Miss Iceland Read online

  I pour milk into a bowl.

  I’ve acquired a cat.

  I stroke it several times.

  A cat owns me.

  The following morning a raven perches on a lamp post outside the skylight and croaks. The kids throw stones at it and when it launches into flight, I notice that one of its wings is damaged.

  The joy of being alive and knowing

  that I’m going home to write

  I clock out at five.

  I walk past Snæbjörn and Bragi Brynjólfsson’s bookstore windows in Hafnarstræti every day and often go in to browse through their shelves. I’ve already decided which books I’m going to buy when I get paid. In Hafnarstræti there’s also the Nordra Bookstore, which sells the Nordisk Konversations leksikon encyclopaedia in eight volumes through monthly instalments, bound in leather with gold-embossed letters. In Austurstræti there’s the Ísafold bookshop and in Bankastræti there is Kron’s; on Laugavegur there are the Mál og menning, Bókhladan and Helgafell bookstores. Lárus Blöndal’s bookstore is on Skólavördustígur. That’s my circuit. I’ve also walked all the way to the new park at Klambratún and back, and looked at the trees that have recently been planted there.

  I get paid on Friday. Then I’ll go to Landsbankinn on Austurstræti and pay it into my account. In the bank there are murals by the same artist who did the paintings that Ísey’s father-in-law wanted to get rid of. They depict women stacking salt fish. My wages are lower than I’d expected. Sirrí informs me that serving girls get half what waiters get.

  “Even though we split the room in two and serve as many tables as they do. That’s how it’s always been and that’s how it will always be, they say. I just wanted you to know that,” she adds.

  Occasionally I buy myself a coffee at Skálinn, but when I get canapés for Ísey they’re deducted from my wages. I’ve walked out to Grótta twice, all the way to the lighthouse, and stood there in the slippery seaweed, listening to the hiss of the surf until it faded. Sea foam whirls high in the wind. Somewhere on the other side of the strait and the headland topped by the glacier that contains the exact centre of the earth, Dad sits writing his descriptions of the weather. Even further out in the white surfy ocean is the seasick Jón John on his way to Hull with fish in the hold. While I’m serving in the Hotel Borg, I keep the story alive in my mind. Even though I’m in the middle of pouring coffee, my mind isn’t there; I’m elsewhere, because I’m thinking about what I’m going to write in the evening when I’ve clocked out.

  “Miss,” says a woman, “there are no sugar cubes.”

  Occasionally I scribble a few words on a napkin and stick it in my pocket when I collect an order from the kitchen.

  “Are you writing down a phone number?” Sirrí asks.

  The man from the Beauty Society shows up for the lunchtime buffet every day and sometimes comes in the afternoon and has a coffee with sugar and a slice of cream cake. Sirrí offered to switch areas with me so that I wouldn’t have to serve him. But he still waved at me from the other side of the room.

  “Another pot of coffee, miss.”

  When I bend over to place the pot on the white tablecloth, he says:

  “I’ll be your personal tour guide in Long Island. Surely you’re not going to squander the rest of your life as a waitress?”

  When I’m hanging up my apron one day, the head waiter comes up with a big square white box which he hands to me.

  “With compliments from the round table,” he says and smiles.

  I lift the lid. The box contains a tart with pink marzipan shaped like a woman in a long dress. She has a red maraschino cherry on each breast and ornate lettering in chocolate icing:

  Miss Volcano

  Sirrí glances at the tart.

  “I just want you to know, Hekla,” she says, “that you dared to do things that other waitresses would have been fired for. Like telling that guy sitting with the director of the sewage company that enough was enough and, when he refused to back off, having the guts to pour coffee over the sleeve of his jacket. And then apologizing with a smile. And for that you get a marzipan tart.”

  Poets are entrusted with the care of books

  When I’m not writing, I go to the municipal library in Thingholtsstræti where I’m a member. The fee is five krónur a year and members can take out three books at a time. The building is surrounded by trees and has a high ceiling with ornate plasterwork in the corners and a fluffy carpet on the floor. I sometimes dash over there during my breaks and manage to read a collection of poems. The head librarian is an old poet who wrote a beautiful poem about the desert.

  Also working at the municipal library in Thingholtsstræti is a young librarian I had spotted a few times at Skálinn hanging out with the poets. I’ve caught him observing me when I’m standing at a bookshelf browsing through a book.

  When I lay Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain on his counter, he smiles at me and says: “Life, death, love.”

  He’s wearing a white shirt with a tie under a knitted sweater. I also put down two poetry books I’m going to take to Ísey.

  “It’s mainly the poetry books that people are reluctant to return,” he says. “They love those the most. We’ve even had to collect poetry books from people’s homes.”

  He then stands up and offers to take me on a tour of the library. He says they store manuscripts from the Icelandic Society for the Advancement of Learning and have also stocked Skírnir magazine since its first issue in 1827, but that the library’s real treasure is a precious beautifully bound copy of the Fjölnir journal. The librarian guides me between the rows of books and says they have an important collection of travel literature by foreigners who have explored Iceland, such as, for example, the botanist Hooks who toured the country with Jørgen the Dog-Days King, as well as a book by Lord Dillon and the story of John Barrow’s journey from 1834.

  “I couldn’t help noticing how you handle the books,” he continues. “You pick one up, open it, read the beginning, browse through it and then read a few more lines. Then you skim rapidly through it until you come to the last page, there you pause and read the ending. And put the book back on the shelf. Then you pick up the next book and follow the same method. It’s very unusual for people to read books in the order they’re shelved.”

  A swinging door

  The next day the librarian is sitting at a corner table at Hotel Borg.

  He’s alone, holds a book in his hand, smokes a pipe and watches me. He orders a fourth cup of coffee and smiles at me every time I hand him a new cup. I notice he’s reading Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s translation of the Odyssey. There is also a notebook with a black cover and a fountain pen beside him on the table. I observe how he occasionally opens it, uncaps the pen and scribbles a note.

  I look the owner of the Mont Blanc in the eye.

  “Starkadur,” he says assertively, thrusting out his hand.

  I can’t resist.

  “Are you writing?”

  He nods and says he works at the library for half the day, but that otherwise he writes poetry and has been working on a short story. It transpires that he’s had one poem published in the Eimreid magazine.

  The head waiter has appeared; he takes me by the shoulder and ushers me away from the table.

  “The ladies by the window are out of sugar cubes, Miss Hekla.”

  When I return to the kitchen, he is waiting for me.

  “Waitresses aren’t supposed to fraternize with customers. I can see perfectly well what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Flirtation. We all know what that leads to. Girls get pregnant and quit.”

  “He’s a poet,” I say.

  “Poets get girls pregnant too.”

  He holds the swinging door into the room open with one hand and tips his head in the direction of a man sitting by the window.

  “Instead of falling for a penniless poet you could catch a better suitor. There are loads of single men who need a woman to brigh
ten up their lives. There by the window, for example, is a newly qualified and unattached engineer who owns an apartment in Sóleyjargata and a second-hand Ford.”

  Guardian woman

  The librarian stays put until I’ve finished my shift, then springs to his feet and asks if he can walk with me. We first walk over to Lækjartorg, where a cold wind blows in from the sea, then we wander aimlessly south of the Lake towards Skothúsvegur. On the way, he tells me that there are books by 706 Icelandic authors in the library, a total of 71,719 books.

  He wants me to guess which genre is the most popular among members.

  “Poetry books?” I ask.

  The poet laughs.

  “Novels.”

  He explains that women read novels and since they make up the majority of members, novels are the books that are lent out the most. Books on historical subjects and national issues are the most popular among men, on the other hand. The third most popular category of books are those about distant countries.

  “Both men and women are curious to know about what things are like abroad,” he says, winding up his report.

  I ask him which novels are taken out the most.

  He ponders a moment.

  “That would probably be children’s books by Ragnheidur Jónsdóttir and the rural novels of Gudrún frá Lundi,” he says with some reluctance.

  “Books by two women,” I say.

  He hesitates.

  “Yes, that’s true actually, now that you mention it. Which is pretty weird considering there are so few female novelists in Iceland and they’re all bad.”

  The topic of the library has been exhausted, but once we’ve walked over to Tjarnargata, the librarian halts by a corrugated-iron building and says that this is the headquarters of the Icelandic socialists and that he attends meetings there. The Youth Movement. A placard in the window reads Fight against capitalism.

  Suddenly we’re in the graveyard along Sudurgata. The lychgate creaks. The earth is a decaying swamp, there is death at every step. Nature is an open grave.

  “This is where the poets rest,” says my guide. “Even the immortal ones.”

  “Yes, I say, the dead all look alike.”

  The librarian glances at me and is on the point of saying something but stops, and instead waltzes between the tombstones looking for various resting places. Despite having the rhymes and poetic quotations of both Benedikt Gröndal and Steingrímur Thorsteinsson at his fingertips, he can’t find his way to them; the poets won’t give themselves away.

  “They should be here somewhere,” he says, unable to conceal his disappointment. “They were here the other day when I came here with Dadi Dream-fjörd.”

  The dark autumn evening seeps out of the earth and I’m cold. Wet, yellowing grass brushes against my ankles. I think of Mum.

  “Isn’t the novelist Theodóra Thoroddsen buried here?” I ask.

  The librarian is distracted and by no means certain, but says he fully expects she is resting with her husband Skúli. Darting between the tombstones and skimming through the epitaphs, he is unable to contain his joy when he stumbles on Thorsteinn Erlingsson. He calls me over and fervently breaks into “The Snow Bunting”:

  “Her voice was so fair and so warm and so pure

  Warbling to me from this tiny wee bush…

  and night after night she chanted love poems alone…”

  In the middle of the cemetery is a tombstone belonging to a woman who died in 1838 and strikes me because of the length of its inscription:

  … was the mother of five children who died at a young age, as strong as two giants, a protector of the poor, caring mother, sincere, good hearted…

  “She’s the guardian of this cemetery, the first to be buried here,” says my guide, sidling up to me. He looks at me and I can sense there is something weighing on him:

  “Actually I was going to invite you to the pictures this evening,” he says. “I’ve been manning myself up,” he adds.

  “They’re showing a Fellini movie in the Austurbær Cinema, Cleopatra in the New Cinema, Two Women with Sophia Loren in the Old Cinema and Lawrence of Arabia in Tónabíó,” he rattles off.

  “I want to see To Kill a Mockingbird which they’re screening in Stjörnubíó at nine,” I say.

  I’d seen the book on display in the window of the Snæbjörn Bookstore in Hafnarstræti.

  “The book is by a woman,” I say. “Harper Lee.”

  I surprise him.

  He looks at me in wonderment.

  “You’re the most bookish waitress I’ve ever met.”

  That’s the truth. Not necessarily

  the reality

  We meet outside the cinema at a quarter to nine and he waves the tickets at me. We sink into deep burgundy-leather seats with silver-studded armrests. We’re sitting in the middle of the theatre, the smoky shimmering beam of the projector glowing above us. I try to listen to the language as I read the subtitles on the screen, but it’s difficult. Farming work in America’s Deep South is also quite different from what we’re used to in Dalir. In the middle of the movie, the poet slips an arm around my shoulder.

  “I would have expected a woman to choose a different movie,” he says when we walk out.

  When I say: “The blacks still aren’t liberated, no more than gays are,” he looks at me as if he were struggling to respond. It’s difficult to fathom what’s going through his head. He has beautiful hands and I’m willing to sleep with him if he asks me to.

  Suddenly we’re up on Skólavördustígur where the poet rents a room. A few drunken couples stagger past us here and there, but there are no cars on the road.

  “The Mokka café is just a few yards down there,” he says and smiles.

  I feel my heart pounding.

  He tells me that the room he rents is under a sloping ceiling and that the square metres under the window aren’t actually calculated into the rent. I have to make a quick decision: am I going to go home and write or sleep with the poet?

  Certain situations can only be dealt with by removing one’s clothes. I’m not wearing fancy underwear but he doesn’t care, he just wants me out of it as quickly as possible.

  Afterwards the poet slips some Shostakovich onto the record player and I glance around the room and the ceiling, which is barely high enough for a grown man, except in the centre.

  I mull over when might be the right time to leave and what is the right amount of time to stay.

  The poet tells me he’s from Hveragerdi, where his mother lives, and that his father had been a deckhand on the Dettifoss until the boat was struck by a German torpedo in the war and sank.

  “I was four years old and my sisters two and six when he died,” he says.

  In return I tell him that I’m temporarily living with a male friend while he’s out at sea.

  “He’s like a brother to me,” I add.

  I’m about to say: He’s my best friend, but stop myself.

  By the bed there is a cabinet containing three shelves of books behind a glass door. Unable to resist, I scan the spines. It’s like Dad’s book cabinet. There’s Njál’s Saga and Grettir’s Saga, Sturlunga, Heimskringla and Snorri’s Edda, and Wakeful Nights by Stephan G. Stephansson. One shelf is devoted to anthologies by the national poets with the works of Jónas Hallgrímsson, Steingrímur Thorsteinsson and Hannes Hafsteinn. There are also novels by Laxness, Gunnar Gunnarsson and Thorberg Thordarson, Jón á Bægisá’s translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost and two translated books, Hunger by Hamsun and The Odyssey. All the books are leatherbound.

  “Laxdæla is missing,” I say.

  The poet raises himself on his elbows.

  “Yes, that’s right,” he says after some thinking, “you’re from Dalir.”

  He stretches his arm over to me.

  I could leave now and write for an hour before I go to work.

  Or not.

  When I get home, the cat is waiting for me in front of the hall door.

  I bend over and s
troke it.

  The remains of a bird lie scattered on the pavement: a beak, one wing and two feathers.

  I need to be alone. Many. Alone

  My friend is pensive and seems anxious.

  “My life is over, Hekla.”

  “What happened?”

  “Imagine, a bag of blood burst when we were making blood pudding at my sisters-in-law, Lýdur’s sisters, and splashed all over me. The strange thing is I started to cry. My sisters-in-law stared at me and I felt so ashamed. Hrönn asked me if I was pregnant.”

  “And are you? Are you expecting another baby?”

  She averts her gaze.

  “You must be thinking what have I gotten myself into? Don’t you think it’s awful? I think it’s awful. I’m so happy. I’ve no appetite. I was really looking forward to getting some freshly boiled blood pudding, but I can’t keep anything down. It wasn’t planned, but it’ll be good for Thorgerdur to get a playing companion. Lýdur is happy. He feels one child isn’t a family. A family is nothing less than three children, he says. I haven’t told him I think two is enough.”

  I stand up and embrace my friend.

  She’s as thin as a rake. I can feel her ribs.

  “Congratulations.”

  I think: It’s growing in the darkness.

  “I knew you’d take it like that. Wonder what I got myself into. I really dreaded telling you.”

  I hold her tight.

  “It’ll work out.”

  “It’s still almost invisible. Then it will grow and need to be born.

  “Thorgerdur was four kilos. I’ll die, Hekla. I didn’t realize giving birth was so painful. I was in labour for two days and I had so many stitches I couldn’t sit for three weeks.”