New Wikipedia page

There is now a Wikipedia page on the contemporary Icelandic author Ólafur Gunnarsson. Its earlier absence always puzzled me, and now I have managed to get the page up, though it may still be edited.

Out of the Blue - 2

I have just received a copy of the hardback printed edition of Out of the Blue - it's an attractive book, and it looks instantly readable, like a story that one knows one wants to know the end of. I completely agree with the assessment by Jón Gnarr, ex-Mayor of Reykjavik:

It's an absolutely unique insight into Iceland's culture, mentality, and spirit - a country where the short story is as valued as the sagas.

See also in this blog: Out of the Blue
Body and Soul

Dead Links

The web site of Reykjavík, UNESCO City of Literature / Bókmenntaborgin is a fascinatingly diverse Web publication, offering an enormous amount of information about Icelandic literature, its present and past. It also exists in two versions, Icelandic and English, which interact with each other in a useful way,

What a pity, then, that the section of the site devoted to bio-bibliographical information on over 130 contemporary Icelandic authors does not yet seem to be complete. While the individual authors' pages come up as expected on the browsers I used (Chrome and Firefox), only the top level links appear to work - on many of the pages, clicking on 'Biography', 'From author', 'About author', 'Prizes', etc. yields no response. This is a great pity, and one hopes that the problem will be addressed before too long.

Update May 13: I'm happy to report that the 'books and authors' section of the City of Literature site now appears to be working properly, and the information can be accessed, though a little slowly.

Body and Soul

Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland, edited by Helen Mitsios, with a foreword by Sjón. University of Minnesota Press, 183 pp. 

In addition to being an enjoyable read, this anthology of recent short Icelandic fiction in English translation gives an overview of contemporary prose writing from a part of the world where writing, and the profession of writer, are traditionally held in high esteem. The Icelandic author is a representative of his or her nation, travelling the globe with some of the same nonchalance that the ancient Vikings brought to their more goal-oriented excursions.

Some reviewers of the collection have expressed regret that a number of the stories are set not in Iceland but abroad – mostly in regions of southern Europe. Yet given the history of Icelandic culture, with its openness to Roman and Hellenic influences, this does not seem unnatural. The Icelander abroad is a chameleon-like figure, at once distinctive and transparent, changing according to surroundings, and abandoning foreign cultures and languages as quickly as adopting them. 

Auður Jónsdóttir’s ‘Self-Portrait’, the opening story in the book, is a study of the tension between the fragile consciousness of the vulnerable outsider and the actually threatening nature of a foreign environment. The Sardinian beach resort, with its heat, its homeless people and Mafia operatives, turns out to be more forbidding than the austere northern climate it was supposed to replace and compensate for – in the end it’s a threat to the self, and needs to be rejected.

In Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s ‘Afternoon by the Pacific Ocean’ the film stars Greta Garbo and Marilyn Monroe, both of Nordic descent, read Joyce and Icelandic sagas together on an afternoon picnic under the Californian sun:

Marilyn lay down on her side in the fetal position, and with one hand under her cheek, she looked wide-eyed at Greta, who opened Egil’s Saga. They were at the part where Egil wants to marry Asgerdur after returning from a successful raid. Greta started reading with Marilyn watching her. The sun over the Pacific pierced through the curtains of the big window and bathed the actresses’ feet in golden rays.

The stories set in Iceland – and there are more of them in the volume than some reviewers have implied – blend elements of nature, psychology and society to create an inner and outer portrait of individual people whose lives are at once conditioned and set free by a sense of being at the margins, yet able to look into the depths in a way that is unusual and uncanny. The father in Ólafur Gunnarsson’s ‘Killer Whale’ is gripped by a death wish that is linked to archetypical figures of Icelandic natural and human history:

“No, they’re loners,” Olaf said. “They live in their own herds, by themselves. They don’t mix with other whales. They attack them. They feed on them.”

Likewise Gyrðir Elíasson’s ‘The Black Dog’ focuses on a negative, destructive element in Icelandic folklore and national psychology: in a Kafkaesque parable, the author’s own depression materialises in the image of a dog that ‘for some reason’ can be seen ‘only in mirrors’.

Not all of the narratives dwell on the darker side of human nature, and instead explore the quirkier regions of the supernatural. As Sjón points out in his foreword, in place of philosophy and metaphysics medieval Iceland had poetry and tales – ‘debates on the interaction between body and soul, for example, could be conducted through the medium of verses or stories about birds.’  Óskar Árni Óskarsson writes about a pen that possesses a magical power, granting the gift of originality to its poetry-writing owners as it passes from hand to hand – a cheap, unremarkable Biro. And again in parable form, Magnús Sigurðsson presents a series of dream-like narrative reflections, one of which centres on a play between the Latin word lego, ‘I read’, and the etymology of the Danish toy manufacturer Lego.

For the most part the translations by several hands read well, with the occasional lapse where the process becomes too literal a transposition of Icelandic syntax and phrasing. 

In general Helen Mitsios is to be congratulated on having compiled a highly readable and often entertaining miscellany of writing from a European literary culture that is still not as well known to the rest of the world as it ought to be. The characters of these short stories inhabit a realm that lies somewhere between fiction, mythology and poetry, and everywhere in them there is the sense of a lone, reflective wanderer, observing and noting inner and outer realities. It’s almost as if the same narrator were somehow present throughout the entire volume. As a result, the stories are best read in sequence, almost like a collective novel rather than as isolated texts: I found it the most satisfactory way to absorb this fascinating and eminently re-readable book.

October 2011: Iceland

Words Without Borders has published an Icelandic issue.

Five Books

At TheBrowser, a literary website which announces that it is creating a 21st century library of Writing Worth Reading, Rory McTurk discusses five works on Norse culture and Old Icelandic literature, including Vilhelm Grønbech's The Culture of the Teutons, Sigurður Nordal's Icelandic Culture, and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen's Saga and Society. All the books mentioned in the interview are available in English translation.

Thor Vilhjálmsson 1925-2011

It's reported from Reykjavík that the Icelandic poet, novelist, essayist and translator Thor Vilhjálmsson has died at the age of 85. Among his better known works are the essay collection Fljótt, fljótt sagði fuglinn (1968) and the novel Grámosinn glóir (1986) which won the 1988 Nordic Council Literature Prize and was translated into English by Bernard Scudder (Justice Undone, 1998).

Update: Shortly before his death, Thor Vilhjálmsson was interviewed on video by Icelandic novelist and critic Einar Kárason.

Icelandic literary awards

Via Iceland Review: 

The poetry book Blódhófnir ("Bloodhoof") by Gerdur Kristný and Sveppabókin (“The Mushroom Book”) by Helgi Hallgrímsson received the 2010 Icelandic Literary Award at a special ceremony at Bessastadir, the presidential residence, on Wednesday [February 2].

Hat tip: Literary Saloon

Steinar Sigurjónsson

Sagenhaftes Island has a profile of Steinar Sigurjónsson (1928-1992), whom I knew and talked with in Copenhagen in 1978. The profile has a description of one of his remarkable novels which brings back memories to me:

The book is about Hansi, a composer who has composed nothing and lives in a hovel in Reykjavík with his girlfriend. When he receives an unexpected legacy he buys a piano, a hat and an overcoat, and starts looking for better accommodation. The composer fritters away his inheritance, and loses the piano and an unfinished composition to a swindler. By the end Hansi is on the street; his girlfriend is gone, the hovel demolished, and he is playing the cello in alleys. The work focuses on the plight of creative arts in a society dominated by individualism and materialism. And there is some resemblance between Hansi and Steinar himself, in the homeless, rootless drifting described in the book.

A War Story - 3

III


It was evening and the mother and the daughter were home, but the boy was in bed. He had been in bed ever since his return from the exhibition, facing the wall.

“How is he?” The grandfather asked in a low voice. He was getting ready to go to work.

As his wife was about to reply, the phone rang. She cupped the receiver with her hand and said to her husband with both respect and a touch of alarm in her voice, “it's the city doctor.”

The man took the phone. The doctor needed a taxi for the whole of the evening and the entire night. His regular driver had been taken ill. The man took a pen and wrote down the doctor's address. “You haven´t seen my glasses?” the old man asked his wife as he took the piece of paper, folded it and put it in his pocket.

“No,” said his wife, “and we gave the whole apartment a thorough cleaning yesterday.”

On his way to the doctor two enormous aircraft came flying in low over the city to land. They were B-17s. He was able to identify them from an illustrated article he had read in the newspaper. It was obvious that some sort of airlift was under way. It was getting dusk.

He knew the doctor slightly, had driven him on former occasions. The doctor was a rather short-tempered man. Influenza was ravaging Reykjavík. They drove from house to house. “Will you come with me into the next one and phone the hospital and write down the patients’ addresses?” the doctor asked. “It´s all I can manage to deal with these kids and those crazy grandmothers. The grandmothers are the worst, they make more trouble than the children do,” he added stroking his large bald head.

The man had thought of mentioning his grandson's strange malady, but now thought better of it.

“I´m sorry,” he said. “I can't see well enough to write. I lost my glasses last week and can´t find them anywhere.”

The doctor muttered something and went into a house. Yet another B-17 came sailing over the town.

It was well after midnight until the doctor got a break from his house visits. The driver mentioned the big aircraft to the doctor, who was suddenly filled with an urge to see them. They drove towards the airport.

A few MPs were guarding the great planes that were larger still in the darkness. Under their wings the soldiers looked tiny.

One of the MPs, holding a gun, came over to the car. The doctor rolled down his window. He had been educated in America and explained their business. He and the soldier had a short pleasant conversation. The doctor had been in Idaho and the soldier happened to come from the same state.

Suddenly the soldier pointed to the sky. Yet another flying fortress was coming in. They could see the warbird growing bigger all the time, and the lights on the wing tips blinking.

Then without warning the soldier ran away from the car. It was obvious that something was very wrong. The plane was coming in over the city lake at much too low an altitude. “My God, it's going to crash-land!” the doctor said.

And like a black goose that had been shot down, the enormous plane crash-landed on the gravel airfield. Soldiers were running towards it. The doctor and the driver were out of the car. The soldier who had been talking to the doctor was beckoning to them. The doctor returned to the car to get his bag and then ran towards the soldier. The driver followed. The broken plane seemed to hiss with anger at its own destruction. Then suddenly fire broke out in the cockpit. The driver could see the trapped crew. It was obvious from the men’s terror that they had no chance of getting out. The fire grew more intense with each swiftly passing second. Then, in less than an instant, a fireball engulfed the B-17. Only the tip of the cockpit protruded from the flames.

“Those men are trapped,” the driver said out loud. “Those men are trapped!” he repeated.

They heard strange crackling sounds, like someone letting off fireworks. “My God!” the doctor exclaimed, “they’re shooting the crew.”

On the edge of the light cast over the airfield by the fire the driver watched as a group of riflemen, resembling an execution squad, fired at the cockpit which was now completely swallowed by the flames. He didn't know if the sound they could hear was the shots or the windows cracking from the heat. An officer was pointing to the driver and the doctor and shouting something in an angry voice.

“Let´s get the hell out of here now,” the doctor said and both men ran to the car. When they drove away the driver saw in the mirror that they were not being followed. Nothing was visible of the plane now but flames. They met two cars heading towards the airfield, obviously out of curiosity. A few men were also running in that direction. “They’ll be turned away,” the doctor said.

“We were lucky they didn´t shoot us,” the driver said.

“Well, they know who we are. Who I am. I won’t be surprised if we’re called in tomorrow by the police for an investigation of some sorts. They’ll want to keep the shooting from getting into the papers.”

"They couldn’t have done anything else,” the driver said.

The doctor nodded. “Just take me home. I have to rest a bit. Then I'll phone the hospital and go in my own car in the morning and attend to any patients who may phone during the night. You go home now and have yourself a rest, old pal.” He patted the driver on the knee in a brotherly fashion. “This is quite enough for one night.”

They parted, and the man drove home. The shock of seeing the men being shot in this way to save them suffering had not yet sunk in.

He parked his car and opened the door of the apartment block where he lived. He entered his apartment, took off his clothes in the living room, and looked up into the dark sky where the boy had seen the angel or whatever it was, but there was nothing to see except the moon which stood out large and cold-looking. On the sofa the boy was peacefully asleep in his usual way, with his face turned away from the wall.

The man opened the door to his bedroom, slipped under the sheets and lay there in perfect stillness. He decided not to wake his wife. No matter how hard he tried, he could not get to sleep. Grey light began to show in the window. It would soon be daybreak. He must have slept. He woke up. He had had a strange dream, or was it a vision? He had seen his glasses. They lay by a fence in front of a house by the city lake and they were covered by grass. A few days earlier he had stood there before picking up a resident who had ordered a taxi. “Damn it,” he said. He tried to lie still but knew he would not be able to go back to sleep without making sure that the vision was true. He slipped out of bed.

“Are you going somewhere?” his wife said in a sleepy voice.

“Yes,” the man said. “I have to check something.”

“Will you be long?”

“No, I´ll be home in time for coffee.”

He quickly put on his clothes, went outside and started his car. He drove downtown. There was the fence he had seen in his dream. And the tree at the street corner. He stopped the car and got out. He moved the grass near the fence pole with his shoe. There were his glasses. He picked them up and put them on. They were definitely his.

When he got home, his coffee was ready. As his wife poured him some coffee she said: “Oh yes, the boy´s teacher phoned last night. He was rather upset. He said he just wanted to let us know why he hadn’t included our grandson’s work in the school exhibition. He said that the drawing had been totally unacceptable by any standards, so he'd destroyed it to prevent it causing any more offence. What’s wrong with the lad? What did he do?”

“Probably a fine piece of work,” the man said.


THE END

A War Story - 1
A War Story - 2

A War Story - 2

II


The man woke up at noon. There was stillness in the house. He had been out on the job until the early hours of the morning but nothing much had happened, no drunken soldiers, no desperate girls craving for the company of their army boyfriends who were confined to barracks.

The man lay still for a moment and checked for sounds in the house. There was total stillness. Just the occasional rumbling of an engine when a car drove past. He called out for his wife in the dark tone of command that usually brought her into the room. It was her custom to give him his morning coffee in bed, but there was no reply, she must have gone out on some errand.

Suddenly the door opened and his grandson came in. The boy just stood there staring at him as if he had come across a stranger in his grandfather’s bed. “Yes,” the man said at last.”So what do you want?” The boy had a way of looking at him that sometimes made him shudder.

"Grandmother said you should take me downtown to school,” the boy said.

“She said what?” the man exclaimed. He had never before in his life entered that establishment.

“To see the exhibition,” the boy replied.

"What are you trying to tell me?" the man asked. He assumed at once that there must be some serious misunderstanding.

“Grandmother had to go away,” the boy said. “Her friend was taken ill all of a sudden. You have to take me downtown, for the exhibition. It’s today.”

The man felt himself getting irritated. “What exhibition are you talking about? What’s happening? Where is your mother?”

“The exhibition of the best drawings and paintings by the pupils this year opens today. My drawing is the very best of them all,” the boy said with no obvious pride, as though he took his superiority for granted. Then he looked at his watch. “It opens at one o’clock, he said. “And we mustn’t be late.

His grandfather felt uneasy. He was not used to dealing with things like this. He drove a taxi, and by doing so provided for the family, but all this business of teachers, authority and too much education made him unsure of himself. He only felt at home in his taxi: there he was in total control of his surroundings.

The boy looked at him with a flat expression.

“And where is your mother?” the man asked again.

“She went out last night with her friend and hasn’t come home yet,” the boy said.

The man got out of bed. He felt that he shouldn’t inquire into these matters any further, at least for the present. He got into his trousers and put on the suspenders. He found his slippers with his feet and made his way to the kitchen. He would have to do without coffee this morning. He had no clue as how to go about making himself a cup.

The clock on the wall showed twenty minutes to one and the boy was looking downcast and nervous.

“And did your grandmother say when she’d be back?” the man asked. The boy shook his head and his grandfather gave up all hope of escape. “Well, get dressed then,” he said. “We’d best get this over with.”

He found his shirt, jacket and a tie and put on his shoes. The boy was waiting for him out on the veranda. He looked unusually pale and distracted. “So what are you so uptight about?” his grandfather asked.

“It’s my drawing. I’ve never taken part in an exhibition before, so naturally I'm nervous about showing my work in public for the first time.”

His grandfather suddenly felt an urge to laugh. How strange his grandson was. He was almost like a grownup locked into the body of a child. “Well don’t you worry about it,” he said. “I'm sure the other kids are not as handy with the crayons as you”.

“Oh, they aren't,” the boy said looking at him. His face broke into an enormous smile. “I know I'm by far the best.”

“Now how do you know that?” his grandfather asked, feeling his mood change from amusement to sudden irritation.

“I just do,” the boy said.

When the school came into view the man saw that flags were snapping in the wind high on top of the pools to both sides of the entrance. The stairs to the doorway were broad and wide and reminded him of the entrance to some official building in Germany he had recently seen in a picture in a newspaper. He felt his old sense of discomfort become more intense. Pupils were streaming through the gate with their parents or other relatives, brothers or sisters. The boy and his grandfather walked up the steps.

Slowly they walked along the corridor and then made a tour of all the rooms. The walls were covered with the kind of drawings that children do. There were houses and people and animals, horses and dogs and cats and chickens in drawing after drawing with an eternal sun shining over most of the scenery and the people and the animals and the occasional flower. When they had made the rounds the grandfather said: “Well?”

“Mine isn’t here. They haven’t hung it up.”

“So much for your lady in the sky,” his grandfather remarked. “Never pay any attention to dreams, for the most part they’re nonsense.”

He knew the words were harsh, but he was hoping the whole thing would teach the boy a lesson.

Suddenly the boy looked over to a handsome young man with jet-black hair and square jaws. “That’s my teacher,” he said in a low voice. He tugged at his grandfather's sleeve. “Let’s go and talk to him.”

“Do you think that’s a good idea? If they didn’t see fit to exhibit your picture, and they sure didn’t, you had better accept it,” the old man said.

But the boy was insistent. He tore himself free from his grandfather and went up to his teacher. Suddenly he seemed even more firm and more independent than usual. The teacher was talking to an elderly couple, apparently trying to hide the fact that he was a little annoyed at the intrusion, but the boy kept on talking. The grandfather felt it his duty to go closer in case his grandson needed any help.

The teacher looked in his direction and said, “We only hung the pictures we thought were good enough to exhibit.”

“Come on,” the grandfather said. “I’ll treat you to a soda pop on the way home.”

He glanced down at the child. The boy had a stunned expression, as though for the first time in his life he had had a glimpse of reality.

It was a good lesson, his grandfather thought. But he felt annoyed that the child’s drawing had not been considered good enough to be included in the exhibition.

(to be continued)

A War Story - I

A War Story - 1

By Ólafur Gunnarsson


I

If there was anything positive about the whole affair it was mainly the fact that whoever had got his daughter pregnant, it wasn’t one of the soldiers. It was one of the members of the jazz band that now entertained the soldiers downtown. The boy, strange child that he was, had actually been conceived well before the war.

The boy was now seven years old, and he had always been strange. But the day before, when the man was dining with the family, the boy had really surpassed himself and made his grandfather uneasy. The boy had suddenly looked up from his plate and pointed to the window and said, “I saw a lady in the sky last night!”

“A lady?” his mother asked.

“Yes.”

“And was she out in the street?” the grandmother asked.

“No,” said the boy. “She was up above the rooftops. In the sky. She was flying.”

Now the boy’s mother had one of those crazy, explosive fits of laughter that were the hallmark of her temperament. “A lady in the sky! Flying. Now that beats everything!”

“Tell us more about it,” the grandmother said.

The man felt sudden irritation. Anything out of the ordinary made him uneasy, and his grandson was most certainly out of the ordinary.

“Well,” said the boy, ”the lady was very beautiful and she was all dressed in blue and holding a yellow harp and she was looking at me. She stood still in the sky for a long time. Her enormously long gown moved in the wind. It moved softly," he added. "And then I just went back to bed.”

“Oh, she’d just come down from the Almighty to tell you that you’re going to be a great musician like your father,” was the mother’s response. “That´s why she was holding a harp”. She was still laughing, but the laughter now verged on hysteria. “Oh, what a funny boy you are,” she gasped.

“No, I don’t think that’s why it was,” the boy said solemnly. “I don’t like it when you try to make me play an instrument. I like drawing better. I thought you knew that.”

By now the boy’s grandfather had picked up a newspaper, he was trying to read something but could not find his glasses, he patted his breast pocket, but the glasses were not in their usual place there.

“But what were you doing up in the middle of the night?” the grandmother asked. “Did you need to go to the toilet, maybe?” She had infinite love and patience for the boy.

The boy looked at his grandfather. “No, I was just very sorry because I’d got butter on the wallpaper and wanted to see if the mark had gone away.”
“Well, that explains it all,” the grandfather said, greatly relieved.

The day before the grandfather had papered the living room walls. The new paper had strange designs that nevertheless seemed to reveal a regular pattern, and as the boy had been admiring this he had, quite by accident, put a spot on the wall and been scolded for doing so.

“You only woke up because you felt sorry about the spot, and you dreamt it all,” the grandfather said.

“No, no, I didn’t!” the boy shouted suddenly becoming very excited, and there was an edge to his voice, something close to outrage. “There was definitely a lady there.”

“Yes, yes, that's right,” the boy’s mother said. “Let’s not talk about it any more.”

“Are you taking him to school tomorrow?” the grandmother asked.

“No,” the boy’s mother said. “I have business to see to.”

The grandfather abandoned the newspaper, looked at them all, and before he could be drawn in to whatever was in the making said: “I’m off to work.”

“It’s all right, dear,” the grandmother said to the boy. “I’ll take you.”

“Yes,” the boy said nervously. “It's a big day and I don't want to go all by myself.”

The grandfather was out on the veranda now, and the rest of the conversation was lost to him. He looked at his car and somehow felt a sense of relief at returning to the normal world. He was a taxi driver, and was duly proud of his car. It was a 1940 Chevrolet Sedan.

(to be continued)

Note: this is an original edited text, not a translation

Hallgrímur Helgason: The Author of Iceland - 7

(continued)

The train slowed down, and somewhere out in the night the bark of a dog was heard, then a rifle shot. I transferred myself fearfully to another compartment, but then got into still more trouble when the train guard saw I was in the wrong seat. Next thing, I would be hauled off the train at the next station. Then I would have fallen out of the Great Manuscript and would naturally have ended up like Stjáni. How on earth could people think it was possible to run a society in which a quarter of the inhabitants were made to work as prompters and see to it that their fellow citizens didn’t fluff their lines? And what kind of character was it who saw it as their life’s work to supervise the work of others? A mediocrity took power in every field and gave birth to an even lower type of human being. The Soviet Union was a society upside-down. The gangs that inhabited the sewers of other countries were in power here. Gunmen and bandits sat at the palace table while the most capable scholars and intellectuals of the age were kept in thumbscrews down in the dungeons. As soon as the walls came tumbling down, the presidential candidates were fetched from prison.

At Bolshevo we were shown round a prison. A model prison, it was supposed to be. The corner of shame at the Sunday school. The refectory was magnificent, looking like a Moscow underground station, where the inmates sat dining to cello pieces by Tchaikovsky that hung high up on the walls, and they were also allowed to read the newspapers. We nodded all along, myself and a man from a Scottish newspaper, two Finns and a Dane, a whole delegation from Bulgaria. But after our host, the party stalwart of the district, had been speaking for 12 minutes, the Scotsman nudged me: some of the prisoners didn’t seem to have noticed us, and were just continuing to read their newspapers. But now we observed that one of them, an intelligent-looking, grey-haired man with yellowish skin, was holding his newspaper upside down. He saw that we had noticed, looked up from the paper, and our eyes met. After that, I remembered those eyes once a year. They said: “Everything’s upside down here. Everything’s wrong here. It’s dark at noon here. Don’t lie. Don’t tell them back home that everything’s fine here. Look at me. Don’t lie.”

I saw those eyes every year for twenty-five years. It took me twenty-five years to understand what they were saying. “Don’t lie”. I lied. I told the truth about all the lies I was told. I lied. I bore false witness in the court of history. I painted an icon of the Devil. And for that I was punished.

Stalin was unadulterated evil, the Devil himself in human form. He had his best friends shot at special ceremonies and didn’t go to his mother’s funeral. “I’m not going to cross all those mountains for the damned whore, though of course it will be better to sit with her now than when she was alive.” He made an excellent impression. His hair neatly combed, and unostentatiously dressed. I greeted him. I shook his hand.

Axel and I heard him speak at what they called an “election meeting” in the Moscow Opera. I published that speech in full in Adventure, alongside a two-page profile of “the genius in the Kremlin”. As a speaker, the Leader was totally relaxed, and could indeed be quite reassured about the results of the forthcoming elections. As luck would have it, no one had stood against him. He called them “the freest elections that have ever been held in the world”. Everyone was free to elect him. When the meeting was over we were shown into a high-ceilinged intermediary room, a great banqueting hall, with a fine, thick, ornamentally patterned carpet. Here there were delegations from every other planet in the in the solar system of socialism. All of them very pre-schooled, and very schoolteacher-like. Here you had one country headmaster after another, gentlemen from Viborg, Aalborg and Helsingborg with round spectacles and bald Lenin heads. And they all had nicknames like Otto, Felix, Jan or Karl. The revolution devours its children, but first it baptizes them.

The crowd went quiet when Joseph entered the hall, waited a little, allowed himself to be introduced to people with a few words, shook their hands and was quickly lost from view. It seemed to be pure chance that Axel and I were introduced to him. “This is a Comintern worker from Iceland, and a young author who is writing a book about the Soviet Union…” “Hello,” I said, like the fool of history. He didn’t say anything. Showed no expression. Did not smile. But looked me in the eye. A calm and kindly look, secure in the knowledge that he could have one killed. I stared at his pockmarked skin. He smelled of strong tobacco. And shook my hand. Stalin gave me a handshake.

Fifty years later my hand still shakes.

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

The Author of Iceland - 1
The Author of Iceland - 2
The Author of Iceland - 3
The Author of Iceland - 4
The Author of Iceland - 5
The Author of Iceland - 6

Hallgrímur Helgason: The Author of Iceland - 6

(continued)

There is nothing more beautiful in this world than an Icelandic summer night. When the sun plays hide-and-seek behind a hill or a ness and slowly and calmly we count up to a hundred until it rises again. And meanwhile the light is even and dispersed and neutral, and seems to come from the earth rather than the sky; each tussock, stone and crag, field and gravel-plain seems to glow, seems to reverberate with all the light they have absorbed throughout the day. Night becomes day, and is not made for sleeping; one goes outside to contemplate the simultaneous display of world and life: overhead the sky is as white as an empty sheet of paper on which someone has doodled some clouds out of pure thoughtlessness, on impulse, but also from kindness, filling them full of truth; they shine with an ease that is only within the grasp of a master and around you has been drawn a horizon of hills and mountains, nesses and sea. But it is all of it gentle tonight. The waves have taken to their ocean bed and closed the window behind them: now they are tossing and turning in their sleep under the silent surface. The winds of the heavens have crawled into holes and burrows and are watching there with open eyes. And the glaciers have lost all their coldness and now appear to the eye like the whitest flower heads: newly blossomed mountain cores.

That is what an Icelandic summer night is like. And that is what it is like here in this narrow fjord, tool. Everything is good tonight. And everything is quiet. I could hear each blade of grass around me grow, but it doesn’t, it laughs.

I looked at the people on the slope again. Some kind of restlessness had taken hold of the group. Though no sound could be heard, I saw that two men were having a tussle. What people were these? A small boat now appeared in front of the large mountain, heading slowly but surely into the fjord, breaking the calm surface with its wake and the silence with the low pit-a-pat of its engine. This was beautiful. The boat was riding deep in the water, with a full load, speeding out from its wake like a train on tracks. The night train from Kiev was a noisy rattlesnake. In the window, White Russia was pitch black. The occasional log hut flashed past in a trice in the direction of Utopia; the train on its way in the other. I was being shaken about too much to be able to write, though unable to shake off the foul-smelling proletarian who had lurched into my compartment; a dead-drunk puss-in-boots with a full beard. Only when Russians were drunk did they have freedom of speech. It was like an unwritten law: people weren’t killed for what they said during drunken binges. Not unlike the arrangement here at home. This was, of course, a tradition that dated from tsarist days, and a very good reason for all their drinking. Half way to Minsk he told a joke, in German. Never before had I heard a word spoken against the Leader, and to tell the truth I was deadly afraid as I sat in that compartment.

Yes. Stalin. That Stalin. Stalin, you know who he is. Yes, well, he was taking a dip in the river, the Volga, or, oh well, just some river… It’s just a joke, you know… a joke, yes. But anyway, he landed up in… went out into a strong current, a whirlpool, sort of, and almost got drowned. Stalin, yes. Stalin nearly drowned. Think about it, comrade. Stalin… But then… Then some peasant came along, and he… he rescued Stalin. Pulled him up on to the bank. Then Stalin said: ‘I am Stalin.’ That’s what he said. ‘I am Stalin. You may have any wish granted.’ And the peasant, this fellow, he… The peasant wished… He didn’t want to wish. He just wished that Stalin wouldn’t tell anyone that he had rescued him. For otherwise… “otherwise they’ll kill me.” Heh heh heh, “otherwise they’ll kill me.” Heh heh heh…’

I didn’t get the joke at first. He laughed like a crazy man.

‘He rescued Stalin, you see… The man can’t swim… But the peasant saved him, why did he do that, eh? WHY IN HELL'S NAME DID HE RESCUE THE BLOODY SWINE, EH?’

The drunken puss-in-boots stood up, shook his fist at me, then pulled the window down and shouted out into the night:

‘STALIN! I’LL FRY YOUR ASS AND EAT IT IN MY HANDS!’

(to be continued)

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

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The Lumpfish

by Ólafur Gunnarsson


I thought I recognized him when we first ran into one another in Hotel Borg. I didn’t know from where. He was sitting at a table with a glass yawning. That’s Nonni, said my girlfriend Sigga, and introduced us. I didn’t think he was much to get excited about but Bob hadn’t showed up. Nonni asked me to dance. We smooched our way through a tango and I watched the trumpet player over his shoulder. The trumpet player was really nice looking. Nonni invited me up to the bar for a drink and I let him drool all over me the entire evening. Then we went home together and I let him do it to me. They didn’t always get it straightaway in the old days. Even though they were Americans. I often used to send them home crippled. Ha ha ha. Really crippled.

Well, so he called me on the phone and asked me out to a movie and I went along because Bob had given me up and Nonni had such a fast car. Also he kept his shoes shined and he had some manners. We saw a movie with Tyrone Power in. I bet he was a good fuck. I could really have killed myself for not being in town when he came to Iceland. My girlfriend Sigga still has a five krona bill he wrote his name on.

Nonni and I had been going steady for a month when I discovered I was pregnant. I could have murdered myself. But Nonni wanted to marry me and what was I supposed to do? He had just started an import business. All kinds of stuff from Spain. A lot of it was really nice. Mom and Dad were pleased I was going to get married. Dad was always poking his nose in and he used to get real mad if I came home with a fellah. There was just one time when I had to scream out loud and then Dad said to me next morning: you little whore, I heard you last night. Ugh I paid no attention. I mean is it anyone’s business but her own what a girl does with her cunt ? I’ve always been liberal myself, though I all the old traditions.

Then my Halli was born. Nonni said he didn’t look like him. The garbage they keep in their heads. He started to get drunk and by the time he came home he was real crazy. The boring crap they keep in their heads. First Dad and then Nonni with this quarrel. Well, it’s nice to have some peace at last. That’s all I can say.

Then he started moaning dead drunk about how he wanted to give up business. Said he wanted to live in the country. Stupid dumb fool. He wouldn’t have been able to stand it one single day. I really can’t stand people who sit round moaning they want to be something different from what they are. Even in their old age. The country. Him that always had to lie for a week in bed after a drunk and couldn’t eat anything but hash stew. Opened his sweet little mouth while I spooned the warm meat into him. Ugh. And while I’d be spooning it into him he’d always remind me of something but I was never sure what it was. Dad’s hands.

We got rich quick. You have too look out for yourself. I can’t stand these people who’re always trying to be different from everybody else. Decent people shouldn’t pay any attention to that crowd. They’re against everything and no one’s supposed to own anything so they get it all from others and don’t want to work. They’re perfectly able to look after themselves, if you ask me. Why don’t they all just go to Russia. Ha ha ha. Russia.

Well, when we moved into out house I wasn’t too pleased with the kitchen and then I saw such a smart one at my sister Svana´s place that I just had to change it. Nonni complained at first and I thought he’d never give in. And then one time when he came home from a meeting in the middle of the night he hit me in the face. I had to run out into the street half naked. But I was just joking. I let the blood drip all over everything. I knew he’d be miserable as hell the next day and I’d be able to get whatever I wanted.

Anyway he calmed down a lot over the years and completely stopped having those fits except occasionally. His system just couldn’t take the booze any more. But that moaning! That nobody understood him and that other people ought to show him some respect. That Halli didn’t look like him. You never knew what was coming next. These men have to be taken a firm hold of right away. My poor friend Sigga. She married a real bastard, who tormented her and then walked out on her. Left her with five children and married a twenty-year old girl. But then something else happened. The girl tormented him and he was always as timid as a mouse. Men like that really make me sick. Then Sigga got married again but this guy was only a store assistant and it didn’t work out. He’s in a mental hospital now and talks about nothing but bills and promissory noted the girls were telling me the other day. Poor Sigga. I really must go and see her soon.

Nonni was a bit like that too. He was really hard on his staff and of course I won’t deny that a boss has to be boss but he never tried anything on when I was around. Otherwise the business went well and Nonni employed fifteen people. He also joined the freemasons. I sometimes used to go along to the banquets with him, and I always went with him to Hotel Saga when the old boys from the Business School held their anniversary dinner in the spring. The year my Halli graduated Nonni was speaking to the class of twenty-five. Then my Halli walked into the hall. I was so proud. Nonni also gave a speech to the class of thirty-five last spring. All those old guys with their womenfolk, shoveling the food into themselves. I’ve always kept an eye on the inches, but Nonni had gotten fatter than ever and he couldn’t do it to me any more. Once when he took a trip to Germany to buy firecrackers I went to Hotel Saga with my sister Svana and got myself this sweet little boy. He was really fantastic. I thought he’d never have enough. I was lucky that Nonni was at a meeting. Except that by that time he’d lost all interest in anything but eating. But I was doing something creative. I embroidered and sewed bell-ropes. I must have dine six rococo chairs and all my friends say they’ve never seen anything so nice. The stupid whores. They ruined my parquet floor when they came home after the funeral. Oh yes, while I still remember. Those Business School dinners at Hotel Saga. They remind me of something, those old guys. All those folds upon folds of double chins ? Dad’s hands. In spring when I was little. Where was it I used to go with Dad ? I was never sure.

Well, Nonni´s heart started to crack up and I was lucky if I got it twice a year. The same position time. The woman on her back, the man on his front. Or what was it that book said. I can’t remember now. But it was different in the old days.

Four British soldiers had me at the same time. But that’s a secret. I was so drunk. The doctor told Nonni to lose weight but do you thing he could that. Oh no. He just ate and ate and in the last weeks he’d even stopped going to the office My Halli had just started to work in the family business. He’s a nice boy who’s getting to be more and more like his Dad. He got married the other day. They looked so wonderful at their wedding those two. He mentioned his shares but she didn’t want him to cash them and neither did my Halli when it came to the point, and anyway he’s a lot happier now that he’s started working for himself.

So anyway one evening Nonni said he felt so bad that I just had to call the doctor. Helgi, the doctor arrived too late and said next to nothing. It’s really terrible to see Helgi these days. He was a lot livelier in the old days. Maybe there’s a bit of life left in him yet ? Well, Helgi had just gone when Nonni said his chest hurt him real bad and then he just fell back in bed wheezing and blowing. What could I do? I tried to talk to him but he was so blue in the face and he was belching and wheezing. It just so happened that I’d had a fresh plaice for supper and the entrails and the blood reminded me of something while I was cutting the fish. The bright-colored entrails and Dad’s hands. I leaned over him to get a better look. He’d stopped wheezing and blowing and I’d been staring there for ages looking at him when all of a sudden he opened his mouth wide. And then I remembered what it was Nonni had reminded me of all those years. I tried not to thing it but it was absolutely true. He was like one of the lumpfish in Dad’s sink in the old days. Like a lumpfish. A gaping lumpfish.

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

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(continued)

Yes. It was true, people disappeared in broad daylight. It was true, Axel disappeared one day. And has never been seen again. The day after his arrest, I found the door to room 247 locked. It had been sealed. I hurried out along the corridor and down the staircase and before I was down in the lobby I had completely forgotten I had ever met Mr. Lorens. But I will never forget that door, the long corridor in Hotel Lux and those yellow walls, that red carpet and that gleaming wooden door with the sealed handle, that handle… The door handle moves. I’ll be damned. I catch a glimpse of the old woman through the doorway. She is standing outside, holding the door slightly open, I am looking at one of her eyes, there is a slight glint in it from the light night in the attic, it gleams there along with her mole-nose… I’ll be damned, she's hardly much taller than the door handle. What on earth does she want now? I look at her. She looks at me as though she thinks I can’t see her. This is rather a stupid moment. Then finally she says, without opening the door any further:

‘Are you sleeping?’

‘No.’

‘Can you not sleep?’

‘No.’

Now she opens the door all the way, and steps into the room.

‘Would you like me to help you? Will I help you to get to sleep?’

‘No, no… I… I can easily get to sleep…’

A whopping lie. I would gladly sleep with this old woman if it give me even an hour’s sleep. An hour’s break from this endless military parade in my head. She comes into the room, her head jutting straight from her shoulders, her hair white over her forehead. Her eyes on me.

‘You look good lying there… You look good in bed.’

‘Oh?’

‘There are few better sights than a man in bed,’ she says, toying with the foot-board, eyeing my feet for a while: ‘What size… What size of shoes do you take?’

‘Me? Size 42.’

‘Size forty-two?’

‘Yes.’

‘Forty-two… yes, yes, that should be fine. That should be fine.’ She wandered over to the window, looked out. Out across Fjörður and the fjord.

‘It’s bright outside.’

‘Yes.’

‘Terribly bright, this night,’ she mumbled to some dead flies that lay on the windowsill, swept some of them away with a grey and glass-hard little finger. Then turned round without looking at me and said:

‘Nineteen hundred and twenty-three. It was nineteen hundred and twenty-three. Bjarni his name was. Bjarni from Borgarfjörður.’

The old woman vanished through the doorway, but soon returned:

‘From Borgarfjörður. What did you say they were? Forty-two?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes. Listen, then, I'll go and see if they’ll do. Go and see if they’ll do.’

Then she left the room and stumbled down the staircase. I waited there until everything was quiet. Then went outside. It was a bright, cloudless night in late July. I walked up the hill and sat down there. The far end of the fjord was blocked off by a high, peaked mountain to the south, so that one could not see out to sea. Kólfur, its name was, if I am not mistaken. The silence was complete, not a peep from mouse or bird. The fjord was like a deep cup filled to the brim with stillness. I sat for a while, looking out over the village and its environs. I noticed that the people who had sat on the hillside in recent days were still sitting there. Even though they were far away, I had a sense that they were all watching me.


translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

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(continued)

We took part in it. We placed our words in the balance. We heaved those hewn stones onwards. We spent half our lives building the pyramid that was called communism, to the glory of the man who was never a communist. Who spent half his life shooting communists.

Anyone who was accused had to name another five. Within a very few years the whole nation had become guilty of a conspiracy against one man. The pyramid of communism was built on bullets. Each bullet from the barrel released another five bullets; twenty-five of them in all; and they released another hundred and twenty-five which became six hundred and twenty new bullets which became three thousand one hundred and twenty-five. Bullets fly pretty fast, and within a few years the web was complete: a dictatorship of fear reigned from Minsk in the west to Yakutsk in the east, from the north in Arkhangelsk all the way down to Tashkent.

Communism was a pyramid made of cordite.

When the census was taken in 1936, it turned out that 15 million Soviet citizens were missing. 15 million flies had spun their own web. My gospel was now only 80,000 words long. But under each of those words a person lay buried. I covered 80,000 deaths.

The Adventure in the East. The book I wished I had never written. I once borrowed it from a library, this was many lives later, and lost it. For many years I got regular reminders about my failure to return that book. My failure to return to its subject. In the end I tormented myself by preparing the book for a reprint. ‘Corrections to the language and style’ it said in the preface. ‘Corrections to a life’, would have sounded closer. Did I really have such loathing for myself to get involved in something like that? There are few sorrier sights than an old man of nearly eighty trying to make up for the pranks of his boyhood. It was the summer of 1989. The Wall came down that autumn. The spider’s web unravelled in five minutes. But of course the flies were just as dead as before.

How could I have been so mistaken? I was able to travel widely, I travelled all over the Soviet Union in the winter of 1937-38, but the only word I could find for the society that was the closest thing to hell the earth had ever seen was ‘Sunday school’. I should have been shot for that alone. Shouldn’t I have been able to see through the great illusion? True, everyone spoke according to the author’s script. True, the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was completely in the hands of the dictator of the proletariat. True, it was forbidden to make fun of him. True, no opposition to the government was allowed. True, the words ‘tolerance’ and ‘freedom of expression’ did not exist in the language. True, some authors were banned. But also true: they were probably not very good. True, Christmas was forbidden. True, everything was forbidden except what the Party allowed. True, necessities were in short supply. True, ten people slept in one room. True, all conversations were monitored. (Even the love talk of a boy and a girl in the middle of the night. There was always someone awake. Woe to anyone who spoke ill of Stalin in their sleep.) True, the Party had got rid of what was called private life. True, one’s whole life was in the service of the Party. True, people didn’t even go to the toilet unless they did so for the Party. True, most would have shat on the Party if they could. True, people were locked up just for saying that the streets of Copenhagen were cleaner than those of Vladivostok. And true, the streets were filled with the most ragged crowd of people I have seen in my life, though I had been in both Naples and Palermo. My friend Axel Lorens informed me, however, that there were far fewer of them than there had been when he was here last, in the autumn of 1935. The ‘dirty folk’ had largely disappeared, he said. The purges had done their work.

(to be continued)

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

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(continued)

Little Nína was down on the floor and wanted to get up on the chair between Lena and me. Her mother helped her and then said, a bit too loudly and clearly: ‘Stand on the chair, Nína!’ in Swedish, three times, until Kristján hushed her up, looking quickly around him. ‘Stol, Nina!’ sounded dangerously like ‘Stalina’.

‘It’s very important to be able to keep quiet here. But don’t tell anyone,’ he once told me with a serious look. He had lost some of his earlier playfulness. One summer ago, at Siglufjörður, he’d been the most entertaining person in the north of Iceland and had turned into his favourite character, Bourgeois Bourgeoisson, at Hotel Hvanneyri every night. In one sweep his face was transformed into that of an obese herring speculator who talked like an elderly Mongol on his third glass: ‘Listen, my lads, we don’t always need to be locked in battle like this, you know, the only difference between you and me is that… I’m fat and you’re thin. Otherwise our aims are exactly the same: to build up Bourgeois Bourgeoisson Incorporated.’

One evening a famous actor was standing at the bar. Stjáni: ‘There you see one of our foremost actors. He always acts at the front of the stage. And in the film that Knudsen made last year he put all the other actors in the shade during the filming because he always stood at the front, always right in front of the camera!’ We all laughed and the actor turned round, I felt sorry for him, he came over to the table where we sat. ‘Look! He’s trying to push himself forward again!’ I felt sorry for anyone who tried to get the better of Red Stjáni. He could outwit them all. And always so flaming red in the face. But here in Moscow he’d become a different man.

Axel Lorens. Room 247, Hotel Lux, 10 Gorky Street.

What was more, I had to call him Axel, even though we were sitting alone in the park, the last evening of summer, and I fresh from the train, having just told him all the new from home, all about the violence at the docks up in Skagi and the disputes in the party. I concluded with one of Bourgeois Bourgeoisson’s most famous lines: ‘One man’s profit is the bread of all.’ He made no reply, looked in front of him and said at last: ‘Yes. It’ll be nice to get home.’

We sat there in Moscow’s Ring Road Park, in the autumn of 1937: two soldiers of truth in that war of words that was now being waged all over the world, two evening-sweaty Icelanders determined to lift the Icelandic people from herring level to the next one, two sold souls beneath the Gogol Monument. But how could a man be anything else but a communist in the years after 1930? No one could be neutral in the class war. Only the most depraved villains could remain at home standing on their balconies, looking down on the workman who was toiling to dig a ditch for the sewer, to shovel away their for one króna an hour. No one walked unmoved from an unemployed family’s house in Reykjavik during the years of the depression, lacking WC and shower, with frost-patterned windowpanes and porridge served for dinner, the smell in your coat all the way down Laugavegur. To be a communist was to be a human being.

And we went east. To the model state. A journey of pilgrimage. Redeemed men in jobtraining in Heaven. How could we ever have suspected that we had landed in Hell?

For seven months I lived in the greatest realm of darkness in human history, and came back with a gospel-like manuscript about ‘the perpetual Sunday school that stretches from the Baltic to the Pacific’, where the greatest educational project in history was underway, where the schoolmaster ‘summoned by means of Marxism millions upon millions of people out of the darkness of stupidity and despair.’ In reality it was the greatest theatrical performance in history, a performance that deceived not only those who watched it but also all those who played a role in it, painted scenery, controlled the stage lights, whispered the correct line. Even the principal characters swore loyalty to the author in their final statements, which were, however, pure spinning, spun from a blind derangement of despair, confessed to their non-crimes and were then shot, to thunderous applause. I was in the courtroom. For ten days I sat following the trial of Bukharin and his comrades, and never suspected that that it was all a theatrical performance. The devilish spider had spun such an ingenious web that every fly that was caught in it continued to spin that web, which finally reached across half the planet. Koba sat in the middle of the web; alone in that pyramid he had spent his life constructing, making half of mankind construct it for him, as a mausoleum for himself, the great Pharaoh in leather boots: a monument to the next thousand years.

(to be continued)

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

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Hallgrímur Helgason: The Author of Iceland - 1

The Author of Iceland (Höfundur Íslands) is a novel by the contemporary Icelandic writer Hallgrímur Helgason about a famous Icelandic author who dies at the age of 88, only to wake up in a novel he wrote some 40 years earlier. At first, he is unaware both of his death and of the fact that he is now living in a world of his own creation. The novel is set on a remote farm in the eastern part of Iceland. One day the old man is found lying out in the fields, as if he had just fallen to earth. The farmer carries him into the house, where the writer gradually comes to terms with his afterlife. The character of the writer is based on the personality (and biography) of the Nobel prizewinning twentieth century classic Icelanndic author Halldór Laxness, and the fictional novel is actually Laxness's own Independent People. Helgason's narrative becomes in some sense a reappraisal of Laxness - especially of Laxness's infatuation with Stalinism and Communism, which Helgason takes great pains to document and revisit in circumstantial detail (Laxness even visited Moscow in 1937 to attend the purge trials, and - by his own later admission - misrepresented them for fear of offending the Soviet government). But the book also goes beyond the biography of one man, and becomes a commentary on the twentieth century itself, and the response of Western writers and intellectuals to the vast upheavals and insoluble moral dilemmas that marked it.


The following excerpts (together, they make up Chapter 33) relate to Laxness's time in Moscow during the 1930s.

Stalin stands on a shelf. He stands on a shelf, waving to the crowd. He has stood there for two whole days and nights, waving. Everyone went home long ago. Everyone but me. I lie here on the bed in the yellow room in the Chimney House and pass the light nights with Comrade Stalin. He stands over there on the shelf high up on the wall beside a dusty old candlestick and a vague-looking jug. Now and then he raises his stiff arm and waves, squints and almost smiles. Just as he did on the roof of the mausoleum the other day. My thoughts march past him, stare up at him, one after the other, there seems to be no end to them, they stream forward across the blood-red square.

Stalin stands there alone. He has murdered everyone else.

‘The death of one person is tragic, the death of a million a mere statistic,’ said Count Sosso. That figure was probably 40,000,000, the most recent historians say. The Icelandic nation would fit four times into each of those zeroes. But many more were the souls he murdered. I was one of them. I was a victim of Stalin.

‘Hail to thee,’ I say to him. But he doesn’t hear, so far away. ‘Koba!’ I call. Then try: ‘Sosso!’, ‘Joseph!’ Then finally, ‘Stalin!’ but then recollect myself and remember Jóhanna who is sleeping, or not sleeping, on the ground floor here. The lodger who makes a noise. The lodger with bats in the belfry. Suddenly started invoking the Man of Steel in the middle of the night, and without having paid the rent, too. Still, I’m not really sure that she expects me to pay it. When I came upstairs this evening she lay in my bed with her hand under her chin, and for the first time she looked at me, before saying mockingly:

‘Do you know Davið Stefánsson?’

‘Yes, I’ve met him,’ I replied, not knowing where to put myself, and finally sitting down on a fusty, decayed upholstery-chair facing the bed. She lay there like a little girl trying to be provocative. One of the strangest things I have ever seen. The old crone smiled at me like a frog at a fruitfly. I guess she expected me to jump on top of her like a dog on a bitch.

‘He’s good-looking, that Davið.’

Did she really think this was the right way to chat me up?

‘Yes, he… was good-looking.’

‘Yes, that’s true. He’s a getting on a bit now, is Davið,’ she said, looking at me with eyes that said: ‘But you’re still young.’ How old was she, anyway? Eighty?

‘Aren’t you going to be with me this winter?’ she went on.

‘This winter? Aye… I don’t know…’ I said, trying to look out of the window as though I was expecting a coasting vessel.

‘Well, you might be wanting to go to bed, maybe?’

‘Yes, maybe… maybe I’ll just take a nap,’ I replied as dispassionately as I could, and noticing that Stalin was still standing up there on the shelf. The damned devil. With that infernal Georgian grin. I looked at the woman, this old object lying on ‘my’ pillow. She frowned again:

‘Well, you just go right ahead. I don’t need much space.’

‘Oh?’

‘I won’t be needing much space myself.’

What exactly was she, this old woman? She flitted her eyelids, two ancient moths. I looked at the Leader again. He’d grown awfully small, the poor fellow. I could stand up and take him in one hand and throw him out of the window. But I’d never be able to do that. You don’t throw Joseph Stalin out of a window, not from the second floor.

‘He’s smoking,’ I said.

‘Eh?’ said the old woman.

Stalin stood smoking incessantly, spitting now and then. He stood on top of the Lenin Mausoleum, together with all his men. On Red Square, 7 November 1937. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Revolution. I stood there like a Nordic mouse. We stood there like a hundred thousand mice staring up at the cat, the one with the hunting whiskers. The Georgian tom. He looked out across the herd and made his choices. Suddenly two soldiers came up to us on the platform, cleared a way through to some kind of box of honour, to a small, bald man with a sharp nose and a Napoleon forelock, and made him accompany them up to the mausoleum, to the leaders. Someone whispered: ‘Bukharin’. I recognized the name. Six months later he had been shot. But now he was raised up to the high seat. The cat wanted to smell the mouse.

We stood there, the two of us, Kristján and me. Me and Stjáni. Kristján Jonsson. He was seven years older than me, a definite and determined leader in the Communist Party back home, and employed here on its behalf in the House of the Comintern, as a kind of telegraphist whose job it was to send the party line home. The Moscow line. I looked up to him, though looking up to people never quite suited me. He was an enthusiast, powerfully built and pleasant-natured, with fair, tousled hair that rose like flames from his fiery red head, alert, straightforward, a good dancer with a zest for life, a mimic, the only real humorist in the party. A good lad. With his heart in the right place. His name was on the lips of all Icelanders during the Nóva dispute in Akureyri in March 1933. Red Stjáni cut to shreds the rope the White gangs intended to use in order to keep the workers away from the pier. And in the siege that followed he slept for two nights standing up, the story went. All the way until a final victory was won against the ‘employers’ gang’. How colourful words were back then.

(to be continued)

translated from Icelandic by David McDuff

Íslandsferð - 3

Chad Post has written up his account of the Reykjavik Literary Festival for the online magazine Publishing Perspectives, where he says that A Year After the Meltdown, Iceland is Hot:

The events were very well attended, which shouldn’t be that surprising, considering there’s been increased sales of Icelandic fiction in the domestic market. Most publishers figured that in a time of great economic upheaval, self-help and nonfiction would dominate the best-seller lists, but instead, it seems that most Icelandic readers are looking for an escape. According to Úa Matthíasdóttir of Forlagið — Iceland’s largest trade publisher — there was a surge in sales for fiction last Christmas that went against conventional wisdom.

At Three Percent, Chad also has a post about new and established Icelandic authors.