Do not awaken love
until it so desires
There is a small back garden by the guest house with some plastic chairs and a table. That is where I go with my old typewriter to avoid waking up my friend who came back late last night. There is a pink streak of light in the sky which has vanished by the time I pull the first sheet out of the typewriter.
The manager’s husband walks by in a white T-shirt and nods at me.
“Lady novelist,” he says.
It’s an affirmation. A deduction. He’s been pondering on this for several days.
“You’re getting a tan,” I hear from the bed when I get back.
“You’re breaking out in freckles. You’re turning golden.”
I’m getting a slight tan from sitting and digging in the sandpit, Ísey wrote this summer. Even though it’s always windy and the sun is cold. Thorgerdur has had a cold all summer.
Dearest Ísey,
The heat seeps in everywhere. The nights are hot as well (even though the floor tiles are ice cold). I’ve tasted various fruits that can’t be found at home, such as grapes and peaches. Maybe I’ll become a wholesaler and import fruit for Thorgerdur and Katla. (But it would probably be a hopeless enterprise while all the foreign currency goes into buying fuel for the fishing ships.) Yesterday we ate octopus. They’re as chewy as rubber. I write eight hours a day. The senses are sharpest in the moment just before the sudden fall of darkness. Like carved marble. Jón John has been better than I have at getting to know the locals. Last night I dreamt that there were too many words in the world, but that there was a shortage of bodies. We’ll stay here for as long as the money lasts.
P.S. I got a letter from Starkadur who tells me my manuscript has been circulating (the one that was lost at sea) and that several people have read it. I’m far into a new novel that is different from anything else I’ve written. I don’t expect anyone will want to publish it any more than the other ones.
Peace
When my husband gets home, he’s holding a bottle of wine in his hands.
He places it on the table, then pulls a pair of sunglasses out of his pocket and hands them to me.
“For you.”
I close the book. He borrows wine glasses from the manager.
He has news.
“Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace prize yesterday.”
He had sat with the couple who run the guest house and watched television and the woman had helped him to understand the news. Black, she repeated several times, pointing at the colour of the skirt she was wearing. Peace.
“Did you know, Hekla, that several queers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature?
“Selma Lagerlöf, Thomas Mann, André Gide…” He trails off.
He does not kiss me with the kisses of his mouth
“Are you reading the Bible?”
He is bewildered.
“Yes, it was in the bedside table.”
“Do you understand the language?”
“No, but I know the Song of Songs off by heart.”
I put the book back in its place.
“I got a letter from Dad,” I say, indicating an envelope that is lying on the table.
He stands up and walks over to me.
“Does he want to know if I’m capable of performing my male function?”
I take the letter out of the thin envelope and unfold it.
“He says he’s heard about my changed circumstances and asks whether there might not be some obstacles to the match.”
I hesitate.
“He says we’re not a likely couple.”
My husband sits on the bed and buries his face in his hands.
“Forgive me,” I hear him say between his fingers.
“Forgive you for what?”
“Forgive me for not being the man that you need. For not being able to love a woman.”
He stands up, opens the wardrobe, pulls out a yellow shirt and puts it on. He looks at me as he buttons it up.
“It sometimes happens that I think of women and their bodies. About you. For a brief moment. Then I go back to thinking about men and their bodies.”
In my bed at night I sought him
but did not find him
I wake up in the middle of the night and reach for my husband in the bed. I’m alone. I fall back asleep. When I wake in the morning, he’s lying beside me. Fully dressed. In the same clothes as yesterday. Daylight filters through the shutter. He sits up and looks straight ahead. Into the darkness.
I get up and open the shutters.
He looks battered and says he got into a scuffle. He’d been down at the train station, the police had come and arrested some men in the toilets.
“Are you putting yourself in danger?” I ask.
He seems to be mulling this over.
“I can’t behave sensibly, Hekla,” he finally says.
I ask him how it works when he goes out to meet other men.
“You let them know you’re interested. That’s all there is to it. It’s not complicated.”
I sit beside him.
“Most of the men I meet are married.”
“Like you?”
He looks at me.
“Yeah, like me.”
“So you understand each other?” I say.
“I give them what they don’t get from their wives.”
“Except you don’t have to sleep with your wife.”
He clasps his head with both hands.
“I know I have nothing to offer you, Hekla.”
He stands up and takes off his crumpled trousers and shirt.
Then he rinses his face in cold water at the basin in the corner of the room. I notice he’s looking at me in the mirror.
“What are you thinking about?” I ask.
“About you and your book and whether I’m a minor character or a main character in it, and about a man I met yesterday, and about Mum and what she might be doing, and about a dream I dreamt last night.”
He turns to me.
“The dream was like a memory of a winter’s day in Dalir. Everything was so pure. It was all so white. Snow white. It was still, Hekla. And the weird thing was that it was warm.
