“I got Stefnir, the Brook Bard, to read over the poem and he liked it and mentioned in particular my twofold reference to the netherworld of Hel: hellishly cold hands, infernally deep sand… as morning dawns. He suggested I substitute one word and instead of saying ‘Till death comes to fetch you’, I write ‘Till death comes to haunt you’. ‘You only have to adjust one word,’ he said.”
“Yes, that has a different ring to it,” I say.
The poet halts and sits on the bed. He’s having second thoughts.
“Now I think I should have changed two words in the line that starts with ‘assuage the wound’ and ends with ‘crepuscular gasping of mantled hopes’.”
He reads the poem to himself.
“Then it’s a question of whether it should be mighty or almighty…”
He lights his pipe and fetches a poetry book from the cabinet and skims through it in search of a particular poem. The poet has recently switched from Chesterfield cigarettes to a pipe. He reads a few lines in silence, then closes the book and puts it aside.
“I’ll never grasp the winter of death,” he says and stands up.
He says he’s thinking of maybe popping down to the editor of Thjódviljinn to see if the paper has already gone to the printers.
“Isn’t it all right the way it is?”
“All right isn’t good enough, Hekla.”
He sits on the bed again and rubs his face in his hands.
“The text is too loose. The opening is predictable, there’s a lack of precision in the choice of words, it lacks depth, it lacks the pithiness of the form. It would be best to postpone publication. I’m going to ask them to delay publication.”
I sit beside him, put my arm around him.
“I don’t know where I stand with the other poets, Hekla. I just know I have a chair at the table in Café Mokka.”
He gazes beyond me.
“I feel they look on me as one of the group and yet I’m not quite one of the group. Then I showed Stefnir the poem, he patted me on the shoulder and told me I had it in me.”
I stroke his hair.
“I’ll never be as good as Stefnir. I’m no match for him. I’m promising but nothing more.”
He shakes his head.
“Stefnir read the first lines of a novel he’s working on at Naust last night.”
The poet walks the length of the floor and then walks back. He’s searching for the right words. He stops in front of me and stares at me.
“It’s better than anything either Laxness or Thórbergur Thordarson write. We might be talking about a new Nobel Prize winner, Hekla.”
“Has he had anything published?”
“Not yet.”
“Isn’t that because he can’t stop boozing and his output is so low?”
The poet acts as if he hasn’t heard me.
He marches over to the window and is silent for a moment.
“It takes work to be a poet, Hekla. Inspiration isn’t about output. Output is what you get when you work at unloading a ship or digging a ditch. Working in a cement factory or whaling centre gives one output. Constructing bridges gives one output. Being a poet isn’t about output.”
He picks up his pipe from the ashtray and relights it.
“A true poet sacrifices his personal life for the calling. Stefnir isn’t engaged. Unlike some poets I have a girlfriend to take care of.”
“Are we engaged?”
“No, but it might come to that.”
He smiles.
“On the other hand, it so happens that the poets are green with envy about me. I told them you’d been invited to participate in Miss Iceland and they wanted to know what it was like living with a beauty queen.”
“And how is it?”
He walks over to wrap his arms around me.
“Since a woman has moved in, I felt the need to put up a mirror.”
I look around and see that a small mirror has appeared on the wall, beside the wardrobe.
“Is it too high up?” he anxiously asks, as he walks to the turntable, pulls a record out of its sleeve and slips on “Love Me Tender”.
The needle rasps.
“If the poets only knew that I listen to Elvis with my girlfriend. Can I ask my darling muse for a dance?”
White
I’ve been waiting at the basement door for a good long while, without anyone coming to the door, and am about to turn back when Ísey comes walking between the patches of ice with the pram. She’s pale and her cheeks are cold.
“I wanted to see people,” she says. “So I went out to visit the painter at his studio. I wanted to tell him that I understood him. I walked all the way because prams aren’t allowed on the bus, both because they’re jam-packed and because they catch on nylon stockings and make them ladder.”
I help her in with the child and the pram and she pulls the girl out of her overalls and removes her hat. She sticks the bottle into a pot to warm it up and then says she’s going to make coffee. Her pregnancy is beginning to show, a small bump is forming under her skirt. It occurs to me that the pinafore dress from Jón John might fit her.
“Did you meet the painter?”
“Yes, and he was very friendly. He shook my hand with his callused hand. ‘From the handles of the paintbrushes,’ he said.
“I told him I had three of his paintings and described them to him. He immediately knew which ones they were and said there were still jars, turpentine and rags stuck in the lava cracks of a mound where he had painted one of them.
“He also told me that there were scrape marks in the painting from the handle of the brush and that if I rub one of the paintings with paraffin oil, I’d find another painting underneath. No one knew about it but him. And me. And now you, Hekla. I held Thorgerdur in my arms and he said she was a beautiful child, even though she
