Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

But it was a brutal change for her.

‘The worst thing for me was going to bed without having milked the cows and having no chores to wake up to in the morning. I had pains in my hands from the lack of labour for many weeks afterwards. And I always found it difficult to enjoy the summer days without using them. The sun might shine there for days on end without my being able to get my hands on a rake. I was so relieved when your granny allowed me to paint the outhouse.’

The old woman took to her kindly but could never bring herself to call her Massa, preferring instead to shout ‘Massebill!’ down the corridors. I was never anything more than Den Lille Hveps – the Little Wasp.

And if my mother inherited anything from her mother-in-law Georgía, it was her generosity of spirit and the way she treated everyone with the same respect, whether it was an Icelandic pauper or a German aristocrat.

It didn’t escape me as a child that my parents were more in love than ever before. The flames of love that hadn’t extinguished themselves in seven years were bound to last seven times seven years. And I allowed myself to envy them for that, because my heart has always been a fugitive.

It was at Ocean House in Skagen that I saw the famous Lone Bang for the first time. She was a relative on my father’s side and by then already world famous in Denmark and Iceland; a folk singer who had performed in most European cities. She’d enjoyed a particularly good run in Germany, but after very nobly refusing to sing at a gathering for the Führer in person, all further concerts there were cancelled for her.

Lone was connected to us in every way. She was the daughter of Grandma Georgía’s sister and had, moreover, been born in Iceland. Her father, Mogens Bang, had been a doctor in Reykjavík at the turn of the century and Lone was reared in Reykjavík until the age of twelve, when her family moved to Nykøbing on the island of Falster. She therefore always spoke impeccable Icelandic, although her vocabulary was occasionally slightly infantile. When Grandad Sveinn was appointed ambassador to Copenhagen in 1920, she was invited to live with him and Grandma while she studied singing at the Royal Academy of Music. A twenty-year-old woman entered the home of a forty-year-old couple, her maternal aunt and her husband, and immediately gained the affection of her children. She later studied in Paris and dedicated herself to the folk songs of all countries and could eventually sing in seventeen languages and speak seven. She was a constant guest of the family’s, right up to Grandad’s death. He never called her anything else but his Songbird, and her visits were greeted like the joyful arrival of spring.

Lone was no classic beauty, but possessed an unusually striking air. Her face was as alluring as her voice, her cheekbones as high-set as her hair, a majestic nose that was often considered ‘Jewish,’ although I’d often heard her regret the fact that there was not a single drop of Jewish blood had been traced in her family. She had passionately embraced Judaic culture, sang their folk songs both in Yiddish and Hebrew and was never able to forgive my father for having joined the National Socialists.

One hot summer evening in July 1937 a party was thrown at Ocean House. The guests included the famous actor Poul Reumert and his Icelandic wife, Anna Borg, who owned a summer house in the area and were acquaintances of my grandparents. I recall very little of that night, apart from the clatter of Mum’s heels and the concert after dinner. Her accompanist was Reuter, who sat at the grand piano, and my cousin Lone stood erect in a simple black dress with her hair and chin up. She introduced the songs in Danish, with their history and the stories they told. In my memory her voice is just as peculiar as her face: not exactly beautiful, but clear and enchantingly quirky. The final song was in Icelandic:

Grandad stood up in the middle of the applause and walked over to her, radiating with joy. He took her hand and made her bow once more, as he exclaimed out loud in Icelandic: ‘The Songbird of Spring has arrived!’ At that moment the whole family, inebriated by the wine and the sun, was united in joy; apple-red faces in white shirts with rolled-up sleeves. It was the first time I sat in their midst and the last time I saw us whole.

My father caught the military bug early on, as Grandma Vera used to say. She saw something in his working methods in the haymaking back home on the island that others didn’t see: a kind of relent-lessness mixed with the premonition of his own defeat. ‘He had the same blind zeal I’d all too often seen out in Oddbjarnarsker, which pushed many men to drown at sea.’

Dad embraced Nazism, was one of the very few Icelanders who fought with the Germans in the Second World War, and was the only one to cross into Russia with a gun. I think it was the uniform that seduced him more than anything. His grandfather had been the second Minister of Iceland and his father the first ambassador of the country; they both had gold-embroidered uniforms in their wardrobes and hard hats with feathers. Dad, on the other hand, had none of that garb; even if he’d managed to run an important company in Copenhagen for fourteen months, the adventure came to an abrupt end in a shady bar in Kiel. An unscrupulous colleague in the whorehouse had run off with his receipts, bills of lading and wallet, leaving my father hostage to the pimps for two days until the ambassador of Iceland intervened and settled the bill for his nocturnal escapade and seventeen thousand steel clothes pegs for industrial laundries.

A few weeks later he showed up for the haymaking in Breidafjördur, and then he headed to Germany the following spring to pick his university. By some unfortunate coincidence, having barely reached the age of thirty, he happened to be standing on a pier in Hamburg on 5 May 1937, when for the first time he saw ‘Hjalti,’ who was officiating over the launch of the gigantic cruise liner Wilhelm Gustloff in a grand ceremony in front of a vast crowd. (Before the war, Dad and other Icelanders used to call Hitler by the Icelandic name Hjalti, and a few years later, after the famous series of Hjalti children’s books came out, I started calling him ‘little Hjalti,’ much to my father’s horror.) Dad often spoke about that event. Beholding the Führer seemed to have branded his soul. Already by then the Nordic Studies faculty in Lübeck had changed into some kind of Nazism-justification department: its roots were steeped in Old Norse mythology and the Icelandic Sagas; its ideology stemmed from those glorious blonds who inhabited the Great North. Dad was therefore a weak man in the wrong place, a blond Viking who spoke German with an Aryan accent and, what’s more, came from a high-ranking family. Twenty minutes before the war, Himmler’s bloodhounds sniffed him out and discovered that Herr Björnsson was not just a super Aryan but also the son of the highest official in the land, a formidable catch. They offered him a gilded grey uniform. With runic letters: SS.

Hans Henrik suffered severely from what some people call leader-induced paralysis, or starstruckness. The symptoms are clear: In the presence of a leader or film star, the subject loses his faculties of speech and free will. The ability to reason diminishes and the face moulds itself into a canine smile, coupled with a hanging-tongue syndrome. This is a paralysing condition that can afflict the most unlikely people and transform noble gentlemen into drooling puppies.