Читать книгу Miss Iceland - Audur Ava Olafsdottir - Страница 14
ОглавлениеPoets are men
The dust hovers in a cloud behind the Reykjavík coach, the road is a ridged washboard and we rattle on; bend after bend, soon it becomes impossible to see through the muddy windows and, before long, the Laxdæla Saga trail will vanish into the dirt.
The gearstick creaks every time the driver goes up or down a hill; I suspect the coach has no brakes. The large diagonal crack across the windscreen doesn’t seem to bother the driver. There aren’t many cars about and, on the rare occasions when we meet one, the driver blows his horn. To make room for a road grader, the bus needs to swerve over to the side of the road where it teeters. The levelling of Dalir’s roads is regarded as something of an event, giving the driver an opportunity to wind down his window, lean out and have a lengthy chat.
“I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose a spindle,” I hear the bus driver say.
Right now I’m not a short distance away from the village of Búdardalur, but actually in Dublin, since my finger is stuck on page twenty-three of Ulysses. I’d heard of this novel that was as thick as Njál’s Saga and could be bought from the English bookshop in Hafnarstræti and sent west.
“Is it French you are talking, sir?” the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
“Irish,” Buck Mulligan said. “Is there Gaelic on you?”
“I thought it was Irish,” she said, “by the sound of it.”
The reading was proceeding slowly, both because of the shaking of the bus and because my English is poor. Even though I have a dictionary lying on the empty seat beside me, the language is more challenging than I expected.
I peer through the window. Didn’t a female writer live on that farm? Didn’t the strong current of this coal-grey river full of sand and mud ripple through her veins? She made the cattle suffer, people said, because while she sat writing about the love lives and tragic fates of the locals, striving to transform the sheep’s colours into a sunset over Breidafjördur, she neglected to milk the cows. There was no greater sin than forgetting to empty swollen udders. Whenever she visited a neighbouring farm, she sat for too long and either wanted to recite a poem or fell silent for hours on end, dipping her sugar cubes into the coffee. They say she heard a string orchestra when she wrote and also that she woke up her children in the night and carried them out into the farmyard in her arms to show them the shimmering waves of Northern Lights undulating across the black sky, and that in between these periods she locked herself inside the marital bedroom and pulled a quilt over her head. There was so much melancholy in her that one bright spring evening she vanished into the silvery grey depths of the river. The prospect of eating fresh puffin eggs would no longer do her, because she had stopped sleeping. She was found in a trout net by the bridge and dragged onto the banks: a stiff-winged poet in a soaking wet skirt and laddered stockings, her belly full of water.
“She destroyed the net,” said the farmer who owned it. “I placed it there for trout, but the meshwork wasn’t designed to hold a woman poet.”
Her fate served as a warning, but at the same time she was the only model of a female author I had.
Otherwise poets were men.
I learnt from that not to disclose my plans to anyone.
Radio Reykjavík
Sitting in front of me on the coach is a woman travelling with a little girl who needs to throw up again. The coach swerves on the gravel and halts. The driver presses a button and the door opens to the autumn air, hissing like a steam iron. The weary woman dressed in a woollen coat escorts the girl down the steps. This is the third time the car-sick child has to be let out. The roads are lined with ditches because the farmers are draining the land and drying up the wetlands where wading birds nest. Barbed wire fences protrude from the earth here and there, although it is difficult to make out what property they are supposed to delimit.
Soon I’ll be too far away from home to know the names of the farms. On the steps, the woman shoves a woolly hat over the child’s head and yanks it down over her ears. I watch her holding the girl’s forehead as a thin streak of vomit oozes out of her. Finally she digs into a coat pocket, pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the child’s mouth before hoisting her back onto the dust-filled coach.
I dig out my notebook, uncap my fountain pen and write two sentences. Then I put the cap back on and open Ulysses again.
The driver bangs his pipe empty on the steps, turns on the radio, and the men move to the front of the bus, broad shoulders and hats huddle together to listen. The weather forecast and announcements are about to begin. The driver turns up the volume to drown out the rattle of the engine. Hello, this is Radio Reykjavík is heard, then crackling and he turns the knob to find the right wavelength. The sound is bad and I hear that they are looking for a sailor on a boat. Ready to weigh anchor. Then there is a hiss and the speaker is cut off. The men spread around the bus again and light cigarettes.
I turn the page. Stephen Dedalus is drinking tea as the coach driver overtakes the Ferguson tractor that had passed us when the child was throwing up. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk.
How many pages would it take to overtake the tractor if James Joyce were a passenger on the coach to Reykjavík?
Mother whales
The last stop is at the diner in Hvalfjördur where a boat is pulling in with two sperm whales. They’re tied to either side of the gunwale, each whale exceeding the length of the boat, sea foam swirling over their black carcasses. The vessel sways in the breaking waves; compared to the giant mammals, it looks like a flimsy toy floating in a bathtub. The driver is the first to abandon the bus, followed by the passengers. A pungent stench wafts from the boiling pots of blubber and the travellers scurry into the diner. They’re selling asparagus soup and breaded chops with potatoes and rhubarb jam, but I haven’t got a job yet and I have to watch my spending, so I buy a cup of coffee and slice of pound cake. On my way back to the coach, I pick two handfuls of blueberries.
At the whaling station, a middle-aged man joins the group of passengers. He’s the last one to step on the coach, surveys the group, spots me and wants to know if the seat beside me is free. I move the dictionary and he tips his hat slightly as he sits. When the coach drives off, he lights a cigar.
“All we need now is some dessert,” he says. “What one wouldn’t do for a box of darn Anthon Berg chocolates.”
He popped over to Hvalfjördur to visit an acquaintance who owns all the frigging whales in the sea, he says, and they ate some chops together.
“They’ve carved up five hundred whales this summer. No wonder Icelanders call the smell of shit the smell of money.” Then he turns to me.
“Might I ask you for your name, miss…?”
“Hekla.”
“How perfectly befitting. Hekla doth rise high and sharp to the heavens.”
He examines the book I am holding.
“And you read foreign books?”
“Yes.”
One of the sperm whales has been dragged up a concrete slipway into the carving yard, where it lies in one piece, a giant black carcass as big as the Dalasýsla Savings Bank back home. Bare-handed young men in waders and jeans immediately attack the beast, brandishing giant blades in the air, and are already busy flensing the blubber and fat off the whale, steel glistening in the autumn sun. Soon the youths are covered in liver oil. The entrails lie scattered by the creature’s side, as a flock of birds swarms above them. It is obviously difficult for the young men to walk on the slippery platform by the try pots.
“I see, is the girl checking out the boys?” asks the man. “Doesn’t a sweet girl like you have a boyfriend?”
“No.”
“What, aren’t all the lads chasing after you? Is no one poking you?”
I open the book and continue reading without the dictionary. Some moments later the man picks up the conversation again.
“Did you know that it’s forbidden to harpoon a mother whale, which is why the lads only butcher the males?”
He stubs out his cigar in the ashtray on the back of the seat.
“Unless it’s by accident,” he adds.
We drive past the military barracks and oil tanks of the American army and two armed soldiers standing on the road wave at us. The road twists on up the mountain and even more scree lies ahead. Finally a view of the capital across the strait opens up under a pink evening sky; perched on the peak of a barren mound of rock is a half-finished church dedicated to a poor author of psalms. The tower with its scaffolding can be seen all the way from Kjós.
I close the book.
On a side road down Mosfellsdalur, we meet a car and the coach driver suddenly slows down.
“Isn’t that our Nobel Prize winner?” a man is heard asking as the passengers stir and peer through the muddy windows.
“If that’s a four-door Buick Special model 1954, then it’s him all right,” says the driver. “Fantastic suspension and powerful heater,” he adds.
“Doesn’t he have a green Lincoln now?” asks another man.
The men aren’t so sure any more and even think they might have seen a woman at the wheel and children in the backseat.
By then I had been sitting on the bus and chewing dust for eight hours.
In the last hour:
Reykjavík, foggy, slight drizzle
I’m standing on the lot of the BSÍ coach terminal in Hafnarstræti and waiting for the driver to hand me my case along with my other parcels from the roof. Night is falling and the shops have closed, but I know that Snæbjörn Bookstore, which sells English books, is nearby. Feeling shivery after the journey, I adjust the scarf around my throat and button up my coat. My neighbour from the bus sidles up to me and tells me that it just so happens that he sits on the board of the Reykjavík Beauty Society along with some acquaintances of his, including the owner of the whales in the sea. The society’s objective is to embellish the city and promote good taste and decorum among the population, which is why, for a number of years now, it has been hosting a beauty contest. It was initially held in the Tivoli amusement park in Vatnsmýri, but has now actually been moved indoors.
“We can’t allow rain forecasts to postpone our contest every year. Apart from which the ladies caught colds outside.
“… No, the thing is,” I hear the man continue, “we’re looking for unattached maidens, sublimely endowed with both clean-limbedness and comeliness to take part in the competition. I can recognize beauty when I see it, and I would therefore like to invite you to participate in Miss Iceland.”
I size up the man.
“No, thank you.”
The man won’t give in.
“All your features curve and sway like an Icelandic summer’s day.”
He digs into his jacket pocket, pulls out a card and hands it to me. It contains his name and phone number. Tradesman, it says after his name.
“Should you change your mind.”
He ponders a moment.
“You’re darn pretty in those plaid slacks.”
Mokka
I walk away with my case and head towards a basement flat in Kjartansgata. The clock on the quadrilateral tower in Lækjartorg shows close to seven. On one of its sides is the picture of a smiling woman in a sleeveless pale-blue dress with a wide skirt, who is holding a box of Persil washing powder. In the square, two women in brown woollen coats sit on a wooden bench with iron armrests, while seagulls peck at some breadcrumbs nearby.
I walk up Bankastræti, which is lined with multi-coloured cars, American hot wheels with leather-upholstered seats. The guys are out prowling and blow their horns, with their elbows leaning out the windows, cigarettes dangling from their mouths and brilliantined hair, slowly accosting me, barely older than kids. There are even more bookshops than I had dared to imagine, I also pass a tobacconist’s, a men and women’s clothing store and Lárus G. Lúdvíksson’s shoe shop. To shake off the cars I turn up Skólavördustígur.
There’s Mokka, the café where all the Reykjavík poets hang out, known back home as those smartarse losers who live down south and lounge about in public places drinking coffee all day. I linger a moment outside the window, case in hand, and peer into the thick smoke; the interior is dark and I can’t make out any of the poets’ faces.
Kjartansgata
The doorbell is labelled Lýdur and Ísey and below this is a bell out of order sign. A pram is parked beside the basement door. The fence has fallen into disrepair and in front of the house is a patch of unkempt grass.
I knock. Ísey, my childhood friend, opens the door and smiles from ear to ear. She is wearing a green skirt, and her hair is cut short and held back by a headband.
She embraces me and drags me inside.
“I’ve been looking forward to you coming to town all summer,” she says.
A baby sits on a rug on the floor, banging two wooden blocks together.
She whisks her daughter off the mat and rushes over to me with her. The girl isn’t happy to let go of the blocks. Ísey pulls the dummy out of her mouth, kisses her wet cheek and introduces us. A trail of saliva dangles from the dummy.
“Let me introduce you to Thorgerdur,” she says. “Thorgerdur, this is Hekla, my best friend.”
She hands me the child. She’s the spitting image of her father.
The baby wriggles in my arms and blows a raspberry at me.
My friend takes the child back and places her on the floor, and then embraces me again and wants to show me around the flat.
“I’m so happy to see you, Hekla. Tell me what you’re reading. I’ve no time to read. I’ve such a longing for it. I’m lucky if I manage to read two poems before I fall asleep. I have a card for the library in Thingholtsstræti, but I’ve got no one to babysit for me while I fetch the books.”
The child has lost interest in the blocks and wiggles off the rug. She tries to hoist herself to her feet by grabbing onto a lamp stand, which wobbles. Her mother grabs her and sticks the dummy back into her mouth. She spits it straight out again.
“It’s so much work being with a small child, Hekla. We’re together all week, all day long and also at night when Lýdur is away doing road work in the east. I didn’t know it would be so wonderful to be a mother. Having a baby has been the best experience of my life. I’m so happy. There’s nothing missing in my life. Your letters have kept me alive. I’m so lonely. Sometimes I feel like I’m a terrible mother. Then my mind is elsewhere when Thorgerdur is trying to attract my attention. I’m so scared of something happening to her. You can never let a child out of your sight. Not even when I’m folding nappies. She might stick something into her mouth. The best time of the day is when Thorgerdur is asleep in her pram in the morning and I make some coffee and read Tíminn. I read my coffee grounds every day. There are no deaths. I look forward to when Thorgerdur will be a teenager and we can discuss books together. Like you and I used to do. That’s another twelve years away. Thorgerdur’s had a cold and is peevish and sleeps with me, but when Lýdur comes home at the weekends, he wants her to sleep in her own bed. We slip on an Ellý Vilhjálms record and dance. He’s thinking of quitting his job at the Road Administration. We’re saving up to buy a small patch of land in Sogamýri. Lýdur wants a garage to start his own upholstering or framing company. He says you can also make a packet stuffing birds. Unless he gets a job at the cement factory, then we’ll move to Akranes. A new family moved into the basement next door last month. Lýdur lent a hand and helped carry a dresser. They didn’t have much furniture. I just caught a glimpse of her. I think she’s about our age and she has four kids. The youngest is around the same age as my Thorgerdur. It’s been five weeks since they moved in and there aren’t any curtains in the living room yet. When I got up last night and drank a glass of milk at the kitchen window and I looked out into the darkness, I noticed that the woman was also standing by her kitchen window and looking into the darkness too. I felt she looked really glum. I saw myself reflected in the window and the woman was also reflected in her window, two sleepless women, and for a moment our mirrored images fused and I felt as if she were standing in my kitchen and I in hers, can you imagine anything so silly? The only man I talk to during the day is the fishmonger. There are two of them as it happens. Twins and they work in shifts. I only realized it yesterday when they were in the store at the same time and stood side by side. It was difficult to tell them apart. Then I understood why the fishmonger sometimes jokes with me and calls me his darling and sometimes not; it’s because it’s not the same guy. They wrap the fish in newspaper, Morgunbladid. Let me have a poem or a short story, I say to the guy who’s serving me, no obituaries or death notices. When I got home yesterday, I carefully unwrapped the haddock in the sink, the innermost sheet was soaking and difficult to read but on the next page, there were two poems by a poet who sits in Café Mokka all day long. Sorry if I blab too much. Are you going to go to Mokka and Laugavegur 11 to sit with the poets? I’ve walked past there with the pram and seen them hunched over their coffee cups, lacing them with liquid that comes out of brown paper bags. The waitresses turn a blind eye to it. What would happen if I strolled into the cloud of smoke with Thorgerdur in my arms and ordered a cup of coffee? Or walked into an abstract art exhibition in Bogasalur with the pram?”
“You could give it a try.”
She shakes her head.
“You wear trousers and go your own way, Hekla.”
The child is tired and rests her head on my friend’s shoulder as she paces the floor with her a few times. Then she says she’s going to put her daughter to sleep while I have a look around.
That’s quickly done.
There is very little furniture in the small living room: a green plush sofa and a sideboard against the wall with a crocheted tablecloth and three photographs in gilded frames: a wedding shot of Ísey with a beehive hairdo, a picture of a baby and finally, one of me and Ísey. I bend over to examine it. We stand smiling by a stone sheepfold, I in bib overalls, wool sweater and my brother Örn’s waders, which are three sizes too big for me, having just chased after two ewes all day in the canyon. Ísey hadn’t joined in the search, but helped the women to butter rye pancakes, fry crullers and heat cocoa in a thirty-litre pot in the catering tent. She’s got brown curls, is wearing a skirt and a buttoned cardigan and is leaning her head on my shoulder. Who took that picture, was it Jón John?
After a short while, my friend returns with a hint of sleep in her eyes and quietly leans on the door behind her. I think I heard her singing the same ancient lullaby that a mother sang to her child before throwing it into a waterfall. Once more she tells me how glad she is to see me and sidles up beside me at the sideboard to scrutinize the photograph of us as if she were wondering who those girls are. The picture is two years old.
“I made that skirt myself from a picture in the paper,” she finally says. “She ponders a moment. Jón John helped me with the pattern,” she adds. Then she does the same to the wedding photograph: picks it up and examines it.
“I feel it’s so weird to think that’s me. That I’m a married woman in Reykjavík with a child. Lýdur was just a kid when he came west to Dalir to lay the power line and instal that row of electricity poles with the team of labourers; they lived in work huts, he had a record player and played the Shadows; he had such a beautiful voice that it didn’t matter what he said, it made me weak in the knees; now he’s a husband and father. It’s so strange to think that Lýdur will be the last one.”
I try to recall Lýdur’s voice, but can’t remember anything he said. Whenever we meet Ísey does the talking and he is mostly silent.
On the walls there are two large paintings that seem at odds with the spartan furnishings: one is of a mossy lava field and a glittering lake in a rocky rift and the other is of a steep mountain.
“Kjarval?” I ask.
“Yes, from my mother-in-law.”
She says her father-in-law couldn’t come to terms with the way the artist depicted it.
“He said that wasn’t the Mt Lómagnúpur that he knew.
He’s been out at sea for thirty years and only wants boats on his walls, not landscapes and certainly not coloured rocks. Rocks are just bloody rocks, he says, not colours. The mother-in-law, on the other hand, doesn’t want to see the sea in her living room. Her father was a sailor and drowned when she was small and she chose to live somewhere where the sea was out of sight.”
“That’s difficult on an island,” I say.
“Not in Efstasund.”
We contemplate the paintings.
“My mother-in-law met the painter when she was a cook for road labourers in the east. She thinks he’s a decent enough man but agrees with her husband that he doesn’t get the colours right. Lýdur says that if we had a garage we could keep the paintings there, at least one of them. Now he believes we could even get some money for them. I cried so much he didn’t dare mention it again.”
She seems preoccupied.
“I can’t lose those paintings, Hekla. I look at them every day. There’s so much light in them.”
She walks over to the window and gazes into the darkness. A few withered blades of grass reach the glass.
“This is how deep I’ve sunk. This is how small my world has become: the view over Breidafjördur and its thousand islands and the biggest sky in the whole world has shrunk down to the size of a basement window on Kjartansgata.”
“Still, at least your street is named after a character in the Laxdæla Saga.”
She turns to me.
“I’m terrible. I haven’t offered you anything. I had some rice pudding for dinner and can heat it up for you.”
I tell her I’ve already eaten. That I had coffee and pound cake in Hvalfjördur. Nonetheless, she insists on opening a can of pears and whipping cream.
“It’s Christmas when you come for a visit, Hekla.”
I open my case and hand her a parcel wrapped in brown paper.
“Puffins from Dad,” I say.
I follow her into the kitchen, which has a small Rafha electric cooker, a fridge and a table for two. On the way she repeats how happy she is to see me. She says she’ll cook the puffins at the weekend when Lýdur is back in town and sticks them in the fridge.
“I don’t enjoy cooking but I’m learning. The other day I made Ora fishballs in pink sauce, but Lýdur’s favourite is stockfish. My sister-in-law taught me how to make pink sauce. You use ketchup and flour.”
I tell her that Jón John has offered me a room that he rents in Stýrimannastígur, while he’s out at sea. “Until I get a job and can rent my own room,” I add.
“Have you finished your manuscript?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And started another?”
“Yes.”
“I always knew you would become a writer, Hekla.
“Do you remember when you were six and you had recently started to write and wrote in your childish handwriting in a copybook that the river moved like time? And that the water was cold and deep? That was before Steinn Steinarr wrote his ‘Time and Water’.”
She hesitates.
“I know Jón John is your best friend, Hekla.”
“Male friend, yes,” I say.
She looks me in the eye.
“I realize the child is a distraction for you, but stay with me until the weekend at least.”
I think: that’s three days. I can’t write here.
I say: “I’ll be here until the weekend.”
We sit with the canned pears in dessert bowls, opposite one another at the kitchen table, and Ísey falls into a momentary silence. I feel there’s something on her mind.
“I bought myself a diary the other day and have started to write in it.”
She reveals this cautiously.
“That’s how low I’ve sunk, Hekla.”
I start thinking about my father’s diary entries and how he deciphered the weather from the look of the glacier beyond the fjord every day; it didn’t matter what the glacier looked like, it always augured ill, even a splendid glacier could bode a downpour over the swathes of grass.
“Do you write about the weather?” I ask.
She takes a deep breath.
“I write about what happens, but since so little happens I also write about what doesn’t happen. The things that people don’t say and don’t do. What Lýdur doesn’t say, for example.”
She stalls.
“Because I add thoughts and descriptions to what happens, a quick trip to the store can take up many pages. I went out twice yesterday, once to the fish shop and once with the rubbish. When I walked to the fish shop with the pram, I shut my eyes and felt a slight heat on my eyelids. Is that a sun or not a sun? I asked myself, and I felt I was a part of something bigger.”
She looks anxious.
“I keep the journal in the washing bucket because Lýdur wouldn’t understand me wasting time on writing about things that don’t exist or about things that are over.
“‘What’s over is over,’ he says.
“Still though, last weekend when we got into bed, he said: ‘Tell me what happened this evening, Ísa, that way it feels like it happened to someone else.’ That was the most beautiful thing he has ever said to me. Afterwards he held me in his arms.”
Ísey wraps her cardigan around herself.
“When I’ve finished writing in the diary, I feel like I’ve folded all the washing and cleaned up.”
She stands up because she wants to pour some coffee and do a cup reading. She gets me to turn the cup upside down and place it on the hot plate. After a short while, she examines the cup in the light.
“There are two men in the cup,” she says. “You love one and sleep with the other.”
Like that Joyce
Ísey offers me the sofa under the Lómagnúpur cliffs, but before I fall asleep, I pull Ulysses out of my case, turn on the lamp and read a few pages under the orange-tasselled shade.
When I awaken I hear the mother and daughter pottering about in the kitchen. My friend is giving her daughter skyr, and the child smiles at me, plastered in white from ear to ear and claps her hands. There is constant wriggling, feet kicking in the air without touching the ground; she gesticulates wildly and flaps her arms against her sides, like a featherless bird trying to take to the sky, a thousand rapid movements, flickering eyes. It’s blatantly clear: humans can’t fly.
My friend dresses the child in overalls and slips a knitted cap onto her head and, once she has put her to sleep in the pram in the garden, wants to show me something. She leads me into the bedroom.
“I wallpapered this myself. What does the writer think?”
I laugh.
“Like it.”
The room is covered in wallpaper of green leaves with big orange flowers.
“I had a sudden longing for wallpaper and Lýdur gave in to me.”
She pushes the door closed behind us.
“He says he can’t refuse me anything.”
She pours coffee into the cups, puts the pot back on the stove and sits down.
“Tell me what you’re reading, Hekla. That thick one.”
“It’s by a writer called James Joyce.”
“How does he write?”
“Unlike any Icelandic writer. The whole novel happens within the space of a day. It’s 877 pages. I haven’t got very far with it,” I add, “the text is so difficult.”
“I see,” says my friend, cutting a slice of Christmas cake and placing it on my plate.
“I feel it’s best to write in my diary on the edge of dawn. While the outlines of the world are still blurred. It can take as much as six, seven pages for the light to come up in here. I imagine it’s something similar with that Joyce.”
My friend stands up and walks to the kitchen window. The pram is on the path outside, only the wheels are visible.
“I had a dream,” I hear her say without turning. “I dreamt I was a passenger in a car that was driving down a side track home to the farm. In the middle of the track, I get out of the car and take a shortcut across the moor. On the way I walk past a corrie between two big tussocks that are full of blueberries the size of snowballs. They’re heavy and juicy and they are a beautiful, glistening blue like a dead calm autumn sky. The last thing I remember is scooping up armfuls of sky-blue berries and filling a washtub in a split second. I was alone. Then I heard a bird. Now I’m scared that the berries are the babies I’ll have, Hekla.”
We are all the same,
fatally wounded and disorientated whales
I’m ready with my case when Davíd Jón John Johnsson comes to collect me. He doesn’t want to come in or to accept a cup of coffee because he says he’s still feeling the waves of seasickness in his gut, but he puts down his duffel bag to greet us. He first embraces me and grabs me tight, holding me for a long moment without saying a word, and I inhale the faint smell of slime from his hair. He has slipped a jacket over his salt-crystallized wool sweater. Then he embraces Ísey. Then he peeps into the pram with the sleeping child parked by the house wall.
“I came as soon as I stepped ashore,” he says.
He is pale but his hair has grown longer since I saw him in the spring.
He is even more beautiful than before.
He slips his duffel bag over his shoulder and wants to carry my case.
I hold my typewriter.
A cold jet stream shoots down Snorrabraut, the grey sea can be faintly glimpsed at the end of the street and, beyond that, Mt Esja veiled in the mist that hovers over the strait. We follow the gravel pathway across the Hljómskálagardur park, passing the statue of Jónas Hallgrímsson in crumpled trousers. There the sailor pauses a moment, puts down his duffel bag and the case and gives me another quick hug. In front of the poet. Then we continue.
He tells me that before he went to sea he’d worked at the whaling station.
“We worked on shifts night and day, carving meat, sawing bone and boiling. I was the only one who didn’t go sunbathing with the guys. When they realized I was different, I was afraid they’d shove me into a try pot.
“Still, there was another guy like me.
“I knew it as soon as I saw him.
“He knew it too.
“One evening when we had a break, we went off on a walk together.
“Nothing happened. After that he avoided me.”
He runs a hand through his tuft of hair. It’s shaking.
“They take such a long time to kill those giant creatures, the mortal battle can last a whole day.”
After the whaling, he said he took two trips on a side trawler, Saturnus.
“I was seasick for the whole time,” he says. “Constantly. With vomit in my throat. I couldn’t sleep I was so nauseous. The smell of slime and scales was everywhere, even in my quilt and pillow. The weather was foul. I couldn’t learn to rock with the waves. I slept on a top bunk and the horizon swayed up and down. It helped a bit when I covered the porthole with a curtain. I got the worst chores. My manhood was constantly put to the test. The crew were never sober, and they picked on me. I was so exhausted I couldn’t lift my arms from my sides. Every day I was afraid I’d drown.”
He hesitates.
“They tried to crawl up to me in bed, but because I slept with my clothes on, there was less danger of being raped.
“Then there was the whoring. They noticed I wasn’t into women so they decided to man me up by buying me a hooker when we docked at Hull.”
I look at my pale friend. Two swan couples swim close by on the Tjörnin Lake.
“I told them I didn’t want to be unfaithful to my girlfriend.”
He averts his gaze as he says this.
“I swear, Hekla, I couldn’t survive another trip, I’m never stepping on that rusty raft again. I’m willing to take on any job that doesn’t involve going out to sea.”
He is silent for a moment.
“There was one saving grace, though. The second mate. He paints pictures of schooners when he’s onshore but doesn’t want anyone to know.”
The subject makes me think of Ísey’s father-in-law.
“Once the cook was too drunk to be woken up, so the mate sent me down to the storage room to take some lamb out of the freezer and make meat soup. The kitchen was the only place where I was left in peace.
“That was also where they hid their smuggled stash on the way home. Blaupunkt television sets, cartons of cigarettes and bottles of gin. In nooks inside the walls behind the pantry and in the freezer.”
The moon is my closest neighbour
The path leads west to Stýrimannastígur, not far from the shipyard.
“Are you writing, Hekla?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We halt by a timber house, clad in rusty corrugated-iron. A steep wooden staircase leads up to the sailor’s attic room. He sticks a key into the lock and says it’s stiff.
I look around.
The room has a sleeping couch, a wardrobe in the corner, a bookshelf by the bed and a sewing machine that stands on a small table under the skylight. He says there is a communal toilet in the basement and a view of the stars through the skylight when the weather allows. He spotted the first star three weeks ago, he adds.
“Here you can write,” he says, and removes the sewing machine from the table, opens the wardrobe and places it at the bottom.
I put the typewriter on the table.
He says he’s already moved twice in the space of six months and at first lived in a basement flat in Adalstræti, which was regularly flooded by the spring tides. He then moved into another basement room in Hafnarstræti right opposite the police station.
“So they knew where to find me,” he says, and adds that queers are watched by the police. Sometimes a Black Maria drives past twice a day and the cops slow down to gawk through the windows. Kids also peeped in to spot Sodom and sometimes even adults, which is why he tried to rent an attic room, also because there is less of a chance of anyone breaking in. Not that there’s anything to steal, except a sewing machine, he adds.
“Next week I’ll search for a job and a room,” I say.
“There’s enough room for both of us on the sofa,” he says.
He looks past me.
“Besides, I’m not always home at night.”
I sit on the bed and he reaches for the duffel bag, opens it and pulls out a brown suede coat.
“For you,” he says with a smile. “It’s the latest fashion in the British Isles.”
He hands it to me.
“Try it on.”
I stand up and slip on the coat. Meanwhile, he empties the bag and arranges more articles on the bed: a violet polo-neck sweater, a mini skirt, some kind of pinafore dress and a corduroy skirt. Finally he pulls out knee-high leather boots with heels and zippers on the side.
“You can’t be spending all your wages on me,” I say.
He says that when they docked, the second mate had sent him into town to buy food. On the way he’d been able to buy some clothes. While the crew went gallivanting around the harbour and got sloshed.
“I don’t understand how you manage to get the foreign cash.”
“I have connections. I know a cab driver who works up at the military base in Vellir.
“They’ve got currency.”
I change clothes in the middle of the wooden floor and he doesn’t look away. I first slip into the dress and leather boots and he tells me to walk up and down. I take two steps north and two steps south, two metres towards the harbour and two metres towards the graveyard.
“Hemlines are getting shorter,” he says, and “should be five centimetres over the knee. And the skirt is supposed to be flared.”
I take off the dress and slip into the skirt and parade back and forth. He observes me in silence and is clearly pleased.
Then I climb out of the skirt and put my trousers back on and sit on the bed beside Jón John.
“Next time I’ll buy you a pantsuit with a belt.”
I smile at him.
“They don’t all come back, Hekla. Men go off on drinking binges and don’t snap out of it and make it back to the boat before it sails off.”
He hesitates.
“I considered vanishing and staying behind, but then I bought those boots and wanted to see you walking in them.”
He stands up, walks over to the skylight and turns his back to me.
“I swear, Hekla, I won’t always be here. In the back of beyond. I’m no match for the pounding surf. I’m going to leave. I want to see the world. Something more than Hull and Grimsby. I want to work in the theatre and make costumes for musicals. Or in fashion. There are more people like me abroad. A lot more.”
I crucify the flesh by indulging it
I wake up as Jón John comes home just before dawn. He props himself up against the door, then the wall, falls into a chair, grabs the edge of the table and allows himself to slide onto the bed beside me in his clothes. I move over for him while he takes off his shoes. It takes a fairly long time for him to loosen his laces. He seems as if he hasn’t slept, is drunk and reeks of aftershave.
I sit up and turn on the bedside lamp.
He looks battered, with dirt on his knees and scratches on his face. I see what I think are traces of gravel in his eyebrows, as if his face had been pressed into mud. I help him out of his clothes, fetch a damp towel and wash his face.
His eyes are open and watching me as I clean the grit out of his wounds.
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Where were you?”
“In the outskirts, the heathlands of Heidmörk,” he says and lies down.
He curls up on the bed.
“I’m such a loser,” I hear him say.
“Now now,” I say.
After a short while, he adds: “There were two of them. I went to the Hábær bar and met a man who invited me for a drive. On the way he picked up a friend.”
“We’re going to the police.”
“There’s no point. Do you know what they do to perverts? I’m a criminal, a pathological freak. I’m hideous.”
I spread the quilt over him.
“Besides, one of them is a cop and a prominent figure in the anti-homophile league.”
He is quiet a moment and sniffs.
“They consider us the same as paedophiles. Mothers call in their children when a queer approaches. Queers’ homes are broken into and completely trashed. They’re spat on. If they have phones, they’re called in the middle of the night with death threats.”
He falls into such a long silence that I think he’s fallen asleep.
“It’s so difficult not to be scared,” I hear him say under the quilt.
“You’re the best man I know.”
“I love children. I’m not a criminal.”
I stroke his hair.
“Men only want to sleep with me when they’re drunk, they don’t want to talk afterwards and be friends. While they’re pulling up their trousers, they make you swear three times that you won’t tell anyone. They take you to the outskirts of Heidmörk and you’re lucky if they drive you back into town.”
He turns to the wall and I lie behind him and hold him. I envelop him against the wall like a child who must be protected from falling out of bed.
“Tomorrow I’ll buy some iodine at the pharmacy,” I say.
He grabs my hand. We huddle up tightly together, he’s trembling.
“I wish I weren’t the way I am, but I can’t change that. Men are meant to go with women. I sleep with men.”
He turns to face me.
“Did you know, Hekla, that just before the sun sinks into the ocean it gives off a green ray beyond the horizon?”
In the morning I rub the congealed mud from the knees of the trousers that Davíd Jón John Johnsson kicked off in the night.
With love from John
On my way to the pharmacy I buy a copy of the Visir newspaper and skim through the ads at the back. They’re looking for a girl at the Fönn Laundry and at the bakery, and they also need a girl in the Smørrebrød open sandwich restaurant at Hotel Borg.
When I return, Jón John is lying on his stomach with his face buried in the sheets, his arms outstretched like a crucified man.
The Passion Hymns lie open beside him.
He doesn’t want to talk about what happened last night.
“Are you okay?”
He turns around, sits up and combs back the hair on his forehead. One of his eyes is bloodshot.
“My head is full of black streams.”
I put the bottle of iodine and plasters I bought at the pharmacy on the table and take off the suede coat.
“Thank you,” he says without looking at me.
He stares at his hands, his open palms.
“I don’t belong to any group, Hekla. I’m a mistake who shouldn’t have been born.”
He hesitates.
“I can’t make sense of myself. I don’t know where I come from. This earth doesn’t belong to me. I only know what it’s like to be pressed into it. I know how to chew gravel.”
I sit beside him. He makes room for me.
“My mother met my father three times and slept with him once. A quick roll in the sack and that was it. The damage was done. She spent a year in Reykjavík answering the phone for Hreyfill taxis but never went to any parties with the GIs. One day he showed up at the station. She said he had the hairstyle of some guy out of the movies, tidy and polite, with dark stubble, and that he smelt differently from Icelandic men. She sewed herself a light blue dress and he gave her a copy of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms when he left and wrote in it: With love from John. Mom didn’t understand English, but kept the book in the drawer of her bedside table.
“That was all she got from my father, his autograph and me. Then he was suddenly gone. The ship sailed off before he could say goodbye. She didn’t know Dad’s surname, just that he was called John and the army wouldn’t help her. She didn’t have any address for him. A friend of hers from Borgarnes, who’d also had a child with a soldier and who did have his address wrote him a letter. She got a postcard back with a picture of a graveyard that said: Sorry about the baby, good luck and adieu. At first she thought adieu meant see you again and it took her a long time to find out its true meaning. Mum felt it was likely that the ship had been sunk by a German torpedo. The bodies of soldiers sometimes washed up on the shores of Breidafjördur and she roamed the beaches to see if she would find the father of her child. She believed she would recognize John again, even if he was a washed-up corpse. She never fell in love again. There was no other man in her life.
“I was an illegitimate war child.
“Fatherless.
“‘Your mum’s a Yankee whore,’ the kids used to say.
“‘He wasn’t actually a yank,’ she told me long afterwards. ‘Because your father was wearing a kilt when I met him. A chequered woollen kilt with a buckle. And nothing underneath.’”
The swan poet
“Read for me, Hekla.”
“What do you want me to read?” I ask. “Shall I read some of Hallgrímur’s psalms?”
I pick up the book lying open on the bed.
“Hallgrímur suffered like me,” says my friend.
I glance at the spines on the bookshelf beside the bed.
I pull out some books and silently read the covers. Unlike the bookcases back home in Dalir, many of the books are in foreign languages. Apart from Lord Byron’s biography, which is in Icelandic, there is a novel by Thomas Mann and a play by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, but also poetry collections by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Walt Whitman. I notice that some of the books on the shelf are also by women: Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Selma Lagerlöf.
“That’s my queer shelf,” says Jón John from the bed.
He sits up, reaches for a book, opens it and skims through for a moment until he finds what he is looking for.
“If I die
Leave the balcony open
“He’s my favourite poet, Federico García Lorca.”
He hands me the book. To Johnny boy has been inscribed in a fountain pen on the first page. I put the book back on the shelf.
“From a friend at the military base in Vellir.”
I tell him I want to learn English and that I’m reading a thick book by an Irish writer with the help of a dictionary, but that it’s time-consuming and difficult.
“I’ll ask my friend if he can give you lessons. You don’t have to sleep with him,” he adds. “I’ll do that for you.”
He hesitates.
“He’d be thrown out if he weren’t an officer.”
On the shelf there is a book by an Icelandic poet that seems at odds with the rest, Black Feathers by Davíd Stefánsson.
I pull it out.
“Mum waited a whole year to baptize me, in case a sea revenant stepped onto the shore. While she waited she read her favourite poet.
“She couldn’t decide whether I should be called Davíd Stefánsson or Einar Benediktsson, it was a choice between Black Feathers and Glimpse of the Ocean.
“In the end she felt there were too many waves and too much pounding surf in Benediktsson. And too much of God in the surf, she said. My fate was therefore sealed with the sunrise poet who sang about the night that stores pleasure in its bosom, so I’m named after Iceland’s swan poet and the unknown soldier who vanished into the billowy grey sea.
“Davíd Jón John Stefánsson Johnsson.
“The priest said the name was too long for the form and suggested Mum drop the Stefánsson.
“Otherwise people might think he’s my illegitimate son, Revd Stefán is reported to have quipped. Impishly.
“She felt it would improve my prospects abroad too, if I were both Jón and John.
“‘When you move abroad to find your roots, you will call yourself D.J. Johnsson,’ she said to me.”
He is silent for a long moment.
“Mum always knew I was different.”
D.J. Johnsson stands up and totters over to the wardrobe. He opens it to pull out some black plumage that he drapes over his shoulders like a shawl. He looks like an eagle preparing to fly off the edge of a steep cliff.
“Mum kept a picture of the poet Davíd Stefánsson in her living room, holding a black raven in his arms. She cut it out of the newspaper and had it framed. I collected raven feathers and sewed myself a cape,” he says.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to Skálinn. I’ll treat you to coffee and pancakes.”
He puts the feathers back into the wardrobe and slips on a jacket.
“I don’t fly the way you do, though, Hekla.”
Homosexuals and existentialists
Two tramps are sitting on a bench in the cold sunshine, sipping methylated spirits from paper bags, by the southern wall of the Fisheries Bank. We sit at a window table and order coffee, Jón John has no appetite for pancakes. A group of poets are sitting at one of the tables inside the room, smoking pipes. One of them holds court, waving his hands in the air like the conductor of an orchestra; the other poets look at him and nod. I notice that one of the younger poets isn’t participating in the conversation but is instead looking at me.
“I’m guessing they’re either discussing rhymes or existentialism,” says Jón John. There aren’t many people about and I notice a middle-aged man in a dark coat and hat coming out of the bank with a briefcase, walking swiftly towards Austurstræti.
“That guy’s queer,” says Jón John, nodding towards the man. “He works at the bank. He’s only into young boys and he’s in a relationship with a bloke I know.”
He sips his coffee and then rests his chin on one hand.
“Most of the men who hunt for boys like me are married family men and only queers at weekends. They get married to cover up their unnaturalness. Their wives know it. They know their husbands. Then many of the queers from around the country pretend they have a girlfriend and child back home in the countryside.”
He looks down and buries his face in his hands.
“I don’t want to be like them and live some secret game. I just want to love a guy like me. I want to hold his hand on the street. That’ll never happen, Hekla.”
“Have you met someone?”
“When I moved to Reykjavík, I was with a man for the first time. He wanted to know if I had any experience. I told him I had. I was afraid that he wouldn’t want to be with me otherwise. He wasn’t a lot older than I was, but he’d been with soldiers at the base in Vellir.
“He had this thing for uniforms.”
The first time only happens once
“You were my first,” I say.
He smiles.
“I know.”
He lived in the village with his mother and I’d heard stories about him. That he knew how to use a sewing machine and had sewn kitchen curtains for his mother and put them up while she was at work. That he’d also made a Christmas dress for her. When I first met him, he was the shortest of the boys and I was the tallest of the girls. Then I went through puberty and stopped growing and he went through puberty and started to grow. He wore a bomber jacket like the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.*
It was said that he had made it from leftover pelts that had been given to him at the slaughterhouse, and that he’d managed to transform lamb skin into cow leather.
Like other youngsters, we worked in the slaughterhouse in the autumn, which is how our paths crossed, under the flayed carcasses of lambs that hung from hooks over the chlorine-washed stone floor. Initially, I was assigned to stirring the blood before it was canned and weighing the hearts, kidneys and livers, while he was in the freezer room, stacking soup meat in white gauze bags. One day I fetched him from a frosty white cloud of ice and we ate our picnics by the slaughterhouse wall in the limpid, cold autumn sunlight. The smell of congealed blood clung to us.
He was different from the other boys and didn’t try to kiss me. It was then that I decided that he would be the first. Not that there were many candidates in the sparsely populated Dalir.
When the moment had come, I fetched a bottle of brandy that had been looted from a stranded ship and stored in the cabinet at home, untouched as far back as I can remember.
“Nobody will miss it,” I said.
We spent some time searching for a patch of geraniums or corrie where the grass hadn’t been cut and was higher than our groins. Most important of all was that we were hidden from my brother, younger by two years, who tried to cling to us all the time. He was going to go to agricultural college and then take over the farm, 280 sheep and 17 cows, 14 of them red and 3 mottled. He had recently started to train in Icelandic wrestling and had become a member of the Dalir Young Men’s Association. This now meant that he tried to wrestle any man who crossed his path. Even Revd Stefán was not exempt. My parents sometimes had to apologize to the guests my brother assaulted and invited to tackle him. They looked at him as if he were a stranger, unrelated to them, a teenager who followed his own laws but mainly his whims.
“He’s training for the Grettir’s Belt Cup,” they would say hesitantly. My mother’s expression seemed to express regret at having wasted an eagle’s name on him. His first moves entailed clutching the guest’s belt or grabbing his sleeve and twisting his garment in an effort to lift him up and knock him over with brute force, without losing his own balance. Gradually, his technique improved and he grew more agile and even demanded that his opponents be well versed in the wrestling jargon: upright position… step, step… trip and defend…
He was a slow developer and acned, listened to Cliff Richard, still pubescent and not yet in full control of his voice. The unwitting guests stepped back and forth and struggled in the ring.
“… Relax the arms… step… clockwise…” my brother could be heard saying.
After some time, we found the right spot, behind the sheep shed. Tall, green, whistling grass grew nearby. There we lay down, arms down by our sides, and gazed up at the sky, a wind-blown stratocumulus cloud. I would rather have chosen a cumulus cloud or cloudless sky for my first time, I wrote that evening. There were only five centimetres between us, which is the narrowest gap there can be between a woman and a man without touching. He was in a blue flannel shirt, I in a red skirt in honour of the day. We were both wearing waders.
“I wanted to touch the fabric of your skirt more than I wanted to touch what was underneath it,” my friend now admits.
That was precisely what he did, asked me if he could touch the fabric. “Is that jersey?” he asked. He turned the hem, examined the lining, stroked it with his finger.
“Did you do the hemming yourself?” he asked.
“Are you afraid to touch me?” I said.
Then he first turned his attention to what was behind the fabric and his hand slid up towards the elastic of my panties. The moment had come to put my body on the line. To become a woman. I pulled up my skirt and he down his trousers.
Afterwards we sat side by side up on the hill and gazed at the shore of seaweed and islands in the fjord; his braces were down and he smoked. I spotted three seals on the shore.
Then I tell him.
That I write.
Every day.
That I started writing about the weather like my father and about the shades of light over the glacier beyond the fjord, that I described how white clouds lay like fleece over the glacier, and how people, events and places were then added.
“I feel like many things happen at once, like I see many images and experience many feelings at the same time, like I’m standing on some new starting point and it’s the first day of the world and everything is new and pure,” I say to my friend. “Like a spring morning in Dalir and I’ve just finished feeding the sheep in the barn and the bank of fog hovering over Breidafjördur lifts and dissolves. At that moment I’m holding the baton and tell the world it can be born.”
In return the most handsome boy in Dalir told me that he loved boys.
We kept each other’s secrets.
We were equals.
“People wondered why such a sweet boy didn’t have a girlfriend. I knew I was queer. The only thing that could save me was to sleep with a girl. I’m glad it was you.”
You’ve done it and I haven’t
The next day I was quizzed about the bottle of brandy that had vanished from the cabinet in broad daylight and been returned after four big gulps.
My brother Örn conducts the interrogation. He is not satisfied.
He claims to be a witness to what he shouldn’t have been a witness to.
“I saw you rush up the hill,” he says. “And disappear behind it.”
Now he follows me edgeways, trying to corner me, and bombards me with questions.
He wants to know where we went and what we were up to. Why he wasn’t allowed to come? Whether Jón John had mentioned his name and, if so, what had he said, had he mentioned the wrestling? He continues to pressure me in the days that follow. Ultimately all the questions revolve around Jón John. Is he going away and, if so, where to? To Reykjavík? What’s he going to do? Between the interrogations he sulks.
“Traitor,” he ends up shrieking after me. Then I remember how he and Jón John were sparring once and, in some peculiar way, it reminded me more of birds dancing in a mating ritual than wrestling; it looked more like clumsy embraces than attacks. All of a sudden they were both lying on the grass. Then Jón John had broken free.
