The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

66 Among the Sorbs 1944

Earlier that spring, I had climbed out of three weeks’ basement confinement in some nameless farm in eastern Germany. It wasn’t considered wise to keep me above ground, since the district was being combed for Jews and I was both unregistered and without a pass. Some very kind people had taken me in, joyless peasants with veinous noses and narrow-minded eyes. They had a hunchback son who did the work of three men.

They didn’t speak German with each other but Sorbian, which, like Frisian, is one of the forgotten languages of Europe. I managed to catch only some fragments of this ancient Slavonic language, but the woman of the family gave me a glimpse into the history of the Sorbs, the people they belonged to, which no one knew then any more than they do now. According to her, they were descended from a tribe of nomads who had gone camping in the sixth century, roaming across half the continent until one night they finally set up camp on the banks of the Spree and didn’t make it any further the next day, and were still there. And yet they’d had to put up with ten centuries of harassment on their camping site from beer-swilling Germans.

They called their land Lusatia, a beautiful name that the Germans deformed to Lausitz. This territory, which rapidly vanished into the German woods and is nowhere to be found on a map, has a symbolic shape, in that it looks like a severed tongue. The Internet now tells me there are only sixty thousand Sorbs left above ground and yet they are still struggling for the independence of their land and language, to the deaf ears of the powers that be in Brussels. But I can console the poor devils by telling them that we Icelanders were no more than forty thousand when things were at their worst and our country was plagued by the Laki eruption in the eighteenth century, yet in the end we became a nation among nations, with our singing Björks and crashing banks, Olympic silver and Nobel Prize medals around our necks.

I had stayed with these people a month before moving into the basement, and I tried to earn my keep. Had ended up there after a few hours wandering through the woods, following a fight with some women on a horse carriage. The black-skirted lady taught me gardening, made me plough the garden beds and sow cabbage, turnips and potatoes. She spurred me on with the same harshness her own unhappiness inflicted on her. She had learned her German from two poetry books and chanted the sentences in the most peculiar way, decorating them with rhymes.

‘Stand not under the sun. It’s bad manners, child. Your bowing bend before sun. Bowing bend. Till workday end.’

She said this on the go, because she was always on the go, on her way out the door, across the garden, with potatoes in her apron, water in a bucket, constantly waddling and never pausing. (At least the women in Iceland used to sit at the table every now and then.) In the city they would have considered her mentally ill, but here in the country she yodelled in tune with hens and plants. Nature is tolerant that way, which is why the countryside will never be completely abandoned.

To continentals, light is precious. We Icelanders have never known how to handle the sun. We see so little of it in the winter that it’s barely worth its while to rise. But in the summer we have so much of it that we can work twenty-four hours a day. This is why we Icelanders are always at work, yet at the same time forever taking a break, having no respect for that burning star. On the contrary, we curse the sun if it doesn’t show, but curse it even more if it’s shining, while we pull down the blinds. We hold the world record in curtain pulling.

For that reason I welcomed the subterranean darkness for several weeks, even though we were at the height of spring. But my seclusion in the dim basement was a hot topic above the floorboards. I was starting to understand Sorbian a bit and heard the man say he wanted to get rid of the stray girl, it was asking for trouble, taking in a stranger like that, and who actually believed the girl was really Icemandic? It was obvious she was a Jew. Because they’re a race of poisonous liars, as the Führer calls them.

‘She’s a good worker,’ said the old lady.

‘But she puts us in great danger, woman, and… yes, you better stop speaking that rhyming German when they come.’

‘My German is beautiful.’

‘They’ll think you’re making fun of them. It could be fatal.’

‘Iceland,’ the hunchback then bellowed. ‘I want to go to Iceland.’

Like many a pea-brain, German or otherwise, he had embraced the Icelandic faith. I had told him ludicrous tales about polar bear islands and huts full of women in a country with no trees.

‘No trees? So you don’t have to chop wood for the fire?’

‘No. No chopping.’

He half shut his eyes and dribbled from the corner of his mouth.

‘I want to go to Iceland. No chopping.’ But then he suddenly grew pensive.

‘But how do you make fire, then?’

‘You… just burn… grass.’

‘Grass?’

‘Yes, we have grass cookers and grass ovens.’

‘Grass ovens? I want to go to Iceland.’

In my later trips around the globe, I would regularly come across specimens of his kind, Iceland fanatics, who all carried some kind of chip or hump on their shoulders. The two good gentlemen, God and Christ, who normally provide psychological care to people like this, seemed to have forsaken these damaged souls, who then for some reason directed their hopes towards Iceland and venerated this distant country, lost in the glacial seas of the north, as if it were the promised land.

‘Here it comes, your mouthful,’ said the countrywoman in her strange vernacular as she passed down the rye bread to me in the dark, with the occasional dab of butter or the odd bowl of soup, Lusatian bean soup, which was probably awful but to me was like a warm salmon from heaven. I tried to kill time by carving a horse. The shavings shone in the darkness, like water lilies at night. The horse was as deformed as my stay, since it had been sculpted in haphazard blindness. At night the walls exuded an icy dampness. I shivered in the corner.

On two occasions they erupted into the building in a fury, bursting onto the floor above. My silence was so deep I could hear my heartbeat. They shouted so loudly that cupboards broke. When I later lived in a basement flat in Reykjavík, I always left a light on, 24/7.

‘You, Slavonic lice on Germany’s head! Where is the Jewish child?!’

‘Never was she here. Of that have no fear.’

‘Was?!’

A rhyme could be dangerous. But down in the darkness I clutched the good old hand weapon that Dad had given me as a parting gift two years earlier. ‘You must never forget that your dad loves you.’ Ever since then I’d carried that eagle’s egg across ruins and squares, in and out of garments, and at a time like this it was good to feel the strength of German steel.

They were back again and paced the floor with even more shouts than before. I could hear the rhyming housewife trembling in the corner. But how was one supposed to use a hand grenade in a cellar? Could it be thrown upwards, perhaps?

I hadn’t found any answers to those questions when the trapdoor was thrown open and one or two of them clambered down the ladder. In the meantime, however, I had slipped into the wall cupboard: I lay there flat on a shelf, counting the Svefneyjar islands, with every single islet and skerry, donating a heartbeat to each one. The cupboard had an odd design. Its middle shelf was half built into the wall, so that only part of it was visible when the cupboard was opened. I managed to hop into it so that my head and arms were hidden by the wall, and only my legs would be visible to whoever opened the cupboard. I managed to hide them, just in time, with a piece of shredded curtain and some empty sugar boxes, and then poured starch into my blood just as a soldier threw the door open. I excluded one eye, though, and kept it on blinking duty, floating above my head, clutching the grenade to my heart.

The eruption was accompanied by a thin ray of light that fell from the open trapdoor, and the floating eye now caught a glimpse of the blood-polished barrel of a gun as it swept the dusty sugar boxes off the shelf. But the invisible soldier let the shredded curtains be, and now I was finally happy with the spindly legs I had so often cursed in my puberty, which stood there like thin curtain rods under the threadbare material. Then I heard them rooting through things in the next room and thanked God I was in the habit of hiding the wood shavings in a crack in the wall every night. I stood in the cupboard until the starch had lost its power or receded from my blood. That was long after they had gone back upstairs, closed the trapdoor, shouted more at windowpanes and pottery, shot bullets out of their mouths, and finally stormed off.

A deathly silence descended on the house.

I clambered up on my delicate porcelain legs and then had to climb over the bulky bodies to get out. The couple’s blood had mixed on the kitchen floor. The son, however, lay in the garden with his bleeding hump. And his soul flown to Iceland. But on the other side of the house, the vegetable garden was singing green. Potato and carrot leaves, cabbage and who knew what else. They were all there, joyfully and vigorously leaping out of the soil. It pained me. The godless God had forgotten himself over his heads of cabbage while his blessed children were being murdered in broad daylight.

I ran away, retching.