The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  We stopped at an apartment block near Hlemmur, the bus terminus.

  ‘C’mon, we’ll go up,’ said Agi, with the same, even happiness he’d used to calm me in the car. We wound our way through a narrow stairwell to an attic apartment, Fríða’s place.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ said Fríða, when she opened the door. She looked at the others.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Agi. ‘I had a feeling you would say that.’

  ‘Oh, Pabbi!’ said Anna. ‘Does he think we’re blind?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, worried by their reaction.

  ‘Don’t worry. They are just a little in shock,’ Björn said as they surrounded me, and passed me round for hugs and kisses.

  ‘Is there really any doubt?’ Fríða asked.

  Poor Gísli, he had been right all along. It was, after all, the likeness that undid him. And that, as far as they were concerned, was that. There was nothing to do now but get to know me, and they have never since wavered in that first welcome, when they made their own decision about who I was, and what to do about me. If I was their brother, then I was their brother. There was nothing else to say.

  There was a lot they wanted to know. How long was Gísli seeing my mother? How did she and Gísli meet? What sort of relationship did they have? Who else knew about it? Surely lots of people were in on the secret. Did he visit us, did he know me?

  What do I remember of my responses to them? Mainly, that I didn’t deny them anything they wanted to know. The information flooded out of me in a way that it could only do after so many years of keeping it in. I wanted it out, and all the more for it to finally come home to where it had always belonged.

  Fríða brought out some photo albums and walked me through her own complicated life of relationships, migrations, and returns. Did I have any old pictures of me I could show them?

  ‘No, I haven’t brought any,’ I said. I hesitated, and added, ‘I’m sure I could send some.’

  ‘Send them? You must bring them,’ said Agi. He was busy taking his own photographs. ‘Yes. Are you free on Sunday? We’ll have lunch at our place in Hveragerði. We’ll pick you up.’

  ‘And this time we are bringing Gísli,’ added Fríða. ‘It’s time he saw you.’

  15

  NEW ARRIVALS

  I was surprised to find that Ólöf, my father’s wife, also came to dinner. I could see that she hadn’t slept much, and that her eyes were swollen from crying—it was still but a few days since she discovered that her husband had another child. But like the others there, she greeted me with a kiss and a hug and said, ‘You’re most welcome, Kári. Welcome to the family.’

  It was a remarkable moment of self-possession and generosity, one which over the years she has drawn back from and eventually come to repeat. My sisters and my brother have never looked back: from the day they first met me, and in the face of intense pressure from both Gísli and Ólöf, they have stayed true to me and the feeling of familiarity and closeness from our first encounter.

  These are generous people, and I have no trouble conceding that Gísli has played a part in shaping such a wonderful family. On that day, their first family dinner to include me, there was a very present love and respect for Gísli, even with the upheaval of the previous few days. He wasn’t very well, even though his Parkinson’s disease wasn’t at an advanced stage yet, and he looked drawn and tired, much older than a man who had only recently turned sixty. The resemblance between us had all but gone; it would, I now realised, only be seen by someone who’d known him as a young man, when he had met my mother.

  I see now that I was coming into the family as he was beginning to leave it. In the years to come, he would become more ill and less able to cope with any mention of either me or my mother. His explanation for me would change—I was the product of a one-night stand, a brief affair at work—and I don’t believe he ever admitted the whole story.

  That day, he was as generous in spirit to me as the others were to him. He shook my hand warmly and said he was pleased to see me. He made no reference to the letter, although I found out later that he had received it—it hadn’t ended up in the pile of uncollected mail in the flower pot.

  Fríða drew me aside, most concerned that I should have a long talk to him. She manoeuvred us into armchairs in the centre of the living room and then, not-so-subtly, organised for herself and Anna to hover and listen in. It was set-up rather like a chat show, and probably not conducive to an intimate exchange.

  ‘How did you break your nose?’ he asked.

  ‘I fell over, as a kid.’

  ‘I don’t remember your mother mentioning that. And what do you do now?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m in literary studies.’

  ‘Yes, that makes sense.’

  ‘Why so?’ I thought someone was, at last, going to shed some light on my choices in life.

  ‘Well, you know you’re a descendant of Snorri’s.’

  ‘No. Snorri who?’

  ‘Snorri Sturluson, of course.’

  Of course. The saga author. The one who died in 1241.

  ‘You’re mother chose a beautiful name,’ he continued. ‘But how do they say it in Australia?’

  ‘There’s a girl’s name that’s spelt the same. They call me that.’ I pronounced it for him.

  ‘But your “a” has an accent.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t insist on it.’

  ‘You should. You should be proud of your Icelandic name. Say it as we say it here. How is your mother? Is she here as well?’

  ‘No, she’s in Brisbane. She’s well. Still working.’

  ‘Will you pass on my best?’

  She had always said I was just like my father, but all the same I doubted that this was the conversation that I would have had with a long-lost son. A broken nose, a famous Icelandic ancestor, the correct pronunciation of a name, and greetings to a lover from years ago. We were different. I was both less outwardly assured and more openly sentimental than Gísli. I would have searched for a common soul from the very first meeting, however absurd that might have seemed. I would have wanted to know him. But I couldn’t fault Gísli’s behaviour towards me that day. Now that the past had caught up with him, he took the consequences blithely, perhaps even nonchalantly. It was a reaction that could well have annoyed a wife; he was probably relieved, and I sensed that he rather enjoyed himself that day.

  All the same, I sensed that I had to be content that our relationship might end here, and that we were still no closer to becoming father and son in any meaningful sense. Had he been a different man—more emotional, less protective of his position—I would maybe still be looking for him, and for something that might develop alongside the warmth shown by my siblings. But it was too late for that. He was ill, and it was an illness that made him even more hesitant than before, if not exactly about me anymore. The secret was over, but the fear that it had once produced was remaindered in his manners and his health. As with our meeting at the president’s lodge, I was in no doubt that this was not the start of something.

  Perhaps, this sense of it all having come too late was how my mother had felt when I was five and she left him for Australia. She had moved him out of the picture and concentrated instead on earlier desires: the intense longing for Iceland, the restlessness that had predated him.

  Over the course of the dinner, Fríða’s contractions had become more regular and intense, and she began to time them. It was a day for new arrivals, Agi said: a baby and a twenty-six-year-old love child. At eight, we drove back over the high ground between Hveragerði and Reykjavík. It was a cold, clear evening, and as we came down off the heath the northern lights began to trace their way towards town. Fríða sat in the front passenger seat puffing lightly. The next day, she gave birth to her second child, a boy.

  When I got to Bergur and Rut’s,
I called Mum. I had been waiting until after the gathering, and until I knew how things would go with Gísli and Ólöf. It was noon in Australia, a bright September day, said Mum, the best time of year in Brisbane. There would have been gentle sunshine and a breeze brushing through the apartment. We talked for over an hour—mostly, she wanted to know about Gísli’s family—she actually knew very little about them, and had long wanted to know more. In a way, my siblings had been kept a secret from my mother and me, too. He had divided his world so well, each part sheltered from the other.

  I joked about my being related to Snorri Sturluson.

  ‘Well, it was always the finest of everything with Gísli,’ she said.

  ‘Including you, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose I must have had something about me,’ she replied.

  I also rang Ólöf to ask if we could meet again. I wanted to see her before I left Iceland, partly because I liked her and thought, perhaps naively, that she and I could get along, despite everything, and partly because I feared she would stop my siblings from seeing me. I was, in a way, right about both things. Yes, she had liked me that Sunday afternoon and, no, it was nothing against me in particular but she couldn’t see me again. That was impossible. And over the days that followed, the news filtered through to me that she’d asked Fríða and the others to stop seeing me, too. Thankfully, without success.

  It now seemed like there was no time left at all until I had to return to Brisbane but I had twenty-six years to catch up on with my siblings, so I spent less time at the saga institute. I was being drawn in—into Iceland and out of myself—and out of what suddenly seemed an exaggerated sense of isolation, dwelt upon until it became everything. Perhaps that was the lesson of my life: you were never as far from being included as you thought you were.

  After work one evening, Fríða and I met at her place and went for a walk down Laugavegur, the main street. We were going visit to Amma Fríða, our grandmother, who still lived in the same house in Bárugata as when Mum and Gísli had walked past it nearly thirty years before.

  Inside, the house was every bit an expression of the history and, indeed, the size of its occupant. Nowhere was this more evident than on the top floor, where her sofas and pictures nestled under a sloping ceiling that was an ideal height for her but must have been awkward for her sons. Maybe that was the plan, in order to keep it for herself. It was where she wanted to sit down and, she said, talk to me properly for the first time.

  In this house, she told me, she had raised three boys to be successful and confident, but in their own ways each was a little reckless too. Perhaps, I thought, this was because they’d grown up without a father, like me. It might also have been because they had grown up to be slim, handsome boys with thick hair and light smiles from a passing world, the old Iceland. As they became young men, the softness of youth had been replaced by a charm that may have been invisible to some—at least until you got to know them better—but which I saw plainly enough in the photographs that Amma Fríða brought out.

  ‘You can see why he was popular,’ she said.

  She made us coffee. One of her thin, pale hands held mine, and with the other she patted my face.

  ‘You’re most welcome in my house,’ she said. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of unease about who I was; I could have been holding Lilja’s hand. Perhaps this was the spirit of the women of her generation. Perhaps she was simply a kind mother who understood her sons too well to judge the results of their errant ways. Or, I wondered, maybe when she saw me, she was reminded of my father as a younger man, someone else who hadn’t known his father.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve got too much longer left,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you came when you did.’

  ‘It’s lucky for me, then. I took my time, I suppose.’

  ‘Very rude of you,’ she said. ‘Your manners are getting better now, though.’

  I couldn’t help but wonder whether Gísli’s fear of upsetting Ólöf had originated in this room, with a fear of his mother’s loneliness? But I quickly told myself to stop thinking about him, and in the next moment looked again at the photograph. Maybe he just didn’t like getting caught. And, then again, maybe he did.

  My grandmother Fríða Kristín died not long after I left Iceland. I was in Brisbane at the time and couldn’t attend the funeral. Pétur, who at the funeral read out the list of surviving relatives, was particular in including my name among the grandchildren. The inclusion was among the first of many such acknowledgments that the Ólafs family had a new member, and more than ten years on I have no doubt that I am known in Iceland for who I really am: the son of an English woman and an Icelandic man who fell in love and, despite the difficulties of their relationship, stayed true to a promise they had made to each other.

  There must come a moment for all parents when our children no longer completely accept our vision for them. I must remember that in the future, for breaking the promise to Gísli was the best thing I’d done in my life, and not merely because things worked out with my siblings. It allowed me to close a door on my father—despite his acceptance of what I’d done, I didn’t want to see him again—and open a door on Iceland that I had long thought could only be opened by him. Could I return to Iceland when there was nothing in the way of my return?

  When you write a story like this one, it is tempting to look for section breaks, places where the story pauses or takes on a different mood. I think they must be fairly obvious: the early impetus behind my story lay with my mother’s love of Iceland, and her love affair there; there was my childhood in Reykjavík, one that set me up for my interminable nostalgia about the country; there was a separation, when we moved to England and then Brisbane where I rebuilt my Iceland out of the sagas; and now a return, when family, the landscape of Reykjavík, and its old stories met for the first time.

  If it’s true that you can discover yourself in writing the story of your life, you also lose some of the old certainties. Across section breaks emerge unsettling through lines. I had a growing awareness that over the years a deep anger had settled beside my hopes for Iceland—the search for love had brought with it a touch of hate. That October, as I boarded my plane to London and began the long series of flights that connect Reykjavík and Brisbane, I was aware that I still had another section break to write into my story. I wasn’t quite home yet.

  16

  ISLANDS APART

  If Reykjavík is the freshness of the North Atlantic wind, then Brisbane is all about liquid aroma—the heady comforts of the Pacific. When I stepped off the plane a month later into a November night, I welcomed the heavy fragrances of the coming summer. Strangely, for the first time it felt like home, or at least a home.

  A friend picked me up from the airport and, on the way to my mother’s apartment, I asked if we could stop by the river and take in the air for a moment. We pulled off the road at Toowong, a river suburb just outside the city, and breathed it in. It had taken a return to Iceland to recall just how enveloping the atmosphere here was. It picked you up and carried you away with the pollen.

  When I got to Mum’s, I pulled out a photo collage that my siblings had given me before I left Iceland. Its frame had been much too big for my carpetbag so Rut had taken me shopping for what must have been the largest suitcase in Reykjavík. Even with the bigger case the glass had broken. It was a familiar problem—how to bring awkward items from overseas to Australia. Mum’s solution had always been not to even try. She would give away her furniture before each move, and start again. I was more attached to objects than she, more material. I thought that you could probably have a little bit of Reykjavík in Brisbane, even if the glass broke.

  We spent the night looking over old photographs, hers as well as some that Fríða had given me, and there we began a process of bringing two islands closer together: our story and theirs, Iceland and Australia. It knows no end, because I can’
t ever place one island perfectly over the other. There is quite a difference in their size.

  I soon raised the idea of changing my surname. Even though Mum was now long-since divorced from Ed, she hadn’t changed her name back to Diggons. She was comfortable with Reid—it had eventually become how she thought of herself. But, for me, Reid remained a cover of sorts, a way around the patronymic. Oddly, although I didn’t want Gísli any more, I did want his name.

  For a while, I had been toying with the idea of using Gíslason as a middle name, but this struck me as a concession to the secret—hiding Gísli in the middle. No, it had to be the patronymic, just as it would have been had my situation been different. You couldn’t rewrite history. But you could at least make minor corrections here and there.

  The following year, in 2000, I changed my name and began to save for another ticket to Iceland.

  It was busy in the branch, with people going everywhere. One of the travel agents was very beautiful, very blond and rather more energetic behind the counter than the others. She was direct, even a little blunt. When it was my turn, she said Reykjavík was no problem but she’d need to spend a day on it before she could give me a fixed itinerary. Could I come back tomorrow? Of course I could. When I turned to leave, she was walking behind the row of chairs to fetch brochures for the next customer. She wore a short grey skirt, black stockings, and a grey polo with purple bands on the arms.

  The next day, I took a little extra care in my presentation. A close-fitting, ironed shirt. New jeans. Green shoes, even. Her blond hair was pushed back, and I thought I caught her taking me in. A German face, I thought now, a little Icelandic even.

  ‘May I have a brochure, please?’ I said.

  ‘For Iceland?’

  ‘If you have one.’ And off she went along the row of travel agents, through to the brochures in the back office.

  Some weeks passed, and then I had to go in to tell her I needed to push my departure back a little.