He wants to know what it means.
“I’m just giving him my support. He’s so badly treated on board. And he gets seasick.”
“You’re my girlfriend. I’m not willing to lend you out. Not even on Sailors’ Special Requests.”
He turns it over in his mind.
“It wasn’t even a waltz like the other sailors were getting, but a Beatles song: ‘Love Me Do’. It stood out.”
He turns off the radio, swiftly crosses the floor and then comes straight to the point.
“Have you slept together?”
I ponder on the words slept together in relation to our escapade on the geranium patch behind the sheep shed.
“Once.”
“Oh, my God… I don’t believe this.”
He scuttles back and forth across the room, clutches his head, opens the skylight and immediately closes it again, searches through the pile of records, takes one out of its sleeve, stops himself from putting Shostakovich on the turntable and puts the record back into its sleeve, looks for a book on the shelf, hesitates and finally pulls out Bishop Vídalín’s Sermons for the Home. Was he going to find an answer from God? He quickly fumbles through the book, then replaces it in the cabinet and struts over to the desk.
“I thought he wasn’t into women.”
“It happened when we were teenagers.”
I think.
“We wanted to see what it was like. There was nothing else behind it.” I could have added: We didn’t take all our clothes off.
“How long ago was it?”
“Five years ago.”
“Was he the first?”
“Yes.”
“And you were probably his first love too?”
“I wouldn’t say love…”
At least not Oh, my dearest love, I think to myself.
He interrupts me.
“Women never forget the first one.”
“Like I said, we were just kids.”
“And you’ll always be the only woman in his life…”
I say nothing.
“Isn’t that definite?”
“He also has a mother…”
I walk over to him and embrace him.
“Sorry.”
I stroke his cheek.
“Let’s not make a drama out of this.”
The poet has calmed down and turns on the radio. They’re broadcasting a violin concerto performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.
When he has finished stuffing his pipe, he stretches out to a bookshelf and pulls out Hunger by Hamsun.
“Mum sometimes used to make Royal Chocolate Pudding,” he says. “All you need is a whisk and a bowl.”
From your consciousness to my lips
The wind is picking up, a storm is breaking out and the cat is nowhere to be seen. I call her but she doesn’t answer. After I’ve searched the neighbourhood, it occurs to me to take a look around Stýrimannastígur, but she isn’t there either. On the way home, I pass by Café Mokka to find out if the poet knows anything about the kitten-laden Odin. As far as I can make out, there is a squirming earthworm in the snow on the pavement, which is odd for this time of the year.
I make a beeline to the table where the poets are sitting. Silence strikes the group as I appear.
The poets huddle together on the bench to make room for me, but I tell them I won’t be stopping. Starkadur stands up and I talk to him in hushed tones.
He knows nothing about Odin.
“I’ll see you later,” he says with one eye on the poets as he talks to me. They’re observing us in silence.
“I found that a bit awkward,” says the poet, when he comes home late that night. “When you suddenly appeared. Like you were collecting me.”
He removes his sweater and combs his hand through his hair.
“We were discussing Steinn Steinarr,” he says, grabbing hold of me. “From my consciousness to your lips lies a trackless ocean. But they thought you were cute. I was beaming with pride when you appeared in a red beret and long tossed hair. Ægir, the Glacier Poet, said you looked like a member of the French Resistance, but Dadi Dream-fjörd said you reminded him of a young untamed mare.”
He smiles at me.
“I have the most beautiful girlfriend by far.”
He sits on the bed and wriggles up to me. Then he assumes a stern air again.
“Stefnir’s had a tough time lately.”
“Oh?”
“He lost the manuscript he was working on. He managed to forget it in Naust. Apart from the opening lines he’d read to us, he didn’t want anyone to see it, but said it was almost finished. It just needed proofreading.
“When he remembered it a few days later and went to pick it up, it had disappeared and no one in the place remembered seeing it. He might have left it somewhere else, he now thinks, but can’t remember where. Maybe in the cloakroom of Hotel Holt. He’s gone to his mother’s at Hvolsvöll to drown his sorrows.”
Then he turns to me.
“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”
He smiles at me and pulls the Odyssey off the bookshelf.
“You’re my Penelope.”
That night I think I hear meowing outside the hall door downstairs.
I sit up.
“I’ll go down and open, Hekla dear,” says the poet.
Laxfoss
D.J. Johnsson doesn’t return to the Laxfoss boat in Rotterdam.
The crew was too drunk to notice when he disappeared and no one on board knew what became of him. The ship sailed off without him.
“He won’t get a place again,” says the captain, when I ask about the fate of my sailor.
I’m allowed to phone his mother from the hotel. She remembers me well, the Dalir lass. I tell her I’ve put a box on the coach for her and she asks me whether I think her son will ever come back again. I say I don’t know. She describes D.J. as good and kind and speaks of him in the past tense as if he were dead. He had brown eyes and dark hair, she says. He picked violets and put them in vanilla extract bottles because he wanted our home to look nice. He drew rainbows. There was nothing he couldn’t do with his hands. I bought material for curtains and when I came home one day, he’d sewn them and put them up in the kitchen. He was ten years old. I hadn’t
