The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

85 Hrefnuvík 1980

I found myself out in the shed with Hitler’s egg, placed it in an old wooden box, and hid it under a trough. It was the end of June, so the stables were empty, apart from our ram, the one and only Sigvaldi, who was still in there. I paused by him on my way out. He stared at me stiff and strong-horned, with a macho glint in his eyes. They were all the same. And that’s where they all should have been kept. Locked up in a sty.

The generator was silent, it was a beautiful bright evening, but there were still some small waves, dregs of the afternoon wind, breaking on the shores of the vast Djúpid fjord. The nocturnal stillness was gradually approaching, and a calm had already descended on the glacial lagoon beyond. Kaldalón, Cold Lagoon, is one of the most sacred places in Iceland. My goodness, how I could just stand there watching it, and my goodness, how it soothed me. As long as I could see across the fjord, every day was a Sunday to me. It was like an altarpiece in the landscape: the glacial tongue curved into the lagoon below and reflected in it almost daily, giving it the semblance of a holy picture.

Our farm stood on the edge of the rocky bay, a dwarf house painted in white with a green roof and a few eider drakes floating on the water’s edge. It seemed to be high tide. This could so easily have been my final destination. Herra in the safe harbour of Hrefnuvík after decades of wandering across the open seas.

‘Where were you?’

‘I just… popped out.’

‘Where?’

‘Just, you know… to the sheep shed. Gave Sigvaldi some more food and—’

‘I already fed him this morning. You shouldn’t interfere. I don’t want it! Understand? Were you chasing after Jón? You got the hots for Jón?’

‘Huh?’

‘Have you got the hots for Speedy Jón? What number would he be?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Would he… will you be hitting the mill-jón mark? Are you going to call him mill-jón?’

‘Are you talking about Jón from Módárkot?’

‘You’re a randy bitch.’

‘Aren’t you following the elections?’

‘Randy bitch. You’re such a nympho you’re starting to have it off with the rams in the shed!’

‘Where’s the radio?’

‘I bet you’ll reproduce. Me-he-he! Herra Björnsson and Sigvaldi Kaldalón!’ He thought that was funny. ‘And will your offspring be a Kaldalón? Ha-ha. Won’t it be a Kaldalón? No, what am I saying? You’re passed the childbearing age. Nothing but empty rotten eggs inside you. And the stench, yuck.’

He sat on the edge of the sofa, stooped over the coffee table, bottles, glasses and an ash-sullied plate, and muttered those last words into his chest. With a bit of luck he would soon doze off.

‘Where did you put the radio?’ I repeated.

‘Aren’t you listening to me, woman?’

‘Yes, I want to listen to the results.’

‘Aren’t you listening to me? Listen to me when I speak!’

He sprang up from the sofa and nearly fell back into it again. He put down his cigarette and ran around the table. I tried to flee into the kitchen, but he managed to grab my arm; before I knew it, he squeezed me into a neck lock from behind. The smell was disgusting. Alcohol, tobacco and sweat. I’d given up being able to drink with him. They were hellish days. He tightened his grip and spluttered over my shoulder.

‘Did you hear that, Herra? You should listen to me, woman! I don’t want to be talking to the walls. Get your clothes off.’

He loosened his grip and I managed to breathe again. He threw me on the floor.

‘Clothes off, I said.’

He hauled me towards the bedroom. It was a tiny cubbyhole that had been built for a dwarfy couple who had enjoyed a blissful marriage here, judging by the carpentry and lovingly painted boards. I had got used to this. It was best to obey and bite the bullet. It normally only took about fifteen minutes, probably longer now, though, he was so drunk.

It was strange, but I survived these daily horrors by picturing my boys, focusing hard on my children. Haraldur had moved south to the university, and Ólafur and Magnús were in the district school just three fjords away. I pictured them in their classes, swimming, leaning against walls. What were they leaning against the walls for? They hadn’t started to smoke, had they? Oh, isn’t he finished yet? Damn, it’s bad today.

Maybe he thought so, too, because he couldn’t manage to finish it off and finally stopped, kicking me onto the floor.

‘Jesus, look at you. Like a sheared sheep. No wonder I can’t come with a bag of wrinkles like you. Get out.’

I tried to clamber to my feet. God, how small I’d become. I was about the size of the folded shell of a tern’s egg.

‘Get out, I said!’

I staggered out and grabbed a blanket from the living room. He pushed me from behind, shouting, ‘Out of the house! Get out of the house!’

Then he ripped the blanket off me, dragged me into the hallway, and from there hurled me into the garden, slamming the door behind me. I was a fifty-year-old woman with a battered soul and wounded body, deathly pale and naked, with grazed knees, and locked outside in the only five degrees the Icelandic summer had to offer that night. I hoisted myself to my feet and tried to get back into the house, when I heard him sliding the latch closed on the inside. I begged him at the window. Cried a good long while. My dearest Bæringur. My most generous, sweetest only love. I’ll be good and do everything for you, if you’ll only let me ih-hih-in.

Was he asleep? I looked around. The ocean wind was dying down, but I was so darned cold. Finally I decided to take shelter in the shed. A naked woman seeks wool. I hopped over tussocks and stones. The national highway was just above the farm, but fortunately there were no cars about. I entered on the barn side. The place was almost empty, apart from a small pile of straw in the far corner. All of a sudden I remembered the lambskin rug the previous owners had left behind. What had he done with that? I edged my way along one of the troughs. Sigvaldi stood there stiffly and stared at me. Yes, there it was. He had chucked it over one of the rafters. I grabbed the rug and walked back to the barn. I nested in the straw and wrapped myself in the fleece, black and crusty, but still a lot warmer than the hay. It made me think fondly of sheep. Blessed creatures.

And I stayed like that for the whole evening. A small, terrified woman who had lived half a century and learned nothing. I was still just the frightened girl who had been raped in a Polish cabin on the day of Iceland’s independence and ran away in a fury. No, no… I was angry back then, now I was only scared and broken and drained of all life’s energy. Come now, my young Herra, and give me back the courage I’ve lost. The courage I lost somewhere between Baires and Bæring. Yes, how had it happened? That a woman who, just a few years before, had swaggered down the Boulevard Saint-Michel, bursting with self-confidence and newly acquired Parisian arrogance, had fallen this low, naked and weeping in the five-degree corner of a barn in a forsaken part of Iceland, and allowed an illiterate juicer to transform her into such a little mouse that she didn’t even have the guts to look a ram in the eye. I could hear him, the male with the horns. Moving around the sty. Oh, what a fate.

And to think that the fjord had seemed like such a dream to me. We were going to start a new and better life here and were both so relieved to free ourselves from old restrictions, housewife and sailor. Now we could live together in serenity and peace and take up farming, the most primordial lifestyle for any loving couple. The autumn had been wonderful and ‘dry,’ but then Advent had knocked on the door, with its holiday thirst. Bæring drove into town and returned with six bottles in a box. When they were finished, another six appeared with the ferry Fagranes on the pier. Five months of bottles and beatings ensued, and those bloody daily attacks that had become a constant in our household and followed the evening news with the same relentless regularity as the Icelandic weather forecast. On Good Friday I’d had enough and walked over to the next farm, Módárkot, in the pouring sleet. Jón the hermit wasn’t one for asking questions but served me a hot toddy. Together we sat listening to some radio psalms as the night hammered against the windows. He wiped his glasses with Windex. ‘It makes everything so shiny and bright,’ he explained as I shed a tear into my toddy.

The next day I got a ride into Ísafjördur and spent the Easter weekend with my sturdy cousins Lára and Dadína. They lived together, loved receiving guests, and bombarded me with questions about the boys. On Easter Monday my Bæring appeared, as sober as a judge and totally adorable, and accepted some lamb leftovers. That evening the Easter holiday was over.

And I who had grappled with a whole world war had to admit that of all the conflicts one had to face, private battles were the worst. It’s more reassuring to know that the enemy is in the next trench than on the pillow beside you.

At the end of May, the boys came home from school, two happy neon blonds. Since then, everything had been better, up until now, when they’d gone off to a football tournament. As soon as the bus picked them up, the bottle opened again.

All of a sudden I remembered the Hitler egg I had hidden in the shed. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to… But before I could get it, I heard a creak in the door. The man stepped into the barn, slightly less drunk, but armed with his old hunting rifle. He sometimes shot razorbills at sea and ptarmigans on land. But now he was hungry for woman meat. I sprang up from under the fleece on the straw and ran across the barn and into the shed. He was too slow to react and shoot, but appeared along the trough, sniffing out his prey. The ram gawked at me when it saw me rise naked from the darkness of the sty with a golden sphere in my hand.

‘If you dare,’ I said in a trembling voice, and yes… almost forty years after my father had given me this weapon as a gift, I slipped a finger into the safety pin and prepared to pull. The moment had finally come.

‘What’s that? The perfume? Ha-ha… not only are you a randy bitch, you’re nuts, too.’

‘No, this isn’t perfume. That was a lie. This is a hand grenade. A German grenade from the war.’

‘What a load of horseshit.’

‘Wait and see… If you so much as try to point that gun at me, I’ll pull the pin…’

I was in such a state that not only was my voice shaking, but my hand and fingers were as well. And all of a sudden the pin broke! The bomb was alive.

‘You and your war…’

I held the explosive at a good distance and mentally counted one, two, three, four, as I backed away towards the open door of the building. The floor was soft, covered in layers of sheep shit. Bæring raised his rifle and just as I was throwing the grenade at him a shot resounded. The egg was at the other end of the shed, and I got out in one piece, but the grenade hadn’t exploded.

I dashed straight for the house. Before I reached the corner, another shot was fired. A window broke somewhere. I rushed in, locked the door, grabbed a jumper off a hook, and crawled under the table. I could hear him roaring outside. He wanted the ‘presidential slut’ to come out, open the door. Then he shot at another window and stuck his nozzle through the broken glass.

‘Herra! Where are you?’

Yet another shot. It seemed to hit the armchair in the living room. I managed to wriggle my way forward on the ground, unseen, into the bedroom, found my pyjama trousers on the floor, and slipped into them while he wrestled with the window. Was he breaking in? ‘Fucking hell,’ I heard him curse. Then another shot and something shattering. I opened the bedroom window, clumsily leaped outside, and ran, limping, up to the road, heard him calling and shooting. A bullet ricocheted on a stone. I knew the sound from western films. What had my life turned into? I got across the road and threw myself behind a rock to catch my breath.

Why hadn’t the grenade gone off? All of a sudden I heard him. He was up on the road.

‘Herra. Forgive me, come now,’ he gasped.

I peered over the rock and saw him standing in the middle of the road with no rifle. I retreated to another pillar of rock and picked up a stone. My foot was hurting me.

‘Where’s the rifle?’

‘It’s… down there. I… Herra, let’s be good.’

His voice was slurred but then drowned in the sound of a vehicle driving over the blind hill behind him. Just then, a hunchbacked clunker of a Saab appeared. Bæring turned and moved to the side of the road, but the car pulled up beside him. A cheerful young man’s voice asked for directions to the hunter’s hut. I used the opportunity to slip along the road back towards the farm. Bæring looked at me as he was answering some question the kid asked about the elections. I found his rifle on the grasslands above the house and took it down with me for safety. Behind me, the car turned around and disappeared over the blind hill again. The tide had pulled out, exposing a vast shore rimmed with stones darkened by the sea and a silvery-white stillness across the bay. It was a stunningly beautiful night in the Djúpid, crowned by the majestic glow of Kaldalón.

‘Herra!’

I turned and paused, feeling more secure with a weapon in my hands, in a dark blue sailor’s jumper and chequered pyjama trousers. He edged his way down from the road towards the house, slowly. He was soon within a good shooting distance from me.

‘Herra,’ he said in a calm and sober voice. ‘Forgive me, let’s be friends. Don’t be like this.’

I levelled the rifle to threaten him, but my arm was shaking.

‘The ammunition is finished,’ he said with self-assurance, stretching out his hand as he was approaching. ‘Here, I’ll take it.’

I lowered the weapon and backed away from him, down to the shore to the sound of pebbles. He followed. I turned and gripped the rifle with both hands; then, swinging it in the air, I threw it as far as I could. It smashed against the surface of the sea and sank below. Then I felt a paw on my shoulder and a roar in my ear.

‘What the fuck are you doing, woman!?’

He turned me in a fury and dealt me a mighty punch with his clenched fist, striking my nose. I fell and struggled not to lose my senses, was soon crawling on all fours, and spat out a broken tooth. Blood dribbled over the stones. He looked around, trying to find new bashing opportunities, but I managed to break free, staggering towards the rocky reef to the west. I collapsed twice but got up again and the last time grabbed a stone to have in my hand. Soon I reached the end of the reef and stood there like a death-sentenced convict who had been granted one final thought. In front of me there was death, behind me the Djúpid fjord. He was moving in on me, a heavy brute in boots, with clenched fists and a fuming bull’s snout. But when he was just a boat’s length away from me, he slipped on a wet rock and knocked the back of his head against another and then lay there motionless. I waited a good while. How long? Half a minute? Half an hour? Then I approached him, slowly and trembling. I realised blood was oozing out of his head. Was he dead? Was my darling dead?

I bent over him. But then he suddenly muttered something, opened one eye, and lifted his right hand. I was so startled that I threw the stone I had forgotten in my hand at him. It smashed against his face, close to the temple, with a faint crack.

I was so distraught that I threw myself on him and tried to resuscitate him, stroking his cheeks and uttering some kind of words of love to him, the few drops I had left. But it was all to no avail. The man was dead.

I patted his chest like a nervous wreck and caught sight of the bloodstained stone and threw it into the sea. I then stood on the tip of the reef like a human lighthouse and looked across the bay over to the Kaldalón and felt I was strong, was cold, was me, was triumphant, was a woman. I had killed a man. That feeling lasted about half an hour because then I was cold and clambered over him, staggered back to the farm, and phoned Ísafjördur. They said they’d be there within two hours with an ambulance. So I’d finally called a taxi for him too, el hombre. I sank into the sofa and finished the bottle, then opened another and smoked cigarettes until my broken tooth stopped bleeding, and then finally switched on the radio.

Votes were still being counted; it was almost five. I landed in the middle of an interview: the reporter asked the newly elected president whether she considered this a significant step in thestruggle for equal rights. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir had rarely sounded so proud.

‘Yes, I think it is.’

Then I finally broke down and started to weep.