Miss Iceland. Audur Ava Olafsdottir
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 moment, puts down his duffel bag and the case and gives me another quick hug. In front of the poet. Then we continue.
He tells me that before he went to sea he’d worked at the whaling station.
“We worked on shifts night and day, carving meat, sawing bone and boiling. I was the only one who didn’t go sunbathing with the guys. When they realized I was different, I was afraid they’d shove me into a try pot.
“Still, there was another guy like me.
“I knew it as soon as I saw him.
“He knew it too.
“One evening when we had a break, we went off on a walk together.
“Nothing happened. After that he avoided me.”
He runs a hand through his tuft of hair. It’s shaking.
“They take such a long time to kill those giant creatures, the mortal battle can last a whole day.”
After the whaling, he said he took two trips on a side trawler, Saturnus.
“I was seasick for the whole time,” he says. “Constantly. With vomit in my throat. I couldn’t sleep I was so nauseous. The smell of slime and scales was everywhere, even in my quilt and pillow. The weather was foul. I couldn’t learn to rock with the waves. I slept on a top bunk and the horizon swayed up and down. It helped a bit when I covered the porthole with a curtain. I got the worst chores. My manhood was constantly put to the test. The crew were never sober, and they picked on me. I was so exhausted I couldn’t lift my arms from my sides. Every day I was afraid I’d drown.”
He hesitates.
“They tried to crawl up to me in bed, but because I slept with my clothes on, there was less danger of being raped.
“Then there was the whoring. They noticed I wasn’t into women so they decided to man me up by buying me a hooker when we docked at Hull.”
I look at my pale friend. Two swan couples swim close by on the Tjörnin Lake.
“I told them I didn’t want to be unfaithful to my girlfriend.”
He averts his gaze as he says this.
“I swear, Hekla, I couldn’t survive another trip, I’m never stepping on that rusty raft again. I’m willing to take on any job that doesn’t involve going out to sea.”
He is silent for a moment.
“There was one saving grace, though. The second mate. He paints pictures of schooners when he’s onshore but doesn’t want anyone to know.”
The subject makes me think of Ísey’s father-in-law.
“Once the cook was too drunk to be woken up, so the mate sent me down to the storage room to take some lamb out of the freezer and make meat soup. The kitchen was the only place where I was left in peace.
“That was also where they hid their smuggled stash on the way home. Blaupunkt television sets, cartons of cigarettes and bottles of gin. In nooks inside the walls behind the pantry and in the freezer.”
The moon is my closest neighbour
The path leads west to Stýrimannastígur, not far from the shipyard.
“Are you writing, Hekla?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
We halt by a timber house, clad in rusty corrugated-iron. A steep wooden staircase leads up to the sailor’s attic room. He sticks a key into the lock and says it’s stiff.
I look around.
The room has a sleeping couch, a wardrobe in the corner, a bookshelf by the bed and a sewing machine that stands on a small table under the skylight. He says there is a communal toilet in the basement and a view of the stars through the skylight when the weather allows. He spotted the first star three weeks ago, he adds.
“Here you can write,” he says, and removes the sewing machine from the table, opens the wardrobe and places it at the bottom.
I put the typewriter on the table.
He says he’s already moved twice in the space of six months and at first lived in a basement flat in Adalstræti, which was regularly flooded by the spring tides. He then moved into another basement room in Hafnarstræti right opposite the police station.
“So they