CoDex 1962

by Sjón

  Ten adolescents appear in the wings, three girls aged twelve to fifteen, five boys the same age and two boys in their eleventh year. They step out on to the stage, in the order they died, treading the carpet of light up to the platform, where they climb the steps and take up position, one step behind the children who are there before them.

  The first are two boys who died after long battles with terminal illness. One is carrying a book called Return of the Yellow Shadow that he hadn’t quite finished, the other is holding the unused football he’d been given for the summer he would never see.

  Boy: 10 May 1962 –✝18 January 1973

  Boy: 11 October 1962 –✝30 March 1973

  A girl and two boys follow close on their heels. The boy in the lead had also been struggling with illness and was undergoing rehabilitation, in the belief that he was on the mend, when his body gave up the fight. Next comes a girl who died one spring day in her home district, though only a month before she had been noticeably radiant at a get-together. The third, a boy who was crushed under a stack of radiators during a game of hide and seek in the goods yard on Eidsgrandi, walks with a limp but shows no other ill effects.

  Boy: 7 April 1962 –✝29 January 1974

  Girl: 19 April 1962 –✝26 March 1974

  Boy: 23 September 1962 –✝28 August 1974

  Then a boy and a girl enter, of thirteen and fourteen years old. He was killed by a stray pellet from his drunken father’s shotgun. She died in an accident while on a trip to Denmark.

  Boy: 28 December 1962 –✝7 July 1976

  Girl: 10 September 1962 –✝17 November 1976

  Finally, the oldest members of this group walk the carpet of light. One boy died of exposure on New Year’s Eve. The second fell off the back of a pick-up when his twelve-year-old playmate started the engine and drove off. The girl was killed when she accidentally fell from a balcony in Spain, a month after her fifteenth birthday.

  Boy: 6 December 1962 –✝1 January 1977

  Boy: 22 November 1962 –✝27 June 1977

  Girl: 22 July 1962 –✝28 August 1977

  Once they are all assembled on stage there is a moment’s silence. The younger children wait for their elders to take the lead. Then the eldest girl looks at the boy at her side. He nods and together they say, like a couple of teachers on a disco-dancing course:

  — One-two-three …

  And the other eight chime in:

  — Dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962, we await you here.

  The chorus’s tone is tinged with the general air of scepticism that characterises adolescence.

  13

  Jósef Loewe buries his face in his hands.

  ‘The poor woman, the poor bloody woman.’

  Looking up, he asks in a choked voice:

  ‘What about my father? Wasn’t he my father after all?’

  ‘Jón Jónsson is registered as your father.’

  ‘Does it give any other details about him?’

  ‘He was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, held a Czechoslovakian passport when he came to Iceland in the summer of 1944, took Icelandic citizenship in March 1958, and died in 1994.’

  ‘Thank God, it’s true then. What do they say his name was?’

  ‘Leo Loewe. Spelled in brackets as L-o-e-w.’

  Jósef mutters into his hands:

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes.’

  He wipes the tears from his eyes.

  ‘I thought for a minute that you were going to say my whole story was a figment of my imagination, that I don’t even exist myself, that I’m nothing more than a twinkle in God’s eye, as the little children say.’

  He smiles weakly, swallowing the lump in his throat.

  ‘Yes, or your own imagination.’

  Aleta lays a hand on the stone man’s pale, misshapen arm.

  ‘Then we’d be figments of each other’s imagination.’

  Her words come out more affectionately than intended. Jósef stiffens. Withdrawing his arm, he stares out into the kitchen, then, after a long pause, says without looking at her:

  ‘I’m no fool.’

  Aleta is silent. Jósef points to the picture of his mother.

  ‘Take it…’

  She does as he asks, picking up the picture from the table where she had put it down while making the brandy coffee.

  ‘Take it out of the frame.’

  Jósef watches Aleta turn the frame over, run the blue-varnished nail of her index finger under the copper clips and open them up. She frees the back of the frame. Under the speckled card is a piece of waxed paper. She removes this and lifts the picture of Jósef’s mother off the glass. It turns out to be a cutting from page ten of Morgunbladid from Saturday, 15 September 1962. It has been folded so the picture will fit into the frame, with the accompanying text still attached. Aleta unfolds the cutting, smooths it out and looks enquiringly at Jósef.

  He nods. She reads.

  * * *

  Quick Catch-up with María in Reykjavík

  en route from New York to Paris

  María Gudmundsdóttir, Miss Iceland 1961, made a stopover in Iceland last week, spending a few days at home with her parents, on her way from the United States, where, as readers will know, she recently took part in the Miss International competition at Long Beach. On Friday she continued her journey to Paris, where she has been working for the last year as a sought-after model, with her picture appearing in all the biggest fashion magazines. She plans to work for the Paris-based Dorian Leigh Parker modelling agency until Christmas, and has agreed to write a fashion column for Morgunbladid with news from the city of haute couture.

  — Obviously not just anyone can make it as a model in a competitive environment like Paris. How did you get your break and start sitting for photographers there? we asked María, when we met her at home for a quick chat.

  — Luck, really. I was on my way back from a modelling tour of South America and stopped over in Paris. Two days before I was due to go home, I went to the hairdresser’s and a woman came over and asked if I was a photographer’s model. I said no, and she asked me if I’d be interested in becoming one. I said I was on my way home and couldn’t give her an answer straight away. She turned out to be Dorian Leigh Parker, who runs a big agency supplying models for magazines. She asked me to come and see her next day at her office. There she introduced me to an agent from Coca-Cola, who wanted me to model for them. And I realised I had nothing to lose by accepting the offer, even if I went home first.

  — Since then one thing’s led to another. What’s the work like? Well paid?

  — Yes, it’s well paid, and I really enjoy it. Being a photographic model is quite different from doing the fashion shows. The catwalk girls work during the day, we work at night when they’re not using the clothes for shows. For example, I was working from nine in the evening to seven or eight in the morning for the last two weeks before the competition at Long Beach, and sometimes during the day too, if the clothes were available.

  — Does each photo shoot take a long time?

  — It depends. Photographers fall into two groups. Some take loads of pictures to choose from, others make you pose and that can take a long time. The longest I’ve sat for a single picture was nine hours.

  — It can be tiring, then. Isn’t it a bit cold too, posing in summer clothes before summer’s arrived?

  — Yes, at the beginning of February, for example, they took some of us north to the coast where it was snowy until ten in the morning, and there we were in our swimming costumes. But the photographers tried to be quick, so we wouldn’t catch cold.

  — You say you’re going to leave your job in Paris before Christmas?

  — Yes, I’m not spending another Christmas away from home. I was in Mexico last year and spent the whole of Christmas and New Year ill in bed in my hotel room. But in the middle of January I’m going to New York where I’ve been hired as a photographic model by Eileen Ford’s agency, with an open contract. I met her and signed the
contract on my way from the Miss International competition at Long Beach. I spent a week with her and she invited me out to her country house on Long Island. There’s a beach there and it was lovely and relaxing after all the fuss around the beauty pageant.

  — That must have been a fun trip?

  — Yes, I was very pleased with the trip and grateful to get the chance to go. I came back loaded with all kinds of gifts. There was always a lot going on, too much really. For five days before the competition began we were rushing around all over the place to parties and so on, from seven in the morning until ten or twelve at night. There wasn’t a single girl who didn’t have black circles under her eyes by the time the contest began. Miss France came off worst. She was so overwhelmed with exhaustion that she kept fainting.

  — You mean genuinely fainting?

  — Yes, she didn’t sort of sink down elegantly but keeled over with a crash and bruised herself, sometimes in front of thousands of people. Once I fell asleep at a breakfast party at seven in the morning. We were supposed to stand up and give a speech but when it came to my turn they had to send someone to nudge me. I just sat there, with my eyes open apparently, totally oblivious. But the whole thing went well. And it was good to have this practice run before the contest itself. For instance, before that I was terrified of having to stand up and give a speech, but I’d got used to it by the time the big day came.

  — One last thing. Are French men as charming as they say?

  — They come in all sorts. There are some charmers among them but sadly not for me because so many of them are really small.

  — Do American men appeal to you more, then?

  — They’re more my size, though they’re not generally as charming as the French. The men from these two countries are different types altogether.

  As mentioned above, María left the country on Friday morning. We wish her a good journey and look forward in due course to seeing her news reports from Paris, the city of fashion.

  * * *

  ‘My father so loved me, his only son, that he tried to make up for my lack of a mother by giving me a photograph of the woman considered the most beautiful in Iceland, if not the world, in the year I was born.

  María Gudmundsdóttir, María X, Maria Gudy. I must have been nine when I realised that it was she, and no other, who awaited me on the bedside table when I awoke, she who accompanied me into my dreams at night, not my real mother. In the loft at Ingólfsstræti there was a chest full of old weekly magazines, mostly copies of Vikan and Fálkinn. Back when I could still get up to the loft without help, I spent countless rainy summer days there while my father was at work. As long as there was no one home in the attic flat, I could pull down the loft ladder, climb up, and drag it up after me, all without being seen.

  For hours at a time I would sit, legs outstretched, under the diamond-shaped, south-facing dormer window, turning the pages, lapping up articles about the latest fashions in clothes and music (mini-skirts and space-age chic, Beatles-inspired bands), culture and the arts (the Icelanders’ fight to bring their manuscripts home from Denmark, the madness of Salvador Dalí), international scandals and domestic politics (Profumo in Britain, controversy over the relocation of a bridge in Thingeyjar county), horoscopes and jokes (unexpected journeys and windfalls, mothers-in-law with rolling pins), as well as trying to make sense of the letters sent in to agony aunts and the answers they received. Of all the things I read, the most alien to me were the everyday problems of ordinary folk who signed their letters with nicknames such as Binni, Sissí, Lalli, Ninna, Frída from Brú, Siggi from Kópavogur, or “Yours in a fix” and “Yours undecided”; girlfriends were moody, husbands uninterested, daughters and sons disobedient, friends disloyal, engagements broken off without warning, proposals slow to come. Nothing in my life with my father shed any light on these pleas for help with relationship or family problems. I don’t remember him ever bringing a woman home or anything in his behaviour to suggest that he had intimate relations with women outside the home. He never went anywhere and I’m sure I met more women than he did: at my nursery, at school and later in hospital.

  My closest brush with the sort of thing that cropped up in these micro-stories about love and life was one time when Halldóra Oktavía climbed up to join me in the loft – it didn’t happen often but when it did I felt as if we were children in an adventure story, the two of us together in a murky underground passage, solving a crime, while our faithful dog Sirius stood guard at the cave mouth, ready to bark if our enemies arrived, whether they were assassins dispatched by oriental military powers or the blundering but ruthless henchmen of home-grown crime lords – and suggested we read the problem pages together. This girl of my own age sat down next to me, so close that we touched, and opened Vikan, placing the magazine between us so the left-hand page lay on my right thigh and the right on her left thigh. Then she turned the pages back and forth until she found the one marked in feminine script “Dear Vikan”. Pointing to the first letter, she ordered me to read it aloud; she herself would read the reply. The more magazines Halldóra Oktavía leafed through on our thighs, the redder my cheeks became and the hotter I grew on the side of my body that was touching hers, until the need to pee became so urgent that I leapt to my feet and fled down the ladder.’

  Jósef looks at Aleta.

  ‘Am I blushing?’

  Aleta studies him for a moment before answering:

  ‘Tuh.’

  She shakes her head slowly. He touches his cheeks.

  ‘They’re hot. Feel.’

  ‘Tuh, tuh, tuh. You promised me you wouldn’t get sentimental, you promised you’d spare me the kind of banal childhood incidents that are so common that everyone has poignant memories of them, regardless of whether they happened to them or not – next thing I know you’ll be regaling me with the names of popular brands of sweets taken off the market years ago because they turned out to contain flavourings or colouring agents so toxic that it’s a wonder they didn’t send generations of children prematurely to their graves; or listing foreign bands with incomprehensible names or short-lived domestic hits, sung in broken English, that no one listens to any more except desperate, middle-aged types at class reunions or recluses who devote whole websites to them and sit up all night trying to find out what ever happened to this or that bass player, the third keyboard player in the Smugglers, the Norwegian female artist who sang the hit “You, Me, You” in some year or other, only to discover that they too are unemployed, disabled or stuck in badly paid, dead-end jobs – working as van drivers, cashiers or dustmen in small towns or villages that have given nothing to the world apart from these faded stars – living for the occasional email from lonely people festering in the backwaters of the world, begging for news of them and saying that their music saved their lives; or telling stories of hanging around by vanished sales kiosks, in darkened computer games shops or video rentals run by middle-aged men who were just waiting for a chance to invite socially disadvantaged kids “round the back” so they could ply them with alcohol and turn them on by showing them porn flicks featuring pets, leather-clad women and German dwarfs; and endless descriptions of trips to the cinema where the inevitable car chase on screen was nothing but a backdrop to the gossiping, panting, cuffing and pinching that went on in the gloom, while over all these reminiscences hangs a shared miasma that none of you noticed at the time: the powerful reek of boys’ sweat overlaid with the scent of cheap perfume and lip gloss from the girls.

  Your story’s on a fast track into the black hole of nostalgia.’

  ‘Wait, you’re wrong. My childhood and teens were what you might expect of someone with my growing disability. I don’t even have false memories of them. Where was I?’

  ‘All right. The weekly mags.’

  ‘The weeklies. The main attraction for me was the pictures, of course. Photos from all over the world, some in the vibrant colours of the sixties, that decade that seems to have played out under different, brighter, skies than an
y other time in human history, while others were so grainy and dark that it took me ages to work out what they showed. I soon became hyper-sensitive to the pictures, identifying with them so strongly that I would merge right into them. I would stare at a photo until it began to alter before my eyes, the light becoming suddenly more intense, the subject shifting by a fraction of a millimetre, and I was seized momentarily by the dizzying sensation that I had been present at the moment the shutter clicked. And so the pictures became etched in my memory, lodged in the same part of the brain as my real memories. Of course, it wasn’t long before I came across one of the most photographed women in the history of Iceland, María X. The papers were vying with one another to publish pictures of her as she jetted around the world, to Long Beach, Paris and Cairo, as well as reprinting the covers of some of the world’s top fashion magazines – and wherever María went, I went too. But I kept quiet about my discovery as I didn’t want to put my father on the spot.’

  Aleta touches Jósef’s shoulder.

  ‘Perhaps she was like her. Brynhildur, I mean. Perhaps she and María looked alike, and that’s why Leo chose the picture of her.’

  ‘I want you to know that they did try to get me to continue my education. I lasted a term and a half on an accountancy course in the business department at Breidholt College. The poet Sjón was there at the same time, in the art department. This was in the winter of 1980–81. At that stage he hadn’t dropped the dot from his pen-name and still spelled it “S.jón”, which a lot of people pronounced “Ess-jón”. I remember how it used to get on his nerves. Not that I was part of his circle, but he did sometimes sit at the table nearest the hatch in the school tuck shop, which was where they usually parked my wheelchair, though it was the busiest spot at break-times and everyone was forced to squeeze past me. But no one complained and I was happy. One morning, not long before I decided I’d had enough of struggling to get my head round all that debit and credit nonsense, I spoke to the young poet who was sitting with his back to me, drinking coffee out of a plastic cup: