The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

90 Eye of War 1944

My father was lying on his stomach in the mud with his dusty Mauser rifle on the banks of a river that wasn’t called the Don or Dnieper but the Dniester, no less, which flows down to the Black Sea, drawing the frontier between Ukraine and Romania. Yes, they had retreated that far, poor things, to fight over the land now known as Romania. Ten thousand Germans, in torn trousers and frost-gnawed shoes, pitted against one hundred thousand singing Russians, who under the veil of the night had crept across the river. There is a certain principle in life that says that no matter how much confidence the invading side may have, it will never amount to half the vengeful power of the home army.

All of a sudden the Icelandic soldier saw something white roll down a heap of earth and halt beside him. Some kind of white glistening sphere. A toadstool? Mushroom? No, it was an eye. A detached eye that lay there in the mud beside him and… yes, there was no question about it: it could still see. It looked him in the eye and asked him like a baby’s head that had just popped out of mother earth, What are you doing?

He wasn’t given enough time to answer because there was another explosion with a yellow blaze that scattered everything in his sight into the air. The eye had vanished when he opened his own again, and he noticed that above him, from the banks of the trench, a tall soldier came flying over him with his face locked in a grimace. He landed so close to my father, knocking his head against the edge, that Dad could hear his neck break through all the battle sounds: the emergency calls, blasts, and flying engines.

He told me the story later in a small bar in Copenhagen. We had an unexpected father-daughter moment and could finally talk freely beyond the jurisdiction of Iceland’s law of silence.

Later that day, he marched with his buddy Orel, a pastor’s son from Aachen, and a hundred other downtrodden soldiers, up the bank of the river that flowed peacefully on their right, moving upstream; they were retreating into the hinterland. Orel knew many poems and he liked to rattle them off to kill time. Dad said, ‘I had to ask him to stop reciting them when I found out that most of them were by Heinrich Heine. His poetry was banned within the boundaries of the Third Reich, “because of the Jewish ink in the poet’s pen,” to quote someone more important than me.’

The banks were wide. Unbombed stretches of grass and mounds interspersed with trees. To the left of them rose the Carpathian Mountains, distant light blue summits, which darkened the forests in their shadow and lifted the spirits of a German soldier after three winters on the soggy Russia Plains, but on the other side of the river lay the endless expanse of that same unvanquished land. They avoided looking in that direction, but instead focused their eyes on their worn-out boots, which marched on the path back to Germany like homeward-bound horses. A number of young soldiers splashed themselves in a shallow stream that crossed the path, and two of them flung themselves into it fully clothed. An officer glanced at them in silence.

In the blue distance of the valley, a plume of smoke oozed out of a crooked chimney. Someone was expecting a defeated platoon for dinner. Close by was a roofless military camp hospital that had been set up under tall trees by a wheelless jeep that served as a kitchen. Roars of agony filled the air and pierced the soul. The men cast a furtive glance in their direction but then immediately looked away again. A leg had fallen off the operating table in the moment they had glimpsed it.

Orel kept on with his Heine verses about Napoleon’s soldiers (Dad gave up trying to stop him), while the Icelander was still thinking about the eye that had rolled over to him in the trench in the middle of the battle like a latter-day lotto ball.