The island girl was now thirty-six years old; life’s cracks were beginning to appear on her face, and the tree rings of time around her waist. She had been moved to a height of 133 steps, from churning butter on an Icelandic island to overlooking a continent at war from a German attic. On that tenth day of May, 1940, the German army stood at the Russian border to the east and the Arctic Circle to the north, and they’d rolled into the Netherlands at dawn. A month later, they would be parading under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. In the south they only had to wait a few days for Mussolini. The swastika was spreading its arms, and soon the whole of Europe would be under Hjalti’s moustache.
I concentrated as hard as I could on pressing the Icelandic mountain blue from a German pencil, and if I concentrated even harder, through the open window I could hear the faint rolling of tanks beyond the blurred horizon of the woods. On the edge of the city, spiralling towers stood by the old town gate, Holstentor, which mediaeval men had raised for their protection and glory, but which now was a useless relic, a meaningless ornament. All of a sudden, as I lie here now in the garage at the end of my whiz-bang existence, I feel that the history of mankind is nothing more than a rattlesnake biting its own tail, an endless cycle of absurd events that have virtually nothing to do with life but are just one colossal monument to male madness, which the women of all times have had to endure.
But what did I understand of all those warmongering shenanigans? Very little, obviously. To me Germany was an exciting place and its flag was beautiful. The women were jovial and the men were tough. And my childish mind couldn’t put two and two together to work out the four-armed idiocy. It takes a lifetime to understand life. In the here and now, we’re always quite stupid, but there and then a bit wiser.
I therefore entreat my sisters: we should always rush to buy blankets and canned meat when we hear a man say: ‘We’re living through historic times.’
My parents’ conversation wasn’t over. Once more, Mum asked the same question: ‘But what does it mean, that the English have occupied us?’
‘It means the country has landed on the wrong side,’ said Dad.
‘But Hansi…’ Mum sighed, then continued, ‘You really believe in all this?’
There was a brief silence in our kitchen. The steeple bells of Sankt Jakobi struck eight; a blue twilight had spread across the still sky. Finally Dad answered in a low, unfanatical voice, as he focused pensively on an unlit, naked bulb hanging from the ceiling: ‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure? Sure that…’ Hans Henrik moved away from the door frame, stepped into the kitchen, leaned both hands against the counter, hung his head low, and spoke first to the sideboard, then to the wall, and finally to his own chest.
‘National Socialism is a good ideology. It’s the ideology of union and solidarity. Here everyone works as one to resurrect an entire country, an entire nation, and soon a whole continent. It’s the ideology of perseverance and collaboration, development and the future, the total opposite of Communism, which brings slavery and destruction, revolution and blood. Everything is looking up here and everyone finally has a job.’
He looked up to stare at Mum, who still stood by the sink.
‘Massa, don’t you understand that they’re building a new world here? We’re living through historic times.’
‘But your father says that—’
‘Father is a man of the old regime, a lackey to the Danes.’
‘So isn’t he a lackey to the Germans now? How can you be against the Danish colonisation of Iceland but welcome the German colonisation of Denmark at the same time?’
Dad clenched his teeth: ‘Because the Danish bastards deserve it.’
‘Hansi,’ Mum whispered. ‘Where does this rage come from?’
‘Sorry. But it’s just that when… when a new world is being built, nationality is of no importance. Ideals know no borders.’
‘But borders know ideals when the ideals start running over them with tanks.’
She was such a wise woman, my Mum. And it is, of course, painful for me to recall that conversation and listen to the bullshit coming out of Dad’s mouth. He, who would have become a doctor in Old Norse studies, if he hadn’t been so stupid. My darling little dad. Why didn’t you listen to your father? Grandad Sveinn immediately saw straight through the Nazis. Apparently he’d had to sit through long meetings with these men, who considered it a weakness to sit in a chair and express oneself in words instead of yells. He got on better with the Brits.
‘Massa! You… you don’t understand! Sometimes one has to show strength!’
Mum hardly ever lost her temper but did now. ‘I think I understand better than… why don’t you, Hans Henrik Björnsson, an Icelander in his prime, walk down one floor and knock on Jacek and Magda’s door and… no, break their door down and order them and their children to lie on their bed while you root through their drawers and cupboards for valuables and solemnly announce to them… yes, in that military manner… that their apartment is now yours! That the rightful owner is Hans Henrik Björ—’
She didn’t get to finish her sentence, which was truncated by the sudden slamming of a door.
I turned to Mum. ‘Is Dad really going to take their apartment?’
27
Mother and Daughter in Copenhagen
1940
That was how my father’s military career started: with a 132-step journey into the poisonous depths of history, where he remained for the next five years. He enlisted at a military academy just outside Berlin. Mum and I moved in with Grandma Georgía in Copenhagen. Grandad had gone home. In the wake of the occupation of Denmark, the ambassador had been called back to Iceland and forced by the Germans to take a long route: down to Genoa and from there on to New York, where he woke up on the day of the occupation of Iceland, attended a few obligatory functions, and then sailed to Reykjavík on the MS Dettifoss.
In the space of a few days, the family had been broken apart. While Dad rested on a hard German army bunk, Grandad lay in the arms of the Atlantic Ocean reading about the occupation of Iceland in the New York Times, and Grandma sat up wide awake in the lukewarm ambassadorial bed in Copenhagen reading Lucky Per by Pontoppidan, as she often did in times of high anxiety. Mum and I, on the other hand, both sat on a German train that rattled vigorously across the German border. I tried to keep myself awake by pressing my forehead hard against the cold, grimy window so that the shaking would prevent me from falling asleep, but I soon succumbed.
Mum spent the entire first evening crying in Helle’s arms while Grandma, who because of her position couldn’t embrace people, sat opposite them and shook her head at her son’s incomprehensible decision. How could he have joined the army that daily humiliated his mother’s native land? Yes, here we sat: four disenchanted women who had found some respite from the infernal clutches of time to sigh a little about the stupidity of men.
All the jollity had vanished from the streets of Copenhagen. This great ‘redbrick Paris’ was but a shadow of its former self; German long coats were on every corner and the streets were smothered by a Sunday-like silence. Restaurants were closed, lights were out in most windows, and even the spiral towers seemed terrified. Virtually no one had been killed and not a single building had been blown up, but the people’s eyes reflected a nation in ruins.
Icelanders, on the other hand, were happy to be invaded. Anyone who lives on a forsaken cold crag an hour’s journey by boat away from the nearest post office will gladly welcome any guest, even if he is bearing a gun.