The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

43 Mother of Kings 1959–1969

Haraldur, Ólafur and Magnús, my sons are called. By coincidence I opted for the names of three little Norwegian kings: Harald Fairhair, Ólaf Tryggvason and Magnús the Lawmender. And I’m Herbjörg, the kings’ mother. In keeping with my rank, I tried to maintain as low a profile as possible in that baby-making and to disturb the royal paternal genes as little as I could on their journey into and out of my uterus. They therefore inherited none of their mother’s facial features nor anything of her gentle, loving temperament.

Haraldur arrived in ’59, with a huge, pelvis-shattering head. He was an obnoxious child (so much so that I fled from his cradle), an insipid adolescent, and a dry stick of an adult. The mercantile genes obviously didn’t stretch very far. Haraldur had many interests and swallowed up anything that came his way. But all the knowledge he picked up vanished into the mop of hair that was his head, never to be seen again. He sucked in the whole world but never gave anything back, just like his father in his business. He always reminded me of that old blotting paper used in offices in the days of yore. And right in its core there was a blob as black as ink: the sentence he had passed on his mother for having put him up for adoption at his granny’s so that she could debauch herself on Die Sexyger Jahre in Deutschland. There was no point in taunting him with tales of his mother’s party exploits on the Continent. He was never able to stomach the Beatles.

Haraldur is a born lawyer who could have spared himself those years of academic studies. I offered to testify that the boy didn’t need to take any exams, since he had mounted a case against his mother for neglect in the Kangaroo Court of Iceland before he’d even reached the age of four and had filed several lawsuits against her since. Greed, however, has always prevented him from defending anyone but himself. Speculation therefore became his area of expertise. Haraldur’s main activity is the acquisition of houses and apartments that other people live in. The meaning of life clearly wasn’t a subject covered by the law faculty of the University of Iceland.

Ólafur Helgi arrived in 1965. The name was chosen unconsciously. Despite his holy name (Helgi), my Ólafur was more like the Viking king Ólaf Tryggvason than like his namesake Ólaf the Holy. With his stubborn brain and missionary heart, he has travelled the globe spreading the good word about himself. He developed an interest in gastronomy early on, and I blame myself for that, being such a lazy cook, while he always went hungry. After dipping his finger into this and that, his path led him into all kinds of kitchens around the world. For a long time he managed the kitchen of a spa centre and for a while ran a catering service in Newcastle, but he found the Limeys a bit too stingy.

Now he lives in Bergen, where he’s been for many years, delivering smorgasbord buffets made by his own company, I think, but what does he tell his mother? Nothing, of course. Not a tiny sausage. Since I visited him some years back, he’s sent me nothing but bone-dry Christmas greetings.

The youngest is my Magnús, Prince Potato, born in the spring of 1969, my third attempt at giving birth to a genius. And now you can laugh if you like, but he truly can be called Magnús Lawmender because he got higher qualifications than his father, the post-Jón genealogy expert, ever had. How generous of me to have married and given birth to all these lawyers, considering how lawless I am. Magnús followed his brother’s example and earns his crust in the world of finance. He’s the banker in the family, or bankster, as they call them now.

His job was to dangle the carrot in front of the asses and lure them into the self-deceit that they could instantly borrow a better life, as of today, that they didn’t have to slave away all their lives to buy a dream house to die in. Back home in Breidafjördur you needed the sweat of sixteen generations to acquire a half-decent roof over your head, but these people wanted it all before the weekend. So my Magnús was close at hand to dish out lifetime credit, those infamous currency basket loans.

Instead of paying down the principal with every instalment, each instalment got added to the principal. So the next payment would be even higher still and the principal rose over and over again until the mortgage on a first-floor apartment shot up to the fourth. By the end of the crash, and the crumbled currency it left in its wake, people owed as much as the value of the entire block but were still forced to clear out and build themselves nests in the bicycle shed.

It’s always been a bit strange, life in Iceland.

These loan sharks (e.g., Magnús’s bosses) clearly capitalised on the credit slavery of these common people and then took their gains to the market, where they traded in spiralling bonds and shares, until they came home, like the old father in the folktale with four rotten apples in his sack. That was the genius of the Icelandic economic boom for you. They even managed to sink the Eimskip shipping company, which Grandad Sveinn had founded in 1914. Which only goes to prove that new saying: He who owns nothing can do anything, but he who owns everything can do nothing.

He was therefore badly hit by the crash, my Magnús. He too had taken out some sky-high loan that came tumbling down on him. The patio went, and the house, although the car survived with a dent. And to think he was just getting back on his feet after his divorce six years ago, an event that hit him so badly that he eventually put himself under house arrest. Misfortune comes in truckloads, but luck always rides alone, old people used to say. The enterprising Ragnheidur, Magnus’s ex-wife and the mother of his children, didn’t restrict herself to two-timing him in the disabled toilets around town, as her mother-in-law so shrewdly discovered, but she also stripped him of his possessions, and that after having played the part of primus motor in a plot to sell off my dear old house. She is and will always remain my favourite enemy.

I call her Rainmaker because she generally brings heavy downpours. Once, she even managed to reduce the four-times-over widow that I am to tears. But she herself always sports a steely smile, looking nice and lovely. Lies and treachery are the last things that would come to people’s minds as she pecks them on the cheek, let alone wild passion. A frigid haddock, more like it. And this is something my Prince Potato confirmed to me as he sat weeping in this garage a year ago: she was ice cold in the bedroom department. Back west, women like that were called frozen fish. He therefore came out of that marriage completely frozen, poor fellow, and couldn’t get his tool to work again until, years later, a short woman with a Buddha smile managed to thaw it with her tantric fingers.

As for Rainmaker, she took her freezing appliance all over town, enticing unsuspecting men who mistook her frost for love, abandoning their children and homes. My Dóra, who reads all the gossip mags, told me about two fathers of families whom she had lured into her freezer, only to wake up frostbitten in their own gardens at the crack of dawn: their wives had found them there naked and trembling, with freshly broken hearts and pubic hairs on their lips.