The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

102 The Milk Platform Uprising 1949

My father and I shared a room. He slept badly on most nights and I often had to stretch my arm across the floor until he fell asleep again. In the end we pushed our beds together at night and separated them again in the morning, so as not to give rise to any ugly suspicions.

Hans Henrik was a wreck of a man. The war had shaken every piece of manhood out of him, like coins out of a piggy bank. There was only one coin still ringing inside him. On one side was the image of the swastika he had tried to scratch away, and on the other a picture of a leaking heart.

‘You think your mother left me only because of Hitler or…?’

‘Yes, I… you loved her more than you loved Hitler?’

‘Yes, of course. Love her. Still love her.’

‘But you were ready to die for him but not her?’

Tact has never been my forte.

‘Yes… I’m… a man…’

Although those four words were all possible beginnings of a sentence, clumsy attempts to form a sentence, together they did form a sentence that contained a profound truth: ‘Yes, I’m a man.’ That really meant: ‘Yes, I’m an ass.’

He fell silent. I, meanwhile, could hear the heartstrings snapping inside him until there was only one left.

‘Do you think she’s content with that… coffee guy?’

‘I don’t think so. He’s never even been outside Reykjavík.’

Ah well. Maybe I wasn’t totally insensitive.

After the first summer (winter), I realised that I had probably followed him here for his sake – out of pity. And I couldn’t sacrifice my life for my father. No one does that. I couldn’t turn his defeat into my own, I who had barely started the game of life. But where could I go?

‘You can always go home, Herra, dear, if you want,’ he said sometimes.

‘If I want?’ I muttered into my chest. We were walking along the gravel path in the sun, on our way home after a Sunday in the village, mass and market. The youngest Benni was ahead of us with the rest of the herd, while the old ladies had travelled by car with the elders. ‘And what? Leave you here?’

‘Yes, yes. You shouldn’t be thinking about me,’ said Dad, combing his hair back with one hand, his jacket on his arm. The afternoon sun was hot and the waist-high fields buzzed on both sides.

‘Not think about you? I do nothing else but think about you.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I hold your hand at night, can’t sleep from worry and… I’ve become my father’s mother.’

‘Herra, I… you mustn’t forget yourself.’

‘If only I could.’

‘You mustn’t. It happened to you, too.’

‘Yes, that damned—’ I snapped sharply, but one of the pallid Benítez daughters turned her head and cast me a glance through her hair. I shut up and we deliberately slowed down. I kicked pebbles at the sun, which now shone horizontally in our faces.

‘Dad, why… why did you get into all that madness?’

‘Why?’

‘Yes. Why didn’t you listen to Mum?’

‘I… I should have.’

We had reached the platform where the milk was collected from under a handsome ombu tree on the pathway to the farm. Some flies carried the sunshine on their shoulders into the long shadows. The Bennis had almost reached the farm. I halted and looked at Dad.

‘How… how could you be such an idiot?’

The angry tone even took me by surprise.

‘Idiot?’

‘Yes, if you hadn’t… then none of this would have happened!’

‘Herra, you can’t look at it like that.’

‘Yes! That’s how it was! If you hadn’t… it was just… you… you ruined my life!’

‘Herra, dear, don’t…’

‘Yes, you’ve ruined my life. Just look at this,’ I said, waving my arms at the farmland all around us, furious and flushing. ‘What are we doing here in this… dead-boring shithole of the world?!’

‘Herra, no one… no one’s to blame.’

‘Oh really?’

The sun was sinking over the ocean of corn; its long rays played on the wrinkles of my father’s face. The cod-liver light was different here from what it was back home, not as clear and cold.

‘No, it’s just something that happened. War is war,’ he answered wearily.

‘Oh yeah? War is war and a father is a father and—’

‘Herra,’ he snapped, finally with some severity in his voice, ‘I’m not to blame. It was just… just pure bad luck. Pure and simple bad luck!’

‘bad luck?!’ I yelled so loudly I must have been heard inside the farm.

To see us there, such an unlucky father and daughter in a distant land, boxing the air, trying to punch the ghosts of our own making, which we would never be able to grab, seize by the throat, defeat. Fucking hell. Of course, he was right. It was pure and simple bad luck, which made it all so unbearable. There was no one, nothing we could hit except the air and the boring, doglike spectre we dragged behind us. It’s one thing to suffer, but another to have no obvious culprit.

‘I hate those words: “bad luck”.’

‘Yes.’

‘And this bloody silence there always has to be. One is never allowed to talk… We’re not allowed to talk. You don’t want to talk, and no one else will…’

‘I don’t want to talk?’

‘No. You’re like all the others. One can never talk about anything…’

‘Herra, dear, be careful not to—’

‘No, go to fucking hell! You’re not going to shut me up here in this… shitty South American dump, a whole seven thousand miles from Iceland? It’s just sick!’ I was starting to shout again. ‘This is a sick family! You’re sick! Everyone, this whole fucking family! All sick! Mentally sick!’

All of a sudden I heard what I had said and burst into tears. I fled him, bawling, up the path towards the farm. When I reached the courtyard, I couldn’t face the idea of going inside and waiting for Dad in our room. I turned right and ran over to Juan Héctor’s shed. I lay beside him that night. He played a concert for ten fingers and two ears for me on a crossbeam. It was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard, even though I couldn’t hear anything. He had learned piano in the days of yore and still knew how to play. And it was fitting that the silent man should play a silent piece for the girl who was tormented by silence at the end of this day.

After that pathetic attempt to topple Iceland from a milk platform in Argentina, I made no other, but just collected all my secrets and locked them deep inside my soul. I was no better than the rest of my clan and my miserable nation. Just like them, I surrendered to the tyranny of Mr Silence, the despot who ruled Iceland in the twentieth century, and remained subservient to it all the way here into the garage.

And paid for that privilege with a sevenfold cancer.