The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

73 Red 1944

At the same moment that my groggy grandfather was fumbling with the morning blinds of Bessastadir and realising that he was about to become the president of Iceland for everyone’s sake but his own, I was walking through my Polish night forest, towards the rising sun. I now found myself in some kind of fern kingdom, waist high in plants of unknown origin. High above, the tree crowns silently kept watch. The fire still crackled faintly between my legs, but my head was numb, as if it had been struck. And the strangest thing of all was that I could no longer conjure up Marek’s face, and my memories of the incident were confused. My body had formed a protective bubble around its lost virginity and solely tended to Herra’s soul and self, dismissing anything that had to do with the where, who, and how.

Maybe it was triggered by these primordial conditions (the forest and the dawn), but all of a sudden the legacy of foregone generations, which I unconsciously carried inside me, flared up like an emergency flower that opens in the blink of an eye, offering shelter to all the other plants. No doubt Mum, Grandma, Great-Grandma and all their foremothers had been raped as well. In farms, in barns, in ditches, on hills, on heaths, in bedrooms, in kitchens, in larders, at balls, in woods, on ships, in castles, cabins, gardens and the Garden of Eden. And bit by bit the female species had developed soul protection, which now shot up and enveloped me like a flower out of the earth and prevented me from seeing what had happened. Now that I was wearing my skirt and jumper, I bore none of the trademarks of a rape victim; I hadn’t even cried, just silently cursed myself for having been stuck for so long in a time-bomb relationship instead of following that good Yagina woman across the Atlantic. By now I would have been the owner of a whole chain of flower stores in the state of Illinois with super American sons: a Senator, Michelin chef and stockbroker. And I wouldn’t be living in a garage but a bungalow.

All of a sudden I was distracted from these heavy thoughts. By a red horse in the green woods. It appeared as if out of a magic lamp, standing to the right of me, and swiftly shook its mane, causing a ripple in the ferny green overgrowth, when it noticed me, and then bolted slightly to the side in a few impetuous dance steps. I was equally startled and froze on the spot. This was a huge continental horse, probably a draught horse, with thick lips, bulky knees and furry legs, a horse that we associate more with man than with nature. When he turned his head and looked into my eyes, I could see in his two ink balls that he was just as lost as I was. We stood perfectly still for a long moment, facing each other, and I felt a need for him. At this juncture in my life the only thing in the world that could help me was a horse, a Polish horse. And in his equine heart he, too, felt that a violated damsel from Iceland was precisely what he needed to carry on his back. We were destined to spend the day together, the sunniest day in the history of Iceland.

After a few awkward moments, Red stretched out his head, a two hundred-pound piece of craftsmanship the size of a boat engine. I touched his forehead with the back of my fingers. What lay behind it? He rubbed his imposing chin against my stomach, as if he wanted to sniff the man’s deeds. Then he moved lower, pressed his forehead against my groin, massaging it up and down over my skirt. Was this a rape rescue horse? Red from the Red Cross?

It finally dawned on me that he wanted me to mount him and was offering me his mane as a ladder. I picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder and, hesitantly, I grabbed his stiff, rough hair and climbed over his ears, which were as big as folded napkins. The pain in my groin returned, but I clenched my teeth and managed to bestride him with the help of Red, who tactfully lifted his mane and then set off. On his right flank he bore a large but superficial wound, and he limped slightly on that side. It seemed to improve as we travelled but returned if we paused for too long. The pain lay in his skin; movement softened the lesion, and it stiffened when we stopped.

The workhorse seemed to know where he was going, because he constantly headed east, towards the sun, transporting me under green-leaved chandeliers across floods of spruces, between a collection of rocks and coniferous paths, over streams and rivers. He moved at a steady pace, with heavy and weary but sturdy steps that bore witness to his endurance. When the sun freed itself from the highest treetops, a path appeared, crossing our way. Red halted briefly and swivelled his ears in each direction, but then lowered his head again and trotted over it, heading into the woodland shadows before us, snorting and foaming.

Was he maybe a Nazi horse who was collecting Jews in this region? Was I on my way to a camp? The late Lusatian couple had told me about these Konzentrationslager, which were some kind of camps or warehouses that Hitler had built for his friend Death so that he would never run low on stock. And the Führer had personally selected the best elements of his nation because there is nothing despots fear more than ideas and talent. The greatest honour for any German was to be escorted into a gas chamber: the concentration camps were the honorary German academy. How could I trust this horse? After three years on the run I had developed a solid intuition, which had been shattered by my harrowing night with Marek.

In fact my life had been reduced to pure fiction at this stage of my existence. It was just some worn-out paper on which time scribbled its various unexpected incidents, forming a thick volume of unlikely tales in which the only connecting thread was me, like some kind of ledger, a thousand entries for the thousand items I had been forced to put my name to. I had long ceased to live my life, but instead resigned myself to reading it like a book. And what next? I wondered. Only the God of woes knew what kind of fucked-up, crazy creature would emerge from this chaotic writing. If he had taken a photograph of me at the end of the war, it wouldn’t have been a black-and-white picture of a sixteen-year-old curly-haired girl, but a Cubist Picasso portrait of a Breton fishmonger with a face deformed into a hundred dice.

And one of those dice had just been thrown between my legs. A phallus yesterday, a steed today. And a red one according to the state of my skin. Czerwony means Red in Polish. We trotted towards the day and never crossed a clearing, let alone a human settlement.