The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

67 Marek 1944

In the days that followed, I was a Little Red Riding Hood without a basket, roaming through the woods, and regretted not taking some carrots and turnips from Mr God’s garden, although I was still enraged by that universal idiot. Already on my first forestial day I gained a clear insight into the nutrition universe of caterpillars, only to discover later that they themselves were, of course, the best nutrition. And I occasionally still feel the patter of tiny feet on my tongue when I’m slipping a morsel of hairy food into my mouth. For two nights I stayed in a lovely ant hotel, in the black, mouldy hollow of a tree, and on the third day I met the good old Big Bad Wolf: a bucktoothed wild boar suddenly appeared on the floor of the woods like an ugly ambassador who insists on dancing with a colleague’s daughter. But by then Riding Hood had acquired wild forest eyes and managed to chase the beast away with a simple glare.

The odd thing about wars is that although they always employ all the latest weaponry, they always take you back to antiquity; here the war had catapulted me back into the Middle Ages, into an authentic Brothers Grimm tale.

I can see now where I was, on my ramblings through the woods on the last days of my virginity, by peering beyond my bed at the landscape that fills my flashback and comparing it with what I can see on Google Maps. It seems to have been in some Nieder-something forest east of Cottbus. Strange name for a town.

I ended up sailing across a vast river with a peculiar family of refugees and then accepted a place in their carriage, entering yet more woods. But eventually they ran out of food and I was dumped by a small stream, becoming Little Red Riding Hood again. This was followed by a wonderful forest life, crammed with despair and disorientation, howling hunger and hooting owls. Then finally I found myself wolfishly ravenous in front of a small lumberjack’s hut. I’d obviously stumbled into what had once been Poland because they spoke Polish there. In a dark window a pale and big-eyed creature with a prominent chin appeared with the expression of an imprisoned cat. He turned out to be a Polish war tourist, a boy of about twenty, who after ten hours of reflection decided to offer me a scrap of bread that was as hard as glass. Outside the birds were singing, but we ate in silence: I had entered my first live-in relationship.

Marek was incredibly shy and his eyes were full of horrors. He gestured slitting his parents’ throats, and the loss of two sisters flashed across his big eyes. I myself tried to communicate how I’d lost Mum at the train station in Hamburg, but I didn’t mention Dad, out of respect for Marek’s parents and their demise. Where was my father now? A soldier, prisoner, corpse? On the other hand, I had great difficulties explaining to the Polish boy that I was an Icelandic girl who had grown up in a vast fjord up north by the Greenland Strait. But how was I supposed to mime that?

There in the spring of 1944, I was so incredibly lost and war weary, after two years of travel with my friend the hand grenade, that I was barely Icelandic any more, just Celandic. I had started to think in German and had forgotten all those whale-backed sunsets in Breidafjördur. And of course I had become a teenager, a fourteen-year-old lass with my hair in a bun and a body in full bud, the male-enticing flesh had risen, and my breasts still hung together. I probably wasn’t a bad-looking girl, but I had no way of confirming this because I hadn’t seen a mirror in months.

I can’t remember how I was dressed, but anyway, war has a way of extracting the pizzazz out of any piece of clothing and bestowing it with a kind of emergency glamour that turns every man into a prince in rags. I must have been wearing a skirt of some kind. A skirt and a torn jumper. Yes, it’s coming back to me now. And the old shoes of a delicate-looking man who hadn’t stood up after an air raid, in an underground shelter in Leipzig. I had learned from the boys to hang on a bit in the shelters while everyone rushed outside. More often than not there was some old lady left lying there, who had been trampled on or had sailed away aboard her soul, suffocated in the stampede. And then the body could be searched for pfennig in the pockets, cheese in a bag… and, once, an old man’s shoes. I remember his face, oh my God, I can still remember it. He had a small globular head, the old fellow, like an old Icelandic countrywoman, with round spectacles that I left on his nose, valuable as they were. He looked like a musician who had lost his violin. But I took his shoes, and the heat of life still ran through his feet when I removed them. And now I feel a jab in my aching old heart: was he still alive, poor thing?

Bit by bit, a tacit arrangement developed in that primitive home. Marek would roam the forest in search of food, with his lumberjack’s axe over his shoulder, while I fetched water from a putrid stream nearby and fiddled with the contents of the cabin, sheets and cups. He was a cunning forest cat, particularly at making traps. One night we ate a wild hare under the anodyne light of the moon. In the faint distance we could hear brick walls crumbling, while the train to the eastern front rattled by in a nearby wood, and in the clatter one could make out its heavy clutching of the rails; those carriages were full of fodder for stomachs and canons. But the two of us sat outside the cabin door, chewing on roasted ears and crispy legs.

Marek took care of the fire, all the cutting, lighting and frying, but allowed me to cook the swallow eggs and wild plants. The only thing missing in that home was a child. But I didn’t fancy the forest gangling in that way, with his chess-player airs. The strange thing, though, was that as each day in those woods passed, the lad grew increasingly attractive.

Then one beautiful summer evening he finally managed to light my fire. It was in the middle of my Polish lesson. He had taught me the Polish words for fire, wood and pot and wanted to teach me some courtesies, asking me to repeat: Can I get you something? ‘Czy mozna…’ I started, and then he burst into laughter. I had said moszna instead of mozna, an organ he thought was funny to see inside my mouth. He laughed in staccato, like a coughing tractor, and I burst into a shrill Icelandic giggle before we fell into a timid silence as our faces turned the same tint of red. He leaped to his feet like a stepped-on rake, crammed his pockets with fingers, and vanished into the darkness while I collected the glasses and plates. In a distant tree an owl hooted its ode to mice and midges.