The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

WEEKEND IN REYKJAVÍK ^{KRISTÍN ÓMARSDÓTTIR}

BY THE POND IN REYKJAVÍK stands the National Gallery of Iceland, right next to the Independent Church, which my grandmother built, discreetly tucked away, in a building that once burnt down, the same building where hippies created a civilization once upon a time. On the pond swim hundred-year-old swans; the ducks are younger, and above them web-footed seagulls fly and steal bread from the others. Around the pond rise: a preschool; the town hall; a former theatre; the Downtown School, which was an elementary school that became a high school, but I don’t know what the building is used for now; the Girls’ School that boys now get to attend; and the house of the man who is considered to be the first magnate of Iceland.

At the National Gallery, they are exhibiting the work of a foreign artist who has lived in Iceland and is a representative of conceptual art. In the small attic, the Gallery exhibits its treasure—son trésor—works by artists born in Iceland forty to seventy years ago or thereabouts. In the basement, female artists in their forties exhibit videos of parties they held in a cramped room of an international artists’ building in Paris. There the guests played famous and fallen philosophers, movie stars, human rights’ apostles and writers. The female artists played animals with movie cameras attached to their heads.

The woman at the reception asks me to take my coat off when I’ve looked at the exhibitions—12.03 p.m. on a Saturday in the autumn—and show her the sweater I’m wearing. I throw the coat onto the floor, stand tall and show the woman my front and back. She asks whether I sewed the design onto the sweater afterwards, or knitted it in as I went. My sweater displays a picture of an anchor: here is where I live. She tells me about her difficulty in knitting a sweater with a picture of a jeep. She shows me her knitting. I’m the knitting woman’s escort, I confess, she uses this type of knitting needles too, like you—they’re the best needles you can get in Reykjavík, but I don’t know anything about the pattern. The woman smiles and looks at my sweater for a few minutes, before opening the door and letting me out into the autumnal air. I walk up the slope, the same slope my mother walked up daily when she was little, but there were throngs of people on the slope back then, my mother told me, whereas now everyone goes by car, and the people appear in the graffiti on the house walls where the embassies’ flags fly.

The woman who won me at a tombola at my neighbourhood sports club—I waited a whole day, but it was worth the wait, she braided flowers into my hair—opens the door for me, and looks at the clock, then into my eyes. My eyes could be clock dials, the clock dial on the woman’s wrist my other eye.

She says: punctual as always.

I say: an escort has to be punctual.

And I storm in, bump into her and whisper in her ear: I drew a flower for you that died.

Then I drew a new flower and it didn’t die.

She laughs—this is the Saturday laughter. I laugh a Saturday laughter too. Her mother steps out of the wall clock, laughing, and hugs me like a lost son. I am a lost son, I was a lost son, and I continue being the lost one. Nobody finds me. An escort and a lost son. The mother of the woman who bought me at the tombola says goodbye and runs out with a stocking over her face.

Hm.

It’s good to be an escort and rest in the embrace of a sugary beetle that plucks the clips from my hair.

We take refuge under the living-room table.

I say: I expect the attack will begin at 1.30 p.m.

The woman I accompany says: hardly on a Saturday.

I agree that this would be strange timing. Saturday is not that kind of day, she adds.

While we wait—for Sunday’s or Monday’s attack?—we drink tea from her mother’s thermos, have a nap, read the future Sunday paper, nap, carve little men to sell at the peace bazaar, nap, carve men for the peace bazaar, talk in whispers, something about the dignity of the teaching profession in Iceland and my humiliation as an escort. Her mother sends us food that we accept by tearing a hole in the thin curtain that hides the other dimension. The woman whom I faithfully accompany opens the jars with a strong hand. I hold onto the jars with a weak hand. We eat from the jars. There is also little chance of earthquakes at weekends, I say in a strong, bold voice, such is the effect of food on the voice. Then we have a nap for our digestion. In the evening, we crawl out from the hiding place and sneak out, despite the curfew, and meet very few cats outside—they meow. But the people do their time sitting inside, do their time sitting inside, do their time sitting inside and eating out of jars. The stars don’t penetrate the smoke over the city: it doesn’t smell of powder though, not yet; and the Northern Lights dancers haven’t yet snapped their skates to their ankles.

In an unmarked art gallery a four-person group, myself among them and the woman I accompany, eavesdrop on the most cramped lavatory in the city of Reykjavík: two young men lay eggs that contain night-protein, or Tindersticks, as some call it; the hens speak a foreign language. We who sit on this side of the partition don’t know the language. They wash their hands and laugh—that’s an international language—squeeze out of the bathroom and say goodbye to us with joy and gratitude for free use of a toilet, and leave. We go into the bathroom and examine it all over. The seat is up, what does that mean? The fairy-tale princess drags us out with a fairy-tale rope: the story is about a rich man who lived in a villa and decided to eat her; to gobble the fairy-tale princess up, he’d boiled water in a person-size pot, taken her in his arms to throw her into the pot when an old woman came running in with a flyswatter and saved our fairy-tale princess.

I once drew that flyswatter, I say, in a drawing that I gave my cousin who died.

We hang our heads, think about death and the Statue of Liberty for a minute.

We step into the yellow, pink and silver woods. Some kids had sprayed the woods, put glitter on the bark and shimmer on the leaves; it gladdens eyes that pretend to be clock dials every half hour: tick-tock, tick-tock. The ground is feathery soft. Soft as moss. We sense, feel, the movement of the Earth around itself. I say something. You say something. But we don’t talk about the conditions and dignity of preschool teachers, but about something else, and it’s forgotten as soon as the words forsake us. Your dress has taken on another colour, and my clothes glisten like fish-skin, a moment before I turn into one, and swim through the woods in search of you.

Yes, now I remember what you said because fish remember everything:

You told me about a patient, a girl who sang in a two-person room on the hospital floor where they send people with gastro and infectious diseases. The girl woke up in the morning singing and fell asleep at night singing. But she also napped several times a day so she didn’t sing non-stop all day. She sang for the woman who fed her, and used the rests to swallow the gruel. Patients wanted to die in bed beside her, but were not granted their wish. It’s not possible to arrange death in advance, you said, before I turned into the fish who seeks its mermaid, the one who will hold onto the fish in her arms a while before eating him. I want you to eat me, says the fish to the mermaid. I want you to eat me.

Speaking of hospitals, it says in the loudspeaker system of the shimmering woods, and isn’t that the fairy-tale princess’s gravelly radio voice? Yes, I just think it is, her voice branches out between the trees:

At the end of the working day, people head down to the hospital grounds with their children. The patients come out into the lobby escorted by orderlies, say hello to people, say hello to their fans and go for an energetic walk around the garden, on crutches, in a wheelchair, unsupported, with a drip on a stand, some with new nappies, and give the children who come up with their parents money for lollipops and chocolate sultanas; good to make it easier for the families. The fathers nod their heads and mumble: thank you. The mothers smile nicely. The patients bow: my pleasure, it’s more blessed to give than to receive, this is a sweet kid you’ve raised, this is a sweet piggy bank whose hair you’ve done so prettily and put ribbons in, thanks, thanks, it’s our pleasure, it’s more blessed to give than to receive.

The dry nappies rustle like dried-up leaves this autumn when nappies thus dropped dramatically in price. The show manager announced that despite the show running at a loss, nappies would be on sale. That alleviated the seriousness of the show considerably, to season it with delicate wit: cheap nappies. This trifle of joint funds shouldn’t harm anyone. The joke may be at the expense of those who will never stop wearing nappies. This counsel will also encourage people to have children, so that the future actors-to-be will continue to be born in the country, said the show manager and then bowed.

Says the fairy-tale princess in the loudspeaker system of the shimmering woods and laughs beautifully. That’s what princesses who adventures follow do. Her laughter follows us on the way home: two women who the stray cats shield, with elongated shadows and elongated caterwauling, so the guards don’t notice our journey under the quivering street lights.

I follow my friend and crawl again under the living-room table. I don’t find my nightdress: it’s made of letters and my eyes are without numbers. We dress ourselves in the bags. 23.32. It’s safer to wait here than elsewhere. Under the table there is shelter from the fireworks. May I have a piece of paper, I ask; she hands me a piece of paper. May I have a pen, I ask; she hands me a pen. What is the escort going to write, asks the voice on the radio that rests on top of the table. I: a letter to parents-to-be who can’t afford IVF treatment.

With these instructions I will potter about until Monday morning, when the curfew ends:

Life doesn’t end. I was a building that stood by the pond in Reykjavík: one day I stood up, walked away and left behind a grave in the landscape. I was an escort whose services people bought at the sports clubs’ tombolas; one day I fell off the shelf. I was a frightened animal that lived under a table. One day the table walked out of the living room and out of the house, down the street, nobody knows where to. I was the rain that fell down the roof and washed your windows, washed your eyes, washed the windows, washed the eyes. I was the decoration in your hair and you decorated my hair with flowers. Now the farmer shears my hair, the flowers fall down last and land on top of the pile of wool. Perhaps you’ll knit a sweater from me.

I was a lost son who was found, and got lost again. I was the nail polish on your fingers: the knife of night will scrape that off.

A theatre critic on the radio that rests on top of the table says: the director didn’t manage to communicate the sorrow and oppression to the audience.

I ask the table leg: do you know the couple sorrow and oppression? Do they suit each other? Will the relationship last? Will they conceive a child? What is the child of sorrow and oppression called?

The table leg: the one who oppresses has the sorrow, the oppressed have the hunger.

I feed the table leg leftovers from the jars.

Finally: this is not a theatre, this is a former theatre, and the show is a danger to me. The poet who sleeps under the vertical shafts of sunlight on a bench in another country far from here says with dignity dressed in black: I am never afraid.

Two female artists inside an apartment where the floor is made from the blocks of chocolate that are only available in the most liberal of countries—the escort women’s delivery service sent me here—tie me to a chair, blindfold me and gag me. They carry the chair between them down the highfalutin stairs and into the frosty night.

Is this a throne of woven arms?

Am I part of a performance?

Judging by the Sunday chimes of the Independent Church, they are travelling with me south along Brook Street, in the direction of the pond—I also know the direction because I know the Brook Street wind, the temperature and the toxic, biting mildness. The women set up my throne out on the ice. I listen to the women skate around me on the ice; on the frozen pond, the swans warble, I also hear:

The children squealing at the preschool, yelling, shouting. I hear the theatre ghosts writhe and complain about the constriction and hip pain. I hear the hippies dance in their burning Funville. The magnate milks a cow, a din in the udders, inside his gazebo behind the National Gallery, where the woman in the lobby knits a jeep onto a sweater that is too small and tight. The milk spurts into a can. The ghosts writhe in old and new roles. Hamlet runs away from Ophelia, her face rime-white. Nuns sweep the floors at the Downtown School. I have to go over there and look for the green crown I once lost. Where is the fancy chocolate from the floor in that house? And the breadcrumbs for the swans and ducks?