I had just reached the counter when I heard a thud behind me, when I heard the sound of an engine on the street and that harrowing thud. I turned and blacked out for an instant: it took a few moments for the sunny, bright image of the tables, pavement, and street to develop out of the darkness again. And then I saw that in the middle of it there was a car, an American convertible. A man with a bright hat had stepped out of it. I rushed out, saw Juan stoop over something in front of the car, and then saw something that I have replayed in my mind every day since: my daughter lying on the street and the stream from her skull glistening in the sun, her smile vanished. That was the most difficult thing, to see the look on her face, not even two years old, meeting her maker: it was serene, serious, full of reverence. She had vanished into another world.
I pushed Juan away and bent over the child, losing both mind and heart. The poet friend groped her little wrist and shook his head. Juan enveloped me from behind, and the last thing I saw was the bumper of that car. A shiny chrome American bumper. The sun glared against it, and the crowd’s shadows stretched along it. On the right of the licence plate I spotted countless tiny drops that sparkled in the sun and looked like hundreds of small islands in a broad fjord. In my panic I tried to find those I knew best and the one where Grandma still lived, but I was dead before I could.
I wasn’t reborn until two hours later. To a life different from the ones I’d known before. Life number seven.
109
Visiting Hour
2009
Oh, God rot them all. I’m tired of vegetating in this bed. I’ll probably end up leaving this earth on foot, or isn’t death always in good shape and free of disease? The elves in the cliffs back home were true athletes and, late at night, went to work spinning cartwheels in the nocturnal meadows of Iceland. Oh and, would you believe it, last night I dreamed of the Führer with his arm in the air, about as tall as a finger, on a rock, on a slip back home in Svefneyjar, yelling at the shore and the seaweed.
Then Lóa comes in to bring me back to reality, and she’s dragged my legally registered son along, Prince Potato. Magnús, dear, are you here?
‘Yes. How are you?’
Oh, he’s here to say goodbye.
‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Huh?’
‘Won’t be long now.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s all Hitler’s fault.’
‘What are you saying?’ he asks again. My eyesight is seriously deteriorating. Now elves are lining up by the bed and demanding bottles. What’s all the rummaging? Rumba and rum. I need some new music.
‘Hitler is to blame for everything. You can blame him for how…’
Here came a couple of coughs.
‘Oh, oh, hell and bastards, they’re all demanding bottles now… demanding bottles…’
‘Mum…’
And now many things happen at once, I lose a quarter of my mind, and my Dóra squeezes herself into the garage, greets people, slams a door and starts blabbing: Do I know an Aussie, some guy from Australia, who has been knocking on the door all weekend and now just this morning, big and hulky, a puffed-up troll with arms as thick as legs but a small head and blond hair, and demanding to see Linda, wants to talk to Linda, he’s sure she lives here because her computer is here. Wanted to look through all the rooms, searching under the beds like a cop, got on the floor and was sweating profusely. She had to wipe the floor with a dry cloth after he left.
‘The sweat was pouring off him. His back was wringing wet.’
‘That’s Bod.’
‘Huh?’
‘Tell him Linda has moved.’
‘Linda? Who’s Linda?’
‘The Lady Inside.’
And then it starts to darken in my head again, and my ears fill with snow: I look at my Dóra, her beach tan and pink lips, but can’t hear her, just watch her mouth moving, and Lóa, too, as in a silent film. Is my hearing gone? But my Magnús sits there in a state of virtual collapse, reciting a psalm of repentance like a Business Viking on the steps of hell. He conned fifteen hundred people in his name, raised their debts higher than their houses, and then requisitioned their cars.
‘You’ve got to talk to those people,’ I say when my hearing finally returns. Still my voice remains under the water but my ears above.
‘What?’
‘Do you reckon you’ll be put away?’ I ask, cheeky old thing.
‘Away?’
‘In jail.’
‘No, I… I was just an employee.’
‘Just a cog in the swindling wheel?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a chip off the old block. It’s all Hitler’s fault.’
‘The financial crash?’
‘Yes, and that, too.’
Then there’s a silence, which is odd because Dóra, that big blabbermouth, is there. ‘It was good to see you, Mum,’ Magnús finally says.
‘Send my regards to Haraldur and Ólafur. Tell them that their mother did her best, but my eighth life wouldn’t allow for… for more.’ And then I had a new coughing fit that almost killed me. But I grabbed hold of myself.
‘Just tell them to blame it all on Hitler. He’s the Christ of our age and he’s still…’
I had another coughing fit, but owing to some higher force I survived that one, too. Life was going to grant me another hour. I decided to use it well and started to tell them a story, the story of Dad in the USSR.
110
Hans Bios
1944–1945
Thanks to a fat pig in a Romanian forest, Hans Henrik had become a prisoner of war of the Russian army. The shame was so great that the days that followed never entered his memory; week-long roads, bridges and forest tracks flickered through his mind like a film fed through a projector, while his eyes were glued to the floor of a vehicle, staring at his dirty shoes and seeing Mum’s expression in them.
He ended up in some nameless prison camp in a nameless place. Fifteen men slept in the same bed, snuggled up to each other against their own will, like different species of animals, and were woken at four every morning to chop wood until the first days of frost, and after that, sawing. His co-prisoners were all Germans and died at the rate of two a day, collapsing exhausted in the snow and freezing to stone in minutes. But there was a constant flow of ‘new’ arrivals. My father thought they were all the same men, he saw no difference between those who died on one day and those who came the next. Was he perhaps one of them? He couldn’t exclude the possibility that he had died several times and then found life again, as if the camp were a playing field in which life and death challenged each other for the sheer fun of it.
The slaves looked forward to working in the hope of knocking some semblance of heat into their bodies. The food was unbaked dough the size of a fingernail, soaked in freezing water. My father lost a quarter of his stomach and two of his toe tips. But it was still better than being shot in a shitty Romanian village with six thousand lines by Heine in one’s head.
I know all this from the letters he wrote me, in his many attempts to make peace with himself and the world and, by writing, to establish a closeness with his only daughter, writings that would have made good material for a biography but that were too implausible to find anyone willing to publish them in the Icelandic republic of silence, where people wanted to read only total or partial lies.
‘I didn’t utter a word for the whole time,’ he wrote to me. ‘German was frozen inside me. It was as if Hitler were wreaking his revenge on me by taking away my powers of speech. Some of them even doubted I was one of them. But many prisoners lived in hope and sometimes pricked up their ears at the western wind in the hope of hearing shots from the German army. Instead they got Russian lead in their bodies. It is particularly beautiful to see blood colour the snow. The red colour devours the white until it loses its heat. Then it turns black.’