By the time I wake up, it’s mid morning and a thick grey fog has descended. I open the window. In the distance a steeple hovers in mid air without its foundations.
My friend has returned from work.
He’s not alone.
He introduces us.
“Det er Hekla. Min allerbedste veninde. Hekla, det er Casper.”*
“Hej,” I say.
I speak Danish for the first time.
“I was on my way out,” I say. “For a walk.”
When I return, D.J. Johnsson is gone again. There’s a note by the typewriter:
Back tomorrow morning. Write.
The sky grows heavy under a swarm of clouds and in the evening it starts to pour again, rain pelting against the cobblestones in the alley.
Late in the morning my friend comes home.
Water drips from the fringe of his hair down into his collar, he has darkened eyes and a black stream trickles down his face.
“Didn’t you say that the Danes use umbrellas?” I ask.
He hands me a bag of strawberries and crawls into bed.
“For you.”
Dear Hekla.
The night after you left I couldn’t sleep and thought of you out in the open sea. I got up and took my diary out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen (underneath the flour drawer) and wrote two sentences that popped into my head: A ship runs aground on me in the fog. While grandmothers sing lullabies over the city. When Thorgerdur woke up she said her first two-word sentence. She stroked her little finger on my cheek and said: Mammy cry. Apart from that, the main news is that the streets look like washboards after the winter. I planted some potatoes in one corner of the garden after you left. Yukon gold and red. I’m pretty big now and find it difficult to bend over. I doze off early in the evening, around the same time as the dandelions.
Napoleon’s hat
D.J. Johnsson is on the landing. He leans on the banister, looks down at me and smiles. He’s alone.
“I was waiting for you,” he says. “The same board always creaks when you run up the stairs.”
He’s gone out to buy cake for me and says he’s going to make coffee.
“Napoleon’s hat,” he says, handing me a plate with a slice of marzipan cake.
“Who is he?” I ask.
“He’s a teacher.”
“Is he your boyfriend?”
He hesitates.
“I have my needs. That’s just how it is. One body gets drawn to another.”
He looks at me and seems to be pondering something.
“It’s not easy to be queer abroad either, Hekla.”
He hesitates.
“Some days I feel good, some days bad. Sometimes I’m full of hope, the rest of the time not. One moment I feel everything is possible, the next moment not. I know a thousand feelings that are connected to emptiness.”
He is silent for a moment.
“Here I saw men dance together for the first time in my life.”
He speaks slowly.
“Some things are still banned abroad, however. Men aren’t allowed to touch each other openly on the street. You won’t see two men holding hands. The police also occasionally raid the bar.”
I see some sheets of paper on the table.
“Were you drawing?” I ask.
“Just a few dresses,” he says and stands up.
He puts on his jacket.
“I won’t be home tonight. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
He looks at me.
“If I didn’t have you, Hekla, I’d die.”
My dearest Ísey,
I sit writing all day and soon I will have finished a new novel. Det er så dejligt.* My hosts have a horizon but lack the starkness of our landscape. As I expected everything here is flat! The light is very bright during the day, it creeps out of the straits, but there’s a shortage of light in the evenings. It has rained for the past month. Understanding spoken Danish is more difficult than I imagined. “God dag” were my first words. To a friend of Jón John’s. I still don’t say much. I go on walks every day and have explored the length and width of the city. On the first day, I walked past many restaurants and stores and saw the king’s guards and sat on a bench in a park. Yesterday I visited the grave of Jón Thoroddsen in the Vestre cemetery. He died on New Year’s day in 1925. On the way home, I came across an antique bookstore with two boxes on the street, one containing books and the other 78 rpm records. I searched through the boxes but haven’t bought anything yet. The most surprising thing abroad is the stillness of the air (not the brief showers). The rain isn’t horizontal here, instead it falls vertically like strings of pearls. Total stillness is followed by dead calm.
Underwood Five
Not many days pass before there is a knock on the wall and then on the door. My neighbour is standing in her nightdress, with her child in her arms and complains about the typewriter.
“Have you started to write by hand?” D.J. later asks, observing as I sit at the desk brandishing a pen.
He leans over my shoulder.
“The handwriting is like a loosely knitted sweater. My old writing teacher wouldn’t give you a high grade for that scrawl.”
He smiles.
“So are you left-handed too like Jimi Hendrix and Franz Kafka?”
I tell him the neighbour complained about the noise of the typewriter.
“You need to get an electric typewriter. They’re not as loud.”
I ask him how much they cost and he tells me not to worry about it.
“Next month we’ll buy an Underwood Five.
“With the Icelandic characters ð, æ and þ, so you don’t have to write the rest of your novel in Danish,” he adds.
A blue DBS bike
D.J. Johnsson doesn’t want me to split the rent with him or to buy food. When he comes home with a bicycle for me, I start to suspect he’s taking extra shifts at the bar.
He looks up from the yard and whistles. I go to the window and he holds the bike by its handlebar and signals
