The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

26 On the Fifth Floor in Lübeck 1940

Well, well. Lübeck is a beautiful city with all its marzipan and its Thomas Mann and all those pavements he once strolled upon, but the main drawback is that a petty salesman lurks on every corner. Everything revolves around small change there, that eternal pocket jingle. People spend the whole day giving you back the right change. I was an eleven-year-old girl who’d never seen cash before except when Grandad Sveinn bought us ice cream, but I was quick to realise that coins were as precious to those Schleswig people as words were to Icelanders.

The German word for small change is pfennig, a word that is impossible to pronounce without the greatest respect. The face of an Icelander acquires the cold and empty expression of a cash register as he spurts out his insignificant words for something even more insignificant. Money savers never enjoyed any respect in Iceland, while squanderers were always admired.

But there we were, a newly reunited family of three in a new country and a new city, with a new future. After Grandad had liberated Dad from German custody and cash duty, the young man would accept no more support, least of all financial, so we lived in a cold cubbyhole on the top floor of a tall, narrow brick building where I counted 133 steps up and 132 steps down. ‘Always longer up than down,’ Dad would say. The view from the kitchen window was memorable: crow-stepped gables and mediaeval towers, the whole of Europe stretching beyond the horizon. Dad enrolled at the Nazi faculty and specialised in Hitlerian concepts and Aryan mythology. As already mentioned, the runic SS letters held him firmly by the balls, but he was careful not to mention this unruly mistress in front of his wife. Mum had been brought up in Breidafjördur, where no nonsense had washed ashore since Christianity had been dispatched to the island of Flatey in 1002.

She possessed an uncontaminated mind.

When the first spring of the war came, the issue could no longer be ignored. I remember the conversation in that tiny attic kitchen in May 1940. Mum stood by the open window, Dad on the threshold, and I between them at a minuscule table where I was busy colouring an Icelandic flag that flapped majestically like an unmanned magic carpet over an abandoned turf farmhouse.

‘The army?’ said Mum. ‘Why? Who… who are you going to fight for?’

Dad shrugged. ‘I’ll fight with my friends.’

‘For God’s sake, Hansi. What has an Icelander got to do with a war? Has an Icelander ever fought in a war?’

‘No, up until now we haven’t been manly enough.’

‘Manly enough? Thank God, I say.’

‘Massa. Iceland was occupied this morning.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I heard the news on the wireless today, at Peter’s. He can listen to the British news on the BBC.’

‘Isn’t that forbidden?’

‘Yes. But he’s in the party, so no one suspects him. They took Iceland this morning. Not a single shot was heard.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Thank God? That just shows you what cowards we are, we Icelanders.’

‘Hans Henrik, what’s got into you? The Danes put up no resistance either.’

‘No. Naturally they saw that surrender was their best defence.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘They landed on the right side and don’t have to fear a war in their country. They can sleep soundly while the missiles fly over the skies of Denmark. Like snow buntings in a snowstorm, that’s the Danes for you. Because they’re not the target, Germany is.’

‘Don’t you think the English will try to liberate the Danes?’

‘Why should they do that? Who gives a damn about Denmark? A few pig farms and two breweries…’

‘How can you talk like that about… about your motherland? And the Danes, who’ve treated your father so well…’

‘Father has no illusions about them, even if he has a Danish wife. He knows nations never do other nations any favours. It’s each man for himself.’

‘Didn’t the English go to war because of Poland?’

‘The English only think of London,’ said Dad. ‘Their only fear is seeing Germany from Dover.’

‘Hansi. What I don’t understand is this… this need for aggression. Why do the Germans need to conquer all those countries? What can they do with all these countries?… Aren’t they happy just living at home?’

Dad lowered his voice: ‘Massa, watch your tongue!’

‘As if they understood this tongue.’

‘Wilfried downstairs is a fellow student. He’s fluent in Icelandic.’

Mum hissed: ‘How many countries does this man have to rule over? I say what Mum says, why can’t he hop on a train if he wants to visit places? This is as if… as if Eysteinn in Svefneyjar suddenly wanted to rule over all the islands in Breidafjördur. Then he wouldn’t be able to do any of his farming work. All his time would just go into holding on to those lands. He who has everything can’t enjoy anything, Mum says.’

‘Mum… Mum… and what if… if the islands of Grasey and Lyngey had been taken from him? Wouldn’t he have the right to reclaim them? Germany was humiliated in the last war. We have the right to—’

‘For God’s sake, Hansi, don’t say “we.”’

‘What about the Sudetenland, Prussia, Alsace?… That’s all German land.’

‘Yes, and Norway, Denmark, and Iceland as well. Hansi, can’t you see, this is nothing more than… than megalomania.’

‘Iceland?’

‘Yes, didn’t you say that Iceland was occupied this morning?’

‘Yes, but not by the Germans.’

‘No? By whom, then?’

‘Iceland was occupied by the English. We’ve turned into an English colony.’

‘The English?’

And now there was a pause in the conversation. I continued colouring the Icelandic flag, but the blue lead was getting all used up, starting to smudge on the sheet. But I didn’t dare lean over to grab the pencil sharpener on the kitchen sideboard beside the dustbin. When super powers are battling, little people should sit still. The news clearly came as a shock to my mother.

‘Do you understand what I’m saying now?’ said Dad.

Mum was silent. She turned to the sink, slowly turned on the tap, and stared at the water a good while.

Dad admonished her. ‘Don’t let it run like that. They say there might be a water shortage this summer.’

She stretched out for a pot, filled it up halfway, shut off the tap, and placed the pot on the stove without turning the gas on. Then she turned back to Dad, who was still standing in the doorway in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, one elbow propped against the frame. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with his hand.

‘And did they take… has the whole of Iceland been occupied?’ Mum wanted to know.

‘Yes.’

‘The islands, too?’

‘Breidafjördur? I expect so.’

‘But… there are so many…’

I pictured two thousand soldiers capturing two thousand islands. And standing their watch, one on each skerry, straight as arrows, with rifles slung over their shoulders. And the seals on the surrounding foreshore, like a navy of fat, unknown enemies.

We’d lived there in a place that was a world unto itself and not always a part of Iceland. One of the farmers on the islands had commented that it was good to live there but a shame to be surrounded by Danish mountains. And when the country was finally granted independence in 1944, Grandma is reputed to have said, ‘Now maybe we can start trading with those good people.’ By then she’d lived a long life under the Danish flag, as a Danish subject, but her soul never yielded to them.

‘And what does that mean, then,’ Mum asked, ‘the fact that we’ve been occupied by the British?’

‘It means that Iceland, which is ruled by Denmark, which is now ruled by Germany, is under the British.’

‘Can’t we get any more nations to rule over us?’

Dad bowed his head and watched himself gently kick the base of the door frame with his pointy shoe. That is the scene as I picture it now, but back then I had my back turned to him at the kitchen table facing an open window, stooped over my drawing.

‘We’re just small change in the world’s pocket, sullied by thousands of dirty fingers. Danish yesterday, German today, British tomorrow. We own nothing, are nothing, and can do nothing. Für immer und ewig kaputt.’

‘But we always have the spring,’ said Mum dreamily. ‘That’ll always be Icelandic.’ That’s the way people sometimes spoke in Iceland before the war, and one never knew whether they’d borrowed it from a book by Halldór Laxness or whether he had stolen it from them. She gave off a strange laugh with that answer, both sad and sincere.

The island girl was now thirty-six years old; life’s cracks were beginning to appear on her face, and the tree rings of time around her waist. She had been moved to a height of 133 steps, from churning butter on an Icelandic island to overlooking a continent at war from a German attic. On that tenth day of May, 1940, the German army stood at the Russian border to the east and the Arctic Circle to the north, and they’d rolled into the Netherlands at dawn. A month later, they would be parading under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In the south they only had to wait a few days for Mussolini. The swastika was spreading its arms, and soon the whole of Europe would be under Hjalti’s moustache.

I concentrated as hard as I could on pressing the Icelandic mountain blue from a German pencil, and if I concentrated even harder, through the open window I could hear the faint rolling of tanks beyond the blurred horizon of the woods. On the edge of the city, spiralling towers stood by the old town gate, Holstentor, which mediaeval men had raised for their protection and glory, but which now was a useless relic, a meaningless ornament. All of a sudden, as I lie here now in the garage at the end of my whiz-bang existence, I feel that the history of mankind is nothing more than a rattlesnake biting its own tail, an endless cycle of absurd events that have virtually nothing to do with life but are just one colossal monument to male madness, which the women of all times have had to endure.

But what did I understand of all those warmongering shenanigans? Very little, obviously. To me Germany was an exciting place and its flag was beautiful. The women were jovial and the men were tough. And my childish mind couldn’t put two and two together to work out the four-armed idiocy. It takes a lifetime to understand life. In the here and now, we’re always quite stupid, but there and then a bit wiser.

I therefore entreat my sisters: we should always rush to buy blankets and canned meat when we hear a man say: ‘We’re living through historic times.’

My parents’ conversation wasn’t over. Once more, Mum asked the same question: ‘But what does it mean, that the English have occupied us?’

‘It means the country has landed on the wrong side,’ said Dad.

‘But Hansi…’ Mum sighed, then continued, ‘You really believe in all this?’

There was a brief silence in our kitchen. The steeple bells of Sankt Jakobi struck eight; a blue twilight had spread across the still sky. Finally Dad answered in a low, unfanatical voice, as he focused pensively on an unlit, naked bulb hanging from the ceiling: ‘Yes.’

‘Are you sure? Sure that…’ Hans Henrik moved away from the door frame, stepped into the kitchen, leaned both hands against the counter, hung his head low, and spoke first to the sideboard, then to the wall, and finally to his own chest.

‘National Socialism is a good ideology. It’s the ideology of union and solidarity. Here everyone works as one to resurrect an entire country, an entire nation, and soon a whole continent. It’s the ideology of perseverance and collaboration, development and the future, the total opposite of Communism, which brings slavery and destruction, revolution and blood. Everything is looking up here and everyone finally has a job.’

He looked up to stare at Mum, who still stood by the sink.

‘Massa, don’t you understand that they’re building a new world here? We’re living through historic times.’

‘But your father says that—’

‘Father is a man of the old regime, a lackey to the Danes.’

‘So isn’t he a lackey to the Germans now? How can you be against the Danish colonisation of Iceland but welcome the German colonisation of Denmark at the same time?’

Dad clenched his teeth: ‘Because the Danish bastards deserve it.’

‘Hansi,’ Mum whispered. ‘Where does this rage come from?’

‘Sorry. But it’s just that when… when a new world is being built, nationality is of no importance. Ideals know no borders.’

‘But borders know ideals when the ideals start running over them with tanks.’

She was such a wise woman, my Mum. And it is, of course, painful for me to recall that conversation and listen to the bullshit coming out of Dad’s mouth. He, who would have become a doctor in Old Norse studies, if he hadn’t been so stupid. My darling little dad. Why didn’t you listen to your father? Grandad Sveinn immediately saw straight through the Nazis. Apparently he’d had to sit through long meetings with these men, who considered it a weakness to sit in a chair and express oneself in words instead of yells. He got on better with the Brits.

‘Massa! You… you don’t understand! Sometimes one has to show strength!’

Mum hardly ever lost her temper but did now. ‘I think I understand better than… why don’t you, Hans Henrik Björnsson, an Icelander in his prime, walk down one floor and knock on Jacek and Magda’s door and… no, break their door down and order them and their children to lie on their bed while you root through their drawers and cupboards for valuables and solemnly announce to them… yes, in that military manner… that their apartment is now yours! That the rightful owner is Hans Henrik Björ—’

She didn’t get to finish her sentence, which was truncated by the sudden slamming of a door.

I turned to Mum. ‘Is Dad really going to take their apartment?’