“Mum was forty-eight when she died,” I tell the poet.
“Only music can grasp death,” Dad said before closing himself off to write a description of the day’s weather.
Calm. Temperature: 8°. Steinthóra Egilsdóttir, my wife of twenty years, was buried today. Thirty-three ewes have delivered. Fields under sheets of ice, horses scouring for nibbles. The Arctic skua hunts for food. Long bouts of unpredictable weather cause winterkill. Nevertheless, the flow of streamlets can now be heard resounding across the valley. There was a heavy murmur in the deep narrow channels of the river today.
“Did you know, Hekla dear,” says Dad, “that it was Jónas Hallgrímsson who invented the Icelandic words for space, himingeimur and heiðardalur. It took a nineteenth-century poet to create the Great Beyond.”
The poet wraps his arms around me:
“Shouldn’t one get curtains now that one has a girlfriend,” he says.
MORNING RADIO 8:00. LUNCHTIME NEWS 12:00.
OFF-TIME, SAILORS PROGRAMME.
AFTERNOON NEWS
15:00. ANNOUNCEMENTS
18:50. WEATHER FORECAST
19:20. NEWS 19:30.
20:00: OPUS 13: STENKA RAZIN SYMPHONIC
POEM IN B MINOR BY GLAZUNOV PERFORMED
BY THE MOSCOW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA.
22:00: NEWS AND WEATHER FORECAST
The poet doesn’t have to show up at the library until the afternoon so he can have a lie in. Nevertheless, he’s awake and watches me getting dressed in the dark. Before I go out, he buttons up my coat as if I were a little child.
A man is taking care of me.
The morning is half gone by the time daylight finally creeps into the night like a pale pink line.
After work I walk down to Stýrimannastígur where I keep the typewriter and see Jón John and Odin, and write, while the poet meets up with his fellow poets in Café Mokka. If he’s not drinking coffee in Mokka, he’s at Hressingarskálinn. If he’s not at Skálinn, he’s at Laugavegur 11. If he’s not at Laugavegur 11, he’s in the upstairs bar in Naust, where the poets go when other places are closed. If he’s not at Naust, he might be found at the West End Café. Occasionally, he goes to meetings at the Revolutionary Youth Movement in Tjarnargata in the evenings. When he comes home, I immediately put my book aside and we go straight to bed. Before falling asleep, I check to see the colour of the sky.
“Is my maiden from the dales checking out the weather?” the poet asks.
I ask Dad to send me my confirmation duvet. I had an extra half kilo of eiderdown added to it, he writes in a letter in the parcel.
“Every night with you is so immense,” says the poet.
Immortality
It’s Sunday and I need to get to Stýrimannastígur to write.
The poet lies in bed with a folded copy of the Thjódviljinn newspaper, The People’s Will, on his chest.
“What’s developing here is an unadulterated and unbridled form of capitalism in which racketeers steal from the people and profit becomes the only yardstick.”
He stands up, zealously waving his hands about like a man on a pulpit.
“It’s been nineteen years since Iceland gained its independence and wholesalers have taken over from the Danish kings and monopolistic merchants. They’re building shopping malls all over Sudurlandsbraut with the profits from Danish layer cakes.”
I tell the poet I’m going to visit Jón John.
“But you visited him yesterday. And the day before.”
“Yes, he’s sewing a curtain for the skylight.”
He is bewildered.
“And does he have a sewing machine?”
“Yes.”
He peruses me.
“I feel it’s a bit odd that my girlfriend has a male friend whom she visits every day after work. And on weekends.”
He stands by the window, hailstones pelting against the glass.
“If I didn’t know he isn’t into women, I’d be worried about you hanging out with him so much.”
He paces the length of the floor.
“I heard about the two of you at an art exhibition in Listamannaskálinn yesterday.”
“We went to a painting exhibition. Who told you about that?”
“Thórarinn Dragfjörd. He’s one of us, the Mokka poets. He’s read a short story he wrote on the radio.”
“Yes,” I say, “I said hello to him. He spoke about you.”
“Oh?”
“He said you’re very talented and destined to become famous.”
“Did he say that?”
“Yeah.”
He smiles.
“I said the same thing to him the other day. That he’s very talented and destined to become famous.”
He’s visibly moved and has already forgotten that I have a sailor friend.
He sits at the table and lights a Chesterfield before standing up again, walking to the window and gazing out into the blizzard. From there he walks to the bed.
“Should we have a nap before you leave?” he asks. “Then there’s the radio story after lunch,” he adds.
“Aren’t you going to go out to meet the poets?”
“Not this evening. I was thinking I’d take care of my girlfriend.”
He embraces me.
“I thought we could go to a dance at the weekend. In Glaumbær. Do the twist. As couples do.”
He lets go of me to go find Prokofiev in the record collection.
Curtain number one
While my sailor is sewing curtains for a skylight in Skólavördustígur, I sit on the bed with the typewriter on the bedside table and write. We’re in sync; when I finish the chapter, my friend hands me the folded curtains. He had offered to buy the material for me, which is orange with violet diamonds and narrow
