Читать книгу On Time and Water - Andri Snaer Magnason - Страница 8

December 2, 2015

In the TV room, Grandpa Árni has pulled down the roller blind and set up his slide projector on an old ironing board. He fetches a tray of photographs from his little office. They’re lined up in rows with his handwriting on the front of each one: Lónsöræfi 1965, Vatnajökull 1955, Kverkfjöll 1960. There are snowmobiles, ski cabins, ski champions.

An image appears on the screen, a man shoveling snow that is at least six meters deep; the prow and engine of a large plane are visible, jutting out from the drift. Grandpa Árni can remember almost everything from a long time ago, especially if the memory is accompanied by a photograph.

“This picture was taken at Bárdarbunga on Vatnajökull glacier in 1951. There we are shoveling out a U.S. Army Skytrain plane. It had flown to rescue the crew of another stricken plane, the Geysir, but wasn’t able to take off again, so it was left behind on the glacier. That winter, a thick layer of snow buried the plane. Several enterprising local pilots contacted the military; they bought the aircraft for seven cents per pound, then they launched an expedition to retrieve it.

“Back then, we’d only just started the FBSR—Reykjavík’s Air Ground Rescue Team,” says Grandpa Árni. “We located the prop plane—she was like a little bump on the glacier—and dug it out. It was hellish work: the thing was inside a seven-meter-high snowdrift. We dragged her down to a temporary runway, and it sparked to life first try. From there, it was flown to Reykjavík. It was something of a fairy tale,” Grandpa Árni says wistfully.

The wreck of the Geysir lay nearby and they had been able to save some of the goods that were still on the plane.

Grandma Hulda jumps into the conversation.

“Gudbjörg’s christening dress was made from cloth that had sat all winter up on the glacier, in the plane.”

Grandpa Árni shows me pictures of the wreck; in them I can see the nose wheel and the aircraft’s name. Geysir had lost its way and crashed into the middle of Vatnajökull. The crew was presumed dead, the search called off, and a period of national mourning observed while memorials were planned. By chance, a coast guard ship sailing off the coast off Langanes picked up an emergency call, “… CIER.” No one could understand it until they realized it was the second half of the word “glacier.”

The plane was found after an extensive search. The U.S. Army rescue plane flew to the scene a week after the crash and landed on the glacier, but the aircraft couldn’t take off again as its skis had frozen to the ice. Fortunately, rescuers came from the northern city of Akureyri, and with their help everyone came down off the glacier, including the six-person crew of the Geysir, either stumbling along or on skis. It’s only a matter of time before someone makes a film about this plane wreck.

The albums contain old films from a Rolleiflex camera; there are boxes of 8 mm and 16 mm film from the Bolex camera Grandpa Árni bought off the artist Gudmundur Einarsson. There are thousands of photographs and films, spanning almost his entire life. He is rarely in any of the pictures; usually he’s behind the lens. My mom is there, or my moms, as I call them to tease them, Kristín and Gudrún, the then eleven-year-old identical twin sisters in overalls with KB and GB stitched in big letters on the pants to distinguish them.

These are priceless resources; some of the films and images are absolute works of art. Grandpa Árni clearly had an eye for beautiful framing. He bought himself a scanner and a computer when he was eighty; most people thought he was delusional, that some rogue salesman had tricked him. But over the next few years, he spent entire days in his little office scanning all the old film. At first, he printed out the photos, but after he turned ninety, he started posting them right to Facebook. There’s material there for novels, books of photography, documentaries. So many stories that could be told.

My son is going through a photography phase; Grandpa Árni recently gave him his old Rolleiflex camera from 1960. He even managed to find film for it. Typical: right when he has a high-end camera on his smartphone, he finds a more expensive way to take pictures. While we’re viewing the slides, my son is out in the garage looking for the old enlarger so he can set up a darkroom at our house. He resurfaces with a framed, dust-covered picture. An old trawler. Arinbjörn Hersir is written below the image. Grandpa Árni looks at the image and heaves a sigh.

“Ah, this picture. This is where it all started,” he says. “Where it all started. Dad was on this ship.”

Behind the picture we find a yellowed clipping from the newspaper Vísir, dated March 10, 1933:

Shortly after Arinbjörn Hersir left port yesterday morning on a fishing voyage, one of the crew, Kjartan Vigfússon, fell overboard and drowned. Nobody noticed how it happened. After Kjartan went missing, the ship turned around and notified the police of his disappearance before going back fishing. Kjartan was married, 37 years old, the father of four children.³

Kjartan was Grandpa Árni’s father. The story is told rather mundanely and the phrase “before going back fishing” shows that there was no reason to linger even if someone had fallen overboard. In the first quarter of 1933, thirty-four Icelandic sailors drowned and three foreign trawlers, with about forty crewmen, were lost at sea.

In 1933, Grandpa Árni was eleven. His father, Kjartan, worked as a boilerman on the trawler, and furnace work was both dangerous and difficult. Nobody knows why or how he fell overboard. I ask Grandpa Árni whether he remembers that day. He closes his eyes and finds an eighty-year-old memory there:

“I had cut across the ice-covered Reykjavík pond. I was halfway across when I realized the ice wasn’t stable. The pond started to buckle under me. I started to sprint and the ice cracked every step of the way. I made it off but didn’t stop running until I got back home to Ódinsgata.”

That’s when things fully cracked. Back home, a priest was waiting for him with the news that his father had drowned earlier that morning.

“I didn’t know my dad,” Grandpa Árni says. “He was always at sea and if he was ashore he was usually drunk. I don’t really remember him.”

It probably saved the family’s life that those were the first years of a grand social ideal. They were given a newly built apartment in the workers’ residence on Ásvallagata, thanks to the seamen’s widows fund. These were modern, functionalist apartments designed by a twenty-three-year-old architect, Gunnlaugur Halldórsson, who had just brought over to Iceland the latest modernist trends from Europe. The apartments had running water, toilets, showers, and electric lighting; the residence was in a new neighborhood that the workers’ union leader, Hédinn Valdimarsson, had had the initiative to build. The ambition was immense; a young doctor, Gudmundur Hannesson, was involved in planning the neighborhood with a focus on brightness and air quality. My grandpa benefited from the fact that in 1933 people had begun to understand how “the poor” could be as valuable as “the well-off.” The workers’ homes on Ásvallagata often came up in conversation with Grandpa Árni; he was truly grateful for having been given this apartment. He often asked himself what would have happened to them all if the family had been split up, or what their lives would have been like had they lived in a damp, debilitating basement.

Despite the apartment, Grandpa Árni still had to leave school at eleven to support the household, working as an errand boy and for a butcher: his mother was in poor health and his youngest sister had just been born. Some of his contemporaries at elementary school went on to become engineers and university professors.

“I was the best student in the class,” he said. “Still, I think that those who went all the way to university aren’t necessarily happier.”

It’s impossible to know. I think he lived his life as well and as carefully as possible, but I still detect some sadness and regret when he thinks about his schooling.

The workers’ apartments also housed the Workers Library, full of books he would read in the evening after a long workday. He had a great competitive bent and was on the first team to win the Icelandic Championship in handball, Valur, right when people began playing this new game. He was also the Icelandic champion in the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races in 1942. In 2016 he was still sore about the sinusitis that had caused him to lose the 1943 race.

He saved up to buy a camera and soon became a passionate amateur photographer. He converted a basement closet into a darkroom and he could often be found running home from the track at Melavöllur Stadium so he could develop film to work out who’d won a close race—what’s known today as a photo finish.

The slide machine hums and then there’s a click and a bright light speckled with colors takes up the screen. Grandpa Árni adjusts the focus, bringing into shape rows of dahlias, endless dahlias he and Grandma Hulda had grown. Sometimes the pictures are upside down, sometimes they get stuck in the machine, sometimes two project at once. He adjusts the machine and then the flowers flow away in rows, pink and yellow and reddish dahlias, then mountains, cars, desert sands, endless snowdrifts up on the glacier Vatnajökull, pictures from Lech, in Austria, where they went skiing with friends each year.

The organization of the slides seems to have weakened somewhat, but he remembers everything in the pictures. He fishes up names and dates even though his short-term memory is spotty.

“It just happened one day,” he said. “It was like a crack, like I’d been shot in the head with a rifle, all of a sudden I could not remember a single detail.” He laughs when he says this; he is still very much himself. It makes you think how many traumas the brain can withstand before people cease to be themselves.

He has changed in recent years, though. He was so competitive when he was younger that we feared he might become a difficult old man, but he went the other way, becoming as soft as a wisp of eiderdown, grateful and almost sentimental when he praises Grandma.

When we celebrated his ninety-third birthday in November, he said: “What’s going on? Is it Easter?” The next day he didn’t remember the party. When I tell him he had a birthday, he laughs and says, “How fun! How old am I now?” I tell him he’s 112. “No,” he says disbelievingly, “can’t be.” Then I tell him the right number. He still thinks the number is far too high.

One time when he had to go to the hospital, I got into the elevator with him; looking at himself in the mirror, he asked, surprised: “Who’s that?” “It’s you, Grandpa Árni,” I said. “No, I’ve got red hair!” “Not anymore, Grandpa Árni.” “Well,” he said, confused, “Some people called me carrot-top.” Then he smiled. “But they only ever said it once,” he added, and he showed me his balled-up fists and laughed.

He can’t remember what happens from one day to the next, but he still remembers that someone talked me into running for president. “I think you’re a bit too young,” he says. “How would it be if you turned fifty and you’d already been president? What would you do then?” I wonder how memory works. He does not remember how old he is, he does not remember that he no longer has red hair, but somehow he manages to remember how old I am and can calculate how old I’d have been after two terms in office.

The slides continue to flick past on the roller blind. Now there’s more logic to their order. There are highland trips, there’s the house on Selás, the big white house Great-Grandpa Filippus built when my grandmother’s family moved to the Árbær neighborhood during the war years, long before the suburbs sprang up all around. Next: a picture of my Grandma Hulda’s siblings.

“I was so disappointed when my brother Thórhallur was born,” Grandma Hulda says. “I closed my eyes tight and prayed, ‘Dear God, take away his penis!’” She laughs and slaps her thighs. “But it turned out all right. Later, my sister Thóra was born.”

“There were five siblings, right?”

“Five who survived. Mom lost two children,” Grandma Hulda explains. “Two of my siblings only lived a short time. Valur, who was older than me, and Gudrún. They were born tiny and only lived for twenty-four hours. Great efforts were made to secure a priest because if they weren’t baptized they wouldn’t get into heaven. Then they just died; we never knew what was wrong with them. Then Thórhallur came along and he was just as frail as his siblings, but this time a doctor was called, and he lived. I often think about what would have happened to Gudrún and Valur if they’d had a doctor rather than a priest.”

I think about the dynasty that has sprung from my grandma and her siblings. I imagine Valur as a great-grandpa somewhere in a big house in Árbær with sixty descendants. I imagine a historical novel based on his imaginary life, a four-generation story that begins when there is nothing but turf houses and scattered shacks. The story revolves around number 3 Selás, the big white house with the red roof. I suspect Great-Grandpa surveyed Bessastadir—the President’s residence—when designing the house; it was almost as big and of similar shape. The family moved in in 1944, the year Iceland gained its independence. Back then, Árbær was thought to be way out in the country. Time passed and the whole neighborhood filled with houses, all of them perpendicular to their house. The book could be a kind of Devil’s Island, a One Hundred Years of Solitude in Árbær.

“I never wore shoes,” Grandma Hulda says. “Mom insisted I wear shoes on Sundays, and the rest of the time I’d walk along the banks of the Ellida river and talk to the huldufólk, the hidden people. One time, I managed to befriend a golden plover. I noticed her one spring, sitting on a nest. I was endlessly patient, going a little closer to her every day, until I could stroke her.

“We fetched water and did laundry in the Ellidaá. The laundry tub had a false bottom. Sometimes salmon slipped into it,” she says, smiling. “We also got sent to the old turf cottage at Árbær to buy milk from the old farm lady, Kristjana. Where the built-up suburb of Breidholt is now, there was just a meadow.”

She tells me she once saw one of the hidden people come strolling out of a cliff at the foot of the Breidholt slopes.

“He laid out his clothes to dry. I called my family; the whole lot of them ran out and saw him, but he simply evaporated before our eyes. We ran over to the cliff and the grass at its base was bent, but we couldn’t see anyone.”

Grandpa Árni picks up an album with pictures of Grandma Hulda when she was young; she is thirteen years old, pushing along a bicycle.

“This picture was taken in the summer of 1939, when I rode to Stykkishólmur to visit my grandma. It was the hottest summer I’ve ever experienced.”

“Did you ride from Árbær?” asks my disbelieving son.

“No, actually, from Borgarnes, we took a boat there. We slept in barns and drank water from moorland pools along the way.”

The journey would still have been some 150 kilometers, along mud paths. Grandma Hulda is the family hero; when we were young, we boasted about her, saying, “My grandma is stronger than your dad.” She was the first Icelandic woman to get an airplane license to fly a glider when she took the test in 1945.

“That’s a Schulgleiter,” she says, “and after that I flew a Grunau Baby.”

She shows me a flight certificate and a picture in which she’s sitting on some kind of stick with wings. It most closely resembles the Flyer that the Wright brothers built during the early years of flight.

“Flying a glider is like nothing else. There’s no engine, you’re pulled up into the air and then you float along in silence, like a bird.”

“Were you ever scared?” I ask her.

“You know, it’s so odd, but I’ve never been scared,” she says. “Too bad parachuting wasn’t around back then. I would like to have tried parachuting.”

My grandma’s brothers grew up dreaming of flight. They ran up and over the hill at Skólavörduholt to see the Graf Zeppelin aircraft soar over Reykjavík in 1930; in 1933 they watched in awe as the Italian pilot Italo Balbo and his squadron landed in the Reykjavík bay, twenty-four aircraft in total. Charles Lindbergh, the most famous aviator of his time, arrived later that summer; all these heroes were met with a royal reception and a brass band, and were invited to lunch with the prime minister.

Helgi, my grandma’s brother, went to Germany just before the war to become a pilot. But he turned out to be colorblind and had to return home. It was a blow, but it probably saved Helgi’s life or at least his conscience, because without a doubt he would have ended up in the German air force, the Luftwaffe. Great-Grandpa shepherded his children to the doctor and the dream of flight came crashing down when the doctor announced that all the brothers were color-blind.

When the volcano Hekla awoke from its hundred-year slumber and erupted in March 1947, Grandma Hulda phoned her friend who owned a small two-seater plane and asked if it wouldn’t be fun to see the eruption. He landed on a frozen lake close to her house and Grandma Hulda ran to meet him. They took off and flew around the blazing volcano while ash tumbled onto the aircraft wings. The roaring volcano was so noisy they couldn’t hear the plane’s engine, much less talk.

“It was terrific,” says Grandma, “the glowing volcanic rocks raining down. Some were the size of this table.” She gesticulates wildly and laughs. “We landed in a meadow by a farm, Ásólfsstadir, a short distance from Hekla, to have tea at the farm, but there was nobody home: everyone had fled!”

In March 1947, my mothers were barely six-month-old twins.

“What were you thinking, flying around a roaring volcano in a tiny plane with your six-month-old girls at home? How did your mom feel about it?”

“Dad always encouraged me,” Grandma Hulda says. “He got a lot of pleasure out of my adventures. I knew the pilot, and what’s more everyone at home loved to fly. If you’re always worrying what might happen, you’ll never do anything.”

“Where was Grandpa Björn?”

She shakes her head.

“He was always somewhere out in the countryside attending to his medical duties. He rarely showed up and then he went to America to study surgery and I waited for him for six years. I didn’t really do anything,” says Grandma. “I hardly even went to the movies. Then he visited Iceland, bringing a car with him. I was so foolish that I went right ahead and took a driving test because I thought it was going to be our car. But he was only importing the car to sell it so he had money for tuition.”

She tried on a wedding dress in anticipation of Björn’s return to Iceland. Her father, Filippus, was more realistic. While she tried on the dress, he sat there in the living room calculating what Grandpa Björn owed them for child support. He was right. Björn had come to end the relationship.

“I was so thrown I walked loops around the pond in Reykjavík, devastated.”

“Would you have wanted to be some doctor’s housewife in America?”

“No, after thinking about it, I was lucky. I started hiking in the mountains and that’s where I met Árni.”

Grandpa Árni comes to his senses when he hears his name. He has begun to repeat himself lately, but his repeated words are mostly endless expressions of affection.

“Do you know how lucky I am to have got hold of your grandma? She’s a real treasure. I don’t know what would have happened to me without her.”

“Where did you meet?” I ask.

“We met through Gudmundur from Middalur, in the hiking club. We were on the entertainment committee, and there was an annual gathering up at the ski lodge in Hveradalir. Then I invited her to join us on a glacial expedition. We needed someone to help us with the food while we were building the research base at Jökulheimar. Influential men from the Reykjavík Ski Society asked, shocked, ‘Are you mad, planning to take a woman onto the glacier with you?’ I had no doubt.”

Grandma Hulda takes up the story: “I had only just joined the Icelandic Glaciological Society when I met Árni. I pestered him to take me out onto Vatnajökull; I had twice gone up Snæfellsjökull glacier, so it couldn’t be more difficult than that.”

The expedition set off in May 1955. The guestbook in the old lodge in Jökulheimar states:

This lodge is called Jökulheimar; it belongs to the Icelandic Glaciological Society.

We, the undersigned, built it as volunteers from May 30–June 15, 1955, but we were gone, skiing on Vatnajökull with Gudmundur Jónasson, the week of June 5–12. The weather was generally favorable and we felt very content here in Tungnaárbotnar and on Vatnajökull itself.

Jökulheimar, June 15, 1955

Hulda Filippusdóttir, Árni Kjartansson, Haukur Haflidason, Árni Edwin, Steinunn Audunsdóttir, Sigurbjörn Benediktsson, Stefán Jónasson

Grandpa Árni shows me pictures of the lodge.

“We decided during this trip to carry out an even bigger expedition next year, as our honeymoon. My sister was shocked: ‘Are you going to take on a woman with two girls?’ she asked. I’ve never made a better decision in all my life.”

Grandpa Árni is wearing a checked blue shirt, his hands still strong and coarse, his corduroy pants worn from gardening. His legs have failed him and I think of him as a precious porcelain vase, an antique that totters so much I think he will fall, but then he rights himself.

The pictures continue to appear on the screen and are now mostly skiing photos. Grandpa Árni struggling with the weight of the timbers at the lodge above Draumadalur up on Bláfjöll. Because of the valley’s name, the Valley of Dreams, they called the shelter Himnaríki, Heaven. There are more pictures from mountain lodges, of young folk singing and dancing, pictures from the Kingdom of Heaven II, which rose up after the first burned down.

“The name, Heaven, sometimes led to misunderstandings.” Grandma Hulda smiles. “We were on the bus with my friend Magga, and her son asked, Where’s Dad? He’s in Heaven with Árni, she said. When will he come back? Monday, she said. A priest standing nearby nudged her and said with great sympathy but some zeal: ‘You must tell the child the truth, my good lady!’”

In Grandpa Árni’s collection there are documents of the first years of regular glacial research in Iceland, films of the first drills of the Air Ground Rescue Team, the first years of gliding, of skiing, of the Árbær suburb.

“The Heaven lodge was marvelous, we had a wonderful time. People often came to visit over the weekends and all Easter; we had seventy people in total up in the loft,” Grandpa Árni says. “I reckon I can hardly count all the marriages that sprung from there during that time.”

They were the first generation to “play” in the mountains. At that time, ski equipment was primitive; people had to walk several miles to get to the lodge in all weathers. There was no ski lift, no electricity, no Sno-Cats, no fleece sweaters and no GORE-TEX, no snowmobiles or jeeps to bring people to where they were headed, yet everyone who spent time at the lodge during that period talked about it as the pinnacle of happiness.

When you look back, it’s as if that generation was faced with creating and constructing almost everything from the ground up. They had to found the Republic of Iceland, set up the social organizations, the theaters and orchestras, the rescue squads and sports clubs; build the houses, establish modern infrastructure, construct Reykjavík out of empty meadows. I’m sitting here with my grandparents, a strange qualm in my chest. As I listen to their stories and look at their pictures, I don’t know if I’m trying to preserve their stories for the stories’ sake or whether I’m trying to preserve my grandparents and their lives, to somehow mute an inevitable loss.

Grandpa Árni from Hladbær was born four years after the end of World War I. I think about everything he’s experienced and about how the world can change in a lifetime. I think about all the wars and all the progress, all the revolutions in the arts and the sciences, and I think forward a hundred years into the future as I try to evaluate and understand scientists’ predictions about where we are heading.

Grandpa Árni goes over to the slide projector when a picture gets stuck, leaving only bright white light on the screen. There are so many things I’d like to ask him before he passes into the light.