I smile at him and feed another sheet into the typewriter.
He stands behind me and watches me write.
“Am I in the story?”
“You are and you aren’t.”
“I don’t belong to any group, Hekla. They forgot to take me into account.”
He sits on the sofa and I stand up and go sit beside him.
“Make me a chapter in a novel so that my life can have some meaning. Write about a boy who loves boys.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And who can’t stand violence.”
I nod.
“They’re certainly colourful,” says the poet, as I’m putting up the curtains that Jón John made in Skólavördustígur. “Like a sunset and violet Mt Akrafjall all rolled into the same curtains.”
He turns off the light.
“I don’t mind if you hang out with the queer.”
“Did you know, Hekla,” my sailor had said to me as he watched me writing, “that the typewriter was invented fifty-two times?”
Curtain number two
Ísey has hung nappies outside on the line in the frost where they dangle frozen solid, I take them down and carry them inside with the pegs.
She thanks me and says she forgot the laundry.
“Remember the woman neighbour I told you about who was awake one night when I stood at the kitchen window and looked over at me?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“It’s been three months now and no curtains have been put up in the living-room window yet. I met her at the fish shop yesterday, she was behind me in the line and waited while the fishmonger was wrapping up my fish and joking with me. I thought to myself: there are women who are alone with children in other houses as well, and I wanted to suggest that we could take turns in boiling haddock and running over to each other with dinner before the men got home. Maybe I’ll invite her over for coffee and some fruitcake. Apart from you, she’d be the first person to come for a visit after I moved to the city. As I get bigger, the fishmonger will stop jesting with me. Then men will stop looking at me. They don’t look at a woman in a maternity coat.”
As we’re talking, Ísey feeds her daughter milk from a bottle.
“When I came home from the fish shop, I sat down to write a few lines while Thorgerdur had her afternoon nap. Before I knew it, I’d written a story, Hekla.”
“A short story or…?”
“It’s about the woman in the next house. I made her walk out with a restless child at night. I made it have a tummy ache. I made it a bright summer night. I made the baby fall asleep. I made the woman walk around the neighbourhood and see men coming out of an apartment carrying a rolled-up carpet with something inside it and she realizes it’s a human body. The crime baffles the police, but then the woman steps in and solves the mystery. I made her find clues in the sandpit, which the men had overlooked because police officers don’t search playgrounds. No one believes her. I used one line from my own life in the story, something Lýdur had said to me: Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Ísa. I make the police officer who is taking her statement say that to her. Good job nobody knows the nonsense I get up to in broad daylight.”
She shakes her head.
“I don’t know what came over me. How it occurred to me to murder people. The man in the stationery shop is getting to know me. At first I used to come once a month, now it’s once a week.”
She is silent for a moment.
“When I get an idea, it feels like a slight electric current from the faulty cord of an iron.”
Then she asks:
“Do you notice anything new?”
I look around.
No new paintings have appeared since the last time.
“The curtains?”
She smiles.
“I just got a new potted plant. A begonia.”
Twenty-third night
I’m awake.
The poet is sleeping.
Apart from the vault of stars the world is black.
A sentence comes to me and then another, then an image, it’s a whole page, it’s a whole chapter and it struggles like a seal in a net inside my head. I try to fix my gaze on the moon through the skylight, I ask the sentences to leave, I ask them to stay, I need to get up to write, so they won’t vanish. Then the world swells up and for yet one more night, I become greater than myself, I ask the good Lord to help me shrink the world again and to give me a calm, black, still sea, to give me a still-life picture with a Dutch windmill like the calendar they sell in Snæbjörn’s Bookstore or an image of puppies like the one on the lid of the tin of Nóa sweets that Jón John keeps his newspaper cuttings in. I long for and I don’t long, then I long to continue discovering the world every day; I don’t long to boil fish on the Siemens stove and serve the men in Hotel Borg, to walk out of one cloud of cigar smoke into another with a silver tray; I long to read books all day when I’m not writing. The poet knows nothing of the seals that struggle inside me under the eiderdown duvet, but stretches out his hand to me and I allow him, as I release my grip on the words; tomorrow morning they won’t be there any more, I will have lost my sentences by then because every night I lose four sentences.
It takes work to be a poet
The poet is waiting for me when I get home from work and has good news to share.
“They’re going to publish one of my poems in Thjódviljinn.”
His poem ‘The Blazing Red Flame’ had been lying on the desk of the paper’s editor since the spring, he explains to me.
He’s delighted and distracted and pulls me into
