Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Your friend,

  HEKLA

  This is where we’ll stop

  The train is still on the track in the middle of a valley and then slowly crawls into the station. My husband tells me that the train station is named after a freedom fighter who was executed.

  This is the first destination.

  We scan the menu prices of a restaurant and in the end buy some bread and slices of sausage. We hesitate in front of the cheese, it’s too expensive.

  The woman who runs the Saint Lucy guest house with her husband takes her time registering the information from our passports. She’s also slow to browse through the blank pages, as if she were trying to decide whether to rent us the room or not. It’s half board. Occasionally, she looks up to inspect us. On the table beside her stands the statue of a haloed woman who in her outstretched hand holds out her eyes on a plate. I glance at D.J. Johnsson and wonder if he’s trying to imagine what the woman is thinking; is she maybe wondering whether he will be lying on top of his wife tonight?

  While the woman busies herself with the paperwork, we scan our surroundings.

  In the dining room a television blares at full volume: four stations, explains the woman who is keeping one eye on us and holds up four fingers. The set radiates a blue glow onto the street. On the tables are chequered tablecloths and plastic flowers in vases, and the chairs have been arranged so that everyone can see the television screen while they’re eating. I flaunt the wedding ring and in the end the woman hands my husband a key to a room with light green walls. The cold bedclothes are damp and the wardrobe is full of hangers. My husband hangs his jacket on one of them, unbuttons his shirt and lies on the bed. The sound carries well in the heat: a conversation from two floors below us can be heard as if it were being whispered into our ears, somewhere down on the street a man is singing. I open the shutters in front of the window, the street is so narrow that one can barely catch a glimpse of the sky, the guest house’s bedsheets are hanging out to dry on a line that stretches across the street.

  “You can marry another man later,” I hear from the bed.

  I turn around.

  “I don’t want another man,” I say.

  I lie on the bed beside him.

  “You’re the only man who places no demands on me.”

  He lies with his arms stretched down by his sides. With upturned palms. I stroke the lifeline with my finger. It’s powerful but ends abruptly.

  “Do you think we’ll survive this?” he asks.

  “Yes, we will.

  “If not the two of us, then another two.”

  He stands up.

  “I’ve written to Mum and told her I’m a married man.”

  My dear Hekla,

  I hope you won’t resent me writing to you because you still have and will always have a place in my heart. I hope this is the right address—I got it from Ísey.

  The last time I wrote to you, the letter was returned to me with “not at this address” written on the envelope. Now I’m relieved you didn’t get that letter because it was too mawkish. It had been written soon after you’d sailed away and there was too much moaning in it. My thoughts were all about you. My circumstances have changed since then and I’ve met a girl from Mýrdalir and have started driving a taxi. I’ve stopped writing poetry because I have nothing to say. Now I drive poets home from bars. More often than not I work twelve-hour shifts and sometimes weekends too. I heard about your manuscript in Mokka. Áki Hvanngil had read it as well as some others. Áki got the manuscript from one of his sister’s neighbours who knows the publisher’s reader. There’s one thing I want to say to you, Hekla: you have a gift. You have courage. Even though I’m no longer a poet, I can recognize writing talent when I see it.

  I’ll never forget you.

  Your eternal friend,

  STARKADUR PJETURSSON

  A hole has appeared in the night

  My husband has one pillow and I the other, but we share the same sheet. Sometimes we both lie on our backs or he lies on his back and I lie on my stomach, other times we turn our backs on each other. Occasionally I hold him like a sister holds a brother or he holds me like a friend holds a friend. He doesn’t leave a hand clutching the woman’s breast on the other side of the bed. Nevertheless, when I wake up, it takes a moment to remember that the male body lying beside me is one that only men are allowed to touch.

  I wake up once during the night and my husband isn’t there. I fall asleep again and when I awaken he’s standing in the middle of the room and looking at me and smiling. He hands me a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. We help each other spread the clammy, crumpled sheet, stretch it over the mattress and then tuck in the corners.

  The sky is as blue as yesterday and D.J. Johnsson suggests we go and take a look at an old church. There’s a damp smell inside like in an old potato larder. D.J. walks ahead of me and halts in front of a painting of a young man with golden locks spilling over his shoulders, with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes gazing up at the heavens. A multitude of arrows pierce his stunning body.

  I rest my head on D.J. Johnsson’s shoulder.

  “You can’t get close to a saint without burning your fingertips,” I say.

  He contemplates the work.

  “I wish I were normal, Hekla. I wish I weren’t me.”

  When we get back, the woman tells us a room has been freed on the other side of the guest house with a view of the hills. She says she’s willing to give it to us because we’re on our honeymoon. She was sitting at the television with her husband, both when we left and when we return, and I notice that she asks him if he wants some peach as she holds out a slice to him on the tip of her knife.

  Do not awaken love

  until it so desires

  There is a small back garden by the guest house with some plastic chairs and a table. That is where I go with my old typewriter to avoid waking up my friend who came back late last night. There is a pink streak of light in the sky which has vanished by the time I pull the first sheet out of the typewriter.

  The manager’s husband walks by in a white T-shirt and nods at me.

  “Lady novelist,” he says.

  It’s an affirmation. A deduction. He’s been pondering on this for several days.

  “You’re getting a tan,” I hear from the bed when I get back.

  “You’re breaking out in freckles. You’re turning golden.”

  I’m getting a slight tan from sitting and digging in the sandpit, Ísey wrote this summer. Even though it’s always windy and the sun is cold. Thorgerdur has had a cold all summer.

  Dearest Ísey,

  The heat seeps in everywhere. The nights are hot as well (even though the floor tiles are ice cold). I’ve tasted various fruits that can’t be found at home, such as grapes and peaches. Maybe I’ll become a wholesaler and import fruit for Thorgerdur and Katla. (But it would probably be a hopeless enterprise while all the foreign currency goes into buying fuel for the fishing ships.) Yesterday we ate octopus. They’re as chewy as rubber. I write eight hours a day. The senses are sharpest in the moment just before the sudden fall of darkness. Like carved marble. Jón John has been better than I have at getting to know the locals. Last night I dreamt that there were too many words in the world, but that there was a shortage of bodies. We’ll stay here for as long as the money lasts.

  P.S. I got a letter from Starkadur who tells me my manuscript has been circulating (the one that was lost at sea) and that several people have read it. I’m far into a new novel that is different from anything else I’ve written. I don’t expect anyone will want to publish it any more than the other ones.

  Peace

  When my husband gets home, he’s holding a bottle of wine in his hands.

  He places it on the table, then pulls a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and hands them to me.

  “For you.”

  I close the book. He borrows wine glasses from the manager.

  He has news.

&n
bsp; “Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace prize yesterday.”

  He had sat with the couple who run the guest house and watched television and the woman had helped him to understand the news. Black, she repeated several times, pointing at the colour of the skirt she was wearing. Peace.

  “Did you know, Hekla, that several queers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature?

  “Selma Lagerlöf, Thomas Mann, André Gide…” He trails off.

  He does not kiss me with the kisses of his mouth

  “Are you reading the Bible?”

  He is bewildered.

  “Yes, it was in the bedside table.”

  “Do you understand the language?”

  “No, but I know the Song of Songs off by heart.”

  I put the book back in its place.

  “I got a letter from Dad,” I say, indicating an envelope that is lying on the table.

  He stands up and walks over to me.

  “Does he want to know if I’m capable of performing my male function?”

  I take the letter out of the thin envelope and unfold it.

  “He says he’s heard about my changed circumstances and asks whether there might not be some obstacles to the match.”

  I hesitate.

  “He says we’re not a likely couple.”

  My husband sits on the bed and buries his face in his hands.

  “Forgive me,” I hear him say between his fingers.

  “Forgive you for what?”

  “Forgive me for not being the man that you need. For not being able to love a woman.”

  He stands up, opens the wardrobe, pulls out a yellow shirt and puts it on. He looks at me as he buttons it up.

  “It sometimes happens that I think of women and their bodies. About you. For a brief moment. Then I go back to thinking about men and their bodies.”

  In my bed at night I sought him

  but did not find him

  I wake up in the middle of the night and reach for my husband in the bed. I’m alone. I fall back asleep. When I wake in the morning, he’s lying beside me. Fully dressed. In the same clothes as yesterday. Daylight filters through the shutter. He sits up and looks straight ahead. Into the darkness.

  I get up and open the shutters.

  He looks battered and says he got into a scuffle. He’d been down at the train station, the police had come and arrested some men in the toilets.

  “Are you putting yourself in danger?” I ask.

  He seems to be mulling this over.

  “I can’t behave sensibly, Hekla,” he finally says.

  I ask him how it works when he goes out to meet other men.

  “You let them know you’re interested. That’s all there is to it. It’s not complicated.”

  I sit beside him.

  “Most of the men I meet are married.”

  “Like you?”

  He looks at me.

  “Yeah, like me.”

  “So you understand each other?” I say.

  “I give them what they don’t get from their wives.”

  “Except you don’t have to sleep with your wife.”

  He clasps his head with both hands.

  “I know I have nothing to offer you, Hekla.”

  He stands up and takes off his crumpled trousers and shirt.

  Then he rinses his face in cold water at the basin in the corner of the room. I notice he’s looking at me in the mirror.

  “What are you thinking about?” I ask.

  “About you and your book and whether I’m a minor character or a main character in it, and about a man I met yesterday, and about Mum and what she might be doing, and about a dream I dreamt last night.”

  He turns to me.

  “The dream was like a memory of a winter’s day in Dalir. Everything was so pure. It was all so white. Snow white. It was still, Hekla. And the weird thing was that it was warm. It was silent. Totally silent. As if I were dead.”

  What never happened

  I sit at the table and I think he is still lying in bed, but suddenly he’s standing at my shoulder and watching me write. I turn around.

  “What do you look forward to?” he asks.

  “I look forward to finishing the book I’m writing.”

  “And then?”

  “To starting a new book.”

  “And then?”

  “To writing another book.”

  “And when you finish that?”

  I hesitate.

  “I don’t know.

  “And you?”

  He walks to the window and turns his back to me.

  “Make us lovers in the story, Hekla. Make what isn’t going to happen happen. Let the words become flesh. Make me a father. So that I leave something behind.”

  “The world won’t always be like this,” I say.

  “The liberation of queers is about as likely as men walking on the moon, Hekla.”

  I pull the last page out of the typewriter and place it on the pile, face down. It’s page 238. Then I stand up from the table and walk over to him. He looks at me.

  “Even if the world can’t accommodate a queer, Hekla, it can at least find room for a female writer.”

  “Let’s go to sleep,” I say. “You’ll feel differently tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow is seven minutes away,” he says.

  Dear Hekla,

  We have finally moved to Sogamýri. The neighbourhood is full of half-finished houses with many children inside. We live in the only room that has been completed and I cook on one hotplate in the laundry room. The bathroom, however, has just been covered with yellow tiles. Lýdur did the tiling but I got to choose the colour. We still haven’t got the inside doors and there’s plastic instead of glass in the living-room windows. Beside us are the open foundations of a building full of yellow water. I’m so scared of Thorgerdur falling into them and I don’t let her out of my sight. At the end of the month, I’ll be getting a cooker and sink in the kitchen. We’re going to lay a lawn next summer and I dream of planting a bush on one side of it—preferably redcurrant—and have a pretty flower bed. I want poppies most of all.

  Your friend,

  ÍSEY

  The body of the earth

  A bizarre whine resounds, not unlike the howling of an animal or the wailing of wind pressing against a loose windowpane in the heart of winter, and, just as swiftly, the floor of the 400-year-old guest house is jolted and there’s a rumble, as if a throng of forty horses had suddenly been unleashed from a bare patch of land and started to gallop. The earth trembles under the foundations, everything is in motion. The wardrobe shifts and I see it fall flat over the bed, the garden rails collapse, the windows shake, a fissure has opened in the earth. There is a cracking sound, like the wall has fractured.

  I lie on the grass chewing straw when Mum comes running out. When we go back inside after the earthquake, the kitchen cupboards are open and two Bing & Grøndahl porcelain cups with white birds and gilded rims lie broken on the floor.

  I grab the typewriter and manuscript and rush outside.

  Hekla dear,

  It’s been an inclement winter. A heavy snowstorm has now broken out from the east with a fierce spell of frost. Your brother met a girl at a Thorrablót feast but it was a short-lived relationship because he got jilted. It’s a long way to the end of wintertide. Surtsey is still erupting.

  YOUR FATHER

  Dear Hekla,

  Thank you for the manuscript. I read it in one session and shut myself off (I had it in the taxi so I could dive into it between fares). I was surprised by your request to use my name on the cover of the book. Nevertheless, I fully understand that you want the book to be published. At first I thought it was preposterous for me to appropriate your work, but after careful consideration and consulting my girlfriend Sædís about it, I am willing to accept your request. The book shall therefore be mine.

  STARKADUR PJETURSSON

  * This is Hekla. My very best friend. Hekla, this is Caspe
r. [Translator’s note]

  * It’s so delightful. [Translator’s note]

  NOTES ON QUOTATIONS

  There are loose translations from Nietzsche on page 7 and page 191. Loose translations of poems by Hulda are quoted on page 23, Grímur Thomsen on page 122, Steingrímur Thorsteinsson and Jónas Hallgrímsson on page 160, Karítas Thorsteinsdóttir on page 184, and Stephan G. Stephansson on page 209.

  The headings on pages 15, 242 and 245 are references to the Song of Songs in the Bible. The heading on page 102 is an indirect reference to Tomas Tranströmer. The heading on page 120 is a reference to André Malraux and the second heading on page 201 to Shakespeare. The headings on the following pages reference lines of poetry by the following authors: on page 143 to Stein Steinarr, page 193 to Abelmajid Benejelloun, the first heading on page 205 to Mhamed Lakira, the second heading on the same page to Haldór Laxness, and page 229 to Hulda.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  Living at home with her baby, Ísey wonders ‘“What would happen if I strolled into the cloud of smoke [in the poet’s café] with Thorgerdur in my arms and ordered a cup of coffee? Or walked into an abstract art exhibition in Bogasalur with the pram?”’ What do you think would happen if she did? Do you think mothers are excluded from literary and artistic culture?

  Hekla is pestered by one of her customers at the hotel to participate in a beauty contest to become the next Miss Iceland, a contest that she learns is something of a scam. Do you feel that the novel subverts the idea of a “Miss Iceland”?

  Towards the beginning of the novel, Ísey reads Hekla’s coffee cup and declares ‘“There are two men in the cup… You love one and sleep with the other.”’ The end of the novel finds Hekla married to Jón John, yet the arrangement doesn’t seem to make either of them happy. What kind of roles do men and women fulfil in this novel, and does it seem that sex and love between men and women are mutually exclusive?