Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  The poetic ear

  The corrugated-iron roof glistens in the silvery frost and the kitten-laden cat has difficulties walking. She no longer dares to jump down onto the neighbours’ garage roof, so I escort her out in the mornings when I go to work. She follows me a long way, but then turns around. When I come home in the afternoon, she’s waiting for me by the door. I boil fish and potatoes in the evening for the three of us: the cat, the poet and me. It doesn’t take long. I drink a glass of milk with the fish. Occasionally I make rice pudding and we eat it with cinnamon sugar.

  The poet says he’s thinking of quitting at the library and getting a job as a night porter.

  “I’ve no time to write with my library job,” he says. “It’s also a question of finding the right environment for inspiration,” he adds.

  He says they’re looking for a night porter to share shifts with Áki Hvanngil at Hotel Skjaldbreidur. Áki has a poetry book in the works and says he has his best ideas at night.

  “One can’t create surrounded by constant distractions.”

  “How about in the mornings before you go to the library?”

  “Mornings aren’t my time, Hekla.”

  When the poet is asleep, I get out of bed, turn on the desk lamp and pick up the book.

  Then his eyes are suddenly open. At first he lies there dead still, watching me, but then sits up. He wants to know what I’m reading. I hand him the book and he examines the cover, turns a few pages for good measure and reads the title.

  He looks at me.

  “Is this one of the books from the queer?”

  He seems sullen.

  “Some of the things you read, Hekla, are offensive to the poetic ear,” he says before lying down again and turning towards the wall.

  I continue reading about the second sex:

  It is through gainful employment that the woman has traversed most of the distance that separated her from the male; and nothing else can guarantee her liberty in practice.

  I think to myself: I have both, but I earn so little that I will never be able to save enough for a ticket abroad.

  Missing you

  The postman stands in the slushy snow in the skimmedmilky grey light and hands me a postcard. “Hekla Gottskálksdóttir,” he reads, and I know he wants to know who is sending me a card with a photograph of red tulips and missing me. Another postcard arrives two weeks later with a picture of Frederick IX of Denmark in full attire.

  Found a job and a place to live.

  “I see you’ve received yet another card from the queer,” says the poet.

  Next I get a letter in a sealed envelope with a return address.

  In it he writes that at first he rented a room in a B&B, but now he just rents a room.

  Then he says:

  I’ve met a man, Hekla.

  Books then start arriving, one book in every parcel.

  I pick them up at the post office.

  In the weeks that follow, I get Last Tales by Karen Blixen (a postcard my friend slipped into the book tells me she also used the penname of Isak Dinesen), Childhood Street by Tove Ditlevsen and Light by Inger Christensen.

  I round up words

  Then one night I get up to write. I sit up, the hot body in the bed turns over and wraps the eiderdown around himself. His breathing is deep and regular. The cat sleeps in the recess under the window. The alarm clock reads five and Dad will be on his way to the shed to feed the sheep.

  The skylight has misted up in the night, a white patina of snow has formed on the windowsill. I drape the poet’s sweater over me, move into the kitchen to get a cloth to wipe it up. A trail of sleet streams down the glass, I trace it with my finger. Apart from the squawk of seagulls, a desolate stillness reigns over Skólavördustígur.

  I fetch the typewriter from under the bed, open the door into the kitchen, place the typewriter on the table and feed a sheet into it.

  I’m holding the baton.

  I can light a star in the black vault.

  I can also turn it off.

  The world is my invention.

  An hour later the poet is standing at the kitchen door in his pyjama bottoms.

  The cat follows at his heels.

  “What are you doing?” he asks. “Are you writing? I woke up and you’d disappeared. I searched for you, but the earth had swallowed you up,” he continues as if he were way-worn after travelling down a long road and not just from the other side of the partition, as if he’d climbed a heath in search of a lost sheep who hadn’t returned from the mountain and finally found her under the lee of an eroded bank where she was least expected to be found. Unless he had been searching for me in a dream?

  The poet scrutinizes the pages on the table.

  “Are you writing a poem?”

  I look at him.

  “Just a few sentences. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “More than that it seems to me. That’s a whole load of pages.”

  The cat stands by the empty saucer on the floor so I stand up, get the milk carton from the fridge and pour some into the bowl.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were writing as well?”

  “I was waiting for the opportunity to tell you.”

  “Have you been published?”

  I hesitate.

  “Yes, a few poems.”

  “A few poems?”

  He seems confused and anxious.

  “Four poems, to be precise, and two short stories.”

  He pulls out a kitchen stool and sits on it.

  “A poem of mine was lying on the editor of Thjódviljinn’s desk for three months and you’ve had four poems and two short stories published. Where were they published if I may ask?”

  “In magazines: Mál og menning, Morgunbladid’s literary supplement and Birtingur.”

  I hesitate.

  “And two poems in the Tíminn newspaper,” I add after some thought.

  “Here I am struggling to get published and my girlfriend—Miss Northern Lights as the queer calls you—has been published in all of the country’s top newspapers and magazines.”

  “That’s a bit of an overstatement,” I say. “Besides, it was under a pseudonym. I used a male name.”

  He looks me sternly in the eye.

  “What pseudonym, may I ask?”

  I hesitate.

  “Sigtryggur frá Saurum.”

  He leaps to his feet.

  “Are you Sigtryggur frá Saurum? We thought he was one of us. We knew it was a pseudonym, but didn’t know which one of us it was.”

  “And one poem under the name of Stella Maris.”

  “We thought Stella Maris was Ægir, the Glacier Poet. He seemed so smug when we mentioned the short story in Morgunbladid and behaved as if he knew more than he was letting on, just stuffed his pipe and didn’t say a word. Still, it was different from the lines he had read to us.”

  “The short story in Morgunbladid was actually a juvenile piece, I was eighteen when I wrote that. I write differently now.”

  The poet sits on the kitchen stool again and buries his face in his hands.

  “Are you writing longer pieces?” he asks in a low voice. “I mean something longer than short stories?”

  “I wanted to tell you I was writing, but wanted to finish my novel first. I knew you would have wanted to read it, but then I wouldn’t have wanted to finish it.”

  He looks at me in disbelief.

  “Are you writing a novel?”

  “Yes.”

  “A whole book?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long?” I hesitate.

  “Longer than two hundred pages?” he asks.

  “About three hundred pages.”

  Our neighbour, the mechanic, has switched on his radio and turns up the volume so as not to miss the weather forecast. I have to get dressed and go to work.

  “Is this your first novel?”

  “I’ve written two other manuscripts. One of them is actually with a publisher. I’m wai
ting for an answer.”

  The poet is lost for words.

  “My girlfriend is an author and I’m not.”

  He opens the fridge, takes out the milk and pours himself a glass.

  The cat meows, the saucer is empty.

  “And you’ve hidden this from me. I never suspected a thing. I feel like I’ve had to repeat an entire year at school. You’ve surpassed me. You’re the glacier that sparkles, I’m just a molehill. You’re dangerous, I’m innocuous.”

  My explanations are futile. The poet has been thrown off-kilter.

  “Does the queer know this? That you write?”

  “Yes.”

  He downs the glass of milk.

  “And Ísey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everyone but me knows my girlfriend is a novelist.”

  He stares at his hands.

  “Did you come to Reykjavík to be an author?”

  “No, to work.”

  He stands up.

  “I didn’t realize you wanted to be one of us, Hekla.”

  I walk over to him, put my arms around him and say:

  “Let’s go lie down.”

  And I think: let’s get into bed and spread over us the quilt full of raven’s feathers, full of black quills.

  My manuscript

  The poet stands at the desk, holding a sheet in his hand.

  Mozart’s Requiem is playing on the record player.

  His lips are moving.

  He’s reading my manuscript.

  I put down the shirts I picked up at the A. Smith laundry on the way home from work, walk over to the poet and take the page away from him.

  “I’ve read your manuscript.”

  “It’s not ready. I asked you not to read it.”

  The glass ashtray is crammed with butts.

  I open the window.

  “Didn’t you go to work?” I ask.

  “No, I didn’t feel well. I sent them a message to say I was sick.”

  He sits on the bed and I sit beside him.

  “If things were as they should be, I would come home for lunch, Hekla.”

  He looks at me.

  “Would you put some potatoes on to boil like other women?”

  I say nothing.

  He takes the record off the turntable and turns on the radio. The ads are on.

  Second-hand fridge for sale.

  He turns off the radio.

  “No, you don’t want to be an ordinary woman, Hekla.”

  He stands up and props one arm up against the wall, his head drooping over his chest. After three weeks of fickle stormy weather, it has started to thaw and rain pounds the corrugated-iron.

  “No one is asking you to write. Why do you have to do everything like me?”

  I watch him climbing into his trousers and sweater.

  “Are you going out? Aren’t you sick?”

  The poet doesn’t answer but switches topic.

  He wants to know if that vulgar guy at Hotel Borg has been pestering me lately.

  “Yes, he was hitting on me today as it happens.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He asked if I was engaged or not.”

  “And what did you answer?”

  “I told him the truth. That I wasn’t engaged. Because I’m not.”

  “How old is he?”

  “A middle-aged man. Twice my age. Family man.”

  “They’re the worst. I don’t want to see you put on display on a stage for entertainment. It’s a dreadful event: to sell women. Capitalism in its worst form. You would never see a Miss Soviet Union beauty contest? Miss Romania?

  Miss Cuba?”

  He looks at me.

  “I’m not going to participate. I’ve told them so many times. The man is stalking me.”

  He swivels on his heels and puts on his parka.

  He’s gone out to meet the poets.

  A single sentence is more important than my body

  It’s 3 a.m. by the time the poet returns home, brandishing a bottle of schnapps in a paper bag.

  Starkadur, the son of Hveragerdi, is drunk.

  He swings an arm, falls over a chair and drags it with difficulty to the desk where he sits on it and opens a notebook. It takes him a very long time to get the cap off his fountain pen.

  “I’m just a shell,” I hear him say.

  I get out of bed and walk over to him.

  When he’s finished writing I’m just a shell on the page, he caps his pen again with some effort and drinks from his bottle.

  “Do you love him?”

  “Who?”

  “The queer? Does he make passes at you? Does he want to sleep with me as well?”

  “Don’t talk like that about him. Besides, he’s gone.”

  He tries to clamber out of his trousers, but steps on one leg and has trouble maintaining his balance. His braces dangle.

  “Don’t you want to ask me what my favourite word is, Hekla? Whether it’s dewy? You don’t ask me about anything… One never knows what you’re thinking, I can tell by the way you look that you’re always writing, even when you’re not writing. I know that distant look in your eyes, you’re here but at the same time somewhere else…”

  “That’s not true, Starkadur.”

  “You betray nothing on the surface. When a man lives with a volcano, he knows there’s glowing magma underneath… You know, Hekla, you hurl boulders in all directions… which destroy everything on their path… you’re a prickly bramble. I’m no match for you…”

  I take the bottle away from him.

  He lies on the bed.

  “Writing is more important than me, a single sentence is more important than my body,” I hear him mutter unintelligibly.

  I’m unable to control myself and sit at the table to write: A single sentence is more important than my body.

  He reaches for the bottle.

  “How do you do it?”

  “How do I do what?”

  “Get ideas.”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer but continues:

  “Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”

  “Yes. A few people. You said it yourself a few days ago.”

  “Did you know that seagulls fall silent when they see you?”

  “Would you like me to boil an egg for you?”

  The poet had come home with three eggs in a paper bag earlier in the day.

  He follows me into the kitchen and, stretching his arms out on the table, he props up his head with his hands.

  “I… have been… sneaking… to look at you… while you’re sleeping… to try and fathom you,” I hear him mumble. “Then I feel… we’re equals… When you’re sleeping. Then you’re… not writing… and then you’re not… a better writer… than me… And…”

  Listen, Hekla

  When I get home, the poet is awake.

  He is sitting on the bed, holding the cat, but springs to his feet to welcome me. I immediately see that he hasn’t only tidied up the bedroom, emptied the ashtray and made the bed, but also washed the floor. I also notice that he’s shaved and put on a tie.

  There’s a bouquet of yellow roses on the table, which he grabs and hands to me.

  “Forgive me,” he says. “I’ve neglected my girlfriend.”

  He embraces me.

  “I was so scared you weren’t coming back, Hekla. That you’d left me.”

  “I popped into a shop on the way home,” I say, brandishing some bread and a bottle of milk.

  The cat leaps onto the floor and gives itself a shake.

  We don’t have a vase so I hunt around for something to put the flowers in. The schnapps bottle which the poet came home with last night is empty, but there are seven roses and only three of them would squeeze through the neck of the bottle. And there’s little chance of any of the hermits in the attic owning a vase, so the only option is to knock on the door of the woman who rents the rooms out on the floor below. I’m holding the bunch of roses in my arms.
>
  She eyes me with suspicion; a woman doesn’t ask another woman for the loan of a crystal vase.

  “For how long?” she asks.

  I could have asked in return: What’s the lifespan of a rose?

  “Five days,” I say.

  I’m expecting her to ask me about the odds of the poet breaking the vase.

  When I come back up, the poet has slipped “Love Me Tender” onto the turntable. He shifts to one side on the edge of the bed, I sit beside him and he grabs my hand.

  “They were asking about you.”

  “Who?”

  “The poets. Whether you’re going to pop by. I told them you were also writing. It took them by surprise. Stefnir wants to meet you.”

  He looks at me.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask.

  He says that he has a headache and that every sound is magnified in his head and turns into noise, even the cat’s purrs.

  A collection of Steingrímur Thorsteinsson’s poems lies open on the bed.

  He’s already chosen the piece he’s going to read to me and says: “Listen, Hekla.

  “Of all things blue, my sweetheart dear,

  The best is in thy glance sincere;

  No sky such glorious blue has got;

  So blue is not forget-me-not.”

  Birth of an island

  … and sometimes islands rise out of the sea,

  Where chasms previously dwelt

  (JÓNAS HALLGRÍMSSON, FJÖLNIR, 1835)

  I’m wanted on the phone at work.

  “It’s your father,” I’m told.

  I stand with the apron around my neck and the receiver in my hand.

  “An eruption has started, Hekla dear,” he says. “Out in the ocean where there is no land. South-west of the Westman Islands.”

  He says that his sister Lolla phoned from the islands to let him know there was a lot of white vapour in the air.

  “Before it was on the news. The eruption has taken everyone by surprise, she said. The day before her husband had cast his net in the same area, and now there’s an eruption going on under the sea and he hadn’t noticed anything abnormal, although he hadn’t spotted any whales. The birds had been diving into the water as usual, hunting for food. Her friend in the east village of Vík in Mýrdal had called her the night before to say she got a whiff of sulphur when she was putting on the potatoes. They’d connected the smell with the imminent eruption under a glacier.