Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  He scratches the animal behind its ears and gives her an extra few strokes.

  “Odin is expecting kittens,” he adds.

  Motherland

  I move out of the attic room on Stýrimannastígur into the attic room on Skólavördustígur. In the basement there is an upholstery store, beside which are a dairy shop and a picture framer, diagonally across from a cobbler and barber. There is also a corner shop, a drycleaners and a toy workshop where they replace the eyes of dolls that have been damaged.

  Jón John lies on the sofa with his hands cupped under his head when I come to pick up my case. The cat lies at his feet. I tell him the poet is waiting downstairs.

  His eyes are swollen.

  “Are you sick?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sad?”

  He turns around and looks at me.

  I tell him I need to ask him for a favour. If I can keep my typewriter with him. For a while. And also whether I can come to his place after work to write.

  “Doesn’t the poet know that you write? Haven’t you told him?”

  “Not yet.”

  He peers at me.

  “Come away with me, Hekla. Let’s go abroad together.”

  “What would I do abroad?”

  “Write books.”

  “No one can read my books there.”

  “I can read them.”

  “Yeah, except you.”

  “We’re kindred spirits, Hekla.”

  I sit on the edge of the sofa.

  “It costs money to sail. Where am I supposed to find money for the ticket? My wages are so low. And where would I get the currency?”

  “There’s no beauty here. It’s always cold. It’s always windy.”

  I stand up. The cat also stands and rubs itself against my legs.

  My friend sits up.

  “I’ll come every day,” I say.

  “Can I mind your cat until I leave for good, Hekla? Before Christmas at the latest. Before the worst weather kicks in and the rusty tub sinks.”

  I hug him and tell him he can have the cat.

  “Whenever I’m feeling down, I’ll always imagine I’m your cat.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” I repeat.

  He strokes the cat.

  “You’d be the woman I would want to marry, Hekla, if I were normal. But I couldn’t do that to you,” he adds.

  The poet carries the case, but en route wants to pop into the library in Thingholtsstræti to make sure all the windows are shut. I wait for him while he walks around the building and takes two steps up the stairway in a single stride to check the door handle.

  The wind whirls around the church that is being built on Skólavörduholt and rustles the rubbish. When we get up to the room, soaring engines can be heard.

  “That’s Gullfax on its way to Copenhagen,” says the poet.

  The plane waits out on the runway. The propellers rumble and then it darts down the tarmac and steel wings glide over the corrugated-iron rooftops.

  I think: it only takes six hours to fly abroad on steel wings.

  Only music grasps death

  The poet has made room for my clothes in the wardrobe and freed some wooden hangers. Apart from what Jón John has bought me, I don’t own many clothes.

  “Are four hangers enough?” he asks.

  There are a total of four rooms in the loft that are all let out to single men. The poet tells me that one of the neighbours is a theology student at the university, another works at the cement factory and is only home on weekends when he gets drunk on his own and falls asleep. He sometimes sobs but doesn’t cause trouble. The room on the other side of the panel is rented by a boat mechanic who has started going deaf and turns his radio up loud when he’s ashore. He listens to the news and all the weather forecasts of the day, to the Sailor’s Station and to Sailors’ Special Requests on Thursdays. Then he turns up the volume. When the batteries run out, the transistor gives off a loud hiss but sometimes he puts the batteries on the kitchen radiator to make them last longer.

  Next the poet wants to show me the communal kitchen, which is shared by the four rooms as is the toilet which has a sink. In the kitchen there is a Siemens cooker and, under the sloping ceiling, a small kitchen table at which I could see myself writing.

  “Here you can cook,” says the poet.

  The scaffolding around the church of Hallgrímskirkja is visible through the kitchen window and beyond it, fragments of Mt Esja; a white veil of mist severs the mountain in two.

  The poet has vacated part of a bookshelf and observes me as I pull books out of my case. He runs a finger over the spines, bewildered.

  “Are you reading foreign authors?”

  “Yes.”

  He picks up Ulysses, opens it and skims through the book.

  “That’s 877 pages.”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you finish it?”

  “Yes. I used a dictionary.”

  “There aren’t many national authors on your shelf,” he says and smiles.

  He stretches out for a book on his section of the shelf.

  “It’s all here. With our writers,” he says, patting a cover to add emphasis to his words. “For every thought that is conceived on earth, there is an Icelandic word.”

  He smiles at me and puts Einar Benediktsson back on the shelf.

  “You don’t bring owls to Athens,” he concludes, and fetches another poetry book from the cabinet.

  We sit side by side on the bed. He has one hand on my shoulder, while the other holds Grímur Thomsen. He only lets go of me to turn the page.

  “Listen to this,” he says:

  “Deep inside you in the marrow

  Be it joy or be it sorrow

  An Icelandic song resounds”

  He closes the poetry book and puts it back on the shelf.

  “There’s a bookbinder in a basement here over on Laugavegur, Bragi Bach, who could bind books in leather for you.”

  When I’ve finished sorting my books, I put up a photograph of Mum. She has a pensive air and peers out of the picture as if she were trying to decipher the weather or scrutinize a layer of clouds.

  My wife’s breast was removed yesterday, Dad wrote in his diary between two entries about the weather.

  It didn’t take her long to die.

  One day she is baking hot cakes and the next she is gone, in the middle of the lambing season. I was alone with her in the hospital when she died. Dad and my brother were in the sheep shed. She had become unrecognizable and had difficulty breathing. Dark blotches had appeared on her skin. I lay a bouquet of dandelions on her duvet. I put my hand under hers. She was warm. Then she took her last breath and her hand went cold. The church was cold after the winter and the carcasses of flies from the previous summer lay on the windowsills. My brother sat between me and Dad on a hard wooden pew, gilded stars adorned a blue-painted celestial vault on the ceiling. The coffin sank into the grave and after the funeral reception, we went home and Dad heated some lamb soup from the previous day. My brother said he had no appetite and lay in bed with his hands under his head, staring up at the fringe chandelier. It was from a stranded ship, with painted miniature pictures depicting pastoral scenes in a blossoming countryside. One of the images was of a man with a scythe.

  “Mum was forty-eight when she died,” I tell the poet.

  “Only music can grasp death,” Dad said before closing himself off to write a description of the day’s weather.

  Calm. Temperature: 8°. Steinthóra Egilsdóttir, my wife of twenty years, was buried today. Thirty-three ewes have delivered. Fields under sheets of ice, horses scouring for nibbles. The Arctic skua hunts for food. Long bouts of unpredictable weather cause winterkill. Nevertheless, the flow of streamlets can now be heard resounding across the valley. There was a heavy murmur in the deep narrow channels of the river today.

  “Did you know, Hekla dear,” says Dad, “that it was Jónas Hallgrímsson who invented the Icelandic words
for space, himingeimur and heiðardalur. It took a nineteenth-century poet to create the Great Beyond.”

  The poet wraps his arms around me:

  “Shouldn’t one get curtains now that one has a girlfriend,” he says.

  MORNING RADIO 8:00. LUNCHTIME NEWS 12:00.

  OFF-TIME, SAILORS PROGRAMME.

  AFTERNOON NEWS

  15:00. ANNOUNCEMENTS

  18:50. WEATHER FORECAST

  19:20. NEWS 19:30.

  20:00: OPUS 13: STENKA RAZIN SYMPHONIC

  POEM IN B MINOR BY GLAZUNOV PERFORMED

  BY THE MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA.

  22:00: NEWS AND WEATHER FORECAST

  The poet doesn’t have to show up at the library until the afternoon so he can have a lie in. Nevertheless, he’s awake and watches me getting dressed in the dark. Before I go out, he buttons up my coat as if I were a little child.

  A man is taking care of me.

  The morning is half gone by the time daylight finally creeps into the night like a pale pink line.

  After work I walk down to Stýrimannastígur where I keep the typewriter and see Jón John and Odin, and write, while the poet meets up with his fellow poets in Café Mokka. If he’s not drinking coffee in Mokka, he’s at Hressingarskálinn. If he’s not at Skálinn, he’s at Laugavegur 11. If he’s not at Laugavegur 11, he’s in the upstairs bar in Naust, where the poets go when other places are closed. If he’s not at Naust, he might be found at the West End Café. Occasionally, he goes to meetings at the Revolutionary Youth Movement in Tjarnargata in the evenings. When he comes home, I immediately put my book aside and we go straight to bed. Before falling asleep, I check to see the colour of the sky.

  “Is my maiden from the dales checking out the weather?” the poet asks.

  I ask Dad to send me my confirmation duvet. I had an extra half kilo of eiderdown added to it, he writes in a letter in the parcel.

  “Every night with you is so immense,” says the poet.

  Immortality

  It’s Sunday and I need to get to Stýrimannastígur to write.

  The poet lies in bed with a folded copy of the Thjódviljinn newspaper, The People’s Will, on his chest.

  “What’s developing here is an unadulterated and unbridled form of capitalism in which racketeers steal from the people and profit becomes the only yardstick.”

  He stands up, zealously waving his hands about like a man on a pulpit.

  “It’s been nineteen years since Iceland gained its independence and wholesalers have taken over from the Danish kings and monopolistic merchants. They’re building shopping malls all over Sudurlandsbraut with the profits from Danish layer cakes.”

  I tell the poet I’m going to visit Jón John.

  “But you visited him yesterday. And the day before.”

  “Yes, he’s sewing a curtain for the skylight.”

  He is bewildered.

  “And does he have a sewing machine?”

  “Yes.”

  He peruses me.

  “I feel it’s a bit odd that my girlfriend has a male friend whom she visits every day after work. And on weekends.”

  He stands by the window, hailstones pelting against the glass.

  “If I didn’t know he isn’t into women, I’d be worried about you hanging out with him so much.”

  He paces the length of the floor.

  “I heard about the two of you at an art exhibition in Listamannaskálinn yesterday.”

  “We went to a painting exhibition. Who told you about that?”

  “Thórarinn Dragfjörd. He’s one of us, the Mokka poets. He’s read a short story he wrote on the radio.”

  “Yes,” I say, “I said hello to him. He spoke about you.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said you’re very talented and destined to become famous.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiles.

  “I said the same thing to him the other day. That he’s very talented and destined to become famous.”

  He’s visibly moved and has already forgotten that I have a sailor friend.

  He sits at the table and lights a Chesterfield before standing up again, walking to the window and gazing out into the blizzard. From there he walks to the bed.

  “Should we have a nap before you leave?” he asks. “Then there’s the radio story after lunch,” he adds.

  “Aren’t you going to go out to meet the poets?”

  “Not this evening. I was thinking I’d take care of my girlfriend.”

  He embraces me.

  “I thought we could go to a dance at the weekend. In Glaumbær. Do the twist. As couples do.”

  He lets go of me to go find Prokofiev in the record collection.

  Curtain number one

  While my sailor is sewing curtains for a skylight in Skólavördustígur, I sit on the bed with the typewriter on the bedside table and write. We’re in sync; when I finish the chapter, my friend hands me the folded curtains. He had offered to buy the material for me, which is orange with violet diamonds and narrow pleats below. He puts the sewing machine back into the wardrobe and clears the desk for me.

  I smile at him and feed another sheet into the typewriter.

  He stands behind me and watches me write.

  “Am I in the story?”

  “You are and you aren’t.”

  “I don’t belong to any group, Hekla. They forgot to take me into account.”

  He sits on the sofa and I stand up and go sit beside him.

  “Make me a chapter in a novel so that my life can have some meaning. Write about a boy who loves boys.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “And who can’t stand violence.”

  I nod.

  “They’re certainly colourful,” says the poet, as I’m putting up the curtains that Jón John made in Skólavördustígur. “Like a sunset and violet Mt Akrafjall all rolled into the same curtains.”

  He turns off the light.

  “I don’t mind if you hang out with the queer.”

  “Did you know, Hekla,” my sailor had said to me as he watched me writing, “that the typewriter was invented fifty-two times?”

  Curtain number two

  Ísey has hung nappies outside on the line in the frost where they dangle frozen solid, I take them down and carry them inside with the pegs.

  She thanks me and says she forgot the laundry.

  “Remember the woman neighbour I told you about who was awake one night when I stood at the kitchen window and looked over at me?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “It’s been three months now and no curtains have been put up in the living-room window yet. I met her at the fish shop yesterday, she was behind me in the line and waited while the fishmonger was wrapping up my fish and joking with me. I thought to myself: there are women who are alone with children in other houses as well, and I wanted to suggest that we could take turns in boiling haddock and running over to each other with dinner before the men got home. Maybe I’ll invite her over for coffee and some fruitcake. Apart from you, she’d be the first person to come for a visit after I moved to the city. As I get bigger, the fishmonger will stop jesting with me. Then men will stop looking at me. They don’t look at a woman in a maternity coat.”

  As we’re talking, Ísey feeds her daughter milk from a bottle.

  “When I came home from the fish shop, I sat down to write a few lines while Thorgerdur had her afternoon nap. Before I knew it, I’d written a story, Hekla.”

  “A short story or…?”

  “It’s about the woman in the next house. I made her walk out with a restless child at night. I made it have a tummy ache. I made it a bright summer night. I made the baby fall asleep. I made the woman walk around the neighbourhood and see men coming out of an apartment carrying a rolled-up carpet with something inside it and she realizes it’s a human body. The crime baffles the police, but then the woman steps in and solves the mystery. I made her f
ind clues in the sandpit, which the men had overlooked because police officers don’t search playgrounds. No one believes her. I used one line from my own life in the story, something Lýdur had said to me: Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Ísa. I make the police officer who is taking her statement say that to her. Good job nobody knows the nonsense I get up to in broad daylight.”

  She shakes her head.

  “I don’t know what came over me. How it occurred to me to murder people. The man in the stationery shop is getting to know me. At first I used to come once a month, now it’s once a week.”

  She is silent for a moment.

  “When I get an idea, it feels like a slight electric current from the faulty cord of an iron.”

  Then she asks:

  “Do you notice anything new?”

  I look around.

  No new paintings have appeared since the last time.

  “The curtains?”

  She smiles.

  “I just got a new potted plant. A begonia.”

  Twenty-third night

  I’m awake.

  The poet is sleeping.

  Apart from the vault of stars the world is black.

  A sentence comes to me and then another, then an image, it’s a whole page, it’s a whole chapter and it struggles like a seal in a net inside my head. I try to fix my gaze on the moon through the skylight, I ask the sentences to leave, I ask them to stay, I need to get up to write, so they won’t vanish. Then the world swells up and for yet one more night, I become greater than myself, I ask the good Lord to help me shrink the world again and to give me a calm, black, still sea, to give me a still-life picture with a Dutch windmill like the calendar they sell in Snæbjörn’s Bookstore or an image of puppies like the one on the lid of the tin of Nóa sweets that Jón John keeps his newspaper cuttings in. I long for and I don’t long, then I long to continue discovering the world every day; I don’t long to boil fish on the Siemens stove and serve the men in Hotel Borg, to walk out of one cloud of cigar smoke into another with a silver tray; I long to read books all day when I’m not writing. The poet knows nothing of the seals that struggle inside me under the eiderdown duvet, but stretches out his hand to me and I allow him, as I release my grip on the words; tomorrow morning they won’t be there any more, I will have lost my sentences by then because every night I lose four sentences.