The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

9 ‘Your Cab Is Here’ 1959

The feet of Jón the First, or the Pre-Jón, as I would later call him, were always a turn-off. He would frequently plonk them down in front of me in the evening and order me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. There was no way I could love those Icelandic men’s feet, shaped as they were like birch stumps, hard and chunky, as screaming white as wood when the bark is peeled off. Yeah, and about as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that looked like dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the stench, because smelly feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and virtually slept in their shoes.

How was it possible to love these Icelandic men who belched at the table and farted relentlessly? After four Icelandic husbands and a whole string of plump paramours, I’d become a real connoisseur of flatulence and could describe its varieties with the same confidence as an enologist describing wines. Howling blaster, loaded stinker, gas bomb, coffee belch, silencer and Luftwaffe were among the terms I most used.

Icelandic men just don’t know how to behave, never have and never will, but are good fun, on the whole. Or so Icelandic women think, at any rate. They seem to come with this internal emergency box, crammed with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open if things get too rough. It must be a hereditary gift wired into their genes. Anyone who gets lost up a mountain, is snowed in or has to spend a whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and wriggle out of the situation with a good story. After wandering around the world and living on the Continent, I’d long grown weary of polite, fart-free gentlemen, who opened doors and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or insisted on fucking till the crack of dawn. Swiss watch salesmen who could never fit a quickie into their schedule, or hairy French apes who always required twelve rounds of screwing at the end of a five-course meal.

I guess I liked German men the best. They were a decent combination of the belching northerner and cultured southerner, of western order and eastern folly, although in the post-war years they were, of course, shattered men. There wasn’t much you could do with them except try to straighten them out first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and tiresome in the long run. That irony machine seemed to have eaten away their true essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is driven by unadulterated seriousness, and the Frogs can drive you around the bend once they slip into their philosophical jargon. Italians worship every woman like a queen until they get her home and she suddenly turns into a whore. The Yank is a swell guy who thinks big and always wants to take you to the moon. At the same time, though, he can be as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress and goes berserk if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich on the spaceship. I found Russians quite interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of them all: drank every glass to the last drop and hurled themselves into any merriment, knew countless stories, and never talked seriously until they had reached the bottom of the bottle, when they started to weep for their mothers, who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were totally nuts and better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their bedroom acrobatics.

Nordic men are as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and belch, and finally start to ‘sing,’ even in public restaurants, where people have paid good money to get away from the racket of the world. But their wallets always waited dead sober in the cloakroom, while the Icelandic purse lay open for everyone in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. ‘Reputation is king, the rest is crap!’ my Bæring used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything less would have been failure. But the morning after, they turned into putty weaklings. Icelandic women don’t shy away from managing their marriages: some run them like businesses, and they can be unlucky with their staff, of course. I frequently had to fire my personnel and didn’t always find satisfactory replacements.

Still, though, I did manage to love them, those Icelandic oafs, at least down as far as their knees. Below that, things didn’t go as well. And when the feet of Pre-Jón junior popped out of me in the maternity ward, I’d had enough. The resemblance was minute and striking: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I immediately developed a physical repulsion for the father and prohibited him from coming in to see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in his bass voice from the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on, I made it a rule: I dismissed my men by calling them a cab.

‘Your cab is here’ became my favourite line.