The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

53 Daughters-in-Law 2009

And now I dabble in cyber-crime – but only to keep in some kind of contact with my daughters-in-law.

The last dose of family I had was when Haraldur’s daughter, Gudrún Marsibil, visited me here before Christmas last year. She left me a box of chocolates – which I still have, even though its contents have been eaten – before she disappeared to Australia, where she is studying some kind of tourism thingy and trains as a swimmer. They’re bouncing around in bright, sunny pools now, those ancient Breidafjördur fishing genes.

The real hassles with my family started in the mid-1990s when, to my misfortune, they managed to convince me that a patient with advanced emphysema and chronic cancer would be better off vegetating in the company of other zombies. By then I was completely bedridden and out of it, owing to the wrong medication. I left taps running and kept milk cartons under my bed. Things often got pretty smelly as a result. In the end, Haraldur threatened to sue me for slipping up on the amount of pills I was swallowing, and his wife had a smoke detector installed in my room, which screeched at me from the ceiling, like a wrathful god, every time I blew smoke out of my nostrils. ‘We can’t allow her to smoke in bed, she could set the house on fire,’ I heard her say down the corridor. I paid a kid next door to disconnect the detector, but she was as stubborn as hell. My addiction reached new heights when I lay there puffing under the piercing screeches from the ceiling, enjoying some of the best smokes of my life.

In the end, though, I gave in, being so deeply moved by their sudden interest in their mother and mother-in-law. But I looked on it as a temporary stay and always aimed to get back to my parents’ house, on Skothúsvegur, where I’d lived after Mum’s death in autumn of ’88. Naturally, I immediately missed my smokes in bed and the view of Reykjavík Lake through the blinds, where I was free of long corridors and social intercourse. They drove me up to a place that masquerades as a nursing home but is really nothing more than a wing of a famous retirement home for old sailors. The institution was called Skjól, the Shelter, but all I ever experienced there were battles and storms. I called it the penitentiary, a place where they dump people who insist on surviving and refuse to die. Everyone is served a life sentence there.

Haraldur and his wife said goodbye to me with far too much glee. Naturally this had all been concocted for their convenience, not mine. They could finally stop worrying about the old biddy; she was now in the gelid clutches of the system.

That’s what society is made for.

So I’d been dumped in an old folks’ home, not even seventy years old. For a while, even I believed I was condemned to accept their services and care until I’d kicked the bucket. But after three years I snapped out of this institutional coma; it dawned on me that maybe I wouldn’t die today or tomorrow, that maybe I’d live for another year or two. That was eight years ago.

I decided to escape. And I did so by disguising myself as rubbish on wheels. I threw a black bin bag over myself, slipped into the goods lift on a wheelchair called Thunderbird, pressed the right button, and, before I knew it, was sitting in a van. I stayed with the driver that night, in a basement apartment. He offered me a drink. I asked him if he needed a woman. He reacted by disappearing into a cupboard and returned with a wig, which I have worn ever since. Then he crouched over me with his pungent smell of sweat and lay me on the sofa. I slept like a baby under some ghastly paintings and a collection of poems. And dreamed of Dad as a young man.

A day later I’d been tracked down. The supervisor from the institution (a broad-shouldered heroine with thick lips and three or four sets of breasts) showed up and I did some crying for her, managed to squeeze some tears out of those dried-up lemons my eyes have become. But she wasn’t moved. ‘Now you’re going to come with me in the car, Herbjörg, isn’t that right?’ It was only when I threatened a poop-to-rule strike that she picked up the phone, and she was already out on the steps when she finally got hold of Dóra, who had an empty garage. For a whole week, I slept in the newly vacated room of a young girl, under pink bookshelves, while Gudjón worked on getting the garage ready. Rarely has a man radiated such joy as when he was asked to set up a kitchen unit and toilet in his own garage.

The supervisor from the institution asked whether I didn’t want to let my ‘next of kin’ know. I asked her to notify my three sons that their mother was now living in cyberspace, planet no. 15.463. Gudjón then went off with his pockets full of my money and bought a computer and state-of-the-art router for me. HP, it’s called, and it’s still working.

Gudjón and Dóra turned out to be better than my own children. The garage is a fine old folks’ home in its own right. Generally speaking, Icelanders use their garages not to keep their cars in but to store the junk they don’t need in their race against time, stuff like wind-bent tent poles, obsolete lawn mowers and old people. I know of at least three other contemporary paupers like me in this city, or garage relics, as I like to call them.

It was certainly no thanks to my boys that I found my shelter. And as I’ve already mentioned, two of my sons have never seen me in here, in the eight years I’ve lived here, and the third one has only looked in twice. But this no-show is, no doubt, also due to the old bags, that is, me and those women called my daughters-in-law. My boys actually all ended up marrying the same woman, same mould, as they used to say, and as different from their mother as they could possibly be. They belong to that purely Icelandic species of busybodies with smooth blond hair, deep-set eyes and a big tangle of nerves, fast-talking women with heavy heels who do their makeup in the car and answer their phones during hospital visits, never stopping, always rushing off to here and there, saying ‘Hi!’ like chainsaws, and only smoking when their cigarettes are lit, but at all other times declaring that they have quit smoking. Just like the diets they obsessively follow between meals.

I sometimes wonder where these women came from in our society, because I can’t remember meeting them in Breidafjördur before the war, nor in Reykjavík in the post-war boom. They call themselves girls, which is in fact what they are, since they’ve never reached womanhood, never walked in a long dress, never owned a fur or a pearl necklace, gone to an opera, read Doris Lessing, sat on a train, or danced their way below deck, locked in the arms of a tango man, and they have therefore never known chivalry, and I don’t blame them, since our country is a whole three hours away from good manners. On top of everything, they can’t even pronounce a word of French; my daughters-in-laws’ greatest aspiration is to sip a glass of ‘camembert sauvignon.’

I myself came back to Iceland three times after spells abroad and on each occasion was referred to in the gossip columns as a ‘lady of the world,’ just because I wore lipstick and bought men drinks. And on each occasion I managed to drink that label away because I’ve always felt best as one of the boys. I was in my element when the women had gone home and I was left sitting with the gin-sodden doctors and smoke-puffing wholesalers. That was when all the good stories and stuff came out. It’s terribly boring to be a lady but such great fun to be a mister.