Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

World War II therefore still rages in my body; it’s an eternal struggle. The Germans marched into my liver and kidneys just before Christmas last year with their ruthless malignance and still occupy the area, although the Allies pushed them into retreat from the stomach and colon the previous spring. (The battle for the breasts ended long ago, and one of them is now a member of the Breast Assembly in a better world.) The Russians, however, continue their assault on the breast cavity and are rapidly heading towards my heart, where sooner or later the red flag will be planted. And that’ll be the end of me; peace will reign in this part of the world until Stalin shows up with his scalpel to dissect my body in two.

Then I’ll be burned. I’m dead set on that.

So eighteen years have passed since I was given three months to live. I survived it and continue to do so. When I’m bored being Linda Pétursdóttir, I sometimes appear under my own name on dating sites: ‘Single-breasted woman with cancer in her lungs, kidneys, liver and elsewhere seeks healthy male. Port-wine stains not a problem.’

Lóa lent me her mobile phone yesterday while she went out to the 7-Eleven to buy me a lightbulb. I grabbed the chance to call the crematorium and get some information about the procedure. They tell me they cremate seven to ten bodies a day, each of which produces four to seven pounds of ash (depending on their weight, I presume), and the temperature of the furnace goes up to a thousand degrees Celsius. One probably needs to stay in it for an hour. ‘Or possibly an hour and a half, I would say,’ a young girl told me in a dreary tone. She seemed to be a whole lifetime away from ash and fire, despite the fact that she was standing there right in the centre of death’s smelter. I’d imagined it would take less than that, but I suppose I won’t be in any great hurry when the time comes. The girl seemed incredibly dim-witted.

‘I’d like to book an appointment with you for a cremation.’

‘Book an appointment?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right, okay… could I… have your name, please?’

‘Herbjörg María Björnsson.’

There was a slight rustling of papers.

‘Right, I can’t find it in our register. Have you sent in an application?’

‘Yes; no, I’m making a booking for me, for myself.’

‘For yourself?’

‘Yes.’

‘But… you see… we need to get the form first, you understand.’

‘And how do I do that?’

‘You can just fill it in online and send it to us, but we won’t actually process it until… well, yes.’

‘Until what?’

‘Yes, well, we don’t actually, you know… until people are, you know, deceased, you see.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll be dead when the time comes, you can be sure of that.’

‘Yes? Erm…’

‘Yes, if the worst comes to the worst I’ll come over and you can just shove me into the furnace alive.’

‘Alive? No-o, that’s… not allowed, you see.’

‘Right, well, I’ll try to come dead then, when do you have a slot?’

‘Yes, well, er… when would you like to…’

‘When would I like to die? I was thinking of dying before Christmas, during Advent, around mid-December.’

‘Yes, we have vacancies… Yes, it’s all blank, I think.’

‘Right, so can you book me a place?’

‘Er… yes, sure. When, then?’

‘Let’s say the fourteenth of December. What day of the week is that?’

‘Erm… that’s… that’s a Monday.’

‘Yes, that’s perfect, perfect way to start the week by having yourself cremated. What times do you have?’

‘Erm… the very first slot is free as it happens, nine o’clock. You can also come after lunch, you know.’

‘Yeah, I… I guess it would be safer to have it in the afternoon. Then I can take my time.’

‘To… to come here, you mean?’

‘No. I might have to slash my wrists and I’m not going to do that on a Sunday evening. I mean, the blood could take some time to flow out of me…’

‘Uh-huh… I’ll just write that down… but you…’

‘What?’

‘Are you absolutely… I mean… are you absolutely sure that you want…?’

‘Yes, yes, I just want the furnace to be really hot, I don’t want to be half-cooked. A thousand degrees, you say?’

‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, we can heat it up well in advance before…’

‘Yes, and I go in headfirst, right?’

I prefer the incinerator to the grave, although I could easily afford a coffin and wreaths. Of course, the boys might be drawn to the idea of carrying their mother down the church steps, but I don’t really know whether I feel like letting them do that. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that they will even attend their mother’s funeral. They’re busy men, so they might not even listen to all the death announcements on the radio.

Yes, I’m determined to depart at Advent. I couldn’t stomach another Christmas stuck in this garage. We had such a lonely Christmas in here last year, the laptop and I, and a cold one, too, even though dear Dóra had some roast meat and gravy delivered to me. Actually, I’m surprised the council hasn’t thought of some way of recycling people like us who would like to donate their organic waste to the planet. They could grind us up for fertiliser to give the flowers, instead of killing them in our honour. But I probably wouldn’t be eligible, with all these toxins in my body. Yes. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of those thousand degrees. The flames of purgatory could hardly be any hotter and ought to remove some of the blemishes on my wretched soul, which I’ve been unable to erase myself.

Simplicity is number one in this garage. Everything I need is here because I don’t need anything. Just drugs, food and the net.

Yeah, and cigarettes: seven a day.

My bed is an old but good hospital bed that got wheeled down the road from the clinic, all the way here, thanks to the initiative of some good women. I can adjust my back and neck, which I normally keep quite high. My pillow is propped up against a sturdy, windowless wall that faces southwest and shields me from all of life’s showers, like the man I never found. The wall opposite me faces northeast and contains a door with a glowing knob and, to the left of it, three small windows, high up. The one furthest to the left offers me a view of Lennon’s light pillar on dark autumn nights.

Then, on the left side, is a thin, non-soundproof partition, concealing the garage and Gudjón’s junk. To the right, along the eastern wall, is a kitchen unit with a sink, a refrigerator and hot plates, and my daily ordeal sits in the corner by the door: the toilet cubicle. It’s a strange society that we live in that forces its elderly to walk. I’ve repeatedly tried to point this paradox out to the girls – in the olden days, even the poorest of the poor had the right to defecate in bed! – but always in vain.

‘Sorry, we can only assist people with ILS.’

‘What’s ILS?’

‘Independent life skills.’

‘But I don’t have them, never had!’

I forgot to mention the bedside table, a four-legged antique from Grandad Sveinn and Grandma Georgía, carved out of the Danish family tree. On top of it I keep an ashtray, an heirloom from Dad, made out of German brass. Oh yes, and then there’s the antique desk chair by my bedside, which leans inexplicably forward. Awaiting visitors with infinite patience. I sometimes use it as a walking frame to help me along the Via Dolorosa.

All the fixtures are the fruit of Gudjón’s labours. Where would I be without him? In addition to the toilet, he set up the kitchen unit and partitioned off the garage, varnished the floor, and adjusted the lights. He’s a craftsman by nature, like every other Icelandic male. We’ve always been such a keen DIY nation. People are either knocking down walls, building verandas or fixing the wiring, all for the sake of patching up their marriages. But everyone knows that modern difficulties all stem from what I call male inertia. Marital problems didn’t exist until men stopped working at sea and started pottering about at home on weekends. Men have finally understood this themselves and try to fill all that unfortunate free time on their hands with imaginary urgent tasks. ‘I promised Gummi I’d help with the summerhouse,’ I heard him say on the other side of the partition the other week. Yeah. There’s obviously no marital hell in Iceland you can’t build a veranda over.