that it just so happens that he sits on the board of the Reykjavík Beauty Society along with some acquaintances of his, including the owner of the whales in the sea. The society’s objective is to embellish the city and promote good taste and decorum among the population, which is why, for a number of years now, it has been hosting a beauty contest. It was initially held in the Tivoli amusement park in Vatnsmýri, but has now actually been moved indoors.

  “We can’t allow rain forecasts to postpone our contest every year. Apart from which the ladies caught colds outside.

  “… No, the thing is,” I hear the man continue, “we’re looking for unattached maidens, sublimely endowed with both clean-limbedness and comeliness to take part in the competition. I can recognize beauty when I see it, and I would therefore like to invite you to participate in Miss Iceland.”

  I size up the man.

  “No, thank you.”

  The man won’t give in.

  “All your features curve and sway like an Icelandic summer’s day.”

  He digs into his jacket pocket, pulls out a card and hands it to me. It contains his name and phone number. Tradesman, it says after his name.

  “Should you change your mind.”

  He ponders a moment.

  “You’re darn pretty in those plaid slacks.”

  Mokka

  I walk away with my case and head towards a basement flat in Kjartansgata. The clock on the quadrilateral tower in Lækjartorg shows close to seven. On one of its sides is the picture of a smiling woman in a sleeveless pale-blue dress with a wide skirt, who is holding a box of Persil washing powder. In the square, two women in brown woollen coats sit on a wooden bench with iron armrests, while seagulls peck at some breadcrumbs nearby.

  I walk up Bankastræti, which is lined with multi-coloured cars, American hot wheels with leather-upholstered seats. The guys are out prowling and blow their horns, with their elbows leaning out the windows, cigarettes dangling from their mouths and brilliantined hair, slowly accosting me, barely older than kids. There are even more bookshops than I had dared to imagine, I also pass a tobacconist’s, a men and women’s clothing store and Lárus G. Lúdvíksson’s shoe shop. To shake off the cars I turn up Skólavördustígur.

  There’s Mokka, the café where all the Reykjavík poets hang out, known back home as those smartarse losers who live down south and lounge about in public places drinking coffee all day. I linger a moment outside the window, case in hand, and peer into the thick smoke; the interior is dark and I can’t make out any of the poets’ faces.

  Kjartansgata

  The doorbell is labelled Lýdur and Ísey and below this is a bell out of order sign. A pram is parked beside the basement door. The fence has fallen into disrepair and in front of the house is a patch of unkempt grass.

  I knock. Ísey, my childhood friend, opens the door and smiles from ear to ear. She is wearing a green skirt, and her hair is cut short and held back by a headband.

  She embraces me and drags me inside.

  “I’ve been looking forward to you coming to town all summer,” she says.

  A baby sits on a rug on the floor, banging two wooden blocks together.

  She whisks her daughter off the mat and rushes over to me with her. The girl isn’t happy to let go of the blocks. Ísey pulls the dummy out of her mouth, kisses her wet cheek and introduces us. A trail of saliva dangles from the dummy.

  “Let me introduce you to Thorgerdur,” she says. “Thorgerdur, this is Hekla, my best friend.”

  She hands me the child. She’s the spitting image of her father.

  The baby wriggles in my arms and blows a raspberry at me.

  My friend takes the child back and places her on the floor, and then embraces me again and wants to show me around the flat.

  “I’m so happy to see you, Hekla. Tell me what you’re reading. I’ve no time to read. I’ve such a longing for it. I’m lucky if I manage to read two poems before I fall asleep. I have a card for the library in Thingholtsstræti, but I’ve got no one to babysit for me while I fetch the books.”

  The child has lost interest in the blocks and wiggles off the rug. She tries to hoist herself to her feet by grabbing onto a lamp stand, which wobbles. Her mother grabs her and sticks the dummy back into her mouth. She spits it straight out again.

  “It’s so much work being with a small child, Hekla. We’re together all week, all day long and also at night when Lýdur is away doing road work in the east. I didn’t know it would be so wonderful to be a mother. Having a baby has been the best experience of my life. I’m so happy. There’s nothing missing in my life. Your letters have kept me alive. I’m so lonely. Sometimes I feel like I’m a terrible mother. Then my mind is elsewhere when Thorgerdur is trying to attract my attention. I’m so scared of something happening to her. You can never let a child out of your sight. Not even when I’m folding nappies. She might stick something into her mouth. The best time of the day is when Thorgerdur is asleep in her pram in the morning and I make some coffee and read Tíminn. I read my coffee grounds every day. There are no deaths. I look forward to when Thorgerdur will be a teenager and we can discuss books together. Like you and I used to do. That’s another twelve years away. Thorgerdur’s had a cold and is peevish and sleeps with me, but when Lýdur comes home at the weekends, he wants her to sleep in her own bed. We slip on an Ellý Vilhjálms record and dance. He’s thinking of quitting his job at the Road Administration. We’re saving up to buy a small patch of land in Sogamýri. Lýdur wants a garage to start his own upholstering or framing company. He says you can also make a packet stuffing birds. Unless he gets a job at the cement factory, then we’ll move to Akranes. A new family moved into the basement next door last month. Lýdur lent a hand and helped carry a dresser. They didn’t have much furniture. I just caught a glimpse of her. I think she’s about our age and she has four kids. The youngest is around the same age as my Thorgerdur. It’s been five weeks since they moved in and there aren’t any curtains in the living room yet. When I got up last night and drank a glass of milk at the kitchen window and I looked out into the darkness, I noticed that the woman was also standing by her kitchen window and lookin
g into the darkness too. I felt she looked really glum. I saw myself reflected in the window and the woman was also reflected in her window, two sleepless women, and for a moment our mirrored images fused and I felt as if she were standing in my kitchen and I in hers, can you imagine anything so silly? The only man I talk to during the day is the fishmonger. There are two of them as it happens. Twins and they work in shifts. I only realized it yesterday when they were in the store at the same time and stood side by side. It was difficult to tell them apart. Then I understood why the fishmonger sometimes jokes with me and calls me his darling and sometimes not; it’s because it’s not the same guy. They wrap the fish in newspaper, Morgunbladid. Let me have a poem or a short story, I say to the guy who’s serving me, no obituaries or death notices. When I got home yesterday, I carefully unwrapped the haddock in the sink, the innermost sheet was soaking and difficult to read but on the next page, there were two poems by a poet who sits in Café Mokka all day long. Sorry if I blab too much. Are you going to go to Mokka and Laugavegur 11 to sit with the poets? I’ve walked past there with the pram and seen them hunched over their coffee cups, lacing them with liquid that comes out of brown paper bags. The waitresses turn a blind eye to it. What would happen if I strolled into the cloud of smoke with Thorgerdur in my arms and ordered a cup of coffee? Or walked into an abstract art exhibition in Bogasalur with the pram?”

  “You could give it a try.”

  She shakes her head.

  “You wear trousers and go your own way, Hekla.”

  The child is tired and rests her head on my friend’s shoulder as she paces the floor with her a few times. Then she says she’s going to put her daughter to sleep while I have a look around.

  That’s quickly done.

  There is very little furniture in the small living room: a green plush sofa and a sideboard against the wall with a crocheted tablecloth and three photographs in gilded frames: a wedding shot of Ísey with a beehive hairdo, a picture of a baby and finally, one of me and Ísey. I bend over to examine it. We stand smiling by a stone sheepfold, I in bib overalls, wool sweater and my brother Örn’s waders, which are three sizes too big for me, having just chased after two ewes all day in the canyon. Ísey hadn’t joined in the search, but helped the women to butter rye pancakes, fry crullers and heat cocoa in a thirty-litre pot in the catering tent. She’s got brown curls, is wearing a skirt and a buttoned cardigan and is leaning her head on my shoulder. Who took that picture, was it Jón John?

  After a short while, my friend returns with a hint of sleep in her eyes and quietly leans on the door behind her. I think I heard her singing the same ancient lullaby that a mother sang to her child before throwing it into a waterfall. Once more she tells me how glad she is to see me and sidles up beside me at the sideboard to scrutinize the photograph of us as if she were wondering who those girls are. The picture is two years old.

  “I made that skirt myself from a picture in the paper,” she finally says. “She ponders a moment. Jón John helped me with the pattern,” she adds. Then she does the same to the wedding photograph: picks it up and examines it.

  “I feel it’s so weird to think that’s me. That I’m a married woman in Reykjavík with a child. Lýdur was just a kid when he came west to Dalir to lay the power line and instal that row of electricity poles with the team of labourers; they lived in work huts, he had a record player and played the Shadows; he had such a beautiful voice that it didn’t matter what he said, it made me weak in the knees; now he’s a husband and father. It’s so strange to think that Lýdur will be the last one.”

  I try to recall Lýdur’s voice, but can’t remember anything he said. Whenever we meet Ísey does the talking and he is mostly silent.

  On the walls there are two large paintings that seem at odds with the spartan furnishings: one is of a mossy lava field and a glittering lake in a rocky rift and the other is of a steep mountain.

  “Kjarval?” I ask.

  “Yes, from my mother-in-law.”

  She says her father-in-law couldn’t come to terms with the way the artist depicted it.

  “He said that wasn’t the Mt Lómagnúpur that he knew.

  He’s been out at sea for thirty years and only wants boats on his walls, not landscapes and certainly not coloured rocks. Rocks are just bloody rocks, he says, not colours. The mother-in-law, on the other hand, doesn’t want to see the sea in her living room. Her father was a sailor and drowned when she was small and she chose to live somewhere where the sea was out of sight.”

  “That’s difficult on an island,” I say.

  “Not in Efstasund.”

  We contemplate the paintings.

  “My mother-in-law met the painter when she was a cook for road labourers in the east. She thinks he’s a decent enough man but agrees with her husband that he doesn’t get the colours right. Lýdur says that if we had a garage we could keep the paintings there, at least one of them. Now he believes we could even get some money for them. I cried so much he didn’t dare mention it again.”

  She seems preoccupied.

  “I can’t lose those paintings, Hekla. I look at them every day. There’s so much light in them.”

  She walks over to the window and gazes into the darkness. A few withered blades of grass reach the glass.

  “This is how deep I’ve sunk. This is how small my world has become: the view over Breidafjördur and its thousand islands and the biggest sky in the whole world has shrunk down to the size of a basement window on Kjartansgata.”

  “Still, at least your street is named after a character in the Laxdæla Saga.”

  She turns to me.

  “I’m terrible. I haven’t offered you anything. I had some rice pudding for dinner and can heat it up for you.”

  I tell her I’ve already eaten. That I had coffee and pound cake in Hvalfjördur. Nonetheless, she insists on opening a can of pears and whipping cream.

  “It’s Christmas when you come for a visit, Hekla.”

  I open my case and hand her a parcel wrapped in brown paper.

  “Puffins from Dad,” I say.

  I follow her into the kitchen, which has a small Rafha electric cooker, a fridge and a table for two. On the way she repeats how happy she is to see me. She says she’ll cook the puffins at the weekend when Lýdur is back in town and sticks them in the fridge.

  “I don’t enjoy cooking but I’m learning. The other day I made Ora fishballs in pink sauce, but Lýdur’s favourite is stockfish. My sister-in-law taught me how to make pink sauce. You use ketchup and flour.”

  I tell her that Jón John has offered me a room that he rents in Stýrimannastígur, while he’s out at sea. “Until I get a job and can rent my own room,” I add.

  “Have you finished your manuscript?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “And started another?”

  “Yes.”

  “I always knew you would become a writer, Hekla.

  “Do you remember when you were six and you had recently started to write and wrote in your childish handwriting in a copybook that the river moved like time? And that the water was cold and deep? That was before Steinn Steinarr wrote his ‘Time and Water’.”

  She hesitates.

  “I know Jón John is your best friend, Hekla.”

  “Male friend, yes,” I say.

  She looks me in the eye.

  “I realize the child is a distraction for you, but stay with me until the weekend at least.”

  I think: that’s three days. I can’t write here.

  I say: “I’ll be here until the weekend.”

  We sit with the canned pears in dessert bowls, opposite one another at the kitchen table, and Ísey falls into a momentary silence. I feel there’s something on her mind.

  “I bought myself a diary the other day and have started to write in it.”

  She reveals this cautiously.

  “That’s how low I’ve sunk, Hekla.”

  I start thinking about my father’s diary entrie
s and how he deciphered the weather from the look of the glacier beyond the fjord every day; it didn’t matter what the glacier looked like, it always augured ill, even a splendid glacier could bode a downpour over the swathes of grass.

  “Do you write about the weather?” I ask.

  She takes a deep breath.

  “I write about what happens, but since so little happens I also write about what doesn’t happen. The things that people don’t say and don’t do. What Lýdur doesn’t say, for example.”

  She stalls.

  “Because I add thoughts and descriptions to what happens, a quick trip to the store can take up many pages. I went out twice yesterday, once to the fish shop and once with the rubbish. When I walked to the fish shop with the pram, I shut my eyes and felt a slight heat on my eyelids. Is that a sun or not a sun? I asked myself, and I felt I was a part of something bigger.”

  She looks anxious.

  “I keep the journal in the washing bucket because Lýdur wouldn’t understand me wasting time on writing about things that don’t exist or about things that are over.

  “‘What’s over is over,’ he says.

  “Still though, last weekend when we got into bed, he said: ‘Tell me what happened this evening, Ísa, that way it feels like it happened to someone else.’ That was the most beautiful thing he has ever said to me. Afterwards he held me in his arms.”

  Ísey wraps her cardigan around herself.

  “When I’ve finished writing in the diary, I feel like I’ve folded all the washing and cleaned up.”

  She stands up because she wants to pour some coffee and do a cup reading. She gets me to turn the cup upside down and place it on the hot plate. After a short while, she examines the cup in the light.

  “There are two men in the cup,” she says. “You love one and sleep with the other.”

  Like that Joyce

  Ísey offers me the sofa under the Lómagnúpur cliffs, but before I fall asleep, I pull Ulysses out of my case, turn on the lamp and read a few pages under the orange-tasselled shade.