Miss Iceland

colours into a sunset over Breidafjördur, she neglected to milk the cows. There was no greater sin than forgetting to empty swollen udders. Whenever she visited a neighbouring farm, she sat for too long and either wanted to recite a poem or fell silent for hours on end, dipping her sugar cubes into the coffee. They say she heard a string orchestra when she wrote and also that she woke up her children in the night and carried them out into the farmyard in her arms to show them the shimmering waves of Northern Lights undulating across the black sky, and that in between these periods she locked herself inside the marital bedroom and pulled a quilt over her head. There was so much melancholy in her that one bright spring evening she vanished into the silvery grey depths of the river. The prospect of eating fresh puffin eggs would no longer do her, because she had stopped sleeping. She was found in a trout net by the bridge and dragged onto the banks: a stiff-winged poet in a soaking wet skirt and laddered stockings, her belly full of water.

“She destroyed the net,” said the farmer who owned it. “I placed it there for trout, but the meshwork wasn’t designed to hold a woman poet.”

Her fate served as a warning, but at the same time she was the only model of a female author I had.

Otherwise poets were men.

I learnt from that not to disclose my plans to anyone.

Radio Reykjavík

Sitting in front of me on the coach is a woman travelling with a little girl who needs to throw up again. The coach swerves on the gravel and halts. The driver presses a button and the door opens to the autumn air, hissing like a steam iron. The weary woman dressed in a woollen coat escorts the girl down the steps. This is the third time the car-sick child has to be let out. The roads are lined with ditches because the farmers are draining the land and drying up the wetlands where wading birds nest. Barbed wire fences protrude from the earth here and there, although it is difficult to make out what property they are supposed to delimit.

Soon I’ll be too far away from home to know the names of the farms. On the steps, the woman shoves a woolly hat over the child’s head and yanks it down over her ears. I watch her holding the girl’s forehead as a thin streak of vomit oozes out of her. Finally she digs into a coat pocket, pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the child’s mouth before hoisting her back onto the dust-filled coach.

I dig out my notebook, uncap my fountain pen and write two sentences. Then I put the cap back on and open Ulysses again.

The driver bangs his pipe empty on the steps, turns on the radio, and the men move to the front of the bus, broad shoulders and hats huddle together to listen. The weather forecast and announcements are about to begin. The driver turns up the volume to drown out the rattle of the engine. Hello, this is Radio Reykjavík is heard, then crackling and he turns the knob to find the right wavelength. The sound is bad and I hear that they are looking for a sailor on a boat. Ready to weigh anchor. Then there is a hiss and the speaker is cut off. The men spread around the bus again and light cigarettes.

I turn the page. Stephen Dedalus is drinking tea as the coach driver overtakes the Ferguson tractor that had passed us when the child was throwing up. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk.

How many pages would it take to overtake the tractor if James Joyce were a passenger on the coach to Reykjavík?

Mother whales

The last stop is at the diner in Hvalfjördur where a boat is pulling in with two sperm whales. They’re tied to either side of the gunwale, each whale exceeding the length of the boat, sea foam swirling over their black carcasses. The vessel sways in the breaking waves; compared to the giant mammals, it looks like a flimsy toy floating in a bathtub. The driver is the first to abandon the bus, followed by the passengers. A pungent stench wafts from the boiling pots of blubber and the travellers scurry into the diner. They’re selling asparagus soup and breaded chops with potatoes and rhubarb jam, but I haven’t got a job yet and I have to watch my spending, so I buy a cup of coffee and slice of pound cake. On my way back to the coach, I pick two handfuls of blueberries.

At the whaling station, a middle-aged man joins the group of passengers. He’s the last one to step on the coach, surveys the group, spots me and wants to know if the seat beside me is free. I move the dictionary and he tips his hat slightly as he sits. When the coach drives off, he lights a cigar.

“All we need now is some dessert,” he says. “What one wouldn’t do for a box of darn Anthon Berg chocolates.”

He popped over to Hvalfjördur to visit an acquaintance who owns all the frigging whales in the sea, he says, and they ate some chops together.

“They’ve carved up five hundred whales this summer. No wonder Icelanders call the smell of shit the smell of money.” Then he turns to me.

“Might I ask you for your name, miss…?”

“Hekla.”

“How perfectly befitting. Hekla doth rise high and sharp to the heavens.”

He examines the book I am holding.

“And you read foreign books?”

“Yes.”

One of the sperm whales has been dragged up a concrete slipway into the carving yard, where it lies in one piece, a giant black carcass as big as the Dalasýsla Savings Bank back home. Bare-handed young men in waders and jeans immediately attack the beast, brandishing giant blades in the air, and are already busy