Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

I rushed down with bottles and cheese. The mother and daughter had used the apartment on the top floor as a larder and there was no shortage of food or wine. When I came back down to the third floor, some Russians were sitting with the two women and broke into howling when they saw me and the bottles. One of them, a young one with a big nose, pushed me into a corner and exhaled a stench that reminded me of both the nozzle of a cannon and the spout of a bottle. His black hands groped my breasts, and the small wounds on his face started to simmer. Then he said something in Russian and turned to his comrades, who burst into a triumphant, lustful laugh.

The tufty-haired woman filled the glasses and they sat and drank, toasting in all languages and cackling as buildings burned out in the night. I was sent back up to fetch more wine. In the staircase I came across a black-haired woman in a knee-length caftan, standing there as pale as a ghost with half-eaten fingers, asking me with a shattered gaze: ‘Have you seen Johan? You haven’t seen Johan, have you? He lived here, Johan.’ She tried to follow me into the kitchen, but Birgitte’s mother pushed her out and slammed the door.

‘She’s a nutcase. Nobody wants her.’

The eldest in the group was the leader, a slightly plump man with thin lips and thin hair who had obviously claimed Birgitte for himself. She seemed to be fully satisfied with his hand on her thigh. The old woman relished the males’ attention, reborn to her former glory and pumping up her cleavage. I was surrounded by wanton eyes. I realised I had been led into a trap. If I had gone to the toilet, one of the men would have followed me.

For men the war was over, but for us women it was only just beginning.

After I tried to escape, I was locked in the room day and night, with a bucket in the corner, like a caged animal. Two big windows looked onto the street. Occasionally I could hear tanks or troops marching by, or shouts and cries, sometimes a round of gunfire with clatters and gasps.

It was a pretty depressing form of entertainment, and I mostly kept to my bed. Birgitte pushed my ration of food along the floor with the tip of her smallest toe and then locked the door, which connected directly to the landing, on the other side of which was the Stettin ladies’ kitchen, the Red Army’s community centre. The partying started after noon and stretched into the night. When I was lucky, no one would show up until dinnertime, although there were seldom fewer than three before dawn, sometimes more. The first week was one long night of panting beasts, smelly sons of Volga and older groaning warlords blowing their load on a fifteen-year-old girl. It was all one big inferno, and no one was better than anyone else. I was numbed by the horror and paralysed with fear. I barely slept, and my dreams were a blaze of infernal flames, although I tried to believe in God during the daytime.

I sometimes heard the finger-eaten woman out on the landing. She either called out for her Johan as before or delivered long monologues on the psychology of women that could have been written by Samuel Beckett.

It was better in the dark because at least I couldn’t see them. The door opened with a flood of light, and Der Nächste would be standing on the threshold, a drunken silhouette who would then close the door and turn into a puffing lump with hands and a hard piece of flesh, uttering the occasional word – ‘Dashenka, Dashenka’ – groping his way into me, and finishing it off in a few minutes. If I was lucky he would die on the pillow and sleep a good while, during which time nobody else would come.

One of them fell asleep before even getting his trousers off. His comrades had pushed him in and he came crawling to the bed. He was an elderly bearded man with little hair and he snored like a horse. I tried to make the most of it and snatched his cigarettes. Where did all these men come from? Russia was like an overturned anthill. There were at least ten of them for every German girl. Some of them tried to be friendly and stroked me like a kitten, trying to convince themselves that they were lovers and not rapists, but they turned out to be the worst pigs of them all when it came to the crunch. But this one was too tired to do anything. He woke up later, though, and started to grope and pant in the dark. A curtain fell over my life, and there was a ten-minute intermission. When the curtain rose again and my heart resumed beating, he had gone back to his snoring. I lay with my back against his, curled up like a foetus, and thought of Mum. Mum, Mum, Mum. I remember your trying on those shoes at the embassy in Kalvebod Brygge, Copenhagen, and the time we fell asleep in bed together, listening to the BBC. I sniffed three times but there were no tears left. In its own way, the man’s snoring had a soothing effect. There were no more noises from the kitchen, and the building had plunged into a kind of silence. The shift was over for the night.

I finally managed to fall asleep and dreamed of hay in the Svefneyjar islands, sunshine, and rolled-up sleeves.

The Russian soldier stirred in his sleep the next morning. Steel-grey light filtered through the two windows, illuminating the few hairs on the man’s shoulders. I felt a strange urge to lightly blow on them, as I lay on the pillow staring at them. The hairs of varying length flickered in the breeze like Icelandic shrubs. Oh, would I ever see anything like that again, see my country again, see… He turned over on his back and I saw his face.

It wasn’t the right face, not the right face at all.

He gave a start, we looked each other in the eye, and our faces assumed the same expression; no father and daughter had ever looked so alike since the beginning of time.

In an instant my life arranged itself into chapters, immovable, cemented chapters, my entire future, like rooms off a giant stairwell. The only thing left to me now was to follow those steps all the way into this garage.

The madwoman could be heard howling. But outside, the birds were singing. The war was over and so was my life.

Polished black shoes glisten under the straight hem of equally black trousers. The soles press into the carpet. Are they Grandad’s shoes? No, they’re that fellow’s with the hair. The prime minister, Grandma says. ‘Grandad talks to him and then he talks and talks.’ The prime minister is one of the Thors brothers from my dad’s youth, the very ones who tried to drag him away from my mother and thus prevent me from being conceived. I’m wearing a flared white dress with a fine yellow-and-green floral pattern, and I waddle between the auks that stand in clusters of three in the living room of Bessastadir, as the sun is about to set, toasting together and laughing, with black tails and white breasts, Icelandic post-war males. Some have their wives standing beside them, with their hair done up, wearing gloves and long dresses, many of them trailing trains. The women’s faces are powdered white and their lips and eyes are heavily painted. They all look like marble statues because none of them says a word, none of them move their lips towards a word or a smile.

But there is one exception: out by the window stands the famous Lone Bang in a simple black dress with her hair done up and high cheekbones, chiselled features and looking swell, with a radiant smile, surrounded by admirers and nodding. ‘No, in London,’ I hear her say in Icelandic. ‘Yes, for the entire war. I couldn’t travel anywhere!’ Her accent is both polished and pronounced.

The head of protocol bangs on a glass and opens the door to the dining room. Grandma and Grandad, the president and First Lady of Iceland, greet their guests at the threshold. The summer light shining through the French windows glistens on Grandad’s glasses. Behind them stands a long dining table with standing napkins, set for thirty people. Every plate carries a name-tag written in ornate letters. I find ‘Miss Herbjörg María Björnsson’ between the names of two gentlemen close to one end of the table, the one closest to the kitchen. There is a glass of milk beside the plate, the only one on the table.