She fetches the coffee pot from the stove and tops up my cup.
“You’ll be out in the world and I’ll be left here, hoping that the fishmonger packs the haddock in a poem or a serialized story.”
She stands up and grabs her daughter who has just pushed a chair up against the sideboard and is about to climb it.
“It won’t be long before the farmers back home in Dalir start to burn the withered grass, there will be a smell of smoke and singed earth in the air, black hummocks even. Flames will flicker at length beneath the moss. And when there is no longer any night between the days, a child will be born.”
I have loved you
since I spied on you
Black clouds approach from the ocean and rapidly tumble overhead. A bird flies against the bank of clouds. As evening falls, the clouds begin to slow.
“Are you leaving me?”
“Yes.”
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“You’re leaving and the migrant birds are returning,” says the poet.
He looks at me.
“I knew about you before we met. I watched you. I first spotted you outside Mokka, I sat inside and you stood outside the window with your suitcase. You opened the door, scanned the place like you were looking for someone and then closed the door again. As if you’d changed your mind. I went out after you and watched you walk up Skólavördustígur. You didn’t notice me. I also saw you strolling down Bankastræti once, walking tall, you were wearing chequered trousers and walked with a determined stride, like you knew what you wanted. I followed you, but you weren’t aware of me. I saw you stop in three bookshops, looking at books and browsing through them without buying anything. I saw you walk into Hressingarskálinn and sit at a table with a dark-haired man. I didn’t know who he was then. Everyone was staring at you, but you didn’t notice. You laughed. I thought he was your boyfriend. You were different with him than you are with me. I thought to myself that I’d like to have a girlfriend that I could laugh with. I followed the two of you all the way west to Stýrimannastígur. I gathered information and found out you were working in Hotel Borg. I also asked about your friend and was told that he wasn’t into women.”
He’s silent for a moment.
“I set myself the goal of taking you away from him, but I didn’t succeed.”
The time has come to embrace
necessary separations
I tell the poet I’ll be staying with Ísey tonight.
“Mum airs the quilts every spring. You won’t be here then.”
When I say goodbye to the poet, he hands me a small oblong parcel and tells me to open it on board the Gullfoss.
“What I admire about you, Hekla, is that you have faith in yourself, even when nobody else does.”
He offers me his hand in a handshake and then withdraws it just as fast and turns away.
In other lands no shelter find,
endless storm a-raging
“I’ll never get to taste the cold buffet on the Gullfoss ferry,” says Ísey. “They’ve got decorated salmon with lemons in their mouths every day for lunch, jellied halibut, green peas, white cloth napkins, hot food in the evenings, German and Danish cuisine with fizzling sparklers planted on top of the ptarmigan breasts and tornado steaks, and there are flags on the tables with the Eimskip company logo. At the captain’s table there are women in long dresses and pearl necklaces, and there is a dance every evening on the deck in front of the smoking room. Everyone drinks genever and ginger ale before dinner. Then everybody gets seasick when waves strike the ship because out at sea no man is more of a man than any other. I know a woman who worked on the Gullfoss and she said it had been difficult to carry silver trays up and down three floors in rough seas, and she had to both help deliver babies and take care of corpses. Write to me and tell me everything, Hekla.”
My friend pulls me into her arms; between us, the child she bears under her belt.
Then she pulls out a striped scarf and hands it to me. It’s red and white.
“In the colours of the Danish flag,” she says. “I finished it last night. It’s a garter stitch,” she adds and smiles. “Even though there’s always good weather abroad, it will be cold on deck as you cross the sea. There will be surf, Hekla, it’ll be choppy, there’ll be waves.”
* James Dean’s bomber jacket was sold at Palm Beach Modern Auctions in Florida in February 2018 for the price of $600,000.
II
AUTHOR OF THE DAY
Far on eternity’s ocean
your island stands watch
(STEPHAN G. STEPHANSSON, 1904)
I no longer have
firm land under my feet
There are banks of fog along the shore and, once the hull crawls beyond the island of Engey, the mainland is no longer visible, islets and reefs come and go, floating across the surface of the water.
I share a second-class cabin with a woman and her little girl. I offer to take the top bunk and the woman is grateful. She has a Danish husband and speaks Danish to the child.
I’m travelling with a small suitcase and my typewriter, which I place on a tiny table when the woman leaves the cabin with her child. We sail south of the country and when we approach the sooty black island emerging from the ocean with its white plume of smoke, I go up on deck to find out if the rumbling
