by Sjón
But no, that’s not how the boy’s day is going to pan out. Instead, the main protagonist of the day will be his eighty-two-year-old father and he himself will only be a minor character in that drama – or perhaps merely a spectator. The old man reaches a furtive hand down to the floor and snatches up a massive oaken staff.
— At least I got to keep the bloody stick …
He brandishes it over his head, smashing the light-fitting above the table.
Fragments of glass rain down on father and son.
* * *
THE OLD MAN AND THE MARE
This is how your grandfather died.
Ignoring the protests of foolish farmhands, he ordered them to shoe a crazy mare that everyone else agreed was fit for dog-meat but that he insisted was a child’s ride and had named Cinderella to underline his point.
After they had chased the mare up hill and down dale, calling and stretching out their arms as if they had finally worked out how to capture nature itself, they managed to corner the beast in the shoeing pen by the farm. But no one dared go near her. It fell to your grandfather, the old-timer – he was born in mid-September 1778 – to shoe her.
Well, after wishing the lily-livered cowards to hell and beyond, your grandfather crept up on the mare with a “Steingrímur’s iron” in his hand. This was a home-made horseshoe named after himself, and with hissing and threats he managed to hook it round the animal’s near hind leg. He drew the hoof to him, fitted the shoe and positioned the first nail – but as he raised the hammer for the blow the mare decided that it was not her time that had come but his: she flung off the shoe and gave him a good kick in the head, sending him flying backwards in a great arc to land at the foot of the farm wall.
Man of steel as your grandfather was, he rose to his feet unaided, glared fiercely at the group standing round him in a semicircle and staring at him aghast, and snarled:
— What are you gawping at, you bunch of gutless milksops?
Before anyone could tell him that the mare had left a nail in the middle of his forehead, he fell down unconscious. The first thing the homeopath Haraldur Skuggason did when he came to visit him was to ask for a pair of pliers.
For several days men took it in turns to try to prise the nail out of his forehead. Of course it was bloody useless: the mare had been sired by a nykur, a water monster from Lake Kappastadir, and your grandfather came from Trolls’ Cape. Then, on the third day, he sat up and bellowed so deafeningly that people looked up from their haymaking in the meadows.
The warrior wakens
his whistle dry
a desperate desire
to drain an ocean
A young girl was ordered to water him. This proved such a daunting task that she ended up having to pour sour whey down his neck morning, noon and night. The horseshoe nail made your grandfather so thirsty that he drank unceasingly, but only if your grandmother brought him the drink.
One night, deciding she’d had enough of carting whey to your granddad, she seized the pliers that lay on the chest by his bed. Straddling the old man, she gripped the nail with the pliers and after an interval of rocking the blood gushed into the air like a geyser, right in your grandmother’s face. You can guess what happened next!
It was not the only thing to gush out of the old man.
Yes, that’s how your father was conceived.
That is why you are here.
* * *
The day passes something like this.
The old man wanders round the house, managing to keel over in a stupor in every room in turn, before rising almost immediately from the dead only to pass out again in the next room. And he begins every resurrection by telling his son the story of his conception. In between times he bellows to himself that it is no coincidence that it should fall to him, and no other living Icelander, to be chosen as a model for the giant in the new republic’s revised coat of arms. The boy follows him to make sure he doesn’t hurt himself. As if he could prevent the troll from destroying himself or anything else that gets in his way. He tells his friends the old man is ill.
Usually it is his sister who watches over the colossus on his peregrinations round the house. On these occasions the boy shuts himself in the attic, puts on his balaclava to muffle the sound of what’s going on downstairs and tends to his stamp collection. The old man thinks it a foolish pastime.
Now they’ve reached the bathroom. The old man sits on the side of the bath, shaking his fist at the window. The hubbub of the celebrations carries in through the vent in the top right-hand corner. He leaps to his feet, cups his hands into a foghorn and yells at the smartly dressed people on their way down to the square:
— Long live the rabble-public!
The boy draws the curtain across the window. He knows that this display of bad temper is not because the old man was neither offered a seat of honour and a woollen blanket at the ceremony at Thingvellir nor invited to take part in recreating the coat of arms as a “tableau vivant” on Lækjartorg Square. No, he is aggrieved because his son will not follow in his wake as a swimmer, and, what’s more, he suspects that his daughter is carrying on with a soldier. The boy knows that this is quite true.
He also knows that he stopped wetting his bed the day he cut off the tip of the middle finger on his right hand, the very day he – Ásgeir, the son of Helgi, the son of Steingrímur – was due to begin training with the Poseidon Swimming Club.’
IV
(11 March 1958)
5
‘The first creature to wake up that morning is a black nanny-goat which is lying outside by the wall of a shed in the back garden of a dignified wooden house on a street leading up from the centre of a small town in the corner of an inlet on an island located in the north of the mid-Atlantic.
She scrambles to her feet, darting yellow eyes around to check on the world. Everything is in its place and tinted with red. The rainwater glows in a brimming bucket by the corner of the shed. The goat heads over to it.
When she has drunk her fill an early spring fly settles on her. She shakes it off and waddles over to the house at number 10a Ingólfsstræti.
She’s hungry.
* * *
Leo Loewe is at the National Gallery of Iceland, attending the opening of a photographic exhibition entitled “Faces of Iceland”. The Minister for Culture is giving a speech on how landscape and weather shape the soul of the nation – and how the soul engraves itself on the visage of its people. He speaks extempore, the words flowering on his tongue like buttercups on a mountain-top. He himself is not tall, for men of vision seldom rise as high as their thoughts. Therein lies the beauty of his opening speech.
— This interplay between land and people, this story of man and nature, these glad tidings are captured by the photographer at a single instant in time. The eye of the camera opens by the miracle of technology and sees the truth: that man and country are one. Iceland speaks to us in faces that have been turned towards snow-white mountain peaks, red-glowing lava and berry-blue moorlands. For generation after generation the nation has celebrated its landscape and this celebration is reflected in its cloudless expression.
Here the minister pauses in his speech and the exhibition guests thank him with some shy clapping. Turning to the photographer, a tall man with hawk-like eyes, the minister places a hand on his arm. The photographer does not stir but inclines his head, thereby signalling to the minister that he is ready to hear more. The minister removes his hand from the artist, leaving it dangling motionless in the air between them.
— So it is not only today’s children of Iceland who look out at us from these pictures; no, when our eyes meet theirs we come face to face with Iceland’s thousand years. And we must ask ourselves whether they like what they see …
(Dramatic pause.)
— Yes, we must ask ourselves whether we have “followed the path of righteousness, with good as our goal”, as the poet said. Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I hereby declare the exhibition “Faces o
f Iceland” open.
This time the applause is vigorous and the photographer bows to the President, the Minister for Culture and the guests, most of whom have their picture included in the exhibition. People disperse around the gallery in search of themselves, Leo Loewe among them. The walls of the gallery are hung with the portraits of almost every living Icelander, arranged according to county and settlement, except for Reykjavík where they are in alphabetical order by street name.
In the gallery housing the citizens of Reykjavík, Leo comes across the anthropologist who accompanied the photographer on his three-year circuit of the country. He is standing in the midst of a group of tweed-clad gentlemen sporting bowties, university types. The anthropologist himself towers over them, silver-haired, with a coarse-ground pepper-and-salt beard. There is a frisson of anticipation among the men and some have started to smoke. The anthropologist is telling them something amusing. He speaks like a man of the people, with a hard northern accent, forcing out the words between clenched teeth as if he had a half-eaten trout’s head in his mouth.
— There’s something I must show you …
The anthropologist beckons them to follow him and leads them straight across the gallery to where the letters I–H are hand-painted in black on the wall above the pictures. Leo, tailing along behind, sees the anthropologist searching with his finger for a particular face on the wall, while the group around him waits expectantly.
— Ing-ing-ing-ing …
The finger hovers over the pictures.
— Ingólfsstræti!
The finger stops but Leo can’t see exactly where because the academics all lean forwards as one – and fall silent. Leo inches his way closer; he lives on Ingólfsstræti. The anthropologist awaits his colleagues’ reaction, anticipating tears of mirth; he himself is at bursting point. But instead of a gale of laughter swaying them like buckwheat, the tweed figures slowly straighten up and look at one another awkwardly – no one looks at the anthropologist. Once they have adjusted their bowties they all discover simultaneously that the girl with the drinks tray has come to their rescue.
The anthropologist is left standing there with superfluous laughter in his throat. Perhaps Leo can laugh with him? Yes, though anthropology often makes a mockery of people with its eccentric sense of humour, there is no need to punish the anthropologist personally for this. Leo approaches the wall. Ah, yes, there are his neighbours. The anthropologist bleats something.
— Best approach him warily. Let’s see: 2 Ingólfsstræti, 3 Ingólfsstræti, 4 Ingólfsstræti (no one lives there, that’s the Old Cinema), 5 Ingólfsstræti, 6 Ingólfsstræti (where’s Hjörleifur?), 7 Ingólfsstræti …
Leo is just getting to his house when the anthropologist emits a dreadful howl of laughter:
— Behehe, behehe …
He gulps, rolling back his tongue as Leo looks at him encouragingly. Leo searches for his picture on the wall. The anthropologist is whining with laughter. Then Leo spots himself; his name is typewritten in clear letters on the strip of paper beneath the black frame:
Leo Loewe, overseer.
But the picture is not of him at all but of a big toe. It fills the entire frame with its dark, deformed nail and a coarse tuft of hair on the joint.
— Behehe, behehe, behehe …
The anthropologist bleats, pointing at Leo. Other exhibition guests come flocking over, with the President and Minister for Culture in the vanguard. The photographer presses his lips to Leo’s ear and breathes:
— You are what you see …
— Behehe …
* * *
— Behehe, behehe, behehe …
The goat is trapped by the horns in Leo’s bedroom window. Having chewed down the Coleus plant that stands on the sill, she now wants to get back out into the morning but this is proving hard.
— Behehe …
Leo shakes off both anthropologist and sleep. He sits up. The goat’s head is hidden by the curtains but the animal’s struggles seem full of despair; she kicks the window pane with her forelegs and snorts angrily. The flowerpot is tossed out from under the curtains and lands on Leo’s bed, showering the newly woken man with dirt and broken pottery.
— I’d better sort this out before she pulls the window out of its frame. She’s annoyed enough people already …
He leaps out of bed and yanks back the curtains. Startled at the sight of the man, the goat goes berserk and splinters start flying from the woodwork. Leo reaches out a hand to lift the catch but the goat snaps at him. He whips back his hand and she recommences kicking the wood. He puts out his hand, she snaps. Etc.
Footsteps are heard upstairs. Mr Thorsteinson, Leo’s landlord, a member of the Reykjavík House-owners’ Association, is up and about. He doesn’t like the goat. Were it not for the fact that she is an ally in his battle against Mrs Thorsteinson’s scheme of turning the patch of yard behind the house into a garden, she would long ago have been sent back to the rubbish tip.
Leo knows this but the goat does not. She keeps up the same behaviour, finally succeeding in biting him. He squeaks soundlessly and thrusts his hand into his armpit, then dives into the kitchen and fetches a pot of parsley to offer his tormenter. It works. The goat tucks in and Leo manages to lift the window latch with his free hand. He eases the goat’s head out of the window, followed by the parsley pot.
The goat is violet in the morning sun and the udder that bulges out from between her hind legs shines a rosy pink.
So it is to be a goat.’
‘What kind of a way is that to describe a goat?’
The woman leans back on the sofa, smoothing the dress over her stomach – a twinkle in her eye. But the storyteller doesn’t react to the joke. His eyes grow wet.
‘I owe more to that goat than almost anyone else.’
‘Really…’
‘My father found her when she was hardly more than a kid. He was walking along the Gold Coast on the west side of town with Pétur Salómonsson Hoffmann, the uncrowned king of Reykjavík’s rubbish dumps, when they heard a pathetic bleating coming from a cardboard box marked with the logo of a local coffee merchant, but we’ll leave his name out of it. Pétur wouldn’t go near the box, saying he didn’t touch Masonic stuff like that, it resulted in nothing but trouble – that’s assuming it wasn’t a merman. But my father feared neither Freemasons nor sea monsters. He opened the box and looked straight into the yellow eyes of a kid that had been left there to die. It craned its neck towards him and bleated appealingly.
He freed the baby goat from its prison, took it in his arms and told his companion that this was a pure diamond. Pétur snorted: “Goats are unnatural creatures, they don’t understand Icelandic.”
“I’m keeping her anyway.” Leo clutched the creature tighter, prepared for a long argument about goats. It wouldn’t be the first time he had disputed about such things with Icelanders. But nothing came of the argument. Pétur had spotted a gold ring inlaid with precious stones.
He rubbed the dirt off the ring, handed it to Leo and asked if this was what he was looking for. No, it wasn’t the right ring. Leo’s ring was still in the hands of robbers, split in two. Pétur said he would continue to keep an eye out for it – though he didn’t understand what was so special about it; gold was gold.
Anyway, the kid, which was as black as coal, was christened Ambrosia. Goat’s milk is the food of heroes.’
‘I won’t argue with you about that.’
‘Leo bandages his wound and sighs when he looks in the mirror and catches sight of the suit hanging on the lavatory door. Today he had meant to be so very smart, never smarter than today of all days. But now his bandaged hand would protrude from his elegant sleeve like a picture puzzle for everyone he encountered. They would all want to know how he had hurt himself. And how was he to answer? That he had been bitten by a goat? That would only lead to further questions, which might in turn lead to others, and he had no desire to answer those.
Leo takes his suit down from the pe
g on the lavatory door and flicks off some imaginary dust. No dust has ever fallen on it. Every Saturday morning without fail for the past seven years he has taken it out and brushed it. The temptation to put it on was great, especially at first. But he refrained, since nothing must be allowed to spoil the hour when it finally came. The suit is tailor-made, of black wool with three buttons, but when he pulls on the trousers he discovers that he has lost weight since he bought it.
Today is the formal occasion for which the suit was made.
Leo puts the kettle on. He takes a bottle of milk from the fridge and a scrap of sponge from the side of the sink, intending to pick up both at once but hampered by the bandage. He pours the milk into a soup bowl and puts in the sponge, then takes it into the pantry that opens off the kitchen.
Leo fumbles his way forwards in the gloom with his bitten hand. Besides what you would expect to find in a pantry there is a set of copper vessels. The largest stands on a simple electric hotplate. It is boiling and drops are dripping from the pipe that connects one vessel to another until it turns into a spout that tapers down to nothing. Leo checks the spout: a minuscule droplet glitters there, while in the crystal-glass beaker below there is a golden flake the size of a child’s fingernail. Making gold is a time-consuming business.
He lays down the bowl and after groping along the top shelf on the outer wall he takes down some jam jars and lines them up on the shelf below. My crib is revealed, a rather ancient and somewhat dented hatbox. Standing on tiptoe he slips his good hand underneath it, gets a purchase on the box and checks whether he has enough strength to lift it down without tipping it. He manages.
