History. a Mess.

by Sigrún Pálsdottír

  I’m wondering how likely that is when I hear a car horn. I’ve half-crossed the road, and the car is almost upon me. The man behind the wheel lifts his hand questioningly in the air. I retreat and step back up onto the sidewalk. The car drives on and the woman in the passenger seat shoots me a searching glance. An overly intense reaction, given the situation, I think to myself, but before I can follow that thought to its end, her face reappears in my memory. From a short time before Hans and I moved away. She’s standing at a table inside a large hall at a suburban charity fundraiser. On the table there’s red fabric, a thin, crushed velvet, material for a party dress being used as a tablecloth. I’m on a girls’ night out with Sigga D., at Bjarnfríður Una’s invitation. The lady from the passenger seat had turned to me to talk about international aid organizations. Inviting me to sponsor a child, to become a so-called “Global” parent. Because I did not know what sum of money was involved, I suspected the requisite generosity was beyond me, so I replied with considerable agitation, lying that I was already a “Global” parent, then walked away in the direction of the table where the winetasting was taking place. And as I stood there, a glass in one hand and morsels of cheese in the other, I watched Sigga fill out a piece of paper this same woman had handed her, as Bjarnfríður stood by and nodded helpfully. Like someone who knows from experience. Bjarnfríður the global mother to many children? But how in heaven’s name had I thought up this excuse? It’s not like lying to a youngster in the lobby of a mall that you already bought a little furry creature to support a charity for alcoholics earlier that day. In some other store.

  I’ve crossed the street and am standing before a big white stone house. One that stands so much more prominently than any of the others. I slow down and look at the elegant entryway, the steps up to the massive front door, look in the living room window, at the white, silk-smooth replicas of Boy and Girl and of The Water Carrier. An older man emerges from the house and says hello to me as I stand by the garden side. He does so only out of politeness, I doubt he remembers me. Not the way I remember him, through tears that little by little blurred my vision of his face. A white medical gown that blended with the wall behind him as I made a cellphone call to the indifferent Hans, who at the time was only two kilometers away from me, in the large conference hall, a glass of wine in his hand, together with his Icelandic colleagues, while on the right huddled clusters of molecular biologists, small groups orbiting the same nucleus. When had the guy received the Nobel Prize? Had Hans ever gotten to talk to him? Had it been my very phone call that ended that tremendous opportunity for my loving sweetheart, my words spoken in a cracking voice, telling him how our little thing had come to nothing, that he needed to come right away? When he asked me if I couldn’t take a cab home from the hospital, my pain altered into the peculiar well-being necessitated by sudden revulsion toward one’s loved ones. No, I no longer wanted anyone beside me, not even Daddy or Mom. I resolved to thrive on the pain, to walk on through this suffering alone.

  I spent the next few days mostly with the comforter over my head, unable to bear how Hans’s puppy eyes stared at me whenever I moved around our tiny student apartment. His facial expression, which meant to express regret, seemed to me nothing but an automatic request for immediate forgiveness so that we could go back to living our lives. A hasty absolution so that he could continue working toward his goal. He couldn’t afford to lose any time.

  When I am just a few steps past the doctor’s beautiful white home, I hear in the distance a crying baby. A woman of my age, with short-cut dark hair, walks briskly toward me, hoping that the speed of the stroller she pushes away from herself will comfort the child lying inside. She does not look at me but I see her face clearly. See it even once she’s passed me. She looks at me from twenty years ago. She is in horrendous shock. She’s screaming, but I cannot hear anything because of the loud music carrying from somewhere, some nearby neighborhood in a foreign city. All there is is her long, dark hair swinging back and forth almost in line with her body which hangs in the open air, hands on the balcony rail. I bring myself over to the railing and take her arms, but swiftly realize this won’t work. I’ll never be able to lift her up. I’m trying to call for help but no words come because it’s so far down and I’m dizzy and I have to let go of her slender wrists to steady myself and take a step back onto the tiled balcony floor. A mosque and a few spires reflect the burning sun, half gone behind the horizon. Who is that snaking through the picture like lightning? The Queen of Sheba, King Solomon! Get me away from here!

  And then finally things opened up and I was able to call for help. But at the same moment, I fall to the balcony floor under a blow from someone who comes running out onto the balcony and pushes me down, allowing the upper part of their body to lean out over the balcony, to grab the girl’s waist and pull her to one side and up with heavy pants, and then the girl is throwing one foot over the railing and helping out with her own rescue. The girl lands on the floor but stands up right away, pushing herself away from the young man who now came running out onto the balcony; she goes crying into the hotel room. Bjarnfríður Una plunks herself down with her back to the balcony railing and hand over her mouth. She does not look at me. She looks straight ahead and is close to petrified. I stand by her side and look down at the tiles. I listen to the voice shout inside me and feel for a moment that my next step can only be replaying again the recklessness of our school friend, a girl we didn’t know well but who we’d still followed from the farewell party of our graduation trip abroad to a hotel room, where we tried in vain to reassure her after her ferocious argument with her boyfriend. I take hold of the railing and lean my head down and torment my cowardly soul by staring seven stories below to the street. When I look up, the sun has set and the music gone quiet, though from inside the room carry choked sobs and, mixed with them, low whispering. Bjarnfríður has gone back in and is standing in front of the couple, nodding hesitantly at their wish that “this,” as the young man calls the incident, not go any further.

  We leave the room and head down to another floor. Bjarnfríður worried, doubtful about the promise we had ended up giving, acting like I don’t exist. I scream silently, alone inside myself.

  I look at the clock. I’m about halfway through my journey to Mom, and I walk faster as I feel raindrops on one of my cheeks. From my raincoat pocket sounds a tinny noise, quiet to begin with but getting gradually louder. Sigga D. thanks me for last night and asks how I’m doing. However, she does not mention a word about how last night’s gathering possibly, most likely, ended. She talks, on the other hand, about chatting with my parents, says how nice it was to see them. Then she says something I do not hear well because of the traffic. “Hold on,” I say, and step into a narrow passageway between two houses. I stand at the far end of the passageway, which looks into a remote backyard, and give Sigga a signal to continue. “I was asking why you’re always telling people I don’t like my job? Your mom asked me last night, not for the first time, when I was finally going to follow my dream and go back to school. For literature!”

  I look up into the black sky, past the alien backsides of houses I never knew existed. At a slender, short woman who walks out onto one of the balconies. The woman lights a cigarette and I say something to Sigga about how I feel she never talks about her work, so much less than the fiction she’s reading. “Which you are reading,” she says, “And why, do you think?” I say I can’t answer that, I’m in a hurry. I need to say goodbye to her.

  The woman on the balcony, who seems middle-aged, leans over the railing as a teenage boy appears behind her and starts to tug at her sweater. Because of his size and build, I guess he wants her to come in and get him something to eat. From the food filling all the cupboards and cabinets hidden inside the kitchen of this residence, which hides itself away behind the visible street scene. How would you get inside this house? Through this passageway? Past three words that have been scrawled so crudely here on the wall and which I notice on my wa
y back to the main road? I realize how repugnant they are as soon as it dawns on me that I am not getting out of the passageway any time soon: rainwater forms a tight wall in front of me. The black cloud. I decide to use the time to call Sigga back. To greet her more kindly, with excuses and promises to contact her later today. I take the phone out of my coat pocket and look at the screen. Twenty new messages. A week old, all from Bonný. I know it will take a while before I go over them all, but the beginning of the first message is enough to make me wait to call Sigga: You are missing a lot, hon! I glance through the disjointed texts. There’s a whole mass. I lean against the graffitied wall, against that dirty Icelandic word I’ve never been able to put in my mouth. Support myself on it as I patch the fragments from Bonný together into my mind and fill in the story by dint of what I know. And some imagination:

  They’d arrived at the cottage about five-ish. Sigga immediately turned on the water and gas; some of them went out on the deck and praised the view and talked about how long it had been since they last were there, but Bjarnfríður Una had no sooner slipped off her shoes than she was arranging snacks and cheese on a tray which she laid on the new coffee table. In fact, she’d pushed the table top to the side before laying the tray on it to see if there was something newer in the cabinet under the panel than the years-old Weekly News from their last visit (I just know she did).

  Shortly after that, the cooking began. Bjarnfríður opened the first red wine bottle of many that she set out as part of her generous contribution to the celebration. It was a fine French wine that she had bought wholesale through her acquaintances. The group was relaxed and there was much merriment over the table. Some rapid drinking. Ester most of all, and by the time coffee was served she had suddenly begun to talk, out of thin air, about sex. And not just sex in general. She talked about the married couple’s sex life. In their row house. The forest green one. In the suburbs. Sigga A. got up quickly and went to sleep. She had, as usual, been silent, but this time for a reason Sigga D. will tell me about later, Bonný writes. But to clear the air after Ester’s frankness, because all of her sex talk had a very positive note, which made it even more unbearable than otherwise, Sigga, the heir to the cabin, suggested they move over to the sofa and play a game of trivia. The idea was met with appreciation.

  Glasses were moved between tables while Sigga fetched the game. Everything went well, and the women’s “ignorance” brought forth old memories and laughter. But when the game was about half over, the competition took an unexpected turn, beginning with Tína’s question for Bjarnfríður Una: “What French writer is the author of these words: Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind where the real and the imaginary will cease to appear contradictory?”

  Tína looked at the answer, nodded to herself, of course, at the benefit of having the information on the card. She put it back in the deck, obviously not expecting much from Bjarnfríður’s response; the latter squinted her eyes and stroked her lips.

  Bjarnfríður racked her brain for a few seconds, then said, with some hesitation, and in fact, as a question: “André Breton himself, is it not?”

  The whole group was silent. Tína looked questioningly into the eyes of her friend. Then she said, without hesitation: “André Breton himself? Is he a family member? You cheated!”

  Bjarnfríður then turned big, questioning eyes on Tína: “Wait, how could I?”

  “You peeked, or else you saw the answer earlier when you pulled two cards out of the box or something,” answered Tína.

  “I peeked,” Bjarnfríður said, breathing deeply, “And who am I? Who am I, Tína? Who am I in your eyes?” She asked, her voice cracking. She leant half across the table to wait for Tína’s response, as she sat there on the other side of it, looking upward as if to escape this question, which was about to blow up the paneled little cabin in West Iceland.

  Bjarnfríður Una sat back on the couch and sipped her beer, swallowing a tidy burp and looking down. None of the women said a word. It’s as though the atmosphere Bjarnfríður’s existential question created weighed heavier than what Ester had conjured by sharing the secrets of her bedroom and the thickset ballplayer earlier this evening. It was so unbearable that not even Sigga D. could defuse it.

  But now, just when you would think that the country cabin story is about to reach some sort of peak, it’s like Bonný’s thumb dropped off with all the texting. Her truncated, disjointed messages nevertheless let me know that the wretched Bjarnfríður Una seemed to have broken the silence and answered her question herself: “A cultureless, self-obsessed nag from the North.” She had leaned back and repeated her words, now in the form of a question that she answered by taking the silent group of girlfriends twenty years back in time. This wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar journey, given how often Bjarnfríður tells and has told the story of her becoming part of this group.

  The story Bonný refers to here, which I had in fact long forgotten, and now remember as I stand in this passageway, sheltered from the pouring rain, started up north, in the small town of Húsavík. Bjarnfríður had lived there with her single mother since she was a toddler, but the real stage for the story is Reykjavík High School where she got to know her girlfriends and thenclassmates. At Húsavík, the loud-voiced and powerful Bjarnfríður earned a good reputation within the town’s amateur theater, and it was therefore natural that she joined the theater club at her new school when she came south. In the theater club, she soon met the big shot, a boy, a senior, who was fascinated with the self-certainty and talent of this rough-hewn northern belle. He never called her anything but Una.

  But that fairytale did not last long. Tína, an elfish wanderer, suddenly got the acting bug too, and got caught up in the relationship between the promising young actor and Bjarnfríður. Caught up, in fact, in Bjarnfríður’s chance of a dramatic career, because her position within the group diminished in the aftermath of all this, and she was eventually driven away. She was subsequently isolated from the girls who were her classmates, the girls who indirectly took up Tína’s resentment because Bjarnfríður was a stranger from the north. One of us was the ringleader; Bonný, if I remember right. I don’t quite know, however, whether it was Bjarnfríður’s mother’s illness or frustration with school that led to her decision to head back north to work in a fish-processing plant for the summer but the trip was still decisive because that autumn she returned south, sturdier than ever, her stocky prankster by her side. In fact, she herself had put on a little weight, too.

  Gradually, Bjarnfríður started to hang around with this boy’s friends, a right-wing group from the graduating class, more than her own peers. After all this fellowship had taken her in with open arms when Tína and her crowd betrayed her. And this signaled the marked start of a political identity for this young amateur actress from Húsavík, without there ever having been any kind of ideological revelation, nor was there any indication biology was a factor in her political orientation. Bjarnfríður Una simply did not think anything her saviors, the people right before her eyes, had to say about the role and purpose of contemporary politics could be anything but right and true.

  Then a year later these two boyfriends, the actor and the conservative, disappeared from Bjarnfríður and Tína’s lives. The classmates’ friendship resumed, but without the former leaving her ex’s social circle, those people who’d supported her so well. And so Bjarnfríður Una’s position in life was fully established. Politics became her companionship, her refuge, rather than her passion and conviction. The same was true of Tína. She had gone onto the stage, where her interest in political theater was awakened, not necessarily due to her ideals but rather because it was her way to give her career as an actress more gravity when misgivings about the significance of the art began to occupy her mind. But that path—inevitably left-wing and radical—also signaled her ignorance of the more subtle texts in that genre and their impenetrable but powerful politics.

  That’s where my version of th
e story Bonný referenced ends. I look back down at the screen and the confusion of abbreviations displayed on it. It seemed that Tína had at the story’s end moved over to her girlfriend, embracing her and saying that Bjarnfríður Una had a big heart, although she did not always speak like it. And that those who speak most loudly about compassion and the need for generosity in our world aren’t always exemplary themselves. She knew that all too well; in reality, people were rarely in a position to show their true qualities; most of us never end up in such situations. Then she stood up and extended her delicate hand to her friend, the girlfriend whom she had indirectly, by stealing her boyfriend, pushed toward the very political associations she herself had spent her life condemning, and pulled her up from the couch: “And I’ve never said you were a cultureless hillbilly. Just never thought you were into French surrealism.”

  Bjarnfríður Una had put her hand to her chest and sat up with an innocent expression. They walked out onto the terrace. And that’s how I see the story end before me: Tína putting a cigarette in her mouth, and then leaning down to Bjarnfríður’s hand, which keeps the fire lit. They settle down on the wooden bench, feet crossed and up on the railing. In front of them the shrubs, the lake, the mountain and the sun behind them, silhouetted when seen from the living room, visibly sharing a sisterly cigarette in the evening quiet as the sun sinks down across the horizon.

  It had stopped raining. A while ago. Why had Bonný sent me all this? I step out from the passageway, brush my hair off my face, tighten my ponytail and head down the street. Beyond all the cellar windows containing lives that seem cast aside, hidden behind strange trash on window ledges, behind curtains from another century, behind the panes’ thick dust. I go past the house that was once a ship owner’s wealthy estate but is now a guesthouse named, thanks to a homemade sign, after an Icelandic settler. Then I come to the end of the street and stand at Ragnar’s Frameshop, which is in the house on the corner. I look into the store front, at a woman who stands beside a radiant, brand-new abstract painting, discussing the frame with a man behind the counter. Ragnar? I focus on the glass, pout my lips as soon as my reflection appears. I run my hands over my trench coat from the waist down and am about to turn up my collar when my focus expands to take in the store. On the wall above Ragnar hangs a big print, turbulent landscape in a golden frame. I get closer to the glass. The clouds fade and move slowly away. The colors dissolve into one another until my face lies superimposed on Turner’s sky: