When I stand up with the sleeping child in my arms, he nods toward the flower pot with the frail green shoots and says:
— No, that’s not your rose species; it’s a future lily, if I read the writing on the packet of seeds correctly.
Father Thomas escorts us to the street; he probably isn’t expecting me to return in the afternoon. I have the sleeping child in my arms. As he’s shaking my hand to say good-bye, he suddenly asks:
— What’s your rose called again, the one you moved into the garden?
— Eight-petaled rose.
— Yes, eight-petaled rose, of course, I thought so. You should take a look at the rose in the window over the altar in the church the next time you’re passing; it has eight connate petals around its core.
Seventy-seven
We wake up early in the morning; it’s still dark outside. At some point in the night I lifted my daughter up into my bed and now she’s sitting beside me, looking around and in the air. Her mother’s scent still lingers in the quilt.
— Twi, twi, says the child, pointing at the dove with half a wing.
I turn to my daughter and she smiles from ear to ear.
— Shall we go home to Granddad?
— Gan-da.
— Does Flóra Sól want to walk on moss?
— Should Daddy pick crowberries for you?
— Does Flóra Sól want to try sitting on a tussock?
I carry her into the kitchen in her pajamas, fill the kettle, and light the gas. Then I put some oatmeal in the pot and tie a bib around the child while I wait for it to boil.
We don’t linger much after breakfast, but get dressed and go out. I put the child in the carriage it isn’t totally bright yet, and a peculiar reddish-blue mist hangs over the monastery in the still air.
When we get into the church I put the brakes on the carriage under the doomsday painting. I pick up my daughter, sit her on my shoulders, and we set off on a journey toward the sun, moving through the semidarkness at the very back of the church. We give ourselves plenty of time, stopping frequently on the way. I slip some coins into the jar for Saint Joseph and light a candle. I hold the burning candle with one hand and my child’s ankle with the other, carefully trying to ensure that the wax doesn’t leak. Slowly we move farther into the church toward the chancel where the sun is just rising, a flare of amber on the edge of dawn. Bit by bit, the delicate light narrows into a beam through the stained-glass window, filling the church like a shaft of translucent white cotton. My daughter remains perfectly still on my shoulders, and shielding my eyes with my hand, I look into the light, into the blinding glare; and then I see it, way at the top of the chancel window, the violet-red eight-petaled rose, just as the ray pierces through the crown and lands on the child’s cheek.
About the Author
Audur Ava Olafsdottir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1958. She studied art history and art theory in Paris and is a lecturer in history of art at the University of Iceland and a director of the University of Iceland Art Collection. She has curated art exhibitions in Iceland and abroad, for example, at the Venice Biennale, and written about art and art history in various media.
Audur Ava is the author of three novels, a book of poetry, and a play. The first novel, Raised Earth, was published in 1998. Rain in November was published to rave reviews in 2004 and received the City of Reykjavik Literary Award. The Greenhouse, published in 2007, won the DV Culture Award for literature and a women’s literary prize in Iceland and was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award. Since The Greenhouse was published in France in the autumn of 2010 under the title of Rosa Candida, the book has attracted a great deal of coverage in the French media and received unanimously good reviews. In September 2010, it received the Prix de Page literary award as the best European novel of 2010. The Prix de Page award is determined by a group of 771 bookstores in France where the book was on the best-seller’s list for five consecutive months. The novel was also nominated for three other literary awards in France, including the prestigious Femina award. In January The Greenhouse won the Canadian 2011 Prix des libraires du Québec award. Audur Ava Olafsdottir published The Hymn of Glitter, a book of poetry, in 2010, and her first play will premiere at the National Theatre of Iceland in September 2011.
Audur Ava Olafsdottir’s middle name, Ava, was adopted a few years ago as a tribute to the blind medieval French saint, Ava. Audur Ava Olafsdottir lives and works in Reykjavik.
About the Translator
As a translator and playwright, Brian FitzGibbon has a particular passion for the translation of fiction. With experience that spans over twenty years, he has translated a vast array of film scripts, treatments, stage plays, and novels, working exclusively into English from Italian, French, and Icelandic.
His translation of the Icelandic cult novel 101 Reykjavik by Hallgrimur Helgason, published by Faber & Faber in the United Kingdom and Scribner in the United States in 2002, was hailed by the Guardian as “dazzling” and the New York Times as “lucid.”
Brian’s one-act play, The Papar, was staged by the Abbey Theatre at the Peacock in Dublin in 1997, and subsequently adapted into a short film called Stranded, premiered at the Tribeca Film Center in New York one year later. An Icelandic translation of the play was broadcast on Icelandic radio in 2005 and nominated for a Gríman Award the same year.
His full-length play, Another Man, was a finalist at the Playwrights Slam at the 2005 Chichester Theatre Festival in the United Kingdom. A radio adaptation of the play was broadcast on Icelandic State radio in the spring of 2008 and nominated for an Icelandic Gríman Award.