We had walked all the way to the door now, and her rage seemed to intensify the scent of the perfume that engulfed me from her unruly hair and chest, which was veiled no longer in silk but in a wartime beige bra, since her negligee had come undone around her waist and dangled loosely on her sides, like drooping theatre curtains framing a great tragedy.
‘Bloody rubbish! Enough nonsense out of you, now. Get out! You shouldn’t be poking your nose into other people’s business. Out, I said!’
‘My schoolbag,’ I quacked.
‘Yeah? Where is it?!’ she yelled like a hysterical teacher.
Without answering, I ran back down the corridor all the way to the sofa and grabbed the leather bag the boys called Germany because it was similar in shape.
Before I could return to the door, the bell rang. The teacher swiftly swallowed her fury, fastened the belt on her negligee, adjusted herself in the mirror in the hall, and transformed herself from a person into a tart in the blink of an eyelid. I slid past her, my schoolbag rustling against the wallpaper. The school bell rang again. The woman came after me, gave me a frosty smile before opening the door, and chirped, Guten Tag.’
Outside stood a chubby young Offizier in a cold green uniform. His moustache twitched slightly as he eyed me quizzically: Was this (a) the prostitute’s daughter, (b) the youngest practitioner of the oldest profession in the world or (c) her previous client? I left him with his speculations and dashed up the stairs, determined never to ring the wrong bell again.
35
Bitch’s Belly and a God Named Dust
2009
Lóa is gone. Did she leave some treat behind? Yes, there’s something. What’s that? Skyr? Porridge? I forget everything, poor me. I must have been eating that earlier. But now I can’t remember if I’m still hungry. Whether I was hungry, I mean, and am now full. I seem to have lost all contact with my stomach. It’s running its own show.
I don’t know what day this is, but it must be close to noon. There’s no way that it’s a good enough reason to draw breath. I’ll say it loud and clear: the closer I get to the furnace, the more insignificant my days become. What’s that rude knocking on my window? Wind? Allow me to respond in kind! To that liver-grey sky and the wind-bent trees with shrivelled leaves that look like overused hankies. Which shows you what a head cold the Icelandic summer is. I spit on this crap they try to pass off as everyday life to us who have lived under a more radiant light than the vile sputum of this rain could ever give. And it falls from a sky that looks like a damp and foul-smelling bitch’s belly. Yes, that’s our fate as Icelanders, to crouch under the belly of a stray bitch. Under erect teats that have nothing to offer but sterile, freezing icicles.
I, the sentenced bed-bird, say: The days become more diluted as life goes by. At first, existence seems so immense to us and we so incredibly insignificant; we gulp it all down. We spend our lives swilling it until we discover that there’s nothing left to suck from it, because we realise that we ourselves are so much more significant than days, time, and all those things they call reality, a phenomenon that men have venerated for centuries but that pales into insignificance in the face of unreality. It was my good fortune in life to have freed myself from the former and subscribed to the latter. It was such a complete liberation for me to no longer have to get out of bed, pour milk into a bowl, totter over to open envelopes, watch TV, and make phone calls. That was when I first started to enjoy life, when I no longer had to live it and therefore got to cherish it in secret. Therefore let no one pity me for vegetating in this cramped garage in a dreary neighbourhood, because I’ve finally found life itself. And God. I can make him out with my glasses, on the floor by the sink: a transparent, tiny, lightweight dust ball, who moves only when the door is opened. I call him Dust. And honour him with this verse:
Happiness is to own nothing. And believe in Dust.
36
Everyone Loves War
2009
I peep over the end of the bed and see myself down there in life, as tiny as a freckle on a distant face and so weary of the bullying from those Danish kids, but also glowing with excitement for everything that was in the air.
Human beings have always had a need for disasters. If nature doesn’t provide them for us, we create them ourselves. And of course the war was fun. Of course I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. One lived so intensely that sometimes the moment simply vibrated like the black gear stick of an old tractor. There will obviously always be departments of the human soul that welcome events of this kind: heads of divisions will leap into the air, flex their braces over their chests, put their feet on their desks, and toast with their employees: ‘Well, dear colleagues, now we’ll see some action! The war is here!’
Here’s pretty much what a Hungarian told me right after the war, somewhere deep in an Argentinian train carriage. ‘I sometimes don’t understand how I was able to endure it, crawling through ice-cold mud for maybe days on end or trembling in graves of snow for weeks, weeks of hell without anything happening! That was worst of all. Or walking three hundred miles with holes in my shoes and sixty pounds on my back and… Yes, well, I wore the same underwear for four years! But somehow you just couldn’t complain, in some odd way you were happy. Now men wake up to birdsong and the smell of coffee and spend the whole day worrying about whether their bosses will like their reports or their wives are two-timing them. And miss having their hair grazed by bullets.’
War makes us all happy, because no one is given a choice. In peacetime, people become unhappy because they have to choose and reject. All wars therefore stem from man’s insatiable longing for happiness. There are few things that men fear more than peace on earth.
Man prefers to be a passenger on the great wheel of destiny, rather than determine its course. Least of all does he want to assume responsibility for that destiny, which is why he worships those who do.
And when it comes to destinies, wars provide the most radical of them all. That’s why we feel so good in war, we find our inner peace in war. And World War II was the ideal war because it was, as Goebbels put it, der totale Krieg – the total war that was everywhere: it spread across the entire continent and plagued every soul, leaving no one unscathed.
37
Womanhood
1940
Yes, that’s what the war was like. On every single staircase in Copenhagen there lived women… No, let’s put it like this: On every floor in every European city – Oslo, Lyon, Lublin – there were locked doors, and behind each one of them, major destinies. You could have knocked on any of them, and the doors would have opened like a thousand-page novel – tragic, dramatic, sad, exciting, incredible, and far, far too long. Every door to every house in every city was like a book cover with big burning letters: He Left Me for Hitler, Mussolini’s Bride, I Did It for My Husband…
Anneli came to the door in a pale dressing gown and went straight back to bed. Her hair was unbrushed and tumbled over her shoulders. It was considerably longer than I had imagined. I followed her and leaned on the edge of the bed.
‘You’re late today,’ she murmured feebly.
‘Yes.’
She was incredibly beautiful as she lay there so languidly with her head half-sunk into a big, thick pillow. Her eyelids drooped at the end of every sentence.