The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

72 17 June 1944

I didn’t get away until two hours later. Away from that hellish man I had so hellishly longed for. Naked I fled into the nocturnal light of the forest, with my luggage in my hands, clothes and belongings and a red stream down my thigh. In the film of my life, I see myself fleeing that lumberjack’s cabin and cursing the twigs that bite my feet. Determined never to tarnish myself again in anything that might be confused with love!

Away, away, away!

I did, however, pause at a grenade’s throw from the cabin and was on the point of hurling my father’s heart at it, which the Polish bastard had managed to momentarily seize from me, along with my virginity, which was no ordinary virginity, of course, but a sacred international relic that I had managed to preserve across an entire country for half the war. What an idiot I’d been! To have stroked that mortal enemy’s groin and awoken his poisonous pleasures. But I managed to make the brute bleed with a sudden bite when I grabbed my weapon back from him. Was on the point of using it, felt this was the moment – a ‘Germany girl’ with her German grenade! – but the forest whispered into my ear: ‘There will be other rapes after this one.’ And I shoved the steel egg into my torn bag, walked away and into my clothes, with burning blood between my legs, a red scarf around my throat.

Bit by bit, birds started to sing to my glory. Nature clearly wanted to honour me for the sacrifice I had made in its name. Yes, God was godless. I cursed him and cursed myself, cursed Marek and cursed the birds, as I stepped out of the leafy blackness into the semi-dark grasslands. Dawn broke with a feeble light and a sunless sigh, as if the earth were exhaling its light towards the celestial darkness.

But when I’d reached the next stretch of woods, the birds greeted me with a new song, new lyrics. From their throats one could now hear, ‘Trumpets are sounding loudly.’ For they knew something I did not, that today was 17 June 1944, the day Iceland became a sovereign state.