The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

88 Funerals 1988–1989

Mum died in August 1988, and I said goodbye to her with waves of salty tears. Thórdís Alva wrote so beautifully about her in the paper that I sent her 20,000 kronur in an envelope. In a few eloquent sentences she had conjured her up for me again as the earthly goddess who had enveloped me in the fragrance of her sweat in the embassy bed that first Christmas of the war. Just two months later, though, that powerful umbilical cord had been severed, and I was able to just about reattach it only in old age. In many ways my life had been a long race up to the hospital where she lay on her last day. I just managed to arrive on time and stooped over the side of her bed, gasping for breath, and got to be a daughter again until the evening came.

Oh, my lovely Mum.

All the Johnsons came to the ceremony, and the entire Björnsson clan. I had never realised what a fine and noble figure my mother had become until I looked behind me in the church and, for a brief moment, thought that I was at the wrong funeral, that they were burying some aristocratic dame from a fancy neighbourhood, until I spotted faces from Breidafjördur: weather-beaten islands in an ocean of face powder and furs.

After the reception, I took Dad home and helped him up the steps of Skothúsvegur. He managed to insert the key into the lock but then crumbled on the threshold. I had to get the neighbours’ help to get him into bed and then sat by his side, took his scaled hand, and held it for ten whole months, read newspapers for him, slipped records onto the turntable, and recited all the Schiller I knew. Every now and then, the poems seemed to trigger a memory and he muttered something. He had given up smoking for Mum’s sake after they got back together again, but I got him to start again, gave him a drag from one of mine. I could tell he enjoyed it, even though he was in another world.

Once, I had the Hitler egg with me and allowed him to handle it. He held it for a whole half hour and then asked when the next train to Berlin was.

He went on a bright June day, just before dinnertime. Swans drew a cloud in front of the sun over the city lake; I sat alone with him and tried to bid him farewell in peace. But the strangest thing was that, as soon as he had breathed his last, my mind was assailed by a whirlwind of forty-year-old questions. Hadn’t this man, through his confusion, wrong decisions, and relentless bad luck, exerted too much influence on my existence? I would have been only too happy to live my life without a father, but now I was stuck with a triune one because, in the end, fate had shaped him into my father, son and holy burden all at once. And yet he was the man I had given the most to in my life. A whole heart was needed to reconcile myself with him, which is why there wasn’t much left of this piece of meat. I’m the woman who spent her life trying to love the man who robbed her of the possibility of finding true love.

Mein Vater, mein Vater…

I organised a nice funeral, which was well attended, and I stood stone cold on the edge of his grave, chucking six hundred conflicting feelings onto the coffin as it descended into the earth. And it wasn’t until I visited his grave two weeks later that the tears came. I saw things as they were: my past had been buried. It had vanished out of sight. I couldn’t brood over it any more. It’s only when your parents are dead that you can start to live. And I got to live three whole years, until the doctors informed me of my death sentence in the spring of 1991.