The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

120 Clasped Hands 2009

My eyes remained open even though they had been closed. Through my eyelids I could see everything that was to be seen and more. I had become all-seeing and all-knowing.

They sat around me and kissed my cooling cheeks, each in turn, and drew a cross over my body like slightly daft children, until Dóra invited them all into the house and put some coffee on. Then they called a priest and a doctor, who both discharged me in their own ways.

‘Her taxi is here,’ said Dóra on the kitchen threshold at midnight, slipping into her shoes, as the ambulance pulled into the driveway. Two members of Reykjavík’s emergency response team tried to pry the Hitler egg out of my clasped hands without success and then saw the scar etched on my right arm. This didn’t look good. An old woman is found dead in a garage, clutching a German hand grenade from World War II and sporting a swastika mark on her arm. It was like the opening to some third-rate crime novel.

They carried my body out into the blizzard and travelled cautiously down the deserted streets. They drove slowly over glistening-wet speed bumps, which I’d never noticed before but which are now to be found at every crossroads. It was a short distance to the morgue in Fossvogur. There my remains were put aside pending further examination.

Lóa kept her promise and demanded a cremation. And the reservation proved useful, Monday, 14 December at 1:30. In the morning an emergency team was summoned from the National University Hospital: a man and woman with a saw. Thus, I slid into a thousand degrees minus my hands and burned there for about half an hour. My phantom wrists still ache.

The clasped hands were handed over to the Coast Guards’ explosives division. A few days later, in a pre-Christmas mist, my father’s heart was blown up with dynamite in a sand ditch by Lake Raudavatn and thus delivered to God by my own two hands.