“Because you’re…”
She says this twice at the table.
“You’re practically a daughter-in-law,” the poet interprets.
I praise the strawberry ice cream and the poet’s sister, who is eight months pregnant, passes me the bowl of wafers. The boyfriend is a man of few words, but wants to know what kind of car we came in. He says he has a Ford Taunus Station 62 model with a radio, which he bought with a mileage of 17,000 kilometres. Got it for peanuts, he says. He drops the subject and lights a cigarette when the poet tells him we came by coach. The men soon disappear into a cloud of smoke. While the mother and daughter clear the table, I look through the book cabinet until I find a small collection of poems by Karítas Thorsteinsdóttir. The preface says she moved to the New World at a young age and settled there. I open the book:
I can’t poeticize about Canada,
I don’t know Canada,
Just arrived in Canada,
Feel like this in Canada.
“Happy Christmas, Hekla dear,” says the poet, handing me a parcel.
I unwrap the gift: a cookery book by Helga Sigurdardóttur, the headmistress of the Housewives’ Teachers College of Iceland, Learn to Cook. Then I pick up a Christmas parcel from Dad. It’s a collection of short stories by Ásta Sigurdardóttir.
She’s from Snæfellsnes, Dad writes in the card.
Sleet
By the time we fall asleep, the temperature outside is close to freezing and during the night it starts to rain over the mounds of snow, which turns into sleet before dawn. Around noon it suddenly freezes again causing perilously slippery ice and in the afternoon a blizzard breaks out. By dinner time, it subsides, leaving half a metre of snow. We had planned on returning to town the following day, but temperatures have plummeted to -10°, and the mountain road is impassable. All coach trips are cancelled until after New Year. The poet still thinks he can find us a ride and makes several calls.
“Happy Christmas, it’s Starkadur,” I hear him saying.
Finally he stands up and shakes his head.
“No one is driving over the mountain road until it’s been cleared. It isn’t such a long time to New Year,” he adds unconvincingly. “A few days. Five days to be more precise.”
I skim through the book cabinet in search of something I haven’t read and pull out Mother by Maxim Gorkí. It’s in two volumes, bound in grey linen and retranslated from the German translation of the Russian edition.
Cold smoked meat is served at mealtimes and at coffee there are six kinds of cookies, layer cake, both white and brown, and meringue tart. On New Year’s Eve, the poet’s mother serves shrimp jelly.
On New Year’s night, it starts to rain and by morning the earth has cleared and it’s 10°. A few rockets lay strewn in the village.
The poet has found a ride back to town. He is visibly relieved.
“We’re saved,” he says.
The poet’s mother has referred to me as the girl and addressed me in the third person for seven days.
Until she says goodbye.
Then she strokes my cheek and says:
“Goodbye, Hekla dear, fairest of the mountain queens. When you come in the summer, you’ll get to taste a tomato from the greenhouse.”
We drive behind the snowplough in a Willys jeep that belongs to the priest, a childhood friend of the poet’s who has to pop into town to bury his mother’s sister. He is wearing snow boots and a woollen cap. The poet sits in the front and I in the back with a cake tin in my arms, containing the poet’s favourite cookies. A patchwork quilt, a Christmas gift from the poet’s mother, lies folded in the case. Two electricity pylons are down in Skólavörduholt after the wild weather, a whole chimneystack has collapsed onto Lækjartorg and windows are white from the salty wind.
At night I dream I spot Jón John from behind on the street. I run after him but it’s not him. Everything is bathed in a reddish light.
Why fly,
if not to see God?
Thorgerdur is now wearing glasses.
“I noticed,” Ísey tells me, “how she went up very close to things to see them. She also held on to Lýdur’s ear and put her face right up to his to look at him. It seemed odd, but I thought it was because she saw him so rarely that she felt he was a stranger. But it turns out she’s very short-sighted and needs glasses.”
My friend stands by the cooker in a white polo-neck sweater and the brown pinafore dress from Jón John, with her back turned to me as she puts on some coffee. I sit at the kitchen table with the child in my arms.
She also wants to make me some toast with the toaster Lýdur gave her as a Christmas gift.
“We use it for guests. There aren’t many of those. Just you actually. I also use it for myself and buy half a loaf of white bread and let the butter melt.”
As she’d expected, she and Lýdur got a telephone side table from her parents-in-law for Christmas. She doesn’t mention a camera, but says that they gave her mother-in-law a hair-salon nylon cape.
“I dreamt of Jón John,” I say.
“Do you miss him?”
“He wants me to join him. He says I can live at his place and write.”
“I’ll never go abroad, Hekla. No more than Mum and Granny. What would
