The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

83 Bæring 1974

His name was Bæring, son of Jón. A Bolungarvík, specimen from head to toe. Helmsman on the Vesti ÍS 306, he had spent half his life standing on the bridge of a ship, with an undulating horizon in the window.

And I, who wasn’t going to tie myself down again. We spent a wild weekend together in his huge house and hit it off with a bang. I even shed a few tears when he said goodbye to me on the pier (he’d signed up for a long fishing trip) and then phoned the boys to tell them to hop on a plane: Mum had settled back in the West Fjords.

A week later I had filled Bæring’s place with my gang. It was a typical house of that period, like a garage with glasses. It was a pretty weird change for Haraldur, Ólafur and Magnús, to finish school in Paris in the spring and start again in the autumn on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Hello, gloves and hats… No cafés, no metro, no menu fixe. And no glances or daily flirts. Just weary mothers with plastic blue berets in the freezing plant.

I got the old camera going again, though, and took a whole series of pictures of men down in the fishing huts, but then forgot about the camera while I was waiting for them to send me some printing paper from the south. Years later I sat drinking with a conceptual artist who was blown away by this dusty camera, which stored fifteen fishermen from Bolungarvík, anno 1974. ‘This camera is a work of art all by itself!’ he exclaimed, and he wanted to put the thing in an exhibition as a conceptual art piece, with his name on it. Then I blew my top and assured him that there was skill in those pictures, two years of study in Hamburg with all the maternal sacrifices and Beatle kisses that entailed.

I guess my spirits were dampened by this new housewife existence. Long winter days were spent sitting on a stool in the living room, smoking Pall Malls and staring out at the ocean through the huge window. I could sit like that for days on end. The island girl had missed the ocean and enjoyed seeing how time kept on drawing on it with a pencil that was sometimes sharp, sometimes blunted. In Iceland the sea is never the same. Currents are constantly changing, and every day is wacko. Occasionally my sailor would call me from the marine radio to tell me to have the bottles ready for his landfall, one a day.

Hitler’s egg slept in the drawer of the bedside table.

It’s wonderful to raise children out in the country, the cliché goes, but it was my children who started to raise me. For fifteen years, in my rebellion against male dominance, feminine instincts and historical trends, I had struggled against the fact that I was a mother, but here I was almost buried in the role of a housewife: the wife of a sailor in a coastal village. I was at home when they went to school, I was at home when they came home, and I was at home in between. I was always at home, goddamn it, barely left the house for four years.

And all for a man I couldn’t even see through the window. Who only appeared once every three weeks like a seaborne Santa Claus. The lust was so great I normally had to pack my boys off to Bæring’s brother when the sailor was on shore leave. But the lust was as shortlived as it was great: by the third day I couldn’t wait for the boat to take this cargo away from me again.

I loved him when he was shore bound, but adored him even more when he sailed away.