The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

8 A Thousand Fathoms 2009

But I’m no sailor, I’m no captain, and now I sink into the depths of my quilt, the downy-soft, ice-cold depths, deathly blue and breathless, where drowned sailors, women and the great poet go about their business on the flatfish-covered bottom. Dear bottom dwellers, look, I’m sinking now with all my load, sails and oars. With all my lies.

I squint my eyes and can hear bubbles of air coming out of me. The wig slides off my small head and turns into an unusually solid jellyfish, waving its tentacles in front of the cod and haddock, while the lanugo on my head flutters like famished plankton and the hospital pyjama bottoms swell up to my groin, exposing the horror of fleshless legs: the skin on them flutters like fish gills, and the heels are convex like ancient electrical sockets attached to my calves by cable-thin tendons, but there’s no electricity in them any more, they don’t dance the tango the way they did in Baires of old. And the sail-stiff pyjama top clings to the tubular frame that was once modelled with firm white flesh and desired by muscular seamen all over the globe. From the long, open neckline flows a condom-shaped sack of skin called a breast… Oh dear, oh dear.

Here sinks a skew-backed shadow of itself, a sinking garage goddess, a marble mummy that deserves no tombstone, deserves no anything, nothing but the shovel.

Yes, see what a wretch I am, and hear me sing as I sink:

But what do I see as I float about in the darkness of the deep? Yes, I see the depths of life, I see my ice-cold salty life, all my eternal cursed confusion. Below me I can make out glowing cities, islands, countries. Men grin like sea wolves, sharks glide by overhead, marked with the German Luftwaffe cross, and in the distance the air-raid sirens of whales can be heard.

And out of the green twilight my relatives come sailing, like a shoal of tuna fish. Grandad, Grandma and her entire upper-class Danish pharmacist family, and Grandma Verbjörg in sodden Breidafjördur woollens; Eysteinn and Lína, happily exhausted as ever, and Great-Grandma Blómey like an old sea-beaten sailing-boat mast, but not at all mouldy; then come Mum… and Dad… they swim together, in evening dress, followed by Dad’s siblings, all sombre… and right at the back comes a little girl… my little, little girl… with her blond hair fluttering around her ears like gently flapping fins. Oh dear, my soul. See the expression on her face, so pretty, so peaceful, and yet she caused more damage than a night of bombing on Berlin…

They float past, all with the same wonderfully shoal-like air. And they leave me sinking, alone.

Down into those thousand fathoms that make up a human life. And now below me I see a city engulfed in war, everything in black and white, but glowing red in the flames. I take a ride on a bomb, a falling bomb. I’m a Norn on a crater, a witch on a broomstick transformed by sorcery into rain… yes, I’m being dissolved into thousands of drops, I’m falling, falling…

Now I’m falling on Thingvellir. Dissipating all over Thingvellir. On 17 June 1944, the day of the inauguration of the Icelandic Republic, a day of heavy rainfall. I drench the flags, wet the spears, drip down the shields and swords, the railings, hats, brims and backs of chairs, and yes, I also drip on the document that my grandfather is signing. He wipes away those shimmering tears from Iceland’s future, thinking they’re rain, but tastes the salt and looks out over the wet fields, sees that he is taking over a nation under water.

And on I trickle, through the grass and further down, far below Grandad’s signature, down into the earth and a chasm through a crevice, into the quick of the land, the flowing lava, where Hitler thunders on a rostrum, spewing the fire that cast its flames on my life…

‘Do you want your porridge now?’

‘Huh?’

‘Do you want to have your porridge now?’

‘No one eats in hell.’

‘Huh?’

‘No one needs to eat in hell!’

‘Herra, dear.’

‘I’m no Herra.’

‘Herbjörg…’

‘My name is Blómey!’

‘Blómey, dear, here’s your porridge. Would you like me to help you?’

‘No one can help me.’

‘Do you want to eat it by yourself, then? You have to eat.’

‘Says who?’

‘We all need to eat.’

‘You’re only shoving that into me to make me shit. To give you something to do. To wipe me. That’s what you want and want. I don’t want to need to shit. I’ve shat enough!’

I’m gasping breathlessly by the end of my speech.

‘Herra, dear…’

‘Blómey! Blumeninsel! Das Blumeninsel im breiten Fjord. Das bin ich’

‘I don’t understand German, you know that.’

‘You don’t understand anything.’

She stares at me, at this hissing cat of a woman, this queen of wrinklehood in a ludicrous wig, and stands there in silence for a while, with the bowl of porridge in her hands, like stupidity itself with eyebrows. I deserve better than this, goddamn it. I deserve so much better. I thought I would at least be allowed to die in my own bed, even with my so-called family by my side. But the boys don’t seem to know whether I’m being dressed or dissected. They don’t seem to realise that a mother was needed to bring them into this world, that they would never have reached here on their own. No, a splay-legged, hairy-crotched mother was required to push their piglet asses through the tunnel out into the light. Honour your father and mother, it’s written somewhere, but who remembers Scripture in the computer age? It’s been three whole years since I last heard from them and their saggy-titted wives, although I actually have my ways of keeping an eye on them now.

‘Maybe you’re not hungry?’

‘No tengo cinco años.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’m not five years old.’

‘Shall I maybe take the computer away so that you can eat by yourself on the overbed?’

‘Over dead?’

‘No, overbed. They call it an overbed at the hospital.’

‘Don’t talk about hospitals. I’m not in hospital.’

‘No, no, I know,’ she says, raising the headboard for me, totally unsolicited, and then she adjusts my pillow, pulls up the quilt, and spots the war egg. Careless of me; I forgot to put it away. She picks it up from under the quilt. Were I still able to blush, I would.

‘What’s that?’ she asks.

‘That? That’s… that’s a so-called cooling ball that I used in hospitals in the olden days.’

‘Oh yeah?’

She swallows it, the gullible child, and puts the object away in the bedside table drawer, like the humblest of property masters. I regain my composure.

‘You’ve got to have some sex. You don’t want to become a mouldy virgin, do you?’

‘I know, you’ve already told me.’

‘Your mother won’t knock you up.’

‘No, ha-ha, I know.’

‘I can fix you up with a boy. How do you like my Australian?’

‘I think I’d rather have an Icelander.’

‘Nonsense. They’re just wooden fish. It’s all about mixing the blood. A little golden plover like you ought to be mating with a pelican; that’ll start something new.’

‘The golden plover waits for the spring and the right mate, too.’

‘Yes, you’re a smart girl. You know it all better than I do; I squandered my virginity on rocks and ditches. Right, then, you cheeky thing, give me the porridge.’