BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Butterflies in November
Hotel Silence
MissICELAND
Auður Ava
Ólafsdóttir
Translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon
Copyright © 2018 by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir
English translation © 2020 by Brian FitzGibbon
Cover art and design by Nathan Burton
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Miss Iceland was first published as Ungfrú Ísland by Benedikt in Iceland in 2018
First published in English in the UK by Pushkin Press in 2020
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: June 2020
ISBN 978-0-8021-4923-7
eISBN 978-0-8021-4924-4
Designed and typeset by Tetragon, London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
Black Cat
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20 21 22 23 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory
of my parents
There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without significance.
(FIRST EPISTLE OF PAUL THE APOSTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS)
One must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.
(NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA)
CONTENTS
Cover
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
—I—
Motherland
—II—
Author of the day
Notes on Quotations
Reading Group Questions
Back Cover
Nothing is still or dead in the entrails of the earth, for that is where the most powerful and menacing of the elements rages, and that is fire.
(JÓNAS HALLGRÍMSSON, FJÖLNIR LITERARY JOURNAL, 1835)
1942
The room of the one who gave birth to me
I stumbled across an eagle’s nest when I was five months pregnant with you, a two-metre rough cavity of flattened lyme-grass on the edge of a cliff by the river. Two pudgy eaglets were huddled up inside it. I was alone and an eagle circled above me and the nest. It flapped its wings heavily, one of which was tattered, but refrained from attacking. I assumed it was the female. She followed me all the way to the edge of the farm, a black shadow looming over me like a cloud that obscured the sun. I sensed the baby would be a boy and decided to name him Örn—Eagle. On the day you were born, three weeks before your time, the eagle flew over the farm again. The old vet that had come to inseminate a cow was the one who delivered you; his final official duty before retiring was to deliver a baby. When he came out of the cow shed, he took off his waders and washed his hands with a new bar of Lux soap. Then he lifted you into the air and said:
“Lux mundi.
“Light of the world.”
Although he was accustomed to allowing the female to lick its offspring unassisted, he started to fill the blood-pudding mixing tub to bathe you. I saw him roll up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and dip an elbow into the water. I watched them—the vet and your father—stoop over you with their backs to me.
“She’s her father’s daughter,” your father said. Then he added and I clearly heard him: “Welcome, Hekla dear.”
He had already decided on the name without consulting me.
“Not a volcano, not the gateway to hell,” I protested from the bed.
“These gateways have to be allowed to be somewhere on this earth,” I heard the vet say.
The men pressed together to hunch down over the tub again and took advantage of my defencelessness, my aching pain.
I didn’t know when I got married that your father was obsessed with volcanoes. He would submerge himself in books with descriptions of volcanic eruptions, correspond with three geologists, have foreboding dreams about eruptions, live in the constant hope of seeing a plume of smoke in the sky and feel the earth tremble under his feet.
“Perhaps you’d like the earth to crack open at the bottom of our field?” I asked. “For it to split in two like a woman giving birth?”
I hated lava fields. Our farmland was surrounded on all sides by thousand-year-old lava fields that had to be clambered over to go pick blueberries; you couldn’t stick a fork into a single potato patch without striking a rock.
“Arnhildur, the female eagle,” I say from under the cover that your father pulls over me. “The one who is born to wage battles. There are barely twenty eagles living in this country, Gottskálk, I add, but more than two hundred volcanoes.” That was my last card.
“I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee,” your father said. That was his compromise. He had made up his mind. I turned the other way and shut my eyes, I wanted to be left in peace.
Four and a half years after you were born, Hekla erupted after its one-hundred-and-two-year slumber. That’s when your father finally got to hear the roaring explosion he had been pining to hear in the west in the Dalir district, like the distant echo of the recently ended world
