After a short while, my friend returns with a hint of sleep in her eyes and quietly leans on the door behind her. I think I heard her singing the same ancient lullaby that a mother sang to her child before throwing it into a waterfall. Once more she tells me how glad she is to see me and sidles up beside me at the sideboard to scrutinize the photograph of us as if she were wondering who those girls are. The picture is two years old.
“I made that skirt myself from a picture in the paper,” she finally says. “She ponders a moment. Jón John helped me with the pattern,” she adds. Then she does the same to the wedding photograph: picks it up and examines it.
“I feel it’s so weird to think that’s me. That I’m a married woman in Reykjavík with a child. Lýdur was just a kid when he came west to Dalir to lay the power line and instal that row of electricity poles with the team of labourers; they lived in work huts, he had a record player and played the Shadows; he had such a beautiful voice that it didn’t matter what he said, it made me weak in the knees; now he’s a husband and father. It’s so strange to think that Lýdur will be the last one.”
I try to recall Lýdur’s voice, but can’t remember anything he said. Whenever we meet Ísey does the talking and he is mostly silent.
On the walls there are two large paintings that seem at odds with the spartan furnishings: one is of a mossy lava field and a glittering lake in a rocky rift and the other is of a steep mountain.
“Kjarval?” I ask.
“Yes, from my mother-in-law.”
She says her father-in-law couldn’t come to terms with the way the artist depicted it.
“He said that wasn’t the Mt Lómagnúpur that he knew.
He’s been out at sea for thirty years and only wants boats on his walls, not landscapes and certainly not coloured rocks. Rocks are just bloody rocks, he says, not colours. The mother-in-law, on the other hand, doesn’t want to see the sea in her living room. Her father was a sailor and drowned when she was small and she chose to live somewhere where the sea was out of sight.”
“That’s difficult on an island,” I say.
“Not in Efstasund.”
We contemplate the paintings.
“My mother-in-law met the painter when she was a cook for road labourers in the east. She thinks he’s a decent enough man but agrees with her husband that he doesn’t get the colours right. Lýdur says that if we had a garage we could keep the paintings there, at least one of them. Now he believes we could even get some money for them. I cried so much he didn’t dare mention it again.”
She seems preoccupied.
“I can’t lose those paintings, Hekla. I look at them every day. There’s so much light in them.”
She walks over to the window and gazes into the darkness. A few withered blades of grass reach the glass.
“This is how deep I’ve sunk. This is how small my world has become: the view over Breidafjördur and its thousand islands and the biggest sky in the whole world has shrunk down to the size of a basement window on Kjartansgata.”
“Still, at least your street is named after a character in the Laxdæla Saga.”
She turns to me.
“I’m terrible. I haven’t offered you anything. I had some rice pudding for dinner and can heat it up for you.”
I tell her I’ve already eaten. That I had coffee and pound cake in Hvalfjördur. Nonetheless, she insists on opening a can of pears and whipping cream.
“It’s Christmas when you come for a visit, Hekla.”
I open my case and hand her a parcel wrapped in brown paper.
“Puffins from Dad,” I say.
I follow her into the kitchen, which has a small Rafha electric cooker, a fridge and a table for two. On the way she repeats how happy she is to see me. She says she’ll cook the puffins at the weekend when Lýdur is back in town and sticks them in the fridge.
“I don’t enjoy cooking but I’m learning. The other day I made Ora fishballs in pink sauce, but Lýdur’s favourite is stockfish. My sister-in-law taught me how to make pink sauce. You use ketchup and flour.”
I tell her that Jón John has offered me a room that he rents in Stýrimannastígur, while he’s out at sea. “Until I get a job and can rent my own room,” I add.
“Have you finished your manuscript?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And started another?”
“Yes.”
“I always knew you would become a writer, Hekla.
“Do you remember when you were six and you had recently started to write and wrote in your childish handwriting in a copybook that the river moved like time? And that the water was cold and deep? That was before Steinn Steinarr wrote his ‘Time and Water’.”
She hesitates.
“I know Jón John is your best friend, Hekla.”
“Male friend, yes,” I say.
She looks me in the eye.
“I realize the child is a distraction for you, but stay with me until the weekend at least.”
I think: that’s three days. I can’t write here.
I say: “I’ll be here until the weekend.”
We sit with the canned pears in dessert bowls, opposite one another at the kitchen table, and Ísey falls into a momentary silence. I feel there’s something on her mind.
“I bought myself a diary the other day and have started to write in it.”
She reveals this cautiously.
“That’s how low I’ve sunk, Hekla.”
I start thinking about my father’s diary entries and how he deciphered the weather from the look of the glacier beyond the fjord
