I sit beside him. He makes room for me.
“My mother met my father three times and slept with him once. A quick roll in the sack and that was it. The damage was done. She spent a year in Reykjavík answering the phone for Hreyfill taxis but never went to any parties with the GIs. One day he showed up at the station. She said he had the hairstyle of some guy out of the movies, tidy and polite, with dark stubble, and that he smelt differently from Icelandic men. She sewed herself a light blue dress and he gave her a copy of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms when he left and wrote in it: With love from John. Mom didn’t understand English, but kept the book in the drawer of her bedside table.
“That was all she got from my father, his autograph and me. Then he was suddenly gone. The ship sailed off before he could say goodbye. She didn’t know Dad’s surname, just that he was called John and the army wouldn’t help her. She didn’t have any address for him. A friend of hers from Borgarnes, who’d also had a child with a soldier and who did have his address wrote him a letter. She got a postcard back with a picture of a graveyard that said: Sorry about the baby, good luck and adieu. At first she thought adieu meant see you again and it took her a long time to find out its true meaning. Mum felt it was likely that the ship had been sunk by a German torpedo. The bodies of soldiers sometimes washed up on the shores of Breidafjördur and she roamed the beaches to see if she would find the father of her child. She believed she would recognize John again, even if he was a washed-up corpse. She never fell in love again. There was no other man in her life.
“I was an illegitimate war child.
“Fatherless.
“‘Your mum’s a Yankee whore,’ the kids used to say.
“‘He wasn’t actually a yank,’ she told me long afterwards. ‘Because your father was wearing a kilt when I met him. A chequered woollen kilt with a buckle. And nothing underneath.’”
The swan poet
“Read for me, Hekla.”
“What do you want me to read?” I ask. “Shall I read some of Hallgrímur’s psalms?”
I pick up the book lying open on the bed.
“Hallgrímur suffered like me,” says my friend.
I glance at the spines on the bookshelf beside the bed.
I pull out some books and silently read the covers. Unlike the bookcases back home in Dalir, many of the books are in foreign languages. Apart from Lord Byron’s biography, which is in Icelandic, there is a novel by Thomas Mann and a play by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, but also poetry collections by Rimbaud, Verlaine and Walt Whitman. I notice that some of the books on the shelf are also by women: Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Selma Lagerlöf.
“That’s my queer shelf,” says Jón John from the bed.
He sits up, reaches for a book, opens it and skims through for a moment until he finds what he is looking for.
“If I die
Leave the balcony open
“He’s my favourite poet, Federico García Lorca.”
He hands me the book. To Johnny boy has been inscribed in a fountain pen on the first page. I put the book back on the shelf.
“From a friend at the military base in Vellir.”
I tell him I want to learn English and that I’m reading a thick book by an Irish writer with the help of a dictionary, but that it’s time-consuming and difficult.
“I’ll ask my friend if he can give you lessons. You don’t have to sleep with him,” he adds. “I’ll do that for you.”
He hesitates.
“He’d be thrown out if he weren’t an officer.”
On the shelf there is a book by an Icelandic poet that seems at odds with the rest, Black Feathers by Davíd Stefánsson.
I pull it out.
“Mum waited a whole year to baptize me, in case a sea revenant stepped onto the shore. While she waited she read her favourite poet.
“She couldn’t decide whether I should be called Davíd Stefánsson or Einar Benediktsson, it was a choice between Black Feathers and Glimpse of the Ocean.
“In the end she felt there were too many waves and too much pounding surf in Benediktsson. And too much of God in the surf, she said. My fate was therefore sealed with the sunrise poet who sang about the night that stores pleasure in its bosom, so I’m named after Iceland’s swan poet and the unknown soldier who vanished into the billowy grey sea.
“Davíd Jón John Stefánsson Johnsson.
“The priest said the name was too long for the form and suggested Mum drop the Stefánsson.
“Otherwise people might think he’s my illegitimate son, Revd Stefán is reported to have quipped. Impishly.
“She felt it would improve my prospects abroad too, if I were both Jón and John.
“‘When you move abroad to find your roots, you will call yourself D.J. Johnsson,’ she said to me.”
He is silent for a long moment.
“Mum always knew I was different.”
D.J. Johnsson stands up and totters over to the wardrobe. He opens it to pull out some black plumage that he drapes over his shoulders like a shawl. He looks like an eagle preparing to fly off the edge of a steep cliff.
“Mum kept a picture of the poet Davíd Stefánsson in her living room, holding a black raven in his arms. She cut it out of the newspaper and had it framed. I collected raven feathers and sewed myself a cape,” he says.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s go to Skálinn. I’ll treat you to coffee and pancakes.”
He puts the feathers back into the wardrobe and slips on a jacket.
“I don’t fly the way you do, though, Hekla.”
Homosexuals and existentialists
Two tramps are sitting on a bench in the cold sunshine, sipping methylated spirits from paper bags, by the southern wall of the Fisheries Bank. We sit at a window table and order coffee, Jón John has no appetite for pancakes. A group of poets are sitting at one of the tables inside the room, smoking pipes. One of them holds court, waving his hands in the air like the conductor of an orchestra; the other poets look at him and nod. I notice that one of the younger poets isn’t participating in the conversation but is instead looking at me.
“I’m guessing they’re either discussing rhymes or existentialism,” says Jón John. There aren’t many people about and I notice a middle-aged man in a dark coat and hat coming out of the bank with a briefcase, walking swiftly towards Austurstræti.
“That guy’s queer,” says Jón John, nodding towards the man. “He works at the bank. He’s only into young boys and he’s in a relationship with a bloke I know.”
He sips his coffee and then rests his chin on one hand.
“Most of the men who hunt for boys like me are married family men and only queers at weekends. They get married to cover up their unnaturalness. Their wives know it. They know their husbands. Then many of the queers from around the country pretend they have a girlfriend and child back home in the countryside.”
He looks down and buries his face in his hands.
“I don’t want to be like them and live some secret game. I just want to love a guy like me. I want to hold his hand on the street. That’ll never happen, Hekla.”
“Have you met someone?”