The Promise of Iceland

  After graduating in English and Law, Kári Gíslason wrote a doctoral thesis on concepts of authorship in medieval Iceland. He has published scholarly articles dealing with the family sagas, as well as shorter pieces about Iceland for newspapers and literary journals. Kári has taught English Literature and Writing at the University of Iceland and the University of Queensland, and currently lectures in Creative Writing and Literary Studies at Queensland University of Technology. He lives in Brisbane with his wife, Olanda, and their two children, Finnur and Magnús.

  For my mother

  CONTENTS

  Reykjavík, 1990

  1 The Shark Net at Balmoral

  2 The Road to Reykjavík

  3 Love in the Time of Cod War

  4 Paper Run

  5 The Army of Foreign Secretaries

  6 Leaving Iceland

  7 Wirral Rats

  8 On the Lake

  9 Thin Girls in Yellow Shoes

  10 Lovers

  11 Falling off Horses

  12 To Hlíðarendi

  13 Family Names

  14 Letters to Iceland

  15 New Arrivals

  16 Islands Apart

  17 Into the Fjords

  18 Digging

  19 Parting Notes

  20 Fatherhood

  Reykjavík, 2010

  Ashes

  Acknowledgements

  REYKJAVÍK, 1990

  My mother liked to joke that he was the only nervous adulterer in Iceland, and that it said a lot about her that she’d managed to be with him. All these years after their affair ended he was still frightened by it, and with so much going on in his mind he couldn’t see his way clear to talk about us as father and son. Had he managed to, I might have told him that I was thinking about living in Iceland, and then we might have met half-way.

  I had first contacted him at work, struggling on the phone with my childlike Icelandic to explain who I was. I couldn’t quite bring myself to remind him that I was his son, so I mentioned my mother and focussed on why I was in Reykjavík—I had my roots here, I’d told him.

  ‘Can I speak English?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘please speak Icelandic. I understand you. But where is your mother? Is she here with you?’

  No. She was back in Brisbane. It had been her idea that I come to Reykjavík. She didn’t want me to forget where I was from. And in any case, she’d said, I should have a year off between school and university—to travel, to breathe and, despite everything that had happened in the years before, to get in touch with my father. To find him, as she had done nearly twenty years before.

  ‘We must meet,’ he said, quietly and close, like a co-conspirator. ‘There are some things I have to talk to you about. I’m in a difficult position.’

  I suppose we both were, and I did want to meet him, but I had to explain that I was going away for a week, on a bus tour some old friends had organised for me. Our meeting would have to wait until I got back. I was annoyed with myself; I should have called earlier, when we could have met straight away.

  The next day I joined a small group of travellers and we began our crossing of Sprengisandur, the wide, vacant tundra of Iceland’s central highlands. I’d just spent two weeks of late nights hunched over a friend’s typewriter, writing poems about a girl called Jessica, who I’d left behind in Scotland. It felt right to be among the long, desolate echoes of Iceland’s geological past, and beyond myself. It suited my mood, which suddenly sought out open spaces, the sparse intensity of the island’s interior. The blue mountains were always distant. White glacial rivers cut through the black hills of fine lava, ribbons of cream light on their way to the south coast.

  Our guide mentioned the famous outlaws who’d survived in the tundra for years. They would steal sheep that had strayed from the farms of the fertile valleys to the north, once a wealthy part of the country but now losing out to the south. The sea, he said, was populated with benign creatures, generous-hearted seals that came to the aid of fishermen in distress. But the interior was only ever a feared and dangerous place—something like my father, I thought, and the mysteries of his interior life. A lost landscape. Farmers who crossed it on their way to markets perished, their deaths stored in the common imagination as a warning to others.

  All the others on the bus were Icelandic and, over the three days it took us to cross the black tundra, the group task was to improve my grasp of the language. They sensed my falling away from Iceland; and as far as they were concerned being an Icelander meant speaking the language. ‘It will come back,’ they kept on reassuring me. Perhaps they sensed my hope that it would, for I had said nothing to them about wanting to return here.

  They asked me about my story, my Icelandic side, and I gave them the poor return of well-rehearsed, evasive answers. But what was I doing in Australia? they asked, as though living in such a far-flung place signalled some deliberate perversity on my part. Didn’t I want to come back to Iceland to live? Of course I did. That was the Icelandic gene, wasn’t it; you could never stay away for long? You had to return to where you belonged, where you were known.

  As always, the problem wasn’t in forgetting where home was, but in working out a way of getting there. A month before, the Icelandic embassy in London had told me that, in the eyes of the law at least, I was a foreigner who simply happened to have been born in Iceland. My mother was English. There was nothing in the records to suggest an Icelandic connection.

  I protested ineffectually, telling them I was born and raised in Reykjavík—didn’t that mean something?

  No. It might be different, they conceded, if I could get my father to acknowledge me. There had to be evidence of his paternity: ‘You say your father is Icelandic, but there is no record of this.’

  Technically, Ed Reid, my mother’s ex-husband, was my father. She had still been married to Ed when I was born. Although my mother had refused to give a father’s name for my birth certificate, the law had an alternative in Ed. To prove the point, I was shown a copy of my birth certificate. There was Ed Reid’s name with a note in Icelandic that read, ‘In the absence of a declaration of fatherhood, the mother’s husband is deemed to be the father of the child.’

  I could feel the humiliation of those words, or more particularly the sting of being surprised by what was on my birth certificate—still. I thought Gísli, my real father, might have changed his attitude after all these years, and he had the power to change that birth certificate. My mother had never made him out to be a villain. In fact, her stories about him were always flattering: he was successful and hard-working; he had a big, new house by the sea; his wife was beautiful; he could be charming and funny, especially when he talked about Iceland. He was as sentimental about his home as any nostalgic Icelander could be, and this was a country that specialised in the painful love of one’s country. In Iceland, you could be homesick even when you were home.

  Perhaps, I thought, he would see this in me, too, and bend in his resolve to stay quiet about me. He would recognise that my coming back to Iceland was never just a visit; it was a homecoming, another chance at immersing myself and finding, in the years ahead, the sense of belonging that existed in the past. But I needed his help. I needed him to say that I had a father here. Even if it were just for the two or three seconds it took him to sign a form.

  When I got back from the north, I rang again. In the same torn Icelandic as our first conversation, I arranged to meet him at a car yard just down from where I was staying—just down from my room with the typewriter, the stack of poems, and the views over the south
ern shores of the town.

  It was a five-minute walk through the damp September air. Fortunately, there weren’t many people around, but in any case he and I knew each other straight away. He was tall, and more fallen away in the face than I’d expected; tired-looking. But the resemblance between us, which Mum had spoken about so often, was there: the light brown hair, the babyish cheeks, a small mouth, and eyes that disappeared when we smiled. I remember he wore a light brown jacket—it was the same colour as his four-wheel drive. The match gave him a middle-of-the-road flashiness.

  We shook hands.

  ‘Velkominn heim,’ he greeted. (Welcome home.)

  ‘Takk, Gísli,’ I replied.

  ‘I want to go for a drive,’ he said straight away. ‘There’s somewhere I’d like to show you. And we can talk undisturbed in the car.’

  We wound down to a road that skirted a small bay of skerries and tidal mudflats near the south road out of town. With the rising wind, there were little sailing boats out on the water.

  ‘This back road is better, I think. No-one will see us here.’

  It wasn’t a promising start, but I’d heard so much about this fearfulness that the comment didn’t surprise me. My mother had often said that he hadn’t coped with the outcome of their affair. He had never allowed himself to be seen in public with us. Even the potted fjord sidetracks that we followed today were dangerous grounds for him.

  I was strangely preoccupied with his appearance and didn’t worry too much about his nerves. His looks had faded. I had a view on this: it was probably due to the worry that I might one day come back and claim something from him. How old was he? I didn’t know, and even today, when I have more reason to know, I struggle to remember. He couldn’t have been much more than fifty then.

  ‘It’s a small town, as you know,’ he said, turning to me as he drove. ‘I think people would guess who you were if they saw us together.’

  I supposed he was right. We were so similar, and clearly the resemblance tortured him. He had been sure that it would one day undo our secret, and in a way he was right.

  ‘Have you told anyone you’re seeing me today?’ he asked. ‘I have to be careful.’

  ‘Yes, one or two people, but no-one who knows you.’ This was a lie. I had told Ragnar, one of his closest friends.

  ‘Good,’ he replied. ‘That’s very good.’

  We bumped along an uneven track that brought us out at Álftanes, a flat, exposed spit on the other side of the bay. Beyond it was the open coastline of the Reykjanes peninsula, and the table mountains of the highlands to the south. He said he was taking me to Bessastaðir, the president’s lodge and its cluster of farmhouses on the far side of Skerjafjörður.

  ‘Have you been before?’ he asked.

  ‘No, never.’

  ‘I worked there when I was a boy. You probably know that my father—your grandfather—died when I was young. I sometimes had to work to help Mother.’

  Being fatherless was another thing we shared, I had always known that about us. I, too, had been doing odd jobs around Reykjavík when I was eight, but I didn’t mention this to Gísli. I don’t think I had ever helped much with the bills—my earnings went mainly on Matchbox cars.

  ‘It’s always windy here,’ he continued. ‘Wind and goose shit, and that’s how I remember it.’ It was cold, too, and it was just the two of us. No tour groups out today.

  ‘Yes, I really worked here as a boy,’ he said again, as we walked from the car.

  ‘For your mother’s sake?’

  ‘Things were different when I was a boy. Everyone worked. Children worked all summer.’

  ‘What’s my grandmother’s name?’ I asked.

  ‘Fríða Kristín Gísladóttir. She is very tough but a very good, kind woman—strong, like your mother.’

  ‘Your grandfather’s name is Gísli?’

  ‘This is a family of family names. You are the exception. But your mother chose well. You should be happy with Kári. It means “wind”. Did you know that?’

  I couldn’t get him to speak English, so the conversation remained patchy. It seemed we wanted different things from this day, and perhaps that made things more awkward still. He told me he was fond of this place, and he walked around it in a ponderous mood that seemed to have little to do with my showing up. I guessed that the farm stood for his childhood, and that this made him uneasy. But, despite the language difficulties, I could see that, just as my mother had often said, he was a natural guide, personalising everything. I understood why she remembered and often quoted their talks about Iceland. His seriousness was attractive.

  ‘We won’t disturb her,’ he said, pointing to the lodge. ‘We are too polite for that.’ He then said the president, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, might well have been looking down on us, wondering who we were. Two tall, awkward men feeling the cold of the first days of winter, dodging goose shit and staying out when they should have gone in.

  ‘It’s funny. I used to push her trolley around,’ I replied. ‘We’ve both worked for the president.’

  I liked all this: the wind, the cold, the revelations. He brought me here because it was deserted; but I interpreted it to also mean that he couldn’t quite contain a second desire, which was to show off to his son, and perhaps even to relate me to Iceland.

  ‘It’s wonderful to be back in Iceland,’ I confessed.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ he said. ‘We can talk better in the car.’

  We got out of the wind and he began a light interrogation that I had expected much earlier. He had waited until after we walked around together.

  ‘Is there any reason you got in touch with me?’ he asked. ‘It’s been such a long time since I saw your mother.’

  He kept saying ‘your mother’ or ‘Susan’, and it occurred to me that fathers you grow up with call their wives ‘mum’.

  ‘No, no reason.’ I tried to slow down my thoughts. I wanted him to think beyond the threat he thought I posed: ‘Well, I wanted to meet you.’

  The truth was, I didn’t know why I was there. It had simply been a necessity. Perhaps I just wanted him. Perhaps I wanted this nervous man to line-up beside my much better, imagined version of him and take over. I wanted a better father than the one I had had till then. I wanted him to recognise himself in me, to be affected by our meeting, and to take this opportunity to be my father. And I wanted him to sign a simple form, and with that signature perform the most elemental declaration of all: this person comes from Susan Reid and Gísli Ólafsson. This person is ours. This boy is mine.

  ‘Can you keep me a secret?’ he asked, instead. ‘My wife would leave me if she found out. I’d lose everything.’

  He was embarrassed to be so nervous, I could tell. He was embarrassed that even a seventeen year old could see how much he had fretted over asking this question. How he had timed it.

  ‘I didn’t come here to cause any problems,’ I replied. It was a line I had rehearsed over and over. ‘But I have a question I want to ask you. It’s rather personal.’

  ‘Yes, go ahead.’

  ‘Were you ever in love with my mother—I mean, when I was conceived?’

  It feels like only yesterday when I asked this, and not twenty years ago. Even after all this time to dwell on it, I am still a little puzzled as to why I asked. Perhaps it was a test: if he loved her, then I was right about my mother, and she had loved him. It wasn’t true then, as she liked to say, that there wasn’t anything all that special about Gísli. I was sure you didn’t love someone without having some of that love returned.

  My father didn’t look at me, but I could see he wasn’t upset. I had thought he might refuse to answer. Instead, he kept his thin eyes focussed on the track ahead as he drove and I thought I detected a light smile in them. Then he replied, ‘Yes, I loved your mother very much.’

 
I was delighted.

  ‘In fact,’ he continued, ‘I only ever loved two women in my life. Your mother, Susan, and my wife. I have never told anyone that before.’

  He was now talking as much to himself as he was to me. He wasn’t exactly justifying himself; the mood was more nostalgic than defensive. He leant a shoulder towards the steering wheel as we cornered, as though for some kind of emphasis.

  When we arrived back in town, he was reminiscing about Iceland in the 1970s, telling me how many of the roads we were driving along had been unpaved until long after my mother had arrived on the island. The concrete homes on the outskirts of town were all new, he said, the overflow of new money.

  ‘Your mother probably wouldn’t approve. She was rather pure about the old Iceland.’

  ‘She still is. She loves the way it was when she first arrived. I think she would be disappointed to see all this development.’

  ‘We all did love it. She came during a golden time. When we all woke up. When the country woke up.’

  After a pause he asked, ‘Isn’t your birthday coming up?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll be eighteen this month.’

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t sent you anything in the past.’

  He stopped the car and unclipped a piece of paper from the sun visor and wrote down the date of my birthday.

  ‘I’ll try to remember better in the future.’

  It was, I understood, his way of saying he didn’t want to see me again.

  ‘Is there anything I can help you with in Iceland?’ he asked.

  ‘I could use some help with money,’ I surprised myself by asking. Yes, I was broke on this trip, and it would help to have some more cash for the travels that lay ahead. But I was also suddenly aware that my request was voicing a longer resentment about his money, and my mother’s struggles over the years to get by.

  ‘What for?’

  It didn’t occur to me that I’d need a reason for it. I gave him vague answers about university and travelling.