Reply to a Letter from Helga Read online

  They had no inclination for books, her forefathers in Blöndudalur Valley. They were more for the body than the soul and wanted only to work. Not every story about them was generous. Her grandfather was long renowned for fining a female worker on his farm fifty aurar for dropping the chamber pot and wasting the old urine. That’s how precious this liquid was to them, while human relationships were of little value. And while I’m on the subject of the folk in Blöndudalur, there’s another story about when her mother was baking bread. Once folk there thought the bread tasted funny. Finally someone said straight out that the bread definitely tasted like piss, and others agreed. The housewife wondered aloud whether she’d grabbed the wrong pail when she mixed the dough. She took a bite and chewed for a long time before saying, “Well, darned if I know what that is.”

  Now I’ve lost the thread, Helga. But I’ve lost it for a reason. I actually feel bad bringing this up.

  Naturally, I knew that there was more going on in Unnur to explain this distracted behavior of hers, which seemed to be saying just one thing: I’m guilty.

  I understood her and sympathized with her.

  I knew that after the operation it was as if work became her sole raison d’être. She was punishing herself for another problem that was impossible for her to discuss frankly. She was suppressing her misery, and sorrow devours the heart, as it says in the Hávamál. She wouldn’t seek help. Nothing could persuade her. She either screamed and sobbed in a closet while I stared, paralyzed, at the knots in the floorboards, or she disappeared behind the spinning jenny and doggedly drove the spindles.

  I can tell you a little story to explain this a bit. Sometime after she had her operation, it became clear that our cow had mastitis. The milk turned to curds or cheese in the left udder. There had to be an explanation for this, and I racked my brains over it until I discovered the cause one day when I was rigging a fishing line on the other side of the cowshed gable. Unnur didn’t know I was there.

  She started milking our Huppa as usual, but after a few moments I heard grumbling and swearing, and when I took a closer look I saw her prodding and punching the cow’s udder with half-clenched fists, cursing and calling the creature bad names since it wouldn’t give her milk as quickly and willingly as she wanted. I couldn’t stand for this and burst in and gave her a piece of my mind there in the cowshed. She kicked at the pail in a huff and ran out, choking down sobs.

  But I was a good husband to her, have no doubt of that. I asked again and again whether she would like to talk about what had happened, whether we could consult the experts down south. But she wouldn’t budge.

  She abandoned me in the physical world. Doubtless, any caresses only reminded her of what she was no longer capable of, and for that reason she tried to avoid sparking my desire. The shame bent her humanity. I could never so much as hint at the operation or suggest that it might be possible to go back to the doctors for another operation that could put the first one right. It was clear as day that this medical procedure had gone horribly wrong. But it was as if she took the doctors’ mistake as a predetermined and immutable fate—as if she deserved nothing else. Her reaction was always the same whenever I mentioned the operation. First she would stuff herself into the closet and weep and wail, then pale like withered grass and speak not a word. Eventually the redness would return to her cheeks and she would start cranking the spinning jenny so hard that the spindles smoked. She could work like that long into the night. I stopped bringing it up because of her reaction. But I’d lived long enough and had enough sense to know that doctors make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Otherwise we aren’t human.

  4

  Then came the December day when I helped you with servicing the ewes. I came as agreed with my ram, Kútur, the treasure of the Jökuldalur stock. I recall that it took place on the Feast of St. Ambrose, and my coveralls smelled of glycerol after repairing Gauti of Staður’s International the day before.

  You dove straight into speaking badly of Hallgrímur, who was busy with “the mares to the east.” It was obvious you two were having troubles as well. Hallgrímur put too much of the farming on your shoulders and displayed you too little tenderness when he was near. Yes, I must tell it as it is: he wasn’t much of a farmer, that Hallgrímur, and not his father’s son at all. There are loads of stories about his father, old Jónas, who cultivated more than a few hayfields at his farm, Alviðra, and whose grass was said to grow better than any other farmer’s.

  Of course, I helped you with the breeding that short, snowless winter day; I always tried to be there for you, both as a friend and the hay officer for Hörgár Parish. I made my way lazily down the track by the sea on the old Farmall with Kútur in the trailer—over the Lambeyrar sandbanks and along the hard, dry grassland that was only lightly covered with snow up to the Skorar crags. Past Blóðbrekka Slope, where it’s said that a teenage boy in the Middle Ages cut his own throat and let himself bleed to death. The creeping thyme winds around the rocks there, and every time I pass by the place I’m overcome with a deep-rooted weariness.

  I looked out at Barnasker Skerry, where eagles, of old, ate small children at their ease after nabbing them from their homefields, while mothers screamed on the shore and no boat could push past the breakers. Who hasn’t heard the children’s shrill wails coming from those skerries through the fog and north wind? Then I meandered past Freyjaskjól, where, without any warning, men grow erect and women aroused as they pass by alone—it being an old stopover where children were eagerly conceived. There under the spell of these old places I drove slowly and thought of you. Was that perhaps the point of no return? Next, I drove down the gully and over Þröngubotnalækur Stream, that useless trickle, which since ancient times marked the boundary between the farms, and therefore between us. If it hadn’t been for the stream, all the land up to the Víðines River would have belonged to Kolkustaðir; there would have been no Alviðra, and no Hallgrímur, because his father Jónas wouldn’t have lived there, nor his father Kristinn before him. It would have been just you and I, Helga. And Kolkustaðir.

  The wind was from the north, and sunbeams shone between tongues of sleet hanging from banks of storm clouds. Under such weather conditions, there should have been more ram lambs that year. You called this superstitious and wouldn’t let me forget it when your ewes produced far more ewe lambs. After Kútur had finished tupping the ready ewes and licked the salt in the back pen, I recall how you came over to me and leaned forward on the rail, showing the outline of your white bosom. I felt the ewes to assess their body condition, as is the hay officer’s responsibility. I sank my fingers into the thick, coarse wool; felt the amplitude of their chests and from there down along the ribs to the rib tips, finding no flaws. Then I turned to their backs and felt down along the loins and then the rump to check for any gauntness. Next I ran my fingers along the breastbone, and from there up onto the spinous processes and down along the transverse processes as you watched carefully and rubbed your nipples, those beautiful knots on the female trunk, against the trough rail. I felt the thick, muscular legs down to the hocks and saw that this sheep was well rounded and well fed, removing any doubt that they would all stand the winter. But you leaned forward, giving a glimpse of one breast, and said casually that I was a great genius in touching and feeling, and asked whether I knew how to use such a gentle touch on the female kind.

  “Well,” I said, “it looks to me as if you’re fairly well rounded yourself,” and before I knew it I’d reached my hand in jest toward your chest; but just as I made this silly gesture you bared your breast, heavy and swelling, and told me to look, apparently in full earnest. I noticed the blush spread over your cheeks. Yet it wasn’t shame, but rather pure fire—it was the gleam of fire. Isn’t it so, Helga?

  A pervasive, all-encompassing fleshly desire overcame me seeing your bare body in this place; it had been a long time since I’d laid eyes on such a finely fashioned, wholesome form. Your encouraging words enflamed me so strongly that I had to g
o out into the north wind to cool down, wandering around the farmyard like an old ram pulled off a willing ewe in the heat of things.

  But I held firm. God alone knows what a heavy burden that was. When summer came, I cooled off in the brook out back of the farm, stripping bare and trying to extinguish the fire in my flesh by bathing in the chilly water. I composed a sacred verse that I showed to no one, except you, now, because you inspired it:

  When she loves

  O’er mountaintops it rings.

  She bathes her silky hair

  In clear mountain springs.

  Trying to cool myself in the water had the opposite effect. Before I knew it, I found myself most brutishly masturbating, for which I was ashamed, feeling, as I always did, as if someone could see me. That I was doing something wrong. Why does one think this way? Much later, I realized that what I sensed was naturally the hidden people in the Fólkhamrar crags above the brook. Do you suppose they find it amusing watching us wretched humans pleasuring ourselves? Maybe they feel sorry for us, trapped in our lust?

  I realized that I would never succeed in getting you out of my mind—I would covet you as long as I drew breath. It doesn’t bother me to write this, Helga, I’m an old man who has nothing to lose. Soon all of my fire will be extinguished as I lie there gaping with my mouth full of brown earth. Is it possible I’ll still covet you then? Maybe I’ll be a ghost and wander around with my dick hanging out, trying to express myself?

  You sparked in me a desire that grew and could burst into a bonfire at any moment and for no reason. If I saw a stout tussock or a rounded grassy bank, your lines would combine with it in my mind until I could no longer distinguish the world in and of itself—only you in the world’s manifestations. When I saw a ram lamb greedy for nourishment from its mother, I saw myself in it. How does the old rhyme go?

  Cross the road ran little ram,

  Lost and bleating for his mam,

  To help her find her straying lamb.

  It’s of course only I who knows the location of the “Helga Tussocks” here in this district, and when I die I’ll take this place-name with me to the grave. These tussocks on the south side of the slope at Göngukleif resemble earthly casts of your breasts, albeit in enlarged form; it’s as if the shape of the tussocks, with their smooth, flat tops and steep, rounded sides, are made from the same mold as your breasts, by the same creative hands. How often did I lie there in the Helga Tussocks in a sunny, southwesterly wind, with my head between the breasts, imagining that I was in your arms? At the same time, you rode naked on a black horse through my mind, and I watched your breasts bob slowly to the rhythm of the trot. Or you stood there like the ogress Gjálp in Snorri’s Edda: astride the river, causing it to rise so much that I floated carefree in your warm, fragrant stream. And there I lay, the man whom every resident of the parish looked upon as your deceiver, which created a sort of pressure that forced its way into my will and made me simply covet you more. Yet I held firm.

  I recall that the weather was exceptionally bad that season: there was a bitter, chilling north wind, making it impossible for me to travel up the fjord with Unnur’s skyr. I left as soon as it relented, with all the tubs full of frozen skyr. And wouldn’t you know it—the northerly turned into a southwesterly gale, blowing straight at me and churning water into the boat. This was shortly after I elevated the dory’s boards and bought a little Gauti motor for it, on which I let it run—otherwise I would have vanished into the deep that day. I bailed desperately and steered into the wind at the same time, fighting my way like that up the fjord for hours on end. I remember what I was thinking; yes, I can say it now: it was pretty much all the same to me if I sank, but worse was the fact that we’d never been intimate. That was the only drink in this mortal life I regretted never having sipped—it’s perhaps like this: a man’s desire, constantly suppressed in his breast, appears brighter and clearer in the face of death. Nor did my lustful desire exactly slacken afterward, when I looked over at your farm.

  “Fresh Unfrozen Kolkustaðir Skyr,” wrote shopkeeper Jens on a board that he hung up as an advertisement at the Co-op. Folk chuckled about old Jensi’s logic for quite some time afterward.

  5

  Then came the spring when your sheep got the scab, and you called on me to help with the Walz’s dip. It was the spring that our Member of Parliament didn’t come, which he’d always done before the elections. We discussed this out in front of the Co-op. Gunnar of Hjarðarnes asked whether it wouldn’t be best to vote for someone else since the Progressive Party’s MP no longer showed his face in the district.

  “You believe in God even though you can’t see him,” said Gísli of Lækur, before blowing his nose vigorously into his handkerchief. At that the matter was settled.

  Hallgrímur was up north breaking in horses, and your kids were at boarding school. You were alone. On the farm. I’d received clear instructions from the Farmers’ Association on how to deal with the sheep scab, depending on whether it was from sheep ked or mites. Hörgár Parish had at its disposal a so-called portable bathtub, paid for by the district administration and easy to move on custom-made wooden posts that we called litters for fun. The parish had a huge lant can—eighty liters of stinking, concentrated cow’s urine purchased from elsewhere—and a big aluminum pot. I brought them to you on the hay wagon. It was a slushy spring day, and the brooks trickled like silver threads down all the slopes. I was always considered eccentric and followed my own lead when it came to raising sheep. I didn’t want to squander old lore concerning the furtherance and fortification of sheep farming. Clear instructions came from Reykjavík about using the lant diluted with water for the dip, but I preferred to follow Sheriff Magnús Ketilsson’s lant-dip formula, which called for tossing both seaweed and wood ashes into the undiluted lant and then adding tar, old human urine, and several tobacco leaves. Which made all the difference. We made this mix and heated it in the fireplace of your old farmhouse, and after we’d poured it all into the good old portable bathtub in the middle of the sheep shed, we dipped the sheep in it. You doubtless remember as well as I how it went. The mix splashed onto your blouse when you tried to rub the liquid into the wool, while I tried to hold the ewes to make sure it didn’t flood their noses and mouths.

  In my mind’s eye I can vividly envision the moment when I poured the shark-liver oil over the spines of the final lambs. Then I see you starting to remove your blouse, and the light from the little window where the medicines stood falls on your breasts, creating shadows in the hollows beneath.

  I beheld your loins filling out from your waist and I grew completely stiff as my eyes drank in this image. I’d never witnessed a fairer earthly sight except when I was berrying up on Kúluholt Hill one late August; I looked over the countryside, barren down to the hillocks and gravel beds, but then saw how the freshly mown hayfields of Tungunes were bedecked with dense, radiant-green, ripened hay—the three hectares that I’d plowed and sown on my Farmall, which I’d purchased through the association, the first to do so in the district. This green patch was like ivory in oak, as was said of Þórr when he came among other men, this patch that I should never actually have needed to cultivate, since I’d never used the hay from Tungunes myself; no, I gathered it all into a stack three to four ells high and eighteen to twenty ells long and draped a sail over it, to be used as a reserve in case anyone should be short of hay in late winter. There were sure to be plenty in the community with little hay left over in the spring; that much I knew as hay officer. And just as expected, the Tungunes hay reserve dwindled down, until nothing was left by winter’s final days but the staked-down sail. Not a single person said a word of thanks to me, though I kept the Tungunes hay in reserve every autumn for seventeen years. So it went. “Bleeding is the heart that begs,” says the old poem, and they perhaps didn’t want to admit that they were dependent on someone else, these people. But I was dependent on you. I realized that then, as you stood in the light of the little window, white as a hen salm
on newly run to the riffle, smelling of lant and tobacco leaves.

  Then the barrier broke within me and everything poured out as if from a pump. I told you what had happened with Unnur. That she’d been sent south for an examination after experiencing pain in her womb for some time. The doctors suspected a tumor in her uterus and determined that the only option was to remove it, although we still hadn’t had any children. They tore into her with their instruments and cut out her uterus, Unnur had told me in a choked-up voice.

  Had they asked her what she wanted?

  No, she wasn’t allowed a word in edgewise; no one asked her anything, and she was alone there at the hospital, terrified, because I couldn’t leave the animals.