The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

87 The Leaf and the Wind 1984

What did I do after my years in Djúpid? I moved south and… hang on, here comes my Lóa, bless her.

‘What did you do last night?’

‘Last night? I just stayed at home, watching TV with Mum. We watched ER together.’

‘Tosh. You should go to Afghanistan and take care of women there. It’s so good to get into a war when you’re young.’

‘I don’t think Mum would be too happy about that.’

‘Tush. It’s good for all mothers to see their children leave.’

‘But I’m her only child.’

‘Yes, you’re lucky. You just mustn’t forget life, Lóa, dear. It’s a lot more fun to live it than to watch it.’

She gives me my medicine and then I allow her to feed me, pretend to be feeling weak. I can’t be bothered shovelling that stuff inside me, I’m tired of grub. But pretty soon I’ll be able to give up all these ingestions. Advent is fast approaching with the fabulous fourteenth. One thirty, the girl at the crematorium had said.

Yes, what did I do after my years in Djúpid? I went south and moved in with my Prince Potato in Reykjavík, where we found our shelter. There I turned into a gardening hen, pecking at flower beds with a scarf wrapped round my head and rejoicing at anything green that sprouted out of the soil. We start off our lives dreaming of golden-green forests and end up marvelling at a single tree. That pretty much sums up our existence: it’s all about chopping down our dreams. Liberating one’s self from everything one wanted and everything one got. Now I lie here with just one egg left.

I forgot to mention it. When I threw the grenade at Bæring, it landed on the floor of the sty, bounced there into a corner, where Jón of Módárkot found it for me and brought it to my bed of sorrows. He mistook it for a ‘carburetor,’ but I corrected him and told him it was a Russian hip flask that my Bæring had found in the stomach of a catfish and that was very dear to him. ‘Oh, really?’ The safety pin was no longer on it, so it was no doubt unusable, past its shelf date like a fresh cheese from 1942. To be honest, I was sorry I’d never had a proper chance to use it, to see it shine. But now it’s all I’ve got left, that and life itself: Le seul souvenir de ma vie turbulente.

The thing that pleased me the most about moving back to Reykjavík was renewing my contact with Mum and Dad, who had been living on Skothúsvegur for so long now that their holy spirits inhabited every single object in the house. In the corner there was a statue of the first settler, and Mum regularly dusted his helmet and spear.

My mother was edging close to eighty now but stayed in good shape, had kept her back straight with all the dignity of a Breidafjördur lass, which couldn’t be said of her daughter, who excelled at back-bending activities in the garden behind the house. My father was seventy-five years old, with a smooth forehead and combed-back hair, but he looked good for his age, although in his eyes everything was still in ruins. Some journalists had written a book about ‘Icelandic Nazis,’ and there was a photo of Dad in it in full uniform, Hitler’s soldier, ‘the president’s son.’ Every five years for the whole of my life, I received a phone call from some zealous hack who was eager to dig something up about my father’s misfortunes.

‘Where can I get hold of him? Is he in hiding? Don’t you think the nation has a right to hear this story?’ And now they had finally put this book together. Half-truths about half the war. The other half was too complex for the media. My father had obviously already done his penance many times over. Even his children and wife had bled for their father’s sins. But the reporters wanted to hang them around their own necks and proudly show them off around town.

‘Don’t you want to tell the story yourself?’ I asked my father one snowy, bright autumn Sunday.

‘Ach. Who wants to hear a leaf tell the story of the wind?’

I clasped him in the middle of the living room, and we stood there, locked in an embrace, until the deception that nothing had ever happened took hold of us. Never on his part, never on mine. Never between us, ever. Mum came in from the kitchen carrying a pot of hot chocolate, with white hair and dressed in a skirt, and said, ‘Well then.’ She couldn’t bear sappiness any more than Grandma could, than I could. But did she really not know what had happened?

So many things had been buried in silence. When my father returned from the war, he promised Grandad never to mention Germany again, never to go there again, never to answer any letters from there. And on no account was he allowed to talk about his experiences during the war. This clear order from the father of the nation was in keeping with the traditional Icelandic code of silence. Dad had obeyed. Had he also neglected to tell Mum about what took place at the end of the war, and contaminated his, and my, life for the rest of eternity?

I never asked. Silence begets silence.