History. A Mess.

Sigrún Pálsdottír, Lytton Smith

• Publisher: Open Letter
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781940953984
• eBook ISBN: 9781948830027
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

While studying a seventeenth-century diary, the protagonist of Little Dark Room uncovers information about the first documented professional female artist. This discovery promises to change her academic career, and life in general... until she realizes that her "discovery" was nothing more than two pages stuck together. At this point there's no going back though, and she goes to great lengths to hide her mistake—undermining her sanity in the process. A shifty, satirical novel that's funny and colorful, while also raising essential questions about truth, research, and the very nature of belief.

Six Hundred Pages Later
In Another City:
Reykjavík

Hallway

“And then what?” I’m the one asking the question. Here in my dressing gown. In a conversation I’m beginning to fear will have no end.

“Well,” says my sister-in-law, vacantly, an automated prelude to what follows: “I simply pointed out to them that one way out of the problem was for everybody to sit down and write out all the things that trouble them about their working conditions.” There’s a short pause as she dangles her keychain ring from her middle finger and conceals it in her palm like castanets; she sets off along the hallway, taking slow steps as her lips let out these words: “For just as the written word can help people express complex feelings, through it we can also recognize and understand the insignificance and frivolity of the problems we face. Or, as they say, everything looks better on paper!”

And now, all at once, I feel her words somehow directed toward me in particular, feel that I must now start writing down whatever nonsense I can—but then I stop thinking about it, because as my sister-in-law’s account of the bruised egos in her departmental meeting approaches its peak with a description of the excessive response one of her colleagues made to the idea of these “worry notes,” her statement that “everything looks better on paper,” I notice a door on the living room wall. It’s a door I don’t feel I’ve noticed before. I get up and stand deathly still while I stare at it before me, but my sister-in-law has reached the front door. She is now talking about baggage and boxes, all the metaphors of this hobbyhorse of hers and is more like herself than she was. Because, despite her social standing, despite being part of Icelandic academia, it’s unusual for her to use words like frivolous. Less so the written word, which is so clearly absurd in her case, but there’s no time to reflect on that now as I make my way out of the living room in her wake, heading toward the entrance, pondering this door in my head while waiting for her to show herself out.

My sister-in-law has grasped the knob and is about to open the door, but hesitates an eternal moment as she realizes that she has forgotten to ask me how I’m doing. Her rhetorical question comes in the form of a suggestion that maybe I should use my sick leave, “I mean, this period of time,” to read her latest blogpost: “The Great Importance of the Present Moment.” She roughly explains the gist to me, guides the conversation to another topic, and reminds me to talk to “that Diana.” Finally wraps things up: “Alright, hon, talking cures.” She turns the knob without opening the door while she tugs, unsuccessfully, her tiny denim jacket’s bodice over her ample bosom and says: “The final spurt can be almost everlasting, I remember when I finished my own thesis and …”—and with this the front door opens. And with it the heavens open! Black clouds stand out against light pillows that stand out against the sunshine and the calm skies, and I stare into the open endlessness, into the beauty I once dreamed about depicting, and I cannot help but once again rehearse the event that put an end to all those intentions. But there is nothing to be done, and I start pondering something unrelated, not coming to my senses until the scattering of birds from a huge oak tree in the park on the other side of the street, swooping up into flight; I study my sister-in-law’s carefully ruffled chestnut hair as she takes heavy but carefree steps away from my house. Ready to wrestle with some new scientific mystery of human interaction and behavior. All the pregnant moments in time the confused people of this world forget to enjoy. The academic delegate for the growing business of mindfulness and life-coaching whose own existence is predicated on the message that each person’s problem is hidden from themselves.

I close the door and push my face up against it. The great importance of the moment. I draw deep breaths and then walk, overly quiet, practically backward, into the living room. It’s no more than three or four steps. How can I have missed seeing this door in the six whole days I’ve been living here? Was it here yesterday? I don’t dare answer that question right away; I sit on the couch and retrieve the crumbled rectangle of paper, the business card my sister-in-law handed me, from my clenched palm; I caress it and try to smooth it flat.

Díana D. Lárusdóttir

Life Coach

Member of The International Coach Federation (ICF)

Fear is that little darkroom
where misconceptions are developed.

Right! I feel myself dissolving as I sit here trying to see myself through my sister-in-law’s eyes and in the company of the person named on the card. Who was she to say goodbye the way she had? Had she figured out my situation? As soon as I pose these questions, it occurs to me that her loquacity is a telltale sign she suspects I’m facing something more than a severe headache. That I have some kind of theoretical dilemma: “The final spurt can be almost everlasting.” Intuition, or drivel?

For now, I lean toward the latter; I stand up and stick the card in my dressing gown pocket. I walk toward the door. It’s slightly shorter than the rest of the doors in the apartment. I run my fingers over the door’s plain surface, grab the handle and start to push it down. Then I break off, relaxing my grip; I bend down and gently put my face up against the door, one eye to the keyhole. At first, there’s nothing but darkness, so black it’s like there’s nothing inside, as though the wall is right up against the door. Eventually, the darkness dilutes and I think I discern a faint light a distance back. I straighten up and regard the door. I knock on the wall around the doorframe. Then I grab the handle quickly and go to open it. The door, of course, doesn’t budge. I start to shove and push the door, to pull at it, suddenly stopping when I sense someone standing behind me.

My husband, Hans. In front of me, now. Me here with the door at my back. Where did he come from so suddenly, here in the living room with two shopping bags, his face at once questioning and smiling? “What?” I say. He replies, “What what?” Kisses me and smirks. Then he takes the bags into the kitchen. I trail behind him.

Why hasn’t anyone mentioned this door since we moved in? Perhaps for the same reason as the truth about my many years of research refuses to come to the surface: I cannot, of course, bring myself to think about it, no, not so much as put it into words inside my own head. And all around me there’s a wonderful silence, a momentary understanding that there’s been a little dent to my health, nothing more, that has caused my studies to have been suspended for the foreseeable future.

I cut some vegetables, wondering how to find words for the topic. How to phrase this question: “What’s that door in the living room, Hans?” “There’s a door in the living room?” “Hans, did you notice that door?” “You know, I never noticed that door until today.” Perhaps it’s more than just a matter of phrasing, I think, and take the hot dish out of the oven; as we sit down at the table, I realize that time is running away from me. Or, rather, that it isn’t working in my favor: after having set the table, my opportunity to articulate my question has gone. Or am I deliberately second-guessing my words? Am I creating suspense and expectation out of the unsaid, seeking something to rack my brain over amid my intolerable existence? Might I have taken it upon myself to imagine a door, given the dead-end my life has run into? Unless, perhaps, this is the door of that “little darkroom” that houses all the false ideas only the Díana D.s of this world can correct.

I look down at my plate. Nothing is about to happen here. How could my life undergo so much change in so short a time and yet return to the same conformity this absurd picture of the two of us here at the table suggests? I look at Hans chewing his food but hear nothing. So comfortable in his own skin, tender in some remote way, but when I tell him about his sister’s visit and everything she had to say, he looks at me in a way that says, despite everything, we’re in this together. Because Hans perceives the gap between me and the others, and nothing ties two people together more tightly than that kind of understanding. Even if that person can seem occasionally distant, like Hans, so lost in his world that if you don’t reach out, grasp hold of him, he floats away, as he’s doing now, as I’m letting him do. I’m still trying to figure out what his reaction would be if I reached out for him and laid my cards on the table. Cards on the table. I suspect that his reaction would be sensible. And prudence is no use to me now. My problem calls for a radical solution.

His seat is turned so that whoever sits there only need glance into the living room to be confronted by the door. And Hans does that as he pauses amid some funny story from his laboratory, trying to recall the name of the employee in question. I look at his eyes looking toward the door, but that’s no use in working out if he sees it; his gaze is so remote, his search focused on the lost name. Suddenly he looks away from the door and straight into my eyes: “Valmundur!” The employee’s name. But by this time, I’ve already lost the thread.

We stand up from the table and Hans concludes his story inside the kitchen, after which he strolls off and I’m left standing alone at the sink; it strikes me that the door is on the outer wall. And there is no window on that wall. I go into the living room and look out of the front window of the building, the window closest and perpendicular to the windowless side, and try to see if the distance from the corner of the room is the same inside and outside. But there’s no way to make sure from here, my face pressed against the glass. I’d better go out and check. How hollow was the sound when I knocked on the wall around the door? And where is Hans? He’s gotten into bed, his face behind a book; facing him, along a direct line of sight through the bedroom doors and hallway, is the door.

Hardly; half the door. From his side of the bed. I see so for myself when I come to bed and find an excuse to lean in his direction, peeking up from my book about a man who paints pictures on pencil boxes and thinks about death. I turn back to the book and continue to travel the pages without knowing where the story’s heading, my thoughts erasing the meaning of the words as soon as I’ve read them. My inner turmoil constantly whirrs away, destroying all the story’s innumerable little details that should click together to form the complete meaning of this finely-wrought, dust-jacketed book’s message, a message I will not locate any time soon, for my eyes start to close and the book is on top of my face. But just before that happens, I get this brilliant idea.

Then she smiles slyly, almost warmly, as she fetches a little book and holds it out toward me

As soon as Hans closes the door behind him, I get up and rush to the basement. Down the steps, stroking the light-green stone wall, the paint that hides a mural I have murky memories of from having come to this house once as a child. Inside the storage space, I reach past a black plastic bag full of empty glass bottles to pick up what lies rolled up on the bottom shelf opposite the door. I take the fabric roll in my arms and hold it out in front of me.

When I get back upstairs, I unroll the material on the living room floor, smoothing it out: Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho have spun their thread and cut it, standing with their toes planted on their prey. Death overcomes a chaste maiden. Something of that sort. A reproduction of a much larger tapestry, something we bought right before moving back to Iceland. I lift the hanging up off the floor and remember why it’s been rolled up in storage since we moved in a week ago: I haven’t yet found a way to hang it. But now there’s only one solution; I have the hammer in one hand and five long nails in the other. I push the chest, which stands in the middle of the living room like a table, across the floor to the wall and climb up on it. I drive the nails into the wall above the door frame, clamber down from the chest, drag the fabric behind me and stretch the upper margin across the nails. The hanging does not quite cover the door all the way to the floor, but I just stack books and other stuff carelessly in front of it.

I sit on the couch and regard the setup. I’ve hidden what can’t be seen, fearing it’s only visible to me. But I’ve also done this to nurture an old dream, wanting my living space to be more than what can be seen. Hazy suspicion about doors and mysterious nooks gets proved; beside the corner is a small staircase right up against the wall. Just a few steps, leading up to the door, the door that opens into a dim room, the room that opens out to a beautiful garden. And from there I can look out onto green fields. Until I recover my senses and face my disappointment; hazy suspicion about doors and mysterious nooks gets disproved.

I’m bored. I look at them, The Three Fates, the Moirai. Atropos’s green-blue dress and the golden twig-belt, the flowers creamy and crimson against the night-blue background. An ancient agricultural scene that now conceals what’s probably nothing more than the door to a locked storage compartment containing flotsam from the estate to which our apartment belongs. I push the books on the floor gently away from the door, sneak my hand behind the tapestry, and tug the handle. I hold it down, but instead of pulling it toward me like yesterday, I jiggle it a bit to the side and wrest it in circles to try to better release the latch from its hole in the frame. A click. The door budges and starts to pull the fabric away from the wall, so I push it closed again. I open it a slender crack, stick my head under the tapestry and peer into the darkness. The air is thick but smells of some kind of cleaning fluid. Of old cleanliness. Taking shape before me I see a small windowless room. Empty, except for the wall opposite the door, where there hangs a golden frame. And, from the ceiling on the right, something white dangles, some material, but as I move to open the door further and stretch my hand inside to see what that is, I hear a knock behind me. Someone is hammering on the front door. Two heavy determined blows. I close the door, smooth down the tapestry, and traipse along into the hallway.

Two older women are standing on the steps outside the house. They are dressed in trench coats. Poplin. One of the two, almost a head taller than her companion, wishes me good day and gets right to the matter, a question about whether I ever think about the amount of soap I use for cleaning and other hygienic purposes here at home. And without giving me a chance to answer, she hands me a folio sheet folded in four. On the front, there’s a pencil drawing of a man with shoulder-length hair and open arms. Jesus. Christ. The woman holds the paper in her outstretched hand, but under the sleeve of her coat I see her shirt. Polyester. Paisley. I look away, down at the floor, where the woman has stuck her foot over the threshold. A brown leather shoe, laced over swollen insteps. Custom-made? Orthopedic? I look up as I move to close the door. The woman jerks her foot out; as they are bidding me farewell, they turn out not to be as old as I thought they were at first. I take the little booklet into the kitchen and throw it into the bucket under the sink, where the fish Hans took out of the freezer this morning are lying in a sieve. Ready for the soup I’d intended to spend my day preparing. I place both hands on my head. An impending ache.

From inside the kitchen I analyze every gesture. Mom takes off her silk-soft cashmere coat and hands it to Dad, who hangs it in the closet while Hans helps my Aunt Gréta out of her garment. It’s not a coat but a thin, crumpled windbreaker. A kind of purple. Then Hans comes into the kitchen to fetch drinks as I go into the living room and sit on the sofa next to my father. Gréta sits opposite us in a chair, but the inspector doesn’t sit right away. Mom never sits right away. She stands and scrutinizes the surroundings and watches. Now she can seize her moment, here in this apartment rented off the estate of her parents’ childhood friend: “Is this what you bought in London?” She crosses to the wall hanging and scowls when she sees the nails poking out from the top. She slides her gold-plated glasses down to the rounded tip of her nose, takes the edge of the tapestry and pulls it taut to more closely examine the image; her plump, smooth face is framed by her silver-gray bob. My mother is blunt, yet somehow still frail, unlike Gréta, who is sitting behind her sister, listening to her give a short disquisition on Flemish medieval weaving and Petrarchan poetry. Gréta is delicately built yet sturdy, with short hair; slender, cheap gold threads dangle from her ears. Her shirt fabric has indistinct pencil-strokes, but on her shoulders there is some modest padding and the garment is buttoned up to the neck; it’s a bit difficult to say whether my mother’s sister looks more feminine or masculine. She is a systems analyst, introverted and sometimes a bit rough, but still with some warmth in her manner, just like how Mom’s gentle, calculated appearance can sometimes seem distant and cold, as it does now, once she’s finished her speech and thoughtfully inspects the ceiling, still holding the edge of the tapestry between her index finger and thumb so that, from where Dad sits beside me on the couch, the door is exposed. I stand up, walk over to her, and flatten the tapestry so that she loses her grip and the door disappears. “Dinner is served!” My words emerge from Hans’s mouth as he appears at that exact moment from the dining room.

As I’m ladling soup into Gréta’s bowl, I call to mind the white material I thought I saw hanging from the ceiling in the room behind the door. I suppose there must have been a sheet over some stuff stored there, or so I think as I hand Gréta her bowl. She vigorously nods thanks, because Mom has started to talk so slowly and so quietly that the least sound would cause her listeners to lose the thread of her story, about a young, up-and-coming Icelandic artist. She’s mastered this style little by little since deciding to finally take her high-school exams and go to college at the age of 50, having abruptly left school as a teenager. That historical fact is the foundation of the complex relationship between her and Gréta, who was buried in books but stumbled terribly in her personal life—she’s thrice-divorced—whereas Mom thrived triumphantly with her lackey by her side, a doctor and gentle soul who seemingly has an unstoppable need to push her forward as a great intellect. Beyond logic, beyond what would be considered normal for a loving marriage. After Mom completed her university degree, achieving very good results, as a matter of fact, her strength has primarily been in her good taste for knowledge; she is a connoisseur of what one ought to know at any given moment, and liable to disseminate that knowledge to those who don’t care for it: “There is in her work a jarring clash between tradition and revolution, I think she’s working with our history in ways no Icelandic artist has ever done.”

Although I’ve never heard my mother talk about the person under discussion, this conversation has happened before. In form. That is, if I accord the proper significance to the expressions on Greta’s lips and Dad’s head movements as Mom begins to describe the work, giant portraits of Icelandic national leaders from the past two centuries. Four times two meters in area, composed of several hundreds of mirror fragments which, by dint of the discriminating color of each piece of glass and its position in the larger image, reveal two different faces, male and female, depending on from where the work is viewed. Another part of the work is the viewer’s multifaceted reflection in the image, the figurative sculpture standing before it.

Suddenly Mom falls silent, looking to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• S. B., Diary for 1642/1643. Bod. MS. 3971 (Pick) 8vo
• Six Hundred Pages Later In Another City: Reykjavík
• To my mother
• For my mother