Miss Iceland Read online

  He bends to smooth out some of the crumpled cuttings with his hands, reads in silence and carefully rearranges them on the sofa.

  His lips are moving.

  “I dream of a world in which there is a place for everyone,” he says.

  I notice the Icelandic cuttings are shorter than the others, by just a few lines. My friend confirms this.

  “King gave his speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom last month, but none of the Icelandic papers reports what he said.” He picks up a few clips:

  “Althydubladid on August the 29th mentions the march and that the black leader gave a speech but doesn’t quote any of it. Morgunbladid makes very little of the march and doesn’t say a single word about Martin Luther King or the speech. But it says that some famous artists participated in the march to draw the limelight to themselves. It also says that there were fewer people than expected. But it was still a higher number than the entire Icelandic population put together, Hekla.”

  He takes a deep breath.

  “But since Icelanders have no interest in Martin Luther King,” he continues, “his friend down south at the Vellir base has procured him some American papers that his sister sent him from back home.” Jón John browses through the collection searching for a particular clipping, pulls out the article and translates for me as he reads:

  “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character… I have a dream today!”

  He has tears in his eyes.

  “King says the black man’s problems are the white man’s problems.” He carefully puts the cutting back in its place and looks me in the eye.

  “The problems of gays are the problems of non-gays, Hekla.”

  He folds the paper cuttings, one after another, collects them together and puts them back in their place in the Sælgætisgerdin Nóa sweets tin, opens the wardrobe and places the box at the bottom of it beside the sewing machine.

  He shakes his head.

  “I’ve tried in vain to get a job at the Vellir base, but they don’t want any blacks or queers. Even though I’m half soldier. Queers get kicked out of the army and jailed if they’re found out. They’re looked upon as child molesters and communists.” He sits down on the bed beside me.

  “The Icelandic government negotiated a deal to make sure there would be no blacks at the base. They sent one over by mistake last year, and they let him stay on condition that he never left the barracks. He had a tough time this summer because he couldn’t sleep in the sunlight at night.”

  He’s silent for a brief moment and then says:

  “My blood runs in the veins of so many, Hekla. Both in those who’ve gone and those who have yet to be born.”

  He then wants to know how the job interviews went. I tell him I’ve been given a job as a serving girl in Hotel Borg.

  “I’m supposed to serve in a skirt and not in trousers.”

  He smiles.

  I also tell him that his namesake, Johnson, the vice-president of the United States, is coming to the country next week.

  “Might he be a distant relative?” I add. “L.B. Johnson and D.J. Johnson?”

  “There’s a difference of one ‘s’. I’m Johnsson with two s’s. The son of John.”

  The Beauty Society

  The trays are heavy, once they have been loaded with coffee pots, silver sugar bowls and cream jugs.

  The head waiter is keeping an eye on me on my first day at the job. So is my colleague Sirrí.

  “This is my serving area and that’s yours,” she says. “You serve those tables and I serve these tables.” She watches and is waiting for me when I come back into the kitchen after my first trip with the tray. She wants to warn me that certain punters can get difficult when they’ve had a few drinks.

  “The older men are the worst,” she says.

  “If they pinch you, then come into the kitchen and we’ll switch tables. They grab you when you walk past. They grope your arse and run a hand up your skirt. They’ll also fondle your breasts when you’re pouring into their cups. Then they’ll do everything to make us bend over. Normally they’ll drop a teaspoon. Once a waiter wanted to spare me the trouble and was about to bend over for the spoon, but the customer insisted on me doing it. They whisper into your ear, follow you, want to know where you live. They wait for the serving girls after they’ve finished their shifts. One drunken regular customer followed a girl into the larder when she was getting some mayonnaise. He cornered her there and tried to touch her up like a piece of meat. If they follow you out onto the street, go into the lingerie store at the bottom of Skólavördustígur and ask them to let you use the back door out of the storage room. They won’t dare follow you in there.” She mentions some other stores that have a backdoor exit such as the Liverpool domestic appliances store. I feel like asking her whether there are any bookstores that save damsels in distress, whether it’s possible to hide there, even for a whole night, alone with a book, but I refrain.

  “Beginners face the highest risk,” she adds.

  “If you complain they’ll say: that’s the way it’s always been, get used to it.

  “One girl lost her balance when she was pinched and dropped her tray. She was a single mother and had a kid to look after. She got a warning and was transferred to cleaning the rooms. That’s said to be even worse because the chambermaids are alone with guests who walk around naked in open dressing gowns while they’re vacuum-cleaning. I don’t know what happened, but one day she came down from the third floor, crying and was in a real state. They took her into the office.”

  My colleague blows her smoke into concentric rings and then stubs out the cigarette.

  “They said she wasn’t the right type for this kind of job.”

  When I walk back into the room to collect the dirty crockery, I notice a familiar man sitting at a round table with a group of old men, watching me.

  He’s had the meat soup and is carefully cleaning the meat off the bones and sucking out the marrow. A pile of bones lies on the rim of the plate.

  He addresses me through a cloud of cigar smoke.

  “So you’ve started waitressing at Hotel Borg.”

  I look up, it’s the man from the coach, the one from the Beauty Society who gave me his business card.

  “Do you enjoy laying tables?”

  He doesn’t wait for an answer but continues.

  “I only ask because one of the tests in the Miss Iceland competition entails precisely that: laying a table and folding serviettes.”

  He adds that the competition is still being developed and they are also considering asking the girls to have a go at repotting plants.

  “Are you interested in house plants?”

  “No.”

  “Needlework?”

  “No.”

  “Reading good books?”

  “No, only bad books.”

  He looks at me uncertainly and laughs.

  “So the girl has a sense of humour.”

  The man leans over to his neighbour and mutters something, as if he were putting him into the picture. His table companion eyes me up and nods his head.

  Then he turns to me again and asks if I’ve thought the matter over.

  “What matter?”

  “Can I invite you to become Miss Iceland?”

  “No, thank you.”

  The man continues unabated.

  “You’ll get to travel abroad, a limousine and private chauffeur.”

  I quickly pick up the dishes.

  “… Miss Iceland gets a crown and sceptre, a blue Icelandic festival costume with a golden belt for the competition on Long Island, two gowns and a coat with a fur collar. She gets to stand onstage and go to nightclubs and meet famous boxers and she gets her picture in the papers.”

  As I hurry away, I hear the man say:

  “You should raise your skirt above the knees. It’s a shame to hide s
uch beautiful knees. It’s important to doll yourself up.”

  Sirrí is waiting for me behind the swinging doors in the kitchen and with a tip of the chin, indicates a man at the round table I need to watch out for.

  “Several girls have been pestered by him.”

  When I’ve hung up my apron and punched out, my colleague comes rushing after me. She tells me she knows a girl who participated in Miss Iceland a few years back when the competition was still held in the open air in Vatnsmýri and now works at the switchboard at the Hreyfill cab company. She can introduce me to her if I want.

  “She was also promised a fur coat and trips abroad. It never happened.”

  “I’m not thinking of participating,” I say.

  She adjusts her headscarf around her hair, lights a cigarette and puffs smoke out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  The ocean planets

  Jón John has given up trying to find a job on land.

  “It’s hopeless,” he says. “I’m going to have to take another fishing trip. Even if it kills me. Even if I sink with the rusty wreck. I’m named after the swan poet, not after the sea poet, I’m not the son of rocks and waves.”

  He is lying on the bed and says he’s thinking of heading west to the fjords, where he can get a place on the Freyja motorboat from Tálknafjördur or a temporary herring-fishing job with the boat Trausti in Ísafjördur. Is it more trustworthy to choose a boat that is named after a man or a woman? He’s also considering spending the winter in a fishing factory in Neskaupsstadur in the east. But wages are low everywhere and people are brazenly cheated.

  “It’ll take me a year to save enough to go abroad,” he adds.

  He stands up, walks up to the skylight and stands there, staring into the darkness.

  “A last resort would be to get hired on that rusty trawler raft again, Saturnus, emptying the net.

  “I could try choosing one of the other ocean planets: maybe Pluto, Neptune or Uranus?”

  I walk over to my friend and place a hand on his shoulder.

  “Not that it matters what planet or drunkards I go down to a watery grave with.”

  “Isn’t it pretty dangerous to stand under those tons of fish?” I ask.

  He paces the length of the floor.

  “Unless I take a three-month salt-fish trip to Greenland. If the skipper isn’t too drunk, there’s a chance I’ll survive the icebergs and polar bears.”

  By evening Jón John has decided to go to the western fjords, but by the following morning, he has changed his mind and been taken on by the Saturnus side trawler again, in the faint hope that he’ll get to substitute for the cook, be left in peace and survive the trip.

  “We sail tonight,” he says, when I come home from work.

  The duffel bag is ready by the bedroom door.

  “We’re sailing to Hull with the catch.”

  My friend dawdles in the middle of the floor and I can see there is something troubling him.

  “I want to ask you to do me a favour, Hekla.” He looks down at the splintered wooden floor and then past me before he continues, as if he were standing peering at the horizon in the offing, and not under a barely habitable dormer bedroom on Stýrimannastígur.

  “I wanted to ask you to see me off at the docks.”

  He hesitates.

  “I told them the clothes were for my girlfriend, but they wouldn’t believe me and wanted to see you.”

  I’ve never drowned myself

  Splinters of white scatter in the air and the wind is picking up, so I button up my suede coat and put on some gloves. My sailor, on the other hand, is bareheaded in a wool sweater. Darkness has fallen and the warehouses by the harbour are closed. Between the slippery wooden planks, one can glimpse the oil-patched sea. The rusty trawler stands at the end of the wharf.

  The crew is boarding, staggering on their feet, with hands in their pockets and cigarettes in their mouths. Some come straight from the pubs in crumpled suits and Sunday best shoes. I can’t help staring at two who are heading up the gangway, both wearing ties and patent leather shoes. One of them is holding the other under the arm, actually dragging him along, while the other has a bottle from which he occasionally sips. When he spots Jón John, he tries to wave the bottle in our direction, but trips and slips on the gangway.

  “There’s the fucking freak with a lady on his arm,” I hear him say. Once he’s regained his balance with some difficulty, like a newborn foal trying to stand on its legs for the first time, he runs a comb through his brilliantined hair and, after several attempts, manages to fish a cigarette out of a packet in his pocket and light it.

  “Aren’t you going to invite the lady down to the cabin?” the other calls out, slurring.

  “That’s Konni Nonsense and Steini Nozzle,” says Jón John. “Coming straight from the Rödull club.”

  He smiles faintly.

  “They have nicknames like poets,” he adds.

  I grab my friend’s hand, he looks at me with gratitude and holds on to it tightly like a drowning man to a life buoy.

  “I’ll buy some books for you in Hull,” he says.

  I escort him to the gangway and embrace him, waves lapping under our feet.

  “You’re not allowed to drown,” I say.

  “It’s not the worst thing that can happen. It doesn’t take long to croak in the cold.”

  I hug him tight.

  “I won’t, out of consideration for Mum,” he adds. A seagull draws a circle in the air, for a moment the bird hovers straight above us and allows its legs to sink as if it were preparing to land, but then with two flaps of the wings the bird vanishes into the white shaft of hail over Saturnus.

  Medea

  I hand Ísey a white waxed box containing four canapés. It took some effort to wrestle it all the way over to Nordurmýri in the stormy weather. I notice she has moved the cot out of the bedroom into the living room.

  “That way I can keep an eye on Thorgerdur during the day,” she says. “She sleeps in my bed at night.”

  She lays her daughter down in the cot, lifts up the lid of the box and smiles from ear to ear. I see that the canapés have shifted in transit and that streaks of mayonnaise have been smudged and squashed with the prawns. She puts them in the fridge and then sits facing me at the kitchen table. The door to the living room is open and she keeps an eye on the child.

  “Remember I told you I had started to write a journal?

  Which isn’t exactly a journal, though.”

  “Yes, I remember that.”

  “I walked all the way into town with the pram yesterday and bought another journal. Battling the storm. The man in Gudgeir’s stationery store remembered me well. He advised me to buy copybooks instead or squared exercise books since I was so quick to fill them up and it would be cheaper. They’re the only treat I allow myself.” She is quiet for a moment as she prepares coffee.

  “I’ve started to write conversations,” she finally says.

  “What kind of conversations? Things people say?”

  “Both what people say and what they don’t say. I can’t explain it to Lýdur: that when he says something, I want to write it down. And even less that I write down the things he doesn’t say. Nor would he understand that I sometimes want to stop what I’m doing and write about it instead.”

  My friend’s head droops.

  “The other day we were invited to my parents-in-law in Efstasund and my sisters-in-law were there as well. They get the Yankee TV channel from the military base, which is really difficult to get. One line Dröfn came out with about her husband made me excuse myself and escape into another room to write down a few sentences.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Imagine, Hekla, I’ve started to walk around with a notepad in my handbag.”

  She pours coffee into my cup and then adjusts the clip in her hair.

  “When we got home and Lýdur had fallen asleep, I continued writing conversat
ions. Before I knew it, I’d written eighteen pages about a woman who discovers her husband is having an affair and takes revenge by murdering their child. Lýdur wouldn’t understand that.”

  She lifts the child out of the cot and places her on her hip.

  “Tell me what’s happening out there, Hekla, tell me who comes to Hotel Borg, tell me about life beyond Kjartansgata.”

  Should I tell her about all the men who won’t stop pestering me, who leer at me and seize every opportunity to touch me without my permission? Who ask me out. Powerful men. I always politely decline. They don’t take it well. They’re used to having their own way and getting the girls who spurn them fired. Instead I tell my friend who writes conversations at night that I’ve now got a municipal library card from Thingholtsstræti and can take out books for her.

  Ísey wants us to move into the living room. She hands me the child, gets the cups and places them on the coffee table.

  I notice that yet another Kjarval painting has been added to the collection because there are now three. To fit them in she’s had to move the sideboard and hang one painting above the other so that the brown frame of one of them almost touches the ceiling. Ísey says that they now have landscapes from three different parts of the country in their tiny living room.

  She drops into the sofa and assumes a grave air. It transpires she’s dreamt a dream.

  “I dreamt,” she says, “that we had moved into a new house and all of the furniture was made out of palisander wood and there was a long staircase up to the top floor, lots of steps, and I held Thorgerdur in my arms. There were four children’s bedrooms in the house. Now I’m scared that means I’ll have four children.”

  Odin

  (or when I acquired the God of poetry and wisdom)

  Dusk is starting to fall and at the bottom of Ódinsgata I hear a piteous cry coming from the top of a tree that stands beside a green corrugated-iron house. It’s the only tree on the street. I look up and make out a scrawny creature hanging on a branch and feebly meowing. I find my footing in a cleft at the bottom of the trunk, climb up the tree, manage to grab the terrified animal and lower it down to the pavement. The cat isn’t fully grown, black but for a white spot over a missing eye and untagged. I stroke it a few times, but then have to hurry home because I want to finish a chapter. When I get down to Austurstræti, the animal is still behind me and follows me all the way up to Stýrimannastígur. I open the hall door and the cat immediately shoots past me and up the steep wooden stairs, where it waits on the narrow landing and meows. I let it in.