Steinunn Sigurðardóttir

The Good Lover

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

World Editions

breda 2016

Published in Great Britain in 2016 by World Editions Ltd., London

www.worldeditions.org

Copyright © Steinunn Sigurðardóttir

English translation copyright © Philip Roughton, 2016

Cover design Multitude

Image credit © Getty Images/Bridgeman Art Library

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published as Góði elkshuginn in Iceland in 2009 by Bjartur, Reykjavik

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

isbn 978-94-6238-014-1

This book has been translated with financial support from

Distribution Europe (except the Netherlands and Belgium): Turnaround Publisher Services, London

Distribution the Netherlands and Belgium: cb, Culemborg, the Netherlands

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Email: info@worldeditions.org.

This book is dedicated to the writer Málfríður Einarsdóttir

(1899-1983).

A friend—and mentor, in hindsight.

But it is a fact that in every man

(not every woman) there lives a lover.

Joseph Conrad

Chance

A Traveler

Not a dream. Radiant green hills filled the entire horizon—what was once a seabed, the book stated. An hour’s hike from the beach that Lotta found for him, according to his preferences: yellow sand, secluded, maybe even remote. And it was very remote, more abandoned than secluded, and more than yellow; that is, golden.

The traveler sat down and gazed at a thousand uprisen hills beneath streaming clouds like Biblical revelations. He took off his shorts when it started pouring rain in the midst of sunshine, fell asleep rain-drenched and woke up dry—stared in amazement at his own naked body on the seabed that was. He had woken to the cries of a cuckoo that leaned toward his toes and fell gravely silent, like a messenger waiting for a signal to commence his delivery.

The sun was gone when he returned to the beach. He sat down on a dune, dug his toes into the golden grains and let his mind wander as he scrutinized the sea that took the color of the sunless sky. There was no one in sight until a man came riding his bicycle along the water’s edge. Tomorrow he would do the same, rent a bicycle and pedal thirty kilometers, two trips back and forth on the long mirror between sky and sea.

Around noon he walked to the end of the beach, ate bright red fish in a bamboo hut and drank white wine from the Loire Valley. That something from the Loire Valley should have found its way here! The sun returned and shone full blast over the pitch-black, craggy island on the opposite side of the slender channel. On the way back he amused himself by examining clusters of pebbles that cast shadowy lines on the sand.

He planned to spend the rest of the day taking turns swimming and lying in the sand, regardless of where the sun and clouds were going. In the evening he would sit out on the balcony and watch the dull gleam of the moon sail across the sea. Not move a muscle; eat dinner on the balcony. Let the purl of the waves lull him to sleep. Much later.

On his first visits to distant beaches, he would recall: I’m alone. That was in the past. Yet behind every moment that he existed, alone with himself, especially on the beach, there were moments with kisses and music, during the winter that was, with spring and midsummer, and although they were so thoroughly gone, so long gone, new moments had their origin in them as well as their right to exist.

Ahead there was nothing else to seek; as such, he lived in the present, and anything called the future had nothing to do with him. He didn’t hurry, was free from impatience—everything he needed was within reach, here and now. People said that it was good to be close to him, especially his lovers, and that was because he didn’t have any particular destination. As a result, he was little inclined to change his travel plans, let alone out of the blue.

Which is why Lotta broke custom and asked a direct question when he called her from the water’s edge at dusk and said that he wanted to go to Reykjavík at the first opportunity. She asked: ‘What happened?’

##

A colossal chill hung over the town and in the town on a February morning around the time when people stirred, and coldest of all, the sea itself around the little frost-encrusted island with a few lights lit above the pitch-black beach. The dark blue sea was so off-putting that the traveler driving along the coast felt sorry for the fishes to have to live there and couldn’t see how any creature kept itself warm in those depths, no matter how cold its blood was. The traveler knew that a warm-blooded person could live only a short time in the sea beyond the city of his birth. Drowning came quickly—although those who had narrowly escaped that fate claimed it to be peaceful.

A fleet of frost-covered cars, cold through and through, stood waiting for children and adults who were assembling in the vestibules of all the neighborhoods and dressing themselves warmly for the short stretch outside to them. Cold-weather shoes of all sizes were just then ending up on the correct owners, some wide, others too small, pinching unhardened toes and, in the worst cases, turning them permanently crooked.

Low wage earners, along with students, immigrants, and eccentrics, had started to trickle into the bus shelters, hapless folk in other respects than that something called in literature ‘dawn’s gleam’ was being born in the east; here it was a lighter streak of gray within a universal grayness. These people were cold, no matter how warmly they dressed, and some weren’t even dressed well enough. The worst-off held the hands of icy blue children, while the children were even worse off than the ones holding their hands.

In the swimming pools this winter morning were unnaturally thin, sinewy, shriveled folk over sixty, folk who walked barefooted on the brittle ice on the banks of the pools without batting an eyelid; excessively healthy people who suffered neither sore throats nor heart murmurs, but would still cost society and themselves large sums of money by living until no less than ninety, and some of them even longer.

Over these people and over the cold in the town and the sea loomed a radiant, early-morning full moon, like the exposed offspring of the sun, giving a false promise of warmth that could never shine from it, not on this town, this sea, nowhere.

The traveler watched the taxi drive off and lingered in the starbright calm outside his accommodation. The red wooden house catty-corner from him was one of the few left belonging to the Skuggi neighborhood of old. Otherwise they had all but disappeared, or had been blocked by other buildings, like his old corner house that stood in invisible silence behind a cluster of highrises.

He listened closely, as if the music from the house would come to life if he only listened; Jussi Björling singing about the woman he loved, but hopelessly; Ástamama and the actor with the bass voice belting out the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier: Ohne mich, ohne mich, jeder Tag dir zu lang ... Mit mir, mit mir keine Nacht dir zu lang ...

A row of jagged icicles hung threateningly over the door of the red house. The traveler had always been afraid of icicles. People had been killed by icicles falling onto their heads. Later he discovered that an icicle is the perfect murder weapon. It melts.

He was considering moving when the door of the red house opened and a young man with bronze-colored hair rushed down the stairs. As the door slammed shut, an icicle fell and shattered on the landing. The one whom it nearly struck didn’t look over his shoulder at the crash, and continued his dash toward the sea.

The traveler ignored the elevator and darted straight up the stairs like a salmon on its journey home. Panting and puffing, he opened the door to the penthouse and stood frozen in the doorway when the gas station appeared, a black sea and iron-gray Mount Esja beneath a low moon.

He collapsed onto a white leather chair by the window. His heartbeat returned slowly to normal as he took in the view behind the shadow of the kiss on the girl’s face the evening that the present took shape and transformed into the future.

It was in fact February. A whole month and more he had gotten to be near the girl, who smiled either wonderfully or mischievously. He still knew her smiles by heart after all those years: the wonderful smile that dwindled slowly and left a little mark on her face long after it had disappeared—and the mischievous smile that came and went so quickly that one needed to be very alert to catch it.

It was stormy that night after the movie. They fought against the wind and spray of the waves on Skúlagata, had hot dogs and Cokes at the gas station, and she came home with him and said something sounding like ‘Yes’ after the kiss. Now, that jumping-off point for the future appeared to him like a hallucination in the moonlight.

When he finally got up, stiff to his toes, he realized that the door behind him was open and his suitcase was in the corridor. Leaving behind evidence like that was so unlike him. Astonished, even slightly horrified, he corrected his blunder.

The penthouse apartment was as it should be. Clean in style and spacious. A high ceiling, white walls, a dark parquet floor. Few pieces of furniture, but elegant. An espresso machine that he would have chosen himself. No unsightly clutter. But one thing was lacking. The roses. Not good enough. The price of the apartment demanded that it stand up to the smallest detail. The roses were actually the main point. He was going to call Lotta to get her to set this straight, but of course it was night in North America.

There was no lack of things to choose from in the refrigerator. A starving man eyed the skyr and cream, smoked lamb, and Grandma’s Flatbread. Too worn out to do anything, he gulped down Icelandic tap water and collapsed crosswise onto the two-meter-wide bed covered with a dark blue cashmere blanket.

When his mind cleared after long, confused dreams with melodies from Nino Rota, he was thoroughly irritated at his own behavior. He had broken rule number one: had travelled to this country without informing his sister Fríða and niece Ásta. He was ill-prepared for Frosttown and would have to buy himself some warm outerwear if he planned on going to the cemetery with roses for the grave of Ástamama.

The traveler was in such a state that he had to focus hard to open his suitcase and hang up his trousers and jacket, take out his black pajamas and lay them on the bed. He’d slept in underpants and a t-shirt, something that he couldn’t recall ever having done; he’d been a pajamas-boy all his life.

Despite his nagging hunger, he had no interest in the Icelandic delicacies. He wanted a petrol-station hot dog and Coke, plain and simple. A crazy idea that he prepared to carry out by first putting on two pairs of underpants, two pairs of socks, a short-sleeved shirt, a paper-thin sweater.

When he came outside, he expected to see suspicious characters lurking about, and he looked in the direction of the old icicle house. But there was no one out in the February darkness except for a tramp who shouted Ho! like someone lost on a foggy heath.

The hot dog proved to be problematic for the traveler, because there were now all sorts of bacon-wrapped hot dogs and grilled hot dogs to choose from, with potato salad, shrimp salad. He stuck to a good old regular hot dog with everything on it but raw onions, and a small bottle of Coke. It tasted exactly like it did in the old days, and he dimly envisaged his girl coming there sometimes to relive that stormy evening of long ago.

He was on his way out when he saw the roses. Maybe they would suffice, rather than nothing at all, for a man who’d been falsely promised real flowers in his overpriced accommodation. The white roses were the best of the lot, but a bit too funereal, so he chose yellow ones.

A young man with bronze-colored hair came in as he was paying. The one who lived in a house full of perfect murder weapons but didn’t know how to guard against them. And what was he doing at the gas station? Sizing up a traveler in a Dior overcoat?

The traveler wanted to be certain that he wouldn’t be followed to his apartment. Which meant only one thing: he had to take a taxi. He would have to figure out later how to explain the absurdity of being driven the distance of several buildings. Maybe make up a leg injury?

The cashier didn’t understand Icelandic and ordered the taxi in English. That was in keeping with the new Reykjavík. Urban sprawl had affected everything: inordinate intersections in town, gigantic developments that laid their shadowy paws over the wooden houses. As if to cover over what once was, the past and smallness. The language itself had become too small.

While waiting for the taxi, the traveler contemplated the roses. One of them stood out; it had the biggest bulb and the straightest stem. He drew it closer; dead straight, with beautiful petals. It was beauty in all its glory. This would be a privileged rose, which he would keep when he threw away the others.

The driver said ‘Yes’ unusually loudly when the passenger gave him the address on Seltjarnarnes: Silfurströnd 3. That immense ‘Yes’ resounded like a heavy sentence of doom in the ears of the man who had unwittingly announced the world’s most absurd destination.

It had never crossed his mind to approach her. Not even by looking her up in the phone book, calling just to hear her voice before hanging up. Why should he have tried as much as that? She was lost forever. He understood that perfectly when she said what she did, staring at the Swiss roll that he’d made for her. It was irrevocable, and he had left the table hurriedly so that she could go her way.

As soon as he no longer heard her footsteps on the street, he knew that life had become just a memory; he would become a man who had nothing to expect of the future. Futureless man; that was the term for him, and he could not rid himself of the still-life image of a kitchen table set with the finest service and a half-eaten slice of Swiss roll.

When the taxi stopped at number three he said: Oh, it was the next house, and then he paid the driver and stepped out. He kept the one true rose and left the rest of the bouquet in the back seat. A perfect place to get rid of it. Either the next passenger would take it, or the driver himself.

The air on Seltjarnarnes was perfectly still, and the sky above Silfurströnd cloudless. The moon and stars were out, high up in the sky and in the dark sea. The sidewalk was frosty, and he stood there bare-handed, holding a rose—as if he were about to hand it to someone.

He waited until the taxi had driven out of sight before taking any steps toward her house. A two-story house, so strictly funkis that he named it monkish, and earned top points from his girlfriend for it. Those who had had it built, her parents, were, on the other hand, not quite in tune with its character, and decorated it with flowered curtains and carved pine furniture. Those oversights were gone now. Curtains as if the architect had chosen them himself (perhaps he had done so), sofa and floorlamp as if cemented to the floor. The painting as if it were nailed to the wall. He guessed it was by Svavar Guðnason.

Last time (in his former life!), he saw the house in the dazzling brightness that unveiled and exaggerated its good attributes, but now it turned out that darkness suited this house well; it was a nocturnal house. The darkness softened the austere simplicity of its form, and the garden landscape, with spotlit pine trees here and small hills there, formed a vivid contrast to the rectangular concrete and glass.

A woman wearing dark-blue pajamas appeared behind the oblong living-room window. The venetian blinds slowly descended. And the woman’s shadow switched off the lamp and disappeared.

He saw at once that little had changed. The same powerful, yet soft gait. Her hairstyle the same: short, bangs, parted in the middle (a Louise Brooks bob). She hadn’t gained much weight; only five kilos, maybe, and it suited her face better—her high cheekbones and aquiline nose. She was perhaps even more beautiful now than as a young woman. The man on the street was as proud of her new beauty, as if he himself had added color and glow to a female image that had been radiant enough already.

He was going to wait for her to switch on a light in the bedroom. He knew where it was; knew the house like the back of his hand after the one and only time he’d been there. At the time, she had just moved from Grundarstígur. It was a sunny evening in July, and it was true that he’d been in the same house and garden, in this life, with the woman in blue pajamas. She had settled there, in the house of her parents, where they had spent an evening together and gazed at the ocean, which was still as it had been and not infinite, since it ended on the beach in front of this house, on the same rocks as then.

The light switched on in the bedroom, and he threw the rose onto the sidewalk as he walked. Marble! How gauche. Something that the man of the house had come up with, no doubt. His girlfriend had had such precise taste that he used to tease her about having absolute vision. Now she would enjoy the sight of a frosty rose sculptured on the marble when she looked out in the morning.

He crossed the street and sat down on a bench in the bus shelter across from the house. His heart hadn’t beaten any faster when she appeared at the window. This is what he had come halfway across the world to see—why should his heartbeat have sped up?

The light in the bedroom went out; it was completely dark in the house, but the outside lights were on and amplified the snow-white pine that reached out to him over the edge of the garden of number five. Now the woman in number three was pulling a duvet over herself. She was lying on her side, because she always slept on her side, finding it the most comfortable position, and if she was still quick to slumber, as she had been most often in her youth, she might be in dreamland before he rounded the corner.

The traveler, who was usually in no hurry, wanted nothing more than to sit in that bus shelter until the break of day, but the cold drove him to his feet. He was going to order a taxi, but could remember neither the number of the taxi service nor that of Icelandic directory assistance. A taxi certainly wouldn’t just show up by chance, no more here than at the end of the world.

He set his course toward a concrete block that was perhaps a shopping mall. Hopefully there he could find a pay phone, a phone book, and a taxi. He ran the last few meters, because his unprotected ears stung fiercely, but it was more like heading for the summit of a mountain, when the destination is always farther than it seems.

In the end, his goal became The Yellow Sheep, a shopping-mall bar. He went in, despite everything in him protesting. No matter how desperate the situation. The Yellow Sheep. To be caught dead anywhere near such tastelessness! The Black Sheep, fine, or even The Shorn Sheep; but this! Yellow! How could a sheep be yellow?

The traveler went and waited at the bar, as he normally would, but it mattered little, because the bartender was busy. That is, he had his back turned to his customer and was fiddling with something; hard to say what.

The traveler had to blow his nose and did so, not very loudly, but enough to startle the bartender and make him turn around.

‘Good evening,’ said the bartender.

‘Good evening,’ said the traveler, carefully tucking his handkerchief into his breast pocket.

‘Sorry I didn’t see you,’ said the bartender respectfully. To his shores had drifted a long-awaited real customer, who knew how to handle a hanky.

‘That’s okay,’ said the traveler, asking himself when it became possible to see someone with the back of one’s head.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Whiskey, a double.’

The bartender pointed at one bottle and another, and the traveler was surprised at the impressive assortment. There was even a sixteen-year-old, first-rate whiskey of the same sort he usually kept in his wine cabinet out west on Long Island and down south in France.

He ordered that one, and paid a third of the price of the entire bottle, four thousand krónur. Such overpricing made his blood boil; just like other people with money, he insisted on paying the correct price for things. It wasn’t about stinginess, but what was fair and right. The golden ratio—between the quality of the product and the price put on it.

The bartender served using all the tricks of his trade, with shrewd politeness. Instead of asking whether his customer would like his whiskey with water or on the rocks, he brought him a pitcher of water, a glass of water, and ice in a bowl. The whiskey glass was the right one, as was the water glass. A bartender of his cut would have been at home in a high-end bar for the elite, if he wasn’t a bit too fond of his drink.

The traveler shivered from the cold and had to make an effort not to spill his drink as he raised it to his lips. The bartender watched, and naturally, drew his own conclusion based on his expertise. An alcoholic, in such bad condition that he hadn’t yet managed to drink off his tremors despite the lateness of the evening.

This traveler was always picky about seating at a bar or restaurant. Now he looked around for the perfect place, as far as possible from two older men who sat together at a table, shrouded in a cloud of their own smoke and unadulterated silence.

He was about to walk across the room, whiskey glass in one hand and the glass of water in the other, when the song began to play. He quickly put down the glasses and stood there.

Only in a dream do we share the same road ...

The waltz by Lilja Jóns that was a hit when he was little. A song that wouldn’t have come into existence had not a little boy once gotten some nonsense in his head.

The thing was that Kalli, his mother’s little boy, heard the term ‘tuneless’ at his friend’s house. He didn’t fully understand it, but he thought it such an awful word that it literally bewildered him, and he ran off alone to Hljómskálagarður Park and who else knows where. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that the entire world was tuneless. All of its tunes had been used up, and no new ones could be made anymore.

A few days passed in the tuneless world and Kalli seemed so distraught that his mother asked: ‘Is something wrong?’

She had come to tuck him in and say goodnight. He wanted to pull his duvet over his mouth, bear up, but he couldn’t. Tears welled in his eyes and he whimpered: ‘Are all the tunes used up?’

‘Wait a minute, Kallikalli. Used up, how?’

‘Well, you see, so terribly many tunes and songs have already been made that the world has run out. It’s tuneless.’

That evening they went to bed late. Ástamama explaned that there were endless possibilities for writing new tunes, new songs. That numerous new songs were being written every day, in every single country in the world, including Iceland.

‘Even I can make up a song,’ she said; ‘just listen.’

And Kalli listened and Ástamama spun up a song about Kalli Tyke.

I always wanted my own little boy,

and here he is, Kalli Tyke.

Now that she’d started, she continued writing songs, first for her Kalli and her Fríða. Then she changed into the singer-songwriter Lilja Jóns, who had her big breakthrough with one of her original songs:

Only in a dream do we share the same road.

How proud he was of his mom when they went to the Performing Rights Society (PRS) building on Laufásvegur to pick up a check, and a nasal-voiced composer who looked lika a mad scientist praised her to the skies for her glorious waltz with its dreamy lyrics.

‘An original and catchy melody,’ he said, and was so elated about having such an excellent opportunity to compliment a seamstress for her musical talent that he gave her a kiss on the cheek. And her singing was fabulous. ‘Particularly fine intonation,’ he added weightily, through his nose.

The two terms, PRS and intonation, settled into Kalli’s consciousness like parts of magic spells and became guiding lights in his life. He would have loved to say that he earned his livelihood from PRS payments, and that music is what kept his nose to the grindstone. With a special emphasis on singing and perfect intonation.

As the song was drawing to a close, the smokers stood up and started dancing, elegant and bony, until Ástamama’s voice trailed off:

... only for a moment in a dream ...

‘They’re gay,’ said a woman who’d suddenly appeared at the bar, from no visible direction, or audible one either.

‘Good dancers,’ said the traveler, as he watched them take their seats again, hand-in-hand.

Jón used to be a dance teacher. Biffi is deaf. They were one of the very first gay couples in town. To have come out of the closet, if you could call it that. They should open a museum in their honor. Just a little one.

He wouldn’t have recognized him again: Jón with his black mane and grand mannerisms, who came to Ástamama to chat and have clothes tailored for him. And maybe he wouldn’t have remembered him, either, except that one day when Jón arrived, an eleven-year-old girl had just gone down the stairs. He had stood there like an idiot in the kitchen doorway, holding a glass of milk and a cookie, and the guest had said mischievously: Bon appetit.

‘And were have we come from?’ asked the woman.

‘I don’t know about “we,”’ said the traveler, ‘but I just came from a walk.’

‘It’s a nice place for walks,’ said the woman. ‘In the sea air. And with Snæfellsjökull Glacier practically at your doorstep.’

‘I’d forgotten about that.’

‘How could you forget Snæfellsjökull? You must live abroad. Yes, you live abroad. You have an accent.’

He had an accent? He, who did his utmost to speak perfect Icelandic on those rare occasions when he had the chance, he who had done all he could to maintain his beloved mother tongue, listening to Icelandic readings in the car, including the scholar Einar Ólafur Sveinsson reading Njál’s Saga. That he had an accent was hard for him to swallow.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I have no interest in sailing accent-free under false pretences and pretending that I’m Icelandic.’

‘Where are you from, then? German American, or American German. Is your mother American?’

‘The other way around. My dad was American.’

He hoped that she would leave, so that he could be alone with his expensive whiskey and the image of a woman lowering blinds over a window. But this person wasn’t budging.

Who was she, anyway? Not young. Not old. Not beautiful. Not ugly. Not drunk, at least not very. Far from being sober, though. She was wearing a well-tailored felt jacket with a high-quality wool scarf, but both in obscure colors that he couldn’t put his finger on. Rust-red? Greyish green? Her demeanor was like the colors: not all there. Her voice was flat and slightly whiny.

And her questions were importunate and personal. Now she came to the crux of the matter, with an accusatory tone in her voice:

‘So there’s absolutely no Icelandic blood in you?’

‘Not a drop. Sorry.’

‘Where did you learn such good Icelandic, then?’

‘My dad was working in Iceland, so I used to stay here for long periods of time when I was a kid. My mother was particularly good in Icelandic. She read a huge amount of Icelandic literature and was even personally acquainted with Halldór Laxness.’

‘You’re lying,’ said the woman, who was now starting to sound as if she were the one under interrogation.

‘It’s really not that unbelievable,’ said the traveler, as soon as he noticed that he’d turned into a massive liar. The man who had never told a lie, you might say, unless to a lover, of course, ever since he was a child telling nonsense-stories.

‘I really would have liked to have known Halldór Laxness,’ said the woman, with a light snort.

‘There’s no need to know an author personally. You get to know him best by reading his books. You see the person clearly by having nothing but his words before you. No annoying tone of voice, no attitude covering over the words, or laying emphasis on them.’

The traveler said this decisively, as if he were at the podium with his high-school Debate Club—and from that stage, he had melted more than one unhardened female schoolmate’s heart without even noticing it. There was only one heart that concerned him.

‘I think that no one covers himself more than someone who writes. He drinks in the techniques used to cover himself. With his mother’s milk. His words are a cover-up, not an exposure. Artists and composers can’t camouflage themselves the way a writer can. Their art is naked, it’s straightforward. Words are evasive. In his works, the writer appears as an x-rayed mummy. And an x-rayed mummy can’t be understood. Except perhaps by a highly-trained specialist.’

The alien had spoken. The traveler stared at her, dumbfounded. It was time to get out of there.

Out, away, one, two, three, he said to himself, but his will was weakened by the chronological jumble of green sea-hills and a gas station and a woman who appeared at the window after seventeen years and transformed into a shadow. He stood there as if nailed to the floor and heard himself say: ‘What can I get you?’

‘Same as you’re having, thanks,’ said the woman sluggishly.

He ordered more of the same and forked over eight thousand krónur. This was a man who always paid in cash, if possible, and Lotta usually made sure that he could. This time, however, he had had to use the atm at the airport in Keflavík. It was vulgar and awkward, like buying condoms in public. A money-man waving around a wad of cash.

‘Outstanding whiskey,’ said the woman, as if she were on the verge of passing out.

‘Great that they have this type here.’

‘Lúter Indriði is the best bartender in town. We’re related.’

She kept going, in a half-whisper, as if she were at that stage when strangers become the greatest of confidantes. ‘His full name is Hreinn Lúter Indriði, but he just calls himself Lúter, except in writing, when it’s H. Lúter Indriði. H comes before L in the alphabet. Which can often come in handy.’

H. Lúter Indriði kept himself quietly occupied in the shadowy world behind the bar. The best bartender in town never addresses customers first, even if they’re related. The best bartender in town doesn’t involve himself in a meaningful conversation that two strangers have struck up on their own at the bar.

The traveler felt weak at the knees and leaned up against the bar, as if overcome with drink. Rather than being caught in such an unglamorous pose, he asked if they shouldn’t perhaps sit down.

‘By all means.’

She went first, taking a seat at a corner table farthest away from the two smoking men. On the table were two candles and two roses. The bartender’s generosity in overdrive. The traveler glared at the flowers; he couldn’t deny that he had deliberately thrown a rose onto the sidewalk tonight. What would the woman in the house say in the morning when she came across a flower lying there; what would this Ingi Bói or whatever his name was say if he found it before her? Luckily, they didn’t have a child who might be startled by finding a three-dimensional frost rose on the pavement in front of the house as he was going to school.

The woman had stood up and walked off. He thought she might be leaving because he’d been so rude not to say anything when they sat down, but she returned holding a pitcher of water and two glasses. The customer, serving? What had happened to the town’s best, H. Lúter Indriði?

The traveler hadn’t noticed anyone enter the bar, but suddenly a newcomer was there: a man holding a bouquet of roses. Was it in fashion now in Iceland to sell roses at bars?

The man with the roses glanced around, before heading straight across the room and holding out the bouquet to the traveler: ‘You left these in the car when I drove you to Silfurströnd 3 earlier. Here you go.’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’d certainly appreciate it if passengers wouldn’t always be leaving their crap on my back seat.’

‘May I offer you a reward?’

‘Goodness, no,’ said the taxi driver on his way out.

‘Bye, Gummi,’ said the woman, and he returned her farewell.

‘Bye, Gummi,’ said H. Lúter Indriði from the dark nook behind the bar.

‘Is he a celebrity here on Seltjarnarnes, this Gummi?’ asked the traveler.

‘Everyone is, here on the peninsula,’ said the woman. ‘He’s also a neighbor of mine.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Silfurströnd 5. What brought you there?’

‘I felt like going for a drive by the sea, but I thought it seemed a bit aimless just driving around. That’s why I gave him an address. That specific one was just a coincidence.’

‘I’ll tell that to Una,’ said the woman, making a noise that was supposed to be laughter but sounded like a low growl. Like a tired dog had heard something funny and really wanted to laugh.

‘Isn’t that unnecessary?’

‘Yes, it’s unnecessary. Nothing gets past Una.’

The man who loved Una said nothing, but repeated this sentence in his mind: Nothing gets past Una.

‘Are you married?’ asked the woman.

‘I’m divorced.’

‘What was her nationality?’

‘German.’

‘They’re often first-rate women. The German women who came to Iceland after the war were stocky women who toiled away like Vikings.’

‘She’s a hard worker, for sure, but is far from being stocky.’

How utterly unthinkable it would have been to have a wife, let alone a stocky one. He wouldn’t even have had a stocky woman as a lover. That was the word he used for the women in his life. Never ‘sex partner,’ never ‘one-night stand,’ but lover, even if it had nothing to do with love. It was a question of grounding. The closest he would ever get to tangible love.

‘Do you have children?’

‘No children.’

‘What about you? Do you have any children?’

‘No. That was a risk I couldn’t take. I was determined even at a young age not to have children. There are so many things that can go wrong with a child. And then your life is ruined. I’m immensely relieved not to have a child. Even though I love children. And I understand children. They can tell. They come to me.’

‘Children are a tribe I know little about. Except that they’re a nuisance on long-distance flights.’

‘You’re missing out on a lot, knowing so little about children.’

‘That’s the definition of life—missing out on a lot.’

‘Some people gain a lot in place of missing out on a lot. Others gain less than nothing by missing out on a lot. You must be in the group that gains a lot in place of missing out on a lot.’

The traveler wondered if the same could be said about him and his houses, his travels and delightful lovers, plus abundant luxury; that he’d gained a lot in place of missing out on a lot. Una with her eyes that nothing got past. Una, who was sleeping in her house by the sea, on the peninsula where he’d drifted like flotsam onto the shoreline. No, wasn’t it more a case of having gained a great deal instead of a lot? Quantity instead of quality?

‘What about yourself?’

‘It’s hard to say. At least I don’t have to worry about money. I go swimming in the mornings in the best pool in the country; it’s wonderful, and I spend a lot of time in the steam bath.’

The traveler nearly laughed out loud. This steam-bath woman definitely had an overall diluted look: her eyes, hair, the color of her skin. Almost as if she were missing a color gene. But she certainly was sharp.

When it came to a lover, he never gave any thought as to whether she was sharp or stupid. He wanted her to be easy to talk to, and she mustn’t have an ugly voice. She had to have a good sense of humor, or appreciate good humor even if she didn’t have it herself. She didn’t have to be a beauty, but she had to be elegant. Flawless. And slim, of course.

Those were his standards, but unfortunately, he had a weakness for women who were on the plumper side; women who were slightly fat. He thought this bordered on weirdness, and he almost always chose thin lovers. When he indulged himself with plumper women, he found it gave him a great deal more pleasure. The last one wasn’t less than seventy-five kilos, which was actually outrageous. She wasn’t even flawless, what with the varicose veins on her calves.

And now it so happened that he’d met this far-too-overweight woman five times, despite having set himself the goal of meeting no woman more than three times. Was he becoming old and soft? After his one time with Doreen Ash, the system-wrecker. Could it be coincidence, how much the number of lovers he had was reduced following his time with her? Less than one a month for the past three years.

Old and soft. Or simply dazed by the evening’s soup of coincidences.

‘How did he track me down with the bouquet, that taxi driver Gummi?’

‘There’s really only one place to go to.’

‘You mean he just knew I was here?’

‘He knows where everyone is. He has telepathic abilities. Clairvoyant, through and through.’

‘Is that epidemic here on the peninsula? Una as well?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said that nothing gets by her.’

‘What about you?’

‘I’ve seen a few things. But I keep them to myself.’

‘Did you see me earlier this evening, maybe?’

‘Of course I saw you, outside Una’s house. You threw a yellow rose onto the sidewalk outside her house.’

‘How do you know it was yellow, and that it was a rose?’

‘I checked.’

‘Are you saying you followed me here?’

‘There was no need to follow you. You don’t need to be clairvoyant to figure out people’s movements. It’s so obvious that you’ve been living abroad that it can be seen in the dark. Of course you wouldn’t have remembered the taxi service’s number. So you couldn’t have gone anywhere but here. It’s too cold to walk downtown, and you’re not wearing a hat.’

The traveler was about to ask the woman if she’d read a bit too much Sherlock Holmes, but instead he said: ‘Are you a regular here?’

‘I pop in every now and then. Lúter Indriði and I are cousins. He used to work at Le Meurice in Paris, which caters only to the cream of the crop. It’s been three years since he came home. He’s got problems with alcohol.’

‘He’s in the best job, then, for tackling his problem every night.’

‘Cousin Lúter doesn’t feel well. He’s becoming dangerously depressed. Alcohol is poison for such people. And naturally, drinking makes people depressed. Speaking for myself, if I’m feeling worse than usual, alcohol is the first thing I cut out. Then I cut out coffee. If that doesn’t do the trick, I go to the steam bath every morning and evening. It’s so incomparably cleansing.’

You couldn’t argue that the woman wasn’t clean. This traveler was competent to judge, because he had a particularly sensitive sense of smell. Other people’s odors never escaped him: soap, sweat, perfume, cleanliness, uncleanliness, general or particular—but he couldn’t catch even a whiff of shampoo from this woman. Even less that her breath smelled of anything. If he’d been asked what people were odorless, he would have said no one. Except for ghosts. Is that what she was? A revenant from the house next door to Una’s? A sending? And who had sent it?

The traveler wanted to turn the conversation to sendings, but couldn’t come up with a good way to do so, and instead asked personal questions of the sort he’d trained himself to avoid. ‘Do you live alone?’ he asked.

‘I live by myself in a two-story building. I don’t even have a cat. Just a goldfish. A goldfish isn’t much company, you see. A cat would be decent company if it were a standout cat, but a goldfish is really just a non-entity. I read a lot, but you can’t read more than seven hours a day, which leaves a lot of hours. I suffer debilitating neuritis, and don’t see many other people besides Una and Lúter. They’re incredibly kind to me. People who don’t have children are often very kind to others. People who have children don’t have any kindness left for others.’

‘I’m sure you could find yourself some company if you really wanted.’

‘Yes, I know. Sure I could. But people are so demanding. Some friends call you after midnight. I once had a friend like that. It just doesn’t work. I’m usually in bed by ten.’

‘You’re past your bedtime tonight.’

‘Every now and then I can’t sleep, so I stare out the window. And you came walking in through the dark.’

‘Staring out the window in the dark. What for?’

‘You would understand it if you were me. There’s so much in the February darkness. It’s actually darker than in December, and there’s something cozy about it, because you know it’s going to start getting lighter soon. By April, it’s bright and shiny, and there’s just one month between February and April.’

‘I remember that.’

‘The months when you and Una were getting to know each other.’

‘Me and Una?’

‘The one the rose is intended for.’

‘It wasn’t intended. My hands were so frozen that I had to drop it.’

‘She’ll find it in the morning. She’ll know who it’s from.’

‘What do want from me?’

‘Una told me about you.’

He hadn’t intended to finish his drink. Now he drained his glass.

‘I’ve had enough,’ he said to his drinking partner. ‘If you’ll excuse me.’

‘Sure.’

‘Thanks for the chat,’ he said, and stood up.

‘Should I order you a taxi?’ asked H. Lúter Indriði, having had even more to drink.

‘You think you can manage it?’ the traveler heard himself say, as if he were someone else. A German American, or American German. He wasn’t used to talking to people like that, least of all wait staff. In restaurants, he could seem almost apologetic when ordering a specific dish or wine. Or almost as if he were asking whether he was doing the right thing. Whether it was all right for him to be there in the first place. If it turned out that the wine he ordered was off, he acted is if it were his own fault when he let the waiter know. More than one lover had mentioned this. Namely, the bossy women. The ones he generally managed to avoid. Luckily.

‘No problem,’ said H. Lúter Indriði, before ordering a taxi with consummate style.

‘Whose idea was it to call this bar The Yellow Sheep?’ asked the traveler.

‘It was just an idea I had. I can’t bear bars with cool names. Bars should have corny names. Preferably as pitiful as possible.’

‘Well, you succeeded.’

‘Yes, don’t you think? There’s no tackier name than The Yellow Sheep. And it brings in customers. People want to get hammered at The Yellow Sheep—you know, follow the herd.’

‘You should have had been awarded Grand Prize for Tackiness.’

‘I was.’

The door to The Yellow Sheep opened. A gust of wind blew out two candles.

The shoulders of the man who entered were hunched up to his ears and his head was lowered, as a defense against the weather, and he looked as if he had no neck.

‘You ordered a taxi?’

‘Barely a minute ago,’ said the traveler, now recognizing the taxi driver Gummi.

‘Short way to go. I stick to the peninsula after dark.’

The steam-bath woman had come to the bar, and asked the traveler if she could tag along.

‘Tag along or ride along, just as you please,’ he heard himself say.

‘Thank you,’ he then said to Lúter Indriði.

‘On the contrary—thank you. You’re welcome anytime.’

On the contrary—thank you. What equivalent would Lúter Indriði have used at Le Meurice—for the world’s stars and moneymen?

He was startled from his thoughts when the taxi driver Gummi pushed the bouquet at him: ‘Quit forgetting your flowers,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ve got other things to do besides tracking down people like you.’

Because of those damned roses, the traveler had to use all his strength to hold onto the door of the taxi, one-handed. The wind jerked at the door as he sat down, and he just managed to prevent it from blowing off. At the same time, Gummi struggled to get the woman safe and sound to the front seat.

‘We get such strong gusts out here on the peninsula,’ said the steam-bath woman. She had what the traveler thought was a Skaftafell-region accent.

‘Are you from Skaftafell?’

‘Half of me is from Western Skaftafell County,’ said the steam-bath woman. ‘Best place in Iceland. In the countryside.’

‘Makes me sad to hear it,’ said the traveler. ‘I’ve never been there.’ (Why lie about it? Ástamama was from there, and he’d often made trips to the east.)

When Gummi finally drove off, hail was pouring down so thickly that the streetlights dimmed, as well as whatever lights were still lit on the peninsula. They cruised slowly through the withering wall of hail. Inside the taxi, it was silent. Maybe the two shots of whiskey had put the woman to sleep—and it was well past her bedtime. Maybe the traveler himself had nodded off. In any case, he startled when she asked: ‘You wouldn’t want to come in for a nightcap?’

Wasn’t a nightcap the natural follow-up to having begun to get drunk at the Yellow Sheep? No, what nonsense was this? He had to get home to his penthouse and look out over the gas station and reminisce about the greatest bliss in the world, until he passed out in a white chair by the window.

But he wasn’t sure whether he dared to go as far as even one block with a taxi driver who was an insuppressible revenant. Wasn’t he just going to rob the well-dressed passenger? Hadn’t he figured out that here was a man carrying wads of cash? Maybe he’d accidentally flashed the stack of bills when he was paying at Silfurströnd.

‘I can also drive you downtown,’ said the taxi driver.

What kind of comment was that? Was that news—that a taxi driver could drive you somewhere? Maybe he was crazy. Dangerous? The steam-bath woman was probably insane too, but hardly dangerous. And he would have an excellent chance with her in a struggle—which wasn’t as certain with the taxi driver.

‘Maybe I’ll take you up on that nightcap,’ he said.

‘That’s more like it,’ said the woman, before adding: ‘And while I remember it—my name is Sigríður.’

Karl Ástuson, a traveler who wasn’t about to say his name, took the banished roses with him, rather than risk having the taxi driver Gummi follow him around with them. He let the woman pay for the taxi—he had no intention of exposing his wallet any more than he already had. He stepped out of the car ahead of her at Silfurströnd 5. In the house next door slept a woman in dark-blue silk pajamas, a woman named Una, who probably dreamed sometimes, not only at night, about their time together. From the New Year’s bonfire and all winter long, and then into spring, their final exams at school, and well into summer.

The hailstorm stopped as abruptly as a tap being shut off. The wind held its breath, and a crescent moon lit up a retreating cloud. The cold light fell on the house of the beloved woman, and particularly on a snow-white pine tree at the edge of the garden of number five. Now he was going to go into that house for a nightcap.

A nightcap! Not a complicated thing! But what about the rest of it? How was he supposed to get out of that house? Order a taxi? Wouldn’t Taxi Driver Gummi just show up one more time? To finish what he started? What had he started? No, he would have no choice but to sleep in a ghost-house and wait for the buses to start crawling about in the ice-cold dawn of the day. To walk downtown without a hat was impossible. One whipping hailstorm followed another.

If he ever made it back to Iceland, a rental car was an absolute must. He would never again take a chance on ending up in Gummi’s cab, with the yellow roses. But he would probably never return. This would be his final trip. He had seen the woman appear at the window. He had seen her lower the blinds. And her shadow had switched off a lamp in the living room. He had been granted this final vision. Now he no longer had any reason to visit Iceland.