The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

5 The Braces of Iceland 1929

For the Christmas of 1928, Hans went to Copenhagen, to stay with his parents and siblings. Granted a welcome break from the Reykjavík night life, which was no less wild back then than it was to become and will remain for centuries, the firstborn could fall asleep at midnight undisturbed and wake up at noon to the smell of hot chocolate, which Helle, good Helle, the Danish cook for the Icelandic ambassador and his wife, had the pleasure of making for the Björnsson boys. Dad’s younger brothers, Puti and Henni, still lived with their parents and went to a Danish high school. They whiled away the time playing endless pranks on each other, but the carefree spirit in the gaze of the eldest had been glazed by the first autumn of his careless youth. A woman’s pregnancy weighs heavily on a man.

In addition to the Christmas food sent from Iceland, Dad had received a letter written from an attic at Hafnarstræti 5. And after New Year, the twenty-year-old blond with the dark eyebrows walked into his father’s office (in those days all men of stature also kept offices at home, though they looked more like small panelled chapels, where numbers and phone calls were venerated) to inform him of a certain incident that had occurred in Iceland earlier that winter, a certain incident, yes, mishap even, a certain thing that carried a certain weight, which could only grow heavier with time. He muttered the girl’s name and then ended his speech by making a vague rotating gesture with the index finger of his right hand, presumably to symbolise the future course of events. Grandad Sveinn removed his glasses and slipped his thumb behind his braces, just above the waistline of his trousers. These were Iceland’s braces on foreign soil.

‘I see. And who is her family?’

Damn it, although this was the first question that all Icelandic fathers had asked their offspring about their children-in-law since the First Settlement, it caught Dad completely off guard. In fact he’d never thought about it. And it proved the classic aphorism that a young man never thinks further than the jet of his sperm. He just about remembered that the girl was some Salómon’s daughter and that her mother was some old woman from some island somewhere. He wasn’t even sure she was altogether human; she could have been the offspring of some obscure tribe that dwelled on a remote Icelandic skerry, a cross between elves, seals and flatfish.

‘Erm… I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Er… no.’

And now the ambassador was silent. Silent long enough for his son to realise what he’d done; it was as if he’d invited his father to a wild Charleston dance in his very own office, in broad daylight, just like the wild one that he himself had danced with that bloody island girl on the night I was conceived, a girl who, on top of everything, was called Massa. She might just as well have been called Massive! So low class! God forbid that the old man should ever find out her name. And to think his father had gone all the way to Copenhagen to find a wife, who bore the dignified name of Georgía, and now he was sitting here as the country’s primary representative in a sumptuous residence under a twelve-foot ceiling, with an extra six feet in case the ambassador of Iceland suddenly needed to jump higher than his own height, like Gunnar of the Sagas. The sordid island girl had obviously been raised in a pathetic single-room, chimneyed tussock that could probably have fitted into their front dining room without even having to raise the crystal chandelier. No. Yes. No. This was disgraceful. My father burst into a sweat as he sat in front of his father, who was still silent. Except for a sigh, a solemn snort. The ambassador remained silent for a whole seven seconds until he said, ‘Well, my dear son…’

No, my good father. Just forget it. This is just… It’s nothing, this is just a child, just one little life… no one needs to know about that.

Dad stood up and walked through the wrong door into his father’s wardrobe, only to be confronted by pressed shirts with stiff collars, Iceland white, and behind them the famous uniform, the gold-lined jacket that my aunt had designed for Grandad Sveinn so that he could stroll past the king of England. Hans Henrik turned crimson and said agitatedly, ‘No, it’s… it’s nothing,’ before he found the right door.

‘It’s nothing.’ That’s how I was ushered into this world.

This was followed by difficult months in the young man’s life. He headed back to Reykjavík, where he lived a double life, peppered with small lies, until the moment of farewells came in the spring, the moment of betrayal, when it was Dad’s turn to be silent until Mum understood.

She boarded the mail boat with a drooping head, while Dad travelled south across the moorlands into the straits. The evening sun shone on the young man’s tears as he followed the coast from the Raudará River back to town. Across the sun-bathed bay he spotted the slowly shrinking boat, and beyond the mountain range a few clouds hovered, like smoke signals from the islands that slept beyond them.

Mum never spoke of her nervous breakdown, not to me at any rate, but as the five-month-old tenant inside her womb, I wasn’t spared the consequences and have been in therapy ever since as a result. No, I’m lying now; what a cow I am.

Shortly afterwards she appeared like all her foremothers before her, pregnant on the home pier, and carried me under her apron for the whole of that summer until she was packed off on a boat to the west to give birth to me. But I’m not lying when I say that I came enraged into this world in the house of her father’s parents, screeching at all the misery I had caused and announcing a world depression, a prophecy that proved accurate twenty days later, when the famous crash occurred on Wall Street. That same autumn my father was admitted to the law faculty of the university like any other incurable love hen. The summer after that, he was dispatched to Vejle, Denmark, for further healing, to Grandma Georgía’s paternal uncle, who owned a small pharmacy there with thousands of tiny drawers, and was supposed to teach Dad Danish bookkeeping and the art of courting well-bred girls.