The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

109 Visiting Hour 2009

Oh, God rot them all. I’m tired of vegetating in this bed. I’ll probably end up leaving this earth on foot, or isn’t death always in good shape and free of disease? The elves in the cliffs back home were true athletes and, late at night, went to work spinning cartwheels in the nocturnal meadows of Iceland. Oh and, would you believe it, last night I dreamed of the Führer with his arm in the air, about as tall as a finger, on a rock, on a slip back home in Svefneyjar, yelling at the shore and the seaweed.

Then Lóa comes in to bring me back to reality, and she’s dragged my legally registered son along, Prince Potato. Magnús, dear, are you here?

‘Yes. How are you?’

Oh, he’s here to say goodbye.

‘Won’t be long now.’

‘Huh?’

‘Won’t be long now.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s all Hitler’s fault.’

‘What are you saying?’ he asks again. My eyesight is seriously deteriorating. Now elves are lining up by the bed and demanding bottles. What’s all the rummaging? Rumba and rum. I need some new music.

‘Hitler is to blame for everything. You can blame him for how…’

Here came a couple of coughs.

‘Oh, oh, hell and bastards, they’re all demanding bottles now… demanding bottles…’

‘Mum…’

And now many things happen at once, I lose a quarter of my mind, and my Dóra squeezes herself into the garage, greets people, slams a door and starts blabbing: Do I know an Aussie, some guy from Australia, who has been knocking on the door all weekend and now just this morning, big and hulky, a puffed-up troll with arms as thick as legs but a small head and blond hair, and demanding to see Linda, wants to talk to Linda, he’s sure she lives here because her computer is here. Wanted to look through all the rooms, searching under the beds like a cop, got on the floor and was sweating profusely. She had to wipe the floor with a dry cloth after he left.

‘The sweat was pouring off him. His back was wringing wet.’

‘That’s Bod.’

‘Huh?’

‘Tell him Linda has moved.’

‘Linda? Who’s Linda?’

‘The Lady Inside.’

And then it starts to darken in my head again, and my ears fill with snow: I look at my Dóra, her beach tan and pink lips, but can’t hear her, just watch her mouth moving, and Lóa, too, as in a silent film. Is my hearing gone? But my Magnús sits there in a state of virtual collapse, reciting a psalm of repentance like a Business Viking on the steps of hell. He conned fifteen hundred people in his name, raised their debts higher than their houses, and then requisitioned their cars.

‘You’ve got to talk to those people,’ I say when my hearing finally returns. Still my voice remains under the water but my ears above.

‘What?’

‘Do you reckon you’ll be put away?’ I ask, cheeky old thing.

‘Away?’

‘In jail.’

‘No, I… I was just an employee.’

‘Just a cog in the swindling wheel?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re a chip off the old block. It’s all Hitler’s fault.’

‘The financial crash?’

‘Yes, and that, too.’

Then there’s a silence, which is odd because Dóra, that big blabbermouth, is there. ‘It was good to see you, Mum,’ Magnús finally says.

‘Send my regards to Haraldur and Ólafur. Tell them that their mother did her best, but my eighth life wouldn’t allow for… for more.’ And then I had a new coughing fit that almost killed me. But I grabbed hold of myself.

‘Just tell them to blame it all on Hitler. He’s the Christ of our age and he’s still…’

I had another coughing fit, but owing to some higher force I survived that one, too. Life was going to grant me another hour. I decided to use it well and started to tell them a story, the story of Dad in the USSR.