The Weather

Tzipora had gone to the cinema the night before to see the news, and they told her it was going to be ten degrees centigrade on Thursday. She woke up in the morning and it was cold. She had fallen asleep wrapped in a blanket on the chair in her room with a paperback she didn’t think much of in her lap. She was still wearing her school clothes. She washed her face with hot water as the radio reported it was eight degrees. When she took the steps down from her apartment with her satchel in hand she noticed the dark hairs on her legs standing on end. She did not think she was hairy until she was cold, when she became self-conscious of it. It never occurred to her she could shave her legs.

Any movement of the air was sharp and cool. It was like a locker door had opened to the great glacier in the centre of the island, where the air rolled down and out towards the coast, settling over them like cold water. She didn’t care what the radio said; it wasn’t eight degrees.

She shivered as if to reciprocate the thought and went back upstairs and hitched a pair of soft trousers around her waist, beneath her skirt and over her shorts. This was the Vekllei fashion and it made all the girls look like Inuits in the winter, no matter their colour. She thought the new season had arrived and stopped wearing them, but Oslolan weather was temperamental and subject to the fickle intersection of the Arctic and the Gulf Stream.

Seispri is an industrial neighbourhood on the slope of the borough of Lola, where it had once been home to abattoirs and diemakers. When the war came, the bombs dropped on Reykjavic sent shockwaves up these hills which had blown away most of what had been here. Now there was little trace of those savage old industries except for snaking brick paths to nowhere and a lonely chimney at the end of the street. Now this was a place of machines and workshops, but the blood from the abattoirs seemed to have soaked deep in the soil. This was a very old place. Most of the butchery in the city had been conducted here; nowadays they ate hardly any meat at all.

The tram stop was at the end of the street. It came every few minutes and with her cape and her trousers she didn’t mind the wait in the cold. On days like this nothing seemed to move, like the trees were waiting with her. When the tram came trundling along it seemed inconsiderately busy and loud.

‘Good morning,’ she said to the driver. Not all trams had drivers but this was a scenic line and so it was common enough to see them. The interior was old-fashioned, with red seats arranged in booths. The wood floors were better because they coloured nicely under wet shoes; the linoleum and plastic compound of newer trains stirred the slush around underfoot. The heaters underneath the seats were on and she pushed her legs right up against them.