He smiles at the man. That shuts him up.
* * *
The boy lies down on the sofa and in no time he is asleep.
He dreams of antelopes.
xxvii
— Máni, Máni Steinn …
The boy feels a touch on his shoulder:
— Máni …
Sóla G— is kneeling beside the sofa.
* * *
They emerge from the clinic where the boy has been held and he discovers that he’s in the largest building he has ever entered. A whitewashed corridor; black-varnished doors on either side as far as the eye can see; a ceiling three times the normal height; highly polished linoleum; and great spherical ceiling lights that recede in a row down the corridor like a fading echo.
Máni Steinn feels an urge to shout.
The staircase alone would make an impressive structure. As if hewn from rock, the steps descend and vanish into the darkness of the lower floors. And from the wide stairwell rises a tower of wrought iron: the elevator shaft.
Sóla G— is at home here. Her father’s office is on the first floor. She presses a button beside the elevator doors.
A clank is heard from the top of the shaft.
The mechanism comes to life and with a reassuring hum begins to drag the elevator up to where they are standing.
* * *
Sóla G— lends the boy her hand and helps him out of a window on the top floor of the huge Nathan & Olsen building. It is pitch-dark.
— Stay close to me.
The boy picks his way after the girl’s silhouette, first along a walkway above the eaves, then diagonally up the sloping roof until they reach the top. His head swims, and Sóla G— tells him to straddle the ridge. Seated like this, he shuffles after her to the tower, where she helps him to his feet.
— I thought you might like to see this before you leave.
From the roof of the largest building ever constructed in Iceland — it is a whole six stories high — there is a view north to the Snæfellsjökull Glacier and south to the Reykjanes Peninsula with the pyramid form of Mount Keilir.
There is a view of Reykjavík too, darkened by the shortages — the houses look like the lumps of coal that people can only dream of.
Máni Steinn gazes out at the spit of Laugarnes, the only place in town left untouched by the epidemic, and suddenly the thought strikes him that before he and Sóla G— say goodbye for the last time there is something he must tell her about himself.
He points to an imposing wooden building on the spit.
— That’s where I lived for the first year after I came to town.
The girl is thrown.
— At the Leper Hospital?
* * *
The freighter Sterling is lying at anchor in the harbor.
Two passengers are to leave with her at dawn.
The boy is one. The other is an Englishman, who for more than a month has been waiting out the Spanish flu at the Merchant’s House in the village of Eyrarbakki on the south coast. And he’s surprisingly kind for a peg leg — as the old lady would put it — since he has agreed to escort the boy to London.
There he will be received by an Icelander who knows all the ropes — the playwright Haraldur Hamar.
Máni Steinn laughs; black wings beat wildly in his breast.
X (July 9, 1929)
xxviii
There is a cosmopolitan air to the group who appear at the telegram counter of the Reykjavík Post Office one July afternoon in 1929.
These are the trio associated with the Pool Group — the director Kenneth Macpherson, the poet Robert Herring, and the novelist Annie Winifred Ellerman, who has adopted the pen name of Bryher — and M. Peter Carlson, their assistant and interpreter on their Icelandic tour. The purpose of their visit to the country is to record footage for an experimental film.
Shortly before leaving England they held a screening in an art gallery of their second short film, Monkeys’ Moon, and celebrated the first issue of the fourth year of their cinema journal, Close Up, published and edited by Macpherson and Bryher, to which Herring has from the outset been one of the key contributors. The journal proclaims itself the first in the world to treat cinema as a fine art that calls for experimentation and psychological inquiry. It also crusades against censorship of all kinds.
Like their friends in the French surrealist movement, the group is fascinated by Freud’s theories and methods. They believe that with focused and audacious cinematography — scratching and drawing directly onto film, irrational montages, superimposition, changes of speed, close-ups of objects and body parts, intercuts between images of animals and people, the subversion of a linear plot — it is possible to re-create the complex life of the unconscious and free the individual from obsolete ethical norms and psychological inhibitions.
Their goal is the psychoanalysis of the masses and the liberation of society through film.
Two of the foursome enjoy a permissive lifestyle that would be unthinkable to the inhabitants of the country they are visiting, not because they live a life of luxury courtesy of Bryher’s vast fortune — she is the daughter of the shipping magnate John Ellerman, the wealthiest man in the history of Britain, lives in an exclusive villa in Switzerland’s Montreux, and is a patron of artists from all over Europe — nor because they move in a world where friendships can be destroyed by a difference of opinion about a minute-long close-up or a single word in a poem, but because Bryher and Macpherson entered into their marriage solely in order to adopt the daughter of Hilda Doolittle, a.k.a. H.D., the American poet and member of Pool, with whom both are having an affair.
The telegram assistant cannot guess from the appearance or behavior of the group that they are experimentalists in more than just literature and film. Macpherson’s and Herring’s vivacity doesn’t strike him as the slightest bit odd — after all, high spirits are perfectly normal in those who have just disembarked in a new country; his attention is mainly drawn to Bryher’s short hair, since his own girlfriend has been talking about getting a bob.
The group’s reason for visiting the telephone exchange is for Bryher to send a wire to H.D. — due to a crise de nerfs, she has not come with them to Iceland but remained at home in London in her flat on Sloane Street — for so passionate is their love that they write to each other daily when parted by land or sea.
Carlson makes the arrangements and waits while Bryher reads the message to the pop-eyed assistant:
“DEAR CAT — STOP — SAFE IN THULE — STOP — LOVE FIDO”
Once they have emerged from the post office, Carlson asks his traveling companions to excuse him because he is still unsteady on his legs after their voyage around the cape of Reykjanes and he doesn’t feel up to attending afternoon tea with Snæbjörn Jónsson, owner of the English Bookshop, and his wife, A. Florence Westcott. Before he takes leave of the trio, they agree to meet first thing the next day in the saloon of the S.S. Arcadian.
They will be leaving port early on this large cruise liner, which literary types like to call Pan after the most famous of Arcadia’s sons.
The footage the Pool Group have come to Iceland to shoot is to include seals, and they are hoping to find some up north.
xxix
Shortly after the locals and their guests have sat down to dinner, M. Peter Carlson walks through the cemetery gate on the corner of Sudurgata and Sólvallagata. At the top of the slope are the graves of those who died in the Spanish flu.