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 station, 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.
“Did you know that it’s forbidden to harpoon a mother whale, which is why the lads only butcher the males?”
He stubs out his cigar in the ashtray on the back of the seat.
“Unless it’s by accident,” he adds.
We drive past the military barracks and oil tanks of the American army and two armed soldiers standing on the road wave at us. The road twists on up the mountain and even more scree lies ahead. Finally a view of the capital across the strait opens up under a pink evening sky; perched on the peak of a barren mound of rock is a half-finished church dedicated to a poor author of psalms. The tower with its scaffolding can be seen all the way from Kjós.
I close the book.
On a side road down Mosfellsdalur, we meet a car and the coach driver suddenly slows down.
“Isn’t that our Nobel Prize winner?” a man is heard asking as the passengers stir and peer through the muddy windows.
“If that’s a four-door Buick Special model 1954, then it’s him all right,” says the driver. “Fantastic suspension and powerful heater,” he adds.
“Doesn’t he have a green Lincoln now?” asks another man.
The men aren’t so sure any more and even think they might have seen a woman at the wheel and children in the backseat.
By then I had been sitting on the bus and chewing dust for eight hours.
In the last hour:
Reykjavík, foggy, slight drizzle
I’m standing on the lot of the BSÍ coach terminal in Hafnarstræti and waiting for the driver to hand me my case along with my other parcels from the roof. Night is falling and the shops have closed, but I know that Snæbjörn Bookstore, which sells English books, is nearby. Feeling shivery after the journey, I adjust the scarf around my throat and button up my coat. My neighbour from the bus sidles up to me and tells me that it just so happens that he sits on the board of the Reykjavík Beauty Society along with some acquaintances of his, including the owner of the whales in the sea. The society’s objective is to embellish the city and promote good taste and decorum among the population, which is why, for a number of years now, it has been hosting a beauty contest. It was initially held in the Tivoli amusement park in Vatnsmýri, but has now actually been moved indoors.
“We can’t allow rain forecasts to postpone our contest every year. Apart from which the ladies caught colds outside.
“… No, the thing is,” I hear the man continue, “we’re looking for unattached maidens, sublimely endowed with both clean-limbedness and comeliness to take part in the competition. I can recognize beauty when I see it, and I would therefore like to invite you to participate in Miss Iceland.”
I size up the man.
“No, thank you.”
The man won’t give in.
“All your features curve and sway like an Icelandic summer’s day.”
He digs into his jacket pocket, pulls out a card and hands it