Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  The poet unwraps a Prince Polo bar which he bought in the shop at the BSÍ coach terminal, snaps the chocolate wafer in two and hands me half.

  “I haven’t told Mum that we live together,” he says. “Just that you’re my girlfriend.”

  It’s almost noon by the time the pink December sun rises above Mt Kambur. In front of us are two geologists who pull a pair of binoculars out of a holster and point them at the sea. The volcanic plume is clearly visible as it billows high into the air, like the head of a giant cauliflower, dark grey below, almost white at the top. The sight of the cloud of ash causes a stir among the passengers who huddle together at the windows on one side of the coach.

  “Mum is putting us in separate rooms because we’re not officially engaged,” the poet continues.

  After yet another bend round Kambur, the pink dawn is switched off and we drive into sleet. Here and there vapours shoot out of the earth between the mounds of snow.

  The stench of skate fish hovers over the village as we step off the coach.

  The poet’s mother receives us at the door with a chequered Dralon apron tied around her neck.

  The poet introduces us:

  “Hekla, my girlfriend. Ingigerdur, my mother.”

  I stretch out my hand to the poet’s mother.

  We’ve arrived just in time, she’s placing the skate fish and turnips on a dish.

  “She wants to be called Lóló,” says the poet, when his mother has vanished back into the kitchen to manage the pots.

  I scan the dim living room. It’s fully carpeted and I notice several homemade sheepskin rugs: one in front of a red plush sofa with fringes, another in front of an upholstered armchair, another by the sideboard and yet another in front of the closed glass cabinet that stores the precious china. On the sideboard there is a large picture in a gilded frame of a man wearing a cap. It turns out to be the poet’s father, a steersman on the Godafoss.

  She stands in her apron at the edge of the table and watches us eat.

  “God, that girl doesn’t…” says the poet’s mother, looking at her only son.

  “… eat much,” the poet interjects.

  “Mum, don’t you want to sit down?” asks the poet.

  She finally relents but barely touches her food.

  “What…” she asks.

  The rest of the question comes some moments later.

  “… family…

  “… does the girl come from?”

  I tell her.

  “And where…

  “… does the girl come from?”

  “I’m from the west, from Dalir,” I say.

  The poet looks at me with gratitude.

  “What work does the girl…

  “… do?”

  Don’t mention the novel writing, the poet had told me on the way.

  “I work as a waitress at Hotel Borg,” I say.

  “Are you two…?” she asks.

  “No, Mum, we’re not engaged.”

  “Are you going to get…?”

  The poet smiles at me.

  “Yes, it could well happen that we’ll exchange rings.”

  “Would you like to take…?”

  She holds up a cup with a red-and-blue floral pattern and gilded brim.

  “No, we won’t take the cup set this time.”

  He smiles at me.

  “Maybe next time.”

  All of the poet’s mother’s attempts at a conversation end mid-sentence.

  “He didn’t take…”

  “I saw…”

  “My Starkadur was…”

  The poet completes the sentences for her.

  She offers us coffee after the skate fish and brings out a can of peaches.

  “Would the girl…?” she asks.

  “Would you like peaches?” he asks me.

  “Yes, please,” I say.

  After the meal we sit on the sofa, the poet lights a pipe and opens a book, as his mother brings me an album which she plants in my arms without saying a word.

  I carefully turn the silk pages and glance over the deckle-edged photographs glued to the sheets.

  She stands behind me and points to a boy in a woollen cap and boots, sitting on a sledge.

  “Starkadur…”

  “Pjetur made…”

  After I’ve leafed through three albums, she approaches me with a shoebox.

  “These are unsorted…” she says.

  “Various departed ancestors from the east,” says the poet who is sitting in the armchair with the Saga of the Sworn Brothers.

  Each photo is like the next, solemn figures dressed in their Sunday best in the only photo ever taken of them.

  The poet’s mother stands behind the sofa and occasionally points. “Pjetur… Kjartan Thorgrímsson… Gudrídur, Starkadur’s great-aunt. Bragia…”

  “Dad’s brother in the east,” the poet explains.

  The only time the poet’s mother comes close to pronouncing a complete sentence is:

  “She is younger than I…”

  She puts me in the guest room and her son in his old room. The ironing board stands beside my bed with the Christmas tablecloth draped over it. During the night I cautiously open the door to the poet’s bedroom. He’s awake and immediately lifts the corner of his quilt to make room for me. There is a sheepskin rug to the side of his single bed.

  Starkadur the second

  When we re-emerge in the morning, the poet’s mother is boiling smoked lamb. She’s got curlers in her hair and offers us home-baked rye bread with rolled meat sausage. A carton of milk stands on the table. She has also arranged home-baked cookies on a plate: butter cookies, half-moon cookies, vanilla wreaths, serina cookies and raisin biscuits. The poet’s older sister is married to a sailor from Skagaströnd and lives in the north, but his younger sister and her boyfriend, a sailor from Thorlákshöfn, are expected for dinner.

  “If the roads aren’t blocked,” says the poet who is listening to the weather forecast.

  When the poet has finished setting up the Christmas lights for his mother, he wants to show me the scenes of his childhood. The path we take leads up to the churchyard and he walks straight up to the grave where Pjetur Pjetursson rests.

  1905–1944, it says on the tomb.

  He is silent for a brief moment. Then he says:

  “Dad drank when he was on shore and was sometimes quick to lash out.”

  Beside the steersman is another tiny grave.

  Starkadur Pjetursson, the tombstone reads. Born and died in the same year, 1939.

  “My brother,” says the poet.

  “He was born a year before me and passed away in a cot death. I’m named after him and I owe my life to his death. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been born, Mum says. He’s Starkadur the first, I’m Starkadur the second.”

  He pulls up the collar of his jacket.

  “I sometimes feel like I’m lying there and he’s standing here.”

  Did you go…?

  “Did you go…?”

  “Yes, we went to the graveyard, Mum.”

  “Did you show…?”

  “Yes, I showed Hekla both graves.”

  “Did you see…?”

  “Yes, the volcanic plume could be seen from the graveyard.”

  Since more guests are expected, the dining table needs to be taken apart and extended. The poet fits the extension board, after which his mother spreads out the three-metre tablecloth she ironed while we were in the churchyard.

  “Tell the girl…”

  “Mum made this tablecloth,” says the poet.

  The electricity flickers on and off and at five o’clock, in the middle of the cooking, the power cuts off in the village from the overload. Meanwhile, the rack of lamb waits in the oven.

  “It happens…” says the poet’s mother.

  “Yeah, it happens every year,” the poet rounds off.

  The radio is battery-powered so the announcements can still be heard. A communist doesn’t listen to chu
rch services so the poet suggests we move into the bedroom. He wants to show me a poetry book by a poet from the village, who had published eleven books. He double-locks the door.

  “Mum likes you,” he says.

  He’s pleased.

  A short while later there is a knock on the door.

  “May I ask the girl to…?”

  “Mum wants to know if she can ask you to fold the napkins.”

  She shows me where the boys should sit, her son and son-in-law—they should get the rolled-up Christmas napkins—the women’s should be folded into fans. The power is back and the poet’s sister and her fiancé pull up in the yard. The rack of lamb is preceded by thick, rich raisin rice pudding with cinnamon. The poet doles it out onto the plates and his mother betrays no surprise when he fishes out the almond for himself. Apart from folding the napkins, I’m not allowed to help carry anything to or from the table, or help with the dishes of roasted lamb, rhubarb jam, steaming red cabbage and caramelized potatoes, and definitely not with the washing-up.

  “Because you’re…”

  She says this twice at the table.

  “You’re practically a daughter-in-law,” the poet interprets.

  I praise the strawberry ice cream and the poet’s sister, who is eight months pregnant, passes me the bowl of wafers. The boyfriend is a man of few words, but wants to know what kind of car we came in. He says he has a Ford Taunus Station 62 model with a radio, which he bought with a mileage of 17,000 kilometres. Got it for peanuts, he says. He drops the subject and lights a cigarette when the poet tells him we came by coach. The men soon disappear into a cloud of smoke. While the mother and daughter clear the table, I look through the book cabinet until I find a small collection of poems by Karítas Thorsteinsdóttir. The preface says she moved to the New World at a young age and settled there. I open the book:

  I can’t poeticize about Canada,

  I don’t know Canada,

  Just arrived in Canada,

  Feel like this in Canada.

  “Happy Christmas, Hekla dear,” says the poet, handing me a parcel.

  I unwrap the gift: a cookery book by Helga Sigurdardóttur, the headmistress of the Housewives’ Teachers College of Iceland, Learn to Cook. Then I pick up a Christmas parcel from Dad. It’s a collection of short stories by Ásta Sigurdardóttir.

  She’s from Snæfellsnes, Dad writes in the card.

  Sleet

  By the time we fall asleep, the temperature outside is close to freezing and during the night it starts to rain over the mounds of snow, which turns into sleet before dawn. Around noon it suddenly freezes again causing perilously slippery ice and in the afternoon a blizzard breaks out. By dinner time, it subsides, leaving half a metre of snow. We had planned on returning to town the following day, but temperatures have plummeted to -10°, and the mountain road is impassable. All coach trips are cancelled until after New Year. The poet still thinks he can find us a ride and makes several calls.

  “Happy Christmas, it’s Starkadur,” I hear him saying.

  Finally he stands up and shakes his head.

  “No one is driving over the mountain road until it’s been cleared. It isn’t such a long time to New Year,” he adds unconvincingly. “A few days. Five days to be more precise.”

  I skim through the book cabinet in search of something I haven’t read and pull out Mother by Maxim Gorkí. It’s in two volumes, bound in grey linen and retranslated from the German translation of the Russian edition.

  Cold smoked meat is served at mealtimes and at coffee there are six kinds of cookies, layer cake, both white and brown, and meringue tart. On New Year’s Eve, the poet’s mother serves shrimp jelly.

  On New Year’s night, it starts to rain and by morning the earth has cleared and it’s 10°. A few rockets lay strewn in the village.

  The poet has found a ride back to town. He is visibly relieved.

  “We’re saved,” he says.

  The poet’s mother has referred to me as the girl and addressed me in the third person for seven days.

  Until she says goodbye.

  Then she strokes my cheek and says:

  “Goodbye, Hekla dear, fairest of the mountain queens. When you come in the summer, you’ll get to taste a tomato from the greenhouse.”

  We drive behind the snowplough in a Willys jeep that belongs to the priest, a childhood friend of the poet’s who has to pop into town to bury his mother’s sister. He is wearing snow boots and a woollen cap. The poet sits in the front and I in the back with a cake tin in my arms, containing the poet’s favourite cookies. A patchwork quilt, a Christmas gift from the poet’s mother, lies folded in the case. Two electricity pylons are down in Skólavörduholt after the wild weather, a whole chimneystack has collapsed onto Lækjartorg and windows are white from the salty wind.

  At night I dream I spot Jón John from behind on the street. I run after him but it’s not him. Everything is bathed in a reddish light.

  Why fly,

  if not to see God?

  Thorgerdur is now wearing glasses.

  “I noticed,” Ísey tells me, “how she went up very close to things to see them. She also held on to Lýdur’s ear and put her face right up to his to look at him. It seemed odd, but I thought it was because she saw him so rarely that she felt he was a stranger. But it turns out she’s very short-sighted and needs glasses.”

  My friend stands by the cooker in a white polo-neck sweater and the brown pinafore dress from Jón John, with her back turned to me as she puts on some coffee. I sit at the kitchen table with the child in my arms.

  She also wants to make me some toast with the toaster Lýdur gave her as a Christmas gift.

  “We use it for guests. There aren’t many of those. Just you actually. I also use it for myself and buy half a loaf of white bread and let the butter melt.”

  As she’d expected, she and Lýdur got a telephone side table from her parents-in-law for Christmas. She doesn’t mention a camera, but says that they gave her mother-in-law a hair-salon nylon cape.

  “I dreamt of Jón John,” I say.

  “Do you miss him?”

  “He wants me to join him. He says I can live at his place and write.”

  “I’ll never go abroad, Hekla. No more than Mum and Granny. What would I be doing there anyway? Lýdur has never been abroad either. I’ve already met the man of my life and know what my life will be like until I die.”

  “Maybe I can get a job as an air hostess,” I say to my friend.

  I tell her I went to the Air Iceland office on Lækjargata and that I’d been told I’m the right material.

  “They said it would be preferable if I participated in a beauty contest first, but that’s not a condition.”

  My friend peruses me.

  “I know that man’s oldest dream is to fly and that you want to see the clouds from above and the stars up close, but I know what you’re thinking, Hekla. You can’t just step off the plane and make yourself vanish like Jón John. Who’s going to look after the passengers on their way home?”

  She looks worried.

  “And another thing, Hekla, not all the planes come back. Remember what happened to the Hrímfaxi plane last Easter. Now there’s only Gullfax left.”

  She pours coffee into the cups.

  “Besides, some of the stars are long dead, Hekla. The light takes ages to travel.”

  The poet says the same thing when I get home from visiting Ísey and I tell him I’m looking around for another job.

  He takes a deep breath, pumping up his cheeks with air.

  “Air hostesses? Is that to get abroad? Away from me?

  “Are you going to visit the freak?”

  Eternity is a Ferguson

  “People in the capital aren’t as amazing as they think they are,” is the first thing my brother Örn says to me. “People in Reykjavík don’t know how to work,” he continues.

  My brother is in town for a meeting of the Progressive Party Youth Movement and is planning
on using the opportunity to go on a drinking binge and to check out the bars. We arranged to meet on Sunday morning at the Farmers’ Association building in Hagatorg where he is staying at the party’s expense. He’s completed agricultural college and aims to drain the land and expand our father’s sheep farm and turn it into the biggest in the district. He is sitting at a white tableclothed table in his suit and dress shoes, with brilliantined hair and a liquorice tie. He still has bad skin. I sit opposite him. Born on the same day as the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he is too young to buy alcohol or to get into bars. He therefore carries his own bottle of vodka in his jacket pocket and pours trickles into his glass of coke at regular intervals.

  “The goal is to make all the ewes have three lambs each,” he says, topping up his glass.

  He orders a bowl of cauliflower soup and another glass of coke. With a straw.

  I have coffee.

  “Were you out boozing?” I ask.

  He said he’d traipsed over to the Klúbbinn, Rödul and Glaumbær bars and intended to find a girlfriend but couldn’t get in.

  He’s not impressed by what he’s seen of Reykjavík, however.

  “Now women are supposed to look like little girls with their body shape and clothes; flat-chested, no waist, no hips and no calves. It’ll probably end with me having to advertise for a housekeeper?” he says, taking another slurp from his glass.

  “No shrinking violet, mind you,” he adds. “She has to be energetic and know how to drive a tractor down to the milk churn stand.”

  He switches the topic to wholesalers.

  “They’re raking in the money with foreign biscuits and bakery products, by squandering and wasting in other words, instead of boosting agriculture at home.”

  It occurs to me that he and the poet would have a number of things to talk about.

  The next question concerns the poet as it happens because he wants to know if it’s true that I live with a communist.

  He doesn’t wait for an answer, but instead asks me if I’m writing a novel.

  I nod.

  “My sister is the only writer who knows how to clear up a sheep shed.”

  I smile.

  To my brother, eternal bliss is a solid durable tractor and time is measured by the lambs that are led to the slaughterhouse in the autumn.

  He’s become visibly drunk.