The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

29 Death of a Soldier 1940

We were silent on the way home. I looked around at the people, streets and houses. You could tell Denmark was a dead country at a mere glance. It was clear that even the lamp posts were in mourning. Cars drove down the streets in a funereal silence. Many windows were concealed behind dark curtains, and pitch-black swastikas fluttered over public buildings like ominous eagles. All of a sudden I felt the chill of the occupation and broke into a cold sweat at the same time that I reached the height of my ten years, acquired a new maturity, and understood that Mum was right: it is impossible to occupy a country. It’s like wanting to control someone in his own home.

I said goodbye to Åse on the landing and ran up the stairs into our apartment, which now seemed as vast as a whole region to me: the last free patch in Denmark, an Icelandic island in the middle of the ocean of war, inhabited by a few isolated people.

Yes, we were even more isolated than the people back home in Breidafjördur because now there was no longer any telephone contact with Reykjavík. The last phone call had come from Grandad to Grandma: ‘They want me to be governor. It’s a new post, temporary, while the occupation lasts.’ Then Grandma passed the receiver to Dad, and the future governor of Iceland spoke with Hitler’s future soldier. I remember him standing in the long corridor, with one foot on a Turkish rug and the expression of a stubborn twelve-year-old as he listened to his father.

‘Son, they… they say that a father who watches his son go to war feels… feels two things.’ His voice quivered slightly. ‘Pride, on one hand… and apprehension, on the other.’

‘Yeah?’

‘It pains me, son… It pains me to feel only one of those emotions.’

‘Yeah?’

I think Dad was spared a death on the battlefield by the fact that he was already dead before he left.