It is 3 a.m. and despite utter exhaustion my brain refuses sleep. I can attest to the fact that it has not gotten dark, not for an instant. The birds are singing all night long and I fear they must be as overwrought as I am.
Tomorrow, i.e., today, is a big day, the first official day of the book tour. Radio interview in the morning, book event in the afternoon, dinner party for whichmy cousin and host Hrefna has prepared a ham marinated in blueberries and some kind of red Icelandic berries from her garden. Then a TV interview the following morning, another book event in the afternoon, dinner out with friends I have yet to meet in person. And then the next morning we head for the volcano, which seems to be slumbering still, and the glacial lagoon.
But tomorrow, meaning today, feels like the biggest day, somehow. At the book even this afternoon I will read out loud from my novel in Icelandic. My greatest fear is that I will somehow make the beautiful Icelandic language discordant to my listeners, but really I'll be thrilled if they simply understand me. Hrefna helped me make my f's sound more like v's and my t's sound more like d's and we removed one word from the piece that is just too horrifyingly difficult to prounounce.
Then I finished my Powerpoint presentation and Hrefna proofread the slide titles, which are all in Icelandic in case some people in the audience aren't completely following my English. These would be mainly older people, who are sometimes not as astoundingly fluent in English as so many Icelanders are.
Earlier in the day I had a 2 hour interview with Eyglo from The Iceland Review at a cafe in Reykjavik, which was just lovely and stimulating. She helped me to understand a dream I had in 1985 about the Icelandic grandmother I never met pushing words out through my fingers in a stream of light. This while Oliver was playing golf at the lava-ringed course in Hafnafjordur.
And this evening a dearly romantic dinner with Oliver by the lake, unbelievable fish soup, divine shrimp, mussels, lobster tails, smoked beef tongue, lamb medallions, finished with flan and, for Oliver only, the dreaded Harkarl (fermented shark meat), which he seemed to thoroughly enjoy chased down with Brennavin.
Then a very deep and intensive half hour conversation with our Turkish waiter, who speaks English with an Icelandic accent and is about to become an Icelandic citizen. "Iceland is not for everyone," he said. But, we agreed, it is certainly for some of us.
After dinner we stood by the lake at midnight listening to the church bells ring and watching hundreds of birds twittering and diving under a blue sky tinged with pink. I saw the bridge that Freya once watched Saemundur walk across with longing. And the house of books on the other shore. (Like yesterday at Thingvellir, these seemed like actual memories and not fictional scenes invented for my book.)
And then I fell into bed in the deepest exhaustion, sure that finally I would sleep after nights of sleeplessness but no, here I am, after three hours of uselessly lying in bed I have gotten up and eaten a banana and written this blog.
I wish could post photos of the lobster and hakarl and especially the lake and birds but we haven't even begun to sort through all the photos from yesterday. Plus we forgot the camera and maybe that was for the best.
The strange thing is that I have a black eye mask and a black curtain to block out the light and earplugs to block out the birds and even sleeping pills. But my brain is somehow stodgy and insistent: if it isn't dark, then it isn't night.
And by now it really is day, if it ever wasn't. May sleep be with me.
Comments