The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

94 Mrs Johnson 1945

Dad and I returned on the Esja at the beginning of July, with a large group of Icelanders who hadn’t seen the country since before the war. On a bright summer morning we finally saw Iceland again. We stood on deck when the Westman Islands rose out of the sea, and then the glaciers behind them. The initial feeling was strange. It was like seeing one’s own face emerge from the depths, slowly and arduously, trying to catch its breath again. Then I thought of this line from a poem by Laxness: ‘My mountains rise, as white as curds and milk.’ Because after all my misery, my country looked like a banquet: I literally wanted to gulp it all down.

Grandma Georgía made sure we were driven straight from the harbour out to the presidential residence of Bessastadir, where my father was kept in a room like a state secret. I was to bring him his meals up in the loft because he wasn’t allowed to appear at official functions. He sat up on the edge of his bed, acting as if nothing were amiss, but ensuring that he avoided his daughter’s gaze and focused on the food. I sat down briefly beside him and tried to find the key word that would unlock some dialogue about the horrors that were tormenting him and us and that I couldn’t discuss with anyone but him, and he with me, but that were too big for two small beings like us to deal with. But the god of speech was too reluctant to release that word. At the end of his pancake, Dad looked at me, determined not to cry, and patted me on the knee.

‘Don’t think about it.’

Mum and I didn’t meet until three months after our homecoming. Grandma couldn’t forgive her for the sin of having, as soon as she returned home at the end of the war, thrown herself into the bed of Mr Johnson, the staid coffee merchant who, moreover, already had three children with another woman. The fact that the latter was dead was of no importance; Grandma felt Mum had betrayed the family and she therefore ‘put her on ice,’ which was her way of dealing with anger.

As for me, my relationship with Mum was never the same after I’d watched her vanish from sight on that pier in Dagebüll in 1942. A child’s soul won’t listen to reason. It felt her mother had abandoned her. She had sent me away, only twelve years old, on a boat to some unfathomable destination and then didn’t come to meet us in Hamburg as she had promised.

She later told me how the trains had shut down for a month, how she had cried that night and many more, how she trusted that my father would take care of me, and how she remained in the Lübeck household until the summer of 1944, when a friend of the family invited her to stay at his country estate – the Loon Count of Loonyburg, she called him. Was she in love with him? ‘He was a tease,’ went the answer. But she did spend the winter of ’44–’45 at his place. Sometimes a man is a woman’s refuge.

The island girl was a resourceful woman. As soon as the castle fell into the hands of the Allies, she was in a jeep shooting west, with a giant wheel of cheese on her lap. After an adventurous journey, she reached England and from there sailed on to Iceland; she was home by April 1945, long before all the other Icelanders who, like us, had been trapped by the war. And shortly after her homecoming, she’d found refuge in the arms of that gentle, elderly widower.

I waited for her in the living room of the presidential residence in Bessastadir, a sixteen-year-old woman by then, with neatly brushed hair, on a sunny autumn day. The chauffeur parked in the driveway and Mum stepped out, like the sovereign of some other country, a country I didn’t know. Alfred, the residence manager, received her, and without moving, I watched her in her high heels as she stepped onto the stone floor of the foyer and on into the cloakroom. She didn’t see me until she came out again, coatless, in a light dress, adjusting her elegantly set hair with open palms on her first visit to the president’s residence. I felt an urge to take a step towards her, despite Grandma’s stern look, but couldn’t. I couldn’t step over all that had happened, and I waited for her with leaden feet.

Mum came sailing towards me smiling, broader and more heavily keeled than before, and started off trying to kiss me in a manner that was appropriate for a public place, even though Grandma was the only other person in the room, but then gave up and embraced me, as her head started to shake and a tear trickled from one eye. We embraced again and I vanished into her hair but could no longer find the smell of seaweed, just the scent of post-war boom. She had become Mrs Johnson.

I was unable to utter a word. Mum filled the silence with remarks like ‘How you’ve changed and grown, my child…’ I could sense from her voice that I no longer lived inside her, but stood outside, outside the sanctuary of her soul. And I felt it would take me a lifetime to penetrate it again. Unlike Mum, I didn’t produce a tear, although my insides were screaming in pain. There was a fence in the sound of my mother’s voice, insurmountable and bristling: the god of events had broken us apart.

Further inside the house, my father’s heart was ticking, until he finally appeared in the living room, constantly stroking his forehead with the open palm of his right hand. When he finally stopped stroking it, he took the hand of the woman he had betrayed for Hitler, and she could observe how the war had thinned his hair and consumed his being.

He didn’t say anything and neither did she. But Grandma broke into Danish: ‘Jæja, så kan vi gå ind.’ Right, then, let’s go in. She had organised this long-awaited family meeting and directed it like a general. She sat us down by the window in the dining room, me beside Dad and Mum opposite us, and placed her chair at the corner of the table so that she could spring up and scuttle into the kitchen, while she watched over Mum like a guard, with her elbows on the edge of the table. Elín, the maid, brought pancakes and hot chocolate to the table. She was a country girl with dark hair and pure cheeks, adorably free of any sense of servitude.

‘Would you like me to bring in the cream now?’

‘Yes, that would be nice.’

‘Whipped, then?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘But you realise that’s the last cream.’

The hostess nodded and smiled at the maid, while we silently stared at the steam rising from our cups, which turned golden in the horizontal rays of the autumn sun. Back in Breidafjördur, those rays were called cod-liver light.

Grandma addressed a few ice-cold questions to Mum, and I noticed that Dad’s hand was trembling when he tried to lift his cup by the handle. But then it was as if the quiver transferred to Mum’s voice.

‘More than anything, I would, of course, want Herra to come live with me.’

Grandma immediately quashed that. Then Hans Henrik would be left all on his own while she, Massebill, not only had a husband but three children. Mum was speechless, Fridrik Johnson’s children were grown-ups; she had seen only two of them twice. But Grandma remained immovable. One couldn’t have everything in life. The negotiations ended with an agreement that I would visit her once a month. Dad sat through this in silence but finally started to cry without anyone but me noticing. He dabbed his eyes with a napkin and I lay my hand on his under the table. Mum was quiet and observed our alliance with broken eyes. In her eyes one could read that Dad and I were bound together by something that couldn’t be found in a dictionary, something between the illicit and unspeakable.