The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

4 Hotel Iceland 1928

My father, Hans Henrik, was the firstborn of Sveinn Björnsson and his Danish wife, Georgía. He was born in 1908 and was therefore four years younger than my mother. She was the daughter of the aforementioned Verbjörg Jónsdóttir and a one-night stand named Salómon, who died in the storm of 1927.

Mum was always called Massa, although her name was actually Gudrún Marsibil Salbjörg Salómonsdóttir. She had been given the names of the three women who had helped Grandma the most. As Grandma liked to say, ‘Since I’d been such a miser with my eggs, I had to give all the names to my Massa.’ And it paid off. The three women had obviously fused in Mum to produce one good one. A triply good one. If Grandma Vera had been ‘good and good,’ as she would often say about things, then Mum was good and good and good. Then I came along and I wasn’t even plain good. Somehow, I was totally devoid of that gentle, tireless spirit, kindness and innate sense of sacrifice associated with the Svefneyjar islands of Breidafjördur, where I spent my first seven years. I was a rotten mother and an even worse granny.

Mum and Dad met in Reykjavík, at a ball in the Hotel Iceland, or so the story goes. Maybe they’d met dead drunk up some blind alley and ripped each other’s clothes off behind a rubbish bin. What do we know of our conception? Barely more than ‘God’ about the creation of the universe.

Massa was a lively girl from the West Fjords, who lodged at Mrs Höpfner’s at Hafnarstræti 5. Dad had yet to finish high school, a pale, intelligent boy with timid eyes, a privileged child who lived south of the Reykjavík Lake, in the second-nicest house in town. Grandad Sveinn and Grandma Georgía had become an ambassadorial couple in Copenhagen by then, so Dad lived alone in the big house with the cook and a paternal aunt who was entrusted with the care of the boy and later blamed herself for how things turned out. Dad’s best friend was Benni Thors, who lived next door in the finest house in the country. Benni’s father was the wealthiest man in the land, and his brother Ólafur later became prime minister.

How could a boy with a background like my father’s have fallen for a maid from the west who’d been conceived in a rowing boat under a glacier and, worse still, came with a past and was a whole four years older than he was? It was obviously no small feat to bring me into this world. But the Almighty Farmer Above, as my grandma used to call the Creator, had cast His nets and hooks over the town and lured my future father into a drinking binge with the Thors brothers that night, and they dragged him to the Hotel Iceland, chucking pebbles at the ducks on the way and chanting the latest hit song at the cops they passed – ‘I scream for ice cream!’ – while Mum was doing up her face in her Hafnarstræti loft and giggling herself into the mood with her friend Berta, the broad-faced daughter of a teacher.

As soon as they got into the place, Dad, of course, had to pee and got delayed in the toilets, cornered by a dead-drunk employee of the Icelandic Steamship Company, who immediately had something to say about Dad’s father, who had founded the company: ‘A great man, your father – great man. But how’s it going? Doesn’t he get bored there in the embassy?’

It unfolded as follows: when Dad finally stumbled out of the gents, the first thing he saw was a girl who had just sat down at a table with her friend – a thick-armed beauty from the Svefneyjar islands with bushy eyebrows, three men under her belt, and one at the bar.

Through the hubbub of the dance a blond cupid whispered her destiny into her ears, and she turned her head as Dad walked by. Her dark red lipstick singed itself into his soul, along with her black eyebrows and sea-pebble blue eyes. Her skin white, all so evenly white, like a calm white sea between those enchanted islands. He was clueless when it came to girls and always remained so, but he felt a comforting security as a kind of paralysis took hold of his heart, and a heavy blow from that Breidafjördur gaze struck his forehead.

Mum rolled her eyes at her friend, and they smirked: a typical Reykjavík lad.

Two glasses later he came staggering across the dance floor, like a small salmon elbowing its way through a shoal of herring, and stopped in front of her table. He planted himself there swaying slightly, and started acting stupid: pressing his arms against his sides and gesticulating with his right hand as he lifted his right leg and cackled, as if he were trying to mimic a goose trying to piss like a dog. He repeated this act at least three times, Mum endured my father’s idiocy with that uniquely Icelandic forbearance and rewarded him three out of five possible smiles. (No woman can resist a man who is willing to make a fool out of himself for her. It’s an unequivocal declaration of love.) She shifted back one seat just before an invisible hand struck the back of my father’s neck and pushed him down on the chair she had just vacated.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked, licking his lips.

‘Huh?’ The band was playing a lively polka.

‘What’s your name?’ he repeated.

‘Gudrún Marsibil.’

Mum exchanged a glance with Berta, who sat at the other end of the table, with her broad face and curly black hair.

‘What?’

‘Gudrún Marsibil.’

Mum cast another glance at Berta, who seemed amused, with her big chin and small, wide-set eyes.

‘Gudrún Marsibil…’ he parroted, releasing a drink-laden gasp, like a marathon runner who has finally crossed the finish line and hears his time, which he repeats to himself, before collapsing from fatigue: ‘Gudrún Marsibil…’

‘And you?’

‘Huh?’

‘What’s your name?’ There was a smirk in her voice.

‘Me? I’m Jan Flemming. Jan Flemming Pedersen Havtroj.’

‘Huh? Are you Danish?’

‘Yes, I’ve got bloody Danish skin and I can’t get rid of it!’

He pulled on the skin of his right wrist with the fingers of his left hand and let go of it, watching it snap back like elastic. He repeated this and then clawed at his arm and skull and finally slapped himself across the cheek: ‘Just can’t! Oh! Damned, damned Dane.’

‘But you speak very good Icelandic.’

‘Are you with someone?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And where is he?’

‘Over there.’

‘Where?’

‘There.’

She pointed to a short man with a big head who was approaching the table with a bottle of wine and three glasses and a deadly serious expression.

‘That guy with the forehead?’

‘Yeah.’ She laughed.

‘What’s his name?’ ‘Alli.’

‘Alli?’

‘Yeah, Adalsteinn.’

‘Adalsteinn?’

‘Yeah. Or just Steinn.’

‘Or just Steinn? Can’t he make his mind up? If I were your boyfriend… Your eyes are like stones. Two stones.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Can I have them?’

Everything that came out of him was unclear. He was totally hammered, with his fringe toppling over his forehead and shaking incessantly.

‘Have them?’

‘Yeah. Can I have them?’

And then something odd happened, something that can only be explained as a keystroke in the weaving of destiny.

‘Well then.’

The short man with the big head had reached the table, where he put down the three glasses and bottle of wine. He muttered something that no one heard and sat in front of Mum. The stern eyes under his swollen forehead were like two fishermen’s huts under a steep cliff. He filled the glasses clumsily, as if he had never offered anyone else a drink before.

‘Alli, this is… Jan… er… Flemming, didn’t you say? Is your name really Jan? Your name isn’t Jan. You’re Icelandic.’

‘That’s Björnsson. A bourgeois bastard,’ said the forehead man in a voice that was strangely strong and deep. It flowed out of his frail body like a tow rope from a dinghy.

‘Huh? Do you know him?’ Mum asked.

‘I thought you ducklings weren’t allowed to drink.’

It was like the voice of a mountain piercing through a colony of screeching birds.

‘Huh?’ Dad exclaimed in his alcoholic haze, smiling internally at the two sea stones that Mum had just given him. Adalsteinn ignored him and raised his glass: ‘Cheers!’ Mum and Berta crashed glasses with him.

‘Ah, there you are, man!’ Benni Thors and his brother had reached the table and stood over them looking smug. ‘You obviously don’t know how to drink, man. You’ve got to drink yourself up, not down, as my brother says. C’mon. We’re leaving.’

‘I didn’t know that the Danish princes of the fishing industry were allowed out of the palace gardens,’ Adalsteinn quipped.

Benni Thors made to punch the man with the forehead, but his brother managed to halt his fist. Adalsteinn turned to Dad and proclaimed in his thunderous voice, ‘A plague on both your houses!’

It was a curse we would long have to contend with, placed as it was by Steinn Steinarr, who would become the greatest Icelandic poet of the twentieth century, and who, if I remember correctly, was quoting Mercutio’s dying words from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The Thors brothers hoisted Dad from his chair and dragged him away. On the floor the dance was still in full swing; the tables were bustling with chatter and flirtations. Men hung at the bar, cheap paintings on the walls. Everything bore the marks of the present, from the décor to the fashions – October 1928 was a time like no other, and no one knew what awaited them outside those walls: sunny times, depression or war.

Dad followed his companions through the streets. Someone had mentioned a late-night party in Bergstadastræti, which turned out to be in a loft apartment that was obviously very small because the line stretched down the stairway and out onto the street. A snake of hat-clad boys loitered on the veranda on top of the steps, gulping down the night, as men are wont to do. It was a still and mild autumn night and their voices echoed across the treeless gardens. The Thors brothers joined in the medley, but Dad hung out on the street with his hands in his pockets, drunk as a skunk and as awkward as any Reykjavík kid throughout the ages, pondering on the Breidafjördur lass who had given him the two beautiful sea pebbles of her eyes.

The die had been cast. Yes, that much was sure. Mum preferred Dad to Steinn Steinarr, and chose the ambassador’s son instead of a Voyage without Promise, a choice she was severely punished for, thus proving the old saying that he who forsakes a poet brings bad luck.