Jón John lies on the sofa with his hands cupped under his head when I come to pick up my case. The cat lies at his feet. I tell him the poet is waiting downstairs.
His eyes are swollen.
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Are you sad?”
He turns around and looks at me.
I tell him I need to ask him for a favour. If I can keep my typewriter with him. For a while. And also whether I can come to his place after work to write.
“Doesn’t the poet know that you write? Haven’t you told him?”
“Not yet.”
He peers at me.
“Come away with me, Hekla. Let’s go abroad together.”
“What would I do abroad?”
“Write books.”
“No one can read my books there.”
“I can read them.”
“Yeah, except you.”
“We’re kindred spirits, Hekla.”
I sit on the edge of the sofa.
“It costs money to sail. Where am I supposed to find money for the ticket? My wages are so low. And where would I get the currency?”
“There’s no beauty here. It’s always cold. It’s always windy.”
I stand up. The cat also stands and rubs itself against my legs.
My friend sits up.
“I’ll come every day,” I say.
“Can I mind your cat until I leave for good, Hekla? Before Christmas at the latest. Before the worst weather kicks in and the rusty tub sinks.”
I hug him and tell him he can have the cat.
“Whenever I’m feeling down, I’ll always imagine I’m your cat.”
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” I repeat.
He strokes the cat.
“You’d be the woman I would want to marry, Hekla, if I were normal. But I couldn’t do that to you,” he adds.
The poet carries the case, but en route wants to pop into the library in Thingholtsstræti to make sure all the windows are shut. I wait for him while he walks around the building and takes two steps up the stairway in a single stride to check the door handle.
The wind whirls around the church that is being built on Skólavörduholt and rustles the rubbish. When we get up to the room, soaring engines can be heard.
“That’s Gullfax on its way to Copenhagen,” says the poet.
The plane waits out on the runway. The propellers rumble and then it darts down the tarmac and steel wings glide over the corrugated-iron rooftops.
I think: it only takes six hours to fly abroad on steel wings.
Only music grasps death
The poet has made room for my clothes in the wardrobe and freed some wooden hangers. Apart from what Jón John has bought me, I don’t own many clothes.
“Are four hangers enough?” he asks.
There are a total of four rooms in the loft that are all let out to single men. The poet tells me that one of the neighbours is a theology student at the university, another works at the cement factory and is only home on weekends when he gets drunk on his own and falls asleep. He sometimes sobs but doesn’t cause trouble. The room on the other side of the panel is rented by a boat mechanic who has started going deaf and turns his radio up loud when he’s ashore. He listens to the news and all the weather forecasts of the day, to the Sailor’s Station and to Sailors’ Special Requests on Thursdays. Then he turns up the volume. When the batteries run out, the transistor gives off a loud hiss but sometimes he puts the batteries on the kitchen radiator to make them last longer.
Next the poet wants to show me the communal kitchen, which is shared by the four rooms as is the toilet which has a sink. In the kitchen there is a Siemens cooker and, under the sloping ceiling, a small kitchen table at which I could see myself writing.
“Here you can cook,” says the poet.
The scaffolding around the church of Hallgrímskirkja is visible through the kitchen window and beyond it, fragments of Mt Esja; a white veil of mist severs the mountain in two.
The poet has vacated part of a bookshelf and observes me as I pull books out of my case. He runs a finger over the spines, bewildered.
“Are you reading foreign authors?”
“Yes.”
He picks up Ulysses, opens it and skims through the book.
“That’s 877 pages.”
“Yes.”
“And did you finish it?”
“Yes. I used a dictionary.”
“There aren’t many national authors on your shelf,” he says and smiles.
He stretches out for a book on his section of the shelf.
“It’s all here. With our writers,” he says, patting a cover to add emphasis to his words. “For every thought that is conceived on earth, there is an Icelandic word.”
He smiles at me and puts Einar Benediktsson back on the shelf.
“You don’t bring owls to Athens,” he concludes, and fetches another poetry book from the cabinet.
We sit side by side on the bed. He has one hand on my shoulder, while the other holds Grímur Thomsen. He only lets go of me to turn the page.
“Listen to this,” he says:
“Deep inside you in the marrow
Be it joy or be it sorrow
An Icelandic song resounds”
He closes the poetry book and puts it back on the shelf.
“There’s a bookbinder in a basement here over on Laugavegur, Bragi Bach, who could bind books in leather for you.”
When I’ve finished sorting my books, I put up a photograph of Mum. She has a pensive air and peers out of the picture as if she were trying to decipher the weather or scrutinize a layer of clouds.
My wife’s breast was removed yesterday, Dad wrote in his diary between two entries about the weather.
It didn’t take her long to die.
One day she is baking hot cakes and the next she is gone, in the middle of the lambing season. I was alone with her in the hospital when she died. Dad and my brother were in the sheep shed. She had become unrecognizable and had difficulty breathing. Dark blotches had appeared on her skin. I lay a bouquet of dandelions
