‘Hello, Hebron!’
That was how all my classes started, but worst of all were the breaktimes, when I was pushed around like a pest-infested goat. I tried to go on strike again, but Mum stubbornly insisted that things would get better and pushed me into the car every morning. Things only got worse. Sometimes I literally had to flee school. Luckily I had three big gardens to choose from and a rich variety of trees to hide behind. Then on the next corner there was the National Gallery of Denmark, where I sometimes took refuge and managed to shake off the kids down its maze of corridors. Ever since that time, I’ve been able to move through museums at high speed, thanks to my well-trained eyes.
In autumn of 1940, the National Gallery was, of course, under German control. There was no Cubism, Fauvism or Expressionism on show, just Nazism. Athletic men brandishing spears and obedient women breastfeeding. It’s amazing how staid all tyrants are when it comes to art. The Nazis sent an entire race to the gas chambers but couldn’t tolerate the slightest mutilation on canvas.
32
Other People’s Poop
1940
Children are cruel animals, with a bestial sense of smell and sharp intuition. They immediately sniffed out that the newcomer was not only an Icelander but something even worse. It’s no coincidence that ‘The Ugly Duckling’ happens to be the Danes’ national tale.
Mum had sent me to school warning me never to let the other kids know I spoke German. But she herself had made the mistake of sending me there with traditional Icelandic rye bread (Grandma Georgía liked it so much that she taught Helle how to bake it) stuffed with seal meat sent from home that we had carried around since Lübeck. Moreover, she’d cut the bread widthwise instead of lengthwise, the way the Danes have done by royal decree since the year 1112.
‘What are you eating? Seal-shit bread? And cut widthways! Is everyone cross-eyed in Greenland like you?’
‘Nein!’
With that my fate was sealed. German discipline terrorised adults during the occupation of Denmark; no one dared to criticise the Germans or German-speaking Danes. The so-called Danish liberation struggle didn’t start until liberation day, when everyone wanted to have been a hero. But children were another story. The things that were only whispered in their homes were repeated out loud in the school playgrounds. Yes, the yards, lanes, alleys, corridors and paths. Actually, the Danish resistance only existed among children.
The Danish word for hell, helvede, is far too soft to describe the things I had to suffer in Sølvgade. Girls burned my hair with candles, and boys put smelly hot turds in my boots and then stood there sneering at a distance, watching me in the cloakroom. I struck the pose of a submissive nation – proud, proud, proud! – and acted as if nothing were wrong, slipped my feet into the Danish shit, and then walked past the rapturous piercing jeers of the Lasses and Björns. As usual, the car was waiting for me outside, but I slipped out of a side exit and took the street. I didn’t want to soil Iceland’s private car.
It gives you an odd feeling to walk on someone else’s shit. And ever since, I’ve had problems walking the streets of Copenhagen; I always feel the hot excrement pressing up between my toes. With tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat the size of a grenade, I crossed the City Hall Square and headed down to Kalvebod Brygge. Mum wasn’t at home, and Helle embraced me alone. She had massive breasts that were good to sink into, a short lady with perennially bare arms that reminded me of hot, fragrant loaves of bread (which are not baked in a mould but allowed to rise on their own on a plate). Her face was always sprinkled with yeast and possessed a fully baked expression, creamy teeth, tasty lips and pastry-brown cheeks peppered with freckles that looked like sesame seeds on buns. But on that day it was difficult to abandon myself in her Danish bosom.
‘Are we a bit sad today?’ she asked in Danish. ‘Oh dear, what a mess! Now we’ll just take a bath and it’ll all be fixed!’
She promised not to tell Mum that I’d had a little accident in my boots today. No one could find out. Not even Åse, my Norwegian friend. She went to a German school and got invited to birthdays by upper-class kids. The quisling’s daughter was the beautiful fruit of the occupation. She was secure, but I was wrong everywhere I went. To Åse I was too Danish. At school I was too German. And to everyone too Icelandic. I never fitted in. At any time in my life. In Argentina after the war, people thought I was German and looked at me askance. In Germany, when they realised I’d been to Argentina, people looked at me askance. And at home I was a Nazi, in America a Communist, and on a trip to the Soviet Union I was accused of ‘capitalistic behaviour.’ In Iceland I was too travelled, on my travels too Icelandic. And I was never elegant enough for the presidential residence in Bessastadir, while in Bolungarvík, where I lived with my sailor Bæring, they called me a prima donna. Women told me I drank like a man, men like a slut. In my flings I was deemed too keen; in my relationships too frigid. I couldn’t fit in any damned where and was therefore always looking for the next party. I was a relentless fugitive on the run, and that’s where the endless escape that’s been my life started – in that elementary school in Sølvgade in September 1940.
33
Anneli
1940
By mid-November I’d simply stopped going to class. I’d met a kind woman who took pity on me when she found me crying on a bench in the Rosenborg Gardens. As soon as the embassy car vanished around the corner, I walked towards a dark red door at the bottom of the street and rang a bell marked ‘A. Bellini.’
Her name was Anneli, a well-groomed lady with a red rose in her coal-black hair and pale, padded cheeks. She generally sat at a white-clothed table under a tall window, gazing through the blurry glass with a beautiful but melancholy countenance. One could see a white gable and part of a brick wall and, between them, a portion of the street. I felt she was constantly peeping between the two buildings, as if she were expecting someone.
She was married to an Italian countertenor who was now a pilot in Mussolini’s air force. He had participated in the invasion of France, one of the most ludicrous operations in the total absurdity of the Second World War: Italians in the flower of their youth sacrificing their lives so that the word tabac could be changed into tabacchi on some tobacconist’s signs in a few Alpine villages.
That was in June and now it was November and the little rose lady no longer knew where her tenor was singing – whether he was stuck in his wreckage on some cold Alpine peak, delighting the inhabitants of heaven with his high Cs, or happily gallivanting in his boots down the streets of Nice having traded in his Danish love for a French one, singing his arias through revolving hotel doors and hot vulvas.
We sat there for long mornings and played cards, listening to Caruso spinning on the gramophone, and I told her all about the Icelandic ambassadorial couple while she instructed me on the tragic nature of love: ‘Happiness is the most dangerous thing. Because the higher it takes you, the greater the fall.’ Otherwise we just sat there for long stretches in silence, an eleven-year-old Icelandic girl and this beautiful Italo-lovelorn Danish woman, who in my mind was forty, fifty or sixty but was probably only thirty. She was prone to shutting up mid-conversation and staring out the window for a long moment, like a dead-still porcelain doll who only occasionally fluttered her eyelashes – long, black, and so even they seemed to have come out of a factory. On her forehead were three birthmarks that formed a love triangle.
She grew paler by the day, and every time I said goodbye she would give me a gift: a notebook, a gramophone record, a pearl necklace, earrings, lipstick. ‘Use dark red during the day and vermilion at night.’ Instead of memorising the names of Russia’s big rivers and Sweden’s lakes, I was learning how to become a lady, taking classes in makeup and jewellery.