He is silent for a few moments.
“Your mother almost left me once. It was when I took you south to see the eruption of your namesake, but she thought I had taken you too close to the glowing lava.”
Terms used by my father
in Hotel Borg
Pillars of fire
Ocean of fire
Beauteous fire
Sparks of fire
Bolts of fire
Eyes of fire
Cinders of fire
Shower of fire
Atrocity
A north-westerly wind sweeps down Laufásvegur and, as I walk past the American embassy, I notice that the star-spangled banner is flying at half-mast. A small cluster of people stands silently in the cold in front of the three-storey building. Unusually, the poet isn’t in Mokka but at home. He is solemn, with his ears glued to the radio.
The symphony concert has been interrupted to announce an atrocity committed in the outside world.
“President Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas this morning,” he says.
He stands and immediately sits again.
“Last week a new island was born. On your birthday.
“This week a world dies.”
He paces the floor and says the news is still unclear, but that the Russians are believed to be behind the murder.
“People blame the Russians for everything. Not just for the launching pads in Cuba,” he adds.
He puts on his jacket to go to a People’s Front meeting. Odin stands and vanishes behind the door with the poet. The cat has been restless over the past few days. When I stroke her, I feel the kittens.
I need a new ribbon for the typewriter so I don’t write tonight. Instead I lie in bed with Black Feathers.
When the poet returns, he takes off his parka, unbuttons his shirt and says:
“It’s a day of national mourning in Russia. Radio Moscow is playing funeral marches.”
He sits at the desk and writes some words on a sheet, which he then folds.
Is he next going to open the skylight to dispatch a paper plane with an important message about the blood-red revolution down Skólavördustígur? While the wind intensifies and pounds the window, the birds grow silent and the world comes to an end?
He takes off his trousers.
“I’ve got an idea for the opening couplet,” he says as he lifts the duvet.
The following morning he’s torn up the page.
Twelve pages
The poet has quit at the library and started working as a night porter at Hotel Skjaldbreid.
It’s a slightly longer walk down to Kirkjustræti than it is to the library, as the poet points out, but on the other hand, it’s a shorter distance to the Naust bar.
We meet between shift changes like colleagues; he comes home and slides under the duvet at around the same time I’m getting up. This also means that I can write into the night because I’m not disturbing the poet.
He’s stopped reading for me, he’s stopped saying:
“Listen to this, Hekla.”
Instead he wants to know if I’ve written today. And for how long.
“Were you writing?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“How many pages?”
I skim through the manuscript:
“Twelve.”
“You’ve changed so much since we met. If you’re not working, you’re writing. If you’re not writing, you’re reading. You’d drain your own veins if you ran out of ink. Sometimes I feel you only moved in with me to have a roof over your head.”
I slip my arms around the poet.
“Tell me, what do you see in me, Hekla?”
I give it some thought.
He presses me.
“You’re a man. With a body,” I answer.
And I think: He could also certainly hand me a quill
like a flower
that he has plucked from a black bird
wet with blood and say:
Write.
He stares at me in astonishment.
“At least you’re honest.”
He lies down on the bed, fully clothed.
“A poet needs to live in the shadows and experience darkness. There’s a lack of darkness with you, Hekla. You’re light.”
Black
The day no longer manages to pick itself up; it breaks briefly on the crystallized salty window around noon when the red sun rolls over the frozen lake, then darkens again.
“They’ve given her a name,” says the poet.
“Who?”
“The new island. It’s called Surtsey, the black island.”
He cleans out his pipe in the ashtray.
“They say that so far it’s still mostly a heap of black pumice, but lava has now started to flow and the island is piling up.”
The poet is also looking glum because during the day the story broke that some French journalists have stepped onto the island without permission.
And planted a flag.
He’s not at all happy.
“It’s in the paper,” he says, pointing at the article on the front page: Unauthorized newshounds from French gossip magazine Paris Match step onto Surtsey.
“It says they stayed on the island for twenty minutes but then had to escape from explosions and flowing lava.”
He closes the newspaper and puts it down.
“It actually burned pretty fast, the tricolour. The flames from the bowels of the earth set fire to the flag of fraternity.”
He stands up.
“Once an imperial power, always an imperial power, is my communist’s conclusion.”
He then wants to know whether I’ve been to Tómas Jónsson’s butcher shop and bought something for dinner.
Odin’s sons and daughters
I hear some rustling from the kitchen and, when I open the door, see that our neighbour, the mechanic, is crouched down on all fours in front of the kitchen table where my typewriter sits. He’s in blue-striped pyjama trousers. Under the table I catch a glimpse of Odin’s black pelt. When the boat mechanic stands, I count eight kittens sucking on Odin’s swollen pink teats, four black like their mother, three spotted and one white. Our neighbour says that he came into the kitchen during the night to cook himself some prune porridge and saw that two kittens had already been born. He didn’t want to leave the mother until she’d delivered her full litter. It had taken a good four hours and he had to poke one of the kittens on the nose because it wasn’t breathing. That
