The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

31 Danish Primary School 1940

We were stuck in Denmark until autumn and beyond. There were few trips by ship to Iceland and they were risky. German and British submarines were locked in a relentless ship hunt and there wasn’t a single whale in the sea that was unaffected by the war. Grandma Georgía went back to Iceland in autumn, on the famous Petsamo trip, in which two hundred Icelanders living in Nordic countries were offered the option of sailing home on the Esja but first had to make their way to Petsamo, a fishing village on the northern tip of Finland. Grandma insisted on our not coming with her. ‘You don’t put all your golden eggs into one boat.’ Puti immediately feigned offence and said, ‘Am I not a golden egg then, Mum?’ since he was to accompany her on the trip.

‘No, you’re a balding egg,’ I answered.

Mum and I were due to travel on the next crossing. But it never happened. Dad had vanished to his war job in midsummer, and the two of us were left in the embassy residence. In light of events, the embassy had been shut down, but the sale of the upstairs apartment had been delayed for many months because of the occupation. Initially we held on to our heroic chef Helle and chauffeur Rainer. He descended from Franco-German nobility but had lost all the papers that proved it in the mess of World War I. The genes were still firmly implanted in him, however, because his heels always clicked when he was forced to wait in a corner or on a pavement. He sported three bushy black eyebrows on his face: two on his forehead and one on his upper lip.

At the beginning of September, I was placed in the local school. The first day didn’t go well because I came home with ‘scrap wounds.’ The kids had surrounded me in the yard and jeered at me: ‘Klipfisk! Klipfisk!’ – Salted fish! Salted fish! A day later the teaching started. The teacher was a fat gentleman with a high-pitched voice.

‘And here we have a new pupil from Iceland, Miss Björnsson. Perhaps you’d like to tell us a little bit about Iceland? Is it true what they say, that no trees grow there?’

‘No. But they’re very short. They say if you get lost in an Icelandic forest, you only have to stand up.’

The class laughed loudly to show they were laughing at me and not my joke.

‘But they also say that to see Danish mountains you have to bend down.’

For that impudence I was beaten up in the school playground and came home with a torn ear. I refused to go the next day, and a week-long school strike followed, until Mum found a cosy little school for me up by the Rosenborg Park that went under the charming name of Sølvgades Skole, Silver Street School, and every morning Rainer drove me there.

The bullying of Icelandic children in Danish schools seemed to have been approved by the parliament as part of the national syllabus, since I got the exact same treatment from this elementary school as I had from the previous one.

‘Salted fish! Salted fish!’

The teacher was a tall blond man with thin hair and thick-lensed glasses who finished his introduction by mispronouncing my name to gales of laughter in the classroom, and the nickname ‘Hebron’ was whispered around the room. The Hebron Hotel was a notorious brothel at the time, so the children thought it was hilarious.

‘Hello, Hebron!’

That was how all my classes started, but worst of all were the breaktimes, when I was pushed around like a pest-infested goat. I tried to go on strike again, but Mum stubbornly insisted that things would get better and pushed me into the car every morning. Things only got worse. Sometimes I literally had to flee school. Luckily I had three big gardens to choose from and a rich variety of trees to hide behind. Then on the next corner there was the National Gallery of Denmark, where I sometimes took refuge and managed to shake off the kids down its maze of corridors. Ever since that time, I’ve been able to move through museums at high speed, thanks to my well-trained eyes.

In autumn of 1940, the National Gallery was, of course, under German control. There was no Cubism, Fauvism or Expressionism on show, just Nazism. Athletic men brandishing spears and obedient women breastfeeding. It’s amazing how staid all tyrants are when it comes to art. The Nazis sent an entire race to the gas chambers but couldn’t tolerate the slightest mutilation on canvas.