A swinging door
The next day the librarian is sitting at a corner table at Hotel Borg.
He’s alone, holds a book in his hand, smokes a pipe and watches me. He orders a fourth cup of coffee and smiles at me every time I hand him a new cup. I notice he’s reading Sveinbjörn Egilsson’s translation of the Odyssey. There is also a notebook with a black cover and a fountain pen beside him on the table. I observe how he occasionally opens it, uncaps the pen and scribbles a note.
I look the owner of the Mont Blanc in the eye.
“Starkadur,” he says assertively, thrusting out his hand.
I can’t resist.
“Are you writing?”
He nods and says he works at the library for half the day, but that otherwise he writes poetry and has been working on a short story. It transpires that he’s had one poem published in the Eimreid magazine.
The head waiter has appeared; he takes me by the shoulder and ushers me away from the table.
“The ladies by the window are out of sugar cubes, Miss Hekla.”
When I return to the kitchen, he is waiting for me.
“Waitresses aren’t supposed to fraternize with customers. I can see perfectly well what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?”
“Flirtation. We all know what that leads to. Girls get pregnant and quit.”
“He’s a poet,” I say.
“Poets get girls pregnant too.”
He holds the swinging door into the room open with one hand and tips his head in the direction of a man sitting by the window.
“Instead of falling for a penniless poet you could catch a better suitor. There are loads of single men who need a woman to brighten up their lives. There by the window, for example, is a newly qualified and unattached engineer who owns an apartment in Sóleyjargata and a second-hand Ford.”
Guardian woman
The librarian stays put until I’ve finished my shift, then springs to his feet and asks if he can walk with me. We first walk over to Lækjartorg, where a cold wind blows in from the sea, then we wander aimlessly south of the Lake towards Skothúsvegur. On the way, he tells me that there are books by 706 Icelandic authors in the library, a total of 71,719 books.
He wants me to guess which genre is the most popular among members.
“Poetry books?” I ask.
The poet laughs.
“Novels.”
He explains that women read novels and since they make up the majority of members, novels are the books that are lent out the most. Books on historical subjects and national issues are the most popular among men, on the other hand. The third most popular category of books are those about distant countries.
“Both men and women are curious to know about what things are like abroad,” he says, winding up his report.
I ask him which novels are taken out the most.
He ponders a moment.
“That would probably be children’s books by Ragnheidur Jónsdóttir and the rural novels of Gudrún frá Lundi,” he says with some reluctance.
“Books by two women,” I say.
He hesitates.
“Yes, that’s true actually, now that you mention it. Which is pretty weird considering there are so few female novelists in Iceland and they’re all bad.”
The topic of the library has been exhausted, but once we’ve walked over to Tjarnargata, the librarian halts by a corrugated-iron building and says that this is the headquarters of the Icelandic socialists and that he attends meetings there. The Youth Movement. A placard in the window reads Fight against capitalism.
Suddenly we’re in the graveyard along Sudurgata. The lychgate creaks. The earth is a decaying swamp, there is death at every step. Nature is an open grave.
“This is where the poets rest,” says my guide. “Even the immortal ones.”
“Yes, I say, the dead all look alike.”
The librarian glances at me and is on the point of saying something but stops, and instead waltzes between the tombstones looking for various resting places. Despite having the rhymes and poetic quotations of both Benedikt Gröndal and Steingrímur Thorsteinsson at his fingertips, he can’t find his way to them; the poets won’t give themselves away.
“They should be here somewhere,” he says, unable to conceal his disappointment. “They were here the other day when I came here with Dadi Dream-fjörd.”
The dark autumn evening seeps out of the earth and I’m cold. Wet, yellowing grass brushes against my ankles. I think of Mum.
“Isn’t the novelist Theodóra Thoroddsen buried here?” I ask.
The librarian is distracted and by no means certain, but says he fully expects she is resting with her husband Skúli. Darting between the tombstones and skimming through the epitaphs, he is unable to contain his joy when he stumbles on Thorsteinn Erlingsson. He calls me over and fervently breaks into “The Snow Bunting”:
“Her voice was so fair and so warm and so pure
Warbling to me from this tiny wee bush…
and night after night she chanted love poems alone…”
In the middle of the cemetery is a tombstone belonging to a woman who died in 1838 and strikes me because of the length of its inscription:
… was the mother of five children who died at a young age, as strong as two giants, a protector of the poor, caring mother, sincere, good hearted…
“She’s the guardian of this cemetery, the first to be buried here,” says my guide, sidling up to me. He looks at me and I can sense there is something weighing on him:
“Actually I was going to invite you to the pictures this evening,” he says. “I’ve been manning myself up,” he adds.
“They’re showing a Fellini movie in the Austurbær Cinema, Cleopatra in the New Cinema, Two Women with Sophia Loren in the Old Cinema and Lawrence of Arabia in Tónabíó,” he rattles off.
“I want to see To Kill a Mockingbird which they’re screening in Stjörnubíó at nine,” I say.
I’d seen the book on display in the window of the Snæbjörn Bookstore in Hafnarstræti.
“The book is by a woman,” I say. “Harper Lee.”
I surprise him.
He looks
