“I’ll make you a nice cup of coffee,” your father said. That was his compromise. He had made up his mind. I turned the other way and shut my eyes, I wanted to be left in peace.
Four and a half years after you were born, Hekla erupted after its one-hundred-and-two-year slumber. That’s when your father finally got to hear the roaring explosion he had been pining to hear in the west in the Dalir district, like the distant echo of the recently ended world war. Your brother Örn was two years old at the time. Your father immediately called his sister in the Westman Islands to find out what she could see through the kitchen window. She was frying crullers and said that a plume of volcanic smoke hovered over the island, that the sun was red and that it was raining ash.
He covered the mouthpiece and repeated every single sentence to me.
“She says that the sun is red and it’s raining ash and that it’s as dark as night and she had to turn the lights on.”
He wanted to know if it was a spectacular and daunting sight and if the floor was shaking.
“She says it’s a spectacular and daunting sight and that all the drainpipes are full of ash and that her husband, the boat mechanic, is up on a ladder trying to unclog them.”
He lay with his ear glued to the radio and gave me the highlights.
“They say that the mouth of the volcano, the crater, is shaped like a heart, a heart of flames.” Or he said: “Steinthóra, did you know that one of the lava bombs was eleven metres long and five metres wide and shaped like a cigar?”
Eventually he could no longer satisfy himself with his sister’s descriptions of the views from her kitchen window or the frozen black-and-white photographs of the giant pillar of smoke on the front page of the Tíminn newspaper. He longed to see the eruption with his own eyes, he wanted to see colours, he wanted to see glowing blocks of lava, whole boulders shooting into the air, he wanted to see the red fiery eyes spitting shooting stars like sparks in a foundry, he wanted to see a black lava wall crawling forward like an illuminated metropolis, he wanted to know if the flames of the volcano turned the sky pink, he wanted to feel the heat on his eyelids, he wanted his eyes to tingle, he wanted to charge down south to Thjórsárdalur in his Russian jeep.
And he wanted to take you with him.
“Jónas Hallgrímsson, our national poet, who produced the best alliterations and poetry about volcanoes ever written, never witnessed an eruption,” he said. “Neither did the naturalist Eggert Ólafsson. Hekla can’t miss seeing her namesake erupting.”
“Why don’t you just sell the farm and move down south to become a farmer in Thjórsárdalur instead?” I asked. I could just as easily have asked: “Don’t you want to move from the land of Laxdæla Saga to the Land of Njál’s Saga?”
He sat you on a cushion on the passenger seat of the jeep so that you could see the view, and I was left behind with your brother Örn to take care of the farm. When he returned with melted soles on his boots, I knew he had gone too close.
“The old dear’s arteries are still bubbling,” he said, and carried you to bed, sleeping in his arms.
In the summer, ash reached us in the west in Dalir and destroyed the fields.
Dead animals were found in troughs where gas puddles had formed: foxes, birds and sheep. Then your father finally stopped talking about volcanoes and went back to farming. You, however, had changed. You had been on a journey. You spoke differently. You spoke in volcanic language and used words like sublime, magnificent and ginormous. You had discovered the world above and looked up at the sky. You started to disappear and we found you out in the fields, where you lay observing the clouds; in the winter, we found you out on a mound of snow, contemplating the stars.
Who has a fairer fatherland,
With mountains, valleys, blackened sand,
Northern lights in a glowing band
and slopes of birch and brook?
(HULDA, 1944)
Poets are men
The dust hovers in a cloud behind the Reykjavík coach, the road is a ridged washboard and we rattle on; bend after bend, soon it becomes impossible to see through the muddy windows and, before long, the Laxdæla Saga trail will vanish into the dirt.
The gearstick creaks every time the driver goes up or down a hill; I suspect the coach has no brakes. The large diagonal crack across the windscreen doesn’t seem to bother the driver. There aren’t many cars about and, on the rare occasions when we meet one, the driver blows his horn. To make room for a road grader, the bus needs to swerve over to the side of the road where it teeters. The levelling of Dalir’s roads is regarded as something of an event, giving the driver an opportunity to wind down his window, lean out and have a lengthy chat.
“I’ll be lucky if I don’t lose a spindle,” I hear the bus driver say.
Right now I’m not a short distance away from the village of Búdardalur, but actually in Dublin, since my finger is stuck on page twenty-three of Ulysses. I’d heard of this novel that was as thick as Njál’s Saga and could be bought from the English bookshop in Hafnarstræti and sent west.
“Is it French you are talking, sir?” the old woman said to Haines.
Haines spoke to her again a longer speech, confidently.
“Irish,” Buck Mulligan said. “Is there Gaelic on you?”
“I thought it was Irish,” she said, “by the sound of it.”
The reading was proceeding slowly, both because of the shaking of the bus and because my English is poor. Even though I have a dictionary lying on the empty seat beside me, the language is more challenging than I expected.
I peer through the window. Didn’t a female writer live on that farm? Didn’t the strong current of this coal-grey river full of sand and mud ripple through her veins? She made the cattle suffer, people said, because while she sat writing about the love lives and tragic fates of the locals, striving to transform the sheep’s colours into a sunset over Breidafjördur, she neglected to milk the cows. There was no greater sin than forgetting to empty swollen udders. Whenever she visited a neighbouring farm, she sat for too long and either wanted to recite a poem or fell silent for hours on end, dipping her sugar cubes into the coffee. They say she heard a string orchestra when she wrote and also that she woke up her children in the night and carried them out into the farmyard in her arms to show them the shimmering waves of Northern Lights undulating across the black sky, and that in between these periods she locked herself inside the marital bedroom and pulled a quilt over her head. There was so much melancholy in her that one bright spring evening she vanished into the silvery grey depths of the river. The prospect of eating fresh puffin eggs would no longer do her, because she had stopped sleeping. She was found in a trout net by the bridge and dragged onto the banks: a stiff-winged poet in a soaking wet skirt and laddered stockings, her belly full of water.
“She destroyed the net,” said the farmer who owned it. “I placed it there for trout, but the meshwork wasn’t designed to hold a woman poet.”
Her fate served as a warning, but at the same time she was the only model of a female author I had.
Otherwise