The Promise of Iceland Read online

  ‘C’mon,’ said my best friend at school, Óskar, ‘try it.’

  I did, and I slipped and fell down the stairs, banging my nose. The doctors said I would be okay. Then they poked, hooked and fished, and out came two abscesses, one out of each nostril, each deep green and about the size of a marble. Somehow, they didn’t notice that I’d also broken my nose.

  Downtown, we again ignored the warnings and cut across the pond, Tjörnin, which froze over during the coldest weeks. Ads running on TV taught you how to crawl over to someone who’d fallen through.

  ‘What would you do if you fell in?’ asked Óskar.

  ‘I would stand up,’ I replied. ‘The water’s only up to my waist.’

  This was a cruel thing to say to Óskar, who was also only up to my waist. He would have to swim until I crawled over to save him.

  I had small friends. Mum and I lived a little way out of town, and some miles from my school, in the suburb of Hraunbær, or ‘Lava Farm’. My best friend there, Harri, was also at a dangerous height for falling through the ice. My new bike was much too big for him.

  ‘Let me try it,’ he begged.

  ‘No, Harri, you’re too small.’

  ‘Kári, you can’t have it to yourself.’

  ‘But I only just got it.’ Guðmundur, one of my mother’s bosses at T & J, had bought it for me.

  ‘It’ll be fine. I promise.’

  He got to the first corner, fell off, and smashed it. And himself. There was much hooking and prodding, and abscesses were found and extracted. The bike was put away and never repaired.

  Óskar and Harri were doubles and I undertook all the standard misbehaviours of the day with both of them. We made peashooters by taking the fingers off plastic gloves and attaching them to plastic tubes. We chased busses, pretending we wanted to get on. We rang doorbells over and over, and set fire to polystyrene foam that lay on the unguarded worksites of Hraunbær. The lies I told were to them not the same, though. For the benefit of Óskar and my friends at school, I invented a father whose wealth was as great as his absence. He was an international businessman with his own jet, dividing his time between England and Iceland, dropping in now and then to ride in his Cadillac through the shabby streets of Reykjavík.

  ‘Why are you here, then?’ asked Óskar.

  ‘He and Mum have separated,’ I explained.

  ‘Doesn’t he give you any money?’

  ‘Not really. But he would if we asked for it.’

  Harri, who lived in the block adjacent to ours, was spared this elaborate invention. Probably, I couldn’t see it working so close to home. Besides, he and I had just become workmates. There was a limit to the type of lies that you told a colleague.

  When I rang Mum at T & J with the news of my new position, she said, ‘What do you mean you have a job?’

  ‘Hannes came around today and asked if anyone wanted to help with the gardening.’

  ‘Gardening? What gardening?’ Mum, who already felt bad about leaving me at home alone in the mornings, was seized by fear. But this was Iceland.

  ‘In the block, of course,’ I explained.

  ‘Kári, you’re much too young to work. Don’t the older boys want to do it?’

  ‘They don’t think the pay is good enough.’ It was the standard Icelandic response during the boom years.

  ‘When does it start?’ she asked.

  ‘Now. It’s okay, Mum. I’m bringing in a little extra money.’

  It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Children had always worked in the summer months, normally back in the villages of their parents’ childhoods, and the Reykjavík Council wanted to continue the tradition in town. As in the old days, we worked unsupervised—that was part of the nostalgic ideal, that children were free. In the evenings, my mother would hear us screaming, and take a panicky look from the balcony. I was usually pushing ‘little Harri’, as she called him, up and down the grass in a wheelbarrow. It was independence, the Icelandic dream, and it both amused and disturbed her. She was already seen as something of an ogre for insisting I came home before midnight. How could she stop me from working if I really wanted to?

  When the gardening job came to an end, she had little choice but to let me join the line outside the offices of one of the daily papers. There were two, Morgunblaðið and its rival Dagblaðið og Vísir. Just about everyone had Morgunblaðið delivered, but not so much the other. It became my paper, and each day I joined the small army of nine, ten and eleven year olds who left the newspaper’s distribution offices and marched past Hlemmur, the box-shaped bus terminal at the top of Laugavegur, and split up to cover the downtown streets.

  This is how you sold a newspaper. You screamed ‘Dagblaðiðogvísir’, as a single word and with all the stress on the ‘Dag’ and ‘v’, the others virtually unsounded. I was good at it. By my second day on the job, I was a double-satchel boy. I took Hverfisgata, a street of interminable roadworks, cheap apartments and rundown shops, and followed it along to the harbourside Vesturgata. This brought me into Vestubær proper, the old part of town.

  ‘Dagblaðiðogvísir.’ And sure enough a man would soon emerge out of his apartment.

  ‘Hérna vinur,’ he would say. (‘Here, my friend.’) Then I would turn up the hill towards Landakot, where the fancy offices were. There was nothing wrong with opening a door.

  ‘Dagblaðiðogvísir.’

  ‘Já! Komdu.’ (‘Yes! Come here.’)

  The money was wonderful and I was feeling full of independence. I think that must be why I decided to visit Gísli.

  For some time, I had been aware that the paper run gave me an excuse to pop in and sell him a paper. What could be more natural than that? Gísli and his best friends, Margeir and Ragnar, were well established in their business as hardware importers in competition with the Black & Decker firm for which they’d once worked. Mum must have pointed out their office to me, because I found it straight away and opened the door.

  ‘How can I help, dear?’ asked the receptionist.

  ‘Dagblaðiðogvísir.’

  ‘Yes, we can hear you, friend,’ she said. ‘I don’t need the paper, thank you.’

  ‘What about in there?’ I said, pointing at the door to the offices.

  ‘Go in if you want,’ she replied. Gísli and Ragnar were inside, sitting in facing rooms.

  ‘Would you like a paper?’ I asked.

  ‘Hello, Kári,’ said Gísli from his desk.

  ‘Is it Kári?’ called Ragnar. He too had worked with Mum at T & J and had known us as long as Gísli had. He came out to join us. I wish I could remember the look they exchanged, but all my attention was on my father. Was it as obvious to Ragnar as Gísli had always feared? He must have guessed. And perhaps that is why he would be the first person I ever told, just before the time Gísli and I met when I was seventeen, when he drove me to the president’s lodge.

  ‘How are you?’ asked Gísli. He didn’t show any discomfort. ‘You’re selling newspapers now.’

  ‘Yes. Would you like to buy one?’

  ‘We have ours delivered,’ he said. He stroked my hair. ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘She’s good.’

  ‘You’ll send her my best, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll buy one,’ said Ragnar. ‘It won’t hurt to have two copies.’

  ‘Thank you for dropping by,’ said Gísli.

  He didn’t visit us again, and I couldn’t call into his office after this. I took his not buying a newspaper to mean that he didn’t want to see me. I wondered if I was being oversensitive but Mum didn’t think so. For the first and only time I can remember, she was angry with Gísli.

  ‘He couldn’t even buy a lousy newspaper.’ She called him a ‘rotten bugger’, the worst expletive I ever heard her say.
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  Mum was getting worried about me.

  ‘You’re just like your father,’ she would say. She meant it as an ironic sort of compliment, an irrefutable declaration of disposition. ‘You always want the most expensive things,’ she would add, as final proof.

  Once, the item under dispute was a bouncy ball and, this being Iceland in the early 1980s, the range wasn’t great. The choice was between a cheap one and an expensive one, and of course I had chosen the expensive one. Yes, she had a point. I worked a lot because I liked to spend: bouncy balls, Matchbox cars, Lego. This, according to Mum, was a problem both cultural and genealogical.

  ‘Your father always has to have the dearest of everything. Typical Icelander.’ I took this to mean that he would have chosen the expensive bouncy ball, too.

  According to Mum, I was becoming Icelandic in the following ways: showy and vain, materialistic, inquisitive, creative, and much too fond of Iceland, which, she conceded, was a problem that she and I shared. I was English, or a Diggons, or a Harold, in the following, single way: restless, like her. I could probably never be still, and I would probably never be satisfied, she’d said.

  Where the countries and the two family trees met was in my independent spirit. Mum recognised it as the combined inheritance of two lost souls, hers and Gísli’s, and she worried that I was heading the same way. I would go off for walks on my own. Usually I followed the bus routes around town, which I knew well, as Mum had never owned or driven a car since the Kombi van of her Ed years. But once I wanted to walk to visit Mum’s friend Molly, and this was a problem as she lived on the other side of the river that ran along Hraunbær.

  ‘I’ll take you there if you like,’ replied Mum. She didn’t want me crossing the icy bridge on my own.

  ‘No, Mum, please. I’m sure I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Let me call Molly.’ She picked up the phone and, while she began to negotiate the terms of my visit, I got ready. This took a bit of doing: the boots, the inside pants under the outside pants, the jacket and gloves, scarf and hood.

  ‘All right,’ Mum said to me, eventually. ‘Walk up on your own. But you’re not to leave the path or go anywhere near the edge of the river.’

  The day was grey and the snow seemed to merge with the sky above. I was aware of myself as a solitary blue suit against the whiteness. I was standing out clear in the world. Only solitude gave you that clarity. At the bridge, I stopped to look at the frozen edge of the stream. The ice was solid at the banks but became less translucent as it neared the thin line of moving water in the middle. There was a jumpable section there.

  I tested the edge. It was firm. I could hear the stream gurgling underneath, but I thought it would take my weight. I took my first step. A light strain appeared on the surface of the ice.

  ‘I know you’re there,’ it seemed to say.

  With my second step I was exposed. A crack. I bounced back.

  ‘You made it,’ said Molly when I arrived, ‘and all by yourself, too.’

  ‘Yes, it’s not that far,’ I replied. ‘The river’s frozen. Mum was worried I’d fall in.’

  Testing the ice, I think, was how I celebrated my victory in being allowed to go across on my own. But more recently I learnt that Mum and Molly had worked out their own system for seeing me across safely. They were on the phone the whole time, with my mother watching until I got to the bridge, and Molly taking over the surveillance once I’d crossed. They were giving me something I loved, a sense of being solitary. But they were also keeping an eye on me.

  For my part, I felt released by walking alone, as though solitude was an answer. I wasn’t pretending when I was with others—I liked people and wanted to be with them as often as I could. My teachers in Iceland, as in Sydney, suffered because I wouldn’t sit still. But even then I recognised that only solitude was real, and that this was because my social self was distanced from my inner life. I was aware that secrecy was a type of lying as well as a style of living. There was no such thing as a right to silence. But there was, I thought, a right to go off walking on my own.

  I did this a lot, sometimes conspicuously, leaving school or after-school care and always following the bus routes home. I can’t say that I spent my time alone thinking about Gísli, but I knew that the pleasure of walking was related to him, and that it somehow released the pressure of the fact that I was never not thinking about him. I knew that I had half-brothers and half-sisters, and that they knew nothing about me. I knew that these were their streets, too.

  To most others, my mother and I seemed adrift. Her friends worried about us and invited us stay for Christmas and other holidays. Our doctor was worried, too. I was looking pale; Mum had to take me away so I could get some sun for a fortnight. So we joined the July exodus to Slovenia, where we were adopted by Gunnar and Lilja, an elderly, adrift couple who, like us, had been moved from the main, over-booked hotel to a quieter one down the road.

  They broke a sacred tradition among Icelanders abroad by not being big drinkers, and by comparison seemed quiet and shy. At first, there was even a touch of embarrassment about the four of us being put together at a rather lonely table at the hotel restaurant.

  ‘So you like sitting with us?’ I asked on the second night.

  ‘Thank you, Kári, we’re fine here,’ replied Lilja.

  ‘Let them be,’ whispered Mum.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ I called out.

  ‘Yes, very much,’ said Gunnar.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Same as you, I expect. Relaxing, walking, having ice-cream. It’s been so hot!’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Reykjavík. You are too, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I heard you mentioning certain streets that I know.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ interrupted Mum. ‘Kári, let them have their dinner.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ said Gunnar. ‘But wouldn’t you rather be left to yourselves?’

  ‘Us?’ said Mum. ‘No, not at all.’

  We had possibly found the only people in the world who were more concerned not to cause any trouble than we were.

  ‘Do you go fishing much, Kári?’ asked Gunnar.

  ‘No, I’ve never been fishing.’

  ‘That’s good to hear. Fishing is the worst job in the world. There is very little enjoyment in it, and you must never let anyone talk you into it. I know, because I have a little boat called Svanur. In the summers, Lilja sends me out to catch haddock for her to put away in the freezer for winter. She won’t let me back into harbour until I’ve caught a hundred, at least. Isn’t that right, Lilja?’

  ‘No, of course that’s not right.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her, Kári. It has to be a hundred or I don’t get my coffee. And no cigars. She has space in the freezer for a hundred, so a hundred it is. All for a cup of coffee.’

  Coffee, I discovered on my first visit to their place later that year, was everything. It was late summer, and I’d been invited to drop in for pancakes. Gunnar and Lilja sat opposite each other at the kitchen table and slurped their black coffee through a sugar cube held between their teeth. When they were finished, Gunnar showed me around the house while he trailed lines of cigar smoke behind him. Whenever I could, I drew in deep breaths of it. I thought it was the most beautiful aroma I had ever smelt.

  ‘When are we going fishing then, Kári?’ he asked. ‘I have to get these haddock in before the autumn.’

  ‘I don’t know, Gunnar. When does Lilja want you to go?’

  ‘She says I should go tomorrow. But that would be too soon for you.’

  ‘I’m free tomorrow.’

  ‘All right, then. Let’s go down to the harbour now and put Svanur in. Then, she’ll be all ready for the morning.’

  His red Lada
spoke to the world from all its parts. They were separate in a way that I thought a car shouldn’t be separate.

  ‘This is a very fine car,’ said Gunnar. ‘A lot of people make fun of my Lada. Never listen to them, Kári. This is a good, honest car.’

  ‘But it rattles.’

  ‘Yes, and what do you think a car should do, dear Kári?’

  ‘It should be smooth.’

  ‘No, there you are mistaken. A car should always let you know what it’s made of and what it’s doing. Otherwise what’s the point of all those bits and pieces? I paid for them. I might as well hear them.’

  Mum and I had recently seen Gísli driving though town in his new car, which Mum somehow knew was the only one of its kind in Iceland. It had hummed past with an almost invisible quietness; even in the rain it was quiet. And here was Gunnar telling me that it was better for a car to be heard.

  There was already someone else at the boat yard when we arrived.

  ‘Blessaður Gummi minn,’ said Gunnar. (‘Bless you, my dear Gummi.’)

  ‘Blessaður og sæll Gunnar. Hvað segir menn?’ came Gummi’s reply. (‘Bless you and greetings, Gunnar. What’s news?’)

  ‘It’s time to catch something, isn’t it?’ said Gunnar.

  ‘Svanur’s day at last.’

  ‘Yes. And, finally, I have some help.’

  ‘How old are you?’ asked Gummi.

  ‘Nearly ten,’ I replied.

  ‘He looks pretty big for his age, Gunnar, but watch he doesn’t get pulled in.’

  ‘I promised his mother I’d bring him home.’

  ‘One of your grandsons?’

  ‘He is a friend, this one. We found him in Porta Rosa in the summer. But let’s hope he fishes like a grandson. Let’s hope he’s a fishy one.’