It had been many years now since the singing bird had made an appearance in their home. Lone Bang had lived in London throughout the war, rubbing shoulders with mammoth celebrities like Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti, who many years later won the Nobel Prize for literature. She had performed several times in the famous lunchtime concerts of the National Gallery where there was nothing on show but songs. But now she had come home; the war was over and there was no peace any more.
The president was wearing a coat and hat, Lone a black coat with hair that flickered like a candle in the wind.
‘Good morning!’ said Dad vigorously. ‘Did you walk down to the shore?’
They blanked us and walked past in grave silence, like a presidential couple following a hearse. Yes, of course, they made an elegant couple.
Despite everything that had preceded this, this was probably the most painful moment I shared with my father. I had seen him and his father chatting at the table in Bessastadir, but once Lóa had arrived their communications were severed. And here the father had virtually repudiated his son in front of his daughter, under the influence of his lover. We carried on walking towards the tip of the peninsula where the grass swayed to and fro like a demented soul. I took my father’s hand, like a mother leading a child, and tried to say something to raise his spirits, something about the Arctic terns and mussels, but he didn’t answer. I glanced back and saw the unofficial presidential couple of Iceland embark on the path back to the house – he furtively squeezed her hand. The backdrop to this moment was the residence, with its red roof and white facade that suddenly looked like Grandma’s face.
When we reached the end of the peninsula, I realised we’d chosen the right time. The tide was completely out and the shore was covered in slippery, slimy seaweed. But there were no mussels or other shellfish in view. We had to struggle not to fall, but Dad stepped over the seaweed, staring straight ahead, advancing another two hundred metres, as far as he could go, to the border between land and sea. Stood there for far too long for my taste, with his back turned to me, gazing at the fjord and beyond it where the brand-new Reykjavík airfield had been built. But finally he decided not to drown himself on that day and turned around.
What did that woman know about Dad’s fate? What right did she have to scorn the son of the woman who was the wife of the man she secretly loved and what’s more, her maternal aunt? Who was she to judge, from her pseudo-Jewish standpoint? Grandad’s destiny was to stand between fires. The president, who had seen through the divorce between Iceland and Denmark, was eternally trapped between his mistress and wife, and his roles as a lover, husband and father with a chronic lack of courage.
And why the hell couldn’t he have chosen an Icelandic mistress?
As I look back on that image through the telescope of time – that furtive touching of hands by secret lovers on that blustery sunny August day of 1945 – I can see how it encapsulates the curse of a whole family. Those who live in hell breathe fire, the old people on the islands used to say, and Grandma had certainly lived in hell for half her life. And the effects were felt by her children, children-in-law, grandchildren…
Would my father have deserted the family nest had the house been whole? Had he embraced Nazism in response to the self-crowned ‘queen of the Jews’?
Sometimes the king’s love is the curse of the court.
97
Spite and Love
2009
Lóa, who was the purest of virgins when she first appeared here in the garage, has finally been deflowered. I can hear it in her voice. It isn’t as prudish as it was. She’s giving nothing away, except for a smile and talks about a ‘friend.’
‘Oh, there’s nothing friendly about love,’ I say.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Spite and love… are flames from the same fire.’
‘Maybe things were different in the olden days?’ she says as she slips on a solar-yellow rubber glove.
‘Oh no. It still burns just as hard.’
‘Should one avoid the fire, then?’
‘No one can. Because that fire is life itself.’
She seems to have lost the thread and is, moreover, trying to find the other rubber glove when she childishly asks, ‘You’ve been in lots of countries, haven’t you?’
‘Countries are fine, but for no more than two weeks.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, because then it starts to get complicated. You fumble in people’s pants and start to get phone calls.’
‘You… did you fall in love a lot?’
‘Nah… the heart is like grilled meat. There’s no way it can be grilled again.’
‘You mean one can only fall in love once?’
‘Yes, of course, you can try regrilling it, but it gets terribly tough… terribly bland.’
‘And how long did it last for you?’
‘The first love lasts a lifetime. I still think about him.’
‘But I mean how long were you… together?’
‘We were a couple for two’ – I pause for breath – ‘two days, I think.’
‘You were together for two days and you still think about him?’
‘Yes. Love is measured in degrees, not minutes.’
98
Escaping Post-war Iceland
1948
Dad was an outlaw. After his prison sentence in the presidential residence, he tried to walk the streets unnoticed, rented a room, but got little sleep from the stones that got chucked at his window. I continued to live in the comfort of Bessastadir while he decided to move to the countryside in the east, where he traipsed across the moors in boots, drenched, with fencing wire on his shoulders.
Since the law of silence still reigned supreme in Iceland at that time, it took my father two years to understand his father’s wish for him to get out of the country. At a small party in the presidential residence on 9 September 1948, held in honour of a certain nineteen-year-old lady, Hans Henrik finally managed to read the magic word in the eyes of the hosts that was to solve the problem: Argentina.
Life in Bessastadir had become increasingly unbearable for me, too. The daughter of war, I didn’t always feel at home in Icelandic society. There was a ban on discussing anything to do with Germany, according to a tacit presidential decree. I was supposed to erase half my life. If only I could have…
But I had nowhere else to go. My mother’s home was out of bounds, and besides, Reykjavík had turned into such an endless tea party I almost loathed going into town. How that clutter of huts could have turned itself into an American film in the space of a few years was one of the enigmas of the century. Old mud-puddle streets had been paved, and everyone went into town smartly dressed. People seemed to be following an urge to strut around town, to see and be seen: women with capes and hats, veils in front of their eyes and cigarette holders in their handbags, heavily made up from Monday to Monday, and men ready for the shooting of a big film, with hats tipped over their eyes and a cigar between their lips. In stores, boys pulled fat wads of notes out of their pockets and waved them in front of old people before they paid for their comic books. And Cadillacs glided down the streets like exotic animals.
Everything had become American, all the daddies were rich and the mamas good looking.
During the war, the Yankees had taken over from the British as the protectors of Iceland, and they hadn’t left yet, despite their promises to do so. Grandad wanted to hang on to them as long as possible, being the cautious realist that he was, because otherwise there was the danger of a Soviet Iceland. Besides, no other nation had recognised Iceland’s independence in practice. Though he’d been sitting on the presidential throne for three years, no king or other country had invited him out on an official visit, apart from that good old gentleman Franklin D. Roosevelt, the summer before he died.