Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “Lolla says that planes carrying geologists from Reykjavík and American military aircraft from the Vellir base are flying over the area, but that sea vessels have been warned not to get too close. That means that my brother-in-law Ólafur and I can’t sail up to the eruption on Fannlaug VE, as I’d intended.”

  There’s a brief silence on the line and I can see that the head waiter has his eye on me. Service is required in the dining room.

  As expected, my father is too restless to stay put in the west and is on his way south. He says he’s already made arrangements for a taxi driver, my aunt’s husband on my mother’s side, to drive him to Kambabrún to see the plume of smoke with his own eyes.

  “Since the eruption isn’t visible from Skólavörduholt, the way it was with the 1918 Katla eruption,” he adds.

  “Yes, yes, Daddy dear…”

  Apart from that, he tells me he needs to see an optician. His old glasses are held together with sellotape, but only just about. Now he’s wondering whether he should go to the optician before or after his drive east to Kambabrún.

  “Wouldn’t you be more likely to see the volcanic plume if you have new glasses?” I ask.

  There’s another brief silence on the phone. The head waiter looms over me.

  “I have to go now, Dad.”

  “I’ll say happy birthday to you then, Hekla dear.”

  That comes last.

  “Like I said: you were born four years too soon.”

  Ball of ash

  It transpires that the poet has phoned his mother in the east, in Hveragerdi, to ask her if she can see the eruption through her kitchen window.

  “She said she was washing-up after lunch when she heard a mighty rumble and saw the sky light up with flashes of lightning. She described a massive plume of steam to me that shot out of the ocean: a tall white pillar of smoke with a spherical crest at the top, and said that the cloud reminded her of a picture she’d seen of a nuclear explosion.”

  This gives the poet an opportunity to raise the subject of the Cuban crisis and world peace hanging by a thin thread.

  “Mankind’s lifeline is in the hands of three lunatics and total annihilation looms,” he says, banging his pipe over the ashtray.

  A copy of Thjódviljinn lies on the table with Khrushchev on the cover. He hesitates.

  “While I was at it, I told Mum I’ve met a girl.”

  He looks at me.

  “Would my girlfriend like to take a coach trip east over the mountain to Hveragerdi village?”

  To see an eruption and meet Mum.

  End rhyme

  I get off work an hour early to collect Dad at the coach terminal and he suggests seeing my workplace, saying hi to my colleagues and having a drop of coffee before the taxi driver, his brother-in-law, collects him in his Chevrolet. Sirrí serves us and he removes his cloth cap to run a comb through his hair before greeting her with a handshake. She smiles at him.

  He orders cream cake with coffee for both of us and slips two sugar cubes into the coffee.

  “They say the eruption is at a depth of 130 metres and that the plume of ash is 6 kilometres high,” he says, stirring his coffee.

  Next he wants a description of the boy I’m seeing.

  “Is he a poet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he write blank verse?”

  I give this some thought.

  “He uses alliteration, but no end rhymes,” I say. “He also works at the library in Thingholtsstræti,” I add. I don’t mention that he’s thinking of quitting his job at the library and turning into a night porter.

  My father then wants to know if I’m writing.

  “Is my Hekla writing?”

  “I don’t write as much as I would like to.”

  “You used strange words as a child. You read books backwards.

  “You knew all those old Icelandic words for the weather.

  “You said: williwaw.

  “Drizzle.

  “Mizzle.

  “Twirlblasts.

  “Thunder-head.

  “Your brother wanted to wrestle and become a farmer.”

  He pats my cheek.

  “You get that from me. The urge to scribble.”

  He sips his coffee.

  “Weather descriptions you mean?” I ask.

  “No, not exactly. What I mean, Hekla dear, is that for twenty-five years I’ve kept a record of people’s premonitions of eruptions all over the country, including their dreams and the strange behaviour of animals.”

  He finishes his slice of cake and scrapes the cream off the plate.

  “That’s an area that geologists haven’t really explored much. I’m thinking of calling it Volcanic Memoirs and publishing it myself.”

  He asks me to call over the girl for more coffee. I notice that the man from the Beauty Society is having his afternoon coffee at the window table and is keeping an eye on us.

  “I don’t think it’s the destructive power that attracts me, Hekla dear, but the creative force.”

  I tell Dad I’ve been invited to participate in Miss Iceland but that I’ve turned down the offer.

  “Many times,” I add, “but they won’t take no for an answer.”

  He finishes his cup of coffee and scoops the sugar out from the bottom with a spoon.

  “You hold your headdress up high, Hekla dear, but don’t let them ogle you and measure you like some piece of cattle. Those Laxdæla women, Gudrún Ósvífursdóttir and Auður the Deep-Minded, didn’t allow themselves to be pushed around by men.”

  He opens the bag he has brought with him, pulls out a parcel and places it on the table.

  “Your birthday present, Hekla dear. From your brother and me. Örn wrapped it.”

  It’s Paintings and Memories by Ásgrímur Jónsson. I open the first page.

  “It’s the memoirs of that painter who painted the biggest picture of Hekla. Your grandfather was working on the roads east in Hreppur when Ásgrímur stood by the cranes and painted the mother mountain herself and most of the Árnessýsla district through the opening of a tent. He had raised a tent made of large brown sailcloth that smelt of mould—it had probably been packed wet. Your granddad greeted him in the tent and said that the patch of turf that the painter stood on had turned into a mire in the rain, a slimy pit of mud. Nevertheless, he had sensed the presence of something bigger. ‘I think it was the beauty, Gottskálk,’ he said to me.”

  He stretches out over the table for the book and wants to read the opening lines about the Krakatindur Hekla eruption in 1878:

  “I’m standing out in the yard, a two-year-old toddler, all alone. But suddenly I look north-east and there, out of the blue, I see sparks of fire shooting into the air, giant red poles slashing the dark sky…”

  He closes the book, looks at me, and wants to know how long I intend to hang around in the capital and if I’m considering rushing abroad after my friend.

  “I think the wanderlust comes from your mother, Hekla. She had this restlessness in her soul and didn’t want to be wherever she was. She used to rush out into the evening dew on her own, barefooted.”

  He is silent for a few moments.

  “Your mother almost left me once. It was when I took you south to see the eruption of your namesake, but she thought I had taken you too close to the glowing lava.”

  Terms used by my father

  in Hotel Borg

  Pillars of fire

  Ocean of fire

  Beauteous fire

  Sparks of fire

  Bolts of fire

  Eyes of fire

  Cinders of fire

  Shower of fire

  Atrocity

  A north-westerly wind sweeps down Laufásvegur and, as I walk past the American embassy, I notice that the star-spangled banner is flying at half-mast. A small cluster of people stands silently in the cold in front of the three-storey building. Unusually, the poet isn’t in Mokka but at home. He is solemn, with his ears glued to the radio.
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  The symphony concert has been interrupted to announce an atrocity committed in the outside world.

  “President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas this morning,” he says.

  He stands and immediately sits again.

  “Last week a new island was born. On your birthday.

  “This week a world dies.”

  He paces the floor and says the news is still unclear, but that the Russians are believed to be behind the murder.

  “People blame the Russians for everything. Not just for the launching pads in Cuba,” he adds.

  He puts on his jacket to go to a People’s Front meeting. Odin stands and vanishes behind the door with the poet. The cat has been restless over the past few days. When I stroke her, I feel the kittens.

  I need a new ribbon for the typewriter so I don’t write tonight. Instead I lie in bed with Black Feathers.

  When the poet returns, he takes off his parka, unbuttons his shirt and says:

  “It’s a day of national mourning in Russia. Radio Moscow is playing funeral marches.”

  He sits at the desk and writes some words on a sheet, which he then folds.

  Is he next going to open the skylight to dispatch a paper plane with an important message about the blood-red revolution down Skólavördustígur? While the wind intensifies and pounds the window, the birds grow silent and the world comes to an end?

  He takes off his trousers.

  “I’ve got an idea for the opening couplet,” he says as he lifts the duvet.

  The following morning he’s torn up the page.

  Twelve pages

  The poet has quit at the library and started working as a night porter at Hotel Skjaldbreid.

  It’s a slightly longer walk down to Kirkjustræti than it is to the library, as the poet points out, but on the other hand, it’s a shorter distance to the Naust bar.

  We meet between shift changes like colleagues; he comes home and slides under the duvet at around the same time I’m getting up. This also means that I can write into the night because I’m not disturbing the poet.

  He’s stopped reading for me, he’s stopped saying:

  “Listen to this, Hekla.”

  Instead he wants to know if I’ve written today. And for how long.

  “Were you writing?”

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “How many pages?”

  I skim through the manuscript:

  “Twelve.”

  “You’ve changed so much since we met. If you’re not working, you’re writing. If you’re not writing, you’re reading. You’d drain your own veins if you ran out of ink. Sometimes I feel you only moved in with me to have a roof over your head.”

  I slip my arms around the poet.

  “Tell me, what do you see in me, Hekla?”

  I give it some thought.

  He presses me.

  “You’re a man. With a body,” I answer.

  And I think: He could also certainly hand me a quill

  like a flower

  that he has plucked from a black bird

  wet with blood and say:

  Write.

  He stares at me in astonishment.

  “At least you’re honest.”

  He lies down on the bed, fully clothed.

  “A poet needs to live in the shadows and experience darkness. There’s a lack of darkness with you, Hekla. You’re light.”

  Black

  The day no longer manages to pick itself up; it breaks briefly on the crystallized salty window around noon when the red sun rolls over the frozen lake, then darkens again.

  “They’ve given her a name,” says the poet.

  “Who?”

  “The new island. It’s called Surtsey, the black island.”

  He cleans out his pipe in the ashtray.

  “They say that so far it’s still mostly a heap of black pumice, but lava has now started to flow and the island is piling up.”

  The poet is also looking glum because during the day the story broke that some French journalists have stepped onto the island without permission.

  And planted a flag.

  He’s not at all happy.

  “It’s in the paper,” he says, pointing at the article on the front page: Unauthorized newshounds from French gossip magazine Paris Match step onto Surtsey.

  “It says they stayed on the island for twenty minutes but then had to escape from explosions and flowing lava.”

  He closes the newspaper and puts it down.

  “It actually burned pretty fast, the tricolour. The flames from the bowels of the earth set fire to the flag of fraternity.”

  He stands up.

  “Once an imperial power, always an imperial power, is my communist’s conclusion.”

  He then wants to know whether I’ve been to Tómas Jónsson’s butcher shop and bought something for dinner.

  Odin’s sons and daughters

  I hear some rustling from the kitchen and, when I open the door, see that our neighbour, the mechanic, is crouched down on all fours in front of the kitchen table where my typewriter sits. He’s in blue-striped pyjama trousers. Under the table I catch a glimpse of Odin’s black pelt. When the boat mechanic stands, I count eight kittens sucking on Odin’s swollen pink teats, four black like their mother, three spotted and one white. Our neighbour says that he came into the kitchen during the night to cook himself some prune porridge and saw that two kittens had already been born. He didn’t want to leave the mother until she’d delivered her full litter. It had taken a good four hours and he had to poke one of the kittens on the nose because it wasn’t breathing. That was the white one, he adds.

  I bend over, Odin is exhausted and closes her eyes.

  I gently stroke her fur.

  Our neighbour said he had a tub of cream he was going to have on his prune porridge but instead had poured it into the cat’s milk bowl.

  “She has no appetite,” he says, shaking his head.

  The poet follows on my heels. He was returning from his night shift and crouches beside me to examine the furry heap under the table. He had come home with a cardboard box a few days earlier and placed it in the corner of the room. The cat had sniffed the box but shown no interest in it.

  The poet straightens up.

  “She didn’t want my cubbyhole but instead made a lair under the table you write on,” he concludes.

  The undersized

  On my way to Ísey’s, I stop by the Liverpool household-goods shop on Laugavegur and buy a green tractor with rubber wheels for Thorgerdur.

  Ísey opens the door with the child on her hip and is visibly upset. The thing she had feared the most has happened: her mother-in-law has sent her a pile of ptarmigans.

  “In their skin and all. I feel like she’s trying to make sure I look after Lýdur properly.”

  She now stands bewildered over the frozen white-feathered bundle on the drainboard.

  “The problem is we never had ptarmigan at Christmas and I don’t know how to cook them.”

  I examine the birds.

  We’re used to seabirds back home in Breidafjördur, so I say to my friend:

  “Imagine they’re puffins. Then just act as if you’re cooking those.”

  “That’s the problem, Hekla. Lýdur says I have to pluck them instead of skinning them.”

  She sits her daughter in a high chair and sinks onto a kitchen stool.

  The child sits at the end of the table and bangs a spoon against it.

  I notice there are no curtains on the window.

  Ísey tells me she had taken the curtains down and soaked them in bleach, but now she doesn’t feel like fishing them out again, or drying and ironing them.

  “I told Lýdur I want a camera for Christmas. I’m also always thinking about the copybook hidden in the bucket,” she adds in a low voice.

  She ties a bib around the child’s neck and, as she’s stirring the skyr, tells me that Lýdur is going to quit his job with the Road Administration in the east
and try to find work building blocks of flats in Álfheimar.

  “He had to fill out an application form,” she says and sighs. “That’s new. Now the trade union wants contracts to be in writing. The funny thing was that it was so full of spelling mistakes that I had to rewrite his application from scratch for him. He says he’s never been good at commas. But it wasn’t just commas. He can make anything with his hands but he can’t spell for peanuts. He mixes up all the letters, I don’t get it. He wrote: I the undersized.”

  She is silent for a moment.

  “Will you get a man in your book to say: Being a father and husband shaped me and gave my life a purpose and meaning? Do that for me, Hekla.”

  I smile and stand up.

  I tell her the cat is lighter and has a total of eight kittens.

  “The mechanic, our neighbour, is going to take one and Sirrí, who works with me, another, but I have to find a home for the others.”

  I hesitate.

  “There’s one that’s different from all the rest. White. I’m wondering if you might like to have him?”

  I button up my coat and she follows me to the door.

  “Starkadur is asking whether any of the poets want a cat. It could be tricky, though, because Stefnir, the Brook Bard, says Laxness doesn’t have a cat.”

  Mother’s nest

  Behind the longest night lies the shortest day of the year.

  On the coach, a suitcase and a tin of sweets with a picture of kittens on the lid sits above us in a net. Our neighbour, the mechanic, is going to take care of Odin and her offspring over Christmas.

  “Mum wants sweets,” the poet had said.

  There is a snowdrift on Sandskeid, then we drive into a dim cloud of hail in the white mottled lava field of Svínahraun and the world darkens for a brief moment. On the edge of the road, up the hill by the ski lodge, it clears for an instant and when I lean over to the window and look up, I glimpse blue sky.

  “There’s gold in your hair,” says the poet.

  At the same moment, we drive into a dense mass of fog.