Reply to a Letter from Helga Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2011 by Bergsveinn Birgisson English translation copyright © 2013 by Philip Roughton Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Kjartan Hallur

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Reply to a Letter from Helga was first published in 2011 by Bjartur as Svar við bréfi Helgu. Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton. Published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2013.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612187174

  ISBN-10: 161218717X

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012913020

  It was once a clear morning.

  It was many years ago.

  The two of them walked along the sidewalk

  and held hands facing the rising sun.

  Facing the rising sun

  both considering their own way.

  Now they both walk their own way

  and hold hands.

  Hold hands

  across a clear morning.

  —Stefán Hörður Grímsson, “They”

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  GLOSSARY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  Kolkustaðir, Feast of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, 1997

  Dear Helga,

  Some people die from what is beyond them. Others die because death has been in them for ages, clamping their veins from within. They all die. Each in his own way. Some fall to the floor midsentence. Others depart peacefully in a dream. Do their dreams then end, as when the film is no longer projected onto the screen? Or do their dreams just change in appearance, taking on new light and colors? Is this perceptible in any way to the one who dreams?

  My dear Unnur is dead. She died in a dream one night when no one was near. Blessed be her memory.

  Personally, I’m in decent enough shape, not counting the stiffness in my shoulders and knees. Old Lady Age is doing her job. Of course, there are moments when you look at your slippers and think how the day will come when the slippers will be standing there—but not you yourself to put them on. But, “welcome to it, when it comes,” as Hallgrímur Pétursson says in his hymn about death. Enough life has sloshed through my chest. I’ve had my taste of it—life. That’s how it is, dear Helga.

  Oh, I’ve become a compulsive old man—it’s clear in how I’ve started opening old wounds. But everyone has a door. And everyone wants to let his inner person out that door. And my door—it’s the old one on my departed father’s sheep shed, where the sun shines in through the chinks, long and slender rays between the thin planks. If life exists somewhere, it must be in the chinks. My door has become so crooked and thin and worn out that it’s no longer able to hold the inner from the outer. And maybe that’s precisely what’s good about the carpenter—that he’s not perfect? That in his work there are cracks and chinks, letting in sunshine and life.

  Soon I’ll set off for the Great Relocation congenital to all men, dear Helga. And it’s inevitable that people try to lighten their burdens before setting off on such a journey. Of course, it’s quite beside the point writing you this letter now, when everyone is more or less dead or senile, but I’ve decided to jot it down anyway. If you don’t like these scrawls of mine, just toss them out. My words are well meant. I’ve never wished you anything but good—you know that, dear Helga.

  Your Hallgrímur died in late winter. His last year, he couldn’t swallow any longer because of the cancer; they couldn’t get any food into him, that giant of a man. He wasted away in their hands at the hospital, and was nothing but skin and bones when I visited him in February. It was sad to see. Blessed be his memory.

  Blessed be all things, indeed, that try and have tried to exist.

  My nephew Marteinn fetched me from the retirement home, and I get to spend midsummer in a room with a view of the farm where you and Hallgrímur once lived. I let my mind wander over the slopes all around here, smelling sweetly of long-past sunshine. That’s the most one can do these days.

  Unnur lay on her deathbed for five years, four and a half of which she wished to die. In many ways, I came out of that period badly. Nor do I understand what came over her. Little by little, it was as if the good in her was overturned and replaced with reprimands about trivialities. If I spilled juice or bumped into a flower vase while I nursed her, I was scolded for having always been a “damned bungler,” “incapable of any chores.” Might this have been the hardened disposition that existed deep down inside her, but that until then I’d only caught glimpses of?

  She stopped getting out of bed and refused to eat, emaciated as she was; she just lay there wasting away due to some invisible sorrow. That familiar old spirit of hers rotted away. Yes, her spirit left her. She grew sharp-tongued and temperamental, no matter how carefully she was coddled. She simply became decrepit, and terribly ill to boot. And the ill may not be judged the same as the healthy. I watched the blue of her eyes grow dim and blacken like the sky over the mountains and felt as if I should be there to provide her company, considering her circumstances. It seemed that she was unhappy with her situation, unhappy having been brought forth into this life, and unhappy at how she’d spent it. For my pains, I was declared an absolute villain who had played a game of deception with her our entire life together. I had never loved her, she said. Ice cold. And then she looked away.

  I was as affectionate to her as could be. Bought her newspapers and boxes of chocolates. Brought out photos of her and me in the haymaking at Grundir, of the old farm, of the fish racks bending beneath lumpfish and half-dried cod, of us gathering eiderdown and young puffins on the islets, of me scraping a seal-pup skin and making repairs on the dory in the shed, of Unnur on the Farmall with the milk box on the back, and simply all of the sunshine that I managed to photograph during my life with the old Polaroid camera. We caught a glimpse of you in one of the photos. It was from before Hulda was born, when we did the haymaking together. She pointed at you. Said, “You should have taken her. Not a gelded yearling like me. You always wanted her, not me.”

  She pushed the album away. She stared at the foot of the bed with empty eyes. I felt for her. Felt that I loved this helpless, feeble old woman, this doomed individual who had almost no one else in the world. I felt that I’d done right tending our small farm with her all those years. Who else would have cared for her? Tears ran down her cheeks like tiny waves of sorrow. Outside our retirement home, night had come and the traffic had started to settle down. The glimmer of a streetlight peeked in through the room’s window and shone faintly on her tear-moistened cheeks.

  Then she died. In the middle of the night. In a dream.

  2

  The old ghost that I thought had been put to rest long ago appeared again in Unnur. The specter that folk in our corner of the countryside had conjured up out of sheer irascibility. Wasn’t it Hallgerður who awoke in her, that damned Icelandic habit of never being able
to shake off the past or forgive anything? At the retirement home, I’d become “an adulterer,” “a charlatan,” “a downright double-dealer,” and she started expounding for me in small details the lustful pleasures that I supposedly had from you every roundup. It left me shamefaced, to put it mildly, and it was sheer grace that there were few to hear it when she started shouting about my taking you from behind, giving your heavy breasts a voracious feel and jerking you so hard that your ass cheeks smacked. That’s how she talked: “your heavy breasts.” These fits of hers would then end in sobs, with her accusing herself of being a gelded, abandoned yearling. And although she called me a lazybones who could never manage anything financially or domestically—you know, Helga, that I never stopped working, except during the one week that I was laid up with pneumonia—this hurt me less than the accusations of that countryside rumor from so long ago, which threw salt in my wounds.

  What was the incident that ignited the rumor but that never took place, yet led to consequences just as bad—no, even worse!—than if the incident had actually occurred? And is it possible to draw a line between what in fact happened and what the slanderous populace says happened, hanging around their kitchens, all worked up from great gulps of coffee, innuendo, and their blather about others? What didn’t occur that Feast of St. Lambert, 1939—yet still occurred in the minds of the blatherers?

  Was it when the others had made their way down Hörgsdalur Valley and rounded Framneshæð Hill that I supposedly made my way slowly down the ridge and met you in the grassy hollow by Steinhúsbakkar Slope? And then, so the rumor goes, we walked together and talked about how beautiful the sheep’s wool was when they came down from the mountain that year, how the lambs’ paunches were white as snow, how plump they were, how clean their lines. And I, as Hay Officer for Hörgár Parish, declared I had no need to fear that farmers would be half starving their sheep that year, so well the haymaking had gone. And then—oh yes—I remembered your mark: double half-cropped tip, low-notched, and swallowtailed both sides. And you asked me what mine was again: cropped and notched upper side left, swallowtailed at the tip and upper side right. Precisely. Then of course we exchanged a few words about the ram Bassi, whom we’d borrowed from out east in Fljót: how barrel-chested he was, how muscular at the spine. And after exchanging these words about Bassi, our blood churned in a sweet frenzy, and I brushed aside your curls and likened them to snow blowing down a mountain slope, but you laughed and said, “Oh, Bjarni!”

  Then I supposedly kissed you, and some sort of overexcited groping took place before I pulled down my trousers as you lifted your sweater and bared your breasts, and next I let my milk-white thighs slap against yours as the whimbrel trilled and the heavy scent of heather saturated the air around us, and we two—scrubby beasts, there in the hollow—became one with the dying growth for a moment or two, and the white seed trailed gelatinously from your inner thigh down to some blades of withered grass that had become the only witnesses to the sudden blaze that engulfed us.

  No less than all of that, apparently.

  Is there anything more natural than for such a thing to have occurred? Hasn’t all of creation arranged it so that such chance meetings might indeed take place?

  And folk would have made their kitchen insinuations, as is their wont. But that wouldn’t have done any harm, because I would have been modest and begged my Unnur humbly for forgiveness for this wild aberrance, and she doubtlessly would have dealt with it better than my own repulsive defensiveness, which would have made enemies of all who wished to hurt me after the rumor was spread. I would have even tried to make up for it by lavishing her with even greater tenderness, and understood that this earthly life isn’t about slapping against others’ bellies but about affection and caring for the people closest to you. You and I would have made love and satisfied our lust, thereby putting it out of the picture and allowing me to turn to other matters, to start thinking of and desiring other things.

  The fact is it didn’t happen. We weren’t together up in the valley, as those who spread this rumor thought—you know that we just happened to return from the search last and met at the gap above the corral. That’s why we walked together down the slope. But it was enough to spark an incident in people’s minds, with accompanying sighs and contented exhalations—and who can fight against it once a person’s head starts filling with such ideas? And so the rumor of our lustful release spread like wildfire, until the gossip reached my own house. I stepped in one day from the spring’s biting cold and rubbed my hands together and sighed. “This cold we’re having is unheard of,” I said as I walked into the kitchen where Unnur was stooping over her pots.

  “Why don’t you go fuck to warm up—I’m sure she’s waiting for you with her legs spread on the other side.”

  Her statement stunned me at first. And then I was furious. I slapped Unnur’s face and told her to guard her tongue. She reddened. Then she started wailing crazily and called herself a frigid wretch and said she didn’t understand why I was holding onto her. It would be best if I cut her loose. That I loved you and not her.

  I said no.

  She said it would be best if I left her and took you as my wife instead. She said that she’d seen how I looked at you, and that I never looked at her like that. That I coveted you. Then she rushed off and shoved herself into the closet. I said, “No. That will never happen!”

  She shouted out from the closet and wept pent-up tears that she actually seemed to be fighting against, making her weeping even more poignant to hear. I sat there as if thunderstruck on the master bed. Stared down at the floor. Started thinking about whether I shouldn’t try to polish up the damned floorboards. The cursed boards were starting to peel and crack and could easily put a splinter in someone’s foot.

  I was heavyhearted after the cruel slander started spreading around the district; or, shall I say, the cruel slander soon felt like a big air bubble around my heart. I was discontent in my daily occupations, grouchy and impatient, and didn’t know where to direct what was surging within me. I felt as if people were looking at me suspiciously. “Damned adulterer,” I read in the glances of my neighbors when I went to the Co-op or to church. Unnur grew distant from me, perhaps because I’d grown insolent and irritated at her sobbing at home.

  Inside me, a bug sparked to life, longing to spray its digestive juices on the sweet event that was on everyone’s lips, but which I’d never gotten to experience, though my name was attached to it. I began to desire you, dear Helga. It’s just how you were created; it was no wonder they started spreading the rumor. In doing so, they revealed their own dreams.

  Every time I came to visit you and Hallgrímur to loan you worm or stool medicine or do whatever else a friend, neighbor, and hay officer could, and Hallgrímur was in the Eastfjords, “breaking in something more than a mare,” as you put it, leaving you alone on the farm with your two children, my thoughts were primitive. God alone knows how paltry I was in my soul after news of this nonevent spread; I was bitter at being convicted, without having sipped of the cleansing sweetness of the crime.

  3

  Is it any wonder that I thought of you whenever they went to herd the sheep up in Fellir? Have I said that I felt as if I’d fallen into a heavy whirlpool after the rumor started going around? The autumn that we met following the other herders down Mógilsbakki Hill. It was Ingjaldur of Hóll who first started running his tongue about us getting together, I know it. Who was he to blather and make insinuations about others? There’s a famous line attributed to his father, Guðmundur, from the time when two families lived at Hóll and it was so crowded that everyone shared the same bed in the family room. Guðmundur supposedly said the following to Bárður’s wife as she snuggled up to him one evening: “Oh, is that you, Sigríður? But then who’s Bárður banging?” You don’t suppose that was the night when Ingjaldur was conceived?

  When my mind wanders back to those times, I think unabashedly of our relationship, which began to bloom shortly after the sl
ander started getting to me. You might say I’ve become completely immoral, like a shameless ladies’ man. But I remember feeling as if I wanted to let everything bottled up inside me burst forth. On you.

  Little by little the distance between Unnur and me grew, as we shared no intimacy to speak of. She was always there, of course, doing her work steadily, with an expression for everything: “First to droop is the reddest rose,” she said about my wise idea of sending the biggest lambs to the slaughterhouse first, to be butchered, barreled, salted down, and sold to Norway. “Well then—angels watch me” meant “I’m going to bed now.” “Beams and motes,” she declared, when something was said about the folk at Hóll or the neighboring farms. As if you could never say anything! Our conversations grew awkward. Her entire demeanor became mechanical and predictable, like the spinning jenny that she worked in her spare time. A rhythmic, clapping beat. She always said the same things, in her own way, passionless. She was a fit farmwoman and was tremendously good at distinguishing sheep, meaning she knew which heads belonged to which lambs, even after they’d been singed and boiled. And there was a kind of thread connecting us, though quite tangled. She made blood pudding for the winter, did salting and curing (until the freezer arrived), made jam, and smoked meat and fish most industriously. It’s rare for a woman to be in charge of the smoke sheds, but I couldn’t get anywhere near them, apart from helping with the salting and other preparations. Except for the lumpsucker, which was my job alone. Anything other than work was the most despicable waste of time in her eyes.

  Once some visitors came: Finnur Fowler, as he was called, with his four sons, who, like him, all turned out to have the greatest talent for hunting seabirds and rappelling down cliffs for their eggs. I recall that Finnur had no more tobacco, and it was all sold out at the Co-op. We went to the barn, and I picked leaves from the hay for him; these he stuck in his pipe and subsequently looked as happy as could be as he sipped coffee and sucked on his pipe in the kitchen. This was an old trick, and for our own amusement we came up with a new expression: “Hay—tobacco for hard times.” Then the Co-op started selling Commander cigarettes, and after that breakthrough Finnur was never seen smoking anything else. In fact, it was Finnur Fowler who taught me to smoke Commanders. But anyhow, Finnur asked me all about the activities of the Reading Club, for which I was the book buyer. We were reading Sturlunga saga then, and I gave him an idea of what was discussed in the reading circle; for instance, when Gissur saved himself by hiding in the whey tub. This inspired heated debate over whether such a thing could actually have happened, or whether the account of the burning was exaggerated later. For some reason, this chafed Unnur so much that every time I went to a meeting of the Reading Club, I was, according to her, going to discuss “Gissur in the whey tub.” Whenever I went up to the garret to read recently arrived books that I’d ordered from Reykjavík, she asked what was new of Gissur in the whey tub when I came back down; it was always the same old refrain every time books came up, as if culture and literature were unnecessary luxuries that you should be ashamed of giving your attention, because in the meantime you were neglecting your work.