Oraefi

by Ófeigur Sigurðsson

  Bernharður Fingurbjörg is 198 centimeters tall, Dr. Lassi wrote in her report, 64 kilos, he is gangling, ruddy, curly-haired and unkempt, pale and a bit freckly, large-mouthed, gap-toothed, green-eyed, with an intense, dewy gaze, a joyful, determined countenance, protruding ears, a large head, a slender neck, long, distinctive limbs over which he has little control. It will do him good to lie there a few months and rest so that his muscles and bones get re-acquainted while his wounds heal. He uses thick glasses because he is very far-sighted, +5 on the left, +6.5 on the right, his eyes seem massive in the glasses, heavy glasses that slip down to the tip of his nose. He has a long stride but a rather stiff walk. He is wearing high-laced military boots laced on top of his pants; a raincoat and cream yellow shirt. Generally neat, he is somehow inherently chaotic; he wore a bow tie on the glacier. Several of his characteristics would be a model for young people.

  Despite growing up in a staid home among distinguished tea drinkers and medicinal-plant aficionados from the herbalists on the ground level, there was always some underlying turbulence, some instability, as in all homes, Dr. Lassi reported. A dark sadness hung below the houses, underneath the city. Tómas, my older brother, hung himself in the living room one cold winter night in 1982 in the middle of the week, said Bernharður, he was nine years old, it was an accident, we brothers were alone at home playing, I went over to him and cut him down with my father’s razor and carried him to bed and set him up there, I was numbmouthed, weak-kneed, I lay in bed with him and held him and cried, there was no one I could notify and nothing occurred to me, although I do not know how well I remember all this, I don’t know what is dream and what distorted memory, it would have been good if the world had stood still, it was evening, the monks next door had probably gone to bed, I could just lie there with him and nothing would ever happen again in the world. I must have fallen asleep because our mother was in the doorway, calling my dad, telling him to come and see us there together, the brothers; they had been out to dinner and the theater.

  My mother sought salvation from the so-called Benedictine house in the monastery; there, she was offered Christian trauma counseling and psychotherapy. She got more and more involved in church business, and it seemed to do her good; she did a lot of good work there. The summer after Tómas died, my mother went to Iceland with her sister. She did not come back the same. That’s what my father always said. I was in constant conflict with my father, most of it good-natured. And yet I was hardly ever around my parents throughout adolescence: they were busy at work and with their social life, while I was utterly distracted, wandering aimlessly around town. I was, however, a good student; I applied to the Nordic Studies Department at the University. When I announced this to my father, he said: Tómas would have become the Austrian Foreign Minister. Then he started asking, day after day: How are you going to support yourself? A subsidy from the state? I thought you wanted to become a diplomat like me, you’ve always wanted to travel, diplomats travel a lot, I have already put in a good word for you at the State Department, there’s a post waiting for you, of course you’d begin with something general first, like I did, sorting documents, answering the phone, something like that and before you know it, you’ll be the assistant to the Foreign Minister …Who’ll pay for the apartment when we’re dead and gone? What does a toponymist do anyway? Teach? Examine maps? … Humanities? Bernharður, how can you do this to me? We haven’t managed to set aside as much as we planned to … toponymy, of all things … I plucked up my courage and asked my father: You work on relationships, right? As a diplomat and ambassador? Toponymy is the same, I said. What do you mean? asked my father mildly; he was adept at holding conversations using Socratic methods and getting you into trouble. Place names are relationships, I said, place names are the conversations people have across a country, they spring up between people in a country, for example, property rights, natural structures, stories, business transactions, even military actions, toponymists play an important role in military affairs just like regular diplomats, toponymists are the land’s diplomats, I said, making every effort to please my father. I read in National Geographic, I said, that it is a tradition between fathers and sons in Iceland to study place names; the fathers tell their children about the place names, teaching them, that’s how it’s been since the Settlement …Well, fine, said my father, have it your way … I wanted to deviate from my parents’ path, I didn’t want to go into management science or study law or become a public relations stooge or project manager or diplomat, spending my whole life climbing the rankings within the European Union ambassadorial system, as had been mapped out for me, inheriting the apartment after having sent my parents to a faux-Chinese luxury retirement home in the Alps, a place with the most expensive view in Austria, finally free, free slaves missing their oppressor, mournful dogs living in financial security and stability, neither secure nor stable but dangling there like the sword of Damocles … you should never do what’s expected of you; there’s always another path through life than the one before you. I wanted to look at maps and work with words but didn’t dare say so directly; I always dreamed of being a hobo, as they call it here in the square, I’m going to become a monk and hobo, I told my parents when I was little. That’s a difficult prospect and an unhealthy one, my mother said; you must foster your name’s reputation, my father said with a mixture of regional pride and urban arrogance … I don’t give a shit about that! I said, startling my parents with my remark.

  The funeral took place in the church on Freyvangur; the monks sang Haydn’s Stabat Mater, always a favorite of my mother, she finally got to mourn her son, and when I think about it today, I find it grotesque that my mother stood weeping beside the coffin and let them sing that song; at the least, it was highly morbid. I remember I sat hardly daring to breathe. I did not cry. I thought about all his stuff I was going to own even as I knew I could not show that I coveted it. Perhaps it was entirely normal, yet I felt an uncontrollable anticipation, I was delighted my brother was dead and the grief that went with that gnawed at me. I watched my mother weeping in her black garments, saw how she avoided looking at me, avoided me, in fact, like I wasn’t there, or she was already gone. Dad focused on supporting her, distressed and wrinkled. Our relatives, all black-clad and with umbrellas, were afraid to make eye contact: every one of them, my grandmother and grandfather, too, avoided looking at me or being near me. The church was filled with frightened eyes avoiding me. This was all my fault.

  Why was I so different from my parents? They wanted me to be the Austrian Foreign Minister, but I wanted to become a hobo; that was my response to the pressure, to hurry in another direction entirely. In truth, I’m no different from them, but I want to be different. They want everything fine and clean and expensive and high-quality; I have things that are coarse, dirty and cheap, though also high-quality. I don’t want anything they want, I refuse to follow their path—but can this be the only train of thought regarding independence, being contrary to one’s parents? Doesn’t it cut any deeper? When I think I’m renouncing my parents, going my own way and acting of my own will, I’m actually denying myself, going the way they have gone, and unthinkingly. Everyone rebels against their parents, it lasts but a short time, naively short, it doesn’t amount to anything but frustration—yet from this naivety and frustration I’m going to make my career … I know and understand misfortune, was brought up by her, that’s what I’m trying to avoid, trying to retrieve my mother’s happiness, taken away on Freyung and in Öræfi, the Wasteland. I always pity my mother, it’s easy to honor her as the commandments demand because she supports everything I do, she understands my impatience because it’s hers, too. She was born in the mountains, and people born in the mountains can’t sit still all their lives in an office, they squirm under their skin, yearning for adventure. My father often spoke through her, her personality disappearing for periods. My mother, said Bernharður, is a fine person. But too delicate for the world, Dr. Lassi wrote. Tómas’s death was unbearable,
and she never recovered from what happened in Iceland; my mother turned gray, stayed out a long time inside the large markets, where she would break down weeping and need help getting back out. She would wander around downtown alone, depressingly dressed, she withered and dried up, my father had to help her with things, picking up domestic chores, barely concealing his frustration—he wanted to be king of the household. My mother wanted to follow her son across the great divide, she loved Tómas as much as a delicate person is able to, with bottomless sacrifices and with weakness. My mother got lost in the haze and I could rarely find her after that, I became a teenager and drowned myself in studies, I had to get away, I wanted to go to Iceland where my mother had been, I had to get out onto Vatnajökull, get inside old issues of National Geographic, I had to find my mother in Mávabyggðir … after Tómas’s death, I avoided my mother the way she avoided the world, her grief was too big. When she returned from Iceland, she’d become a shadow, a delicate ghost, a fragile ghost, a character of dust … I couldn’t follow Tómas into emptiness the way my mother did; I was stuck in the ice cave of reality.

  I do not know whether he’ll ever have the chance to return to Vienna, to Freyvangur, Dr. Lassi remarked to the Interpreter, he’ll probably die here in Freysnes, ho-hum, there are worse places to die, he’d already have been dead if I hadn’t amputated him and castrated him. We doctors have a duty to extend life, and though I’ve gelded this man, some beautiful girl just must come visit him, it is surely love if a dashing woman visits a eunuch, there’s the woman from the Skaftafell Visitor Center, the park ranger, a damn horny creature, stout and broad, Edda, a country girl, a shepherdess, no? … I’ll almost have tears in my eyes when Edda visits her eunuch, such beautiful, beautiful love—then I think with horror of my nagging old biddy in the camper van, no, shush, I can’t say that, maybe if I saw off my breasts using the angle grinder my big buxom girl will love me; self-dismemberment arouses love better than anything, at least for a while. I don’t know what it would take for me to love her, perhaps sawing off her head, I’m sure if she got killed I’d love her, for the first time I’d really love her with all my heart, that’s how love goes, it compensates, I would fall in love with the memory of my old nag, for then you have a free hand, a free heart to shape another person’s character in your memory, it’s not difficult, it happens automatically and unconsciously and so I would love her and she would have loved me … from the other side … I fear love is only possible after death, at least I struggle to have relationships with the living, Interpreter, oh, I guess I love that hag of mine a little bit, late at night, in twilight … I’ve begun to disappear into her hulking bosom in order to maintain my mental health, that’s that state I’m in, Interpreter, my work causes me so much stress and strain that I could never get through the day if I did not have them at home, those blessed breasts, weighty hunks, if I didn’t have them to come home to after castrating and killing animals I would lose my wits, for sure; I could never cut off and anesthetize animals without my voluptuous vixen … Edda seems to have more than a little crush on this Bernharður, right? She probably loves him more now that I’ve cut off his leg, and even more since I sawed off his ass cheek, and still more because I chopped off his pecker, she’ll love him most of all when he’s dead, for that’s when love finally becomes coherent, permanent, and unshakable; she can love him dead her whole life, so it would be really good for Edda if Bernharður kicks the bucket, she’d be able to bathe herself in lovesickness for the rest of her days … but if Bernharður survives, she’ll quickly tire of him.

  Let me tell you this, my dear Bernharður, Dr. Lassi said, nudging the Interpreter, your legs got all wet and you got frostbite and that causes gangrene; when gangrene gets into the limbs, amputation is the only way, the only way, my friend. Let me tell you a story from my region that should cheer you up. Once upon a time, some brothers were making a journey one winter night; it was very frosty, this was back in 1629, my friend, sixteen-hundred-and-twenty-nine, how about that, and the brothers were on horseback, they needed to cross bodies of water that hadn’t frozen over and so their hands and feet got wet. They started fooling around: it was a starlit night, the northern lights crackling in the heavens and the glacier fluorescent through the whole night, gleaming, cracking; they didn’t feel like going home immediately but instead lay about in the snow and drank liquor and watched the stars, composing verses about the sky’s beauty and love’s transience; and then they were weary of all this beauty and hale-heartiness, and they dozed off. This took place on Gagnheið; Jón Espólín writes about it in the sixth chapter of his Yearbook, along with many other extreme events he got from old annals and all kinds of esoteric documents, you can quite imagine! Now, the brothers wake up with their feet frozen to the ground and are truly startled; after some time, they’re able to roll over and tear themselves free, causing ribbons of skin to peel off, stuck to the frozen ground. They crawl painfully to the nearest town, having lost their horses in their drunken tomfoolery, they crawl all the way to Þingvellir and arrive, exhausted, at a farmyard; a doctor lives there and he leaps up when he sees them, he bundles them into his living space and saws off their legs. They lay there a long time through winter and go around on wooden legs the rest of their lives; one of the brothers lost all his fingers as well, but still manages to write reams by binding a feather pen to his stump; he was prolific with his pen, in all senses: the counts of Rosencrone are his descendants.

  Our toponymist flew with an Austrian airline to Copenhagen on Thursday April 10th at 09:40, Dr. Lassi wrote in her report, following the Interpreter’s lead; when Bernharður checked in, he asked for an aisle seat as close to the front as possible, so that he could make a speedy exit on landing; on the other hand, if he was going to survive a crash, he thought, he would need to sit at the back of the plane, something he’d seen in the movies: a crash throws everyone forward in a vehicle, crushing what’s up front—but it was an unbearable confinement, sitting in back. He asked for a seat with space for his long shanks. It couldn’t be done. Bernharður didn’t fare well on planes, he needed to walk around the earth and have a panorama, he couldn’t deal with being strapped into a tube at a great height. Do you have a suitcase? asked the counter clerk. No, a trunk, said Bernharður. Then he had to go to another counter which handled oversize baggage because the trunk was never going to fit on the conveyor belt. Bernharður headed there; his tomb-like trunk raised suspicions. The customs officers sighed and asked Bernharður to open this colossus. Its contents were recorded: 40 pcs. assorted boxes, 40 pcs. cardboard, 4 large sheets of paper, 20 notebooks, 4 cartons of ink cartridges, 1¾ pounds of sailmaker’s twine, 1 pound of combed cotton, 3¾ pounds aqua fortis, i.e. nitric acid, bottled, 30 pcs. pig bladders, 10 pcs. jars, 80 cakes, a patterned silver cake slice, a prized treasure inscribed with gothic lettering, Geist, a travel barometer with a thermometer, a thermometer in a case, fish baskets made of iron, a 600-metre long cable, coiled in a bag, a shaft-less rock hammer, some loose raisins.

  Bernharður had to accept seat 17D if he was going to investigate Mávabyggðir; it was a rather small plane and he did not know how he felt about that, it was both good and bad. He sat in his seat, fastened the belt and picked up the book he had long ago decided to read on the plane, Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann, a book he read every time he flew: if he was going to die, he would die with Thomas Mann. He was glad that this small plane had no televisions to annoy him, that pleased him so much the crying baby in the seat across the aisle had no effect on him. He looked over at the parents and gave them a smile to let them know they wouldn’t have to worry about him, they weren’t disturbing him from reading. He was met by the young mother’s downcast expression; she had seemingly given up on her child, she looked hopelessly up into the air, making a show of her weariness, lost in her own self-pity. Bernharður occasionally snuck a stealthy look out the corner of his eye; the young father seemed to be doing everything for their child, perhaps this was an instance of the tender Scan
dinavian man he had read about in magazines? From Copenhagen, the alpine youth and toponymical scientist took an Icelandair plane arriving in Keflavík, Iceland at 15:45; he would reach Reykjavík around dinner time. The vessel felt pervasively chaotic, everyone utterly helpless to hide the fact that flying a winged cylinder over a large body of water amounts to obvious mortal danger. The flight attendants covered their fear with excess makeup, and pushed the carts selling fake luxuries with great fervor, desperate and nervy; the attendants were smooth and fawning on the surface, but hard and ice-cold underneath, I thought when I looked up from Tonio Kröger, said Bernharður, why isn’t there a diverting sort of flea market on board planes instead of this consumerist horror show, why don’t the flight attendants proceed down the aisle pumping a street organ while a monkey in a yellow vest and red fez jumps between the seats, snatching money and ruffling the passengers’ hair? The time would fly and everyone would die laughing … then he managed to concentrate a bit and finished Tonio Kröger just before landing. He has always felt this was a book about him, Dr. Lassi added. It was almost a disappointment when the plane landed safely on the ground rather than crashing, burning, into the ocean; he had prepared himself to accept that fate with the help of eight glasses of cumin-flavored Brennivín, an Icelandic schnapps with which he was immediately infatuated. Relieved, he unfastened his seat belt and slunk wriggling out of this sardine tin.