“You’re the most bookish waitress I’ve ever met.”
That’s the truth. Not necessarily
the reality
We meet outside the cinema at a quarter to nine and he waves the tickets at me. We sink into deep burgundy-leather seats with silver-studded armrests. We’re sitting in the middle of the theatre, the smoky shimmering beam of the projector glowing above us. I try to listen to the language as I read the subtitles on the screen, but it’s difficult. Farming work in America’s Deep South is also quite different from what we’re used to in Dalir. In the middle of the movie, the poet slips an arm around my shoulder.
“I would have expected a woman to choose a different movie,” he says when we walk out.
When I say: “The blacks still aren’t liberated, no more than gays are,” he looks at me as if he were struggling to respond. It’s difficult to fathom what’s going through his head. He has beautiful hands and I’m willing to sleep with him if he asks me to.
Suddenly we’re up on Skólavördustígur where the poet rents a room. A few drunken couples stagger past us here and there, but there are no cars on the road.
“The Mokka café is just a few yards down there,” he says and smiles.
I feel my heart pounding.
He tells me that the room he rents is under a sloping ceiling and that the square metres under the window aren’t actually calculated into the rent. I have to make a quick decision: am I going to go home and write or sleep with the poet?
Certain situations can only be dealt with by removing one’s clothes. I’m not wearing fancy underwear but he doesn’t care, he just wants me out of it as quickly as possible.
Afterwards the poet slips some Shostakovich onto the record player and I glance around the room and the ceiling, which is barely high enough for a grown man, except in the centre.
I mull over when might be the right time to leave and what is the right amount of time to stay.
The poet tells me he’s from Hveragerdi, where his mother lives, and that his father had been a deckhand on the Dettifoss until the boat was struck by a German torpedo in the war and sank.
“I was four years old and my sisters two and six when he died,” he says.
In return I tell him that I’m temporarily living with a male friend while he’s out at sea.
“He’s like a brother to me,” I add.
I’m about to say: He’s my best friend, but stop myself.
By the bed there is a cabinet containing three shelves of books behind a glass door. Unable to resist, I scan the spines. It’s like Dad’s book cabinet. There’s Njál’s Saga and Grettir’s Saga, Sturlunga, Heimskringla and Snorri’s Edda, and Wakeful Nights by Stephan G. Stephansson. One shelf is devoted to anthologies by the national poets with the works of Jónas Hallgrímsson, Steingrímur Thorsteinsson and Hannes Hafsteinn. There are also novels by Laxness, Gunnar Gunnarsson and Thorberg Thordarson, Jón á Bægisá’s translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost and two translated books, Hunger by Hamsun and The Odyssey. All the books are leatherbound.
“Laxdæla is missing,” I say.
The poet raises himself on his elbows.
“Yes, that’s right,” he says after some thinking, “you’re from Dalir.”
He stretches his arm over to me.
I could leave now and write for an hour before I go to work.
Or not.
When I get home, the cat is waiting for me in front of the hall door.
I bend over and stroke it.
The remains of a bird lie scattered on the pavement: a beak, one wing and two feathers.
I need to be alone. Many. Alone
My friend is pensive and seems anxious.
“My life is over, Hekla.”
“What happened?”
“Imagine, a bag of blood burst when we were making blood pudding at my sisters-in-law, Lýdur’s sisters, and splashed all over me. The strange thing is I started to cry. My sisters-in-law stared at me and I felt so ashamed. Hrönn asked me if I was pregnant.”
“And are you? Are you expecting another baby?”
She averts her gaze.
“You must be thinking what have I gotten myself into? Don’t you think it’s awful? I think it’s awful. I’m so happy. I’ve no appetite. I was really looking forward to getting some freshly boiled blood pudding, but I can’t keep anything down. It wasn’t planned, but it’ll be good for Thorgerdur to get a playing companion. Lýdur is happy. He feels one child isn’t a family. A family is nothing less than three children, he says. I haven’t told him I think two is enough.”
I stand up and embrace my friend.
She’s as thin as a rake. I can feel her ribs.
“Congratulations.”
I think: It’s growing in the darkness.
“I knew you’d take it like that. Wonder what I got myself into. I really dreaded telling you.”
I hold her tight.
“It’ll work out.”
“It’s still almost invisible. Then it will grow and need to be born.
“Thorgerdur was four kilos. I’ll die, Hekla. I didn’t realize giving birth was so painful. I was in labour for two days and I had so many stitches I couldn’t sit for three weeks.”
“It’ll be fine.”
She wipes her eyes.
“I’m named after an iceberg. Pack ice flowed into Breidafjördur the spring I was born. Dad wanted to add an island to the fjord and baptized me Ísey, Ice Island.”
She is silent for a moment. Thorgerdur stands in the cot, and holds out her arms, wanting to be lifted. I pick up the child, she needs a change of nappy.
“It was so boxed in back home, the mountain lay on the other side of the field fence, I wanted to go away. I fell in love. I got pregnant. Next summer I’ll be alone with two small children in a basement in Nordurmýri. Twenty-two years old.”
My friend allows herself to drop onto the sofa, but then springs straight up again and says she’s going to make some coffee. I change the girl’s nappy in the meantime.
“Sorry, Hekla, I don’t ask anything about
