‘What have you done to your boots?!’ Cecilie cried.
I crumpled. Didn’t she even remember? The badger. I should never have come here. I was a misunderstanding.
‘Got lost in a bog,’ I said.
After a while she came in and sat down, pulling her dressing gown tight. She was wearing yellow slippers. Her eyes lingered on me. I fumbled for something to say.
‘How’s it going in Norway?’ she asked first.
‘Alright. Gunnar’s moved to Sogn, Ola’s married a girl in Trondheim and Seb’s become a Child of God. Otherwise things are fine.’
‘What about you?’
‘Me? I’m the same old idiot. Tryin’ to study.’
‘You’ve stopped working?’
‘It was just a summer job.’
‘And now you’ve used your study loan to come here?’
‘Right.’
‘To visit me?’
‘Yes.’
‘That all?’
My head was beginning to ache. It had to be the flight. The air pressure was still there.
‘Thought I could buy a few Christmas presents at the same time,’ I said.
At last she smiled and gave me a squeeze.
‘Wouldn’t you like a dram, too?’ I asked quickly.
Cecilie stood up.
‘There’s an important lecture early tomorrow morning that I have to attend.’
‘Of course.’
‘But afterwards we can take a little trip. You’d like to see the Great Geysir, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yup.’
Cecilie brought me a blanket and I had to sleep on the sofa. I didn’t sleep because I was still flying, just like in my earliest childhood, I was hovering, had to hold onto the cushions. And all the time I had a strange smell in my nostrils, burnt matches, something singed, it had to be a damaged undercarriage, there was going to be a belly landing, I had lost contact with the tower, a disaster was imminent.
I woke up a wreck and on the table was a hastily written note: Back at twelve. Cecilie. I staggered into the bathroom to repair the damage, but as I approached the water I almost about-turned. Either the sewage system had gone to pieces or I had the worst mouth odour of the century. I tried the tap in the kitchen, but it was just as foul. It was the same odour I had smelt in the night, scorched rubber, sulphur, I was standing on a volcano, it would not be long before lava surged upwards like steaming red porridge, the ground beneath my feet shook. I found a bottle of beer in the fridge, Skallagrimsson, had to be strong mead. Tasted of flat lager, lay like a lead weight in my stomach. I had to go to the bathroom again and pee, dabbed some water under my arms and put on my dry clothes. While I was standing there in the burning sulphur smell, curiosity got the better of me. I had a peep in the cupboard over the basin, an extra toothbrush, eau de cologne, I should have bought some on the plane, damn, tampons, guitar strings, I was gripped by a serious longing, so serious that I had to bring up some Skallargrimsson. Afterwards, I felt pangs of guilt and carefully closed the cupboard door. Of course they were not guitar strings but dental floss. But her guitar was in the bedroom, I could see it through the crack. I did not go in. I sat down by the window and waited. There was an hour left until twelve. First of all it rained. Then there was a grey period before the sun burst through in its full glory. Then a wind blew up, a covering of sleet was released, the rain took over, the wind came inland and moved the clouds along, a tornado sent a couple of dustbins flying through the street, then it was quiet and suddenly the sun was back in full force. Then Cecilie came. She sailed up in an immaculate Land Rover and hooted the horn. I rushed downstairs and patted the bonnet.
‘We’re going now,’ said Cecilie, ‘so that we can get home before it’s dark.’
‘Classy set of wheels,’ I said, and was unable to restrain myself. ‘Alexander the Great piss in the pot, did he?’
‘You can walk if you like. Fine by me!’ Cecilie snarled and gave it full throttle. I sprinted after her. She stopped at the corner.
‘Didn’t mean it like that,’ I grinned.
She let me in, did a U-turn with screaming tyres and roared off.
‘The upper classes have exploited the workers for years, haven’t they. And when my upper-class daddy wants to buy me a Land Rover, I say yes and exploit him! But he can’t buy me, if that’s what you think.’
‘Course not. By the way, the water at your place tasted of athlete’s foot.’
‘Same everywhere. The water in Reykjavik’s like that.’
‘Thought I’d entered the lowest circles of hell. The sulphur stung my nose.’
‘That’s where we’re going,’ Cecilie said.
‘Where?’
‘To Hell.’
She put her foot down and it was not long before we had left the town behind us. On a hillock stood a huge spectacle, an unfinished church, the frame resembled the skeleton of a dinosaur. Then we were in the wilderness and in the far distance I espied some snow-white mountain plateaux and shining glaciers. I saw a small, sturdy horse walking across the rotting fields in search of fodder. It started raining again.
‘The meteorologists must get pretty frustrated here,’ I said.
‘Just so long as it doesn’t snow,’ said Cecilie. ‘We could get stuck on a mountain pass. People have been trapped inside their cars because of snow there.’
‘Isn’t there anythin’ excitin’ to look at in Reykjavik?’ I ventured.
But Cecilie drove on. I lit a cigarette. It stopped raining. A flock of sheep leapt off the road in fright. The wind shook the high-sided vehicle. We reached bizarre terrain – rugged, reddish, wavy forms like a petrified sea and that is precisely what it was.
Cecilie pulled into the kerb and stopped.
‘This is lava after an eruption,’ she told me. ‘Can you see what it resembles?’
‘A petrified sea,’ I said.
‘A moon landscape. The American astronauts trained here before they went to the moon for the first time.’
I looked at her. She said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Is that true?’ I whispered.
I opened the door to get out. Cecilie stopped me.
‘You can’t walk in those boots!’ she laughed.
She produced a pair of robust safety shoes and I changed. Then I trotted off, but Cecilie didn’t want to join me. She stayed in the car while I walked on the moon, alone, wearing heavy shoes. I had to tread carefully, slowly, balancing on jagged rocks. There was a smell of sulphur and smoke rose from the ground. I staggered across the moon and space was silent and windswept.
‘You’re a child,’ Cecilie laughed as we drove on.
‘I’m a tourist,’ I said.
We climbed the mountain pass and drove to the white plateau. I thought the snow had started and was nervous, but it was just odd snowflakes flaying the windscreen. Cecilie gripped the wheel tightly and the needle registered 130. She snarled, bared her teeth, squeezed the accelerator, coaxed out a few more horses, cracked the whip, I could hardly take a swig, the bottle rattled against my teeth.
‘We won’t get snowed in, even if you slow down a bit!’ I shouted.
But she just summoned her last ounces of strength, and the windscreen wipers went berserk. It’s me who’s wrong, I thought. I’ve been running at the wrong speed. I’ve put an LP on 45. It’s been like that all the time. It’s going too fast. Then we came down to sea level. Cecilie turned to me with a proud smile. A cool wind caressed the car. I rolled down the window. The föhn. Sudden sun. The smell of salt. I saw the sea. The ground was green and rolled towards the mountain like an upright carpet. The hot springs simmered and smoked. There were big greenhouses by the farms. Two horses ran across a field. A small white church stood surrounded by a stone wall.
Cecilie flung the Land Rover onto a new road and tarmac turned to gravel. The brown-green expanse spread towards a chain of mountains in the east. I still hadn’t seen a tree.
‘Living in Icelan
d, you get to know what imperialism is,’ Cecilie started to explain.
I studied a few enormous rocks scattered down a slope. A jet black bird sailed through the air with an animal in its yellow claws.
‘The government keeps saying it’s going to run down the base, but the fact is that they’re making Iceland more and more dependent on it. Jobs. Foreign currency earnings. They lick the USA’s boots.’
We drove over a river of green water. A bank of fog rolled towards us and for some minutes I couldn’t see a metre ahead.
‘Do you know that the Americans have their own TV and radio programmes here? And they’re transmitted to the whole of the Icelandic population! It’s brainwashing pure and simple!’
When we hit clear weather again, Cecilie stopped and jumped out. I followed suit.
‘Are we there?’
She shook her head.
‘Come on,’ she said.
We scrambled up a hill. The air was cold and pungent. Then we reached the peak. Our lungs contracted with a gasp. Blood took refuge behind knees. I was staring down the mouth of a volcano, a crater, several hundred metres in size, greyish-white ice floes floated on the brown water a long way down, like a crushed eye.
I crept backwards. Cecilie laughed.
‘It’s not dangerous. It’s been extinct for ages.’
I ventured forward again, threw a stone as far as I could, but didn’t hear it fall.
‘Imagine all that power,’ was the only thing I could say.
‘Yes. One day it might erupt again. Just like the people.’
‘Thought you said it was extinct.’
She started to walk back to the car. I needed a leak. I peed into the volcano. It gave me a sense of superiority.
I ran down to join Cecilie.
‘You really are a tourist,’ she said. ‘All men absolutely have to pee into the crater at all costs. You should’ve seen an American coachload here!’
She laughed out loud. I was piqued. We drove for an hour. There wasn’t a road any more, just two wheel ruts. The snow lay strewn in filthy clumps. The fog hindered any views. I was frozen.
Then we were there. We got out and the stench hit me. Sulphur. I had to cover my nose, I almost retched again. I followed Cecilie into the area. The soil was red and brown, deep vents bubbled and gurgled, the steam coiled around my legs. I began to lose a sense of orientation. It was like walking through a dream with someone who was fully awake. Everything trembled around me. I heard a bang and a few metres away a glistening column of water shot into the air, it stayed there for ten seconds, twenty seconds, half a minute, a howling pillar of boiling water, then it slowly subsided and disappeared down a crack. I was stunned, crept closer with care. The earth was breathing, small bubbles simmered around the rim, the water rose, inflated itself into a glass bell, a transparent membrane, an embryo, a pulse, it was beating, then it exploded and the fountain spouted forth again. I ran back to Cecilie.
‘Never seen anythin’ like it,’ I whispered.
‘This is not the Great Geysir,’ she said. ‘It’s Strokkur. Geysir’s up there, but it’s dormant now.’
She pointed to a steaming hillock behind us.
‘Strokkur is just the younger brother,’ she smiled. ‘The only way to make the Great Geysir gush up is to empty green soap into it.’
‘Eh?’
‘They usually do that when there are loads of tourists around. It increases the pressure.’
‘So that’s what you learn at university. To give an enema!’
Cecilie laughed.
‘Come here,’ she beckoned and I went with her to see a puddle.
‘That’s the descent to Hell,’ she said.
The little pond was utterly still, green, I felt with my fingers, scalded myself.
‘Hell?’
I didn’t understand what she meant.
‘Can’t you see the descent?’ Cecilie smiled.
Then I saw it. Beneath the calm surface was a black hole, an abyss, right down into the earth, inside the earth.
‘They threw people down there in the old days,’ she told him.
I began to sweat.
‘And no one… no one knows how deep it is.’
‘Mmm.’
I was standing there staring hell in the eye as something exploded behind us. I almost fell face first into the hole and felt sulphur smack against the back of my neck. We turned and an incredible fountain surged towards the heavens, a water rocket, it rose and rose, it was unending. Strokkur was a mere bag of juice by comparison. Hot rain showered us, I bent my neck backwards trying to see the tip, fifty metres, a hundred metres, holding its position with a power that had blown me to the ground. Cecilie hauled me to my feet and danced round me.
‘It’s the Geysir!’ she shrieked. ‘It’s the Geysir!’
I joined in her jig, and for some time, while it was at its height, we were close to each other, an old intimacy was breathed back into life. Then the Great Geysir disappeared into the ground and the heat and the sulphur were all that were left.
‘It hasn’t erupted for years,’ Cecilie said, exhausted. ‘It gushed for us, Kim!’
I didn’t dare light a cigarette. I was frightened the whole country would be blown into the air.
It happened on the way back. We had only been driving for about a quarter of an hour when the front wheels suddenly buried themselves in mud and we tipped forward like a short-circuited dodgem. Cecilie tried to reverse, but then the rear wheels became stuck. Cecilie tried to turn. We sank even deeper. Cecilie tried everything. Even that didn’t help. I thought Land Rovers could go under water. It wasn’t true. The crate was up to its doors in mud. Cecilie was becoming hysterical. She ordered me to push, but I didn’t think much to being a mud flap. The wheels spun deeper and deeper. I looked around. The flat landscape melted into grey fog. An icy wind stroked my back and I laughed. I was becoming hysterical.
‘We’ll have to wait in the car,’ I said. ‘Then at least we won’t freeze to death.’
‘Just a moment,’ Cecilie bawled. ‘Wait, who for? Father Christmas?’
‘For people.’
‘No one will come this way for at least a week! Don’t you know it’s Christmas Eve the day after tomorrow?’
In fact, I didn’t. But she would never have believed that.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course I know.’
‘And there was you perhaps hoping to celebrate Christmas in Iceland. You have your wish fulfilled now! Cosy here, isn’t it?’
‘Be a trifle difficult to find a Christmas tree,’ I said, trying to be humorous.
Cecilie staggered out of the car. And I followed.
‘I have to be home tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Day before Christmas Eve. Aren’t you goin’ home?’
‘No!’
She was close to bursting into tears. I wanted to console her, but I suppose there wasn’t much comfort in me.
‘If people won’t find us, we’ll have to find them,’ I said objectively.
For some reason she followed me. We plodded along the bumpy wheel tracks and neither of us could remember having seen a house on the way to the geysers.
We must have been wandering around for at least an hour and were near collapse. The wind pursued us from all sides. Visibility was getting worse and worse. Then Cecilie spotted something by the edge of the road like a sort of bird house for sea eagles. But it was a postbox. It gave us fresh heart and we left the wheel tracks and followed a trail into the fog and wasteland. We had been lumbering along for quite a long time, hand in hand, it wasn’t the most pleasant countryside to go for a walk in on the day before Christmas Eve. And the moment we saw a farm, a narrow walled box and two byres, a snarling Norwegian buhund leapt forward and rounded us up with well-practised growls. We were rooted to the spot as the dog’s jowls came closer. At last an old man appeared on the doorstep of the house and yelled: Seppi! At that, the tyrant lay flat, wagged its tail and the master himself waddled towards us with a face covered in
grey beard and an unkempt circle of hair around his knobbly bald pate.
He said three words in Icelandic, I assumed he was introducing himself, so I stuck out my hand and shouted ‘Kim Karlsen’. He gave a broad grin, spat sideways and dislocated my shoulder.
‘Gisle Tormodstad!’
Cecilie took over, it was strange to hear her speak Icelandic, she seemed drunk, or else I was, I was on a direct route out of reality, I just let things happen and that suited me fine. We followed Gisle and Seppi to the farmhouse, he conjured up an ancient jeep from under a tarpaulin, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and kicks he got it going, and we rumbled off across the desolate plain and saw the Land Rover buried in mud.
We attached ropes and chains and Gisle coaxed it out, it was as easy as taking a splinter out of your finger. Cecilie gave thanks in Icelandic, and Gilse uttered a short sentence.
‘He’s invited us for coffee,’ Cecilie translated.
Gisle’s house was narrow, with all the rooms in one line. We sat down immediately, it was chilly there, stone walls, raw. Seppi started to like me and warmed my legs. On the bookcase there were big leatherbound volumes with gold writing on the spine. Gisle served us some dynamite coffee and schnapps from a shiny bottle with a black label.
‘Black Death,’ Cecilie whispered.
Gisle poured and we drank, it burned all the way down. Gisle poured again. There were tears in Cecilie’s eyes. The wind battered the windows. Gilse turned slowly and looked out. Afterwards he said a few words. Cecilie’s face went white and she dried her tears.
‘What’s up?’ I asked.
‘We’ll have to stay here. He says there’s a snow storm coming. We can’t drive over the mountains now.’
‘Did he say all that?’
Gisle added a sentence.
‘You’ll have to help him get the sheep inside,’ Cecilie interpreted.
I trudged after Gisle and Seppi across the farmyard and down to a hollow where I was surrounded by bleating. The wind was blowing the wax out of my ears and I could barely stand. Gisle had the sturdy gait of an elephant. Seppi went wild when he caught the scent of the sheep, ran round in big circles and gathered them until they were as tightly knit as a sweater. Then Gisle found two shaggy horses, which looked pretty weary, swung himself up on one and I deduced that I was supposed to do the same. I assumed I would be thrown straight off, but the beast was easier to mount than a ladies’ bike with balloon tyres. I let the wind blow through my hair, grabbed the mane and we rode home on either side of the flock while Seppi doubled back to pick up the stragglers. Cecilie was standing on the step when we arrived, with a telephoto lens, snapping away. I gave the nag a kick with my safety shoes, something happened, and I found myself on my face among the sheep. They trampled over me, pulled me along, I stared into matt, dry eyes, smelt the strong, pungent stench of sticky wool, and there was a lot of bleating. I heard Gisle laughing, the horse whinnying and Seppi growling, crawled to my feet and Cecilie took me into the house while Gisle saw to the animals.