The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

45 Amrum 1941

Amrum is one of the Frisian Islands, those white sandbanks that glisten like multiple earrings dangling by the throat of Germany, if we look at Denmark as the head.

Frau Baum stood on the pier in an impeccably ironed raincoat and rolled-up hair, splay-footed in high-heeled boots that made her look like Mary Poppins in that film I didn’t see until several hundred pages later. But as we drew closer, her face was grey and stern. The woman, just under forty, seemed to be afflicted by her big lips and overly small eyes, and enveloped in gloom. Her eyes immediately reminded me of two little peas on an empty plate, although her lips were more like two curved sausages. Her children stood shivering in her shadow, three obedient German mice, and further down the pier stood a girl of my age with a wrinkled brow. Her name was Heike, a German through and through, who just like me was kept here away from the war. Her mother had perished in the first British bombing of Berlin, and her father was currently unleashing his sorrow on French farmers.

A crew member carried my case ashore. It contained most of my clothes, brand-new rubber boots, two old, bound Icelandic Sagas and the precious sexy box from the heartsick Anneli. Frau Baum laid claim to it all with a single austere glance.

Like the other Frisian Islands, Amrum is a slightly convex sand dune, shell-white on the sea side, with tufts of grey grass on top. It’s six times bigger than our biggest island in Breidafjördur, and during the war about a thousand people lived there: women, children and incapacitated men.

The Baum family lived in Norddorf, a village of 365 on the northern tip of the island. The house was in the classical Frisian style, white with a steep, dark straw roof. Its interior was dominated by squeaky-clean floors, and every piece of furniture served its purpose. The walls were bare and white except in the living room, where a black-and-white photograph of the master of the household in a Nazi uniform hung, and the kitchen, which was adorned with a coloured picture of the Führer with a lupine expression. It was an old European tradition, rooted in centuries of penury, for people to eat under the watchful eyes of the emperor in the hope that his gaze would nourish their half-empty stomachs.

With clear zeal in her voice, the lady proudly showed me around the house, but she soon revealed her penny-pinching nature when she launched into a long lecture on the quality of the down in my quilt, which she had specifically bought from a farmer on the island, and then insisted on unpacking my luggage herself. I watched helplessly as my case vanished into her room, and was unable to say which of its contents mattered to me the most, except maybe for my German, which I seemed to have buried way at the bottom.

I was mute for the first few days. A nervous breakdown doesn’t blow over in just a few hours. I felt insecure and insignificant, and missed my mother the way a boat misses the sea. Besides, the Frau didn’t inspire conversation, and Heike looked askance at me, told me she didn’t speak any Danish, let alone Icelandic, and carefully kept her things to herself. The women of Copenhagen had seen their share of hardship, but in the eyes of this twelve-year-old girl for the first time I could read about all the misery the war had to offer. Her life was clearly a smouldering ruin. On my first night, I lay awake missing Mum and observed the girl, Heike, in her sleep. At regular intervals she jerked in her bed and buried her head under the quilt. That’s how the soul works; it tries to wear down each shock by endlessly replaying it until it has exhausted all its pain.

The next day I followed her to school. But once we were in the classroom, she acted as if she didn’t know me, and didn’t seem to have any friends in the class either. I later discovered she didn’t speak the islanders’ language. Because even though classes were taught in German, all the kids spoke Frisian to each other. It was a bizarre language. Somebody commented that Frisian was like shipwrecked Dutch. To me the locals always sounded like a dead-drunk Dane on an English merchant ship trying to speak German to a Dutch whore. But to be more poetic I’d say that Frisian is the only true language of the sea. When the North Sea comes ashore and meanders up to the nearest pub, it orders a beer in Frisian.

But I’m told that the Frisians have now lost their language of the sea, and that their noble tongue is spoken by only three old biddies in an old folks’ home in Husum, and that attempts are being made to keep them alive at all costs.

I had come well armoured, of course, after the Danish treatment, and was determined to integrate into the group. It turned out to be easier than expected. The school was completely free of Danish-style torture. Maybe because German was almost as alien to Frisian kids as it was to Icelanders. Moreover, our teacher, Fräulein Osinga, made sure none stepped out of line. She was a blond, pale-skinned woman in her forties, peculiarly beautiful in her own humble way, a kind of Marlene Dietrich with a hair bun but no lovers, like the rest of the women in Amrum. Most of them were real or grass widows. Here there were only a few elderly gentlemen who were too over the hill to face the war and had therefore developed feminine sensitivities. (Men believe in the principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, up to the point when these bodily parts start to drop off.)

The island was virtually a Fraueninsel, or Island of Women.

The school therefore gave me a warm welcome, and being a wind-beaten islander by birth, I blended into this world with a great ease. After a month in Amrum I had not only acquired a Frisian friend but also started to sing in that bizarre language that still resounds in my head, like a ragged flag on a rusty pole. No doubt I should donate my skull to the United Nations Museum of Extinct Languages.

Frau Baum wasn’t too happy about having another mouth to feed in the house, although I know Dad sent her a decent amount of money to cover my keep. And they certainly weren’t poor. Herr Professor Dr Baum was a high-ranking and well-paid official in the Millennial Reich. He was seldom in Friesland. One often forgets that the commotion of war generates a monstrous tangle of red tape; he rarely got a break from his rubber stamping and filing. Their home in Amrum had initially served as the family’s summerhouse, but it now seemed wiser to keep the Frau there with the children until the Germans had won the war.

British Spitfires flew over the island almost on a daily basis, making a big racket on their way to bombing Hamburg or Berlin. The boys in the village had fun counting the planes and cheered heartily if they reckoned two or three were missing on the way back. Amrum wasn’t a target, of course. It was an island outside the war zone, a natural air-raid shelter. I’d actually found a peaceful island in a continent at war, and I tried to make the most of it once I’d recovered from my collapse, although Heike and I would naturally have to wage a war against the Frau.