The Promise of Iceland

by Kári Gíslason

  ‘How long will you stay in Iceland?’ she asked idly.

  ‘Six months this time.’ She glanced back at the computer screen.

  ‘We should be able to fix this.’ Her arm was in a sling. ‘Skiing,’ she explained. ‘I’m always doing this.’

  ‘No more sport for a while, then.’

  ‘No. Strictly indoor activities.’

  I hadn’t meant to pick French porn. There was nothing in the title of the film to say that it was French porn. And, in any case, we shouldn’t be embarrassed about young people discovering their bodies. The French weren’t.

  She was driving an old Volvo sports hatchback; it was fifteen years old, the same age as the young people discovering their bodies. The car rattled, and the rubber lining on the hatch door squeaked. I liked that: it matched Gunnar’s definition of a good, honest car—you could hear its parts.

  After the film we drove to a local café, where we shared a piece of cheesecake.

  ‘I’ve got a big day tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I should probably make a move. Do you need a lift somewhere?’

  ‘Just to Mum’s,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. You’re still living with your mother.’

  It was just while I was saving for Iceland, I explained, but I’m not sure that helped much. We followed Swann Road to Taringa. There was a pause, and then a look that all but pushed me out. There was no peck for the man who lived with his mother and took girls to pornos.

  It was a terrible first date, but she saw her way past it. It was September 2000. Would I like to come to an Olympics party, she asked. A night of swimming on TV: thin men in swimwear, young people discovering their bodies in a much better way. Kieren Perkins was going to be making his exit from the sport. Parents would drop in. We could forget about the movie thing.

  ‘So you’re off to Iceland in three months,’ Olanda said later that night at a club we’d found in Caxton Street.

  ‘That’s right,’ I replied. ‘I know we’re only out dancing, but I guess that puts us in a funny position.’

  ‘Only if we let it.’

  ‘It doesn’t worry you that I’ll be leaving soon?’

  ‘Not yet. I don’t know how long I’ll be in Brisbane, either.’

  It was the line we held onto over the next three months: we wouldn’t let it bother us, not yet. She was also unsure of her future—the reason she was a travel agent was that she wanted to travel. We just had to enjoy what we had while we had it.

  On Boxing Day, I left for Reykjavík as planned, following the dawn across to London, and then up to Iceland. It was the forty-eight-hour day that I’d lived half-a-dozen times before. But this time I phoned Brisbane en route, from transit lounges in Sydney and then Singapore and London, and eventually from Bergur and Rut’s place.

  ‘All that stuff about taking things as they come,’ I said, ‘total rubbish. I’m not even sure why I’m in Iceland, anymore.’

  ‘It’s because you wanted to go,’ she replied. ‘You want to be there, remember.’

  ‘But six months . . .’

  ‘. . . is only six months.’

  I began my work at the saga institute and found a student apartment. In a few weeks, Mum would be visiting. She was going to celebrate her sixtieth birthday party in Iceland; Bergur and Rut would host it at their place and I would cook. In the meantime, a long winter of storms and darkness began, which I attempted to break through with walks to the frozen phone booth on Suðurgata for conversations with Olanda in Brisbane, where she lay sweating under the fan.

  ‘What was I thinking? I could be there with you.’

  ‘Don’t torture yourself like this,’ she replied. ‘Be patient.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous. I can’t keep putting Iceland ahead of everything else.’

  When I confided in my namesake big Kári that I was tortured by regret over leaving Olanda, he said that the only way to ward off my loneliness was to go for a drink. We headed into town, first to Dubliners and then to a sports bar, where TV screens behind the bar played porn, of all things. It was grim, and not at all the delicate French porn of my first date with Olanda. We sat across from each other with pints of dirty-tasting beer.

  ‘To the single life!’ I toasted. ‘Isn’t it grand?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘imagine if Olanda was here. I wouldn’t get to drink with a loser who gave up a beautiful girlfriend in Australia to sit here with me and watch porn. You’ve definitely made the right choice.’

  ‘Thank you. You understand me perfectly.’

  ‘It must be good to get away from the beaches, the cheap food, the wine,’ he continued.

  ‘That’s right. You can have too much of those things,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, you’re okay now. You won’t get any here, I promise. No fun until you leave.’

  There was no denying that we were having a great time, but we eventually called it a night. Kári’s apartment lay further up Laugavegur, mine towards the university, and we parted ways on Bankastræti, near a tatty-looking strip club. I looked through the door to a reception area of tall girls in miniskirts.

  ‘Come in,’ said one. ‘Have a drink. Warm up.’

  I kept walking, past Café Paris and across Austurvöllur, the town square, to a line of telephone booths on the other side. It was two in the morning, very cold, and dark in the way that only Iceland can be dark, as though it were a permanent state, as though the world of light would never be rejoined. A malicious wind wound through the office blocks.

  ‘Hey, it’s me,’ I said into the phone.

  ‘How was your night with Kári?’ asked Olanda.

  ‘Medium. I know just the spot to go if you ever want to watch porn with your beer.’

  ‘Once was enough, thanks.’

  In the years since my mother had left Iceland, the army of secretaries had splintered badly. Judith and Nanci had fallen out over promissory notes that Haukur had obtained before he died. Molly and Patricia were also at loggerheads over something, presumably animals and artwork, possibly Jersey as well. They were getting cranky in their old age, thought Mum. And crazier, too.

  I asked Mum if she wanted to look up Gísli. She replied that she couldn’t think of anything worse, but that she longed to meet my sisters.

  They got along beautifully. Fríða and Bryndís had their share of restlessness, a thirst for the wider world. I was sure that, had the three of them met in the 1970s, they would have been friends; my mother had been taken to Iceland for the same reasons they had been taken away. The meeting was, in a way, the end of a long road for Mum—she wanted to apologise for the affair, and as she did so I was given a rare glimpse of just what a burden the secret had been, no doubt for both her and Gísli. How, I wondered, had she borne such anxiety for thirty years? How could you wait that long to say sorry?

  There was no simple answer to either question, but more than ever I was convinced that she had loved him deeply, and that her desire to know my sisters was because they were his children, and not because they were my siblings. Meeting them brought her a step closer to his world, one that she hadn’t been able to enter completely when she was with him. And while we may have moved to Australia to escape the affair—to finally end it, as she had told me—the meeting with my sisters confirmed to me that she never really had. In many respects, she was still there, in a wind-blown outpost of Europe in the 1970s.

  While not all the secretaries made it to dinner on the night of Mum’s sixtieth, there were enough there to recollect old time, which to some extent recreated the atmosphere of thirty years before. In the end, they didn’t reminisce much, but the gossip and the laughter of the evening was a kind of reminiscing, enacted rather than verbalised. Bergur, now as then, tried to place himself at the head of a group that saw him as merely a lovable man whose much more important wife was providing them
with a place to meet. Were men ever capable of more than that, of being loved, included at dinner, and humoured when they tried to involve themselves in the affairs of the day?

  I wanted to understand Mum and her relationship with the other women who’d fallen in love here. But the army always slipped a little beyond my grasp. Perhaps it was the constant gossiping that kept you out: keeping the conversations overloaded also left the evenings free from real analysis. Or was it their concern for me that ultimately made it impossible for me to really get them? For thirty years, they had been busy working me out, and in doing so had instructed me in self-analysis. They weren’t quite ready for me to turn the lens on them.

  Nor was Mum. I don’t know if she saw it this way, but the night marked the thirtieth anniversary of the only time she and Gísli had gone out together, to the boat-shaped restaurant downtown. Tonight, Iceland was a different place, and also I suspect the same place that she had encountered when she first arrived: cold, windy, and difficult—the sort of place you came to for two years, not for a new life. And as we walked along Suðurgata the next day, she said that she didn’t think she’d be able to cope with the winters again. From then on, she’d visit in summer, when life in Iceland turns out into the streets, the parks, and the countryside.

  There was little sign of spring when Olanda arrived—we hadn’t managed to be apart for six whole months. She joined me in March, when it was minus five, and a fine gale blew across town. There was nothing to do but stay indoors for a week. This went very well; she liked to sit on the broad windowsills of our apartment and watch the snowstorms drift along the narrow street. The midnight blue of dawn extended the nights, and when we finally emerged each day it was into a quiet noon barely touched by human activity.

  We were only two steps from the haphazard urbanity that I so loved about Reykjavík. Our walks around town followed Fríkirkjuvegur, a street named after the Icelandic Free Church that lined the length of the pond and cornered towards a thawed section of water, where a gang of ducks and swans begged aggressively. Behind Fríkirkja, the dog-legged streets of Austurbær formed tiers for dark-coloured Mercedes and Audis. But on the long seashore strip, merchant and fishing life retained a hold. There were warehouses, trawler wharfs, dry docks, and crumbling stevedoring buildings.

  In the evenings, before dinner, we caught the bus down to Laugardalslaug for a late swim. We would sit in the hot pot watching a small clock that hung nearby, calculating as precisely as we could the last minute to get out and still catch the bus to make our way back in to town.

  We talked a lot about living in Iceland, and whether we could move there for good. Olanda wanted to try it, but already reservations showed in her eyes. The Icelanders unsettled her—they didn’t smile, for one thing. Why was everyone always frowning? It wasn’t exactly a frown, I explained, more a well-meaning glare, or just the villager’s curiosity that survived into the modern era. If you believed the old travel writers, it was also peasant surliness, a leftover from the crofter years—they were the stares of malnutrition. But there were other, more benign remnants of the old style of life, too.

  One evening, as Kári was driving us back to the university flat, he asked Olanda how she was getting along.

  ‘Great,’ she replied. ‘It’s beautiful. I’m sure I’ll get to know more people the longer I’m here.’

  ‘And you’re all sorted in the apartment?’ Kári continued.

  ‘Yes, not too bad. If we can just get some music into the place, it’ll be quite homely.’

  The next morning we opened the door to a grinning Kári with a stereo still covered with the dust from his teenage years. It was hard to reconcile the hospitality of those you knew with the air of hostility that you often encountered on the streets but, for me, it was a familiar contrast, and one I didn’t mind. Bumping into friends, which in Reykjavík you simply couldn’t avoid, was always like coming in from the cold weather outside. Iceland was all about intimate circles that existed as a way of differentiating yourself within a small community. For Olanda, it didn’t make any sense.

  The reality is that Iceland only really works for people who fall hopelessly in love with it, and it was plain that hadn’t happened for Olanda. But for the time being, we settled on looking for more, for the softness that undoubtedly lay beneath the brittle Icelandic exterior. It was for me to play the role of the guide, and although I doubted that I was as suited as my father had been thirty years before, I was sure it was possible. But then a crisis arose.

  Olanda fell ill. One night when we had met some of my colleagues for a drink downtown, she began to burn with a fever and started to pass out. I rushed her home, and called for a doctor. It wasn’t clear what was wrong, the doctor said. I was to keep an eye on her; by the morning, she would probably feel a little better. But the next day she could barely move and her lower back ached terribly. I rang Rut, who rushed us to the hospital. Olanda’s temperature had climbed dangerously high, which at that point was the main concern. It then turned out she had a severe kidney infection, and she’d probably been carrying it for weeks.

  The next morning, Olanda’s condition had worsened. She’d reacted to the antibiotics the doctors had prescribed to control the infection—they made her even more ill than the infection. It was becoming harder for her body to control her temperature, and she was badly dehydrated.

  ‘They say they’ve worked you out now,’ I told her, when she finally came to under medication that suited her.

  ‘At last, someone,’ she replied.

  I hadn’t wanted to leave her side the whole time. The nurses said I could sleep on the couch in the visitor’s lounge, even thought it wasn’t really the done thing. When I looked for it the first night I found it made up with a pillow and a blanket.

  On the third day of the crisis, Bergur and Rut and my sisters visited, and Olanda had begun to improve. She insisted that I get a lift home with Rut.

  ‘At least have a shower,’ she half-joked.

  It is awful to be sick in a foreign country. Auden began a poem about Iceland with this line: ‘And the traveller hopes: “Let me be far from any physician”.’ I say, let me be free of local emergency wards. Illness can change how you see the people around you, and Olanda began to view Bergur and Rut and my sisters, even the strangers around us, a little differently. It wasn’t merely that they’d helped us, but that they loved Olanda. She also noticed that part of their concern was selfish: they wanted us to settle here.

  A few days later, Bergur and Rut picked us up from the hospital. While the worst of the illness had passed, Olanda’s full recovery took some weeks, and her enjoyment of the coming spring would be limited by the amount of time she could comfortably spend outside. She had seen how warm our circle of friends and relations could be, but she was also reminded of how far away her own family was, and how quickly that could matter. In May, we began to plan our return to Brisbane.

  When we arrived back, we moved into a share house together. We bought bookshelves, and then a table, and then eventually our own apartment in Paddington, a suburb of steep hills and Queenslander homes just north of the city. Olanda went back to her job at STA Travel and I settled down to finish my doctorate about medieval Iceland. Reading about the Iceland of the far-distant past still offered a way back, but by starting to go back in person I also now understood that reading was merely the beginning of the journey home. I also now understood that the return couldn’t be made on my own.

  17

  INTO THE FJORDS

  The Iceland question was put off, but only for so long. Early in 2003, a German friend and colleague, Steffi, in whom I had often confided my longing to return, put me in touch with Ólina, a journalist and ethnographer from Ísafjörður, a town of three and a half thousand people in the remote Westfjords. Ólína had also been a politician and was now the principal at Ísafjörður Grammar School. After I received my doctorate in Bri
sbane late that year, I wrote to Ólína, asking if she would employ me as an English teacher.

  If we needed a weekend out of Brisbane, Olanda and I would normally drive to Noosa on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Locals made fun of it as being twee and more suited to trendy Melbournians than Queenslanders, but we liked the cafés, the calm Hastings Beach, and the sheltered coves and pandanus palms of Laguna Bay. Olanda’s family had long since come there for holidays, and partly for that reason Noosa was chosen as the place to celebrate her grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. It was September 2003.

  It had been several years since I’d written a poem—it seems that I’d become a little too happy for that; certainly, it helped that the woman I loved also loved me. But while we were celebrating the anniversary, I found myself writing a poem about getting married, and one evening on the rocks that led from Hastings Beach to Little Cove I read it out loud to Olanda. It was sunset, her family was waiting for us at a restaurant nearby, and the sea was beginning to cool and colour in the sand around our feet. Even though I couldn’t afford an engagement ring, what choice did she have but to say yes.

  The following Australia Day, in 2004, we were married. We had a small, simple wedding on the rocks at Noosa. As the time for the ceremony approached, heavy clouds built up around the hills behind the beach. It was going to storm and just as Olanda came down the steps to the beachfront the storm hit, but we pressed ahead. Our wedding continued to the sound of thunder.

  We exchanged our vows, kissed and then, of course, the storm cleared, which we took as a sign of something, either of our good fortune in being together or Godly relief that the service was over. The saga authors would have known which interpretation to make, but the Australian lifeguards mattered more that day. They had closed the rest of the beach but couldn’t bring themselves to move our little party on. Later they told us that the umbrellas we were using were illuminated for the whole of the service; there had been a band of sunshine at the tail of the storm.