“Do you write about the weather?” I ask.
She takes a deep breath.
“I write about what happens, but since so little happens I also write about what doesn’t happen. The things that people don’t say and don’t do. What Lýdur doesn’t say, for example.”
She stalls.
“Because I add thoughts and descriptions to what happens, a quick trip to the store can take up many pages. I went out twice yesterday, once to the fish shop and once with the rubbish. When I walked to the fish shop with the pram, I shut my eyes and felt a slight heat on my eyelids. Is that a sun or not a sun? I asked myself, and I felt I was a part of something bigger.”
She looks anxious.
“I keep the journal in the washing bucket because Lýdur wouldn’t understand me wasting time on writing about things that don’t exist or about things that are over.
“‘What’s over is over,’ he says.
“Still though, last weekend when we got into bed, he said: ‘Tell me what happened this evening, Ísa, that way it feels like it happened to someone else.’ That was the most beautiful thing he has ever said to me. Afterwards he held me in his arms.”
Ísey wraps her cardigan around herself.
“When I’ve finished writing in the diary, I feel like I’ve folded all the washing and cleaned up.”
She stands up because she wants to pour some coffee and do a cup reading. She gets me to turn the cup upside down and place it on the hot plate. After a short while, she examines the cup in the light.
“There are two men in the cup,” she says. “You love one and sleep with the other.”
Like that Joyce
Ísey offers me the sofa under the Lómagnúpur cliffs, but before I fall asleep, I pull Ulysses out of my case, turn on the lamp and read a few pages under the orange-tasselled shade.
When I awaken I hear the mother and daughter pottering about in the kitchen. My friend is giving her daughter skyr, and the child smiles at me, plastered in white from ear to ear and claps her hands. There is constant wriggling, feet kicking in the air without touching the ground; she gesticulates wildly and flaps her arms against her sides, like a featherless bird trying to take to the sky, a thousand rapid movements, flickering eyes. It’s blatantly clear: humans can’t fly.
My friend dresses the child in overalls and slips a knitted cap onto her head and, once she has put her to sleep in the pram in the garden, wants to show me something. She leads me into the bedroom.
“I wallpapered this myself. What does the writer think?”
I laugh.
“Like it.”
The room is covered in wallpaper of green leaves with big orange flowers.
“I had a sudden longing for wallpaper and Lýdur gave in to me.”
She pushes the door closed behind us.
“He says he can’t refuse me anything.”
She pours coffee into the cups, puts the pot back on the stove and sits down.
“Tell me what you’re reading, Hekla. That thick one.”
“It’s by a writer called James Joyce.”
“How does he write?”
“Unlike any Icelandic writer. The whole novel happens within the space of a day. It’s 877 pages. I haven’t got very far with it,” I add, “the text is so difficult.”
“I see,” says my friend, cutting a slice of Christmas cake and placing it on my plate.
“I feel it’s best to write in my diary on the edge of dawn. While the outlines of the world are still blurred. It can take as much as six, seven pages for the light to come up in here. I imagine it’s something similar with that Joyce.”
My friend stands up and walks to the kitchen window. The pram is on the path outside, only the wheels are visible.
“I had a dream,” I hear her say without turning. “I dreamt I was a passenger in a car that was driving down a side track home to the farm. In the middle of the track, I get out of the car and take a shortcut across the moor. On the way I walk past a corrie between two big tussocks that are full of blueberries the size of snowballs. They’re heavy and juicy and they are a beautiful, glistening blue like a dead calm autumn sky. The last thing I remember is scooping up armfuls of sky-blue berries and filling a washtub in a split second. I was alone. Then I heard a bird. Now I’m scared that the berries are the babies I’ll have, Hekla.”
We are all the same,
fatally wounded and disorientated whales
I’m ready with my case when Davíd Jón John Johnsson comes to collect me. He doesn’t want to come in or to accept a cup of coffee because he says he’s still feeling the waves of seasickness in his gut, but he puts down his duffel bag to greet us. He first embraces me and grabs me tight, holding me for a long moment without saying a word, and I inhale the faint smell of slime from his hair. He has slipped a jacket over his salt-crystallized wool sweater. Then he embraces Ísey. Then he peeps into the pram with the sleeping child parked by the house wall.
“I came as soon as I stepped ashore,” he says.
He is pale but his hair has grown longer since I saw him in the spring.
He is even more beautiful than before.
He slips his duffel bag over his shoulder and wants to carry my case.
I hold my typewriter.
A cold jet stream shoots down Snorrabraut, the grey sea can be faintly glimpsed at the end of the street and, beyond that, Mt Esja veiled in the mist that hovers over the strait. We follow the gravel pathway across the Hljómskálagardur park, passing the statue of Jónas Hallgrímsson in crumpled trousers. There the sailor pauses a
