The island girl was a resourceful woman. As soon as the castle fell into the hands of the Allies, she was in a jeep shooting west, with a giant wheel of cheese on her lap. After an adventurous journey, she reached England and from there sailed on to Iceland; she was home by April 1945, long before all the other Icelanders who, like us, had been trapped by the war. And shortly after her homecoming, she’d found refuge in the arms of that gentle, elderly widower.
I waited for her in the living room of the presidential residence in Bessastadir, a sixteen-year-old woman by then, with neatly brushed hair, on a sunny autumn day. The chauffeur parked in the driveway and Mum stepped out, like the sovereign of some other country, a country I didn’t know. Alfred, the residence manager, received her, and without moving, I watched her in her high heels as she stepped onto the stone floor of the foyer and on into the cloakroom. She didn’t see me until she came out again, coatless, in a light dress, adjusting her elegantly set hair with open palms on her first visit to the president’s residence. I felt an urge to take a step towards her, despite Grandma’s stern look, but couldn’t. I couldn’t step over all that had happened, and I waited for her with leaden feet.
Mum came sailing towards me smiling, broader and more heavily keeled than before, and started off trying to kiss me in a manner that was appropriate for a public place, even though Grandma was the only other person in the room, but then gave up and embraced me, as her head started to shake and a tear trickled from one eye. We embraced again and I vanished into her hair but could no longer find the smell of seaweed, just the scent of post-war boom. She had become Mrs Johnson.
I was unable to utter a word. Mum filled the silence with remarks like ‘How you’ve changed and grown, my child…’ I could sense from her voice that I no longer lived inside her, but stood outside, outside the sanctuary of her soul. And I felt it would take me a lifetime to penetrate it again. Unlike Mum, I didn’t produce a tear, although my insides were screaming in pain. There was a fence in the sound of my mother’s voice, insurmountable and bristling: the god of events had broken us apart.
Further inside the house, my father’s heart was ticking, until he finally appeared in the living room, constantly stroking his forehead with the open palm of his right hand. When he finally stopped stroking it, he took the hand of the woman he had betrayed for Hitler, and she could observe how the war had thinned his hair and consumed his being.
He didn’t say anything and neither did she. But Grandma broke into Danish: ‘Jæja, så kan vi gå ind.’ Right, then, let’s go in. She had organised this long-awaited family meeting and directed it like a general. She sat us down by the window in the dining room, me beside Dad and Mum opposite us, and placed her chair at the corner of the table so that she could spring up and scuttle into the kitchen, while she watched over Mum like a guard, with her elbows on the edge of the table. Elín, the maid, brought pancakes and hot chocolate to the table. She was a country girl with dark hair and pure cheeks, adorably free of any sense of servitude.
‘Would you like me to bring in the cream now?’
‘Yes, that would be nice.’
‘Whipped, then?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘But you realise that’s the last cream.’
The hostess nodded and smiled at the maid, while we silently stared at the steam rising from our cups, which turned golden in the horizontal rays of the autumn sun. Back in Breidafjördur, those rays were called cod-liver light.
Grandma addressed a few ice-cold questions to Mum, and I noticed that Dad’s hand was trembling when he tried to lift his cup by the handle. But then it was as if the quiver transferred to Mum’s voice.
‘More than anything, I would, of course, want Herra to come live with me.’
Grandma immediately quashed that. Then Hans Henrik would be left all on his own while she, Massebill, not only had a husband but three children. Mum was speechless, Fridrik Johnson’s children were grown-ups; she had seen only two of them twice. But Grandma remained immovable. One couldn’t have everything in life. The negotiations ended with an agreement that I would visit her once a month. Dad sat through this in silence but finally started to cry without anyone but me noticing. He dabbed his eyes with a napkin and I lay my hand on his under the table. Mum was quiet and observed our alliance with broken eyes. In her eyes one could read that Dad and I were bound together by something that couldn’t be found in a dictionary, something between the illicit and unspeakable.
95
Depression with Whipped Cream
1945
It was a strange summer. Bright sunshine on the outside but dark on the inside: one big depression with whipped cream (I ate sixteen pancakes a day). The dreams recurred night after night, pregnant with pain and suffering. One night I was being drooled over in Russian, the next I was squirming in a pit of worms in an air-raid shelter and the worms turned into people. At one end, children were being born, and at the other, human lives were being extinguished. I tried to crawl my way towards the light but was constantly being drowned by arms and legs and children’s naked thighs.
For entire bright summer evenings I sat in the attic, staring out of the window and wondering what Mum was doing in the town on the other side of the bay. Why wasn’t she knocking on the windows and doors of the presidential residence, howling with remorse?
By any contemporary standards, I should, of course, have been put in some psychiatric ward, where some shrink could have coaxed the horrors of war out of me, and that ultimate shock, but those institutions didn’t exist back then and barely exist now. Instead I got to play bridge with Grandma and her friends, semi-Danish bourgeois ladies who discussed Mum’s relationship with Fridrik in a coded Danish that I nevertheless managed to decipher. Here I got the gossipy version of events: that Mum had met him in England, that they’d travelled home on the same ship, but that she had, above all, fallen for his apartment on Brædraborgarstígur.
In the long, bright nights I stared at the man sleeping in the bed opposite mine, just as I’d stared at Marek in the old cabin, and asked myself how the monstrosity of war had been able to act with such precision, to have glued us together in this calamity, a father and daughter, the only Icelanders in the cast of 200 million people performing in the spectacle of that war. It defied belief. The demonic serendipity. It was as if a walrus had managed to thread a needle.
The atheist God clearly hated me.
96
‘The Songbird of Spring is Here!’
1945
And what then could be said of the evil curse which, like a spear of darkness, pierced every hour that passed in this greatest residence in the land?
My father and I went on long walks, trying to escape the hundreds of black rats that followed us from one room to another. Maybe they would lose themselves along the shore? We walked out to Rani and sometimes even as far as Gálgahraun. The wind blew sunrays against our faces and corrugated folds across the Lambhús Lake, bringing a glow to the late summer hay. We talked about everything but what we needed to talk about. He told me about his summer evenings in Vejle, Denmark, and taught me about shellfish. One day we decided to take a stroll on the shore to look for mussels, despite the warnings from Elín, the housekeeper.
‘There’ll be no slimy shells going into this pot!’
On the path of the Bessastadir Peninsula we met Grandad and our cousin Lone. She had arrived the day before and they were now returning from a stroll. ‘The Songbird of Spring is coming on Friday!’ the president had announced from his office during the week, like a chirpy scout. I glanced at Grandma who was knitting in a deep armchair in the living room. ‘Who?’ she swiftly quipped, knitting her brow.