The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

95 Depression with Whipped Cream 1945

It was a strange summer. Bright sunshine on the outside but dark on the inside: one big depression with whipped cream (I ate sixteen pancakes a day). The dreams recurred night after night, pregnant with pain and suffering. One night I was being drooled over in Russian, the next I was squirming in a pit of worms in an air-raid shelter and the worms turned into people. At one end, children were being born, and at the other, human lives were being extinguished. I tried to crawl my way towards the light but was constantly being drowned by arms and legs and children’s naked thighs.

For entire bright summer evenings I sat in the attic, staring out of the window and wondering what Mum was doing in the town on the other side of the bay. Why wasn’t she knocking on the windows and doors of the presidential residence, howling with remorse?

By any contemporary standards, I should, of course, have been put in some psychiatric ward, where some shrink could have coaxed the horrors of war out of me, and that ultimate shock, but those institutions didn’t exist back then and barely exist now. Instead I got to play bridge with Grandma and her friends, semi-Danish bourgeois ladies who discussed Mum’s relationship with Fridrik in a coded Danish that I nevertheless managed to decipher. Here I got the gossipy version of events: that Mum had met him in England, that they’d travelled home on the same ship, but that she had, above all, fallen for his apartment on Brædraborgarstígur.

In the long, bright nights I stared at the man sleeping in the bed opposite mine, just as I’d stared at Marek in the old cabin, and asked myself how the monstrosity of war had been able to act with such precision, to have glued us together in this calamity, a father and daughter, the only Icelanders in the cast of 200 million people performing in the spectacle of that war. It defied belief. The demonic serendipity. It was as if a walrus had managed to thread a needle.

The atheist God clearly hated me.