We were getting away before the town had a chance to recover from the fight at the school. Rúnar for one said he could never leave as things stood, but I had accepted a teaching job in the capital. Our last look at the fjord would have to stand in place of a better goodbye to Ísafjörður and my students. They still had another full year of the feud ahead of them, one that would see both sides claim vindication, and both Ólína and Ingibjörg resign their positions at the school. The next day, we boarded the Fokker 50 to Reykjavík.
20
FATHERHOOD
Despite some of the difficulties that have come with it, I am a little proud of being the result of a love affair. My parents chose to have it in secret in order to keep it alive; discovery would almost certainly have ended it. My mother protected Gísli, I think in part because that protected them. Their affair changed their sense of who they were, because it changed their conception of how they loved. The basement apartment in Sólvallagata—‘Sun Fields Street’—was the place of a journey—into another version of themselves, and into another possibility in life. Even now, it’s a side of my parents that I only barely understand, and perhaps that’s the way it should be.
Becoming known as Gísli’s son has allowed me to relax in the business of knowing. By late 2005, when Olanda and I had been living again in Reykjavík for some months, another event came to take the emphasis off revealing the past and onto discovering what lay ahead. She had a fair idea that she was ‘un-light’, or ólétt as the Icelandic phrased it.
The all-night chemist wasn’t far. We pushed our way through the tunnel of wind that ran down the front of the block, and returned with a pregnancy test kit and its instructions. The colour on the test was indecisive.
‘Does this mean you’re pregnant?’ I asked.
‘I think it means it doesn’t know.’
The next day as I went to work, Olanda took the bus to Seltjarnarnes. In one of those little coincidences that seem to mean something, the only clinic that could fit her in was by the site of my family’s ancestral farm. Perhaps like my ancestors had once done, she had to pull herself along a fence to get through the snowstorm and into the doctors’ surgery.
‘Yes, you’re pregnant,’ said the doctor. ‘You’re going to have a baby in Iceland.’ She said she didn’t need to do a test. ‘I can give you one if you like. But if you think you’re pregnant, then I’d say you are pregnant.’
It was a busy winter. There was plenty of overtime going at work, and I now also taught part-time at the University of Iceland. Most nights I worked until ten. Olanda also did late shifts at her new job at the swimming pool Laugardalur. Often I’d meet her just before she clocked off and have a night-time swim while she was packing up. It was perfect; I had the pool to myself and the cold air on my shoulders. The hazy pool lights at the bottom inverted the world, with the darkness above a floor of steam and moonlight.
In the spring, we began our prenatal classes. They were run in English for couples like us; mainly, it was the wives who were foreign, captured and brought to Iceland by husbands who unlike me seemed quite sure there wasn’t anything wrong with living here. The instructor was large and very fine, but merciless in her convictions about male stupidity. We were told again and again that there was nothing that our wives could ask that was too much.
‘If she tells you to leave, you leave. If she tells you to come back, come back. If she says, “shut the fuck up,” then what do you do?’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ we repeated from our beanbags.
‘Good. You’re learning. And when you think she might be complaining too much, just imagine a bowling ball being shoved up your anus.’
It was uncompromising instruction. If I couldn’t imagine the bowling ball, I could believe that it was going to be hard to have a first child so far away from your parents and siblings. And occasionally it showed. The distance from Reykjavík to Brisbane appeared in a faraway look that would, if only for a moment, defeat Olanda’s excitement about becoming a mother.
He would be born in July, in high summer. Whether because of the endless light of June, or worrying about how Olanda was coping with being so far from home, I slept little, and long after she’d gone to bed I was still tracing the bike paths that followed the Reykjavík shoreline out to Seltjarnarnes.
June was cold, and the days seldom got into double digits. At midnight, the sun hung just above the horizon and lit the seaweed and the dune grass along the northern beachheads. Behind me, the Reykjanes peninsula and the dormant volcanoes that extended to Keflavík turned purple. The golfers were out. Kayaks, and even the odd swimmer, paddled between the eider ducks, which at last redeemed their icy winters with a frenzy of diving for a sudden abundance of food beneath.
‘Kári,’ Olanda called out, ‘I think he’s coming.’ I checked the small clock at the side of my bed. It was three thirty-eight am. She was breathing herself through a long contraction.
‘Oh, good. You remembered to breathe.’
‘Yes, I remembered.’ The prenatal classes had emphasised this, repeatedly. Breathe, breathe, breathe. During the contraction. During the labour. During the birth. It was, apparently, the best thing you could do. It relaxed you, calmed you, and helped the body do its work. Its work! She had insisted that the body knew its work. If only you remembered to breathe.
‘Should I call the hospital?’ I asked.
‘No, not yet. We have to wait until the contractions are closer together.’
‘Do you want something? A cup of tea? Some food?’
‘Not food. Tea would be good.’ She was up out of bed, sitting near a mountain of pillows that for the past weeks had been placed around every curve of her body.
‘Are you sure I can’t get you something to eat?’
‘No. No. I can’t seem to forget what the instructor said.’
‘You mean about the pooing?’
‘Yes, the pooing. I don’t want his first moment in this world to be all about poo.’
The instructor had told us that most of the women in the room would poo during birth, as the pressure on the anus was so great. The room looked away.
‘I know it might not sound very nice,’ the instructor went on, ‘but, really, it’s a natural part of the process. Your body knows its work. You mustn’t think you’ve done anything wrong if baby comes out with poo around.’
Olanda wasn’t so sure. She was determined to go to the toilet before we left for the hospital. Clear the bowels before the big moment.
‘Okay. But you won’t leave it too late, will you?’ I said. She didn’t answer; another contraction was coming on. She held out her tea cup for me to hold. I put it down on the floor, and then jotted down the time of the contraction in a notebook that I had kept open, especially for this moment. Twelve minutes had passed since the last one. Less intense, too.
It had only just passed four in the morning. There had been rain during the night, but the clouds were breaking up, and some sunshine was reflected in the dark, wet tar of the street outside. There wasn’t much traffic but because of the endless light of the July days, the morning strollers were out already. It was a good time to walk.
At six, the contractions began to intensify and lengthen. One-minute-long contractions were, apparently, the ones to watch for. That’s when you rang the hospital.
‘Maternity ward,’ said the midwife on the other end of the phone.
‘My wife’s contractions have begun,’ I explained. ‘They’re not regular, yet—sometimes every seven or eight minutes, sometimes every ten or twelve. But she’s in a lot of pain, and the contractions are getting longer. Up to a minute long, now.’
‘We’re at the end of a shift here. It would be better if she waited until the next shift came on.’
‘I see. When would that be, then?’
‘Call again at eight.’ I looked around
for Olanda.
‘Where have you gone?’ I asked.
‘I’m on the toilet.’ Then, she screamed.
‘They said to wait until the shift change.’
‘You’re kidding me.’ She looked up from the toilet. Her arm was extended hard against the basin. ‘Please, call back.’
Everything was in place: hospital, notebook, taxi. I was dressed, Olanda was dressed, and her overnight bag was by the door. The only thing left was to get her off the toilet. She sat there in a crash-landing position. The screams were guttural.
‘Darling, the taxi’s coming. It’ll be here in five minutes.’
‘Good. Good.’
‘That means you have to get off the toilet.’
‘I know.’ She wasn’t moving.
‘Please get off the toilet.’
‘No.’ I waited. Another contraction. I heard the taxi arrive. Olanda was getting up.
‘You managed?’
‘Let’s just go.’
It was seven fifty am, and the traffic was heavy. I cursed the Icelanders and their habit of leaving late for work. We were only two kilometres away from the hospital, but at this rate we’d be having the baby in the cab. Another contraction began.
‘Shouldn’t you call an ambulance?’ asked the driver.
Olanda was crying. How did you call an ambulance from a taxi, anyway? The traffic eased as we came into the hospital. The driver pulled up at the door, wished us good luck, and pressed the doorbell. As we entered the lift, Olanda collapsed on my shoulder. I swivelled her into the maternity ward. A pair of midwives greeted us with barely disguised horror. They reached for a wheelchair.
‘Straight to the delivery room, I think,’ said one.
‘Yes, quite,’ said the other.
They were lovely, and spoke good English. One, Guðrún, who would do the bulk of the coaxing and coaching, wore glasses and smiled with gushing, gummy goodwill. The other, Berglind, was more experienced and played a more considered role. She hovered and checked, and made jokes.
‘You’ll get to meet him in a moment,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that exciting?’
‘Yes,’ said Olanda. ‘Yes.’
‘Let’s see how everything’s going down there,’ added Guðrún. She measured Olanda. ‘Goodness. You’ve dilated seven centimetres already.’
‘Is that good? What does that mean?’ asked Olanda.
‘It means, sweetheart, that you’ve done most of the work on your own,’ replied Berglind. ‘You’re nearly there.’
It was eight thirty am. I put on a CD of Mozart and looked outside. It was raining lightly, again. We were on the ocean side of the hospital and out to sea I could see thick clouds still gathered from the night before. The road beneath us was quieter now. Everyone was at work.
Inside, there began rounds of encouragement. She was getting there; she was doing so well; she was such a brave girl; she would get to meet her little boy soon; look, he was starting to show a little bit. All these from Guðrún and Berglind. My job was a different one. It had been given to me by our instructor, my one thing, and I wasn’t going to let Olanda down now.
‘Breathe,’ I said. ‘Remember to breathe.’
‘I am,’ she replied. She screamed.
‘There,’ said Guðrún. ‘You’re so close.’
‘Breathe,’ I said. ‘Just breathe.’
‘Stop telling me to breathe!’
And, then, in one of those moments that you thought you had brought yourself to expect, he was with us, our son Finnur Kári, born at nine thirty-seven am on 5 July 2006. Into a stainless world, it must be said.
I laughed. And a moment later I was sobbing and laughing at the same time.
And then I remembered to breathe.
Finnur’s birth, from the first contraction to his appearance in the world of midwives, hospital blankets, scales and measuring tape, had taken just over six hours. It was only midmorning. How, I wondered, did anyone have a child by midmorning?
Guðrún and Berglind said they would leave us to ourselves, but would be back in an hour or so to move us to our room.
‘Are you alright, darling?’ asked Olanda.
‘Yes, yes, of course. I’m fine.’
We looked at each other. And then we looked at Finnur. There was no escaping it: we were parents. I sent a dozen text messages to our friends and family in Australia, and to my relations in Reykjavík.
‘He’s very quiet,’ I said.
‘Asleep even,’ replied Olanda.
‘You look as though you need some sleep, too.’
‘Yes. And you must be hungry.’
‘Not too bad,’ I said. ‘But I do have an important task.’
‘Really?’
‘It won’t take long,’ I answered. Well, I hoped it wouldn’t. When we had become engaged, I had offered Olanda a poem. I thought it was time I bought a ring.
‘I really feel like a hamburger,’ I said.
‘Go and get a hamburger, then.’ I asked her to stand by the window.
‘When you see me, wave. Then get some sleep.’
I ran down the stairs to Miklabraut and waved. I had taken my photo of the window at which she stood holding Finnur, or at which I hoped she still stood. It was too shadowy to tell. I walked back around to the other, sunny side of the building and on to Laugavegur, and to a Swiss jeweller.
In a couple of months, I was going to be thirty-four. It would be seventeen years since, as a seventeen year old, I had met my father at the car yard and gone with him for a drive to the president’s lodge. He had asked me to keep his paternity a secret, and in the hope that it would bring us closer I had agreed. As often as I have told myself that I was past caring about him—which, for the most part, I was—even now I couldn’t suppress the wish that he would contact me. He didn’t. But he did ask my brother, Björn, to pass on his congratulations.
Gísli and I would remain apart, each on our own side of a rift that ran through Thingvellir and divided the country, its families, and all the disputes that over the centuries would be recorded and then forgotten. I had tried to reach across the divide, and in doing so I had become a father. That was a good result, a homecoming.
Gísli and I had been joined in a strange sort of conspiracy: to complicate the lives of the women we loved. Iceland was to blame, of course—before you knew it, you were not only trying to live there yourself, but involving the innocent, too. But I wasn’t really up to it; I couldn’t push that hard for Iceland. We would return to Brisbane in time for Christmas. And maybe one day we would return again. And maybe Finnur would want to live there. And so on.
It was late July. I hadn’t done much since Finnur’s birth—it was all sleepless nights and late walks; the pram was Finnur’s preferred mode of getting to sleep. Greg, the athlete in our group of friends in Brisbane, came to visit. He looked at me, and sighed. What I needed was a good walk and a long swim.
‘Where do you want to walk?’ I asked.
‘Esja, of course,’ he said.
‘A mountain, then.’
‘Yes. Let’s take on Esja. You’re always saying how much you love it.’
We set off on a bright, warm morning. A sign in the car park said, ‘Be careful on the track. Take your time. The return walk to the top is about eight hours.’
‘Six, surely,’ replied Greg to the sign.
To begin with, the going was easy. Sheep track walking, really. Then for an hour or so we hit scree, and the temperature rose. Another walker said something about it being the warmest day ever recorded in Reykjavík.
‘What would that mean?’ asked Greg.
‘Probably that it’s hit twenty.’
For a few minutes, Greg stopped running. We were into the last section, an exposed zigzag of narrow paths
, the final cliff face, and the part of Esja that on winter days made such a difference to the view of the bay.
‘Three hours to the top,’ said Greg, when we neared the summit. ‘Back down in two and a half.’
‘Food, first,’ I replied. Greg looked handsomely towards Reykjavík. ‘You haven’t even broken a sweat,’ I went on. ‘Aren’t you jet-lagged?’
‘How could you be jet-lagged here?’
It was Reykjavík, but as I’d never seen it before, as flat and exposed to the sea as a slip of blond beachfront in Australia.
‘I’ve always wanted to have a swim in the midnight sun,’ said Greg as we began our descent.
‘Well, the pool’s open till ten,’ I replied. ‘Not midnight, but close.’
‘Not the pool, though.’
‘It’s pretty cold in the sea,’ I joked.
‘Really? Not that bad, surely.’
He did want to swim in the sea. So that evening we rode to an artificial beach that had been built at Nauthólsvík, a small bay at the side of the airport. Even it had a warmed-up section, with hoses pumping hot spring water down to the shallows. No, said Greg, it had to be the open sea.
‘You’re getting in, too, by the way,’ he continued.
It was cold. I was tired. But he had me, because it was light at midnight, allowing the odd Fokker 50 to still come in from the south, and because pale, orange light lit the water.
‘Just get in,’ called Greg.
Across the fjord lay Álftanes, lying on its side like a tired old man. And the road to the president’s lodge. I had never been back. An invitation once came from the university, but even then I’d shied away from the chance. I was glad I hadn’t returned. A short swim in that direction was enough.
REYKJAVÍK, 2010
In July 2010 I made another of my now yearly visits to Iceland—my research still takes me there on a regular basis. Olanda and I have been living in Brisbane for over four years, since the Christmas after Finnur’s birth, and we now have a second son, Magnús, who was born in Brisbane two years ago.
The Promise of Iceland Page 21
