Miss Iceland Read online

  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 kno
w 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.