The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

18 The Haymaker 1936

It was the summer of ’36. On a beautiful, silvery mid-August day – when the season has reached its crest, clouds hang puffed up with heat over a viscous sea, and the mountains acquire slightly more European colours, milder and deeper – a blond man came sailing into the strait.

‘I stood for the entire crossing on the boat from Flatey. I just couldn’t sit down,’ Dad later told me.

And he stepped ashore. Without noticing her, he walked past a seven-year-old girl who had idled down to the shore to see what was happening, and found his Massa out in the field where she was raking hay: as dark haired as before, dreamy eyed as before, beautiful as before.

‘Hi.’

She looked up, and the rake froze momentarily in her hands before she continued, as if nothing were happening. The toothed crossbar of the implement shook as it struck the short, dry grass, and although the sun was hidden, her bare upper arms clearly bore the hallmarks of summer, brown from labour on top and a shimmering white below, which reminded him of a beautiful trout. He longed (this is something I’m sure of, I know my men, having lived with a whole army of them, though the teeth of their sexual beasts may vary in size)… he longed to kiss the brown part and bite the white.

‘Hi,’ Dad repeated. ‘Do you… do you remember me?’

She carried on raking vigorously.

‘No. Who are you?’

‘Hans. Hansi. You…’

‘Hans Henrik Björnsson? I thought that man had died. Giving birth.’

‘Massa… I… I’ve come.’

Once more the fork froze in her hands and she looked him in the eye.

‘I was expecting rain, but not you.’

Then she started raking again.

‘Massa… forgive me.’

‘Have you come here to moan?’ she said coldly, continuing her work with even more zeal than before. She was wearing a sleeveless steel-grey shirt with blotches of sweat under her armpits: dark half-moons that looked as if they had been embroidered into the material. Pearls of perspiration were about to fuse on her forehead. ‘What do you want?’

‘You.’

‘Me?’

At this point, Mum stopped raking and started to laugh.

‘Yes, Massa, I… I’ve been…’

He hesitated yet again, and Mum poked the pile of hay that lay between them and stretched along the field like a yellowing frontier between love and hate. Further down the way, other labourers were hard at work, Sveinki the Romantic and Buxom Rósa, both armed with rakes. The latter positioned herself behind a haystack to observe the newcomer.

‘It’s also been difficult for… but now I…’ Dad continued to stutter around his thoughts. Mum looked at the man, waiting for the rest. He tried again.

‘Now I know…’

But when nothing more came out of him, the woman gave up and said decisively, ‘I’d have more use for your hands right now. Go and get a rake from the shed.’

Dad later told me that he never worked so hard in all his life. Not even in the war, when he was digging trenches east of the Don and Dniester. He laboured like a hundred men that day and that whole week and almost finished the haymaking for the Svefneyjar farmer single-handedly. I remember admiring him as he tossed the bales into the barn, the muscles of his pale arms glistening in the sun. This half-Danish pharmacy cashier had revealed a secret talent for haymaking and concealed the blisters on his hands at mealtimes, although his daughter had spotted them and worshipped them just as the first Christians venerated Christ’s sacrificial wounds.

Naturally, there was something exotic about him. My dad Hansi cut a handsome figure with a particularly striking profile, like a well-bred bird with a straight nose and high chest. Unlike the locals, he always walked with an upright back. Back then he had a pale face, as white as a sheet in the midst of all those weather-beaten faces that sat around the kitchen table at Lína’s, gobbling down smoked seal meat and singed fins. It was only later that his face turned burgundy red. Mum had told me that this man was my father, but he paid little attention to me in those first days and had few more words for my mother. The future president’s son first had to complete his mission in a classic tale. He was the son of the peasant who had to overcome seven challenges before he could win the princess’s hand. Finally she invited him on a boat trip, and together they found their love island, which was invisible to the naked eye.

We sailed south in September, Dad, Mum and I, who stared at the man in the hat for the entire journey. I remember nothing of that first winter in Reykjavík, except that I started school and attracted attention for my stubbornness and precocious manners. ‘Can you read?’ they asked me.

‘Only tern’s eggs.’

In the spring we headed for Germany. Dad had found not only love but himself, too. He closed his law books to open others, starting a course in Old Norse studies at the University of Lübeck.

Contrary to what Mum had imagined, her parents-in-law gave her a warm welcome. The first ambassador of Iceland and his Danish wife had probably harboured greater expectations for their firstborn, in view of their position, but they were basically decent people. The reason my father had denied himself the country girl had not exactly been a categorical order from his father. He had assumed that Grandad Sveinn was opposed to the match purely on the basis of seven seconds of silence.