Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

I guess I liked German men the best. They were a decent combination of the belching northerner and cultured southerner, of western order and eastern folly, although in the post-war years they were, of course, shattered men. There wasn’t much you could do with them except try to straighten them out first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and tiresome in the long run. That irony machine seemed to have eaten away their true essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is driven by unadulterated seriousness, and the Frogs can drive you around the bend once they slip into their philosophical jargon. Italians worship every woman like a queen until they get her home and she suddenly turns into a whore. The Yank is a swell guy who thinks big and always wants to take you to the moon. At the same time, though, he can be as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress and goes berserk if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich on the spaceship. I found Russians quite interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of them all: drank every glass to the last drop and hurled themselves into any merriment, knew countless stories, and never talked seriously until they had reached the bottom of the bottle, when they started to weep for their mothers, who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were totally nuts and better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their bedroom acrobatics.

Nordic men are as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and belch, and finally start to ‘sing,’ even in public restaurants, where people have paid good money to get away from the racket of the world. But their wallets always waited dead sober in the cloakroom, while the Icelandic purse lay open for everyone in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. ‘Reputation is king, the rest is crap!’ my Bæring used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything less would have been failure. But the morning after, they turned into putty weaklings. Icelandic women don’t shy away from managing their marriages: some run them like businesses, and they can be unlucky with their staff, of course. I frequently had to fire my personnel and didn’t always find satisfactory replacements.

Still, though, I did manage to love them, those Icelandic oafs, at least down as far as their knees. Below that, things didn’t go as well. And when the feet of Pre-Jón junior popped out of me in the maternity ward, I’d had enough. The resemblance was minute and striking: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I immediately developed a physical repulsion for the father and prohibited him from coming in to see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in his bass voice from the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on, I made it a rule: I dismissed my men by calling them a cab.

‘Your cab is here’ became my favourite line.

In the years following the war and preceding the endless Cod Wars, every second man in Iceland was called Jón, our version of John. You literally couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into a Jón. You only had to step onto the dance floor to be sure of conceiving a little Jón. In the space of ten years I had three baby boys with three different Jóns, and some people nicknamed me the Jónic Queen.

Jón Haraldsson was the first in line, a Brilliantined wholesale merchant with a double chin and black-peppered cheeks. With him I had Harald Fairhair. Then there was Jón B. Ólafsson, a ginger-haired hack who wrote for the newspaper, hard in bed but limp outside it. With him I had the Smorgasbord King, Ólafur, who lives in Bergen in Norway these days, where he gets along best with bread, but few things irk him as much as visits from his Mum.

Finally, there was Jón Magnússon, the solicitor and genealogical genius, the soft, wobbly one, who had cultivated the art of carpe diem, which he practised on a daily basis, with a bottle and bravura. With him I had my Magnús, ‘the Lawmender.’ For the sake of convenience I call my Jóns Pre-Jón, Mid-Jón and Post-Jón.

And then there was Peace-Jón.

After ordering the cab for Pre-Jón, I left my newborn son with my mother and Fridrik Johnson, her second husband, and travelled to Hamburg, where I stayed for two years, as I recall. I was still too young to settle into the humdrum of Icelandic existence and needed to savour more of life before surrendering to ‘infant mortality’ – because women know that as soon as their children are born, they themselves die. I’d actually had a child before and refused to die for it and instead went on living, which was the biggest mistake of my life. I hadn’t planned on repeating it, but after six months of ploughing against the gales of northern sleet, I’d had enough. I wasn’t made for greyness.

This was my last attempt at making something of myself. I was almost thirty and had learned nothing from life, apart from how to handle a hand grenade and dance the tango. In Hamburg I’d intended to study photography. I’d always enjoyed drawing, and in New York, Bob, who was my boyfriend at the time, had introduced me to this new art form. His father owned an original picture by Man Ray and books on the work of Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï, which caught my eye like ink-black claws. Back home in Iceland, there wasn’t much worth seeing, so I did my best to keep up and sometimes bought Vogue and Life when they were available. Few Icelandic women had made careers as photographers back then, and my father said that if I had a talent for anything, it had to be ‘the art of the moment.’

I had stayed in the Hanseatic city back during the war. In those days it lay in ruins, but now it had all been cleaned up and rebuilt. Always quick to pick themselves up, those Germans. But there was a housing shortage and I soon found myself sharing a room in the Schanzenviertel, the District of Chance, in an apartment with a German girl and her French girlfriend Joséphine. They were a lot younger than I was, pleasure-seeking girls, who lived fast at night and slow during the day. Nevertheless I got sucked into the bright lights with them, and my memory of my time in that city is pretty hazy, as I roamed between the nightlife and the darkroom.

Josie was one of those city girls who knew only the ‘people who mattered.’ And Astrid Kirchherr had by then become something of a star among the young people in the clubs, a short-haired blond of delicate beauty who, like me, was smitten with photography. In those days the main venues were the Kaiserkeller and the Top Ten Club, and one night we popped into the former and saw the boy band from Liverpool playing their electrifying numbers. There was no explosion in the cellar – that came later – but you could see how this music was ushering in a new sensibility. They played American rock music in a European way. The youth of Hamburg, who had been brought up on Bach and beer jazz, had never heard anything like it. I didn’t know much about pop music, of course, but I fell for these long-haired lads’ innocence and joy in playing. They radiated a kind of newly won freedom: finally we had put the war behind us.

Große Freiheit – Great Freedom – the street was called. They played the Kaiserkeller eight days a week. And I read somewhere that this was how they honed their craft. They were kept in constant training because there was plenty of competition. Entry was free and people were quick to leave if they got bored. There was a strip club next door, so it was probably a rivalry with sex that brought all those tunes into the world. That’s the secret of the Beatles. You could probably say the same about Shakespeare and the tons of genius he left for us to enjoy. While he didn’t have striptease to compete with, there were all those bear and dog fights in the next building. And to think people say that sex and violence are the enemies of art.