I close the notebook and set it on the bedside table. Lie on my pillow and look, lost in thought, at the ceiling rosette above me. Then I roll onto my side and watch the cover lift slowly from the pages. I reach into the book and open it to the front: the text about the Demolitionist. For the meeting with Diana that never came to pass.
“Everything looks better on paper”? What had Diana and my sister-in-law’s guru meant by these words? This writing of mine about the demolitionist does not look at all good on paper, nor did these reflections of mine, laid bare on paper, reveal their “petty, impetuous” nature. In other words, I would have to admit to everything stated there, but like much of what one thinks about, I only wanted to keep the reflections for myself.
I look at the spine and see that the paper has not been cut in a way that the pages could easily tear out. I’ll need to get them out some other way. Throw them into the trash, I think, and head to do it.
I walk into the living room and from there into the dining room. Glasses and dishes all over the place. Someone has washed up and arranged things neatly on the table. But where is Hans? Gone to work so early on a Saturday morning? I put the notebook in the breast pocket of my nightshirt, put my hands on the table edge and lean forward. The image that appeared to me in the living room for just a moment is right now being called up in my mind. I can’t bring myself to look back, at my tapestry, which now lies crumpled on top of the books in front of the door. The door is open, but only a slit. Had Bjarnfríður Una and Hans’s sister’s husband talked about regional affairs? Here? He had leaned against the hanging so the handle touched his back. Leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling in a concentrated search for the right words for the obvious. Did they know one another from up north?
I turn around and move myself closer. I grasp the handle and open the door wider. I step up to the threshold and stick my head in. The material caresses my face. I open the door wide. Across the opening there’s a clothesline from which hang three white smocks. Doctor’s coats. A fourth is on the floor. I push the gowns away with a gentle but firm movement. I’m startled by my own scream, surging up powerfully, like thunder, but soon find myself emitting a miserable whine as I make out who stands there before me. The face is snowy white but the eyes are fixed, circled in a black ring of old eye-shadow. The remnants of red color on my dried-out lips. I quickly glance away from my own reflection, look down at the floor, at the three walls. Then back up to the frame around a mirror, at a small card that has been tucked in its lower right corner: Dr. Theodor Jakobsson, M. D. Tel. 2319.
The wide expanse within me. Nothing but a clothes closet, no more than a meter square! I pick the gown up off the floor, stroke the white linen, and bring it up to my face before I cast it back down on the floor. I’m filled with a strange emptiness, unable to tell whether it’s anything but a search for something that’s not nearly as vast as it once seemed. A space that is no longer there when looked at more closely. I lean up against the door frame and allow myself to slide down to the floor. I don’t imagine I will get back up anytime soon.
I let my eyes fix on the darkness in the left-hand corner of the closet, on some card lying there. Did it fall from the pocket of the doctor’s smock? I stare without seeing. Perhaps I’ve had enough of my own perception for a while. I lie for a long time thinking very little, nothing more than about the colors I think I can make out on the card, how they little by little brighten the longer I stare. At one point, I think there’s a very small light shining in the corner. Now I come to see it must be a postcard. I lie halfway across the floor and reach out for it.
La muse. The very small woman who encountered me here in the closet a few days ago? I turn the card over. It’s addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Theodor. The writing is minute. It has to be some of the smallest writing I’d ever seen:
London, August 30, 1960
Dear ma and dear pa!
I simply must share from afar that A. passed the exam with flying colors and has been accepted into the school. What a joy! We now have a few days to enjoy life here in the city. Today we visited the Tate Gallery, Britain’s national art museum. We had to wait in line outside the museum for a whole two hours in scorching heat, would you believe it, because there’s an on-going exhibition of the celebrated Picasso’s work (see picture on the back)—remember, Dad, you showed me a review of the exhibition in the paper just before we left. Here, as a matter of fact, everyone is going crazy for some reason, talking about a veritable Picassomania in this country, even though avant-garde art has been very much in the bad books here. The Queen’s husband made it clear that the painter was clearly a drunk, must be, given his politics and support for communism. But the Queen and her mother were moved and found themselves more than a little intoxicated looking at man’s inner face of man, visible in the painter’s distorted visages.
Your little,
H
Up against the left edge of the postcard, actually on top of the writing itself, was written: p.s. I do not know if the honored couple back home on Túngata might be interested in this news!
I turn the card around. I sniff the image. The honored couple on Túngata? H and A? Hrefna The and my mom? If my world had collapsed on itself when I looked into the closet a moment back, it now expanded out at terrible speed. Headed full force out into the scattered expanses of childthought, without any perception of an ending, just the marvels of eternity in a child’s tiny world:
My earliest memory. The starting point of my life; under it, the distant sound of singing. An old recording, which sounded like butter spattering in a frying pan: “My friend Tito Schipa,” as grandfather referred to his favorite singer. Grandmother standing at the dining table in her shining shirtwaist dress, putting things into her handbag. I tried to get her attention with my words, but when she did not answer me, I tugged at her dress. My grandmother swatted her hand behind her in my direction, driving me back to my nook next to the big cupboard of books, locked behind glass, where I continued my game, feeling the cold, cutting silence brush my back when she walked past me and out of the room. Out of the house and probably down Túngata.
Now it was only grandfather and me. Looking under the cupboard, I saw his foot, the patterned tips of his cognac-brown brogues. The room thick with smoke from his big cigar. Grandfather had said something to grandmother that I had not heard well, but just before she left the room, he said: “To pretend the child has learning difficulties as a way to cover up her illness indicates a sick mindset.” I did not understand what he meant, surely, and I doubt, of course, as I recall his words, that I can in fact have heard them right back then. Especially after having spent the next few years forgetting them thanks to what happened next:
I carefully peeked my face out past the book cupboard; at that same moment, my grandfather looked up from his newspaper. The paper cut off his face just below the eyes, his attentive glance right above the photo on the cover showing Mom, a pinhead in the midst of the thousands of people who had gathered around the unremarkable clock to mark the day’s famous occasion: The 1975 Women’s Day Off. About this event, my grandmother and Mom had talked with some hostility the day before. Continuing it, Grandmother and Grandfather’s silent warfare reached their high-mark the next day. The day it became clear the event was unique, probably historic. The day grandfather’s eyes met mine. The day he came crawling on all fours over to my corner, getting incredibly excited about my toy: his leather-covered pen box, silk needle cushion and a golden thimble from Grandmother’s sewing chest. A gridded teak trivet for hot pans. He lay on his side in his suit the way he would at a picnic, though I’d never seen him lying like that on the living room floor before. Once Grandfather had let Barbie sit on the pin cushion and drink from the thimble, he put the doll down for a nap on the pen case behind the partition, the teak trivet. Then he, too, went to sleep. He fell to his side and straight onto his stomach. And there he lay while I played. Right up until Grandmother returned.
She appears in the do
or. Suddenly, as quietly as she’d disappeared earlier that day. But she’s a different grandmother. With her handbag on her slender arm, she puts both hands around her head, shaking it unceasingly. Emaciated, almost deformed, her face seems to indicate she’s screaming, but I can’t hear a thing. She walks toward Grandfather, slips her handbag off her shoulder, and lets it fall to the floor beside him. She grasps his shoulder, rolls him on his back and begins to shake him and slap his face. She looks around like a frightened animal in search of an escape route. And it was then that she realizes that I was standing there in the living room, had fled over to the corner as she came in, my back straight as a rod, hands reaching down my sides to my flame-red overalls, trying to figure out whether I am more terrified or surprised. Grandma gets up, reaches out her hand and walks slowly toward me. Puts one hand over my eyes, the other on my neck. I stand deathly still, but when I feel almost out of breath, I try to take her hands from my face. Then she grasps me in her arms, and holds me tightly, so my first reaction is to free myself. I push with both hands against her thin shoulders, my little paws on the sheer, shining fabric of her paisley shirtwaist dress. She resists me, clutches one hand around my neck and presses my face into her collarbone. Then I feel myself stiffen, stubborn as anything, responding with some deep and terrible strength, putting both hands on her face to get rid of her. A face I realize I’ve never touched before. I push my fingers up into her skin, drag them along her cheekbone until her soft, elastic skin almost lies across her eye. The image I see brings a scream forth from somewhere inside me, and with it a surge of strength that ends with me on the floor, flat on my stomach, like Grandfather, until my grandmother’s thin hands clasp around my waist and try to pull me back to her. But then her grip is suddenly released; at that same moment, I am taken hold of firmly under my arms, and jerked up. In the dark under my eyelids, I recognize Daddy’s stubble as it tickles my nose, the smell of his skin calming this child’s overstretched nerves. In the distance, I hear a peculiar sound from my grandmother and Mom and then two loud male voices alternately giving orders, and Grandfather is carried out.
I don’t remember if I got any help to forget about this experience, or whether I did forget about it at all, because the event and grandfather’s last words became a sort of black hole for everything related to my young mother, her education and possible illnesses. The first lines in my image of Mom were likely drawn right there.
I get up from the floor and go into the kitchen. In the earthenware bowl on top of the fridge I find the photo of my parents. A photograph that I had used two days ago as a sort of absenteeism for being inside a concrete-walled clothes closet! Dad is standing on the left with a sweater around his shoulders, somehow timeless compared to the classic 1960s image beside him: my mom’s hair is thick, cut short, straightened. She wears a man’s short-sleeved shirt over tight-fitting pants, pants secured with a wide belt around her slender waist. Mom has one foot on a rock wall, narrow-toed flat. Around her neck a bandana, half-hidden behind the smoke entering into the frame from the right, from the cigarette that someone beside her has pinched between an index and middle finger.
But this photo was not taken in the backyard of my mother’s childhood home, as I’ve always imagined. I can see that now. I can see it in my mother’s face. The picture wasn’t even taken in Iceland. This is not an Icelandic rock Mom’s leaning on, resting her foot against. It’s brick. English brick. London in the fall of 1960? Dad adjusts the sweater on his shoulders before he walks out of the picture. Mom follows him. To Iceland, at grandmother’s request. Away from Sixties Britain, that great beginning of history. Toward her destiny as an Icelandic housewife, my dad’s wife and, after a painful ordeal, my mother.
I look at the piled, stony wall in the picture, and feel like it’s going to break apart and fall on top of me. Countless images arrange themselves above one another, voices talking on top of each other. Then silence rings out. It’s the silence under Mom’s words from last night: You see, in today’s historiography, where the focus on the individual is once again becoming stronger, it’s actually better for a forgotten artist to have been a woman than a man. What used to work against the artist has become her success.”
What had sounded simply like erudite chatter directed at my father-in-law’s ears during yesterday evening’s festivities was clearly a message. A message to me. Mom had worked out my problem. Either when she went through Sex, Gender, etc. here in the living room two days ago, or yesterday when she checked out my notebook while I was hiding in the closet. At least, she had put two and two together and was now telling me to stick to my course. But her declaration of support, her promise of concealment, had been disguised. She knew I would never ask her to keep secret such a serious act, so she was having to pretend I don’t know she knows what has happened. What I’ve done. Firmly resolved to make sure I don’t lack what she lacked under grandmother’s awful power, Mom has set her blessing on the deed; as amazing as it sounds, it’s all I need to keep going. But to be absolutely sure about my understanding, I need to get some sign from her. I have to ask her a question. Face to face. Only one simple question and if she answers yes, I will go ahead and submit my thesis.
I’ve swept my hair into a pony tail and come into the front room. I button myself up and step into my shoes with the gold buckles on the instep. I tie the belt of my overcoat and my footsteps click smartly on the entryway floor as I reach for the knob. Like someone accepting a command from on high.
I’m standing on the threshold. The cold breeze strokes my face from the right as it moves west. It’s rather ominous. But I will not let that stop me. My journey to Mom will not take more than fifteen minutes or so. Am I forgetting something?
To my mother
The houses here farthest up the street are stone, mostly painted white; lower down they’re identical constructions, yet multicolored. A Reykjavík street scene with a hazy, fragmented history.
I’ve just gone down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk as a fancy automobile, a Lexus, drives past the house. Far above the speed limit. I watch the car. Was that the Reverend Sigurður? Gotten so thin-haired in these twenty years that have passed since he floated, white-clad and tanned, across the flashing dance-floor toward me. Waving his hands, shaking his pretty hips, so that I dared not answer any other way than to adjust my shoulder pads in time with my automatic foot movements. That evening had started at Sigga D.’s home, but I was now all alone inside the venue because she had been stopped at the entrance for being underage. Instead of turning back and going out with her, I’d moved on into the dark cave, on toward the dance floor. Not yet come of age, a sweatband around my forehead, on a victory high, without a way to communicate it except for these awkward, cunningly-conceived movements in front of this breathtaking young guy. I don’t remember how long the dance lasted, but I remember too well how the evening ended. I stood by the cloakroom, leaning my back up against the rough, dark-colored wall. All around me things were taking shape, but I was not part of any of these intrigues, even though I made it look like I was looking for some imaginary companions there amid the throng. Forlorn, suddenly so young and alone that I couldn’t find a way to either stay put or walk on out. Then he appeared all at once from the hall, grinning broadly and dripping with sweat after his exertions. Streams of bliss surged through my body, and I got busy adjusting the wide belt around my waist. But when I stole a look, I realized his smile wasn’t for me, but for two women his own age standing right in front of me. Just before the three of them left the place, dashing and caught up in some kind of dance, he looked toward me. But his smile contained no brightness; instead, everything had darkened, and I felt my life would come to an end there in the cloakroom queue. There was this relaxed quality to the smile that turned his greeting into a symbol for all of life’s incomprehensible, merciless moments from that point on. Or at least until I saw him long after that, presiding at the altar, ordaining them in marriage: Guðbjörg, today a realtor, and the man whose n
ame I no longer remember. A marriage that was no more successful than the awkward metaphors this former king of the dance floor offered the bridal couple, ramblings about “love and life.” As I sat at the front of the church that day, I recalled my mother’s reaction when I had returned home from the discotheque some fifteen years earlier, cold and swollen with tears, having walked through town. If only I had understood her words and wisdom back then.
As I approach the first intersection, I see a young man coming out of the supermarket on the corner at a run. He’s holding a plastic bag and heads toward a car that has been parked up on the sidewalk of the street opposite. Just before the man disappears into the car, he moves his hand in my direction, but I cannot answer his greeting because my first reaction is to look down at the sidewalk, and when I look back he’s vanished inside his car. When the car has reached the next street corner, I realize who it was. And at the same time, I know why I looked down and away. The young man in the car is a composer. He is married to one of Tína’s friends.
A dinner party. Approximately five years ago. I hear words rush out into the air. Words about music. Highfalutin, intoxicated words about music, the obtrusive words of a layman in search of a specialist’s recognition, the person sitting next me. Had he listened to me out of interest or pity? I was never sure, not for weeks buried under replays of this asinine scene in my head, but now his weightless wave and the smile accompanying it confirm the latter; in his smirk, there’s no doubting the message, that despite such a long time having passed, my musical idiocies could still be made fun of. But as soon as I understand that, I also know nothing can alter the fact that my logic that evening is his lone source of knowledge about me. My words are tantamount to who I am in his eyes and the eyes of all those he might have shared my drivel with. If, that is, I’ve ever gotten a mention among his crowd.
History. a Mess. Page 8