“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
She scrutinizes me.
“Who?”
“A librarian from the library in Thingholtsstræti. He’s a writer as well,” I add.
“Like you?”
“He doesn’t know I write.”
“Haven’t you told him you’ve been published?”
“That was under a pseudonym.”
It had actually been Ísey who had come up with the idea that I take on a poet’s name, the way male poets do. “Preferably something fancy like Hekla Zenith,” she suggested.
“No,” I said, laughing.
She wouldn’t give in.
“Isn’t there some dale, some stream, some spot that you can name yourself after? If you want to go for something fancy we need to delve deeper, how about Deep Canyon…?”
“No.”
“That was tongue in cheek by the way,” she now says.
She studies me.
“Didn’t you tell the poet you were writing a novel either?”
“No.”
“And have completed two manuscripts?”
“I haven’t had an answer from the publisher.”
“What do you do together?”
“We sleep together.”
I’m relieved she hasn’t asked whether I prefer to write or sleep with him, which is the most important: the bed or the Remington typewriter?
That’s her next question.
“Which do you want the most, to have a boyfriend or write books?”
I give it some thought. In my dream world the most important things would be: a sheet of paper, fountain pen and a male body. When we’ve finished making love, he’s welcome to ask if he can refill the fountain pen with ink for me.
She has a serious air and gazes beyond me.
“Women have to choose, Hekla.”
“Both in equal measure,” I answer. “I need to be both alone and not alone,” I add.
“That means that you are both a writer and ordinary, Hekla.”
“We just met. I’m not about to get married.”
She hesitates.
“I know you think I don’t lead a very exciting life but I love Lýdur. I’m no longer just me, Hekla. I’m us. I’m Lýdur and Thorgerdur.”
When I say goodbye to my friend and embrace her, she says:
“If it’s a girl I’ll call her Katla. That’ll make two volcanoes.”
There’s a full moon with a corona over the island of Örfirisey as I head towards Skólavördustígur.
Scrapbook two
I’ve finished work and am on my way home to write when I notice a girl with a beehive hairdo, standing shivering in the breeze on the other side of the street, with her eyes glued to the revolving door of Hotel Borg.
When she spots me, she walks straight over and introduces herself as a friend of Sirrí’s who has asked her to put me in the picture.
“What picture?”
“Miss Iceland. She told me they’ve been swarming around you.”
I tell her I won’t be taking part in the contest.
“She didn’t exactly say you would be taking part, but that your mind was elsewhere and she felt you wouldn’t be a waitress for long. She said that she could sense a restlessness in your soul and thinks you might want to go abroad.”
She wants us to walk and go sit in Skálinn.
“They told me I would get to go abroad too, but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t sent to Long Island as they’d promised.”
On the way, she glances over her shoulder several times, as if she expected someone to be following.
When we’re sitting at Skálinn and I’ve ordered coffee with sugar cubes and my companion a twisted doughnut and a Sinalco, she tells me she works at the switchboard of the Hreyfill cab company and that the station is busiest when the boys come back onshore off the trawlers. They spend their money on taxis. One ordered a cab and had himself driven all the way north to Blönduós.
“He sat with a bottle of liquor in the back and drank. When it was finished, he dozed off and slept for most of the way. In Blönduós he wanted chops with fat, but it was Holy Thursday and everywhere was closed. The taxi driver knocked on the priest’s door and was allowed to phone home to speak to his wife, who called a relative who was married to a woman who had a sister living in Blönduós. She fried some chops in breadcrumbs for the sailor, after which he was driven back to town and the boat. He slept all the way back.”
She sips on the bottle of Sinalco and looks me over.
“No, you don’t look like the kind of woman who stands in front of a mirror admiring her high cheekbones,” she says, biting into the doughnut.
She next turns to the contest itself and says that there had been twelve girls and that there were five men on the jury.
“They had to postpone the contest three times because of rain and wind.”
She sips from the bottle again.
“We were in swimsuits on a wooden platform. There were puddles of water on the stage and one girl slipped and twisted her ankle. We had to hold each other up. I caught a cold and then a bladder infection.”
I gaze out the window: it’s getting dark and people are rushing home from work, a man clutches his hat in the wind.
“My boyfriend was proud all the same. He stood there in the grounds and clapped when I walked down the runway and did a spin. The stage was quite far away and he said it was difficult for him to make out which girl I was, but that he recognized my green swimsuit.”
She chews on the doughnut and continues.
“Only problem was that I was in a yellow swimsuit.”
She shuts up, brushes the crumbs off the table into the palm of her hand and places them on the plate.
“He doesn’t know what I got into,” she says in a low voice.
Once she has pushed the coffee cups aside and convinced herself that there are no crumbs left on the table, she reaches for her bag, pulls out a photo album and places it on the table.
“Here’s the story of the contest in words and pictures,” she says, moving to my side of the table and cautiously opening the album.
“This one won,” she says, and reads the
