The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  The tug was tiny, as much a caricature of a boat as the real thing, and only just big enough for the two of us. When Gunnar put me at the helm, he was left to crouch in the cabin or move to the bow. This wasn’t much fun, either way, as the smell of the engine invaded the cabin, and there was only a thin gangway to manoeuvre along the side of the boat before you got to the front.

  It was calm out on the waters, but cold. I wore one of Lilja’s lopapeysa, the fishermen’s jumpers with coarse patterns chained across the chest. The others she sold to the souvenir shops or the knitter’s cooperative. When we stopped, Gunnar set up four reels, each one with five hooks.

  ‘We might as well bait them,’ he said, ‘even though we don’t really need to. The fish probably won’t know the difference. Wait till you feel the line hit the bottom, then tug a little and wait for bites. When the line is heavy, draw it in.’

  It wasn’t a complicated business. A few minutes after I’d sunk the line, I drew in five fish.

  ‘There we are, five meals already,’ said Gunnar. He gave me a knife and showed me how to cut open the gullets. Then, we dropped the haddock into two holding frames wedged into the red floor of the boat.

  ‘I hope we don’t catch them too quickly,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go back yet.’

  ‘I’m sure our luck will change eventually.’

  I had gone looking for my father, and by accident I’d found Gunnar and Lilja. It was a good trade—even at the time, I could tell that. They were kind and warm, and never once saw either Mum or me as scandalous, a nuisance or, worse still, as the victims of my father’s distance. Instead, they declared my mother to be another daughter and me a grandson. It was an adoption that we could accept, because it had no bearing on either my father or the secret of his identity, or at least not yet. One day, Gunnar and Lilja would play a part in that, too.

  5

  THE ARMY OF FOREIGN SECRETARIES

  My mother’s family was in England and Australia, and in some ways we were very much on our own. Mum told me that she didn’t really get much help from her friends in Iceland, not practical help anyway. But in my memory of those early days, the other ex-pat secretaries were a constant presence, and they became a family of sorts for me. And just like any family, they openly disagreed with my mother’s choices. Through them, I encountered an alternative to her forbearance. The Army of Foreign Secretaries wanted him to pay.

  Everyone in the ex-pat circle could do a hundred-words-per-minute shorthand or efficiently transcribe from the Dictaphone. And as they had all moved to Iceland, they were necessarily a little mad. Maybe that’s why I loved them so much. They had resigned their fate to whatever it was that drew them to the country. All the single women, apparently, were running away from something. There always seemed to be a secret, and the task for the others in the group was to work out what it was. An inability to define home, it was agreed, was often a cause of discontent. Also, broken engagements that had happened many years before but had left the victim unable to love again. United by fitting in where they least expected it, most of them had never felt at home anywhere else.

  Nanci, big and loud and American, had once played hopscotch with famous jazz musicians and eventually met a man large enough to match her childhood. Haukur was a reporter who had come to Chicago for his degree in economics. He smoked four packets of Camel a day, and drank a bottle of vodka. But Nanci was the one who always seemed terminally ill, even long after Haukur, by then financial correspondent for the daily paper Dagblaðið, died, leaving behind him debts and promissory notes that her friends would never quite forgive him for.

  Then there was Patricia, an Australian who lived in an attic flat that belonged to the glamorous Rut and her husband Bergur. Bigger and louder than even Nanci, Patricia drove her red Beetle each day to the American base at Keflavík, where she worked—and where she could obtain the ultimate luxury in Iceland, beer, which, like television on Thursdays, was banned until 1986. She was the part-time artist in the group, and her paintings and craftworks excited occasional admiration but mostly dread. Unsold at exhibitions, portraits of her numerous cats and dogs eventually became Christmas gifts, and were given discreet walls on which to hang.

  English Judith moved in with Gestur, a younger man who was said to have the biggest collection of Elvis records in the country. One sensed that this made Gestur desirable, but Judith nervous. One corner of their apartment was devoted to a magnificent, black hi-fi system and so many shelves of The King that it would take a lifetime commitment to work through. But they remained unmarried—it didn’t do to jinx such a delicate situation with legal obligations.

  And Molly, with mysterious connections in the Channel Islands, had an aircraft engineer whose name was Steini and a summerhouse in Borgarfjörður, part of the wide bay that my mother had crossed in fog. There, in the afternoons, she stood on a narrow, homemade porch and called out to the birds while Steini stayed inside, smoked his pipe, and read through his back issues of Private Eye magazine. Steini, it was whispered, couldn’t stand to fly, and so it was left to Molly to use up their quota of cheap international flights while he stayed at home and smoked his pipe. Her journeys, reportedly made for the cheap shopping in Glasgow, seemed always to involve stopovers in Jersey.

  Nanci, Judith, Patricia, and Molly. They seemed to me at the core of my mother’s group of ex-pat friends, although to her I know there were others, like Lilla, who left Iceland before I really got to know them. In the early days, before I was born and they became mine as much as Mum’s, they met mainly to drink; first the beer from the American base but, as the night wore on, even less forgiving local drinks would do. This meant Black Death Vodka and Brennivin. The local custom was always observed: bottles once opened were emptied. It was a merciless system but it helped attract locals, or a particular kind of local. From what my mother has told me, it was usually the ones who ought to have been abroad. Theirs was an internal dislocation within Iceland that, paradoxically, became a match for the connection that the ex-pats felt. They understood why my mother and her friends had left their countries and, because they were as sentimental as all other Icelanders, they understood what you fell for when you came here.

  Yes, this was a special country, the locals conceded: a community of only two hundred thousand people; an isolated and busy social world; a light that poets came to see. But what bemused and, to some extent, amused them was the way the foreign secretaries saw Iceland as a place for women. They claimed that it was a liberating country, and less sexist. On this point, the foreigners were surely mistaken—if ever a population of women had suffered, it was Icelandic women.

  In the apartment below Patricia’s, lived Rut, a shy beauty who spent most of the night putting up with or giggling at her husband, Bergur. Many years on, they would become two of my dearest friends and, just as in 1971 when my mother first met them, Bergur’s humour would always run along a well-worn track. It was one Rut rather liked, a line of jokes that maintained that he was in fact the much-humbled victim of Rut’s rule. Plenty of others would have liked that role, but as Bergur put it, ‘It is awful being married to a beautiful woman. The beauty becomes oppressive. I have often tried to escape.’ His modest line of work also was a source of great contention between them.

  ‘I sell a few tyres,’ he said with a look of resignation.

  ‘Bergur!’ said Rut, raising her eyes. ‘Everybody knows you don’t sell a few tyres.’

  ‘What would you call it, dear?’

  ‘I would say that you are rich.’

  Give or take, that was the group I call the Icelandic Army of Foreign Secretaries. They had a campaign. For years they would insist that my mother reveal all about my parentage, and in doing so they only helped to fortify her position. They gave her a constant weight against which to put her shoulder, a steady focus for her resistance.

  There was also one other member of their group,
whose quietness was much more persuasive and might well have undone Mum’s secret if they had each stayed in the country longer. Her name was Sóley, and she and my Mum left Iceland in their own ways. I believe they met some time after the army first formed, through my kindergarten. They were both single mothers, both with boys, and they fell into the habit of walking some of the way home together. Over the course of a year, they became friends, and perhaps because of the intensity of their situations, they formed a very deep bond. Sóley was even more dislocated within Iceland than the other local girls, and she was a quiet one, like Mum. Of the group, she was perhaps the most grounded, but also the most vulnerable, because she was the only other one with a child. While the rest became occasional parents to me, Sóley, during the short years we knew her, was more like an aunt.

  For Gísli, the Army of Foreign Secretaries could only have been a concern. He worried relentlessly that Ólöf, his wife, would find out about the affair. My mother told him that she would never tell them, but this didn’t seem to help him much. He couldn’t but think that at one of the parties they held, an Icelandic girl might find out and, once an Icelander knew, all Icelanders would know.

  Nervous but restless, and wanting more than his family life, Gísli would come and go. In this he was no different from Mum’s restless father or Ed, whose adventures had taken him away to Antarctica and then to someone else. Perhaps, my mother reflected, that was how men were—wanderers and womanisers who now and then persuaded you that they were better than that. Or that they, at least, wanted to be better. She thought it would be preferable if they were simply honest and acknowledged their limitations.

  At least partly as a result of a generally sympathetic attitude towards men, she accepted Gísli for who he was. In this she was quite different from her friends, who complained relentlessly about their boyfriends and husbands, and men in general. Mum never asked him to leave Ólöf. In fact, she dreaded the thought, and she would quietly practise her response were he to do so: she would escape to England. When she discovered she was pregnant with me, she had come to the conclusion that her main problem would not be him. Gísli, she told herself, was just Gísli—just a man. Money would be the real issue.

  After years of living in Australia and England, where Scandinavian attitudes to sex were laughed at, she had come to accept that pregnant women couldn’t stay on at work, and that a single woman with a child was even a little despised, and certainly not welcomed in the offices of a respectable firm. She thought she would be asked to leave at the end of her two-year contract on the grounds of moral unsuitability. It was impossible for her to know how Garðar, the less frightening of the two partners, would respond to her news. In the year and a half since she’d been there, he’d been reserved in the way of all Icelandic men, unless they were either tipsy or smitten. When she asked him for time off for a doctor’s appointment, he replied, ‘Yes, of course,’ without asking why or when she’d be going.

  The doctor didn’t perform a pregnancy test—apparently, it was that obvious. He even seemed pleased for her, and certainly didn’t understand her nervousness, or why she kept asking him if he was sure. It was hard for my mother to share in the celebration, but she didn’t ask about abortion or adoption. This was all happening for a reason she’d figured, even if she wasn’t sure what that reason was. She would keep the baby and take her chances with Garðar. Gísli, she decided, she would tell another day.

  My mum knew Gísli was not like many Icelandic men. While it can’t be claimed that Icelandic men are more involved in their children’s lives than in other cultures, there is a strong sentiment in the community that a new child is a good event no matter the circumstances, a leftover from harsher times, perhaps. Even in the 1970s, the disgrace around illegitimacy that existed in other countries was barely present in Iceland, and children were seldom seen as interfering. Partly, this was because in most cases they were left to their own devices. Like everyone else in Iceland, children were expected to be independent. My mother had noticed the freedom of the local children with some concern, interpreting it, as most foreigners do, as neglect. She now feels it was a natural outcome of real affection.

  It works, at least in a small community; but the unusual combination of warmth and self-reliance that permeated the culture was noticeably missing in Gísli. There is no way of putting this nicely: he was, in fact, the opposite in both—rather cold and strangely needy. He wanted Mum in his life as much as he wanted a large family, but he was capable of cutting Mum off at the first sign of trouble. And trouble had come.

  Gísli simply wrote down his blood group and told my mother again of the utmost need for secrecy. He then added that he couldn’t permit himself to see her again. He was, he said, out of her life. A month later he had left T & J and started his own firm. It would be a year before he visited her again and met me, his son, for the first time.

  Garðar, on the other hand, couldn’t have been any less surprised by the news.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he’d said, ‘I assumed you were pregnant when you told me you were seeing a doctor.’

  She then waited for him to ask her to leave the company, but he just continued on with his work. My mother wondered whether he was completely heartless, making her stand there like that, contemplating her fate.

  ‘Is there anything else, dear?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘But, Garðar, my job?’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you want to leave?’

  ‘No. I mean, can I keep working now that I’m pregnant? Would you prefer it if I left?’ Garðar put down his pen and looked up at his foreign secretary.

  ‘My dear, this is Iceland. We like children here. You can work for us as long as you want. I’m naturally very happy for you, and we’re very happy with you. I think the staff would rather talk to you than to Guðmundur or to me. They think we are grumpy, you know.’

  She wanted to cry, and she would have leant across the desk to kiss him, but he had already put his head down and returned to his work.

  It was a conversation that was repeated almost word for word when she spoke to her landlord, Brynjólfur, about whether she would be able to stay in her apartment in Sólvallagata.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  ‘Now that I’m having a baby.’

  ‘What did you think we’d do, dear? Kick you out?’

  That’s exactly what she’d thought. She couldn’t quite believe that a child could be so welcomed.

  The Army of Foreign Secretaries weren’t so sure about the situation. They were childless women living far from home, and they feared what was involved. There had been suspicions and signs, and for a little while talk of a romance that my mother was keeping to herself. Patricia, the most militant in the group, had tried to elicit some information. What was he like, this mystery man? What had drawn her to him? All she got in reply was, ‘Well, I was lonely and he was clean.’

  In the absence of something useful from my mother, Patricia could always add her own view. It was something along the lines of not expecting much more than that from a man. And, in any case, no-one was shocked that my mother wasn’t telling. And nor were they entirely disappointed. A mystery of this kind was just what the group needed; it was the type of business they were most expert at handling.

  ‘Just be glad it’s happening here,’ added Patricia. ‘There are good laws in Iceland.’

  On either side of a long, wooden coffee table, the army of secretaries, foreign and local, smoked and nodded.

  ‘You can get the bastard. I’ll get him for you if you want,’ Nanci growled.

  Judith cast her nervous eyes across to the others and tapped her cigarette over the ashtray.

  ‘What it means, Susan, is that he has to do his share. The law’s quite clear. It doesn’t matter whether you’re married or not. He’s up for his share.’

  In this way, they announced from the very
start that a war of sorts had begun. It would be fought on two fronts—against the father, which was easy; and against the mother, who wasn’t anywhere near angry enough and needed mobilising.

  ‘But what are you going to do?’ Judith persisted.

  ‘Oh, have a baby, I suppose,’ Mum replied.

  ‘Aren’t you worried?’

  ‘Of course, I’m terrified. I haven’t got a clue what to do with a baby.’

  The group nodded their agreement to this. Having a baby looked hard. All the same, they weren’t fools. They knew this was the beginning of one of my mother’s evasions. They tried again at dinner. She would at least have to confront the father, even if she wouldn’t tell them who he was. This reticence—or, even worse, politeness or delicacy—wouldn’t do.

  Bergur tapped a fork on his glass.

  ‘May I speak?’ he said.

  He was the only man in the room. The army, less willing than usual to indulge him, ignored his tapping. Bergur stood up.

  ‘May I please speak?’ he repeated.

  ‘What can you have to say about this?’ asked Patricia.

  ‘A great deal,’ replied Bergur. ‘I have a great deal to say about this. And other things.’

  ‘Stop it, Bergur,’ Rut tried.

  ‘I have gotten up,’ he said, ‘to tell you all something very important.’

  The room fell silent.

  ‘I am standing up here tonight to declare to you all that I, Bergur Jónsson, tyre merchant and property holder, am the father of Susan’s child.’

  Rut grabbed Bergur’s arm and dragged him back into his seat.

  ‘Sit down, you stupid man!’ she cried.

  But the table applauded, and once again the evening bent away from its main topic, and its mission to unearth the secret man and set my mother against him. They interpreted his ongoing absence as you only could: the father was married and, hopefully not as Bergur had declared, one of their husbands. My mother smiled back at the curiosity of her friends, desperately glad that they had stopped asking. She would again and again refuse to tell them what they wanted to know and, really, needed to not know. Not knowing was more fun. But naturally, from then on, every man she was seen with was added to the list of suspects.