Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Butterflies in November

  Hotel Silence

  Miss

  ICELAND

  Auður Ava

  Ólafsdóttir

  Translated from the Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon

  Copyright © 2018 by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  English translation © 2020 by Brian FitzGibbon

  Cover art and design by Nathan Burton

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Miss Iceland was first published as Ungfrú Ísland by Benedikt in Iceland in 2018

  First published in English in the UK by Pushkin Press in 2020

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: June 2020

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4923-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4924-4

  Designed and typeset by Tetragon, London

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  Black Cat

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  20 21 22 23 24 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  In memory

  of my parents

  There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without significance.

  (FIRST EPISTLE OF PAUL THE APOSTLE TO THE CORINTHIANS)

  One must still have chaos within oneself, to give birth to a dancing star.

  (NIETZSCHE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  —I—

  Motherland

  —II—

  Author of the day

  Notes on Quotations

  Reading Group Questions

  Back Cover

  Nothing is still or dead in the entrails of the earth, for that is where the most powerful and menacing of the elements rages, and that is fire.

  (JÓNAS HALLGRÍMSSON, FJÖLNIR LITERARY JOURNAL, 1835)

  1942

  The room of the one who gave birth to me

  I stumbled across an eagle’s nest when I was five months pregnant with you, a two-metre rough cavity of flattened lyme-grass on the edge of a cliff by the river. Two pudgy eaglets were huddled up inside it. I was alone and an eagle circled above me and the nest. It flapped its wings heavily, one of which was tattered, but refrained from attacking. I assumed it was the female. She followed me all the way to the edge of the farm, a black shadow looming over me like a cloud that obscured the sun. I sensed the baby would be a boy and decided to name him Örn—Eagle. On the day you were born, three weeks before your time, the eagle flew over the farm again. The old vet that had come to inseminate a cow was the one who delivered you; his final official duty before retiring was to deliver a baby. When he came out of the cow shed, he took off his waders and washed his hands with a new bar of Lux soap. Then he lifted you into the air and said:

  “Lux mundi.

  “Light of the world.”

  Although he was accustomed to allowing the female to lick its offspring unassisted, he started to fill the blood-pudding mixing tub to bathe you. I saw him roll up the sleeves of his flannel shirt and dip an elbow into the water. I watched them—the vet and your father—stoop over you with their backs to me.

  “She’s her father’s daughter,” your father said. Then he added and I clearly heard him: “Welcome, Hekla dear.”

  He had already decided on the name without consulting me.

  “Not a volcano, not the gateway to hell,” I protested from the bed.

  “These gateways have to be allowed to be somewhere on this earth,” I heard the vet say.

  The men pressed together to hunch down over the tub again and took advantage of my defencelessness, my aching pain.

  I didn’t know when I got married that your father was obsessed with volcanoes. He would submerge himself in books with descriptions of volcanic eruptions, correspond with three geologists, have foreboding dreams about eruptions, live in the constant hope of seeing a plume of smoke in the sky and feel the earth tremble under his feet.

  “Perhaps you’d like the earth to crack open at the bottom of our field?” I asked. “For it to split in two like a woman giving birth?”

  I hated lava fields. Our farmland was surrounded on all sides by thousand-year-old lava fields that had to be clambered over to go pick blueberries; you couldn’t stick a fork into a single potato patch without striking a rock.

  “Arnhildur, the female eagle,” I say from under the cover that your father pulls over me. “The one who is born to wage battles. There are barely twenty eagles living in this country, Gottskálk, I add, but more than two hundred volcanoes.” That was my last card.

  “I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee,” your father said. That was his compromise. He had made up his mind. I turned the other way and shut my eyes, I wanted to be left in peace.

  Four and a half years after you were born, Hekla erupted after its one-hundred-and-two-year slumber. That’s when your father finally got to hear the roaring explosion he had been pining to hear in the west in the Dalir district, like the distant echo of the recently ended world war. Your brother Örn was two years old at the time. Your father immediately called his sister in the Westman Islands to find out what she could see through the kitchen window. She was frying crullers and said that a plume of volcanic smoke hovered over the island, that the sun was red and that it was raining ash.

  He covered the mouthpiece and repeated every single sentence to me.

  “She says that the sun is red and it’s raining ash and that it’s as dark as night and she had to turn the lights on.”

  He wanted to know if it was a spectacular and daunting sight and if the floor was shaking.

  “She says it’s a spectacular and daunting sight and that all the drainpipes are full of ash and that her husband, the boat mechanic, is up on a ladder trying to unclog them.”

  He lay with his ear glued to the radio and gave me the highlights.

  “They say that the mouth of the volcano, the crater, is shaped like a heart, a heart of flames.” Or he said: “Steinthóra, did you know that one of the lava bombs was eleven metres long and five metres wide and shaped like a cigar?”

  Eventually he could no longer satisfy himself with his sister’s descriptions of the views from her kitchen window or the frozen black-and-white photographs of the giant pillar of smoke on the front page of the Tíminn newspaper. He longed to see the eruption with his own eyes, he wanted to see colours, he wanted to see glowing blocks of lava, whole boulders shooting into the air, he wanted to see the red fiery eyes spitting shooting stars like sparks in a foundry, he wanted to see a black lava wall crawling forward like an illuminated metropolis, he wanted to know i
f the flames of the volcano turned the sky pink, he wanted to feel the heat on his eyelids, he wanted his eyes to tingle, he wanted to charge down south to Thjórsárdalur in his Russian jeep.

  And he wanted to take you with him.

  “Jónas Hallgrímsson, our national poet, who produced the best alliterations and poetry about volcanoes ever written, never witnessed an eruption,” he said. “Neither did the naturalist Eggert Ólafsson. Hekla can’t miss seeing her namesake erupting.”

  “Why don’t you just sell the farm and move down south to become a farmer in Thjórsárdalur instead?” I asked. I could just as easily have asked: “Don’t you want to move from the land of Laxdæla Saga to the Land of Njál’s Saga?”

  He sat you on a cushion on the passenger seat of the jeep so that you could see the view, and I was left behind with your brother Örn to take care of the farm. When he returned with melted soles on his boots, I knew he had gone too close.

  “The old dear’s arteries are still bubbling,” he said, and carried you to bed, sleeping in his arms.

  In the summer, ash reached us in the west in Dalir and destroyed the fields.

  Dead animals were found in troughs where gas puddles had formed: foxes, birds and sheep. Then your father finally stopped talking about volcanoes and went back to farming. You, however, had changed. You had been on a journey. You spoke differently. You spoke in volcanic language and used words like sublime, magnificent and ginormous. You had discovered the world above and looked up at the sky. You started to disappear and we found you out in the fields, where you lay observing the clouds; in the winter, we found you out on a mound of snow, contemplating the stars.

  I

  MOTHERLAND

  Who has a fairer fatherland,

  With mountains, valleys, blackened sand,

  Northern lights in a glowing band

  and slopes of birch and brook?

  (HULDA, 1944)

  1963

  Poets are men

  The dust hovers in a cloud behind the Reykjavík coach, the road is a ridged washboard and we rattle on; bend after bend, soon it becomes impossible to see through the muddy windows and, before long, the Laxdæla Saga trail will vanish into the dirt.

  The gearstick creaks every time the driver goes up or down a hill; I suspect the coach has no brakes. The large diagonal crack across the windscreen doesn’t seem to bother the driver. There aren’t many cars about and, on the rare occasions when we meet one, the driver blows his horn. To make room for a road grader, the bus needs to swerve over to the side of the road where it teeters. The levelling of Dalir’s roads is regarded as something of an event, giving the driver an opportunity to wind down his window, lean out and have a lengthy chat.

  “I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose a spindle,” I hear the bus driver say.

  Right now I’m not a short distance away from the village of Búdardalur, but actually in Dublin, since my finger is stuck on page twenty-three of Ulysses. I’d heard of this novel that was as thick as Njál’s Saga and could be bought from the English bookshop in Hafnarstræti and sent west.

  “Is it French you are talking, sir?” the old woman said to Haines.

  Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.

  “Irish,” Buck Mulligan said. “Is there Gaelic on you?”

  “I thought it was Irish,” she said, “by the sound of it.”

  The reading was proceeding slowly, both because of the shaking of the bus and because my English is poor. Even though I have a dictionary lying on the empty seat beside me, the language is more challenging than I expected.

  I peer through the window. Didn’t a female writer live on that farm? Didn’t the strong current of this coal-grey river full of sand and mud ripple through her veins? She made the cattle suffer, people said, because while she sat writing about the love lives and tragic fates of the locals, striving to transform the sheep’s colours into a sunset over Breidafjördur, she neglected to milk the cows. There was no greater sin than forgetting to empty swollen udders. Whenever she visited a neighbouring farm, she sat for too long and either wanted to recite a poem or fell silent for hours on end, dipping her sugar cubes into the coffee. They say she heard a string orchestra when she wrote and also that she woke up her children in the night and carried them out into the farmyard in her arms to show them the shimmering waves of Northern Lights undulating across the black sky, and that in between these periods she locked herself inside the marital bedroom and pulled a quilt over her head. There was so much melancholy in her that one bright spring evening she vanished into the silvery grey depths of the river. The prospect of eating fresh puffin eggs would no longer do her, because she had stopped sleeping. She was found in a trout net by the bridge and dragged onto the banks: a stiff-winged poet in a soaking wet skirt and laddered stockings, her belly full of water.

  “She destroyed the net,” said the farmer who owned it. “I placed it there for trout, but the meshwork wasn’t designed to hold a woman poet.”

  Her fate served as a warning, but at the same time she was the only model of a female author I had.

  Otherwise poets were men.

  I learnt from that not to disclose my plans to anyone.

  Radio Reykjavík

  Sitting in front of me on the coach is a woman travelling with a little girl who needs to throw up again. The coach swerves on the gravel and halts. The driver presses a button and the door opens to the autumn air, hissing like a steam iron. The weary woman dressed in a woollen coat escorts the girl down the steps. This is the third time the car-sick child has to be let out. The roads are lined with ditches because the farmers are draining the land and drying up the wetlands where wading birds nest. Barbed wire fences protrude from the earth here and there, although it is difficult to make out what property they are supposed to delimit.

  Soon I’ll be too far away from home to know the names of the farms. On the steps, the woman shoves a woolly hat over the child’s head and yanks it down over her ears. I watch her holding the girl’s forehead as a thin streak of vomit oozes out of her. Finally she digs into a coat pocket, pulls out a handkerchief and wipes the child’s mouth before hoisting her back onto the dust-filled coach.

  I dig out my notebook, uncap my fountain pen and write two sentences. Then I put the cap back on and open Ulysses again.

  The driver bangs his pipe empty on the steps, turns on the radio, and the men move to the front of the bus, broad shoulders and hats huddle together to listen. The weather forecast and announcements are about to begin. The driver turns up the volume to drown out the rattle of the engine. Hello, this is Radio Reykjavík is heard, then crackling and he turns the knob to find the right wavelength. The sound is bad and I hear that they are looking for a sailor on a boat. Ready to weigh anchor. Then there is a hiss and the speaker is cut off. The men spread around the bus again and light cigarettes.

  I turn the page. Stephen Dedalus is drinking tea as the coach driver overtakes the Ferguson tractor that had passed us when the child was throwing up. Stephen filled a third cup, a spoonful of tea colouring faintly the thick rich milk.

  How many pages would it take to overtake the tractor if James Joyce were a passenger on the coach to Reykjavík?

  Mother whales

  The last stop is at the diner in Hvalfjördur where a boat is pulling in with two sperm whales. They’re tied to either side of the gunwale, each whale exceeding the length of the boat, sea foam swirling over their black carcasses. The vessel sways in the breaking waves; compared to the giant mammals, it looks like a flimsy toy floating in a bathtub. The driver is the first to abandon the bus, followed by the passengers. A pungent stench wafts from the boiling pots of blubber and the travellers scurry into the diner. They’re selling asparagus soup and breaded chops with potatoes and rhubarb jam, but I haven’t got a job yet and I have to watch my spending, so I buy a cup of coffee and slice of pound cake. On my way back to the coach, I pick two handfuls of blueberries.

  At the whaling sta
tion, a middle-aged man joins the group of passengers. He’s the last one to step on the coach, surveys the group, spots me and wants to know if the seat beside me is free. I move the dictionary and he tips his hat slightly as he sits. When the coach drives off, he lights a cigar.

  “All we need now is some dessert,” he says. “What one wouldn’t do for a box of darn Anthon Berg chocolates.”

  He popped over to Hvalfjördur to visit an acquaintance who owns all the frigging whales in the sea, he says, and they ate some chops together.

  “They’ve carved up five hundred whales this summer. No wonder Icelanders call the smell of shit the smell of money.” Then he turns to me.

  “Might I ask you for your name, miss…?”

  “Hekla.”

  “How perfectly befitting. Hekla doth rise high and sharp to the heavens.”

  He examines the book I am holding.

  “And you read foreign books?”

  “Yes.”

  One of the sperm whales has been dragged up a concrete slipway into the carving yard, where it lies in one piece, a giant black carcass as big as the Dalasýsla Savings Bank back home. Bare-handed young men in waders and jeans immediately attack the beast, brandishing giant blades in the air, and are already busy flensing the blubber and fat off the whale, steel glistening in the autumn sun. Soon the youths are covered in liver oil. The entrails lie scattered by the creature’s side, as a flock of birds swarms above them. It is obviously difficult for the young men to walk on the slippery platform by the try pots.

  “I see, is the girl checking out the boys?” asks the man. “Doesn’t a sweet girl like you have a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “What, aren’t all the lads chasing after you? Is no one poking you?”

  I open the book and continue reading without the dictionary. Some moments later the man picks up the conversation again.