My father witnessed this game from the sidelines but saw a young soldier appear on the threshold of the kitchen with an older woman.
She stood out from the other girls because her face was pale and her eyes shone with intelligence. Maybe she was an office girl in hiding. Her eyebrows were thick and heavy and her profile so birdlike that her entire expression struck my father’s head like a whiplash: for a minute he thought Mum was back. The illusion was so powerful that he almost addressed her in Icelandic. But after staring at her face for half an hour, he finally staggered into the bright night garden, drunk on alcohol and memories, and suddenly pictured the day when he stepped off that boat in Breidafjördur and rushed straight to the farm where the woman of his life was waiting for him. Massa in her crown of pearls of sweat, with a rake in her hands. And he was filled with nostalgia. A longing for her and for his life before the war.
Why hadn’t he taken his wife’s advice? He who had longed for her for seven long years but got her back again, only to ignore her wisdom. After a whole three years in the cold and mud, his faith in Hitler crumbled with the simple apparition of this woman’s face on the threshold of a Romanian hut.
‘Yes, and then men talk badly of women and booze…’ Dad snorted, smiling and shaking his head in the small Copenhagen bar long after the war. And there was a hint of sappy juice in his eyes.
92
War from a Distance
1944
Wars don’t need much sleep. Before dew saw daylight, Ivan arrived to send the battalion running. The men clambered to their feet, their cheeks still smudged by women, and peered out into the darkness of the night in terror. Soon bullets would be flying.
‘Hans! Hans!’ Orel’s voice cried out between the gunshots as Dad sat in the woods under a tree counting the Svefneyjar islands. He sat there facing the village. A shower of bullets blasted over it like a hailstorm, and the highest gables glowed in the morning twilight.
‘Hans! Hans!’
Was he a coward? Deserter? Traitor? Or just an Icelander?
He had wandered away from the village around midnight, over the stream and under the roofs of foliage. Lured away by my mother’s face, he had abandoned this rocking, copulating ship in the middle of the forest and had found himself a tree to rest against.
Dad heard Orel yell his name a few more times, without running to his rescue or accompanying him to the Land of the Dead. And then he was heard no more. My father’s ears told him that his companion was gone. The war had silenced six thousand lines by Heinrich Heine.
Few things are as dangerous for a soldier as viewing war from a distance. A sense of futility will take hold of him and there’s no turning back. My father stood paralysed against a tree trunk, observing the massacre, an Icelander in the woods. And that was where the war ended for him.
93
Piglet in the Woods
1944
Mum saved Dad by luring him out of the war and leading him into the forest. But what then did the little pig do, the one that came running in the afternoon along the forest floor, pale pink with singed ears, and constantly shaking his head to rid himself of the pain?
My father regained his senses from where he had prostrated himself on the ground before God and mankind – Come, take me, take all my senses, because I used them to back the wrong horse! – and was resting his head on his helmet, with the summer sun on his forehead. The village crackled in the distance. Isolated gunshots resounded through the ruins. The war shift was about to end.
The pig was followed by voices, almost laughing voices, which echoed through the hall of the forest, and then a shot. My father hoisted himself up on his elbows. Another shot. The pig collapsed in spasms. His tongue slid out, thick and glistening, like a cryptic message from death to life. Dad fumbled for his rifle.
But the Russians got there first. They were suddenly standing over the pig, armed soldiers, and one of them noticed the ‘German’ who was gawking at them as if he’d never seen other humans before. The Icelander’s life rapidly rewound all the way back to his childhood by Reykjavík Lake, and it was there that my father found the most appropriate response. Like a six-year-old boy playing Cowboys and Indians in the summer of 1914, he threw his arms in the air: I surrender! Then he clambered to his feet and held them even higher: I surrender! They didn’t shoot. Maybe they didn’t realise at first that the soldier was German. Maybe the absence of his helmet had saved him. Either way, my father had become a Russian prisoner of war.
94
Mrs Johnson
1945
Dad and I returned on the Esja at the beginning of July, with a large group of Icelanders who hadn’t seen the country since before the war. On a bright summer morning we finally saw Iceland again. We stood on deck when the Westman Islands rose out of the sea, and then the glaciers behind them. The initial feeling was strange. It was like seeing one’s own face emerge from the depths, slowly and arduously, trying to catch its breath again. Then I thought of this line from a poem by Laxness: ‘My mountains rise, as white as curds and milk.’ Because after all my misery, my country looked like a banquet: I literally wanted to gulp it all down.
Grandma Georgía made sure we were driven straight from the harbour out to the presidential residence of Bessastadir, where my father was kept in a room like a state secret. I was to bring him his meals up in the loft because he wasn’t allowed to appear at official functions. He sat up on the edge of his bed, acting as if nothing were amiss, but ensuring that he avoided his daughter’s gaze and focused on the food. I sat down briefly beside him and tried to find the key word that would unlock some dialogue about the horrors that were tormenting him and us and that I couldn’t discuss with anyone but him, and he with me, but that were too big for two small beings like us to deal with. But the god of speech was too reluctant to release that word. At the end of his pancake, Dad looked at me, determined not to cry, and patted me on the knee.
‘Don’t think about it.’
Mum and I didn’t meet until three months after our homecoming. Grandma couldn’t forgive her for the sin of having, as soon as she returned home at the end of the war, thrown herself into the bed of Mr Johnson, the staid coffee merchant who, moreover, already had three children with another woman. The fact that the latter was dead was of no importance; Grandma felt Mum had betrayed the family and she therefore ‘put her on ice,’ which was her way of dealing with anger.
As for me, my relationship with Mum was never the same after I’d watched her vanish from sight on that pier in Dagebüll in 1942. A child’s soul won’t listen to reason. It felt her mother had abandoned her. She had sent me away, only twelve years old, on a boat to some unfathomable destination and then didn’t come to meet us in Hamburg as she had promised.
She later told me how the trains had shut down for a month, how she had cried that night and many more, how she trusted that my father would take care of me, and how she remained in the Lübeck household until the summer of 1944, when a friend of the family invited her to stay at his country estate – the Loon Count of Loonyburg, she called him. Was she in love with him? ‘He was a tease,’ went the answer. But she did spend the winter of ’44–’45 at his place. Sometimes a man is a woman’s refuge.