‘Hi,’ Dad repeated. ‘Do you… do you remember me?’
She carried on raking vigorously.
‘No. Who are you?’
‘Hans. Hansi. You…’
‘Hans Henrik Björnsson? I thought that man had died. Giving birth.’
‘Massa… I… I’ve come.’
Once more the fork froze in her hands and she looked him in the eye.
‘I was expecting rain, but not you.’
Then she started raking again.
‘Massa… forgive me.’
‘Have you come here to moan?’ she said coldly, continuing her work with even more zeal than before. She was wearing a sleeveless steel-grey shirt with blotches of sweat under her armpits: dark half-moons that looked as if they had been embroidered into the material. Pearls of perspiration were about to fuse on her forehead. ‘What do you want?’
‘You.’
‘Me?’
At this point, Mum stopped raking and started to laugh.
‘Yes, Massa, I… I’ve been…’
He hesitated yet again, and Mum poked the pile of hay that lay between them and stretched along the field like a yellowing frontier between love and hate. Further down the way, other labourers were hard at work, Sveinki the Romantic and Buxom Rósa, both armed with rakes. The latter positioned herself behind a haystack to observe the newcomer.
‘It’s also been difficult for… but now I…’ Dad continued to stutter around his thoughts. Mum looked at the man, waiting for the rest. He tried again.
‘Now I know…’
But when nothing more came out of him, the woman gave up and said decisively, ‘I’d have more use for your hands right now. Go and get a rake from the shed.’
Dad later told me that he never worked so hard in all his life. Not even in the war, when he was digging trenches east of the Don and Dniester. He laboured like a hundred men that day and that whole week and almost finished the haymaking for the Svefneyjar farmer single-handedly. I remember admiring him as he tossed the bales into the barn, the muscles of his pale arms glistening in the sun. This half-Danish pharmacy cashier had revealed a secret talent for haymaking and concealed the blisters on his hands at mealtimes, although his daughter had spotted them and worshipped them just as the first Christians venerated Christ’s sacrificial wounds.
Naturally, there was something exotic about him. My dad Hansi cut a handsome figure with a particularly striking profile, like a well-bred bird with a straight nose and high chest. Unlike the locals, he always walked with an upright back. Back then he had a pale face, as white as a sheet in the midst of all those weather-beaten faces that sat around the kitchen table at Lína’s, gobbling down smoked seal meat and singed fins. It was only later that his face turned burgundy red. Mum had told me that this man was my father, but he paid little attention to me in those first days and had few more words for my mother. The future president’s son first had to complete his mission in a classic tale. He was the son of the peasant who had to overcome seven challenges before he could win the princess’s hand. Finally she invited him on a boat trip, and together they found their love island, which was invisible to the naked eye.
We sailed south in September, Dad, Mum and I, who stared at the man in the hat for the entire journey. I remember nothing of that first winter in Reykjavík, except that I started school and attracted attention for my stubbornness and precocious manners. ‘Can you read?’ they asked me.
‘Only tern’s eggs.’
In the spring we headed for Germany. Dad had found not only love but himself, too. He closed his law books to open others, starting a course in Old Norse studies at the University of Lübeck.
Contrary to what Mum had imagined, her parents-in-law gave her a warm welcome. The first ambassador of Iceland and his Danish wife had probably harboured greater expectations for their firstborn, in view of their position, but they were basically decent people. The reason my father had denied himself the country girl had not exactly been a categorical order from his father. He had assumed that Grandad Sveinn was opposed to the match purely on the basis of seven seconds of silence.
19
The Icelandic Tradition of Silence
2009
In those days, silence was one of the pillars of Icelandic culture. People didn’t resolve their arguments through dialogue, and they were more skilled at interpreting silences than asking questions. They believed it was possible to erase a person’s entire existence through the sheer power of silence. But that was understandable, of course: we were crawling out of the millennium of muteness that had reigned over land and sea, when our strife required no words, so that they were best stored in a book in the communal living room. This is the reason why the Icelandic language didn’t change in a thousand years – we virtually never used it.
For centuries on end, very little was said in Iceland. Because people so rarely met. And when they did meet, they systematically avoided conversation. In our living quarters, people listened to readings, in churches to sermons, at big birthdays to whole speeches; and when the population started to grow, in the twentieth century, we developed the perfect way to preserve our silence: whist. Icelandic was much more a written language than a spoken one. It wasn’t until we started to learn other languages that we realised we could use language for other things than poetry, writing and reading.
I’ve heard it said that the great Icelandic silence came from a pact that was made with the Nordic countries: they would leave us in peace, provided we preserve the language for them, since they were rapidly losing it from sucking up to the French and German courts. And one shouldn’t touch the things one is keeping for others. They, however, didn’t hesitate to break the pact, since before we realised it, we’d been turned into their colony. Now they expect us to speak their watered-down variation of the golden treasure we stored, the Latin of the North, no less.
We Icelanders therefore walk around with gold in our mouths, a fact that has shaped us more than anything else. At least we don’t squander words unnecessarily. The problem with Icelandic, however, is that it’s far too big a language for such a small nation. I read on the web that it contains 600,000 words and over 5 million word formations. Our tongue is therefore considerably bigger than the nation.
I did get to know other languages pretty well, but few are as solemn, because they’re designed for daily use. German strikes me as the least pretentious language, and its people use it the way a carpenter uses a hammer, to build a house for thought, although it can hardly be considered attractive. Apart from Russian, Italian is the most beautiful language in the world and turns every man into an emperor. French is a tasty sauce that the French want to savour in their mouths for as long as possible, which is why they talk in circles and want to ruminate on their words, which often causes the sauce to dribble out of the corners of their mouths. Danish is a language the Danes are ashamed of. They want to be freed of it as soon as possible, which is why they spit out their words. Dutch is a guttural language that gulped down two others. Swedish thinks it’s the French of the north, and the Swedes do their utmost to relish it by smacking their lips. Norwegian is what you get when a whole nation does its best not to speak Danish. English is no longer a language but a universal phenomenon like oxygen and sunlight. Then Spanish is a peculiar perversion of Latin that came into being when a nation tried to adapt to a king’s speech impediment, and yet it is the language I learned the best.
Few of these nations, however, have mastered the art of silence. The Finns are Icelanders’ greatest competitors when it comes to silence, since they are the only nation in the world that can be silent in two languages, as Brecht said. We Icelanders, on the other hand, are the only country in the world that venerated its language so much that we decided to use it as little as possible. This is why Icelandic is a chaste old maiden in her sixties who has developed a late sex drive and desires nothing more than to allow herself to be ravished by words before she dies. And that is what she will do. After my latest incursions into the blog world, I am convinced that the coming generations can be trusted to extract the gold from the bullshit and jettison the former to preserve the latter.