Now he lives in Bergen, where he’s been for many years, delivering smorgasbord buffets made by his own company, I think, but what does he tell his mother? Nothing, of course. Not a tiny sausage. Since I visited him some years back, he’s sent me nothing but bone-dry Christmas greetings.
The youngest is my Magnús, Prince Potato, born in the spring of 1969, my third attempt at giving birth to a genius. And now you can laugh if you like, but he truly can be called Magnús Lawmender because he got higher qualifications than his father, the post-Jón genealogy expert, ever had. How generous of me to have married and given birth to all these lawyers, considering how lawless I am. Magnús followed his brother’s example and earns his crust in the world of finance. He’s the banker in the family, or bankster, as they call them now.
His job was to dangle the carrot in front of the asses and lure them into the self-deceit that they could instantly borrow a better life, as of today, that they didn’t have to slave away all their lives to buy a dream house to die in. Back home in Breidafjördur you needed the sweat of sixteen generations to acquire a half-decent roof over your head, but these people wanted it all before the weekend. So my Magnús was close at hand to dish out lifetime credit, those infamous currency basket loans.
Instead of paying down the principal with every instalment, each instalment got added to the principal. So the next payment would be even higher still and the principal rose over and over again until the mortgage on a first-floor apartment shot up to the fourth. By the end of the crash, and the crumbled currency it left in its wake, people owed as much as the value of the entire block but were still forced to clear out and build themselves nests in the bicycle shed.
It’s always been a bit strange, life in Iceland.
These loan sharks (e.g., Magnús’s bosses) clearly capitalised on the credit slavery of these common people and then took their gains to the market, where they traded in spiralling bonds and shares, until they came home, like the old father in the folktale with four rotten apples in his sack. That was the genius of the Icelandic economic boom for you. They even managed to sink the Eimskip shipping company, which Grandad Sveinn had founded in 1914. Which only goes to prove that new saying: He who owns nothing can do anything, but he who owns everything can do nothing.
He was therefore badly hit by the crash, my Magnús. He too had taken out some sky-high loan that came tumbling down on him. The patio went, and the house, although the car survived with a dent. And to think he was just getting back on his feet after his divorce six years ago, an event that hit him so badly that he eventually put himself under house arrest. Misfortune comes in truckloads, but luck always rides alone, old people used to say. The enterprising Ragnheidur, Magnus’s ex-wife and the mother of his children, didn’t restrict herself to two-timing him in the disabled toilets around town, as her mother-in-law so shrewdly discovered, but she also stripped him of his possessions, and that after having played the part of primus motor in a plot to sell off my dear old house. She is and will always remain my favourite enemy.
I call her Rainmaker because she generally brings heavy downpours. Once, she even managed to reduce the four-times-over widow that I am to tears. But she herself always sports a steely smile, looking nice and lovely. Lies and treachery are the last things that would come to people’s minds as she pecks them on the cheek, let alone wild passion. A frigid haddock, more like it. And this is something my Prince Potato confirmed to me as he sat weeping in this garage a year ago: she was ice cold in the bedroom department. Back west, women like that were called frozen fish. He therefore came out of that marriage completely frozen, poor fellow, and couldn’t get his tool to work again until, years later, a short woman with a Buddha smile managed to thaw it with her tantric fingers.
As for Rainmaker, she took her freezing appliance all over town, enticing unsuspecting men who mistook her frost for love, abandoning their children and homes. My Dóra, who reads all the gossip mags, told me about two fathers of families whom she had lured into her freezer, only to wake up frostbitten in their own gardens at the crack of dawn: their wives had found them there naked and trembling, with freshly broken hearts and pubic hairs on their lips.
44
End of Childhood
1941
So, after about a year in Copenhagen, Mum and I ventured into the Nazi empire with smoked Faeroese meat in our picnic basket and Icelandic thoughts in our heads. It wasn’t easy to discern where Denmark ended and Germany began. The villages all had the same Third Reich atmosphere. The train slowed down going through Flensburg, giving passengers a chance to observe the freshly washed flags, immaculate streets, and glistening shop windows full of photographs of the Führer and all his blond children. There was no denying it: every door handle of that redbrick city radiated the joy of victory and self-confidence, and even the cobblestones couldn’t conceal the pride of their most recent territorial conquests: Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania were now in the bag. We stepped onto the platform and changed trains, sat in a smoke-spewing carriage that transported us noisily towards the North Sea. There was, and still is, the port town of Dagebüll, which turned out to be the terminal, the end of my childhood.
Naturally, I was excited to be ‘leaving home’ and discovering new horizons, but our parting came as a shock. The train halted in the centre of the ‘town,’ which was little more than two houses, a hotel and a platform. From there we walked down to the harbour, two coated women, tall and short, blond and dark. Owing to a shortage of funds, Mum hadn’t been able to afford two tickets for the ferry and intended to say goodbye to me on the pier. I was to board the ferry alone and be greeted by strangers. To boost my morale, Mum told stories about Grandma Vera and sang to me:
Sailors sometimes sang this verse to defy their fears if they had to head out to sea in uncertain weather. But it was of no comfort to me, since my mind was too preoccupied with a brand-new feeling that mounted inside me with each step. A little pupa had insinuated itself into my gut and was mutating into a caterpillar, then a worm and finally a small hamster. And when I saw the sea stretching out beyond the pier, the hamster suddenly expanded into a full-grown beaver that pressed his snout up my throat and repeatedly started to click his tongue against my gum. I loosened my red scarf, but to no avail. I couldn’t fathom what was happening to me. I’d never had a visitor in my chest like this before. He had taken over my body. The only thing I could cling to was the knowledge that I no longer had any control over it, a fact that only helped to exacerbate my sobbing and the lump in my throat, a phrase I only learned later.
It was a small ferry, but the tide had raised it, making the gangway almost horizontal. Several well-dressed passengers stepped on board. As we headed down the pier, Mum gave me her main advice: ‘And remember to pray for your father.’ Then she stopped, put down the hard wooden cases, hers and mine, and asked whether everything would be all right now. I couldn’t utter a word, nor could I squeeze a single sound past the beaver whose snout filled my throat and who relentlessly clicked his tongue against my gums. Through some formidable effort I nevertheless managed to swallow, but then my eyes exploded and I started to wail. Inside I was screaming: Mum! Mummy! Don’t send me out to sea! Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me alone!