I scan the dim living room. It’s fully carpeted and I notice several homemade sheepskin rugs: one in front of a red plush sofa with fringes, another in front of an upholstered armchair, another by the sideboard and yet another in front of the closed glass cabinet that stores the precious china. On the sideboard there is a large picture in a gilded frame of a man wearing a cap. It turns out to be the poet’s father, a steersman on the Godafoss.
She stands in her apron at the edge of the table and watches us eat.
“God, that girl doesn’t…” says the poet’s mother, looking at her only son.
“… eat much,” the poet interjects.
“Mum, don’t you want to sit down?” asks the poet.
She finally relents but barely touches her food.
“What…” she asks.
The rest of the question comes some moments later.
“… family…
“… does the girl come from?”
I tell her.
“And where…
“… does the girl come from?”
“I’m from the west, from Dalir,” I say.
The poet looks at me with gratitude.
“What work does the girl…
“… do?”
Don’t mention the novel writing, the poet had told me on the way.
“I work as a waitress at Hotel Borg,” I say.
“Are you two…?” she asks.
“No, Mum, we’re not engaged.”
“Are you going to get…?”
The poet smiles at me.
“Yes, it could well happen that we’ll exchange rings.”
“Would you like to take…?”
She holds up a cup with a red-and-blue floral pattern and gilded brim.
“No, we won’t take the cup set this time.”
He smiles at me.
“Maybe next time.”
All of the poet’s mother’s attempts at a conversation end mid-sentence.
“He didn’t take…”
“I saw…”
“My Starkadur was…”
The poet completes the sentences for her.
She offers us coffee after the skate fish and brings out a can of peaches.
“Would the girl…?” she asks.
“Would you like peaches?” he asks me.
“Yes, please,” I say.
After the meal we sit on the sofa, the poet lights a pipe and opens a book, as his mother brings me an album which she plants in my arms without saying a word.
I carefully turn the silk pages and glance over the deckle-edged photographs glued to the sheets.
She stands behind me and points to a boy in a woollen cap and boots, sitting on a sledge.
“Starkadur…”
“Pjetur made…”
After I’ve leafed through three albums, she approaches me with a shoebox.
“These are unsorted…” she says.
“Various departed ancestors from the east,” says the poet who is sitting in the armchair with the Saga of the Sworn Brothers.
Each photo is like the next, solemn figures dressed in their Sunday best in the only photo ever taken of them.
The poet’s mother stands behind the sofa and occasionally points. “Pjetur… Kjartan Thorgrímsson… Gudrídur, Starkadur’s great-aunt. Bragia…”
“Dad’s brother in the east,” the poet explains.
The only time the poet’s mother comes close to pronouncing a complete sentence is:
“She is younger than I…”
She puts me in the guest room and her son in his old room. The ironing board stands beside my bed with the Christmas tablecloth draped over it. During the night I cautiously open the door to the poet’s bedroom. He’s awake and immediately lifts the corner of his quilt to make room for me. There is a sheepskin rug to the side of his single bed.
Starkadur the second
When we re-emerge in the morning, the poet’s mother is boiling smoked lamb. She’s got curlers in her hair and offers us home-baked rye bread with rolled meat sausage. A carton of milk stands on the table. She has also arranged home-baked cookies on a plate: butter cookies, half-moon cookies, vanilla wreaths, serina cookies and raisin biscuits. The poet’s older sister is married to a sailor from Skagaströnd and lives in the north, but his younger sister and her boyfriend, a sailor from Thorlákshöfn, are expected for dinner.
“If the roads aren’t blocked,” says the poet who is listening to the weather forecast.
When the poet has finished setting up the Christmas lights for his mother, he wants to show me the scenes of his childhood. The path we take leads up to the churchyard and he walks straight up to the grave where Pjetur Pjetursson rests.
1905–1944, it says on the tomb.
He is silent for a brief moment. Then he says:
“Dad drank when he was on shore and was sometimes quick to lash out.”
Beside the steersman is another tiny grave.
Starkadur Pjetursson, the tombstone reads. Born and died in the same year, 1939.
“My brother,” says the poet.
“He was born a year before me and passed away in a cot death. I’m named after him and I owe my life to his death. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been born, Mum says. He’s Starkadur the first, I’m Starkadur the second.”
He pulls up the collar of his jacket.
“I sometimes feel like I’m lying there and he’s standing here.”
Did you go…?
“Did you go…?”
“Yes, we went to the graveyard, Mum.”
“Did you show…?”
“Yes, I showed Hekla both graves.”
“Did you see…?”
“Yes, the volcanic plume could be seen from the graveyard.”
Since more guests are expected, the dining table needs to be taken apart and extended. The poet fits the extension board, after which his mother spreads out the three-metre tablecloth she ironed while we were in the churchyard.
“Tell the girl…”
“Mum made this tablecloth,” says the poet.
The electricity flickers on and off and at five o’clock, in the middle of the cooking, the power cuts off in the village from the overload. Meanwhile, the rack of lamb waits in the oven.
“It happens…” says the poet’s mother.
“Yeah, it happens every year,” the poet rounds off.
The radio is battery-powered so the announcements can still be heard. A communist doesn’t listen to church services so the poet suggests we move into the bedroom. He wants to show me a poetry book by a poet from the village, who had published eleven books. He double-locks the door.
“Mum likes you,” he says.
He’s pleased.
A short while later there is a knock on the door.
“May I ask the girl to…?”
“Mum wants to know if she can ask you to fold the napkins.”
She shows me where the boys should sit, her son and son-in-law—they
