The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  My mother looks after the boys two days a week, but when I am travelling she helps out a little more than that. On my return she naturally fills me in on what they’ve been doing, and the little things they’ve said. I once replied to the updates by asking whether Finnur wasn’t a bit of a handful—he likes to have adult company all of the time.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ she answered. ‘You were much worse. If I was on the phone, you’d throw your shoes at me. You couldn’t stand it if I talked to anyone else.’

  When I left for Iceland this last July, I promised to bring him home some ash from the eruption at Eyjafjallajökull—all Finnur and I had talked about for weeks was the volcano, how volcanoes were formed, and the different kinds of lava formations they produced. I said I’d drive to the volcano, which happens to be located in the heart of Njál’s Saga country, and collect it myself.

  ‘You won’t go too close, will you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no, just to the edge of the ash. I’ll be safe, I’m sure.’

  I had another reason for visiting this time. My sister Fríða was getting married, and she’d asked me to play a song at the service. I wondered openly how Ólöf would feel, having me there in the centre of things; Fríða wasn’t sure, either. Ólöf knew I was a presence in my siblings’ lives, but she still didn’t like to talk about me. But maybe this was the time for reconciliation, and a fresh start.

  The wedding was held late on a clear, warm afternoon. I arrived early with Halldór, with whom I still write and play music, to set up and do a sound check. Soon after we’d finished getting ready, my brother Björn arrived, and then Ólöf with my sisters Anna and Bryndís. Following them were streams of Finnur and Magnús’ cousins, each with a role in the service, and each dressed in light, summer formal wear.

  It was the first time I’d seen Ólöf since 1999, when I contacted my siblings, and the nervousness of those days rushed back to me. Perhaps it was the same for her, because she responded in exactly the same way as she did during that first family dinner, drawing me to her and welcoming me.

  Gísli was too ill to attend the service, and I suspect that helped the rest of us to relax. He had faded from my life, that is, no longer an absence that I took much notice of. And he was now less of a responsibility for Ólöf, too: the advance of Parkinson’s disease meant that he was in permanent hospital care these days, with little chance of ever returning to his own place.

  After the wedding service, I was pulled to the Ólafs family table and told once again a fact that I’d heard from a number of sources, including my mother, that Ólöf was a gifted singer and had more or less given up her music for Gísli and the family. I asked whether she and my sisters would sing for the table.

  ‘No, not now,’ she replied, smiling. ‘I don’t sing as often these days.’

  ‘What song would you like to hear?’ asked Bryndís from across the other side of the table.

  ‘There is a folk song I love, although I only really know it from Ragnheiður Gröndal’s version. It’s called “Sofðu unga ástín mín”. I’m sure you both know it well.’

  Bryndís began singing and, despite her hesitation, after the first few bars Ólöf joined her.

  Sofðu, unga ástin mín,Sleep, my darling child,

  —úti regnið grætur.—outside the rain weeps.

  Mamma geymir gullin þín,Mother will keep your treasures safe,

  gamla leggi og völuskrín.your old bone and the toy box.

  Við skulum ekki vaka um dimmar nætur.We won’t wake in the dark night.

  Það er margt sem myrkrið veit,There is so much the darkness knows,

  —minn er hugur þungur.—mine are heavy thoughts.

  Oft ég svarta sandinn leitOften I saw the black sand

  svíða grænan engireit.scorch the green earth.

  Í jöklinum hljóða dauðadjúpar sprungur.The glacier’s dead-deep cracks call.

  Sofðu lengi, sofðu rótt,Sleep long, sleep peacefully,

  —seint mun bezt að vakna.—it is best to wake late.

  Mæðan kenna mun þér fljótt,Sorrow will soon teach you,

  meðan hallar degi skjótt,while the day quickly fades,

  að mennirnir elska, missa, gráta og sakna.that men love, lose, cry, and grieve.

  Egil the warrior–poet had long ago sung a poem for his lost son, a song of love, loss, and grief. Still today, when we sing for our children, mostly we reveal ourselves.

  I was again staying with Bergur and Rut, and got back to their place at three in the morning. It had been a long and happy party of dancing and drinking, and I slept only fitfully until nine, when the thought of driving to the volcano overcame my ability to lay still. There is no need to set out early in summer—it’s light all day. But I feared that if I left it too late I’d give up on the search and, instead, do as my friends had suggested, and buy bottled ash from the airport souvenir shop.

  Around noon I crossed the heath of lava, volcanoes and hot springs that lies between Reykjavík and Hveragerði, and shortly afterwards at the small agricultural town of Selfoss I stopped for a hot dog and chocolate milk; not exactly a hangover cure but a boost for the second hour of the drive.

  At the village of Hvolsvöllur I couldn’t resist taking the inland road, which would allow me to approach the volcano along Fljótshlíð, the district of Gunnar of Hlíðarendi that I had last visited in 1999 with Bergur and Rut and the Canadian family. The road wound to the northern side of Markarfljót. There were wide pastures on my right, while the hlíð or ‘slope’ on my left rose in irregular steps of home meadows and sheltering woods. The wind was picking up as the day wore on and occasionally I felt the car pushed towards the estuary that traced through the flat expanse of river debris to the south.

  I took the car up to the old church at Hlíðarendi, following a crumbling driveway that was attended by half a dozen horses that approached the car for a treat that I couldn’t offer—I had eaten all my doughnuts. I still hadn’t found any volcanic ash, but from the church I saw that it was about to find me. A vast cloud of the stuff was approaching from Thórsmörk, the deep valley to the east. Beneath me a line of fifty horses, led by half a dozen riders, was escaping its advance, and presented a rich, nomadic image: the south of Iceland was transformed into the site of a desert storm.

  Back on the road, visibility was reduced to about thirty metres, and I began to think better of my promise of ash. A headache from the night before had been shadowing me for the past hour, and with the ash thick in the air I suddenly found the drive a strain. I pushed on to Seljalandsfoss, a waterfall at the base of Eyjafjallajökull, and then, still unable to find ash on the ground, gave up and returned to Reykjavík empty-handed.

  The next day I flew to London, and in the evening on to Brisbane, where Finnur was waiting impatiently for his delivery. I had had no choice. After checking in at Keflavík, I had rushed to the airport souvenir shop and bought a sample of navy-grey sparkles presented in what must have been intended as a test tube. It was certified, by a small sticker with bold type, as coming from the 2010 eruption. Had it been possible, I would have extracted more from my lungs.

  ASHES

  A sample of Icelandic ash sits in pride of place on Finnur’s bookshelf. More than once it’s been carefully packed into the side pocket of his red backpack to take to kindergarten for show and tell. He is becoming quite the expert about Iceland. Although, he resists the language. The best I have managed is to read his Icelandic books in the original and then translate them straight away into English. Never just Icelandic, he tells me strictly.

  During Fríða’s wedding, I resisted urges from my sisters to visit Gísli. They were looking for a reconciliation—they thought it would be the last chance for father and son to find each other before his illness became worse still. I didn’t make it, not least because I didn’t thi
nk he’d want it himself. I assured my sisters that I wouldn’t regret it later, it was too late for regrets of that kind, and it was best to let things lie. He died on 8 September 2010.

  My immediate physical reaction to the news was a pit of regret that formed in my stomach, and told me that I’d made the wrong decision not to see him. I knew now that I had never entirely given up on him. What I had managed was to feel all right without him, and to realise that Iceland existed without his presence in my life. I had not managed to stop loving him, and I know well enough that if you can you should say goodbye to the ones you love. Fríða knew it, too.

  For Christmas, she and my other siblings gave me Gísli’s watch, and I find myself wearing it with as much pride as Finnur shows when he takes his volcanic ash to show his classmates. A tube of silver ash and a Swiss watch: they seem to me emblems of both continuity and change, how time passes but inevitably brings with it much of the past. I like that relationship between the past and the present very much. We are all capable of being bridges across the decades, rifts in the landscape, hemispheres even.

  Twenty years ago, I had wanted my father to sign a document stating his paternity. It was, I thought, my way back to Iceland. Now, after his death, Fríða discovered at the magistrate’s office that they needed my signature. By some silent miracle of Icelandic record keeping, I had come to be listed as one of Gísli’s children. I was asked to join the others in signing off on his estate.

  I was shocked, and asked Fríða to go back and check: I had never corrected the Icelandic records, and couldn’t understand how I’d suddenly appeared as one of his children. Fríða came back with the same news: it was all quite official. I was his son.

  I signed my part of the form. In doing so, I suppose I was providing the signature for a form I’d long wanted Gísli to sign—I officiated over my own entry into the record books. I was bridging another of the rifts that ran in often unpredictable directions from Gísli’s request for secrecy to my life as a father. Next time I’m in Iceland, I’ll check to see whether my birth certificate has also been quietly amended.

  Gísli had been ill for many years: the early stages of Parkinson’s had been present during the family lunch at Hveragerði just over ten years before, and I’d told Mum then that he was much changed. The first images she’d seen of him as an unwell middle-aged man had upset her. News of his death struck her with the mixed and conflicted emotions of the years that they had together, and the enterprise of parenting that they had for the most part undertaken thousands of miles apart. She was sad about him, but perhaps in the way that she had always been sad about him. She loved him, and she felt his loss, but he hadn’t ever quite been there, either.

  Lovers slip away into the water; they usually take something of us with them. In January 2011, we heard that Ed was ill, and a few days later, before we’d had time to see him, he had died. I drove Mum to the funeral, held just a couple of hours’ to the south of Ocean Shores, talking a little about Ed as we went. We rehearsed their life together, their rambling adventures of the 1960s, and their separation.

  ‘He has died the same age as Gísli,’ said Mum.

  ‘And just months apart,’ I added, ‘the two men in your life.’

  I didn’t ask her, as Bolli had once asked his mother Guðrún, whom she loved most, but I couldn’t quite suppress the thought, either. I have written a book that claims to know that my mother loved Gísli, but as we drove through the roadworks at the Gold Coast, I wondered if Ed hadn’t been the one all along, her first love and the one who had in a sense led her to Gísli.

  She changed their lives beyond measure. Gísli, I had been told, had only ever loved two women, his wife and my mother. And after the funeral, Ed’s son Beau told me that in a memoir that Ed had been composing, he’d written that Mum was the love of his life. He’d never gotten over her.

  I told Mum.

  ‘Why didn’t he ever say as much?’ she asked.

  Perhaps theirs was not the generation to make declarations of that kind too easily. And hadn’t Ed, Mum, and Gísli always been rather good at keeping things to themselves?

  I have taken a different approach, and for some time have looked back on the stories about Mum, Ed, and Gísli with a view to getting them down on paper: I suppose my generation tends to declare its feelings more openly, and I am by nature the type who writes things out in order to understand them. I must admit that I wonder how my story will be interpreted by my own children, when they eventually come to join in the creation of the past with their own reading of this book.

  The promises of Iceland have, over the years, changed. I’ve told the boys that we’ll all go to Iceland next year, and of course I would like it if Finnur and Magnús felt something of the connection that I do. Who knows, one day they may find they have another home there. For home, I have discovered, is not a moment in the past to which one returns, or a revision. It isn’t even the feeling of being settled in the place you love most. At the end of this story, my overwhelming feeling is that home is the knowledge that one day you will be back. That, I suppose, is what I have been doing all along: going back to Iceland. And going back to Australia, too. Promises are so often two-sided.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I hope this book reveals the enormous personal debt I owe to many of the people it features. The relationship with Iceland that it represents would not have been possible without the generous support and love of Bergur and Rut and their children Kári, Kolbrún and Rakel; my siblings Fríða, Anna, Bryndís and Björn; and my mother Susan. To Olanda and the boys, saying thank you seems inadequate, so for you I add a takk instead.

  I am also very grateful to friends and colleagues who commented on earlier drafts of this book, in particular Anne Collins, Stuart Glover, Stefanie Gropper, Sarah Holland-Batt, Sam Martin and Anthony May. Our conversations have not only helped me to shape the story, but also to better understand my role in it. I also thank Madonna Duffy, Joanne Holliman and John Hunter at UQP, who edited my book with great care and sensitivity.

  The two verses of the Old Norse poem, ‘Sonatorrek’, on page 138 are quoted from the 1976 Penguin Classics translation of Egil’s Saga by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. The lullaby, ‘Sofðu unga ástin mín’, that appears on pages 264 and 265 is by the Icelandic poet and playwright Jóhann Sigurjónsson (1880–1919). For various reasons, the author has changed the names of some people in this memoir but has been faithful to the truth in his narrative.

  First published 2011 by University of Queensland Press

  PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia

  www.uqp.com.au

  uqp@uqp.uq.edu.au

  © 2011 Kári Gíslason

  This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews,

  as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without

  prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from

  the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/

  978 0 7022 3906 9 (pbk)

  978 0 7022 4680 7 (epub)

  978 0 7022 4681 4 (kindle)

  978 0 7022 4679 1 (pdf)

  Cover design by gogoGinko

  Front cover photograph by katyjones.tv

  Back cover photograph from author’s private collection

  Typeset in 11/15 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

 

 

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