“Maybe I can get a job as an air hostess,” I say to my friend.
I tell her I went to the Air Iceland office on Lækjargata and that I’d been told I’m the right material.
“They said it would be preferable if I participated in a beauty contest first, but that’s not a condition.”
My friend peruses me.
“I know that man’s oldest dream is to fly and that you want to see the clouds from above and the stars up close, but I know what you’re thinking, Hekla. You can’t just step off the plane and make yourself vanish like Jón John. Who’s going to look after the passengers on their way home?”
She looks worried.
“And another thing, Hekla, not all the planes come back. Remember what happened to the Hrímfaxi plane last Easter. Now there’s only Gullfax left.”
She pours coffee into the cups.
“Besides, some of the stars are long dead, Hekla. The light takes ages to travel.”
The poet says the same thing when I get home from visiting Ísey and I tell him I’m looking around for another job.
He takes a deep breath, pumping up his cheeks with air.
“Air hostesses? Is that to get abroad? Away from me?
“Are you going to visit the freak?”
Eternity is a Ferguson
“People in the capital aren’t as amazing as they think they are,” is the first thing my brother Örn says to me. “People in Reykjavík don’t know how to work,” he continues.
My brother is in town for a meeting of the Progressive Party Youth Movement and is planning on using the opportunity to go on a drinking binge and to check out the bars. We arranged to meet on Sunday morning at the Farmers’ Association building in Hagatorg where he is staying at the party’s expense. He’s completed agricultural college and aims to drain the land and expand our father’s sheep farm and turn it into the biggest in the district. He is sitting at a white tableclothed table in his suit and dress shoes, with brilliantined hair and a liquorice tie. He still has bad skin. I sit opposite him. Born on the same day as the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he is too young to buy alcohol or to get into bars. He therefore carries his own bottle of vodka in his jacket pocket and pours trickles into his glass of coke at regular intervals.
“The goal is to make all the ewes have three lambs each,” he says, topping up his glass.
He orders a bowl of cauliflower soup and another glass of coke. With a straw.
I have coffee.
“Were you out boozing?” I ask.
He said he’d traipsed over to the Klúbbinn, Rödul and Glaumbær bars and intended to find a girlfriend but couldn’t get in.
He’s not impressed by what he’s seen of Reykjavík, however.
“Now women are supposed to look like little girls with their body shape and clothes; flat-chested, no waist, no hips and no calves. It’ll probably end with me having to advertise for a housekeeper?” he says, taking another slurp from his glass.
“No shrinking violet, mind you,” he adds. “She has to be energetic and know how to drive a tractor down to the milk churn stand.”
He switches the topic to wholesalers.
“They’re raking in the money with foreign biscuits and bakery products, by squandering and wasting in other words, instead of boosting agriculture at home.”
It occurs to me that he and the poet would have a number of things to talk about.
The next question concerns the poet as it happens because he wants to know if it’s true that I live with a communist.
He doesn’t wait for an answer, but instead asks me if I’m writing a novel.
I nod.
“My sister is the only writer who knows how to clear up a sheep shed.”
I smile.
To my brother, eternal bliss is a solid durable tractor and time is measured by the lambs that are led to the slaughterhouse in the autumn.
He’s become visibly drunk.
Finally he stands up on wobbly feet and asks me to call him a taxi because he’s going out clubbing. Instead I follow my brother up to his room help him get into bed. He lets himself drop onto the mattress without protesting. The Icelandic wrestling champion won’t be finding himself a woman on this city trip.
“I heard you being born,” I say as I help him out of his shoes.
“I miss Mum,” he mutters.
“Me too.”
Then I suddenly remember how obsessed with death my brother was after Mum died. If I caught so much as a cough, he’d say there was a fair chance that I was dying.
“I went to see a medium,” I hear him say under the duvet. “With Dad. Mum came through and told me not to be worried. In her voice. Everything would be fine. Most of the ewes had two lambs that year, some even three.”
He drawls.
“She also mentioned you. She said that some people were born out of themselves. Like you. She sent her regards to you and said… that there needs to be… chaos in the soul to be able to give birth to a dancing star… Whatever that means…”
Winter-boots box
I immediately realize something has happened when I step out of Hotel Borg and see the poet standing by the statue of our independence hero. He rushes over to me with an urgent air.
“Hekla dear,” he says and embraces me.
Then, just as swiftly he lets go of me, and doesn’t look me straight in the eye when he says:
“It’s Odin.”
He speaks slowly, carefully choosing every word.
“What about her?”
“She got run over.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yes, Hekla. The woman who lives next door said she was coming out of the milk store and walked past a cat that had been run over. She thought she saw a red van quickly drive away. Someone called the police and they came and put her down. She said she
