History. a Mess.

by Sigrún Pálsdottír

  I look down, wondering if the statue is such a clever idea. Whether I shouldn’t ask this obliging antiques dealer for a smaller and perhaps more cushioned box than the one here on the counter, in which lies some scrunched-up old newspaper. But when I look down in the box I see a face inside. An obituary accompanied by the photo of an old woman I know, a woman who died at home and was being buried in Reykjavík cathedral on 10 December at 1:30 P.M. Madam Guðlaug Otterstedt. My grandmother’s sister on my mother’s side. I don’t remember being at the funeral. Presumably Hans and I had already moved abroad. But I remember one of the few times I met this old woman. “Aunt” Otterstedt, a woman Mom and her relatives whispered about a lot when recalling the old days. It was my uncle’s sixtieth birthday. At the time, this lady was probably well over ninety; she sat in a wheelchair over in a corner of the living room. I roved from one room to another, in my own world, like any teenager, waiting for the gathering to come to an end, but the old figure was all alone there in the corner and when I went to one end of the dining table to grab a bottle of soda, she tugged on the knot which I had, contrary to my mother’s wishes, knotted in my thin cotton tee at my left hip. She asked me if I wasn’t Mom’s daughter, and when I assented, she pointed to the chair next to her, commanding me to sit. Taking my hand, she put her aged but silk-soft palm over the back of it and started to ask me about my schooling. When I told her I was rather indifferent to high school, she hammered on about how important it was I get through school. I must complete my exams. I told her I could manage that, but then she started talking stuff about women’s education, a jumbled, rather incoherent speech, yet when I made a move to stand up she caught my hand. Suddenly, her speech became clearer, and she began to tell me a story I somehow managed to listen to with one ear; half my head back then was wrapped up in selfish thinking, I was never able to fully concentrate on anything not directly related to myself. But with that one ear, probably the left one, I heard a story that I did not forget as fast as other things that involved the world beyond my own. Perhaps it was Madam Otterstedt’s narration I found memorable, perhaps the scenes in her story. But I never fully understood what or who the story was about, because when Otterstedt came to her narrative’s end, as she clasped my hand tightly, seeming about to follow up her words with some explanation and more detailed information, I saw Mom in the next room giving me a firm, unambiguous signal it was time to leave. We were off; I half-sensed, there in the silence in the back seat of the car, that our sudden departure from the big birthday somehow concerned the friction between Mom and her sister Greta. I pressed my face up against the car window and disappeared into my own daydreaming about some clothes and two boys. I stopped thinking about the story, and did not remember it for many years. Little by little it dissolved, and at moments in my life I would have insisted I’d never heard it. But now, standing here at the counter, in front of a door that seems to lead to the antique shop owner’s apartment, where he’s gone to look for a cloth to clean a porcelain goose-girl I’ve decided to give my mother, Guðlaug Otterstedt’s narrative rises before me; the sentences arranged one after another, and I realize they will finally get their meaning, once put together into a whole. In my retelling, it goes like this:

  It’s early in 1960. A high school history teacher is standing up at the chalkboard. An older man. He has his hands behind his back and is talking about art and an artist; I remember a little bit of how this story went because Otterstedt deepened her voice to imitate the teacher: “His art must be examined without prejudice, not in light of the fact that he had the destiny of the whole continent in his hands. On his shoulders! But yet we cannot separate the two things: because his ability to find the essence of any problem he never needed the foundational education one gets in art school.” Then he looks down, “One could say he approached the canvas and the battlefield the same way.”

  Students write in their composition books. All but one. A girl. She sits motionless, leaning on her table that’s placed by the window, holding both hands to her head. In one ear, she receives a story about Iceland’s occupation, that “great fortune in misfortune,” as the teacher puts it; at the same time, the girl is also thinking of a conversation she heard in her mother’s kitchen a few days earlier, a discussion about old family matters. The powerful voice of the teacher resounds with double force inside the girl’s head so she puts her hands over her ears and looks out the window. And there’s something happening. The girl stands up to the glass: a gleaming, polished Humber Pullman (here I think Otterstedt may have embellished in light of later knowledge, it’s certainly not my addition) is driving into the square, Kirkjutorg, in the very center of Reykjavík. The car parks right by the cathedral. Two jacket-clad men in Knox hats (here, again, all her) get out of the car. They open the backseat door. Out steps a third man. He’s wearing a very dark-blue sailor jacket, cap on his head. The three men, along with an entourage from somewhere else, head toward Parliament. Crowds stream along Skólabrú, but what captures the attention of the high school student is what is happening at the edge of the scene. In a small attic room in the house on the corner of Skólabrú and Lækjargata, a young girl is standing at the window. She’s wearing a floral dress with short sleeves. Her hair is parted in the middle and pinned back with two barrettes so that it fans out on both sides, her shiny locks flowing down to her shoulders. Behind the young girl stands a middle-aged man. He is wearing a uniform. The man moves closer to the girl. He takes her slender waist, buries his face in her little collarbone and pulls her away from the window. The girl takes hold of the curtains and draws them so that everything disappears. Everything except little hands grabbing tightly to the curtains like they might rip them off and then a man’s massive face overlays the picture: the exercised history teacher mirrored in the window. The student can see herself with her hands over her ears, her own horrified expression in the glass, and behind her the teacher, stroking his head in confusion; then a wholly arrogant smile plays across his countenance: “Of course you must know, young lady, all about how the event I’ve been laboring over took place, all about its significance for the Icelandic nation, for her children at such a precarious moment in history? To know your nation’s history and the men who shaped it is every man’s …” but before the teacher can continue his speech, the girl gets out of her chair and rushes out the classroom and out the school building and down the steps, across the street and up to the building at Skólabrú. She stands at the front door, looks around and begins to beat on the door, unrelenting. She starts yelling for help. The teacher looks out the window at this, together with his students, some of whom have actually gone outside and stand there rigid, watching their classmate’s behavior until one of the boys in the group goes after the girl who is now leaning on the door, holding her forehead, dead on her feet.

  The following day, the girl gets called into the principal’s office with her parents; she’s made to explain what happened. At first, she has no memory of it; then, under interrogation, says she saw a soldier, or rather some sort of officer, about to assault a young girl up in an attic room in the building on the corner. She had actually already realized that the image she saw out of the window came from a former time, that it was hardly of this world, but she could give no other reason for her behavior as she sat there between her parents, next to her mother who put her hand over her mouth when the principal explained defiantly that the school authorities had knocked on the door to the house right after the tumult and found what they already knew: there were men working in the house, hanging wallpaper in the rooms and working on the floor up in the attic. The authorities were welcome to look in but not to step on the floor. The paint was still drying.

  The girl was sent to a doctor, who said he believed her suffering stemmed from headache attacks; if he mentioned hallucinations, that was never discussed within the family. Indeed, the atmosphere in the wake of the event became more difficult every day as a result, and eventually led to this superior student divorcing hersel
f from school and half-fleeing abroad with an older girlfriend. The family’s explanation for the girl’s decision was that she simply did not have the focus to complete her matriculation exams.

  Voila! The silver-haired antiques dealer extends a coarse but clean hand invitingly away from himself in the direction of a golden box standing on the store counter. Then he puts a finishing touch on the work by pulling tight a black silk ribbon he has bound around the package. I smile and thank him. Have I paid for the statue? I ask myself as I stand on the upper steps in front of the store, the box under one arm. But I’m not able to answer the question. I can’t even take a step down to the sidewalk due to a sudden, paralyzing realization as to my petty, narrow mindset, which the day’s haphazard events have striven to reveal. What had that message from Bonný been, the one I read inside the passageway just now, except a sign that I have made my friends nothing but fictions of my own imagination? A message that I am constantly reading my own vulnerabilities into others’ actions and behaviors? Sigga’s call? Bjarnfríður Una’s heroic act in the Near East and my cowardly behavior at the same event? What was the difference between Hans’s indifferent response when I lay in the Icelandic National Hospital after my miscarriage and the handball coach’s actions when Ester gave birth to their youngest son? Perhaps that Hans was situated only two kilometers away from where I was suffering, while Ester’s baby was born two months before the due date and the sports tournament was not some divisional contest but a national game overseas? Who had talked to the young composer at the dinner party? Me, or Mom? And Aunt Otterstedt’s story? I remember it as though it was yesterday that she told me about the winter of 1960. And what had happened? Had the girl studied abroad? In London? I would have known if I’d asked and listened and believed Grandpa’s last words instead of letting myself be satisfied with Grandmother’s words, who thought it was better to believe that her daughter left school because of learning difficulties than because of mental illness. Better that the girl was foolish than rebellious and perhaps disturbed; of course, it was nothing but a result of the damn migraines which I’d inherited and which Mom, for a variety of reasons, had never talked about. And after I grew up, I nourished my immature annoyance toward Mom, abetted by the ever-lasting consequences of Grandma’s fiction. This involuntary opposition to Mom, accusations about her being highbrow and haughty, were nothing but my own insecurity. Arrogance is not always a personality trait; much more often, it’s the experience of those who believe they find it in others.

  I was no longer completely sure what my real business visiting Mom was. I’d planned to confirm her silent approval from last night, indicating it would be better for everyone, including old S. B., that I submit my thesis. Even though I’d done what I’d done. But what on earth had given me reason to think that my mother was going to cover up a criminal act? Some casual aside she’d made, a half-answer to one of my father-in-law’s foolish questions last night at a party? Yes, I was a true champion of over-interpreting others’ words and always to my own benefit. More likely my thesis would not only be killed off by the single page I had flipped past without reading. It would be killed off because nothing supported my hypothesis other than subtle hints and some blinkered reading, being fired up to notice all the things that might support my theory, looking assiduously past any factors that undermined it. Until the unavoidable blew up on day 221.

  At the corner, I turn right, up the street toward the church. Misconceptions? At that moment, a small white jeep reverses acrobatically to parallel park along the sidewalk. A woman sits at the wheel. She cuts the engine, gets out, and swings a bag on a hefty gold chain up onto her shoulder. Then she makes a motion with her key before looking away from the car toward me. Her hair is coal black, her skin is dark brown; she looks well weathered, like she’s been around the block more than a few times. I realize at once who she is. I met this woman last year with my sister-in-law. It was the Christmas holidays and she was blonde back then. Some book club I was soon driven quickly away from after having partaken in dinner. This is her! Without doubt. Díana D. Fear is that little dark room where misconceptions are developed! But what’s she doing here? Come to punish me for not meeting my “booked” time to discuss the Demolitionist and unnecessary baggage. We look into each other’s eyes for about five seconds, until I glance away and continue up the street. But I have not walked more than a few steps before I hear footsteps behind me, a clanging crash in high heels drawing little by little so close that I think she must be right next to me. Unconsciously, I shift my route across the street, imagining I can walk all alone up the other side. But the high heels cross the street, too. Without thinking about it, and with quite a ridiculous twist, I plot a course in the opposite direction, down toward the city center. And now I walk as fast as I can without running, the sounds of footsteps at my heels. Until I reach the main street. That’s when I decide to start running, an attempt to get across before the fast-paced traffic starts up and in that way get rid of this unexpected pursuer. I’m across; before I know it, I’m running toward a ten-story concrete lump that stands at the harbor right by the old shipyard. I order myself to stop, to put an end to this nonsense; it’s absurd, I tell myself, but just when I’m going to turn around, I feel something protruding underneath my coat. Something hard against my chest. I grope under my coat and grab the damn notebook from the breast pocket of my nightshirt. Had I forgotten something when I walked out the door to my home earlier on? I’d meant to tear the pages with the nonsense about the Demolitionist out of my notebook. As the damp wind slips up under my coat, I realize that I never actually got dressed; I’m still in my nightgown.

  I put the book in my overcoat pocket, finding I’ve reached the building. The footsteps are still chasing me and there are not many people around, so I don’t allow myself to look but instead head straight toward the fire escape on the building’s west side. The ladder zigzags between platforms, so when I get up to the first one, I know I will definitely see her as I turn to climb the next steps. But no matter how fast I try to get up the stairs, my pursuer is always out of sight, so tightly is she on my heels. And that’s how it goes until we’ve reached the top and I prepare myself to start running along the length of the roof, though I know well that the only escape route lies back down. But I don’t go far because my first step jerks me back, I’m hauled back toward the stairs. I’ve snagged my coat on the handrail, and when I tear myself loose with full force, it rips in two from pocket to hem. My notebook flies from the pocket, and when I reach out to grab it, it fumbles across the rooftop and skitters through the air. The book seems headed out of sight, but falls back down as it nears the roof edge, landing directly on the brink. And there the book lies while I throw Mom’s gift away, get on all fours and move, with shaking hand, out toward it. But I can’t go any further. A slender woman’s hand takes hold of my shoulder. Here to examine my “baggage,” I think, looking straight down the ten stories, down to the sidewalk. Then up and straight forward. Out across the harbor and the sea:

  Professor John W. Lucy. He had given the green light. Deep down, I suspected he’d not read the thesis very carefully, but his comments were somehow in order; he seemed chiefly worried about the length of the thesis. I held to my line about the workmanship, and soon all that was left was to go over the direct quotes from the manuscript. I was on the home straight. I put the manuscript on the table and thought how I was going to miss this old tome. I went back to the book and opened it to day 221. I scanned the page but did not find the sentence I was looking for. I flipped forward and back and found another entry with the same number. This was the right one. The other entry I had never transcribed or read. I had clearly overlooked it, flipped right past. I did not realize then what had transpired, but now I think I know when and why this happened:

  My discovery of S. B.’s gender had awakened a great zeal within me, an intensity that I had never known before, and I had worked well the years following my findings in the entry of day 203. But I was
still the person I have always been: constantly thinking of something else in my environment other than I should be, always looking at people’s appearances, gestures and hand movements while their words dissolved before me. Teachers. Lecturers. Fellow students. And the same was true in reading this manuscript; it was all too easy to disturb my focus. Rarely could I avoid looking up and noticing something else taking place in the reading room. How unfortunate, then, that at the moment I turned from day 221 to the following day, which had the same number, I heard sounds from the next booth across the way. They came from a middle-aged woman who on a regular basis discharged various strange noises. Sometimes it sounded like a piercing howl ending in a kind of bark. I immediately realized this was something that the woman could not control, but I wondered all the same whether she was allowed to, given a deathly silence was supposed to prevail. It was really annoying but when I looked across the room I saw that there was nobody except me who seemed be disturbed by the noise. Everyone was immersed in their own documents.

  Actually, not all of them, and that’s why I did not continue reading right away, but instead watched two old men sitting side by side next to a big table in the hall. One of them held a bound manuscript that the other was trying to take from him; when the latter managed to get hold of the book, the first would not let go. They sat there and fought over something that was obviously very precious to both of them, until the custodian came on the scene and tried to intervene; their bickering ended when he took the book back to the service desk. The two men sat there very still, both looking straight ahead.