Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Finally he stands up on wobbly feet and asks me to call him a taxi because he’s going out clubbing. Instead I follow my brother up to his room help him get into bed. He lets himself drop onto the mattress without protesting. The Icelandic wrestling champion won’t be finding himself a woman on this city trip.

  “I heard you being born,” I say as I help him out of his shoes.

  “I miss Mum,” he mutters.

  “Me too.”

  Then I suddenly remember how obsessed with death my brother was after Mum died. If I caught so much as a cough, he’d say there was a fair chance that I was dying.

  “I went to see a medium,” I hear him say under the duvet. “With Dad. Mum came through and told me not to be worried. In her voice. Everything would be fine. Most of the ewes had two lambs that year, some even three.”

  He drawls.

  “She also mentioned you. She said that some people were born out of themselves. Like you. She sent her regards to you and said… that there needs to be… chaos in the soul to be able to give birth to a dancing star… Whatever that means…”

  Winter-boots box

  I immediately realize something has happened when I step out of Hotel Borg and see the poet standing by the statue of our independence hero. He rushes over to me with an urgent air.

  “Hekla dear,” he says and embraces me.

  Then, just as swiftly he lets go of me, and doesn’t look me straight in the eye when he says:

  “It’s Odin.”

  He speaks slowly, carefully choosing every word.

  “What about her?”

  “She got run over.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Yes, Hekla. The woman who lives next door said she was coming out of the milk store and walked past a cat that had been run over. She thought she saw a red van quickly drive away. Someone called the police and they came and put her down. She said she recognized Odin from the white patch around her missing eye. She came down to Mokka to tell me about it.”

  “So she didn’t die instantly then?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  He hugs me again.

  “What did you do with her?”

  “Ríkey told me I was welcome to bury her in the bed of pansies in her garden. It wasn’t easy digging after the recent freeze, but we managed in the end. We put her in Ríkey’s husband’s winter-boots box. A normal shoebox wasn’t big enough,” he adds in a low voice.

  That night I dream of a cat being run over and I hear the grinding of the bones and crunching of the spine, and then I see the shuddering animal crawl out from under the car with bursting entrails and bloody paws, looking for a shelter in the frozen bed of earth in which to die.

  I wake up with a start and sit up. The poet gropes for me in the dark and rests an arm on me.

  It has snowed during the night and the next morning a white carpet lies over the flower bed where Odin is buried.

  The world is white and pure.

  Like a dream.

  Like a long-faded memory.

  “That’s spring snow,” says the poet.

  Some night watchers watch over nothing

  but the night

  The poet is going to quit his job as a night porter at Hotel Skjaldbreid and try to get a job as a proofreader for a newspaper like Ægir, the Glacier Poet. He lies in bed with his head buried under a pillow. I lift the pillow and he says he has a headache.

  “I’m too tired to write at night, Hekla.”

  He sits up and looks at me.

  “The truth is I can’t think of anything to write about. I have no ideas. Nothing that’s close to my heart. Do you know what it means to be ordinary? No, you don’t know. You’ve got the tumultuous river of life and death flooding through your pages, I’m just a piddling stream. I can’t bear the thought of being a mediocre poet.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Would you be so kind, Hekla dear, as to spare me some words from that treasure chest of yours? Those razor-sharp words that fall like an avalanche over a sleeping town.”

  He takes off his trousers.

  “Words avoid me, they flee me as swiftly as a cluster of black clouds. It takes only fifteen words to make a poem and I can’t find them. I’m sunk and above me lies the briny surf, the heavy and cold ocean, and my words can’t reach the shore.”

  “Don’t you want to go to sleep, Starkadur?”

  “What can I write? The sun rises, the sun sets? I have nothing to say, Hekla.”

  He wipes his eyes with the pillowcase.

  “I know about spring under the snow, about the green grass, about life and I know about death. But I won’t be expanding the beauty of the world. I’m not destined to enhance anything.”

  He shakes his head.

  “I’ll never be bound in leather.”

  After a brief silence, he says:

  “Now that Odin is dead, maybe we can eat something other than haddock. Do you know how to make a meat curry? Mum used to make meat curry every now and then.”

  When the poet is asleep, I sit at the table and write: The words can’t reach the shore.

  Thank you for submitting your novel

  to us for our consideration

  “You’re from Dalir?”

  “Yes.”

  “Brought up in the land of the Laxdæla Saga, like the poet Steinn Steinarr?”

  “You could say that.”

  The publisher sits at a large desk under a cloud of cigar smoke and beckons me to sit opposite him. My manuscript lies on the table.

  It had taken three months to get an appointment with him and I had to get permission for time off from work.

  “And you sent the manuscript in a shoebox?”

  “Yes…”

  “That’s quite a few pages.”

  He taps his cigar over the ashtray and presses his index finger against the manuscript.

  “And you want to be a novelist?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer.

  “It’s difficult to place you. This is neither a rural novel nor an urban novel.”

  He flicks through the bundle.

  “There’s certainly a daring and fearless element in the prose, to be honest I would have thought it had been written by a man…”

  He seems to be thinking.

  “The structure is also unusual; reminiscent of a spider’s web… one could also talk about meshes rather than narrative threads.”

  “Consciousness is a web…”

  The man breaks into a smirk and pulls out his cigar.

  “And this young man in the story, is he a homosexual?”

  “Yes.”

  The publisher is quiet a moment.

  “It’s difficult to publish this kind of stuff. Men who fondle children.”

  “He doesn’t do that…”

  He looks at me sharply, then leans back in his chair, exhaling cigar smoke.

  “The fact of the matter is that this is too different from the kind of material we publish for us to be able to publish it… On top of which we’re going to be publishing the memoirs of Revd Stefán Pálsson this autumn.”

  He smiles.

  “The era of consciousness hasn’t dawned yet.”

  He stands up and walks a few paces.

  “On the other hand, you’re a natural jewel in your own right; Hekla, the crowning splendour…”

  “I’ve heard that quote.”

  “A little bird told me that they were encouraging you to compete in Miss Iceland but that you turned them down?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  He walks to the door and opens it.

  He’s expecting a young poet with his first volume of poems.

  The snow crunches under my feet and a puff of white breath escapes into the cold air. Daylight is breaking. I think of Dad and what he would say. I guess he would say one of two things:

  I expect you to follow in the footsteps of those steadfast Dalir women, Hekla dear.

  Or: Laxdæla Saga wasn’t a
rural novel.

  The hole in the ice of the lake is expanding from day to day, but I nevertheless decide to test whether the sheet of ice can carry the weight of a woman and a manuscript in a shoebox. A goose is honking.

  I long to find another place,

  to reach another star

  Ísey finishes her coffee, turns the cup upside down, gives it three twirls and places it on the hotplate of the cooker. The child sits on the floor and plays with the kitten.

  “I went to meet the publisher,” I say.

  “Is he going to publish the book?”

  “No.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he couldn’t publish a book that was different from the ones his authors write.”

  “Didn’t he find any drifting dandelion fuzz?”

  “No.”

  “No sunrays that heal wounds?”

  “No.”

  “No twilight haze that embraces desires?”

  “No.”

  “No winding mossy ways?”

  “No.”

  I say nothing and, for a while, my friend doesn’t either.

  “I can’t let it go, Ísey. Writing. It’s my lifeline. I have nothing else. Imagination is the only thing I have.”

  “You’re not a writer of the now, Hekla, you’re the writer of tomorrow. What does your father say? You were born too soon?”

  She stands up and walks over to the window. Her belly has grown.

  “Remember the woman I told you about in the basement across the way?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She disappeared into the sea last weekend. The fishmonger told me about it.

  “I could have figured out for myself that something wasn’t right. After five months no curtains had been put up. I heard she’d been checked into the psychiatric ward in Kleppur. She’d stopped cooking and cried all day after she’d had her fourth child. She was twenty-three years old and her eldest boy was seven. Her sister is going to look after the two younger children. Her husband has a new woman and she can’t take in more kids. The older boys will be sent to a community home out in the country. I really feel for them.”

  She turns and walks over to me.

  “Do you remember, Hekla, when we went ice-skating in the valley and slid all the way back over the frozen fields?

  You were ahead of me and there were tufts of yellow straw that stuck through the ice and the men that eventually came west to lay the power lines hadn’t arrived yet and everything was ahead of us.”

  She sinks onto a chair and gazes down at her hands, her open palms.

  “Today the first sunray in five months broke through the basement window. I sat for a short while with the ray in my lap, with my palms full of light, before I got up.”

  These are the headlines:

  The golden plover has arrived

  The lake is filling up with birds and, before long, the length of the days and nights will even out again.

  When I get home, the poet is lying on the bed with the radio to his ear, listening to the news:

  These are the headlines: The golden plover has arrived…

  He turns down the volume and wants to know where I’ve been.

  I tell him.

  “To Ísey’s.”

  He sits up.

  “We can’t go on living like this. Boiling potatoes and fish in the same pot.” He says he’s heard of a room with a kitchenette in Frakkastígur that will soon be vacant. And a two-room apartment in Öldugata.

  “We need to get a home that you can put your mark on. With a dining table and tablecloth. What do you say to that, Hekla dear?”

  I stand by the window, a blackbird is cleaning its feathers after bathing in the drainpipe, its wings a folded umbrella.

  “We could take a bus to Thingvellir and camp in a calm spot by the lake and stay there for a few days. And do things couples do,” he says.

  He looks at me.

  “We could even take a taxi. I could borrow a tent with a rubber base and sleeping bags and we could buy supplies in Valhöll. We could get engaged.”

  He ponders a moment.

  “I could probably borrow a summer house in Grafningur,” he continues. “We could write side by side and read and inhale the scent of the flora. You could wade in the water. What do you think, Hekla dear?”

  At night I go into the kitchen and roll a new sheet of paper into the typewriter:

  I, the undersigned, Hekla Gottskálksdóttir, hereby resign from my job as a serving girl at Hotel Borg. The reason for my resignation is the indecent behaviour of the hotel’s male customers who have been harassing me both at work and in my private life.

  The light has dissolved the night

  The following day I turn up at Hotel Borg in long trousers to deliver my letter of resignation.

  “The world isn’t the way you want it to be,” says the head waiter. “You’re a woman. Come to terms with that.”

  Then I walk into the hotel manager’s office and ask for my wages for the last week.

  “I expected a scandal,” says Sirrí, “that you’d refuse to serve a customer or pour a pot of coffee over the men at the round table.”

  She stands outside on the pavement, smoking.

  “I expected you to be fired for having your own opinions and not being servile enough, but not that you’d hand in your apron. Normally girls are let go if they get too big for their boots.”

  We are such stuff

  as dreams are made on

  “The poet came for dinner,” says my friend.

  She sits opposite me and feeds her daughter.

  I sip on a cup of coffee.

  “Starkadur?”

  “Yes.

  “I invited him in and made coffee. He was ever so sad and said we had a beautiful home. He walked up to the paintings and examined them carefully. He also looked at the photograph of us on the sideboard. He held on to the picture of you and me by the sheepfold for a long time.

  “He looked at Thorgerdur and said: ‘You know, Ísey, I don’t know Hekla at all.’ Then he asked me if you’re going to leave him.”

  She hesitates and then looks me in the eye.

  “And are you?”

  “Yes.”

  She wipes the child’s mouth, removes her bib and places her on the floor. The girl takes a few steps, towing the tractor behind her.

  “Jón John sent me a ticket. I’m sailing on the Gullfoss.”

  She pours the coffee.

  “By next year something will have happened in your life that changes how you view the world, whereas for me everything will be the same. Unless we grow into four. You will have stood under a shimmering leafy beech tree and breathed in its scent, you will have seen the sun shine through the foliage, there’s a fair chance that you will have looked an owl in the eye. You’ll stand in a light cardigan and hold your coat in your arm.”

  She fetches the coffee pot from the stove and tops up my cup.

  “You’ll be out in the world and I’ll be left here, hoping that the fishmonger packs the haddock in a poem or a serialized story.”

  She stands up and grabs her daughter who has just pushed a chair up against the sideboard and is about to climb it.

  “It won’t be long before the farmers back home in Dalir start to burn the withered grass, there will be a smell of smoke and singed earth in the air, black hummocks even. Flames will flicker at length beneath the moss. And when there is no longer any night between the days, a child will be born.”

  I have loved you

  since I spied on you

  Black clouds approach from the ocean and rapidly tumble overhead. A bird flies against the bank of clouds. As evening falls, the clouds begin to slow.

  “Are you leaving me?”

  “Yes.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “You’re leaving and the migrant birds are returning,” says the poet.

  He looks at me.

  “I kn
ew about you before we met. I watched you. I first spotted you outside Mokka, I sat inside and you stood outside the window with your suitcase. You opened the door, scanned the place like you were looking for someone and then closed the door again. As if you’d changed your mind. I went out after you and watched you walk up Skólavördustígur. You didn’t notice me. I also saw you strolling down Bankastræti once, walking tall, you were wearing chequered trousers and walked with a determined stride, like you knew what you wanted. I followed you, but you weren’t aware of me. I saw you stop in three bookshops, looking at books and browsing through them without buying anything. I saw you walk into Hressingarskálinn and sit at a table with a dark-haired man. I didn’t know who he was then. Everyone was staring at you, but you didn’t notice. You laughed. I thought he was your boyfriend. You were different with him than you are with me. I thought to myself that I’d like to have a girlfriend that I could laugh with. I followed the two of you all the way west to Stýrimannastígur. I gathered information and found out you were working in Hotel Borg. I also asked about your friend and was told that he wasn’t into women.”

  He’s silent for a moment.

  “I set myself the goal of taking you away from him, but I didn’t succeed.”

  The time has come to embrace

  necessary separations

  I tell the poet I’ll be staying with Ísey tonight.

  “Mum airs the quilts every spring. You won’t be here then.”

  When I say goodbye to the poet, he hands me a small oblong parcel and tells me to open it on board the Gullfoss.

  “What I admire about you, Hekla, is that you have faith in yourself, even when nobody else does.”

  He offers me his hand in a handshake and then withdraws it just as fast and turns away.

  In other lands no shelter find,

  endless storm a-raging

  “I’ll never get to taste the cold buffet on the Gullfoss ferry,” says Ísey. “They’ve got decorated salmon with lemons in their mouths every day for lunch, jellied halibut, green peas, white cloth napkins, hot food in the evenings, German and Danish cuisine with fizzling sparklers planted on top of the ptarmigan breasts and tornado steaks, and there are flags on the tables with the Eimskip company logo. At the captain’s table there are women in long dresses and pearl necklaces, and there is a dance every evening on the deck in front of the smoking room. Everyone drinks genever and ginger ale before dinner. Then everybody gets seasick when waves strike the ship because out at sea no man is more of a man than any other. I know a woman who worked on the Gullfoss and she said it had been difficult to carry silver trays up and down three floors in rough seas, and she had to both help deliver babies and take care of corpses. Write to me and tell me everything, Hekla.”