“So she didn’t die instantly then?”
“No, not exactly.”
He hugs me again.
“What did you do with her?”
“Ríkey told me I was welcome to bury her in the bed of pansies in her garden. It wasn’t easy digging after the recent freeze, but we managed in the end. We put her in Ríkey’s husband’s winter-boots box. A normal shoebox wasn’t big enough,” he adds in a low voice.
That night I dream of a cat being run over and I hear the grinding of the bones and crunching of the spine, and then I see the shuddering animal crawl out from under the car with bursting entrails and bloody paws, looking for a shelter in the frozen bed of earth in which to die.
I wake up with a start and sit up. The poet gropes for me in the dark and rests an arm on me.
It has snowed during the night and the next morning a white carpet lies over the flower bed where Odin is buried.
The world is white and pure.
Like a dream.
Like a long-faded memory.
“That’s spring snow,” says the poet.
Some night watchers watch over nothing
but the night
The poet is going to quit his job as a night porter at Hotel Skjaldbreid and try to get a job as a proofreader for a newspaper like Ægir, the Glacier Poet. He lies in bed with his head buried under a pillow. I lift the pillow and he says he has a headache.
“I’m too tired to write at night, Hekla.”
He sits up and looks at me.
“The truth is I can’t think of anything to write about. I have no ideas. Nothing that’s close to my heart. Do you know what it means to be ordinary? No, you don’t know. You’ve got the tumultuous river of life and death flooding through your pages, I’m just a piddling stream. I can’t bear the thought of being a mediocre poet.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Would you be so kind, Hekla dear, as to spare me some words from that treasure chest of yours? Those razor-sharp words that fall like an avalanche over a sleeping town.”
He takes off his trousers.
“Words avoid me, they flee me as swiftly as a cluster of black clouds. It takes only fifteen words to make a poem and I can’t find them. I’m sunk and above me lies the briny surf, the heavy and cold ocean, and my words can’t reach the shore.”
“Don’t you want to go to sleep, Starkadur?”
“What can I write? The sun rises, the sun sets? I have nothing to say, Hekla.”
He wipes his eyes with the pillowcase.
“I know about spring under the snow, about the green grass, about life and I know about death. But I won’t be expanding the beauty of the world. I’m not destined to enhance anything.”
He shakes his head.
“I’ll never be bound in leather.”
After a brief silence, he says:
“Now that Odin is dead, maybe we can eat something other than haddock. Do you know how to make a meat curry? Mum used to make meat curry every now and then.”
When the poet is asleep, I sit at the table and write: The words can’t reach the shore.
Thank you for submitting your novel
to us for our consideration
“You’re from Dalir?”
“Yes.”
“Brought up in the land of the Laxdæla Saga, like the poet Steinn Steinarr?”
“You could say that.”
The publisher sits at a large desk under a cloud of cigar smoke and beckons me to sit opposite him. My manuscript lies on the table.
It had taken three months to get an appointment with him and I had to get permission for time off from work.
“And you sent the manuscript in a shoebox?”
“Yes…”
“That’s quite a few pages.”
He taps his cigar over the ashtray and presses his index finger against the manuscript.
“And you want to be a novelist?”
He doesn’t wait for an answer.
“It’s difficult to place you. This is neither a rural novel nor an urban novel.”
He flicks through the bundle.
“There’s certainly a daring and fearless element in the prose, to be honest I would have thought it had been written by a man…”
He seems to be thinking.
“The structure is also unusual; reminiscent of a spider’s web… one could also talk about meshes rather than narrative threads.”
“Consciousness is a web…”
The man breaks into a smirk and pulls out his cigar.
“And this young man in the story, is he a homosexual?”
“Yes.”
The publisher is quiet a moment.
“It’s difficult to publish this kind of stuff. Men who fondle children.”
“He doesn’t do that…”
He looks at me sharply, then leans back in his chair, exhaling cigar smoke.
“The fact of the matter is that this is too different from the kind of material we publish for us to be able to publish it… On top of which we’re going to be publishing the memoirs of Revd Stefán Pálsson this autumn.”
He smiles.
“The era of consciousness hasn’t dawned yet.”
He stands up and walks a few paces.
“On the other hand, you’re a natural jewel in your own right; Hekla, the crowning splendour…”
“I’ve heard that quote.”
“A little bird told me that they were encouraging you to compete in Miss Iceland but that you turned them down?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
He walks to the door and opens it.
He’s expecting a young poet with his first volume of poems.
The snow crunches under my feet and a puff of white breath escapes into the cold air. Daylight is breaking. I think of Dad and what he would say. I guess he would say one of two things:
I expect you to follow in the footsteps of those steadfast Dalir women, Hekla dear.
Or: Laxdæla Saga wasn’t a rural novel.
The hole in the ice of the lake is expanding from day to day, but I nevertheless decide to test whether the sheet of ice can carry the weight of a woman and a manuscript in a shoebox. A goose is honking.
I long to find another place,
to reach another star
Ísey finishes her coffee, turns the cup upside down, gives
