power line and instal that row of electricity poles with the team of labourers; they lived in work huts, he had a record player and played the Shadows; he had such a beautiful voice that it didn’t matter what he said, it made me weak in the knees; now he’s a husband and father. It’s so strange to think that Lýdur will be the last one.”
I try to recall Lýdur’s voice, but can’t remember anything he said. Whenever we meet Ísey does the talking and he is mostly silent.
On the walls there are two large paintings that seem at odds with the spartan furnishings: one is of a mossy lava field and a glittering lake in a rocky rift and the other is of a steep mountain.
“Kjarval?” I ask.
“Yes, from my mother-in-law.”
She says her father-in-law couldn’t come to terms with the way the artist depicted it.
“He said that wasn’t the Mt Lómagnúpur that he knew.
He’s been out at sea for thirty years and only wants boats on his walls, not landscapes and certainly not coloured rocks. Rocks are just bloody rocks, he says, not colours. The mother-in-law, on the other hand, doesn’t want to see the sea in her living room. Her father was a sailor and drowned when she was small and she chose to live somewhere where the sea was out of sight.”
“That’s difficult on an island,” I say.
“Not in Efstasund.”
We contemplate the paintings.
“My mother-in-law met the painter when she was a cook for road labourers in the east. She thinks he’s a decent enough man but agrees with her husband that he doesn’t get the colours right. Lýdur says that if we had a garage we could keep the paintings there, at least one of them. Now he believes we could even get some money for them. I cried so much he didn’t dare mention it again.”
She seems preoccupied.
“I can’t lose those paintings, Hekla. I look at them every day. There’s so much light in them.”
She walks over to the window and gazes into the darkness. A few withered blades of grass reach the glass.
“This is how deep I’ve sunk. This is how small my world has become: the view over Breidafjördur and its thousand islands and the biggest sky in the whole world has shrunk down to the size of a basement window on Kjartansgata.”
“Still, at least your street is named after a character in the Laxdæla Saga.”
She turns to me.
“I’m terrible. I haven’t offered you anything. I had some rice pudding for dinner and can heat it up for you.”
I tell her I’ve already eaten. That I had coffee and pound cake in Hvalfjördur. Nonetheless, she insists on opening a can of pears and whipping cream.
“It’s Christmas when you come for a visit, Hekla.”
I open my case and hand her a parcel wrapped in brown paper.
“Puffins from Dad,” I say.
I follow her into the kitchen, which has a small Rafha electric cooker, a fridge and a table for two. On the way she repeats how happy she is to see me. She says she’ll cook the puffins at the weekend when Lýdur is back in town and sticks them in the fridge.
“I don’t enjoy cooking but I’m learning. The other day I made Ora fishballs in pink sauce, but Lýdur’s favourite is stockfish. My sister-in-law taught me how to make pink sauce. You use ketchup and flour.”
I tell her that Jón John has offered me a room that he rents in Stýrimannastígur, while he’s out at sea. “Until I get a job and can rent my own room,” I add.
“Have you finished your manuscript?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And started another?”
“Yes.”
“I always knew you would become a writer, Hekla.
“Do you remember when you were six and you had recently started to write and wrote in your childish handwriting in a copybook that the river moved like time? And that the water was cold and deep? That was before Steinn Steinarr wrote his ‘Time and Water’.”
She hesitates.
“I know Jón John is your best friend, Hekla.”
“Male friend, yes,” I say.
She looks me in the eye.
“I realize the child is a distraction for you, but stay with me until the weekend at least.”
I think: that’s three days. I can’t write here.
I say: “I’ll be here until the weekend.”
We sit with the canned pears in dessert bowls, opposite one another at the kitchen table, and Ísey falls into a momentary silence. I feel there’s something on her mind.
“I bought myself a diary the other day and have started to write in it.”
She reveals this cautiously.
“That’s how low I’ve sunk, Hekla.”
I start thinking about my father’s diary entries and how he deciphered the weather from the look of the glacier beyond the fjord every day; it didn’t matter what the glacier looked like, it always augured ill, even a splendid glacier could bode a downpour over the swathes of grass.
“Do you write about the weather?” I ask.
She takes a deep breath.
“I write about what happens, but since so little happens I also write about what doesn’t happen. The things that people don’t say and don’t do. What Lýdur doesn’t say, for example.”
She stalls.
“Because I add thoughts and descriptions to what happens, a quick trip to the store can take up many pages. I went out twice yesterday, once to the fish shop and once with the rubbish. When I walked to the fish shop with the pram, I shut my eyes and felt a slight heat on my eyelids. Is that a sun or not a sun? I asked myself, and I felt I was a part of something bigger.”
She looks anxious.
“I keep the journal in the washing bucket because Lýdur wouldn’t understand me wasting time on writing about things that don’t exist or about things that are over.
“‘What’s over is over,’ he says.
“Still though, last weekend when we got into bed, he said: ‘Tell me what happened this evening, Ísa, that way it feels like it happened to someone else.’ That was the most beautiful thing he has ever said to me. Afterwards he held me in his arms.”
Ísey wraps her cardigan around herself.
“When I’ve finished writing in the diary, I feel like I’ve folded all the washing and cleaned up.”
She stands up because she wants to pour some coffee and do a cup reading. She gets me to turn the cup upside down and place it on the hot plate. After a short while, she examines the cup in the light.
“There are two men in the cup,” she says. “You love one and sleep with the other.”
Like that Joyce
Ísey offers me the sofa under the Lómagnúpur cliffs, but before I fall asleep, I pull Ulysses out of my case, turn on the lamp and read a few pages under the orange-tasselled shade.
When I awaken I hear the mother and daughter pottering about in the kitchen. My friend is giving her daughter skyr, and the child smiles at me, plastered in white from ear to ear and claps her hands. There is constant wriggling, feet kicking in the air without touching the ground; she gesticulates wildly and flaps her arms against her sides, like a featherless bird trying to take to the sky, a thousand rapid movements,