The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

27 Mother and Daughter in Copenhagen 1940

That was how my father’s military career started: with a 132-step journey into the poisonous depths of history, where he remained for the next five years. He enlisted at a military academy just outside Berlin. Mum and I moved in with Grandma Georgía in Copenhagen. Grandad had gone home. In the wake of the occupation of Denmark, the ambassador had been called back to Iceland and forced by the Germans to take a long route: down to Genoa and from there on to New York, where he woke up on the day of the occupation of Iceland, attended a few obligatory functions, and then sailed to Reykjavík on the MS Dettifoss.

In the space of a few days, the family had been broken apart. While Dad rested on a hard German army bunk, Grandad lay in the arms of the Atlantic Ocean reading about the occupation of Iceland in the New York Times, and Grandma sat up wide awake in the lukewarm ambassadorial bed in Copenhagen reading Lucky Per by Pontoppidan, as she often did in times of high anxiety. Mum and I, on the other hand, both sat on a German train that rattled vigorously across the German border. I tried to keep myself awake by pressing my forehead hard against the cold, grimy window so that the shaking would prevent me from falling asleep, but I soon succumbed.

Mum spent the entire first evening crying in Helle’s arms while Grandma, who because of her position couldn’t embrace people, sat opposite them and shook her head at her son’s incomprehensible decision. How could he have joined the army that daily humiliated his mother’s native land? Yes, here we sat: four disenchanted women who had found some respite from the infernal clutches of time to sigh a little about the stupidity of men.

All the jollity had vanished from the streets of Copenhagen. This great ‘redbrick Paris’ was but a shadow of its former self; German long coats were on every corner and the streets were smothered by a Sunday-like silence. Restaurants were closed, lights were out in most windows, and even the spiral towers seemed terrified. Virtually no one had been killed and not a single building had been blown up, but the people’s eyes reflected a nation in ruins.

Icelanders, on the other hand, were happy to be invaded. Anyone who lives on a forsaken cold crag an hour’s journey by boat away from the nearest post office will gladly welcome any guest, even if he is bearing a gun.

I sensed, though, that the German occupation of Denmark went down worse with the men than with the women. They took the humiliation more personally and muttered into their breast pockets that they would have happily died trying to delay the Germans’ march into their flat country. ‘Even by just half an hour.’ And that’s men down to a T. They choose death over wounded pride. Women deal with it better because they’re used to lying under strangers.

Still though, I’m not sure the Glistrup approach to defence (abolishing the army and buying an answering machine with a ‘we surrender’ recorded message on it) is the best solution for the wretched nations of the north. It would be more suitable to put together a Nordic army made up of only women. That way there would never be any danger of an invasion. Men never shoot women unless they’re unarmed.

Like the city itself, the embassy had acquired a funereal air. Grandma had aged by a whole decade and was never without a cigarillo. We later realised her marriage was in shreds. In the preceding years Grandad had travelled a great deal, attending meetings in Malmö and Madrid and Icelandic promotions in Brussels and Bern… Grandma didn’t fail to notice that her husband’s daily programme frequently ended with a recital from her niece, Lone Bang.