But there we were, a newly reunited family of three in a new country and a new city, with a new future. After Grandad had liberated Dad from German custody and cash duty, the young man would accept no more support, least of all financial, so we lived in a cold cubbyhole on the top floor of a tall, narrow brick building where I counted 133 steps up and 132 steps down. ‘Always longer up than down,’ Dad would say. The view from the kitchen window was memorable: crow-stepped gables and mediaeval towers, the whole of Europe stretching beyond the horizon. Dad enrolled at the Nazi faculty and specialised in Hitlerian concepts and Aryan mythology. As already mentioned, the runic SS letters held him firmly by the balls, but he was careful not to mention this unruly mistress in front of his wife. Mum had been brought up in Breidafjördur, where no nonsense had washed ashore since Christianity had been dispatched to the island of Flatey in 1002.
She possessed an uncontaminated mind.
When the first spring of the war came, the issue could no longer be ignored. I remember the conversation in that tiny attic kitchen in May 1940. Mum stood by the open window, Dad on the threshold, and I between them at a minuscule table where I was busy colouring an Icelandic flag that flapped majestically like an unmanned magic carpet over an abandoned turf farmhouse.
‘The army?’ said Mum. ‘Why? Who… who are you going to fight for?’
Dad shrugged. ‘I’ll fight with my friends.’
‘For God’s sake, Hansi. What has an Icelander got to do with a war? Has an Icelander ever fought in a war?’
‘No, up until now we haven’t been manly enough.’
‘Manly enough? Thank God, I say.’
‘Massa. Iceland was occupied this morning.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I heard the news on the wireless today, at Peter’s. He can listen to the British news on the BBC.’
‘Isn’t that forbidden?’
‘Yes. But he’s in the party, so no one suspects him. They took Iceland this morning. Not a single shot was heard.’
‘Thank God.’
‘Thank God? That just shows you what cowards we are, we Icelanders.’
‘Hans Henrik, what’s got into you? The Danes put up no resistance either.’
‘No. Naturally they saw that surrender was their best defence.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They landed on the right side and don’t have to fear a war in their country. They can sleep soundly while the missiles fly over the skies of Denmark. Like snow buntings in a snowstorm, that’s the Danes for you. Because they’re not the target, Germany is.’
‘Don’t you think the English will try to liberate the Danes?’
‘Why should they do that? Who gives a damn about Denmark? A few pig farms and two breweries…’
‘How can you talk like that about… about your motherland? And the Danes, who’ve treated your father so well…’
‘Father has no illusions about them, even if he has a Danish wife. He knows nations never do other nations any favours. It’s each man for himself.’
‘Didn’t the English go to war because of Poland?’
‘The English only think of London,’ said Dad. ‘Their only fear is seeing Germany from Dover.’
‘Hansi. What I don’t understand is this… this need for aggression. Why do the Germans need to conquer all those countries? What can they do with all these countries?… Aren’t they happy just living at home?’
Dad lowered his voice: ‘Massa, watch your tongue!’
‘As if they understood this tongue.’
‘Wilfried downstairs is a fellow student. He’s fluent in Icelandic.’
Mum hissed: ‘How many countries does this man have to rule over? I say what Mum says, why can’t he hop on a train if he wants to visit places? This is as if… as if Eysteinn in Svefneyjar suddenly wanted to rule over all the islands in Breidafjördur. Then he wouldn’t be able to do any of his farming work. All his time would just go into holding on to those lands. He who has everything can’t enjoy anything, Mum says.’
‘Mum… Mum… and what if… if the islands of Grasey and Lyngey had been taken from him? Wouldn’t he have the right to reclaim them? Germany was humiliated in the last war. We have the right to—’
‘For God’s sake, Hansi, don’t say “we.”’
‘What about the Sudetenland, Prussia, Alsace?… That’s all German land.’
‘Yes, and Norway, Denmark, and Iceland as well. Hansi, can’t you see, this is nothing more than… than megalomania.’
‘Iceland?’
‘Yes, didn’t you say that Iceland was occupied this morning?’
‘Yes, but not by the Germans.’
‘No? By whom, then?’
‘Iceland was occupied by the English. We’ve turned into an English colony.’
‘The English?’
And now there was a pause in the conversation. I continued colouring the Icelandic flag, but the blue lead was getting all used up, starting to smudge on the sheet. But I didn’t dare lean over to grab the pencil sharpener on the kitchen sideboard beside the dustbin. When super powers are battling, little people should sit still. The news clearly came as a shock to my mother.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying now?’ said Dad.
Mum was silent. She turned to the sink, slowly turned on the tap, and stared at the water a good while.
Dad admonished her. ‘Don’t let it run like that. They say there might be a water shortage this summer.’
She stretched out for a pot, filled it up halfway, shut off the tap, and placed the pot on the stove without turning the gas on. Then she turned back to Dad, who was still standing in the doorway in a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves, one elbow propped against the frame. He brushed his hair back from his forehead with his hand.
‘And did they take… has the whole of Iceland been occupied?’ Mum wanted to know.
‘Yes.’
‘The islands, too?’
‘Breidafjördur? I expect so.’
‘But… there are so many…’
I pictured two thousand soldiers capturing two thousand islands. And standing their watch, one on each skerry, straight as arrows, with rifles slung over their shoulders. And the seals on the surrounding foreshore, like a navy of fat, unknown enemies.
We’d lived there in a place that was a world unto itself and not always a part of Iceland. One of the farmers on the islands had commented that it was good to live there but a shame to be surrounded by Danish mountains. And when the country was finally granted independence in 1944, Grandma is reputed to have said, ‘Now maybe we can start trading with those good people.’ By then she’d lived a long life under the Danish flag, as a Danish subject, but her soul never yielded to them.
‘And what does that mean, then,’ Mum asked, ‘the fact that we’ve been occupied by the British?’
‘It means that Iceland, which is ruled by Denmark, which is now ruled by Germany, is under the British.’
‘Can’t we get any more nations to rule over us?’
Dad bowed his head and watched himself gently kick the base of the door frame with his pointy shoe. That is the scene as I picture it now, but back then I had my back turned to him at the kitchen table facing an open window, stooped over my drawing.
‘We’re just small change in the world’s pocket, sullied by thousands of dirty fingers. Danish yesterday, German today, British tomorrow. We own nothing, are nothing, and can do nothing. Für immer und ewig kaputt.’
‘But we always have the spring,’ said Mum dreamily. ‘That’ll always be Icelandic.’ That’s the way people sometimes spoke in Iceland before the war, and one never knew whether they’d borrowed it from a book by Halldór Laxness or whether he had stolen it from them. She gave off a strange laugh with that answer, both sad and sincere.