But instead I buy two knitted trousers for Auður’s unborn twins.
The boy doesn’t want me close to him while he’s choosing his candy, because he’s his own boss in this and is quite proud to be able to buy it on his own. He seems to have a slight crush on the girl in the pink T-shirt and stares at her intently to be able to capture the words being shaped by her pink lips. It’s not easy for a deaf boy to decipher the syllables coming out of a mouth that is masticating gum.
I see from the boy’s lips that he is doing his best to enunciate his words as clearly as possible, trying to produce sounds that he himself can only barely hear. But she doesn’t understand him and looks at him, bewildered, several times before glancing over at me. He suddenly starts to fiddle with his hearing aid, trying to reset it. I can see that he’s deeply offended, and by the time he’s outside on the gravel by the shop wall again, he’s holding in a green cellophane bag something completely different to what he wanted. I walk up to him and tell him he can buy some chocolate as well, but he is unable to choose between the three types that are on display on the glass counter, unable to decide because he’s already been distracted once, it’s thrown him off-kilter and he’s scared of making a dreadful mistake. So I end up buying all three types of chocolate for him — pleasing a child doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.
As we’re leaving, the owner and father of the girl steps out into the yard to corroborate all of the main points of his daughter’s story about her second place in the beauty contest and her pregnancy, which explains why the girl looks so sickly, poor thing, she can no longer bear the smell of petrol. Recently she even threw up all over a family of four who were sitting in their car.
“But on the other hand, no one understands what she sees in that silly wimp at the pig farm, the guy even plucks his eyebrows,” says the father.
Tumi has forgiven Elísabet Marilyn. I think he’s in love; he runs around us in circles playing a bird with huge flapping wings to say goodbye. When he’s in the car he eats one of his gumdrops out of the bag, but then puts them down and doesn’t touch them any more. He stores the chocolate in a box with his collection of shells and it’s still there under his bed four weeks later.
THIRTY-ONE
One of the advantages of the Ring Road is there is very little danger of losing one’s self, even in the drizzle. But it’s another matter when it comes to finding things in the dark, like a sign, for example, indicating the turn-off to a farm guest house. We drive back and forth a few times around the spot indicated in the travel guide, moving a few centimetres to the east and a few centimetres to the west of the map. It’s difficult to gauge distances in the dark; there are no landmarks here. If there were anyone else around I’d ask for directions. I can see through the rear-view mirror that Tumi is tired and feel such an overwhelming responsibility, it’s worse than being alone — I’m responsible for another person’s happiness. The area is incredibly black. No echo of life disturbs the silence of this wilderness. I kill the engine of the car in the pitch darkness to look up my farm guest house guide again, and then make out the sound of a bird.
It suddenly dawns on me that no one will be travelling this way before the end of winter. The sun won’t rise here until the spring, when once more people will be able to make out the outlines of shapeless things, hear sounds and meet their fellow beings.
I know from experience, though, that there is a landscape out there in the dark, behind those multiple layers of clouds, which the guide commends for its beauty and extraordinarily bright summer days and nights. To conjure up a lava field and valley, I have to summon my imagination, old patriotic poems and memories of foaming streams meandering down the sandy desert. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and find myself at the foot of a steep mountain, with a slope that descends directly into my bedroom window, so close to the building that I’ll have to lean my head back to see the summit between the curtains.
It’s the Christmas lights that save me.
On the sign there is a painting of two smiling cucumbers wearing caps and shaking hands over the farm’s slogan, which reads “Cucumbers in unexpected places”. We walk into the steam of a plate of meat-stuffed cabbage rolls and melted butter in a sauce-boat.
The woman welcomes us and smiles at the boy with a warm and natural air. Maybe she has a disabled relative. She tells me they discovered thermal water in the Hái-Hamar district two summers ago, which is why a small greenhouse has been built to grow cucumbers, their speciality, pride and joy. It’s become popular among overnight guests to buy some cucumbers before they set off on their travels again. They can even have them inscribed with names, messages or declarations of love. One of their guests, an accountant from the city, handed his fiancée a cucumber over the breakfast table that said “Will you. .” Those were the only two words he managed to carve on it, not that anyone had any problems working out the rest of the sentence. They even got applauded by a group of foreign investors on a team-bonding trip, who happened to be in the room having their breakfast.
“Foreigners seem to like the shadow that hovers over the farm all day and the rain. This is the rainiest place on the island,” says the woman. “Because of the shadow from the cliffs we only get to see the sun, when it’s around that is, for two hours a day, and then the shadow comes back over the farm again, although it’s brighter over in the sheep shelter in the fields facing south, and the sheep can sometimes bask in the sunlight well into the afternoon.
“So far this year it’s rained on 295 days out of 320. Not bad, eh? We even wrote it in our brochure; sure, no one comes to Iceland to sunbathe.”
We’re lucky. One bedroom less and we would have had to sleep in the sheepcote, which they’re actually planning on converting into rooms to accommodate thirty more guests. A male choir from Estonia that is touring the country singing German Christmas carols seems to have taken over the entire establishment. It turns out that the guest house has run out of linen to make our beds, so we’re given a sleeping bag room instead. The lady insists on us having dinner; they’ve made meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, potato purée and red cabbage. She’s just cleared up, but there’s plenty left. I watch the child shovelling one meat ball down after another. He hasn’t eaten much over the past three days, just a few morsels, like a small bird. But now, on the fourth day, he’s eating like a fully grown man or a sailor on a trawler. As we’re chatting, he downs three to four glasses of milk with his food.
The woman tells me the sheep keep on getting stuck on the rocks on the cliff and that milk production subsidies have dwindled to a pittance. The summer home for problem kids from Reykjavík has gone up in smoke after two cases of arson, and none of it insured, because the insurance man had only started to appraise the wallpaper and no premium had been decided yet.
“In fact,” says the woman, “we’d come full circle and tried the whole lot: traditional farming, breeding poultry, mink, foxes, pisciculture, rearing sea bass, rabbits, and apiculture. We had to keep the beehives warm all winter, only one bee survived the cold and the rain. We’re still waiting for an answer to our ostrich-breeding application. That’s why we went into the guest farmhouse business. If we get the ostriches we’ll just add them to the foreigners.”
The food is good, but the coffee is undrinkable, no matter how much I try to sweeten and stir it. For an instant I think I catch a glimpse of the back of a familiar figure in the yard through the window, a mere flash. The imagination runs wild in this drizzle. The farmer’s wife offers me a slice of a freshly baked cake called “Conjugal bliss” to go with the coffee. A heavy cloud of rain weighs over everything, but the woman seems content enough.