The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

7 Svefneyjar 1929

As I mentioned, I was born in Ísafjördur, on 9 September 1929. Mum had been sent away, out of public view, to give birth to the one whom nobody wanted to see and who should never have existed: me. There was a minimum time delay set on entering my father’s respectable family, so Mum and I spent the first seven years alone together in the Svefneyjar islands, where Mum worked as a maid in the home of Eysteinn, a farmer, and his wife, Lína.

Lína was the sweetest of women, sturdily built and buxom, always with some verse on her lips, but with a rather high-pitched voice. She had a soft heart but incredibly strong arms, as women did in those days, and over time she developed wooden legs from arthritis. She helmed the large house like a sea captain, with one eye on the waves and the other on the stove. To Mum, she was like a mother because, although Grandma possessed many good qualities, maternal warmth wasn’t one of them. By the will and whim of the Creator, Grandma had ended her life’s voyage in Svefneyjar, although she didn’t live in the house, but in an old boat shed along with three other women. Mum and I, on the other hand, dwelt in Lína’s fiefdom.

Eysteinn had clear-cut features, a downy beard, sea-red cheeks and eyes as calm as a tranquil bay. He had bulky hands and broad shoulders and, with the passing of the years and the swelling of his belly, he used a walking stick. He was chirpy in the mornings but pigheaded in the evenings; amiable at home but mulish when it came to contracts or anything to do with ‘foreign affairs.’ He was renowned for having kicked some Danish land surveyors off the island when they tried to move the southernmost skerry on his land three yards to the south.

He was a ‘good and good man,’ Grandma used to say. She was of Breidafjördur stock on both sides and had made hay on more than a hundred islands. She always repeated her compliments twice. ‘Oh, that one’s fine and fine,’ she would say of a boiled sweet or a labourer. Grandma was a hundred years old when I was born and a hundred years old when she died. A hundred years old for an entire century. Baptised by the sea and hardened by trawling, no man’s daughter, and married to Iceland, mother of my mother and eternal heroine of my thoughts. Verbjörg Jónsdóttir. Soon I will meet her, in age and rage, and knock at her door. ‘Oh, is that you, my darling little dung cake?’

Well, I’ll be darned if I haven’t started looking forward to dying.

Yes, I enjoyed seven blissful years in Breidafjördur until my father recovered from his amnesia and remembered he had a daughter and wife in this part of the Icelandic coast. My childhood was sprinkled with islands. Islands full of rowdy sailors and seaweed-eating cattle. Sun-bright, grass-yellow islands, sea-beaten by the gales on all sides, though in my memory it is always dead calm.

They say that he who has visited all the islands of Breidafjördur is a dead man because many of those islands are buried underwater. And it can probably be said that, even though they seem innumerable at high tide, they’re even more innumerable at low tide. This applies to so many things in life that are hard to count. How many men did I have? How many times did I fall in love? Every remembered moment is an island in the depths of time, a poet once wrote, and if Breidafjördur is my life, then these islands are the days I remember now, as I go chugging between them on my boat of a bed, with this trendy new outboard motor they call a laptop.

Chug-a-chug-a-chug.