Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  My friend pulls me into her arms; between us, the child she bears under her belt.

  Then she pulls out a striped scarf and hands it to me. It’s red and white.

  “In the colours of the Danish flag,” she says. “I finished it last night. It’s a garter stitch,” she adds and smiles. “Even though there’s always good weather abroad, it will be cold on deck as you cross the sea. There will be surf, Hekla, it’ll be choppy, there’ll be waves.”

  * James Dean’s bomber jacket was sold at Palm Beach Modern Auctions in Florida in February 2018 for the price of $600,000.

  II

  AUTHOR OF THE DAY

  Far on eternity’s ocean

  your island stands watch

  (STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON, 1904)

  I no longer have

  firm land under my feet

  There are banks of fog along the shore and, once the hull crawls beyond the island of Engey, the mainland is no longer visible, islets and reefs come and go, floating across the surface of the water.

  I share a second-class cabin with a woman and her little girl. I offer to take the top bunk and the woman is grateful. She has a Danish husband and speaks Danish to the child.

  I’m travelling with a small suitcase and my typewriter, which I place on a tiny table when the woman leaves the cabin with her child. We sail south of the country and when we approach the sooty black island emerging from the ocean with its white plume of smoke, I go up on deck to find out if the rumbling of the eruption will drown out the sounds of the engine under my feet. A raft of birds bobs on the caps of the waves, and I feel the leaden weight of the steel hull beneath me. I have Ísey’s lunch in my stomach, she wanted me to have boiled fish and potatoes before I left because there’s no fish to be seen on plates in the Sound Strait. My stomach has started to stir and a cold seasickness sweat breaks out; everything inside me is moving, a black ocean swells in my veins.

  By the time we sail past the silvery glacier, there are few passengers left up on deck. The sea churns with small whales, spouting fountain upon fountain into the sky. The surge swells, the open ocean lies ahead and the island fades in the distance; soon it will be a faint black mass under a tangle of clouds.

  At night when my cabin mates are asleep, I go up on deck and lie down and look at the sky.

  I’m alive.

  I’m free.

  I’m alone.

  When I wake up, they are setting up the lunch buffet. The sea is calm with gently rippling waves, and the Faroe Islands line the horizon.

  I take the parcel the poet gave me from my case, unwrap and open it. It’s a fountain pen.

  He’s had it engraved in golden letters: Hekla, our national poetess.

  The city of glowing copper rooftops

  It’s calm and raining when we pull into the port early in the morning after five days of sailing. There’s no blustery surf here, no foam crashing against the rocks, just a slight nudge on the side of the ship and a glistening silvery surface.

  I immediately spot D.J. Johnsson standing on the quay, waving at me in a small cluster of people. I edge my way down the gangway with my typewriter and case and he elbows his way through the crowd to welcome me. He embraces and holds me tight for a long moment and then lets go to look at me. He’s wearing a brown ruffled corduroy suit and a purple shirt. His hair has grown.

  “Let’s go,” he says, as he takes the case from me, opens an umbrella and holds it over me. “It’s not far. They use umbrellas abroad,” he adds with a smile.

  People are on their way to work, most of them on bikes. More cyclists than I had imagined.

  We wander down paved streets along the canals, passing warehouses and apartment blocks, and cross over a bridge. Although I feel like a stranger in this city, the street names are familiar: Sturlasgade, Löngubrú and H.C. Andersen Boulevard. I notice a man on a bike holding a violin case.

  “You’ve got to watch out for the trams, they’re silent. So you don’t end up like the poet Jón Thoroddsen who got run over by one when he was only twenty-six years old.”

  On our way my friend tells me that he first got a job washing dishes and cleaning, then at a pig farm on the outskirts and had to take a train. Now he does shift work at a men’s bar, not far from St Peter’s church, but he is still hoping to get a job in the costume department of a theatre. He says he’s got a friend who knows someone who works in theatre and thinks he might be able to get him into a tailor’s firm.

  “I saw Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night this winter,” he says. “I wish I had made the costumes.”

  I read the Danish signs and names of shops and try to memorize the landmarks: Politiken, udsalg, lædervarer, cigaretter og tobak, gummistøvler.

  As we approach the central train station, the Tivoli towers become visible.

  “We’re almost there,” D.J. Johnsson says, turning into Istedgade.

  “This is where we live,” he says, stopping in front of a red-brick building. “On the fourth floor, round the back. The entrance from the yard.”

  Two women stand down a cobbled alleyway, with cigarettes in the corners of their mouths.

  Ivy creeps up the wall beside them.

  “They’re friends of mine,” says D.J. Johnsson.

  He follows me up the peeling lino-covered stairs, close on my heels, and says he’s counted the steps: there are eighty-four. I hear a child cry and an exclamation from a neighbouring apartment, but can’t make out the words being said.

  “One more floor,” he says.

  On the penultimate landing, he stops and inserts a key into a lock. The linoleum is swollen.

  The flat consists of two rooms and the front room has to be crossed to get to the inner one. The inner room contains a single bed, the other a sofa. He puts the case down on the bed and opens the window. A pigeon coos.

  “You take the bed and I’ll have the sofa,” he says, and adds that he also works night shifts and isn’t always at home.

  I nod. I’m still experiencing some dock rock.

  The window overlooks a back garden with a drooping broad-leafed tree.

  The Danes call it a bøgetræ, he says, pointing at the tree.

  Furniture is being dragged along the floor in the apartment above.

  “This is what it’s like abroad, Hekla,” he says.

  I’m shivery after the crossing, so D.J. Johnsson says he’s going to turn on the radiator.

  He has bought rye bread and salami and says he’s going to put on some coffee. I follow him into the kitchen, which is shared with three other flats, as is the bathroom, and he teaches me how to use the gas stove. There’s a cold water tap in the kitchen.

  D.J. Johnsson briefs me while the water is boiling.

  “There are a number of things you have to get used to,” he says. “They eat pork and the rind as well and make meatballs out of it too. They also eat chicken. And they drink ale in the middle of a working day. Pubs are always open. And another thing, Hekla, it gets dark at night, even in the spring.”

  All windows open out

  onto an imaginary world

  In the evening D.J. Johnsson goes to work the night shift at the bar. The child on the floor below cries all evening. The moon hangs between the chimneys, and I hear footsteps on the street below, heels clicking against the pavement.

  By the time I wake up, it’s mid morning and a thick grey fog has descended. I open the window. In the distance a steeple hovers in mid air without its foundations.

  My friend has returned from work.

  He’s not alone.

  He introduces us.

  “Det er Hekla. Min allerbedste veninde. Hekla, det er Casper.”*

  “Hej,” I say.

  I speak Danish for the first time.

  “I was on my way out,” I say. “For a walk.”

  When I return, D.J. Johnsson is gone again. There’s a note by the typewriter:

  Back tomorrow morning. Write.

  The sky grows heavy under a swarm of clouds and i
n the evening it starts to pour again, rain pelting against the cobblestones in the alley.

  Late in the morning my friend comes home.

  Water drips from the fringe of his hair down into his collar, he has darkened eyes and a black stream trickles down his face.

  “Didn’t you say that the Danes use umbrellas?” I ask.

  He hands me a bag of strawberries and crawls into bed.

  “For you.”

  Dear Hekla.

  The night after you left I couldn’t sleep and thought of you out in the open sea. I got up and took my diary out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen (underneath the flour drawer) and wrote two sentences that popped into my head: A ship runs aground on me in the fog. While grandmothers sing lullabies over the city. When Thorgerdur woke up she said her first two-word sentence. She stroked her little finger on my cheek and said: Mammy cry. Apart from that, the main news is that the streets look like washboards after the winter. I planted some potatoes in one corner of the garden after you left. Yukon gold and red. I’m pretty big now and find it difficult to bend over. I doze off early in the evening, around the same time as the dandelions.

  Napoleon’s hat

  D.J. Johnsson is on the landing. He leans on the banister, looks down at me and smiles. He’s alone.

  “I was waiting for you,” he says. “The same board always creaks when you run up the stairs.”

  He’s gone out to buy cake for me and says he’s going to make coffee.

  “Napoleon’s hat,” he says, handing me a plate with a slice of marzipan cake.

  “Who is he?” I ask.

  “He’s a teacher.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?”

  He hesitates.

  “I have my needs. That’s just how it is. One body gets drawn to another.”

  He looks at me and seems to be pondering something.

  “It’s not easy to be queer abroad either, Hekla.”

  He hesitates.

  “Some days I feel good, some days bad. Sometimes I’m full of hope, the rest of the time not. One moment I feel everything is possible, the next moment not. I know a thousand feelings that are connected to emptiness.”

  He is silent for a moment.

  “Here I saw men dance together for the first time in my life.”

  He speaks slowly.

  “Some things are still banned abroad, however. Men aren’t allowed to touch each other openly on the street. You won’t see two men holding hands. The police also occasionally raid the bar.”

  I see some sheets of paper on the table.

  “Were you drawing?” I ask.

  “Just a few dresses,” he says and stands up.

  He puts on his jacket.

  “I won’t be home tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Okay.”

  “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight.”

  He looks at me.

  “If I didn’t have you, Hekla, I’d die.”

  My dearest Ísey,

  I sit writing all day and soon I will have finished a new novel. Det er så dejligt.* My hosts have a horizon but lack the starkness of our landscape. As I expected everything here is flat! The light is very bright during the day, it creeps out of the straits, but there’s a shortage of light in the evenings. It has rained for the past month. Understanding spoken Danish is more difficult than I imagined. “God dag” were my first words. To a friend of Jón John’s. I still don’t say much. I go on walks every day and have explored the length and width of the city. On the first day, I walked past many restaurants and stores and saw the king’s guards and sat on a bench in a park. Yesterday I visited the grave of Jón Thoroddsen in the Vestre cemetery. He died on New Year’s day in 1925. On the way home, I came across an antique bookstore with two boxes on the street, one containing books and the other 78 rpm records. I searched through the boxes but haven’t bought anything yet. The most surprising thing abroad is the stillness of the air (not the brief showers). The rain isn’t horizontal here, instead it falls vertically like strings of pearls. Total stillness is followed by dead calm.

  Underwood Five

  Not many days pass before there is a knock on the wall and then on the door. My neighbour is standing in her nightdress, with her child in her arms and complains about the typewriter.

  “Have you started to write by hand?” D.J. later asks, observing as I sit at the desk brandishing a pen.

  He leans over my shoulder.

  “The handwriting is like a loosely knitted sweater. My old writing teacher wouldn’t give you a high grade for that scrawl.”

  He smiles.

  “So are you left-handed too like Jimi Hendrix and Franz Kafka?”

  I tell him the neighbour complained about the noise of the typewriter.

  “You need to get an electric typewriter. They’re not as loud.”

  I ask him how much they cost and he tells me not to worry about it.

  “Next month we’ll buy an Underwood Five.

  “With the Icelandic characters ð, æ and þ, so you don’t have to write the rest of your novel in Danish,” he adds.

  A blue DBS bike

  D.J. Johnsson doesn’t want me to split the rent with him or to buy food. When he comes home with a bicycle for me, I start to suspect he’s taking extra shifts at the bar.

  He looks up from the yard and whistles. I go to the window and he holds the bike by its handlebar and signals me to come down.

  “You’ve got to have a bike,” he says. “It’s actually second-hand. But I bought a new bell for it,” he adds, ringing it.

  I tell him I’m going to look for a job.

  “I want to work too,” I say.

  I tell myself I could maybe get a job at the Hotel d’Angleterre spreading rye bread with plaice and remoulade paste or peeling shrimp. Or polishing silver. In any case, somewhere behind the scenes where no one would notice me. Where I would be left in peace.

  Once I’ve finished the book.

  Hekla dear,

  I have good news to share. I’ve had another girl. Katla. The birth went better than last time. I spent a week in the maternity ward. My sister-in-law took care of Thorgerdur while I was there. It was the best time of my life. I was served meals in bed, buttermilk with brown sugar and raisins in the morning. Lýdur didn’t show his disappointment even though it was another girl. He intends to have more anyway. They’re just the first two, he says. I’ll die if I have more children. Now I’m really worried that the dream I had—one where I was alone out on a heath and found a plover’s nest with five eggs in it—means that I will have five children. Thorgerdur is really good to her sister. She’s the big sister now and hands me the dummy when her little sister spits it out. The midwife came to the flat to weigh Katla yesterday. My mother-in-law says she’s the spitting image of Lýdur. She said the same about Thorgerdur (I found that offensive). The sisters are nothing like each other. Lýdur has quit his road work job and started working as a welder in town. I take Katla out of the room at night, so that he can sleep because I don’t want him to collapse from exhaustion into the foundations of a building. We’ve made a sandpit in the corner of the garden. With a lid to prevent the cats from pissing in it. Thorgerdur and I dig together and she sprinkles the sand in the air over the two of us: it rains ash and darkens. I think it’s beautiful. Reminds me of you. An eruption.

  D.J. Johnsson meanders up the stairs

  to me and the stars

  D.J. Johnsson works most nights and it is often late in the morning when he staggers up the stairs to me and crawls under the covers. There is therefore no point in making the bed because as soon as I get up my friend comes home.

  Sometimes D.J. doesn’t work his usual night shift and is home several evenings in a row.

  “The body needs some rest too,” he says then.

  I sit by him on the edge of the bed. He makes room for me and I lean against him.

  “I thought it would be different here. I thought it was only at home that quee
rs got married to be left in peace, but most of the guys I meet here have wives and children. It’s difficult for queers to age. People ask them how come they’re not married. Some give up and get married and have sex with their wives once a week with their eyes closed and listen to Brenda Lee singing ‘My Baby Likes Western Guys’.”

  He stands up.

  “Maybe I’ll give up and get married some day, Hekla. But I don’t want to have to lie to my wife.”

  My dearest Ísey,

  I’ve started a new novel. After the manuscript that I sent to the publisher four weeks ago was lost at sea, I’ve followed Jón John’s advice and now use carbon paper to make a copy, although it’s more expensive (twice as much paper). I also have to hit the keys harder. Jón John said: Someone has stolen your story, Hekla. He’s been to two painting exhibitions with me, one in Charlottenborg and another at the Kunstforeningen Art Society and also to a ballet at the Royal Danish Theatre.

  Most memorable of all, though, was the concert we went to at K.B. Hallen last week with the Beatles from Liverpool. They played “I saw her standing there” and “I want to hold your hand” and other songs, but it was difficult to hear them properly because of the screams and hysteria from the Danish girls in the hall.

  Job interview

  I’m ushered into an office with leather upholstered furniture. The man tugs at the knees of his crisply pressed trousers as he sits opposite me. My application letter is on the table.

  “It says here you want to work behind the scenes.”

  “Yes, very much so.”

  “It’s unusual to specify the wish to remain invisible.”