The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

32 Other People’s Poop 1940

Children are cruel animals, with a bestial sense of smell and sharp intuition. They immediately sniffed out that the newcomer was not only an Icelander but something even worse. It’s no coincidence that ‘The Ugly Duckling’ happens to be the Danes’ national tale.

Mum had sent me to school warning me never to let the other kids know I spoke German. But she herself had made the mistake of sending me there with traditional Icelandic rye bread (Grandma Georgía liked it so much that she taught Helle how to bake it) stuffed with seal meat sent from home that we had carried around since Lübeck. Moreover, she’d cut the bread widthwise instead of lengthwise, the way the Danes have done by royal decree since the year 1112.

‘What are you eating? Seal-shit bread? And cut widthways! Is everyone cross-eyed in Greenland like you?’

‘Nein!’

With that my fate was sealed. German discipline terrorised adults during the occupation of Denmark; no one dared to criticise the Germans or German-speaking Danes. The so-called Danish liberation struggle didn’t start until liberation day, when everyone wanted to have been a hero. But children were another story. The things that were only whispered in their homes were repeated out loud in the school playgrounds. Yes, the yards, lanes, alleys, corridors and paths. Actually, the Danish resistance only existed among children.

The Danish word for hell, helvede, is far too soft to describe the things I had to suffer in Sølvgade. Girls burned my hair with candles, and boys put smelly hot turds in my boots and then stood there sneering at a distance, watching me in the cloakroom. I struck the pose of a submissive nation – proud, proud, proud! – and acted as if nothing were wrong, slipped my feet into the Danish shit, and then walked past the rapturous piercing jeers of the Lasses and Björns. As usual, the car was waiting for me outside, but I slipped out of a side exit and took the street. I didn’t want to soil Iceland’s private car.

It gives you an odd feeling to walk on someone else’s shit. And ever since, I’ve had problems walking the streets of Copenhagen; I always feel the hot excrement pressing up between my toes. With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat the size of a grenade, I crossed the City Hall Square and headed down to Kalvebod Brygge. Mum wasn’t at home, and Helle embraced me alone. She had massive breasts that were good to sink into, a short lady with perennially bare arms that reminded me of hot, fragrant loaves of bread (which are not baked in a mould but allowed to rise on their own on a plate). Her face was always sprinkled with yeast and possessed a fully baked expression, creamy teeth, tasty lips and pastry-brown cheeks peppered with freckles that looked like sesame seeds on buns. But on that day it was difficult to abandon myself in her Danish bosom.

‘Are we a bit sad today?’ she asked in Danish. ‘Oh dear, what a mess! Now we’ll just take a bath and it’ll all be fixed!’

She promised not to tell Mum that I’d had a little accident in my boots today. No one could find out. Not even Åse, my Norwegian friend. She went to a German school and got invited to birthdays by upper-class kids. The quisling’s daughter was the beautiful fruit of the occupation. She was secure, but I was wrong everywhere I went. To Åse I was too Danish. At school I was too German. And to everyone too Icelandic. I never fitted in. At any time in my life. In Argentina after the war, people thought I was German and looked at me askance. In Germany, when they realised I’d been to Argentina, people looked at me askance. And at home I was a Nazi, in America a Communist, and on a trip to the Soviet Union I was accused of ‘capitalistic behaviour.’ In Iceland I was too travelled, on my travels too Icelandic. And I was never elegant enough for the presidential residence in Bessastadir, while in Bolungarvík, where I lived with my sailor Bæring, they called me a prima donna. Women told me I drank like a man, men like a slut. In my flings I was deemed too keen; in my relationships too frigid. I couldn’t fit in any damned where and was therefore always looking for the next party. I was a relentless fugitive on the run, and that’s where the endless escape that’s been my life started – in that elementary school in Sølvgade in September 1940.