Bæring Jónsson was fifty when we met, but everyone considered him to be younger than I, who by then was well marked by my seven lives. I was also stupid enough to think that this man was my last chance. My Bæring was a jolly man, but there was a menacing crater lurking inside him that would emerge from the depths of his soul on the fourth day like a boat engineer raising his oil-black head through the hatch door.
The first winter, I always waited for him down on the pier, trembling, with lipstick on. He was generally nuts by the time he reached the shore.
‘There you are! Where have you been?’
‘Oh, just here… ha-ha… up at the house.’
‘I’ve missed you. You were hiding from me!’
‘Erm… no…’ I’d answer hesitantly, still thrown by his absurd sense of humour.
‘Well then, have you been to the off licence?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And did you buy some mixers, too?’
‘Yeah, Canada Dry and orange.’
‘And some whore-ange? Ha-ha-ha.’
He’d always have a drink before we started, even at ten in the morning, and once the ritual was over, the proper boozing started, lasting well into the night. I couldn’t always keep up with him, but I’ve often enjoyed the company of drunken men. Then he conked out and slept for forty hours. Then the second day of his shore leave would begin, a repeat performance of the first. He was an energetic lover, though finesse wasn’t exactly his forte. As a young man he had been married to a woman who now lived up in Ísafjördur, and they had a daughter called Lilja, who was now twenty and would pop in for a drink from time to time.
And I also had some relatives up there, from my mother’s paternal side, who still lived in Ísafjördur. I spent one Sunday showing off my boys to three strong-handed women who repeated one after the other: ‘It was sad to hear about the coffee man, your mother’s husband, he went rather swiftly.’ Mum had had a second husband, Fridrik Johnson, a coffee merchant she met after the war, and he passed away in 1964, in the middle of a phone call. Mum held him a big and fancy funeral, and my father was the first to enter the church and the last one to leave the reception. A few months later they were back together. He cried the whole first year.
‘But they’re all right, aren’t they? Is your father doing OK?’
That’s how people talked about Dad. Is your father doing OK? Yes, he’s OK, apart from the fact that he’s shooting small kids out the window and is currently designing a gas chamber in the basement, but otherwise just fine.
It was fun for me to move to the west, where Icelanders are at their most Icelandic. Tenacious and humble marathon boozers. Naturally, I would have preferred Breidafjördur, but most of the houses there were deserted now. It all happened in a flash. As soon as phones came to the islands, people abandoned them for the mainland. A thousand-year-old civilisation drew to an end.
Despite my string of Jóns and all his bullshit, my Bæring was the most bearable of them all. He was el hombre, although I’m not sure I actually ever loved him. How could a person like me have fallen for an ocean lout like him? A man who had never been anywhere but out at sea and never read a book that wasn’t an Icelandic biography, a literary genre I abhorred. But if we managed to forget our differences, sparks started to fly, and the fun engine was hot-wired into motion. I had finally met a man who was crazier than I was. What’s more, I’d had a more difficult life than he’d ever had and fed on his joie de vivre like an exhausted crab that has finally reached a shore. And the more I fed on it, the more he produced. My laughter turned him into a star in our own hilarious universe: he played the lead and ran straight up from the pier to the house with a brand-new repartee each time, a love song he had composed in his cabin:
He could rattle on like that and was at his best until the drink took over. Love grew more numb with every sip, every kiss became oppressive, every caress a one-man sport. On the last day, he woke up in a vile rage with an aching hangover. The boat engineer stuck his engine-oiled black head through the hatch door and started ordering me about the house.
‘You fucking presidential slut!’
I was scared and locked myself in the toilet. He banged on the door until the panelling caved in and he had to board the boat with a broken hand.
Three days later he returned on a US Air Force helicopter with an elephantine hand. He extended his sick leave indefinitely, and, humiliated, he was another man: we had happy days with a good family life. Bæring was at home and got to know the boys, he arm-wrestled with them with his good arm and let Haraldur win. I enjoyed having a man who loved all my sons equally because they weren’t his own, and ate everything I served him. A man who woke up before me and made coffee for two. Came laughing into the bedroom and rounded off every day with a mighty ‘skin song.’
Life was finally beautiful.
85
Hrefnuvík
1980
I found myself out in the shed with Hitler’s egg, placed it in an old wooden box, and hid it under a trough. It was the end of June, so the stables were empty, apart from our ram, the one and only Sigvaldi, who was still in there. I paused by him on my way out. He stared at me stiff and strong-horned, with a macho glint in his eyes. They were all the same. And that’s where they all should have been kept. Locked up in a sty.
The generator was silent, it was a beautiful bright evening, but there were still some small waves, dregs of the afternoon wind, breaking on the shores of the vast Djúpid fjord. The nocturnal stillness was gradually approaching, and a calm had already descended on the glacial lagoon beyond. Kaldalón, Cold Lagoon, is one of the most sacred places in Iceland. My goodness, how I could just stand there watching it, and my goodness, how it soothed me. As long as I could see across the fjord, every day was a Sunday to me. It was like an altarpiece in the landscape: the glacial tongue curved into the lagoon below and reflected in it almost daily, giving it the semblance of a holy picture.
Our farm stood on the edge of the rocky bay, a dwarf house painted in white with a green roof and a few eider drakes floating on the water’s edge. It seemed to be high tide. This could so easily have been my final destination. Herra in the safe harbour of Hrefnuvík after decades of wandering across the open seas.
‘Where were you?’
‘I just… popped out.’
‘Where?’
‘Just, you know… to the sheep shed. Gave Sigvaldi some more food and—’
‘I already fed him this morning. You shouldn’t interfere. I don’t want it! Understand? Were you chasing after Jón? You got the hots for Jón?’
‘Huh?’
‘Have you got the hots for Speedy Jón? What number would he be?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Would he… will you be hitting the mill-jón mark? Are you going to call him mill-jón?’
‘Are you talking about Jón from Módárkot?’
‘You’re a randy bitch.’
‘Aren’t you following the elections?’