CoDex 1962

by Sjón

  No, she wasn’t letting anyone else see her in this state. Brynhildur made a break for it, blundering down the hall, bashing her shoulder into their host as she went and sending him slamming into the mirror. As she ran past Hanna to reach the cloakroom, to get out of this house with its lethal form of generosity, she hissed at her childhood friend from Lokastígur:

  — Don’t go down to the basement with him.

  Once in the cloakroom, unable to find her own coat, Brynhildur snatched the nearest woman’s garment from its hanger, yanked the door open and vanished into the darkness.

  Hanna yelled after her:

  — Hey, don’t be such a drag, Biddí, don’t go …

  The man with the bowtie righted himself, straightened the mirror on the wall, smoothed down his grey-flecked pullover, then went and closed the front door.

  He turned to Hanna.

  — She’s been nothing but a bloody bore …

  He smiled. And when he offered her his arm, Hanna accepted.

  The twist had started up again in the sitting room.

  At first Brynhildur hadn’t a clue where she was or what time it was. All she knew for certain was that the coat was too small for her. The sleeves only came halfway down her forearms and it was too tight for her to button up. A summer coat. And it was December.

  Once she was a safe distance from the house she slowed down, searching for familiar landmarks, trying to work out from the signs of life around her whether it was day or night. This was a smart area, dominated by sombre-coloured buildings containing two to four apartments, dark walls dashed with Iceland spar or obsidian, lighter ones mixed with sand, interspersed with the occasional white detached house. The curtains were drawn in most of the windows, there were no children about, and apart from the distant throbbing of a motorbike there was no other traffic noise; new-looking cars were parked in the drives – it must be night, or late in the evening.

  So far that year the winter had been kind to Reykjavík’s down-and-outs, but over the last twenty-four hours the north wind had heralded its arrival with plunging temperatures and now it had begun to blow in earnest, bringing an icy rain that became heavier the colder it got until the drops froze into a pitiless, lashing sleet.

  Brynhildur managed to drag the coat around herself by tying it tightly with the belt. Between the houses she spotted the grey concrete tower of Landakot Cathedral rising against the stormy black sky. Ahead the street began to slope down, which meant it must lead either to the sea or to the centre of town. Whichever it was, she should be able to find her way from there to the mental hospital.

  Kleppur offered a refuge to all those who could no longer recognise any part of themselves but their eyes.

  IV

  From tape b)

  (17 June 2009)

  11

  A breeze. The fidgeting of branches. A trout slapping its tail. Mallards quacking.

  A clunk as a glass is banged down on a table. Rustling. Footsteps on gravel. Silence.

  A stream of liquid landing on a smooth body of water.

  — I’m pissing in the lake!

  The geneticist’s voice is loud. He’s not talking to himself.

  — I’m pissing in Lake Thingvellir!

  The shout is intended for the tape still turning in the machine.

  The stream sings on the surface for a while, before beginning to stutter.

  Silence. Footsteps on gravel. Rustling.

  The geneticist:

  — Urine.

  He lifts the glass from the table.

  — I’m converting whisky into urine.

  Indistinctly into his glass:

  — I permit you, O my country, to savour it with me. Eight thousand …

  The last comment is almost inaudible but it is obvious that when the man stood up to go and relieve himself, the 100,000-yen worth of spirit he had knocked back had gone to his head.

  I’m drunk, he thinks: I only talk like that when I’m drunk.

  He’s pleasantly sozzled in the way that happens when you drink alone. Nowadays it’s only when drinking solo that he experiences the enjoyable buzz that had turned him on to alcohol while he was still at sixth-form college. Back then, whenever they clubbed together to buy a bottle, he and his friends used to talk in this elevated manner:

  ‘I permit you, O my country, to savour it with me.’

  A manner of speech that has a tendency to resurface when he is drinking alone and talking to himself. Speaking of which. Clearing his throat, he leans towards the microphone, saying thickly:

  — I always meant …

  He stops himself, takes a breath, swallows and continues, enunciating more clearly:

  — I always meant to be a poet.

  Yes, they’d all meant to be poets, and not just poets, they’d meant to be poets and men of destiny, modelling themselves on historical figures like Snorri Sturluson and Einar Benediktsson: like them they’d meant to make their mark on the worlds of affairs and literature, to be leaders of men, figures of authority, to write the history of their nation, to win famous victories abroad, to be on chatting terms with heads of state, to move their eloquent tongues in praise of the powerful while lancing society’s pestilential boils with the sharpened points of their fountain pens, to mock the arrogant, to stand with the individual against the mob, with the many against the tyranny of the few, to have secret meetings in lonely spots with other men of destiny and conspire with them how to lay traps for the unwary, whether in their writings or in parliament; they would play off their enemies and let them destroy one another, claim to be forever jotting down ideas, deliberately piquing the hopes of publishers while simultaneously pissing off professional authors; exploit the vanity of the weak-willed by placing them in offices and positions only for as long as it suited the ultimate goal; throw people away like used tissues when they failed to live up to expectations or had served their purpose; they would betray a close ally in their hour of need, then forever lament the fact and name their sons after the men they had betrayed; they would topple long-established old men from their thrones, create an atmosphere of low morale and fear in the halls of the great and good, attend international summits and refuse to budge until their homeland was shown the proper respect, laugh coldly when ignorant foreigners called them sentimental for banging on the conference table and quoting lines of verse by Grímur Thomsen in the original Icelandic, stride down corridors and across floors with a retinue in tow, point to something and say something, point to something else and say something else, travel up and down tall buildings in glass lifts, be either famous for their sobriety or notorious for their drinking, either flamboyant or puritanical in their dress, either womanisers or faithful husbands, never be ‘average’ in any way, be on everyone’s lips but refuse to talk to just any journalist, just anywhere; they would keep the world’s press waiting, never fully master the pronunciation of foreign tongues, fall silent in the middle of meetings and leave the room, or send everyone else out of the office; talk quietly to themselves when people thought they thought no one could see, adopt a disconcerting gait which people were forced to emulate in order to keep step with them when they strode along the pavements of foreign metropolises or the corridors of the UN; only admit to knowing those foreign authors who were famous for something other than literature or had powerful friends in their corner of the world; always pretend to understand less than they did, grope for the most basic words, insist that people explain the simplest concepts until they started to doubt them; talk endlessly about books and literature when the subject of conversation was neither books nor literature, express admiration for the inferiority complex that motivated the Nobel Laureate Halldór Kiljan Laxness and the repressed megalomania of the proletarian poet Steinn Steinarr, become patrons of young artists and laugh along at their criticisms of themselves and other men of destiny with pretensions to write, be moved to tears in the presence of the grand old men of art and award them prize money in gratitude for their life’s work, only ass
ociate with artists who had made money from their work, and, above all, never for one moment be ashamed of their own short stories and poems published in school magazines but refer to them with an indulgent smile as ‘experiments’, leaving their audience with the impression that they’d had the potential to be a great writer, and, ultimately, rest assured in the belief that the literature that really mattered was not composed on paper, or contained within the covers of books, or painted on linen with a brush, or engraved in granite, or carved in wood, or spoken or sung, no, it was created from concrete and steel, from election results and economic statistics, from the celebrations of one’s supporters, the satisfaction of one’s shareholders and the hatred of one’s political or business rivals, though if one of their circle ever became a real author he would occupy a special place among his old friends who would make sure he always gave them a signed copy of his latest book; they would buy six, seven, even eighteen copies as Christmas presents for their most important members of staff, thereby reminding everyone that they themselves had literary talent, though they no longer used it for writing but for succeeding in other fields where it gave them an edge over all the talentless mediocrities; the author among them would always be celebrated, especially every ten years when they met up for reunion drinks at the home of whoever was richest at the time, chuckling over their literary efforts as sixth-formers, yes, the author would always be the one who had taken the path that, deep down, the others had known all along they would have to reject, due to pressure from families or girlfriends, due to gnawing doubts about whether their talents would be up to making the grade outside the school walls …

  Most of the members of the Secret Poets’ Society – as they had privately called themselves since they only published in the school magazine under pseudonyms, sometimes several different ones, and always tongue-in-cheek – subsequently went in for law, though one or two read economics with an eye to a political career on the right. They suffered from the fact that two years before them at school there had been five writers who had enjoyed instant success in carving out a place for themselves in the city’s cultural life. Two of these writers had, at eighteen and nineteen, got poems and short stories published in respected literary journals, three had read out their works at meetings of the young socialists or gatherings of protestors against the Keflavík NATO base, and were sometimes to be seen sitting around in cafés with famous poets. They had all got drunk with Dagur Sigurdarson, both in the old cemetery and on the slopes of Öskjuhlíd, one had handed Sigfús Dadason a packet of cigarettes he had dropped on the floor of Kaffi Mokka, two had come off worse in arm-wrestling contests with Thor Vilhjálmsson, and the fifth had taken part in the protest march from Keflavík, walking for half an hour beside two men who appeared to be none other than the celebrated ‘atom poets’ Einar Bragi and Jón Óskar.

  Einar Bragi: You haven’t got very good shoes on.

  Young poet: No, nah, no …

  Einar Bragi: We’ve still got another twenty kilometres to march, you know.

  Young poet: Oh, er …

  Einar Bragi: You’re brave, if you ask me.

  Young poet: Er, yes …

  Einar Bragi: Did you come out like that, with no gloves, in nothing but a thin coat?

  Young poet: I, er, I wanted to do my bit.

  Einar Bragi: There’s a bus accompanying the march, you know.

  Young poet: Is there?

  Einar Bragi: They’ve got hot chocolate and doughnuts. There’s nothing wrong with taking a breather there.

  Young poet: Thanks, I’ll check, er, check it out …

  Einar Bragi (turning to Jón Óskar): He came out dressed like that, in patent-leather shoes and a trench coat.

  Jón Óskar: You don’t say?

  The following summer he was given a French kiss by the writer Gudbergur Bergsson at the Naust Bar.

  The five’s status was later cemented by the critic on the People’s Will who, in his round-up of the year’s literary offerings, mentioned two of them in his list of promising young writers. The fact that he referred to them as young writers rather than schoolboy writers was proof that they had succeeded in getting one foot on the bottom rung of the literary ladder. And as only one of the two who’d been published was mentioned in the article, it was generally acknowledged by their fellow pupils that the other three who had not been named in the article must share the same rung of the ladder and therefore qualified as young writers too.

  Instead of competing with their predecessors on the pages of the school magazine and publishing poems, stories and one-act plays under their real names, the geneticist and his friends in the Secret Poets’ Society had adopted odd, even silly, pseudonyms, in the hope of creating a dissonance between the quality of the writing and the name of the author. In the hope of attracting more attention so that people – the people who scoured school magazines in search of brilliant new talent – would say things like: ‘Horse Horseson is no less a poet than S—’, ‘I find Sing Sing Ri’s stories much funnier than Th—’s’, ‘That monologue by Astrolabe is brilliant, far superior to P—’s stuff’, and so on. The geneticist had published under the names Apollo XVIII and Chair Black. But it was all in vain; none of the secret poets ever amounted to anything other than what their name suggested, poets in secret.

  As the son of a well-known Communist, the geneticist was the black sheep among this group of boys from bourgeois families, and they thought they were being very daring to admit him as a friend. His childhood home had been frequented by almost all the big names on the left, academics and editors, union leaders and members of parliament, composers and authors, his father having at one time or another interviewed them for newspaper or radio, composed speeches for them, or written positive reviews of their work. The geneticist played this down to his friends, not wanting them to know how he had drunk in every word these geniuses and men of destiny had said, practising their voices and gestures when alone in his room or walking to school.

  The decisive moment in his writing career came the morning he casually left the newly published school magazine lying around on the kitchen table in the hope that his eldest brother would read it. On page twenty-one, on the right-hand side, a little above the middle, there was a poem called ‘Homecoming’, printed in a black-framed box and attributed to a poet named Donald Drake. His brother took the bait. The geneticist tried to hide his suspense as he watched his brother turning the pages with his left hand while shovelling down porridge with his right. Both his elder brothers had been editors of the magazine in their day, the brother now leafing through it had at one time been the sixth member of the aforementioned group of five writers: ‘Before they degenerated into an aesthetic freak-show’. He was now a star student in the university’s Icelandic department.

  The geneticist bent over his porridge bowl and pretended to eat. His brother’s jaws slowed their chewing whenever something in the magazine caught his eye, and appeared to slow almost to a standstill when he reached the poem on page twenty-one.

  * * *

  HOMECOMING

  When to our origins we return

  ’tis to find the farm fallen into ruin.

  The well water foul. The oak dead.

  But one can still throw oneself off the roof.

  Still drown oneself in the well.

  And in the oak we spy a branch and know

  ’twill hold our weight.

  Home! Ah yes,

  We were fated to find our way home.

  * * *

  When his brother had finished both magazine and porridge, and got up from the kitchen table without saying a word, the geneticist couldn’t contain himself any longer. What did he think of the magazine? Did he think the editors had done a good job? The piece about the state church was all right, wasn’t it? And the interview with Atli Heimir Sveinsson? It was about time the school magazine interviewed a modern composer, wasn’t it?

  Sure, his brother agreed there was some OK stuff in there, though the article on t
he church could have been harder-hitting, and some of the material was a bit childish for his taste. What about the poems? The one on page twenty-one, for example? The geneticist bit his tongue, afraid he had said too much. The student of Icelandic picked up the magazine and flicked through until he came to the framed ‘Homecoming’, skim-read the poem as if he hadn’t noticed it the first time round, then said without even pausing to think:

  ‘French existential angst. Third-rate pastiche of Sigfús Dadason.’

  The geneticist belches. Tipping the glass, he pours the precious whisky into his cupped left hand, raises it to his lips and laps it like a cat.

  — I myself went to medical school. No Icelandic poet had taken Man as his medium before, literally composing from flesh and blood. There was no danger of my being compared to anyone else; they’d all be third-rate pastiches of me. The Icelanders would learn that it was possible to win a Nobel Prize for more than just literature …

  V

  Adolescence and Teens

  (4 September 1972–23 OctoDecember 1995 2012)

  12

  THE SAGA OF BRYNHILDUR HELGADÓTTIR – PART TWO

  When she thought back over the last four years of her life, the years on the streets, the years in the gutter, they seemed far easier to understand than her life up to the day she had walked out of the home she shared with Thorlákur ‘Preacher’ Röykdal and taken to sleeping rough.

  Thorlákur had raised her up during a revival meeting at Reykjavík’s Philadelphia Church and a week later baptised her into her new life in Christ. To make their relationship acceptable in the eyes of God and the pious congregation – he was a childless widower in his fifties, a bank clerk and influential member of the Pentecostal Movement, she a twenty-nine-year-old mother who’d had a baby at seventeen with an American soldier, a son she had brought up more or less single-handedly in the barracks slum that had once been his father’s army camp, a son she had recently lost (why don’t we have a special word for a mother who has lost her child?), all the evidence suggesting that he had been murdered by kids his own age, not that anyone cared about getting to the bottom of the case because Kiddi was tainted by his connection to the Yanks and the camp, while the kids under suspicion came from good homes – they got married exactly thirty days after Thorlákur had immersed Brynhildur in the baptismal font and both had felt the electricity zinging through the holy water between their robed bodies.