“I went to meet the publisher,” I say.
“Is he going to publish the book?”
“No.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he couldn’t publish a book that was different from the ones his authors write.”
“Didn’t he find any drifting dandelion fuzz?”
“No.”
“No sunrays that heal wounds?”
“No.”
“No twilight haze that embraces desires?”
“No.”
“No winding mossy ways?”
“No.”
I say nothing and, for a while, my friend doesn’t either.
“I can’t let it go, Ísey. Writing. It’s my lifeline. I have nothing else. Imagination is the only thing I have.”
“You’re not a writer of the now, Hekla, you’re the writer of tomorrow. What does your father say? You were born too soon?”
She stands up and walks over to the window. Her belly has grown.
“Remember the woman I told you about in the basement across the way?”
“Yeah.”
“She disappeared into the sea last weekend. The fishmonger told me about it.
“I could have figured out for myself that something wasn’t right. After five months no curtains had been put up. I heard she’d been checked into the psychiatric ward in Kleppur. She’d stopped cooking and cried all day after she’d had her fourth child. She was twenty-three years old and her eldest boy was seven. Her sister is going to look after the two younger children. Her husband has a new woman and she can’t take in more kids. The older boys will be sent to a community home out in the country. I really feel for them.”
She turns and walks over to me.
“Do you remember, Hekla, when we went ice-skating in the valley and slid all the way back over the frozen fields?
You were ahead of me and there were tufts of yellow straw that stuck through the ice and the men that eventually came west to lay the power lines hadn’t arrived yet and everything was ahead of us.”
She sinks onto a chair and gazes down at her hands, her open palms.
“Today the first sunray in five months broke through the basement window. I sat for a short while with the ray in my lap, with my palms full of light, before I got up.”
These are the headlines:
The golden plover has arrived
The lake is filling up with birds and, before long, the length of the days and nights will even out again.
When I get home, the poet is lying on the bed with the radio to his ear, listening to the news:
These are the headlines: The golden plover has arrived…
He turns down the volume and wants to know where I’ve been.
I tell him.
“To Ísey’s.”
He sits up.
“We can’t go on living like this. Boiling potatoes and fish in the same pot.” He says he’s heard of a room with a kitchenette in Frakkastígur that will soon be vacant. And a two-room apartment in Öldugata.
“We need to get a home that you can put your mark on. With a dining table and tablecloth. What do you say to that, Hekla dear?”
I stand by the window, a blackbird is cleaning its feathers after bathing in the drainpipe, its wings a folded umbrella.
“We could take a bus to Thingvellir and camp in a calm spot by the lake and stay there for a few days. And do things couples do,” he says.
He looks at me.
“We could even take a taxi. I could borrow a tent with a rubber base and sleeping bags and we could buy supplies in Valhöll. We could get engaged.”
He ponders a moment.
“I could probably borrow a summer house in Grafningur,” he continues. “We could write side by side and read and inhale the scent of the flora. You could wade in the water. What do you think, Hekla dear?”
At night I go into the kitchen and roll a new sheet of paper into the typewriter:
I, the undersigned, Hekla Gottskálksdóttir, hereby resign from my job as a serving girl at Hotel Borg. The reason for my resignation is the indecent behaviour of the hotel’s male customers who have been harassing me both at work and in my private life.
The light has dissolved the night
The following day I turn up at Hotel Borg in long trousers to deliver my letter of resignation.
“The world isn’t the way you want it to be,” says the head waiter. “You’re a woman. Come to terms with that.”
Then I walk into the hotel manager’s office and ask for my wages for the last week.
“I expected a scandal,” says Sirrí, “that you’d refuse to serve a customer or pour a pot of coffee over the men at the round table.”
She stands outside on the pavement, smoking.
“I expected you to be fired for having your own opinions and not being servile enough, but not that you’d hand in your apron. Normally girls are let go if they get too big for their boots.”
We are such stuff
as dreams are made on
“The poet came for dinner,” says my friend.
She sits opposite me and feeds her daughter.
I sip on a cup of coffee.
“Starkadur?”
“Yes.
“I invited him in and made coffee. He was ever so sad and said we had a beautiful home. He walked up to the paintings and examined them carefully. He also looked at the photograph of us on the sideboard. He held on to the picture of you and me by the sheepfold for a long time.
“He looked at Thorgerdur and said: ‘You know, Ísey, I don’t know Hekla at all.’ Then he asked me if you’re going to leave him.”
She hesitates and then looks me in the eye.
“And are you?”
“Yes.”
She wipes the child’s mouth, removes her bib and places her on the floor. The girl takes a few steps, towing the tractor behind her.
“Jón John sent me a ticket. I’m sailing on the Gullfoss.”
She pours the coffee.
“By next year something will have happened in your life that changes how you view the world, whereas for me everything will be the same. Unless we grow into four. You will have stood under a shimmering
