LITMIR.BIZ

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base in Vellir.

      “He had this thing for uniforms.”

      The first time only happens once

      “You were my first,” I say.

      He smiles.

      “I know.”

      He lived in the village with his mother and I’d heard stories about him. That he knew how to use a sewing machine and had sewn kitchen curtains for his mother and put them up while she was at work. That he’d also made a Christmas dress for her. When I first met him, he was the shortest of the boys and I was the tallest of the girls. Then I went through puberty and stopped growing and he went through puberty and started to grow. He wore a bomber jacket like the one worn by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause.*

      It was said that he had made it from leftover pelts that had been given to him at the slaughterhouse, and that he’d managed to transform lamb skin into cow leather.

      Like other youngsters, we worked in the slaughterhouse in the autumn, which is how our paths crossed, under the flayed carcasses of lambs that hung from hooks over the chlorine-washed stone floor. Initially, I was assigned to stirring the blood before it was canned and weighing the hearts, kidneys and livers, while he was in the freezer room, stacking soup meat in white gauze bags. One day I fetched him from a frosty white cloud of ice and we ate our picnics by the slaughterhouse wall in the limpid, cold autumn sunlight. The smell of congealed blood clung to us.

      He was different from the other boys and didn’t try to kiss me. It was then that I decided that he would be the first. Not that there were many candidates in the sparsely populated Dalir.

      When the moment had come, I fetched a bottle of brandy that had been looted from a stranded ship and stored in the cabinet at home, untouched as far back as I can remember.

      “Nobody will miss it,” I said.

      We spent some time searching for a patch of geraniums or corrie where the grass hadn’t been cut and was higher than our groins. Most important of all was that we were hidden from my brother, younger by two years, who tried to cling to us all the time. He was going to go to agricultural college and then take over the farm, 280 sheep and 17 cows, 14 of them red and 3 mottled. He had recently started to train in Icelandic wrestling and had become a member of the Dalir Young Men’s Association. This now meant that he tried to wrestle any man who crossed his path. Even Revd Stefán was not exempt. My parents sometimes had to apologize to the guests my brother assaulted and invited to tackle him. They looked at him as if he were a stranger, unrelated to them, a teenager who followed his own laws but mainly his whims.

      “He’s training for the Grettir’s Belt Cup,” they would say hesitantly. My mother’s expression seemed to express regret at having wasted an eagle’s name on him. His first moves entailed clutching the guest’s belt or grabbing his sleeve and twisting his garment in an effort to lift him up and knock him over with brute force, without losing his own balance. Gradually, his technique improved and he grew more agile and even demanded that his opponents be well versed in the wrestling jargon: upright position… step, step… trip and defend…

      He was a slow developer and acned, listened to Cliff Richard, still pubescent and not yet in full control of his voice. The unwitting guests stepped back and forth and struggled in the ring.

      “… Relax the arms… step… clockwise…” my brother could be heard saying.

      After some time, we found the right spot, behind the sheep shed. Tall, green, whistling grass grew nearby. There we lay down, arms down by our sides, and gazed up at the sky, a wind-blown stratocumulus cloud. I would rather have chosen a cumulus cloud or cloudless sky for my first time, I wrote that evening. There were only five centimetres between us, which is the narrowest gap there can be between a woman and a man without touching. He was in a blue flannel shirt, I in a red skirt in honour of the day. We were both wearing waders.

      “I wanted to touch the fabric of your skirt more than I wanted to touch what was underneath it,” my friend now admits.

      That was precisely what he did, asked me if he could touch the fabric. “Is that jersey?” he asked. He turned the hem, examined the lining, stroked it with his finger.

      “Did you do the hemming yourself?” he asked.

      “Are you afraid to touch me?” I said.

      Then he first turned his attention to what was behind the fabric and his hand slid up towards the elastic of my panties. The moment had come to put my body on the line. To become a woman. I pulled up my skirt and he down his trousers.

      Afterwards we sat side by side up on the hill and gazed at the shore of seaweed and islands in the fjord; his braces were down and he smoked. I spotted three seals on the shore.

      Then I tell him.

      That I write.

      Every day.

      That I started writing about the weather like my father and about the shades of light over the glacier beyond the fjord, that I described how white clouds lay like fleece over the glacier, and how people, events and places were then added.

      “I feel like many things happen at once, like I see many images and experience many feelings at the same time, like I’m standing on some new starting point and it’s the first day of the world and everything is new and pure,” I say to my friend. “Like a spring morning in Dalir and I’ve just finished feeding the sheep in the barn and the bank of fog hovering over Breidafjördur lifts and dissolves. At that moment I’m holding the baton and tell the world it can be born.”

      In return the most handsome boy in Dalir told me that he loved boys.

      We kept each other’s secrets.

      We were equals.

      “People wondered why such a sweet boy didn’t have a girlfriend. I knew I was queer. The only thing that could save me was to sleep with a girl. I’m glad it was you.”

      You’ve done it and I haven’t

      The next day I was quizzed about the bottle of brandy that had vanished from the cabinet in broad daylight and been returned after four big gulps.

      My brother Örn conducts the interrogation. He is not satisfied.

      He claims to be a witness to what he shouldn’t have been a witness to.

      “I saw you rush up the hill,” he says. “And disappear behind it.”

      Now he follows me edgeways, trying to corner me, and bombards me with questions.

      He wants to know where we went and what we were up to. Why he wasn’t allowed to come? Whether Jón John had mentioned his name and, if so, what had he said, had he mentioned the wrestling? He continues to pressure me in the days that follow. Ultimately all the questions revolve around Jón John. Is he going away and, if so, where to? To Reykjavík? What’s he going to do? Between the interrogations he sulks.

      “Traitor,” he ends up shrieking after me. Then I remember how he and Jón John were sparring once and, in some peculiar way, it reminded me more of birds dancing in a mating ritual than wrestling; it looked more like clumsy embraces than attacks. All of a sudden they were both lying on the grass. Then Jón John had broken free.

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