The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

40 Surf White 1940

Mum and I were left behind in two hundred square metres, like two stray sheep stuck in a chapter of the history of Iceland that had already been written but was still waiting to be printed.

Time after time, I went back to knock on Anneli’s dead door, and my school days soon came to an end. The assistant head had finally phoned Mum to tell her how things stood: her daughter hadn’t been seen in school for five whole weeks. Mum took it very badly. After swallowing the shock, she switched from defence mode into attack and unleashed her fury on the Danish schoolmaster in that glacial Breidafjördur manner: Why the hell did they wait five whole weeks to tell her this? The child could have been led astray!

And started stripping in public toilets, I silently added, secretly kneeling by my bed arranging my jewels in the box.

Her shrill islander’s voice resounded down the floorboards and echoed against the rosette on the ceiling. ‘But this is really un-of-heard!’ she exclaimed in bad Danish. Her mistaken vocabulary, furious tone, and poor pronunciation amplified the echo and the fact that there were two decent people here who were stuck in the wrong place.

But we tried to make the most of it, and the weeks leading up to Christmas were among the best I had in all those wartime years. I confessed how I’d skipped school and then told Mum about my time there, without dwelling too much on my bad treatment to spare her any guilt. Nevertheless, she cried and hugged me, pressing me deep into her thick black hair. I could have sworn I picked up a scent of seaweed. And then it was decided that she herself would teach me until Christmas; she had all the time in the world and enough money to last us into the New Year.

She taught me Danish, arithmetic and spelling. But also sewing and cooking: porridge, white sauce, potato purée and brown sauce. I learned how to make all those things with Mum, and they’ve lasted me a lifetime. There’s far too much fuss about books in schools. Naturally, our best moments were the ones that were dedicated to nothing and therefore included everything. Exactly the kind of everything I still remember today.

Mum boiled eggs under a twelve-foot ceiling while I lay on the sofa reading letters from Dad – ‘They wake us at four here, früh am Morgen, as they call it. The early bird gets the worm!’ – or I browsed through the Familie Journal magazine and read about German film stars. But all of a sudden Mum would come gliding in on high heels and do a spin in the middle of the floor. ‘What do you think of this fine, fine lady?’ Then a big laugh. She enjoyed trying on the thirty pairs of shoes Grandma had left behind in the cupboard and getting me to rate her performance in the high heels. They made a nice clatter on the shiny waxed floors. My mother Massa: the massive woman. On the way back she sometimes paused by the grand piano to run a finger over its keys in her longing to conjure up some magical sounds from that three-legged creature. No doubt it’s the same principle that applies to men fondling women. ‘If you’ve no hope, then grope,’ as Grandma Vera might have said.

I put down the letters and magazines and impatiently waited for the next fashion parade: this was a good opportunity to observe my mother and admire her, that marvellous, marvellous woman. Her thighs had thickened and her stomach grown, while her breasts had shrunk and fused to form a horizontal ledge over her rib cage. Her hair kept its thickness and created a strong frame around her vigorous face, which in its red-lipped whiteness reminded me slightly of Anneli’s face, although they were, of course, very different. Anneli was a gentle rose and Mum a sharp-eyed seal.

Mum was beautiful in a rather Icelandic way, in the same way that the gravel slopes of the Thórsmörk Ridge are called beautiful. She had these beautiful eyebrows and then, of course, that islander’s whiteness, that white, white skin, which I always envied her and which Dad had probably fallen for. The poet Steinn had called her Surf White. My skin, on the other hand, was just canvas stretched over bones, which I then managed to colour through smoking and drink. Grandma Verbjörg was just as bad as I was, so Mum had clearly inherited her beautiful skin from her father, Salómon. The phenomenon wasn’t uncommon in Breidafjördur, since for centuries the islanders had been fed on seal fat, as soft as fire and as white as milk.

‘Mum, have you left Dad?’ I asked when the fashion parade was over.

‘Didn’t he leave me?’

‘But I mean, when he comes back, don’t you want him to come back to us then?’

‘If he co…’ She halted the thought that travelled through every European woman’s mind in 1940, out of consideration for me, and instead said: ‘I don’t know, what do you want?’

‘Me? I just want Hjalti to choke on his own screams and for all this to be over and for Dad to come here so we can go home to Iceland. No, home to the islands. Tomorrow.’

It was a strangely infantile statement to come from a newly crowned woman. She smiled through tight lips, leaned forward, and then burst into a laugh.

‘Ah, you little thing.’

Then she rushed over to me, threw herself on the sofa, ruffled my hair as if to say what a pipe dream it was, and then finally hugged me. It felt good, so good.

‘Tomorrow!’ she mimicked me, laughing, before switching to a serious tone. ‘I certainly wish this madness could end tomorrow.’

‘And would you take Dad back then?’

She directed her blue eyes into mine; under her dense black eyebrows they looked like a heavily overcast fjord. But then she looked away and stared out into the living room a moment, out beyond the grand piano and through an open door into the crystal-crowned dining room, yes, all the way into the kitchen, where two white eggs boiled with reckless abandon in the pot. She was thinking not about them but about other objects that were just as fragile and boiling; I sensed it. She was quiet a long moment, as parents sometimes are with their children when they need to express something about life that cannot be communicated in words. Then she stood up and walked out of the living room, past the grand piano, through the open door into the crystal-crowned dining room, and all the way into the kitchen, where two white eggs boiled with reckless abandon in the pot. She did this in white high-heeled, laced boots: the sound of her footsteps resounded like a soldier’s all over the house, all the way into the kitchen. It was clear what the heels were saying.