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
