The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

91 Women and Booze 1944

They carried on marching all day and in the evening reached a crooked-roofed village. The locals could be seen fleeing when the first helmets appeared between the houses. What was left behind was an unbombed village with a hundred warped houses, all of which were open, some with boiling eggs on their stoves. Ready-made beds and ticking grandfather clocks. The fellows settled into a small building on the edge of the village, with a tiny living room and kitchen, which soon filled with famished retreating men.

They ate their way into the pantry and under the beds and down into barrels. And found bottles: by evening the village had been turned upside down. ‘Heil Hitler!’ They had to drink to the memory of their dead brothers. The Russian campaign had unexpectedly turned into a drunken spree in the Carpathian Mountains. And a wild skirt-chasing expedition. As night fell, young women began to appear between the trees. Heavy-breasted girls with hairy foreheads and a party twinkle in their eyes. Someone went out for a piss and found a friendly gaze in the woods. Soon barns and sheds were rocking.

My father witnessed this game from the sidelines but saw a young soldier appear on the threshold of the kitchen with an older woman.

She stood out from the other girls because her face was pale and her eyes shone with intelligence. Maybe she was an office girl in hiding. Her eyebrows were thick and heavy and her profile so birdlike that her entire expression struck my father’s head like a whiplash: for a minute he thought Mum was back. The illusion was so powerful that he almost addressed her in Icelandic. But after staring at her face for half an hour, he finally staggered into the bright night garden, drunk on alcohol and memories, and suddenly pictured the day when he stepped off that boat in Breidafjördur and rushed straight to the farm where the woman of his life was waiting for him. Massa in her crown of pearls of sweat, with a rake in her hands. And he was filled with nostalgia. A longing for her and for his life before the war.

Why hadn’t he taken his wife’s advice? He who had longed for her for seven long years but got her back again, only to ignore her wisdom. After a whole three years in the cold and mud, his faith in Hitler crumbled with the simple apparition of this woman’s face on the threshold of a Romanian hut.

‘Yes, and then men talk badly of women and booze…’ Dad snorted, smiling and shaking his head in the small Copenhagen bar long after the war. And there was a hint of sappy juice in his eyes.