The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

92 War from a Distance 1944

Wars don’t need much sleep. Before dew saw daylight, Ivan arrived to send the battalion running. The men clambered to their feet, their cheeks still smudged by women, and peered out into the darkness of the night in terror. Soon bullets would be flying.

‘Hans! Hans!’ Orel’s voice cried out between the gunshots as Dad sat in the woods under a tree counting the Svefneyjar islands. He sat there facing the village. A shower of bullets blasted over it like a hailstorm, and the highest gables glowed in the morning twilight.

‘Hans! Hans!’

Was he a coward? Deserter? Traitor? Or just an Icelander?

He had wandered away from the village around midnight, over the stream and under the roofs of foliage. Lured away by my mother’s face, he had abandoned this rocking, copulating ship in the middle of the forest and had found himself a tree to rest against.

Dad heard Orel yell his name a few more times, without running to his rescue or accompanying him to the Land of the Dead. And then he was heard no more. My father’s ears told him that his companion was gone. The war had silenced six thousand lines by Heinrich Heine.

Few things are as dangerous for a soldier as viewing war from a distance. A sense of futility will take hold of him and there’s no turning back. My father stood paralysed against a tree trunk, observing the massacre, an Icelander in the woods. And that was where the war ended for him.