The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  ‘Whatever makes you think that I want to be a real Icelander?’ she replied.

  ‘I don’t think you realise what a big city Reykjavík is,’ he replied. ‘You only get lost in Reykjavík. The country is where you get found.’

  ‘Well, I think I’ll find my own way from here,’ she said. ‘This is where I turn off.’

  ‘Okay, Susan. Goodnight. And thank you for the walk.’

  Gísli followed the road down to the ocean front while my mother headed the other way, towards Sólvallagata, the street of her basement apartment. She turned around to catch a last look at him. Yes, there was something there: the fisherman’s charm turned urban.

  The next morning, when she took the cover off her IBM golf ball typewriter, she found a Ferðafélag Íslands touring programme for the summer wedged under. How quickly he had worked her out. That evening, he followed her home. She knew he was there, and she allowed herself the odd glance at him. He threw a snowball.

  ‘Stop that!’ she called.

  ‘Where are you going, Susan?’ asked Gísli in reply.

  ‘Home, of course.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to go inside on a day like this? Let’s have a snowball fight.’

  ‘Don’t you have somewhere to go?’

  ‘I always have somewhere to go, Susan. You know, I’m a very busy man. My brother’s expecting me.’ But instead of going to dinner with his brother, Pétur, he went to Susan’s apartment. And that, as far as I can tell, was that.

  Over the years I have made numerous unsuccessful attempts to learn more from my mother. This was surely a crucial moment in light of what was to follow. But there was no seduction, not unless you count snowballs. There was humour and lightness. And he came to her. It was the start of a relationship that might easily have begun only after months of flirtation, teasing, and nervousness, but instead it rolled on from a couple of conversations and two walks home. He was just what my mother needed—a charming local who might help her turn her back completely on England and Australia, and seal the end of her marriage to Ed. He might even help her forget Ed altogether.

  For a long while, their affair would continue in the same, uncomplicated way. They seldom talked about the relationship, or reflected on its meaning for their lives outside my mother’s small apartment in Sólvallagata—they only ever met there. In a way, I don’t think he was even quite real, yet, for my mother—he was an Icelandic man in the early 1970s, surely something a little short of reality. He was more Reykjavík than reality. More light than landscape.

  When my mother asked him why he wasn’t married, he replied with blank surprise that he was. He had assumed she’d known—didn’t everyone? Well, no, he didn’t wear a wedding ring. That was because when he was on the trawlers it had got caught and nearly ripped his finger off. He had never worn one since. He seemed unperturbed, unanalytical about this revelation that had just entered their relationship, turning it into an affair.

  Only once did he tell her a story about himself that sounded something like an allegory for what they were doing, or at least what unsettled him about it. It was a moment in his boyhood when he’d been sent by his mother to buy bread from the local bakery. He held the bread in one hand, and his change in the other. On his way home an earthquake hit, which was fairly common in Iceland. This time, though, it was more severe than the normal tremors. He was thrown to the ground. Everything was moving—the bakery, the road, the street signs. But the main crisis was this: which hand to put out to soften the fall?

  ‘What did you save, the bread or the money?’ my mother asked. It was, he’d answered, a moment of indecision that still bothered him.

  But although Gísli wasn’t troubled by guilt, he was nervous. As time went on, it became clear that he didn’t really know how to balance the two sides of his life, that of a responsible family man and of the charmer who always wanted more. My mother began to hear about his wife and how drastic her reaction would be if she ever found out. She would leave him, take the kids, or even come after Mum. But as long as they could keep the affair a secret, everything would be okay.

  She probably should have ended it the minute she found out he was cheating on his wife. It was wrong to be seeing a married man. But she couldn’t resist the feeling that it was quite nice that he was taken. It spared her the troubles of ownership, of marriage. She wasn’t his, not his to look after, or worry about, or impress. Ed had left her for someone more like himself, someone with things to say. A statement person. With Gísli, it was acceptable not to reflect. All he wanted was to be with her, to visit her apartment every now and then. And he made her laugh.

  Suddenly, the charm that seemed forced looked crafted exclusively for her. He was her personal guide, and a way into Iceland that was touched not only with insight but also an intense love for the country and deep sentiment for the past. The people, he explained, were taciturn but profound; they were material but had good taste and family was everything, but most people couldn’t really stand their relatives. Most of all, Icelanders were nostalgic for Iceland. It was a national hobby. Whatever you did, he warned her, you mustn’t ever fall in love with Iceland. You would then never leave, not really.

  She replied that she’d found her home here. She’d understood the place before she knew anything about it, before even his lectures began.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked.

  ‘Mount Esja, of course. And the light, like everyone says. It’s so beautiful. I can walk and walk here. It’s the most stunning landscape I have ever seen. And I feel right. It’s hard to explain, but I’m in the right place here.’

  ‘But surely Australia is very beautiful, too?’

  ‘It is. But this is my landscape. I should have been born in Iceland.’

  She had two destination points now, Reykjavík and the affair, both of which took her further away from her origins in England and Australia, and away from Harold and Mildred, and from Ed and her failed marriage. And perhaps one of the reasons my mother was so accepting of his need for secrecy, was that it meant that their meetings remained as another place to escape to, a further destination within Iceland. She had a companion and a new country, and both were miles away from those who’d known her before. Neither Gísli nor Iceland had any claim on her. This, I think, liberated her to fall in love with both.

  Each year in April, the Icelandic newspapers celebrate the arrival of the Arctic Tern, or kría, my mother’s favourite bird. It journeys all the way from the waters of the Antarctic, and yet arrives with all the purity and precision of spring. After months of cold and darkness, the Arctic Terns announce with their shrill cries and diving attacks that life has begun again in earnest. A window is opened, and out of it there comes a different country, freed of its coats and given back to the outdoors.

  For Susan Reid, it was the signal to begin her travels around Iceland. On the weekends, she worked her way through the day trips listed in the Ferðafélag Íslands booklet that Gísli had left under her typewriter. And in July, when T & J closed for its summer break, she joined another migration, when half of Reykjavík, including Gísli and his family, either boarded charter flights to Spain, Italy or the resort towns of Tito’s Yugoslavia, or went back into the country, to the fishing villages and farms where they’d grown up, and where they were needed for the summer work.

  She had been counselled by Gísli to get out of Reykajvík and into the soul of the country, the bays, farmlands, and the rivers. Then, by chance, someone at T & J mentioned the Hafskip cargo ship that circumnavigated the island, taking on board a small number of paying passengers. The following day, she asked the firm’s young messenger boy, Jón, to run down to the Hafskip offices to see what he could find out about it. He came back with a one-page schedule. Two ships operated at the same time, one following a clockwise, the other an anti-clockwise route.

  It was an easy choice: the clockwise sh
ip was called The Esja, named after the table mountain she so often watched from the Reykjavík shoreline. She and Jón traced the route on the map. Twenty-two stops in all, the whole country as the fishermen saw it, without once having to travel on the dirt roads. She immediately sent Jón back to the harbour with the money to pay for her passage.

  That afternoon, he returned with a ticket and the news that he had bought one for himself, as well.

  ‘Jón, you are joking, aren’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Of course not,’ replied Jón. ‘Don’t you want me to come?’

  She didn’t really need another one looking to her for some support for their own self-examination, but neither did she have the heart to turn him down. On the day of departure, as she stepped out of her taxi and looked up to the deck of the ship, there was Jón leaning on the handrails, waving down to her with all the excitement of a first-time traveller.

  Below decks, she found her cabin, which she was to share with a German nurse, Annette, who was working in Reykjavík. They steamed into a cool day. A fog had settled over Faxaflói, the wide expanse of ocean to the north of the capital, and for the first hours of the trip Susan and Annette lay on their bunks reading. There wasn’t anything to see. Then Jón stuck his head through the door, and smiled.

  ‘Susan, do you have a cigarette?’ he asked. She pulled out a packet from her bag and handed him one. Jón left.

  ‘I’m not sure you should be giving those to a mere boy,’ said Annette.

  A few minutes later he reappeared.

  ‘Susan, do you have match?’

  Annette scowled. Mum passed him a match. He returned yet again.

  ‘Oh, Jón, what is it now?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you have a camera?’

  ‘Yes, I have a camera,’ Mum replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to take a picture.’

  ‘Goodness me, Jón. There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘I want to take a picture of Snæfellsjökull for you. You’re always saying how much you like it.’

  ‘But the fog, Jón.’

  ‘The fog’s gone.’

  They ran up on deck. They had crossed Faxaflói and were rounding Snæfellsnes, a long peninsula that reached out from the mid-west of the island. At its tip was Snæfell, a famous volcano; a crested, glacial summit that my mother often watched magnified in the low winter light of Reykjavík. To this day, it remains her emblem mountain of Iceland, an island littered with volcanic shells.

  ‘I can take the pictures if you like,’ said Jón.

  ‘Thank you, Jón. Yes, please do.’

  ‘You’re very lucky to the see the peak,’ Jón’s new friend on deck, Indriði, said. ‘Normally, it’s covered in clouds.’

  They were nearing the Westfjords, where the mountains fell into the sea like splayed book covers, and left little space for people. Most often, the small farming and fishing communities were pushed out onto thin, curving spits. These were the eyri in Vatneyri, Thingeyri, Flateyri and Suðureyri, villages that sat too close to the shore. The roads were edged into the mountainsides, making dark, uneven scars on the landscape. A very occasional car made sense of these wounds, but the roads were also popular with sheep, which rested on the warm surface of the gravel.

  In the afternoons, my mother sat in the sun at the stern, on a bench that ran along the top of the life raft boxes. As she did, she watched the peninsulas pass by, each its own peculiar Esja for a village or a collection of white-walled farms. At the country’s north-western extreme, they saw farms now all but abandoned and used only in the summers, when the grandchildren of the old farmers returned for hiking and berry picking.

  Next they cruised back along the south coast and Vatnajökull, a glacier which, on a map, colours in the island’s south-eastern corner; and Höfn, a harbour town on the low belly of Iceland’s animal shape. She laughed as she tried to pronounce it.

  ‘Just say it as if you’re hiccuping,’ said Jón.

  The ever-changing landscape of a volcanic island, and the precarious habitations that occupied it were Mum’s introduction to the Iceland of old, as it existed only in the outlying districts. I’ve often wondered how much of her time on board was taken up with thoughts of the capital, and the man who lived there. I’m quite sure that she would say, ‘Oh, not much’—she would resist the movement to sentiment and drama. Still, she must have watched the coastline at least in part through his eyes. It was Gísli, after all, who’d told her to escape Reykjavík. He’d promised her that she’d find her Icelandic side there, and that was true. The landscape and the light pulled her in even more. She was in danger of being trapped. She was in danger of belonging.

  Like it or not, the summer separation was bringing them closer together. My mother now understood Gísli’s sentimental affection for the country in a way that she hadn’t before, not entirely. It was about the light on the land, the way it both brightened and sharpened the mountain cliffs, and never faded them. And Gísli, for his part, was forced to accept her connection with the life of the country as a whole, and that she was now attached. They were less different than they had been when they met.

  Only once during the seven years of their affair did they go out as a couple. It was on one of his first visits, when Gísli came over with an idea for dinner.

  ‘Do you like otox?’ he asked as he walked in.

  ‘Otox? What is otox?’

  ‘You know, otox. The sausage in the bread.’

  ‘Do you mean hot dogs?’

  He adjusted his lips.

  ‘That’s what I said, Susan. Otox. We have very good otox in Iceland.’

  Mum hesitated as she collected her things.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe I should tell you: it’s my birthday today. I’m thirty.’

  ‘In Iceland,’ he said, ‘we do not have birthdays at home. I insist that we to go out to celebrate.’

  It was one thing to be foreign, but even that didn’t excuse my mother’s plan to celebrate at home. A big birthday and not including all your friends . . . it bordered on the perverse. So, instead of picking up otox by the harbour, they went to Naustið, a Viking-boat-shaped restaurant downtown.

  For Gísli, it was a brave moment; even the tourist traps were a dangerous place for a man with a secret, especially in a town where you always bumped into someone you knew. But that night, if only that night, he put aside his anxiety of discovery and took Mum out for dinner. He could, it seems, be that most southern and least Nordic of things, a gentleman.

  My mother has a small list of moments when he did what open lovers do often. There was a gift, an opal ring that he gave her and that was later stolen in a transit lounge on one of our journeys back to Australia. There was a conversation when he confided in her about his money problems and his ambitions for his firm. Once, he even told her about his children and what they hoped for—his oldest daughter was an artist who was already winning her first commissions. They were islands of light in the otherwise shadowy, other life of his first family.

  It was all a mistake, but then not all mistakes are bad. Auden, to prove the point, had meant it to be poets, not ports, when he wrote, ‘the ports have names for the sea’. When he saw the proofs, though, he recognised the improvement, and left it as ports. My mother and Gísli were the same: their lives were better now than before they met. And that feeling is always going to be a difficult one to give up.

  4

  PAPER RUN

  As I said, my mother’s thirtieth birthday was unusual, and Gísli never again allowed himself to be seen in public with either her or me. He did, however, visit us in private as soon as we got back from Sydney in 1979, when Mum’s old bosses had written to her to come back to Iceland.

  ‘You must be Kári,’ he said when I opened the door.

  ‘Yes, I am.’
r />   ‘I’m Gísli. I’ve come to see your mother. I wanted to see how she is.’

  I let him in. This was the first time I had seen him; in the early years he had only visited when I was asleep. I had never even seen a photograph, but straight away I knew who he was. What did I recognise? A fatherly presence, his likeness to me? I’m not sure, but I understood what was happening.

  He and Mum talked for a while in the lounge room. He was tall with fine brown hair. Then, from his wallet he drew a cheque for Mum and some krónur for me. I thanked him and ran across the street for a 7UP. When I came back, he was gone.

  ‘Can I go get another one?’ I asked.

  ‘Is there enough left for another one?’ Mum said.

  ‘Yes. Look.’

  ‘Well, of course, then. It’s yours. Spend it on something you enjoy.’

  And that was that. Mum said that she’d never wanted any money from him, but even Gísli must have noticed the relief in her eyes that night. I saw it, and I hoped he’d come again. I was overwhelmingly happy—to have him in our lives, to have a 7UP, and to see Mum not worrying about us. Mum told me that he had even promised that he would come to see us more often. But, of course, he didn’t.

  I can’t help but think that he visited merely to reaffirm the promise, and to check that my mother hadn’t changed during the two years we’d spent in Sydney. Once he learnt that she was still prepared to shelter him, he left. If I wanted to see him, I would have to find him for myself.

  I was eight, and you could cut ice tunnels out of the banks of snow that piled up at the side of our street. My school, Álftamýri skóli, or ‘Swan’s Marsh School’, was sited on a fairly harmless looking slope. When it was covered in lava ash we couldn’t stay out too long. Without the ash, the ice made a wonderful slide that we couldn’t be made to leave. The younger grades didn’t start school until one, and so the mornings were ours to make all the tunnels or icy slides we wanted. The cold brought other pleasures, too. After a swim, we worked our hair into spikes, darts that snap froze in the morning air and could be broken off. The braver of us would hold our tongues against frozen windows to test whether it was true, as our parents had told us, that your tongue would stick to the glass and snap off.