“From a friend at the military base in Vellir.”
I tell him I want to learn English and that I’m reading a thick book by an Irish writer with the help of a dictionary, but that it’s time-consuming and difficult.
“I’ll ask my friend if he can give you lessons. You don’t have to sleep with him,” he adds. “I’ll do that for you.”
He hesitates.
“He’d be thrown out if he weren’t an officer.”
On the shelf there is a book by an Icelandic poet that seems at odds with the rest, Black Feathers by Davíd Stefánsson.
I pull it out.
“Mum waited a whole year to baptize me, in case a sea revenant stepped onto the shore. While she waited she read her favourite poet.
“She couldn’t decide whether I should be called Davíd Stefánsson or Einar Benediktsson, it was a choice between Black Feathers and Glimpse of the Ocean.
“In the end she felt there were too many waves and too much pounding surf in Benediktsson. And too much of God in the surf, she said. My fate was therefore sealed with the sunrise poet who sang about the night that stores pleasure in its bosom, so I’m named after Iceland’s swan poet and the unknown soldier who vanished into the billowy grey sea.
“Davíd Jón John Stefánsson Johnsson.
“The priest said the name was too long for the form and suggested Mum drop the Stefánsson.
“Otherwise people might think he’s my illegitimate son, Revd Stefán is reported to have quipped. Impishly.
“She felt it would improve my prospects abroad too, if I were both Jón and John.
“‘When you move abroad to find your roots, you will call yourself D.J. Johnsson,’ she said to me.”
He is silent for a long moment.
“Mum always knew I was different.”
D.J. Johnsson stands up and totters over to the wardrobe. He opens it to pull out some black plumage that he drapes over his shoulders like a shawl. He looks like an eagle preparing to fly off the edge of a steep cliff.
“Mum kept a picture of the poet Davíd Stefánsson in her living room, holding a black raven in his arms. She cut it out of the newspaper and had it framed. I collected raven feathers and sewed myself a cape,” he says.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to Skálinn. I’ll treat you to coffee and pancakes.”
He puts the feathers back into the wardrobe and slips on a jacket.
“I don’t fly the way you do, though, Hekla.”
Homosexuals and existentialists
Two tramps are sitting on a bench in the cold sunshine, sipping methylated spirits from paper bags, by the southern wall of the Fisheries Bank. We sit at a window table and order coffee, Jón John has no appetite for pancakes. A group of poets are sitting at one of the tables inside the room, smoking pipes. One of them holds court, waving his hands in the air like the conductor of an orchestra; the other poets look at him and nod. I notice that one of the younger poets isn’t participating in the conversation but is instead looking at me.
“I’m guessing they’re either discussing rhymes or existentialism,” says Jón John. There aren’t many people about and I notice a middle-aged man in a dark coat and hat coming out of the bank with a briefcase, walking swiftly towards Austurstræti.
“That guy’s queer,” says Jón John, nodding towards the man. “He works at the bank. He’s only into young boys and he’s in a relationship with a bloke I know.”
He sips his coffee and then rests his chin on one hand.
“Most of the men who hunt for boys like me are married family men and only queers at weekends. They get married to cover up their unnaturalness. Their wives know it. They know their husbands. Then many of the queers from around the country pretend they have a girlfriend and child back home in the countryside.”
He looks down and buries his face in his hands.
“I don’t want to be like them and live some secret game. I just want to love a guy like me. I want to hold his hand on the street. That’ll never happen, Hekla.”
“Have you met someone?”
“When I moved to Reykjavík, I was with a man for the first time. He wanted to know if I had any experience. I told him I had. I was afraid that he wouldn’t want to be with me otherwise. He wasn’t a lot older than I was, but he’d been with soldiers at the base in Vellir.
“He had this thing for uniforms.”
The first time only happens once
“You were my first,” I say.
He smiles.
“I know.”
He lived in the village with his mother and I’d heard stories about him. That he knew how to use a sewing machine and had sewn kitchen curtains for his mother and put them up while she was at work. That he’d also made a Christmas dress for her. When I first met him, he was the shortest of the boys and I was the tallest of the girls. Then I went through puberty and stopped growing and he went through puberty and started to grow. He wore a bomber jacket like the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.*
It was said that he had made it from leftover pelts that had been given to him at the slaughterhouse, and that he’d managed to transform lamb skin into cow leather.
Like other youngsters, we worked in the slaughterhouse in the autumn, which is how our paths crossed, under the flayed carcasses of lambs that hung from hooks over the chlorine-washed stone floor. Initially, I was assigned to stirring the blood before it was canned and weighing the hearts, kidneys and livers, while he was in the freezer room, stacking soup meat in white gauze bags. One day I fetched him from a frosty white cloud of ice and we ate our picnics by the slaughterhouse wall in the limpid, cold autumn sunlight. The smell of congealed blood clung to us.
He was different from the other boys and didn’t try to kiss me. It was then that I decided that he would be the first. Not that there were many candidates in the sparsely populated Dalir.
When the moment had come, I fetched a bottle of brandy that had been looted from a stranded ship and stored in the cabinet at home, untouched as far back as I can remember.
“Nobody will miss it,” I said.
We spent some time searching for a patch of geraniums or corrie where the grass hadn’t been cut and was higher than our groins. Most important of all was that we were hidden from my brother, younger by two years, who tried to cling to us all the time. He was going to go to agricultural college and then take over the farm, 280 sheep and 17 cows, 14 of them red and 3 mottled. He had recently started to train in Icelandic wrestling and had become a member of the Dalir Young Men’s Association. This now meant that he tried to wrestle any man who crossed his path. Even Revd Stefán was not exempt. My parents sometimes had to apologize to the guests my brother assaulted and invited to tackle him. They looked at him as if he were a stranger, unrelated to them, a teenager who followed his own laws but mainly his whims.
“He’s training for the Grettir’s Belt Cup,” they would say hesitantly. My mother’s expression seemed to express regret at having wasted an eagle’s name on him. His first moves entailed clutching the guest’s belt or grabbing his sleeve and twisting his garment in an effort to lift him up and knock him over with brute force, without losing his own balance. Gradually, his technique improved and he grew more agile and even demanded that his opponents be well versed in the wrestling jargon: upright position… step, step… trip and defend…
He was a slow developer and acned, listened to Cliff Richard, still pubescent and not yet in full control of his voice. The unwitting guests stepped back and forth and struggled in the ring.
“… Relax the arms… step… clockwise…” my brother could be heard saying.
After some time, we found the right spot, behind the sheep shed. Tall, green, whistling grass grew nearby. There we lay down, arms down by our sides, and gazed up at the sky, a wind-blown stratocumulus cloud. I would rather have chosen a cumulus cloud or cloudless sky for my first time, I wrote that evening. There were only five centimetres between us, which is the narrowe
st gap there can be between a woman and a man without touching. He was in a blue flannel shirt, I in a red skirt in honour of the day. We were both wearing waders.
“I wanted to touch the fabric of your skirt more than I wanted to touch what was underneath it,” my friend now admits.
That was precisely what he did, asked me if he could touch the fabric. “Is that jersey?” he asked. He turned the hem, examined the lining, stroked it with his finger.
“Did you do the hemming yourself?” he asked.
“Are you afraid to touch me?” I said.
Then he first turned his attention to what was behind the fabric and his hand slid up towards the elastic of my panties. The moment had come to put my body on the line. To become a woman. I pulled up my skirt and he down his trousers.
Afterwards we sat side by side up on the hill and gazed at the shore of seaweed and islands in the fjord; his braces were down and he smoked. I spotted three seals on the shore.
Then I tell him.
That I write.
Every day.
That I started writing about the weather like my father and about the shades of light over the glacier beyond the fjord, that I described how white clouds lay like fleece over the glacier, and how people, events and places were then added.
“I feel like many things happen at once, like I see many images and experience many feelings at the same time, like I’m standing on some new starting point and it’s the first day of the world and everything is new and pure,” I say to my friend. “Like a spring morning in Dalir and I’ve just finished feeding the sheep in the barn and the bank of fog hovering over Breidafjördur lifts and dissolves. At that moment I’m holding the baton and tell the world it can be born.”
In return the most handsome boy in Dalir told me that he loved boys.
We kept each other’s secrets.
We were equals.
“People wondered why such a sweet boy didn’t have a girlfriend. I knew I was queer. The only thing that could save me was to sleep with a girl. I’m glad it was you.”
You’ve done it and I haven’t
The next day I was quizzed about the bottle of brandy that had vanished from the cabinet in broad daylight and been returned after four big gulps.
My brother Örn conducts the interrogation. He is not satisfied.
He claims to be a witness to what he shouldn’t have been a witness to.
“I saw you rush up the hill,” he says. “And disappear behind it.”
Now he follows me edgeways, trying to corner me, and bombards me with questions.
He wants to know where we went and what we were up to. Why he wasn’t allowed to come? Whether Jón John had mentioned his name and, if so, what had he said, had he mentioned the wrestling? He continues to pressure me in the days that follow. Ultimately all the questions revolve around Jón John. Is he going away and, if so, where to? To Reykjavík? What’s he going to do? Between the interrogations he sulks.
“Traitor,” he ends up shrieking after me. Then I remember how he and Jón John were sparring once and, in some peculiar way, it reminded me more of birds dancing in a mating ritual than wrestling; it looked more like clumsy embraces than attacks. All of a sudden they were both lying on the grass. Then Jón John had broken free.
“Did you do it?” Ísey asks when I next see her.
“Yes.”
“Then you’ve done it and I haven’t,” she says.
That meant that my best friend had to do it as well. In August a group of labourers came west to lay electrical cables and Ísey got pregnant, moved to Reykjavík and got married. Jón John went not long after her with the sewing machine and hoped to get a job in the National Theatre’s wardrobe department or, as a backup, in the Vogue fabric store in Skólavördustígur.
“You saved my life, Hekla. When we became friends, people left me in peace. I thought to myself: she’s like me.”
Skyr
I have two job interviews today: one in a dairy shop that’s also a bakery and another at Hotel Borg. I start with the dairy shop.
The middle-aged baker receives me in a quilted apron, standing on a black-and-white stone tiled floor with a drain in the middle. He treats me informally and shows me around the shop: what shelves the regular loaves of bread are stocked on, white bread here and rye bread there, how the glazed buns and Danish pastries should be arranged and how the pastry should be sliced.
“You get to keep the tag ends of the Danish pastries and take them home,” he says. Finally he makes me practise serving glazed buns over the counter.
“Imagine it’s some high school boy,” he says merrily.
In the end he fetches a tub of skyr from the fridge and wants me to practise wrapping a dollop of it in waxed paper.
He guides me.
“You fold the corners of the paper underneath,” he says.
He says he would go home to rest when I arrive in the mornings and then come back in the afternoons to balance the cash register. But that I’d have to clean the store and tidy up. I stand on the stone floor as he stares at me.
“I could well imagine bun sales increasing with you behind the counter, those high school boys will be standing there with gaping jaws. With that waist and those hips.”
He then wants to know where I live.
I tell him I’m living with a friend until I find a room.
“Is he your boyfriend?”
“No.”
He ogles me.
“You could live at my place. I have a spare room in the cellar.”
Serving girl wanted at Hotel Borg
The other option was the serving girl job at Hotel Borg. I wait for the man I’m supposed to meet at the bar. The counter is dark wood and the bartender leans over to me, knocks on the timber and says:
“Palisander.”
Jón John has told me that gays seek each other out at the bar here on weekends. And that he sometimes watches how a man dances with a woman in the Gilded Ballroom.
While I’m waiting I contemplate a giant painting of Mt Esja and the islands in the bay between the mountain and the city. A fishing boat floats on the strait and in the foreground one can make out seagulls and puffins with colourful beaks, on the shore as the sun sinks into the sea.
The man ushers me into the office where he jots down some notes about me.
“So you’re from Dalir?”
He eyes me up.
“We don’t hide our beauty queens in the kitchen, instead we’ll put you out serving in the dining room.”
He stands.
“You’re hired and start on Monday at nine. And one other thing, Miss Hekla, you won’t serve in trousers, but in a skirt. You’ll get your uniform on Monday.”
The head waiter escorts me through the smoking corner of the dining room, between the starched white tablecloths. There are silver sugar bowls and cream jugs on the tables and crystal chandeliers in the air. He gives me a briefing, speaking in hushed tones, and tells me that the bulk of the customers are a group of elderly gentlemen, who are considered permanent guests and show up for the cold buffet at noon, when it’s jam-packed, and elderly ladies who come in for coffee and cakes in the mid-afternoon, usually in twos or threes. The bar is open for two hours during the day, from eleven to one, which is when the select clientele gets drunk; many of them become unruly and difficult to handle. Then there are the high school boys who come in and order coffee with sugar cubes and nothing else, and sit here for ages smoking, he explains. They’re bunking off school, have poetry books in their pockets and dream of becoming poets. Once they’ve had a poem published in the school mag they move over to Skálinn, Mokka or Laugavegur 11, he concludes.
I notice a woman in a black skirt and white apron and cap atop a dome-shaped structure of lacquered hair, who is standing with a coffee pot by a round table, pouring into the cups of a group of middle-aged men. She observes me.
“There will be two of you in the dining room with the waiters,” he explains.
Finally he shows me the Gilded Ballroom where Ellý Vilhjálms sings with Jón Páll’s band on weekends, as well as the back rooms and dressing rooms, adding that there are forty-six bedrooms in the hotel that can accommodate seventy-three guests. Next week Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice-president of the United States, is expected in the country and, even though Johnson himself will be staying at the newly opened Hotel Saga, a part of his entourage will be staying at Hotel Borg. He lowers his voice even further to inform me that the vice-president is interested in vegetation and livestock, and has expressed some interest in visiting Icelandic farmlands. As he says this, he indicates someone with a nod of the chin:
“That’s one of the heads of the Sheep Farmers’ Association sitting over at the corner table with the director of the Reykjavík Sewage System. It seems likely that Mrs Johnson will be visiting his sheep farm.” To complete the tour, he shows me how to clock in and out with my card.
When we walk through the kitchen, the woman who was serving in the dining room is standing by the sink, smoking. She fans the smoke away, stubs out the cigarette, chucks it in the bin, grabs a tray with prawn mayonnaise open sandwiches and prepares to swing back into the room.
“Sirrí, this is Hekla. The new serving girl. She’ll be working in the dining room with you.”
I stretch out my hand and she nods without putting down the tray.
I work it out in my head: If I work nine hours and sleep for seven, I’ll have eight hours left over in the day to write and read. If I want to write at night, there’s no one to stop me. And no one who is encouraging me to do so either. No one is waiting for a novel by Hekla Gottskálksdóttir.
The man in the Snæbjörn bookstore allows me to put an ad up in the window.
Single girl with full-time job looking for room to rent. Punctual monthly payments.
I have a dream
The sofa is covered in newspaper cuttings.
I bend over and swiftly skim through them. They’re in both Icelandic and English and they all seem to be about the black American pastor Martin Luther King.
“The black rights campaigner,” says Jón John. “I’ve been collecting these. The blacks aren’t free, no more than we are. But they’ve recently found a voice.”
Miss Iceland Page 4
