Miss Iceland

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “It’ll be fine.”

  She wipes her eyes.

  “I’m named after an iceberg. Pack ice flowed into Breidafjördur the spring I was born. Dad wanted to add an island to the fjord and baptized me Ísey, Ice Island.”

  She is silent for a moment. Thorgerdur stands in the cot, and holds out her arms, wanting to be lifted. I pick up the child, she needs a change of nappy.

  “It was so boxed in back home, the mountain lay on the other side of the field fence, I wanted to go away. I fell in love. I got pregnant. Next summer I’ll be alone with two small children in a basement in Nordurmýri. Twenty-two years old.”

  My friend allows herself to drop onto the sofa, but then springs straight up again and says she’s going to make some coffee. I change the girl’s nappy in the meantime.

  “Sorry, Hekla, I don’t ask anything about you,” she says when she returns with the coffee pot. “Have you met someone?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  She scrutinizes me.

  “Who?”

  “A librarian from the library in Thingholtsstræti. He’s a writer as well,” I add.

  “Like you?”

  “He doesn’t know I write.”

  “Haven’t you told him you’ve been published?”

  “That was under a pseudonym.”

  It had actually been Ísey who had come up with the idea that I take on a poet’s name, the way male poets do. “Preferably something fancy like Hekla Zenith,” she suggested.

  “No,” I said, laughing.

  She wouldn’t give in.

  “Isn’t there some dale, some stream, some spot that you can name yourself after? If you want to go for something fancy we need to delve deeper, how about Deep Canyon…?”

  “No.”

  “That was tongue in cheek by the way,” she now says.

  She studies me.

  “Didn’t you tell the poet you were writing a novel either?”

  “No.”

  “And have completed two manuscripts?”

  “I haven’t had an answer from the publisher.”

  “What do you do together?”

  “We sleep together.”

  I’m relieved she hasn’t asked whether I prefer to write or sleep with him, which is the most important: the bed or the Remington typewriter?

  That’s her next question.

  “Which do you want the most, to have a boyfriend or write books?”

  I give it some thought. In my dream world the most important things would be: a sheet of paper, fountain pen and a male body. When we’ve finished making love, he’s welcome to ask if he can refill the fountain pen with ink for me.

  She has a serious air and gazes beyond me.

  “Women have to choose, Hekla.”

  “Both in equal measure,” I answer. “I need to be both alone and not alone,” I add.

  “That means that you are both a writer and ordinary, Hekla.”

  “We just met. I’m not about to get married.”

  She hesitates.

  “I know you think I don’t lead a very exciting life but I love Lýdur. I’m no longer just me, Hekla. I’m us. I’m Lýdur and Thorgerdur.”

  When I say goodbye to my friend and embrace her, she says:

  “If it’s a girl I’ll call her Katla. That’ll make two volcanoes.”

  There’s a full moon with a corona over the island of Örfirisey as I head towards Skólavördustígur.

  Scrapbook two

  I’ve finished work and am on my way home to write when I notice a girl with a beehive hairdo, standing shivering in the breeze on the other side of the street, with her eyes glued to the revolving door of Hotel Borg.

  When she spots me, she walks straight over and introduces herself as a friend of Sirrí’s who has asked her to put me in the picture.

  “What picture?”

  “Miss Iceland. She told me they’ve been swarming around you.”

  I tell her I won’t be taking part in the contest.

  “She didn’t exactly say you would be taking part, but that your mind was elsewhere and she felt you wouldn’t be a waitress for long. She said that she could sense a restlessness in your soul and thinks you might want to go abroad.”

  She wants us to walk and go sit in Skálinn.

  “They told me I would get to go abroad too, but it didn’t happen. I wasn’t sent to Long Island as they’d promised.”

  On the way, she glances over her shoulder several times, as if she expected someone to be following.

  When we’re sitting at Skálinn and I’ve ordered coffee with sugar cubes and my companion a twisted doughnut and a Sinalco, she tells me she works at the switchboard of the Hreyfill cab company and that the station is busiest when the boys come back onshore off the trawlers. They spend their money on taxis. One ordered a cab and had himself driven all the way north to Blönduós.

  “He sat with a bottle of liquor in the back and drank. When it was finished, he dozed off and slept for most of the way. In Blönduós he wanted chops with fat, but it was Holy Thursday and everywhere was closed. The taxi driver knocked on the priest’s door and was allowed to phone home to speak to his wife, who called a relative who was married to a woman who had a sister living in Blönduós. She fried some chops in breadcrumbs for the sailor, after which he was driven back to town and the boat. He slept all the way back.”

  She sips on the bottle of Sinalco and looks me over.

  “No, you don’t look like the kind of woman who stands in front of a mirror admiring her high cheekbones,” she says, biting into the doughnut.

  She next turns to the contest itself and says that there had been twelve girls and that there were five men on the jury.

  “They had to postpone the contest three times because of rain and wind.”

  She sips from the bottle again.

  “We were in swimsuits on a wooden platform. There were puddles of water on the stage and one girl slipped and twisted her ankle. We had to hold each other up. I caught a cold and then a bladder infection.”

  I gaze out the window: it’s getting dark and people are rushing home from work, a man clutches his hat in the wind.

  “My boyfriend was proud all the same. He stood there in the grounds and clapped when I walked down the runway and did a spin. The stage was quite far away and he said it was difficult for him to make out which girl I was, but that he recognized my green swimsuit.”

  She chews on the doughnut and continues.

  “Only problem was that I was in a yellow swimsuit.”

  She shuts up, brushes the crumbs off the table into the palm of her hand and places them on the plate.

  “He doesn’t know what I got into,” she says in a low voice.

  Once she has pushed the coffee cups aside and convinced herself that there are no crumbs left on the table, she reaches for her bag, pulls out a photo album and places it on the table.

  “Here’s the story of the contest in words and pictures,” she says, moving to my side of the table and cautiously opening the album.

  “This one won,” she says, and reads the caption under the picture out loud, running her finger along the letters:

  Glódís Zoëga’s stunning beauty is a divine gift, stemming from the feminine essence of Iceland’s daughters and sisters. Iceland asks no less of its female stock.

  “This one won the year before,” she continues, turning the pages.

  Miss Gréta Geirsdóttir was the winner and received the honorary title of Beauty Queen of Iceland. She is blonde and slim and graced with great charm. Gréta is the daughter of the couple Jódís and Geir (deceased) from the farm of Outer Lækjarkoti í Flóa. She possesses a forthright manner.

  “This one got to meet the Russian astronaut Gagarin and to hand him a bouquet of flowers. According to the article, he was short and only reached the beauty queen’s shoulders. He considered her even more beautiful than Gina Lollobrigida herself,” she continues to read.

  She points at
other pictures.

  “This one got to appear on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ and this one had two lines in a movie about the last year in Hitler’s life. The judge in the Long Island contest said that the name of the Icelandic beauty queen sounded like a cascade of pebbles tumbling into an Icelandic fjord.”

  “What about her?” I say, pointing at a picture. If I’m not mistaken, there’s a glimpse of Tivoli towers in the background.

  “Those who come in third get sent to the Miss Nordic competition.”

  She continues to flick through the album.

  “That’s me,” she says, pointing at a skinny girl. “I went for an interview.”

  The caption under the photo reads: Rannveig is unattached.

  “I was told to say that. It didn’t go down well with my boyfriend.”

  She pulls out the interview and shows it to me.

  “Is there a man in your life?”

  “No.”

  “Are you going to get married?”

  “Hopefully.”

  She takes a deep breath.

  “They invited me to a meeting in the office before the contest and wanted me to try on the swimsuit and practise pacing the room in it. There were two of them. They said it was a good idea to have a dress rehearsal in the swimsuit before the contest to practise the walk and see if I had it in me. When I got into my swimsuit, one of them measured my breasts and hips with a tape measure and the other measured my height with a folding ruler. He placed a book on my head and drew the mark with a pencil. Then he measured the wall and said it was 173 centimetres, which was quite tall for a beauty queen, but that I could be a trade-show girl. Nonsense, said the other man, she can become a trade-show girl and products presenter once she’s been to Long Island.”

  She pauses and looks down.

  “Then the man who had measured my height left the room and I was alone with the other. He locked the door and said that I had what it takes. I would be sent to Long Island and he would be my personal tour guide. He said I would get to talk about the fire that raged under the earth and glaciers and waterfalls. To put him off, I told him I had a boyfriend even though I’d previously told him I was single, because attached girls have less of a chance of going abroad. He told me my boyfriend could wait. We were meant to have dinner together and he suggested we treat ourselves to halibut at the Naust Restaurant.”

  She dabs her eyes with a serviette, blows her nose and puts the album back into her bag.

  I stand up and stretch out my hand to say goodbye.

  She also stands and buttons up her coat. As she slips on her gloves, she wants to know if I have a boyfriend.

  I tell her I don’t.

  “My granny made an embroidery of the picture that was published with my interview.

  “It took her six weeks to draw the grid, count the squares and make the cross-stitch patterns.”

  beauty (in small letters)

  The baby bottle stands on the kitchen table, beside half a cumin bun. As my friend pours coffee, she says she has stopped throwing up and started to put on weight.

  “The sandwich loaf you brought lasted me three days. When you come with canapés, I eat them for dinner and give Thorgerdur rice pudding. I started with the prawn canapé and ended with the roast beef and remoulade.”

  The best news, though, is that she has started to write in her journal again.

  “I felt too nauseous for it before.”

  She cuts a slice of fruitcake and places it on my plate.

  “This morning I sat at the kitchen table while Thorgerdur was sleeping and the fruitcake was baking in the oven and wrote.

  “Lýdur is worried about me. I can’t so much as glimpse at anything beautiful, not even a glow of light in the sky at night without starting to cry. When I was hanging up nappies and sheets on the line yesterday, I noticed that Thorgerdur had gnawed a hole in her quilt and the sky could be seen through it. It was frosty, but for the first time in a month, the sky was crystal clear and, for one brief moment, eternity was in sight. I thought: Higher, my God, nearer to Thee, can you believe it, Hekla? I felt I could touch the sky with the tip of my pen. I felt as if I were standing a short distance away from myself and could understand what was happening, as if it were happening to someone else. Afterwards I went inside and wrote a poem. About the quilt. I felt I had created beauty. Not BEAUTY in capital letters like poets do, but in small letters: beauty. Then I shook my head at my own silliness. Eternity isn’t within my reach. Compared to you, Hekla, who are the daughter of a volcano and the Arctic sea, I am the daughter of hillock and heath!”

  I laugh because my friend is happy.

  “When I’d written the poem, I felt that life was so wonderful that I put on a dress before Lýdur came home from the road work. He was tired but still happy that I felt so good, at least better than last weekend, as he put it. He asked me to put Thorgerdur down to sleep so we could go to bed. I’d just slipped on the dress but he wanted me out of it. That night I slid out of bed to write a few lines and Lýdur came to me at the kitchen table. He wanted to know what I was doing there in the middle of the night. ‘Is Hekla influencing you?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you just leave that nonsense to her?’

  “He was tired and apologized when we got back into bed. ‘It’s so easy to lose one’s bearings, Ísa dear,’ he said. He still finds me attractive. I told him I was writing a shopping list for tomorrow. I didn’t tell him there were just two things on it: haddock fillets and a bottle of milk. Eternity is too big for me, Hekla. It’s like being alone in the desert. I’d get lost. It’s enough for me to camp for two nights in a birch grove in the Thrastaskógur woods where Lýdur is helping his parents build a summer house. I try to find shelter from the cold wind and inflate the blow-up mattress. I cook for the men on the primus and some thrush sings. He doesn’t know that I’m listening to him. Do you know what I dream of, Hekla? Roe and liver. It won’t be before January. I can’t synchronize myself with time. When autumn comes with the darkness, I miss the light and meadowsweet; in the spring I long for blood pudding, in the autumn to suck the inside out of a freshly laid fulmar’s egg.”

  She cuts two slices of fruitcake, placing one on my plate and the other on hers.

  “When I fell asleep again, I dreamt I was giving birth to a child and I couldn’t find a midwife. In the end I gave birth to the baby on my own. It was a big and beautiful girl, but I needed help to unwind the umbilical cord which was stuck to her nose.”

  I don’t have a number

  My trawling sailor is back on land.

  I spot him when I come out of Hotel Borg, leaning against the wall of a building further down the road, opposite the post office, bareheaded in the pouring sleet. He’s holding his duffel bag and is in the same woollen sweater he was wearing when he said goodbye to me. As soon as he spots me, he rushes over.

  “How was the trip?”

  “I thought I wouldn’t survive it, Hekla. We were fishing in hellishly cold weather, the toughest men didn’t even wear caps and had icicles dangling from their hair.”

  When we get home to Stýrimannastígur, he drops onto the sofa and buries his face in his hands in silence before looking up.

  “On the way home, there was crazy weather and we sprung a leak and almost went under, the mast and the bridge were the only parts above water. We had to hammer the ice away to stop the old tub from sinking. The captain made us put on our life jackets and later we resorted to prayer. After the amen we continued to break the ice. I thought we’d sink.”

  He stands up.

  “I was going to stay behind when we anchored at Hull, but they sensed it, the bastards, and watched me and wouldn’t let me off the boat on my own.”

  He paces the floor.

  “The only good thing about the trip is that I went to an art museum with the second mate who was keeping an eye on me. When word got out, they let him be, but not me.”

  He stretches out for his bag and opens it.

  “Your wish was gr
anted. I bought two books for you and a white pantsuit with wide flares and a waist belt, it’s the fashion.”

  He brandishes one of the books in the air.

  “This has just come out and is called The Bell Jar and it’s by an American woman writer. She committed suicide this spring,” he adds.

  I look at the other book.

  “Is this a novel?” I ask.

  “No, this is a book by a French philosopher. A woman.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “The woman in the bookshop said it was about how women are the second sex. You’re number two, Hekla.”

  He hesitates.

  “I’m much further back in the line. I don’t have a number.”

  “Do they live on their writing, these women novelists?” I ask.

  “Some do. Of course they don’t write in a language that’s only understood by 175,000 people,” he adds.

  He looks serious and I sense he’s anxious and elsewhere.

  “We anchored in Hafnarfjördur and in the taxi on the way into town, I heard that my girlfriend had been spotted holding a boy’s hand.”

  He looks at me.

  “Who is he?”

  “His name is Starkadur and he’s a graduate from the Reykjavík High school. He knows Latin and he’s a poet.”

  “Is he your boyfriend then?”

  I hesitate.

  “He’s asked me to move in with him. He lives in a room with a shared kitchen in Skólavördustígur.”

  “And are you going to do that? Move in with him?”

  “Yes.”

  He is silent for a moment and then continues.

  “I envy you. I’d like to have a boyfriend like you.”

  In the evening I hear meowing outside and go down to let the cat in. It’s sitting in front of the hall door and shoots past me as soon as I open it.

  “This is Odin,” I say. “He lives with us.”

  The sailor bends over and picks up the cat, stroking it several times.

  The cat rolls its eyes and purrs.

  “Odin is a female,” he says.

  “I know.”

  He looks at me.

  “You have the same colour eyes.”