Читать книгу Oraefi - Ófeigur Sigurðsson - Страница 9

I was past exhaustion, the Austrian toponymist Bernharður Fingurbjörg wrote in his letter to me, spring 2003. I crawled, Bernharður went on, into the Skaftafell Visitor Center, where I promptly lost consciousness. When I came to, a crowd of people was staring at me, but no one came over to help; my head was swimming; there was a large, open wound in my thigh, reminiscent of a caldera, and I thought I saw glowing lava well from it, a burning current pouring itself out like a serpent writhing up my spinal cord toward my head, which was becoming a seething magma chamber. I was delirious. For a long time, no one did anything, then, finally, after much staring and gesturing, a doctor was called; she happened to be on a camping trip with her family in Skaftafell at the time and came running full tilt to attend to me. I cannot find my mother, I told the doctor in my delirium, I cannot find my mother, I remember saying. I started to cry.

The doctor asked for clean linens and towels, a dishcloth, some organic soap, ethanol, toothpaste, whey, sugar, Brennivín, and an interpreter. The staff jumped to their feet and bounded in all directions at her requests. I heard it all at the periphery of my senses, from deep within my coma, and I saw it all before me, I saw the rich flora of the valley opening up for me, dripping butter from every blade of grass, and I said: Butter drips from every blade! … People flocked around me in the Visitor Center, I could hear myself talking a soup of nonsense, the doctor again calling for an interpreter so she could understand what I had to say.

I later learned that this doctor was, in fact, a veterinarian, one of national reputation: Dr. Lassi, the district veterinarian from Suðurland, a superheroine in thick wax coat and cape, wearing high leather boots and with a bottle-green felt hat on her head. Dr. Lassi said that it was beyond real that I’d emerged alive from the mountains without the rest of my party, given how badly my thigh was injured. I will help you find your mother, she said, stroking me, rubbing me like a newborn calf—all this Bernharður wrote in his letter to me that spring.

When the interpreter got there, people noticed a strange expression on her face; she alone understood the fantastical tosh bubbling from me, the things Dr. Lassi later recorded in her report—although I was speaking splendid Icelandic (for my father is Icelandic, and had used his mother tongue around me and my brother so we could talk to our relatives), there now erupted a flood of delirious German words, or rather Austrian, or, even more accurately, Viennese, to be precise, all a mumbled babble and humming, a soft lowing mix of various languages. Someone brought woolen fabrics and Dr. Lassi wrapped me tenderly, saying, I’m swaddling you like a little boy going to sleep, I’ll watch over you, you’re my little bundle.

The Alpine Child, as the doctor’s report sometimes calls me, was taken by hay-cart over to the hotel in Freysnes, followed by a whole herd of people, according to the report, people who didn’t want to stop looking at me. The hotel in Freysnes is big and expansive and dependable and the cleanest building in the region, even though the roof had recently blown off, and rain would pour into the rooms on the top floor. The big old place had been warped at the foundations by the terrible power of gale force storms, and several people were at work with backhoes and tractors and bulldozers pushing the building back into shape. The patient couldn’t very well be treated in the Skaftafell Visitor Center due to the abundance of sweaty tourists and because the air there was clogged with ancient, greasy, frying juices; all the restrooms were piss-stained and shit-marked. Dr. Lassi had no intention of dealing with an open wound in such conditions, and so I woke with the dew, as the saying goes, to find myself on a rattling hay-wagon; I saw that my leg had turned icy blue, splotched with white. Salmon pink pus bubbled from the wound. I thought I saw a snake crawling about in there, a fur hat on his head, a pipe in his mouth.

Dr. Lassi seemed familiar with the antiseptic revolution brought about by the Hungarian obstetrician Dr. Semmelweis, I mused there in the hay-wagon, how he saved countless lives with hand-washing and good hygiene for mother and newborn alike; perhaps Dr. Lassi knows Dr. Semmelweis through the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, as I do: Céline wrote an important essay about Semmelweis when he qualified as an obstetrician, La vie et l’oeuvre de Philippe Ignace Semmelweis, really more a literary than a medical text, I thought in the hay-wagon on my way to Freysnes, many good writers have been doctors, these professions are by nature similar …

It’s the custom in Öræfi to make do with whatever lies to hand, and Dr. Lassi was well acquainted with that region, having steeped herself in regional life; during her vacations at the Skaftafell campsite with her family and camper van she considered herself a true Öræfing. They would arrive early each spring before lambing started, a time when there were few tourists around. This year, their vacation had run together with Easter, which fell later than normal. Dr. Lassi didn’t hesitate in her task, injecting me with horse tranquilizer via a horse syringe, the sight of which turned me white: I’ve dosed you with the butter-drug, my friend, said Dr. Lassi, and you’ll feel a little numb, beyond cares; you’re heading to another world but remaining with us still, watch carefully now, watch everything carefully and then tell me what you see.

The patient’s case revolves around a significant injury to his leg, Dr. Lassi wrote shortly after in her report: the foot had frostbite and septicemia, and gangrene had begun to develop in the upper thigh, an ugly fleshrot known as coldburn had entered the bone; a large chunk had been bitten out of the thigh, probably several days ago, in a bad frost, Dr. Lassi’s report concludes. I examined the wound and saw at once the bite was from something with straight teeth, not canines, thought it can hardly have been a man who bit this kid in the leg, wrote Dr. Lassi, unless it was someone with an oddly large mouth, like Mick Jagger, though it’s highly unlikely he’s on a trip to East Skaftafell at this very moment, nor would such a decent man turn utterly brutal without warning, though given he’s been out west sailing a little cutter recently the possibility can’t be entirely ruled out, not that you’d find a cutter amid the black sands here, with all the surf and oceanic erosion—no, some wild animal bit the boy, some highly-evolved wild animal with transverse-ridged teeth … Dr. Lassi jotted the three periods of an ellipsis in her report; the interpreter was standing right there, some timid country girl. What’s the guy saying? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter and the interpreter pricked up her ears: He’s telling his mom not to go over to some green Mercedes Benz, he’s repeating that phrase again and again, he’s looking for her and can’t find her.

Dr. Lassi and the interpreter scanned their eyes over me a long time, their garrulous patient, until Dr. Lassi became angry at the continual delay in fetching clean towels and the rest of the things for which she’d asked; lacking what she needed, she started taking off her own clothes. Underneath she was wearing gray woolen underwear and some kind of tank top; she tried to remove my pants but couldn’t do it without causing me great pain so she vigorously cut the pants’ legs open with a pocket knife. Dr. Lassi slipped off her underclothes and made a tourniquet above the wound using her bra, untying the scarf I’d bound there to cut off my circulation, a scarf now thick with coagulated blood. Dr. Lassi was in good shape, and people were embarrassed at suddenly having a naked lady there inside the hotel room. She cried out for vodka and whiskey and Brennivín and spirits and toothpaste and any books that could be found out here, maps, almanacs … everything! shouted Dr. Lassi. People leapt to their feet and disappeared about the hotel, searching in the kitchen and the toilets, opening all the cupboards, going into bedrooms; someone picked up the phone and made a call. Amid all this a bottle came flying, as if summoned by the shouting itself, responding of its own accord … Dr. Lassi plucked it out the air and upturned it over her underwear, cleaning the thigh with great care and devotion; she took a decent swig herself then poured the dregs sensually into my mouth, as though I was her lover dying in a mountain cabin …After finishing up, Dr. Lassi got to her feet; she wrapped herself in her wax overcoat to hide her nakedness and looked at everyone with large, predatory eyes.

In Dr. Lassi’s report there are arguments about how it wouldn’t have served any purpose to call an ambulance: since the community was reunified, it’s 350 kilometers to the nearest hospital, a 12-hour drive given how much there is to see on the way, things one simply has to stop and examine, all kinds of natural wonders which no one could remain unmoved by—and the helicopter was busy out west in the fjords doing something with the Viking Task Force, shooting rogue cattle or else out with reporters, capturing images of Mick Jagger some damn place, Dr. Lassi writes, and there’s no port anywhere in Suðurland, just immense breakers crashing over the sands and across the wilderness; in order to steer a ship to land here, you’d need to know by heart an essay written by the “fire cleric” Jón Steingrímsson, Um að ýta og lenda í brimsjó fyrir söndum (“On Steering and Landing a Ship on Waveswept Sands”)—an essay everyone has neglected over the years; the article isn’t part of the education curriculum and the consequences for today’s travelers are most grave.

Dr. Lassi asked for all the toothpaste in the hotel: once gathered, the toothpaste was to be squeezed out of the tubes into a large bowl; she also needed a trowel or tile float. Several people got to work on this. These tubes are appallingly tiny, said Dr. Lassi. And then Dr. Lassi needed a saw: she stretched out her hand, looked up to the heavens and asked for a saw but no saw appeared in her palm; there wasn’t a saw to be found at the hotel in Freysnes, which shocked many people. No saw? I have saws a-plenty at home, said old Muggur, the farmer from Bölti, if we were at my house, you could have your pick of saws, Dr. Lassi, I have all kinds of saws, wood saws, hacksaws, wheel saws, a saber saw, a table saw, a chainsaw … At the hotel, there were blunt, non-serrated kitchen knives of every kind (only soft food was served there) and a number of wickedly sharp pocket knives, whetted on emery, all arrayed on a tray the local farmers offered to Dr. Lassi so she could carry out her mission; Flosi from Svínafell said that perhaps there might be an angle grinder in his jeep, could she possibly make use of such a thing? …That’ll do it! Dr. Lassi’s exclamation echoed around the hotel, already wobbling on its foundation, the patient is totally out of it …What did you give the fellow? demanded Jakob from Jökullfell quietly, why does it smell of hay? It’s butyric acid! cried Dr. Lassi, made from silage, a domestic-designed and produced medicine, often used in date rape; even if the good gentleman is half-awake, he won’t remember anything after the operation, won’t feel a thing during it, all because of how effective the medicine is. Flosi from Svínafell came back from his vehicle; the angle grinder leapt to life and the hotel splattered with red gore; people felt the mountains dim and the glacier cracking and the sands moaning … Dr. Lassi was dexterous with the angle grinder, taking the leg off at the asshole and scrotum with swift hacks. It saved the tourist’s life, Dr. Lassi writes a little further on in her report, and it was necessary—because of the acute abscesses, infections, deep freezing and frost and fleshrot and coldburn—to entirely sever one of his ass cheeks, and also his penis; the tourist was then sewn back together with twine sterilized in Brennivín; his asshole was saved, although it would have been safer to take that, too, Dr. Lassi writes in her report, before proceeding to provide a literary survey of the local region.

Rumor has it that Dr. Lassi sent the pecker into town on a bus, rolled in cellophane and packed in a cooler to preserve it. The package was addressed to an acquaintance of hers at the Icelandic Phallological Museum, describing this gift as a contribution to high culture and urging the Minister, the warrior queen of Icelandic culture, to take this thing ceremoniously from its cooler and hand it off to the superintendent of the Phallological Museum with a little speech. The ceremony was shown prime time on the national news. There’s no leg museum and no buttock museum, said the Minister of Education, but we’re proud of the Phallological Museum. Back east in Öræfi, there was nothing for it but to discard the leg and ass-cheek in the trash incinerator at Svínafell, an incinerator which heats the swimming pool Flosalaug, wafting a grilling smell over the countryside in the spring breeze, a pungent mix of smoke and soot and trash fumes.

The nasal-voiced regional reporter from the State Broadcasting Service in Suðurland reached Öræfi despite sandstorms at Skeiðarársand that rendered his car entirely plain, stripping all its markings; he interviewed Dr. Lassi after news of this mysterious accident spread, asking about the vet’s impressive initiative and the case of the man whose life Dr. Lassi had worked so remarkably to save, the Alpine Child. In an interview broadcast via telephone, Dr. Lassi said she had no choice but to amputate … dismember, whispered the language consultant at the State Broadcasting Company into the small headphone in the regional news correspondent’s ear … dismemberment, repeated the language consultant in the ear of the correspondent … dismemberment, blurted out the correspondent in front of Dr. Lassi … the dismemberment of the Alpine Child at the hotel in Freysnes, said Dr. Lassi, I was forced to take off a leg, I had no time to lose if the youth was going to live. Dr. Lassi showed the correspondent the leg and butt check, lifted the piece up and shook it a little bit and let it crackle over the microphone where it rattled the wider population, it’ll be discarded in the trash incinerator, Dr. Lassi told the radio listeners, to heat up Flosalaug, which is usually heated with tourist trash but the tourists won’t have arrived this early in the spring, they arrive with the migratory birds … this is energy … trash is energy … all matter is energy, she said, somewhat off track … but the nasal regional correspondent from the State Broadcasting Service asked, energetically: Is it fun being a veterinarian? Yes, it’s fun, said Dr. Lassi, when things are going well. Then they went around the hotel and showed the correspondent the sights, the blood-drenched angle grinder and the maids cleaning the wallpaper. Is it true a sheep bit this man? asked the correspondent, but Dr. Lassi replied carefully that the man had encountered a flock of wild sheep some place up in Öræfi, the Wasteland, where they had been all winter or even for several winters, Dr. Lassi said, and that’s a violation of the law, I cannot say for how many centuries the laws have been broken here in the country … but as to whether a wild sheep bit the man, I cannot say: I don’t know what bit him, but something did. At the end of the interview the correspondent explained somewhat frankly the journey the penis had made by bus to Reykjavík, its warm reception, and the place of honor it could expect there in the capital’s culture.

Dr. Lassi settled down in the Öræfi region while she attended her patient at the hotel in Freysnes, ordering her family to stick around in the tent trailer at Skaftafell and not to trouble themselves, no matter what happened. I must write my report, Dr. Lassi told her family; she had resolved to find out what had happened in the wilderness, where the traveling Alpiner had been, where he came from … It’s not possible to saw off someone’s leg and save their life and then just walk away; that would be unethical, writes Dr. Lassi in her report … How educated are you!? Dr. Lassi shouted at me like I was deaf from the pain in my leg, no longer a leg but a phantom limb, that was the first thing she wanted to know … how educated is he!? Dr. Lassi shouted at the interpreter, who she felt was being sluggish, reluctant to translate … He’s a graduate student, the interpreter reported to Dr. Lassi, he’s studying in the Department of Nordic Studies at the University of Vienna …And what’s he doing there!? asked Dr. Lassi, loud and clear. He’s looking for his mother … no, wait, he’s writing a dissertation in Toponymy? Toponymy? Toponymy? Well, fine, but is that really a field of study these days? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter… And does “the kid” have a name? He’s called Bernharður, the interpreter said to Dr. Lassi, Bernharður Fingurbjörg, from Vienna.

The interpreter worked on the report with Dr. Lassi, Bernharður wrote in his letter, passing on the words I spoke there on my sick bed at the hotel in Freysnes. The interpreter had a hidden narrative gift, filtering out all the delirious babble and needless descriptions; she weaved together a pithy narrative, an escalating, logical sequence of events. Dr. Lassi found it highly compelling and envisioned publishing the report in the Journal of Agriculture or even submitting the report to the great agricultural paper Freyja or publishing it in Friends of the Animals or just in Nature Papers; she imagined, too, getting to know the interpreter rather better, though Dr. Lassi didn’t yet know if the shy country girl had any lesbian inclinations.

I wanted to reach Mávabyggðir, said Bernharður, Dr. Lassi’s report says, and stay there a while to study the place names, their origins and local forms; my intention was to go from Mávabyggðir over to the pass, Hermannskarð, where Captain J. P. Koch and his companions went on their 1903 expedition to measure the ice shelf at Öræfajökull, those preeminent men after whom the pass is named. I was planning to celebrate the 100th anniversary of their expedition there, and then to go up to Tjaldskarð, the valley up from the glacial shield volcano, between two peaks, where Captain Koch spent two weeks in a tent in a variety of weather conditions, knuckling down to his research during the periods he could not be outside taking measurements. One day, as he was sitting writing in the tent, hoarfrost and a heavy snowstorm outside, he saw that the oilcan had sprung a leak and so he and his companion, Þorsteinn, would need to fetch a new one from down in the settlement, and return the horse they had with them since they were no longer using it and all it was doing was risking death. They dressed and hurried away from their spot, following an ancient, perilous way down the precipitous, fissureridden Virkisjökull, the horse with them; Virkisjökull is a tumultuous glacial cascade that descends from high cliffs, a difficult and obstructed glacier, and visibility was low due to fog and rain as they were coming down. They descended to the valley Hvannadalur, where in the old days people picked angelica; it was a long trip, Koch and Þorsteinn went with their horse over the great belt of rocks the glacier had created, tracing a slender path of loose stones at the bottom of a precipitous landslide, with sheer drops down into gaping fissures, I will need to go carefully once I get there, I thought to myself, Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed to the cave Flosahellur on the way because Koch wanted to examine it; it’s great to be here, Captain Koch said in Flosahellur, Bernharður said, Dr. Lassi wrote. From there Captain Koch and Þorsteinn headed down a peat landslip to the lowlands, then down the mountain to get supplies at Svínafell. There was a man there with a newly-acquired wooden leg: not long before he had been out to the shore with three other men hunting seal. They were caught in extreme weather and frost and blown off their path; two of them were lost for good while the third made it home to Svínafell, about 40 kilometers away, with tremendous difficulty: the leg had frostbite and so was sawn off, the stump bound together, and a peg leg made from driftwood, a boot painted on it. Koch and Þorsteinn paused briefly, wolfed down some provisions, gulped down coffee, got a new can and rushed back that very same day, the same route up Öræfajökull; no-one would do such a thing nowadays. I planned to descend the glacier this way and make a research expedition to Svínafell and confirm J. P. Koch’s measurement of Öræfajökull, although all the time I was worried about how I would fare with the horses and my traveling trunk, a large wooden box; I would find a way when it came to it, having never been there before and knowing nothing about the way it was, but I had to go if it were at all possible. Captain Koch had taken a horse down there so I knew it was possible, and I was of the mind that someone ought to traverse the same route in the year 2103 to remember Captain Koch and the 200th anniversary of his expedition, though probably everyone will have forgotten him by then. Place names, though, last forever. On this trip there were many names to encounter: for example, Fingurbjörg, or Finger Rock, the name Captain Koch gave to the large rounded rock on Mávabyggðir, or The Place Gulls Settled; Hermannskarð, The Soldiers’ Pass, the gap through the glacier the soldiers took on the way to Öræfajökull; Tjaldskarð, the Tent Pass, where they were situated when measuring Öræfajökull; and Þuríðartindur, a large and beautiful mountain peak named after Þuríði Guðmundsdóttir from Skaftafell, Þorsteinn’s sister; under this rock Koch and he enjoyed the pancakes she had baked for them as provisions, and they were so grateful to her for the delicacies that they made her immortal in the peak’s name. I found for my part that the way to the glacier from Mávabyggðir through Hermannskarð went on rather too long; I was crushed by gnashing hoarfog on the glacier, by fierce gusts; I did not want to believe that I was lost and walked for many days on my skis going short distances in adverse conditions; most of the time I hunkered down inside my trunk, which suited me fine, until the storms and blizzards worsened and one by one I lost my horses, a disaster, I was morose at having taken them with me out on the glacier, I became estranged to myself—this was a travail I had dreamed about for such a long time, the idea of the expedition had become the idea of myself, my identity, but as soon as my dream was coming true, I was a stranger. The last horse, the one that drew the trunk, disappeared, the trunk along with him, with it all the data for my thesis. Unless the data reappears in fifty years’ time somewhere, at glacial speed. Probably, I took a wrong turn on Hermannskarð and went a long way out onto the glacier, thinking myself safely and correctly almost arrived at a settlement. I reached instead a luxuriant valley surrounded by cliffs that I clambered down; I could not find this valley on a map and there were no external landmarks visible from within it, neither peaks nor elevations—it was as if the land had suddenly slipped apart and up sprang a luxuriant valley full of forest, heather-moss and grasses inside the glacier. A rollicking sense of joy seized me, both at having gotten off the glacier alive and at possibly being in an unknown valley, one which would be named for me, Bernharðsdalur, it would be a real boon for my dissertation, would bowl over the professors in the toponymy department at the University of Vienna, I would become a toponymist and explorer … these days, it’s rare to get a place named after you.

In the valley my compass got completely confused, utterly unable to function, the arrow turning circles at lightning speed, then the compass stopped and pointed resolutely right at me, no matter how I twisted myself about and tried to wrestle myself ahead of the arrow. I attempted that for a while. After the compass stilled, I marveled at all the rich vegetation, the valley’s fragrance, its weather, here in the middle of powerful Vatnajökull. I sat beside a little spring and washed my feet. From there I saw where sheep, long-legged and almost like steinbocks, grazed on the slope; they seemed to glisten. There were rams so obese and rotund that they resembled wethers more than sheep, heavy and sluggish; when the herd became aware of me it startled; the animals began to stamp their feet and the mountains resounded with the noise; it was like darkness crashing into the valley, amazingly intense in contrast to the twenty-four-hour sun that shines this time of year in this latitude. And then a hundred glowing eyes were approaching in darkness. I became so horrified that I lost my faculties and lay prone beside the spring, my whole body going to sleep. I did not lose consciousness; on the contrary, I was too alert, hyper-aware yet paralyzed physically, I felt able to engage everything in the whole world, to hear everything, to see everything, to feel everything; I saw the black sky and the sun enormously large behind the darkness, all a burning fire, I felt myself flying through space as though sallying on in a dream, suddenly a piercingly bright light appeared and the sun was directly over me, stifling hot, I had the notion to remove my clothes and immerse myself in the spring, but then I saw a single fearsome ram standing over me, bleating loud and cruel and biting my leg, but he vanished just as suddenly as he appeared. I was slow to re-orient myself and struggled to shift. I first tried crawling, then hopped a while on one leg, supporting myself with a staff; a blizzard struck and the lush valley immediately became submerged in snow and slush, such that I had great difficulty keeping myself upright in the snow and not being submerged in slush; I sweated buckets causing a thick armor of ice to fasten itself to my clothes, leaving me board-stiff. My leg was numb, lead-heavy, useless; I felt like a weighted-down sled was tied around me, or a horse and carriage, or that my leg was terribly long, unmanageable, and in this fashion I climbed up the rocks and scree out from the valley, like this I crawled along the ice for a long time, like this I crawled over the hills, like this I crawled across rivers and streams, like this I crawled through forests—and like this I crawled back to civilization.

This happened on Holy Thursday. On Good Friday, 18th April 2003, Bernharður Fingurbjörg crawled into the Skaftafell Visitor Center, Dr. Lassi writes in her report, telling the interpreter: I have no option but to believe you what you’re saying, or else the ground beneath my feet will open up, but I am going to make it my immediate mission once I reach Reykjavík to sign up for German language courses in the Continuing Education Department at the University of Iceland in order to read Goethe in the original and talk to all these tourists.

The farmers who owned land and had pastures in the wasteland, Öræfi, took offence when the evening radio news reported wild animals up in the mountains; an emergency farmers’ council took place in the dining room of the hotel at Freysnes early Saturday morning. This disgrace needs to be wiped out, Dr. Lassi writes in her report. The meeting was attended by the District Magistrate of East Skaftafell; he stood up first and spoke, not needing to ask for quiet because there was absolute silence in the room before he said: A herd is on the loose in the National Park. And so his speech ended. Well, said Runólfur from Mýr, that’s not good. No, it’s not, said Flosi from Svínafell. Well …Tempers flared, the report says, they went absolutely crazy by Öræfi standards, although an unfamiliar visitor could have mistaken it for meditation class. The animals are probably on the Skaftafell slopes, didn’t the lad come down that way? He came down the glacier at Morsárdalur, said Jakob from Jökulfell, falling asleep in mid-sentence … Didn’t this little punk head to Mávabyggðir without letting anyone know about his trip and without a sure sense of his route, said old Muggur from Bölti; he deserved to die. He must have gone directly from Mávabyggðir straight across the glacier to descend at Morsárdalur. But where did he get himself bitten? Or is it something other than a bite, Dr. Lassi? asked the magistrate. Perhaps this wild sheep is from Núpsstaður, having wandered from Eystrafjall over the glacier and into the National Park, said Odd from Gröf. Oh-oh, this is all just speculation, the magistrate said. Some were convinced the sheep belonged to Jakob from Jökulfell, it’s your sheep, Jakob, said the farmers from Mýr, or at least it’s on your land. This is not my land, Jakob said, this is State land. From one perspective that’s not really so, Bjarni from Nes chimed in, this is the land of the Lord our Creator and it’s the duty of all of us, Jakob, to herd together …These are State sheep, said someone, and where is the State shepherd? (laughter) Well, well, said the magistrate … wouldn’t it be best to saunter up there in the morning and see what we can find. Has anyone heard the forecast? Of course everyone had listened to the weather report; they knew the weather by heart going back decades.

It is a humanitarian duty of farmers to retrieve sheep from the mountains, I said in a maternal manner at the meeting in the dining room of the hotel in Freysnes, wrote Dr. Lassi in her report, just as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals requires all farmers to do, it’s horfellislögin, an old and just law meaning farmers must ensure sheep have shelter and winter fodder: what is there for sheep to eat up on the glacier? They cannot simply eat up the whole of Skaftafell forest and Bæjarstaðar forest and Núpsstaðar forest, or why would tourists want to come to see the National Park then? The black desert sands? … Besides, grazing is prohibited in the area. You must retrieve the livestock and prevent it from suffering; it must not go wild over winter, for it will be cold, it will be hungry, it will suffer because of your negligence and lack of culture; such a thing cannot be tolerated, it is inhumane, I said at the meeting, so says the law of the land and so agreed the farmers, more or less, with much mumbling and muttering, resolving to go out on a well-manned mission to the countryside to fetch the sheep from off the slopes, to save it and bring it into human hands … that is, to the slaughterhouse.

I knew several of the people present at the meeting thanks to my work in the region, the report continues. Flosi from Svínafell is not a tall man, but strong and powerful, big-boned, reasonable, quiet, reminiscent of Japanese ancient emperors; Flosi never feels pain even though he has repeatedly been badly hurt working on the farm, merely a scratch is what he called a bloody dent in his shin the time a horse kicked him—someone asked at the dinner table why his pants were wet with blood, why there was a big puddle under the table that the children were sliding about in … I saw steaming coffee poured over his hand when the cup overflowed, but he did not notice the difference, and once I witnessed the trunk of the old Volvo he used for saddle storage get slammed shut on his fingers; when asked if it hurt, he said: there’s no damage … I thought, this man cannot recognize pain, but I did not know the Öræfi region well then, I had only just started working at the vet’s office, he must feel the way other men do but just does not like to show it, not in front of others nor to himself. One time, up in the mountains, a fox bit Flosi on the thumb and would not let go. Flosi strangled the fox with his free hand and walked for a whole day with the dead fox dangling on his thumb. He grew tired of the carcass by nightfall so cut the head off the fox and slept like that through the night; the next day he finally gave up on the head, cutting off his thumb with a pocket knife at the breakfast table. Muggur from Bólti was at the meeting, a hot-tempered fellow, gruff, someone with whom few dared speak, neither at the meeting at the hotel in Freysnes nor outside, old Muggur is broad-shouldered and repulsive, with a glowering face and a paltry scraggle of toothbrush beard, eyes like ball-bearings, loud-mouthed, impulsive, he once got struck by lightning when he was laying telephone lines across Skeiðarársandur, he fell screaming down from the pole, some eighteen feet; he simply got up unharmed, but steam rose up off him, however, and his fellow workers’ eyes smarted; they noticed he smelled like a grill, and that gave them hunger pangs. At seventy years old he took a charging bull in a chokehold and flipped it over, a bull which had gored three teenagers and done some serious damage, Muggur held the beast down and stuck a lynch-pin through its nostril and fastened it to the back of the tractor and dragged it home to his house; the bull has been tame ever since, friendly, even.

In Öræfi the weather can be awful, Dr. Lassi’s report says, everything gets blown away, things which people in other parts of the country would never imagine could blow away. During a great sandstorm rocks fly about and then a boulder flings through the air and shatters everything in its path. One time, the fresh haybales were being protected from the weather, tied onto a truck so they would not blow away; that night, the truck was blown on top of the haystack, which was lying under it like a squashed cranefly when the men came out to the farmyard the next morning. Not long ago, a tractor was blown out of the farmyard in Svínafell and flew over the nearby houses. In Svínafell there was a church once; that got blown away. A new church was built but it flew away, too, so people stopped bothering to have a church in Svínafell. Here in Öræfi, cars blow off the road like empty plastic bags; bus windows explode in a hail of rocks and the lacerated tourists on board freeze to death, perishing in large numbers; afterward, a new highway gets unrolled like a licorice curl, slung across the sand. One time, the farmers clubbed together; they were getting tired of visitors to the region constantly being killed by the slightest gust, so they flew to Germany and bought a tank from the military and transported it back to Öræfi; the tank is a tremendous, heavy vehicle which proves successful when it’s necessary to go out onto the sand in bad weather to collect trapped people. At first, the Öræfings simply used the tank as a school bus, but Runki from Destrikt had once been on a course with the Regional Rescue team and decreed that the tank could only be used in storms, whether for transporting children from school, fetching old people from a crumpled bus, or bringing dead tourists to the Visitor Center. Runki from Destrikt is not from these parts and his mentality is very different from the Öræfings: an uneasy man, he took the tank under his command, saying it seemed like the Öræfings wanted to use the tank in mild weather to drive sheep to pasture or kids to school, to cruise around, count birds, survey the sand … at the time Runki invited everyone to a summit at the hotel in Freysnes, wanting to establish a special regional rescue force with the tank at its heart. There was certainly a need, the countryside was full of tourists run amok, ever since the river, Skeiðará, was bridged once the National Park was established at Skaftafell, something he considered entirely outrageous … a National Park! Instead of utilizing the country, Runki from Destrikt said at that meeting, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, everything these days gets protected, he said, are they going to protect foxes next!? Minks!? Today, farmers can’t think about cattle or agriculture, they’re always having to deal with tourists, the tourists want to camp in the hayfields, they want to go horse riding, they want to poke around the farm, they want to birth a lamb, they want to drive a tractor, they want to make hay, they want to stay on the farm, they want to eat lamb for dinner, to eat with the family, to experience a real country atmosphere, coffee and toast in the morning, helping with farm chores; they start driving after us, they ideally want to become the farmer himself during their damn vacations! And, of course, they get in the way! I never get any peace, said Runki, you can’t move without a busload of tourists taking your picture, whether you’re mowing a field or pissing against a wall, better to have sheep in Skaftafell rather than these tourists who trample all over everything, that way the national park would be protected because this nation lives on sheep, at one time there were herds on the slopes and now tourists go walking with their worthless currency in all directions! … (they all had to think a bit to understand this last assertion) … you cannot survive on beauty alone; if anything defines beauty, it’s livestock on a mountain.

The old farmers, Flosi from Svínafell and Muggur from Bölti and Jakob from Jökulfell, had all of a sudden become Tourist Service Farmers and Regional Rescue members and had ill accepted their lot. They tootled about the beach and slopes in the tank and herded sheep, no matter what Runki said. Öræfings are used to heavy vehicles; during World War Two all kinds of powerful off-road vehicles came into being (nothing advances technology better than war); pictures of this apparatus appeared in newspapers and magazines and some of them spread east into Öræfi, which gave rise to the idea that it might be possible to get such a vehicle to Skeiðarársand, the most rugged place in all the Nordic countries. A debate took place and a parliamentary resolution was agreed; a large barge with caterpillar tracks was brought in and transported east over the sands. This astonishing machine was christened Water Dragon, a name soon simplified to the Dragon; it puttered across rivers and was able to ferry large commodities, implements, and building materials. Afloat, the belts functioned like oars, but it was difficult to control, taking considerable practice to master the Dragon. In the wake of this, Jón from Austurbær brought the first car to the region and, taking his lead from the Dragon, he placed empty barrels under the car and floated it across the river. The Dragon reigned over the beach in the years after the war until modernity arrived in the form of bridges, killing off culture entirely. The Dragon got worn down traversing the sand and was costly to run; it did not provide public transportation and was chiefly used to search for the treasure ship that was supposedly somewhere on the sands.

The Tvísker Brothers came to the meeting at Freysnes—Hálfdán, Helgi, Sigurður, and Flosi—even though they didn’t own cattle and aren’t farmers but self-taught scientists; they were planning to use their trip to collect insects, count birds, observe plants, and measure the glacier. Hálfdán is a naturalist, Helgi an inventor, Sigurður a scholar, and Flosi a glaciologist. Then there was Fippi from Núpsstaður, crossing Skeiðarársand in his old Willis, made in 1953, an SUV that has lasted half a century because it doesn’t have a computer in it, Dr. Lassi wrote, computers have destroyed modern cars, every year brings ever greater luxury and ever more junk.

Some claimed the wild herd belonged to Fippi from Núpsstaður, who welcomed the damage to the National Park, that these were the notorious wild sheep from Núpsstaðurskógar’s forests. Fippi wasn’t inclined to respond, having told people a thousand times already that the whole herd population was annihilated in a blizzard from the north and by blinding weather and by falling from the cliffs above the farm; they were all killed at once in the late nineteenth century. These days, a great flood of travelers can be found about the farmyards of Núpsstaður, with tourists wandering off in all directions and popping up at the windows. People come to see the old houses and the chapel dating back to the sixteenth century and the hundred-year-old hermit Filippus Hannesson, the son of the rural mailman Hannes Jónsson; tourism has transformed him into a museum exhibit. Fippi felt he couldn’t refuse to go on the round-up; you never know where you stand with a wild beast, he said, sarcastically, though it’s probably not a wild beast after all, but a very everyday animal. The wild Núpsstaðarskógar herds were quite special, a highly evolved stock, the report continued, they would stay out grazing in the mountain woods the whole year round, and were on the glacier, too, for centuries, perhaps as far back as the Settlement—there were rarely humans about and the animals lived their lives undisturbed in the wilderness, growing fat, sizeable animals yet less well-built than other sheep, because their organs never grew larger than standard lambs’ organs; they were noticeably long-legged, typically multi-colored, mottled, thick-necked and big-horned, they had abundant wool, so thick it never dangled down or lagged like wool on today’s adult sheep. Heavyset, they were uncontrollable because of their cautiousness; it was hard to catch them, they would leap onto the glacier, jump in rivers, and dive off cliffs to certain death rather than fall into human hands. The farmers in Núpsstaður would only allow themselves to seek a single sheep for food, and they did so for centuries, making the hazardous journey, an adventure, in harmony with nature. When I briefly visited Fippi, wanting to inquire about the wild herds so that I could write an article for Agricultural News, he said that so much nonsense had been said and written about the wild animals of Núpsstaður that I might as well just write whatever I felt like, giving me poetic license where his animals were concerned. Though the plan was to write a scientific report for Agricultural News, the idea popped into my mind that I should write a novel about the wild herd. But how do you write a novel about wild sheep? I thought, as I stood with Fippi in the farmyard. We locked eyes. Fippi is, like his father Hannes the rural mail carrier, oddly short and slim. People were often amazed to see the Willis on the sands: it would seem empty and gave rise to numerous ghost stories. Tourists often turned up at the Skaftafell Visitor Center greatly disturbed after going out to see the sands, not so much because they’d been caught in a sandstorm in a rental car whose paint was stripped off by the weather, but because they’d met the old Willis in the dark, yellow and red and bearing the number Z221 and with no one behind the wheel!

At Núpsstaður, the last town before you go out onto Skeiðarársand, is Lómagnúpur, a sheer rockface rising 700 meters from sea level, wrote Dr. Lassi in the report; rational, intelligent men grow fearful and awestruck in his shadow, for inside Lómagnúpur lives the giant Járngrím; he appears to people who perish on the sand. It’s said that men are doomed if they merely see him; below Lómagnúpur raging whirlwinds whip up and noone is worthy of mercy. One time, the farmer at Núpsstaður was fetching water in pails down in the mudflats under the overhang, but as he came back up with his full pails a whirlwind whipped up and swirled him up in the air, face-to-face with the rock’s highest edge, then twirled him about and around and downward, slow and slower still until he was standing in front of his cowshed door, not a drop lost from his buckets.

Fippi’s father, Hannes Jónsson, the rural mail carrier in the Skaftafell area, was known across the land as a heroic traveler, a man as modest and humble as Núpsstaður men tend to be, making nothing of the mortal danger he was placed in by his hazardous journeys across sands and glacial rivers and glacial scree; such stories had to be dragged out of him, like leading a ram to slaughter; he was tortured into writing about his journey over the glacier when the Skeiðará flooded in 1934, an enormous flood; at the time, Hannes was in Öræfi and wanted to cross the sand to deliver his mail and get back in time for Easter, but the sand was practically impassable because of the swelling water, so he detoured across the glacier while the flooding was at its peak, gushing so much water and glacial material and so many icebergs that the Skeidará measured forty kilometers wide across the sand, tumbling along carrying icebergs the size of apartment buildings like little ice cubes; telephone poles were washed away and even the highway, everything in the river’s way. Hannes went above this roaring glacial scree, right over the ebb, with the flood booming under his feet across the ice which had turned blood red from the ash columns steaming off the glacier as it towered over the mailman, all flecked with lightning and glare and flashes and thunderous booms and raining sand; the whole time large pieces would break off the glacier around him and where he’d just this second stepped peat-gray flumes flecked with cudbearred spouted up in the mist. New cracks opened everywhere about him; he had to crawl between them amid the raucous noise, hearing all kinds of murmurations, but he safely crossed with his deliveries, traversing the sands and rivers and glaciers and mountains and forests between Skaftafell and Núpsstaðarskógar, a journey which took eighteen hours and meant he could return home by Easter Sunday. More than once he was prevailed upon to write an account of this journey, and you have to read between the lines in his narrative, which is known by different titles: Minor Incidents during a Pleasant Journey or An Unremarkable Hike.

Freysnes lies between Skaftafell and Svínafell, Dr. Lassi’s report explains at the end of the regional description, since the report was intended for both academic and popular audiences. No-one had lived in Freysnes since that fateful year, 1362: the ruins of dwellings lay about Freysnes for all time, or at least until they were leveled to the ground by a bulldozer one fine winter’s day, and today no one knows where the ruins are. More than that: the ruins are a source of shame in the region. Ragnar, the farmer at Skaftafell, sold his land to the State in 1966 so that Skaftafell could become a National Park and so the Icelandic population, not just farmers and their friends and family, could enjoy its natural beauty, an unsurpassed beauty, and it was agreed it should belong to the populace—in fact, Skaftafell’s beauty should belong to humanity as a whole, said Ragnar. Everything was changing and few people kept up the traditions. Farming was declining even as tourists started streaming toward Öræfi now the Skeiðará had been bridged on Iceland’s National Day, 1974, completing a ring road around the entire country; that year marked 1100 years since Settlement and there were magnificent celebrations. Farming wasn’t to be allowed within the Park, for it does not suit the tourism industry; the hotel in Freysnes was designated for those who didn’t want to, or couldn’t, camp in tents within Skaftafell National Park, such as the elderly and the elegant; Freysnes’ beauty is comparable to Skaftafell’s. And now all kinds of little houses stand in ancient Freysnes, dotted around the big structure, which has wobbled on its foundation: decorated, furnished prefabs and containers tourists can use, Dr. Lassi wrote; Icelandic ingenuity can change trash skips into hotels.

Documents flooded into the hotel room in the form of books and magazines while Bernharður slept. The chronicles record that one morning in 1362 Knappafells glacier exploded and spewed over the Lómagnúpur sands and carried everything off into the sea, thirty fathoms deep: deposits of large rocks, water flumes, sand floods, volcanic detritus, falling rocks, and gray mud left behind desolated sands. The Province was destroyed, all its people and creatures annihilated; no sheep or cattle survived, no creatures left alive anywhere in the province around the glacier, both the historical chronicles and contemporary accounts agree, volcanic material fell everywhere, surging in such great abundance out to sea that ships could not navigate; the corpses of people and animals washed up on beaches far and wide, alongside debris and other rubbish; the bodies were cooked and tender and the flesh so loose on the bones it fell apart. This was the most destructive and fatal volcanic eruption in the history of Iceland, one of the greatest tephra eruptions anywhere on Earth in the last millennium; the eruption surprised everyone with its so-called gusthlaup, the latest scholarly theories contend in a back issue of Nature Studies, Dr. Lassi wrote, sweaty with excitement at the surge of evidence the interpreter dumped onto the table beside her, seventy farms were destroyed in one moment that morning, a gusthlaup rushing with tremendous speed down the steep mountainsides, taking with it seventeen churches copiously furnished with books, vestments, bells, chalices, and other belongings; nothing survived of this thriving civilization. Beauty and fertility instantly turned forbidding and barren in this storm of destruction, the area now a gaping wound; even the place names were scraped off the land, and everything had to be named fresh when the settlements snuck back in fifty years later, humans bedding down on the new land like fragile plants; Hérað, the Province, became Öræfi, the Wasteland; Klofajökull became Vatnajökull; Lómagnúpssandur became Skeiðarársandur; Knappafellsjökull became Öræfajökull; Knappafell became Hnappavellir; Tvísker became Kvísker … N. B: I should put that in a table as a convenience to readers of the report, Dr. Lassi had written, the amputation of place names and their transformation—you’ll like this, Bernharður, you place-name-pervert! Dr. Lassi said, loud and clear.

What the hell is a gusthlaup? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, I keep writing this damn word in the report, taking it from the accounts that stream in here, but I have no idea what a gusthlaup is! The interpreter replied that she didn’t know what gusthlaup meant. Get Hálfdán from Tvísker! Dr. Lassi ordered the interpreter, he’s down at the meeting, no, Hálfdán is the ornithologist … Sigurður! Fetch me Sigurður, or whichever of the brothers is the geologist? Just get any of them, they must all know the word, they’re so learned, these people, and it has to be clear in the narrative.

No area has ever endured such an extensive natural disaster as Hérað did in 1362, Dr. Lassi’s report says, drawing on her sources, fire came up from the glacier, bringing a torrent of burning ash that destroyed all the farms and wiped out the countryside. What’s called a pyroclastic flow, or gusthlaup, sparkling clouds of poison together with masses of staggeringly hot air rushing down the mountain slopes in the first hours of the eruption, burning everything in an instant, damaging anything living. Oxygen was used up; flesh burnt away. Exactly what happened to Pompeii in ancient times happened to Hérað in 1362 … a gusthlaup …The Province became Öræfi—the Wasteland … violent fires melted the glacier and ice water ran down the mountain across the plains carrying burning sludge … Legend has it that a lone shepherd on Svínafell heard a crack, then another crack and then said he would not wait for the third crack but rushed boldly up to that part of Svínafell known as Flosihellir, the place he kept his swine, a hairy boar, broad-shouldered and with human intelligence; the boar discovered a cave where large truffle mushrooms grew, and the storm spewed over the countryside and water and mud flowed over everything and over half the mountain and up to the cave, gray and discomforting; the shepherd and his boar alone survived the disaster, gobbling up the truffles in Flosihellir for six months straight, making them quite dyspeptic. When people later investigated the region, they saw that everything on the mountain had burned up and a meter-thick layer of toxic ash lay over it; a lizard-green haze hovered still, and in it long worms swam, the Annals say, the steam debilitated the searchers’ pupils so they saw everything upside down and contrary to what anyone else saw; this continued for a long time, and what was gray and black seemed friendly and green. Butter drips from every blade of grass, the new settlers said, as a new beauty sprang up.

What is it exactly that happens in a gusthlaup, Interpreter? Dr. Lassi asked the interpreter, it is incomprehensible to me, yet Dr. Lassi did not wait for a response, dashing onward in her writing, Interpreter constantly running to fetch books and sources and maps all throughout the hotel … Here it is! shouted Dr. Lassi and papers and documents swirl up in the air …The sources say a gusthlaup results from an explosion in a crater, some resistance is required causing the debris to storm down the side of the volcano, not straight up in the air … but what is the gust? Interpreter … ! What do we make of the gust!? Ask those Tvísker brothers about the gust … no, here it is, there’s an article in Skaftfellingur about it, let us see … gust is basically lahar fire-cloud, what the French scientists call nuées ardentes, that’s the gust in gusthlaup, a plume of smoke and mud, heavy with a burning eruption of gravel and fiery gas, and the gust—the flow—descended the mountain on its fatal journey, destroying everything before it, all the buildings in the Province, all the people and all living creatures, laying waste the whole area in an instant. No one had time to flee, no one knew what was coming and no one knew what had happened, everything became petrified, cast in molds in an instant as ash and friable pumice fell over everything, covering the dead in a dusty veil. Everything lay motionless for fifty years—and then a new settlement began! Dr. Lassi said aloud at the same time as she wrote it in her report.

Who originally settled Öræfi!? Dr. Lassi asked the Interpreter, that must be in my report, my Interpreter, I was even thinking that it would be neat to start the report with it, what do you think? … Isn’t that neat? …Wasn’t it Ingólfur Arnarson!? I’ll be damned, that’s ideal! Dr. Lassi enthused, how exceedingly elegant that the report begin with the first settler in Iceland. This report of mine will appear in countless magazines and be translated into many languages, Dr. Lassi remarked to the Interpreter; it will garner international attention. Ingólf landed at the place which is now called Ingólf’s Head … that’s how a report like this should start, my dear Interpreter, said Dr. Lassi, how does Landnámabók put it? Where is Landnámabók, The Book of the Settlement, when one needs it? Back home up on a shelf! What use is it there? Surely there’s not a copy in the hotel? It should be here at the hotel, every hotel should have Landnámabók in the bedroom drawers and not the Bible, for Landnámabók is the Icelandic Bible … from now on I will always travel with Landnámabók on me! Dr. Lassi said, it is simply common sense! And good mental health, Interpreter … a damn powerful opening for this report! … But Ingólf the settler did not settle in Öræfi, and it wasn’t called Öræfi at the time, it wasn’t called anything, as far as is known, Dr. Lassi wrote, unless some Irish hermit called the area something. Ingólf stayed here one or two winters, along with his retinue; he had thrown his chieftain’s pillars overboard, as was the custom, and ordered his servants to find where the columns had come ashore. It was beautiful to look out upon what is now Öræfi, for the province was blessed in its weather, woods flourished and tall grasses and people weren’t in favor of going to find the columns, they wanted to stay in the region, and the area was soon given its distinguished name, Hérað, because butter dripped from every blade here where there’s now sand and desolation, where once there was a little glacier and enchanting valley a sinister glacier crawls its desolating way. Back then, seals slept calmly on the shore amid the driftwood; out on the promontory there was an abundance of birds and eggs, fish in the sea, trout in the rivers and water. The Province was paradise, and so there was some disappointment when the pillars were discovered at Reykjavík, though the warm hot springs somewhat enticed the sensualists among them. It’s an unfortunate thing, said Karli, Ingólf’s slave, traversing a bountiful region merely to build on an inhospitable headland; in Reykjavík cold winds blow, it’s all bare gravel and naked ridges and insistent drizzle. This stubborn settler’s household lamented leaving the area, which was still nameless, regretted adhering to the high pillar tradition, giving their fate to the roll of a dice—what sort of nonsense this religious idiot believes, the slaves muttered among themselves, not understanding their chieftain’s actions; the slaves got angry with the gods and the gods got immediately angry back at them, their anger a thousand-fold—and so a curse has lain on the land and its inhabitants ever since, the region scattered widely with supernatural spirits, harbingers of the gods’ anger, the scourge of men; horrors often bombarded the country, settlements were destroyed time and again by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods, especially in the South, close to Ingólf’s original settlement. But Ingólf’s steadfastness saved his progeny from a cruel fate: he followed the gods’ will, abandoned the fertile slopes and fair ground at the foot of the glacier and took the sparse, unprotected land near Reykjavík, Dr. Lassi wrote, cribbing generously from her sources, not giving the slightest thought to quotation marks, because in 1362 Öræfajökull annihilated Hérað. Believe you me, serfs, I chose to leave Norway, said Ingólf. Don’t talk to us about choice, said the slave Karli, you can shove your pillars you know where. Ingólf settled up at Arnarhvoll from where he looked sadly across the fjord; he did not feel like beating the slave. Go, then, Ingólf said to Karli, take a maid as a servant, go settle some land, build a farm, multiply, go fish for happiness with greed’s leaky net—but never return to me unless you are ready to die.

Should we have built a settlement on the cliff in Hérað? Ingólf asked his wife, Hallveig, at Arnarhvol, the area was certainly beautiful to look upon, but the pillars came ashore here in Reykjavík, here where there are hot springs, clean water, fish in the lakes and birds on the cliffs, a perfect harbor, fjords and green islands and spectacular views, the gods wanted this, I could not have imagined that before as we put to sea, we must make ourselves a settlement here, never return to Norway, here we will thrive in peace. So who took the land in Hérað? It will be interesting to see … Now, dear Interpreter, Dr. Lassi said, fetch me someone who knows all about the Skaftafell district, one of those Tvísker brothers, most likely Sigurður, he is such a knowledgeable guy, I can feel my report flourishing, I can sense the material simmering inside me, from settlement to present day, I just need to vent it, to give it form, this could even become a whole book, and a book entirely unlike anything anyone has ever written in Iceland, a medical history of Bernharður with biographical overtones yet mostly about the wound to his thigh and the amputation; a medical history with a biographical element but all wrapped up in national lore, even, my darling, global sensibilities, yes, yes indeed, I see it all flashing clearly before me, this book will not become irrelevant, the way books do because they are so homogeneous these days, only ever about someone, any one thing you could sum up in one sentence, as writers do when they’re asked what their book is about, What’s your book about? they’re asked, it’s about this, the authors answer, sure of their facts, but when I get asked what my book is about I’m going to answer with a single word: everything, everything, it is a global report about an individual and the world, about things in the world, all that’s subjective in the world … but what the hell should the book be called? Help me now, Interpreter, what to call this child? Our thing, it needs to be something subtle, but also descriptive, like Dismemberment … listen up, that’s it! Spare your brain cells, we’ve got our title, Dismemberment, no, stop entirely now, damn, that is a fine title, a keeper, alright by me, as people say nowadays; it just struck me suddenly from the realm of ideas like lightning strikes in the darkness of night in the wasteland! Above me a blinding, gloomy storm cloud grows, brimful of ideas, making lightning flash through the sky! Dr. Lassi said—and there I was, lying there listening to this conversation in order to memorize it, one side effect of butyric acid, Dr. Lassi said, is that everything that comes before the senses gets committed to memory: first butyric acid causes amnesia, then the super-memory in the body and brain get embarrassed and want to compensate a thousand-fold …

Report

about

DISMEMBERMENT

Biography (of sorts)

Medical history with national

& global information written by

Dr. Lassi

That’s what the book will be called, Dr. Lassi told The Interpreter, when the report is published in book form after having appeared in all the world’s major magazines. Or might it be better to call the piece Amputation? That’s more stylish and sophisticated …Am-puta-tion: am … I always have the radio set to AM; puta means whore and I love whores; -tion is action and we must act! … no, better to phrase it like this:

Report

about

Amputation & Castration

&

bio

graphic

medical history

with national and

international information

which was written down verified by trusty

sources by the country’s infamous regional

doctor Lassi

or is that too much? she asked as she wrote out the title on a sheet of paper and lost herself in it—but The Interpreter was itching, pulling at her skirt because she needed to fetch Sigurður Tvísker from down in the dining room …You must help me with this, Interpreter dear … Dr. Lassi read her mind and body language and told her to forget Sigurður for now, for the thing now is to write, don’t hunt down Sigurður immediately, but go away all the same, I’ll call you later if the patient babbles anything, right now I’m going to write a bit of the report, I’ve got my inspiration, although it’s strange how profound I am in your presence, it’s like you blow power and spiritedness into me—yes, you’ll have to be here while I write this report, I can pay you an inconsequential amount, how lucky I am to have you to turn to, I meet so many varied people from day to day in my line of work, I’m always on the go between farms in Suðurland, I have to geld here and dismember there, so I’m exhausted when I come home … my wife, I have to say, is an energy–suck; I get paralyzed in body and soul around her, so she can do whatever she wants with me, I become an object without will in her hands, she controls everything throughout our house and I’m just like a sausage over in the corner, first she drains all the energy from me, all vitality, then she can be in charge of everything in the household—but if I had a person like you around, life would be a thrill, would be fecund, you are an energista my dearest Interpreter, that’s what I’ll call you, you can see how imaginative I am around you, starting to create words, perhaps I’m inclined to pursue the humanities more than the medical sciences since I’m so smart as to be able to create concepts, that would be better for me, but stop prattling on like this, Interpreter, and fetch Sigurður, didn’t I ask you to? No, wait, what’s that Bernharður is burbling, just when I’m about to write, he’s squandering my inspiration, go get him water if he’s asking for water! then bring some more Brennivín for me, just order me a bottle at the bar, the bartender knows me if there’s any trouble, I’ll go see him tonight and pay the bill with my caresses, if he calls them caresses … No, don’t! Interpreter mine, if Bernharður says something remarkable we cannot afford to miss the information for the report, it might suffer perforations because of that, grow thin and full of holes, that’s not good science, the report must be tight and consistent … sorry I am tired, keep an eye on the bleeding while I write, I couldn’t write if you went, I’d get so afraid he’d say something and we’d miss it, it could be the core of the report, so we must not miss anything, nudge me if you see his bandage getting wet, if that happens we must add more toothpaste to the wound, now I’m going to write a bit, I always dreamed of writing, I’m always just about to write something more, there’s just never any time, there’s always things disturbing one, it’s like no one wants anyone to write, I always dreamed of becoming a writer, in some ways it’s childish to be a veterinarian, it’s what I always replied when I was asked as a child what I was going to be when I grew up, I said vet but thought writer, because people reacted to it better, I didn’t have to listen to some long-winded rebuttal; once when I was ten years old I asked my big brother for the loan of a two-króna coin and I bought a notepad and pen, I assumed the pose and felt the beauty of the world surrounding me as I began to stab the pen down, letters beginning to arrange themselves, the words taking shape from each other on the page, meaning accruing, the world opening up! Something so great, so different from what I’d ever experienced: I felt I’d become a magic-woman, a witch, even—but my mother looked over my shoulder and saw the top of the page with, in capital letters, The Biography of Lassi the Veterinarian, by herself, and she exploded with laughter and the whole family burst out laughing and the whole world exploded in laughter, tickled by these fantasies of mine, dead already, it became an entertaining story at every family event and all kinds of uncles and aunts with unfamiliar faces asked me about it and laughed this vile laughter that masked envy and greed; that went on for years, ever thus, ever the same, a mask for envy and greed, it’s still this way, indisposition, envy, and greed, people haven’t thought up anything new under the sun to torment me with. I long since ceased going to those ill-conceived family get-togethers. I’ve dismembered myself from my family, I turned into a teenager determined to rise from my dream’s death so I could have my revenge on my family; I began studying to be a veterinarian, but deep down I was planning to become a writer and record my own life as a veterinarian and how frustrating my family is, how narrow-minded and judgmental, I have always felt that art runs in my blood even though there are no artistic neurons anywhere in my family, I’m so very different from them. Now, finally, now my parents are dead, I will allow my dream to come true, for why haven’t I done it before? In reality, it isn’t possible to do anything in this world until everyone is dead and one finally gets some peace—when all those who have placed obligations on your shoulders are finally dead, you are free and can make your dreams come true, although then you’d be alone in the world, unable to achieve anything. I never wanted children, just to be kind to animals and care for them in this evil human world, prevent them from suffering and cruelty, but it’s proved impossible to escape my family, I’ve been forced to cause many animals to suffer and worse, so much worse, I have been forced to castrate them and kill them, to castrate animals, Interpreter, that is an unspeakable horror … and I cannot get out of this, it has often occurred to me to castrate myself as a deliberate punishment, a payment for all the eunuchs I have made, to remove my uterus, because these are undeniably crimes, crimes against animals, crimes against nature, crimes against life and crimes against God! …You have selected a good job, how noble it is to interpret between people in this post-Babylonian world of ours, Dr. Lassi said, her face clouding as she looked wearily up at the ceiling light, causing shadows to thread shallow wrinkles around her eyes, making her look intensely disordered and cruel, her youth and dreams eaten up the way suburban street systems eat up nature. I have sometimes looked at myself, feeling a pressing need to justify myself, to have self-belief after a hard day at work, and have told myself I’m an interpreter, interpreting between humans and animals, and my wife tells me to cook and clean, she does it indirectly, I come home and nothing has happened at home since the morning, she has been at home all day watching TV, she commands me, dead tired, to cook and clean and I tell her I’m an interpreter between humans and animals, and then I clean and cook food and do it with good graces … but I’m no interpreter, I’m more like a predatory animal, this job isn’t the way children imagine it, I think all veterinarians planned to become veterinarians as children and fixated on the dream and never found a new dream amid the idea-destroying weight of their home environment; it is a dream that arises when children have somewhat lost faith in humanity or, more accurately, their parents, who are humanity’s representatives among children, and so children stop loving mankind, their parents, because they see their parents as executioners; instead, they direct their love to animals, to the animal kingdom, children find harmony with dumb animals and their suffering, although they’re not dumb, all animals have their own language and gestures, it’s just the interpreters are missing, not yet arrived, if I can’t understand German or Viennese, how can I understand pig? And when I step into my childhood dream of giving animals my love, I find I must castrate and kill them, castrate them and kill them, day in and day out, inject them full of drugs and filth; the childhood dream bursts in the adult nightmare, for veterinarians and for everybody else … the adult world is horribly brutish, my Interpreter, it is too late for me to become an author, if my dream had been nurtured when I started my biography at nine years old, I would have become a writer, everyone is always trying to destroy others’ dreams, my parents destroyed my dream by making fun of it, instead of encouraging it, you must start early if you want to flourish as an artist, there’s no time for anything else, you need to start your education at an early age and never stop, I am not talking about school education but self-study, the peace to pursue one’s interests like the Tvísker brothers have been able to, having never busied themselves with farming except for sheer pleasure, they would not be the scientists and artists they are today if they had been required to farm or carry out some other duty; if I’d been invited to write the story of my life when I was a little girl I’d have become an author and lived my dream instead of living in a nightmare as a vet, unceasing, how badly I’ve spent my time, spent my life badly … and now I’m hungry, can you fetch sandwiches or something, and get Sigurður on the way, my Interpreter, sandwiches now and Sigurður from Tvísker, now we need to put the big truck in the report, I first need to disperse my thoughts before I can collect myself in intense concentration, I don’t feel I can write right now, perhaps I can glean something from Sigurður while we have ourselves some sandwiches, put the time to use, instead of eating while staring into the air, we can find out something useful about the history of the Skaftafell district, perhaps when the phone lines were laid across Skeiðarársand, I don’t want salad or anything like that, just ham and pineapple, I think gleaning Sigurður’s words would be a glacial marker on the way to bringing the report to fruition, crossing the choppy, moving glacier that is writing, preferably white bread, and I could become a writer and stop having to castrate and kill animals, but my real dream, my dream is to get out of my dream, though then someone will take my place and continue to torment the animals, so it’s just as well that I do it, I want the sandwich toasted, animal suffering is a cog in the mechanism of society, you can’t stop the wheels, although that sanctimonious bore is always saying so on the radio, over and again, that reedy-voiced little fatso, can’t remember his name, also a jug of water and some glasses, Sigurður’s full of interesting information, he’s a really good and talented man, no ketchup or anything disgusting like that, it’s staggering that these Tvísker siblings are such intelligent people, perhaps it’s because they don’t waste their time farming but attend to their studies, I wish I could lose myself in study, you hear farmers and farm-dwellers say, but we need to attend to the livestock, attend to the livestock and attend to the livestock, always on the run from studying, or how else would we all live? Interpreter, off you go now, it’s just that everyone wants to be like them, like those gifted fellows without progeny, it’s said there’s mental illness in the family, now I’m going to stop castrating and killing and I’m going to apply myself to study, apply myself to creative writing, my dearest lady, my man! Applying oneself to writing is the most exalted and most sinful thing, worse than castrating and killing, I’m headed out of the ashes and into the fire, but who settled Öræfi? I’m going to ask Sigurður as we eat a sandwich, I know Ingólf Arnarson lived here a year or two at Ingólfshöfði but scholars don’t consider that settlement, so what’s settlement? My books are all at home, I want to travel with my books, to install bookshelves in the folding camper or pop-up camper or whatever it’s called, but my wife denies me even that, I was going to pack several essential books for the journey to Öræfi, including The Settlement of Skaftafell & its Governing by Einar Öl. Sveinsson, that first-class piece by a first-class scholar of those first-class pillars, it would have been better to leave a toothbrush than The Settlement of Skaftafell & its Governing, I’ve read it before, but a long time ago, I know the book well but that’s not the point, I’ve brushed my teeth often enough, I would not have to disturb Sigurður if I had the book, you follow, although everyone benefits from disturbing Sigurður, one grows more accomplished from proximity to him, a man spends his time well in the presence of smart people it says in The Brothers Karamazov, something like that comes to mind, I cannot remember who said it, whether it was Ivan or Alosja rather than Dimitri, it would have been good, time well-spent, looking that up, my wife took all the books out the camper van and put them back in their places in my office, she considers books to be furniture, or junk, she said that the family was headed on a trip together and I was not going alone on an outing with my books—but what family? Just her and her abominable poodle, I admittedly neglect them for my work, my endless work trips that take me the length and breadth of Suðurland, and, yes, by reading when I’m finally back home, it’s possible to watch TV together but not to read books together, unless we each read to one another, though I do not want to hear my wife spoiling the text of The Settlement of Skaftafell & its Governing by Einar Ól. Sveinsson, destroying a book which is so precious to me, she goes back to the TV and lies about all day and stares at it in the campsite between browsing about the Visitor Center, looking at postcards, lapping down ice creams, shitting in the bathroom … In modern society, we have to do everything ourselves, so there’s no way for anyone to become a real writer or real scholar, let alone a polymath, no one in modern times has the potential to become a generalist, that’s the past, it’s not so much that infinite specialization has set knowledge and science and philosophy into the shredder, rendering science nothing but a pile of strips nowadays, it’s rather there is no time, they are clever, those brothers Tvísker, they divided the studying between them so that together they are one great polymath; you have no time in these modern times, you have to do everything yourself, despite all the machines, appliances, all this stuff which makes you think you don’t have to do anything except be a master of all of it, cradling oneself in a rocking chair and sucking a pipe and thinking about the deeper questions of existence or even trifling questions, modern appliances let you think they are doing it all and that you yourself have nothing to do, but a person is constantly in a frenzy in their household, if you aren’t constantly in a frenzy the appliances send you an accusing glance so you are always guilty of not being in a frenzy with the appliances, and when you’re in a frenzy over these domestic devices, you’re guilty of not doing your literature and science, of not using the time to gain knowledge instead of being this damned slave to domestic appliances, for modern man is a slave to technology, to nothing else, everything intended to relieve human activity has made it heavier: as well as needing to know everything, you need to do everything yourself, in the past there were many people in a home and each had their role, now everyone is alone at home and has the task of doing everything; in fact, no one is at home any longer because all of us are out serving the State. Where formerly one cooked dinner, another tidied, one raised the kids, the shepherd herded the sheep, things were clear, now everything is so unclear, now everyone feels insulted, particularly women if reminded of a domestic role, there cannot be any division of labor, everyone has to do everything, know everything, and no one can be at home during the day because that would be State inequality, though no one does anything and no one can be anything but a domestic slave and nothing sensible comes from nothing … it will be nice to meet Sigurður from Tvísker, I want to tell him I’ve been a subscriber to his magazine Skaftfellingur from the beginning, although my wife was against it, because we aren’t from Skaftafell district but rather Rangárvalla district, so couldn’t I subscribe to Rangvellingur? But there is no magazine called Rangvellingur, there is the magazine Árnesingur from Árnes district but I don’t care to read it, then there’s the magazine Goðasteinn which Þórður published out in Skógar, a regional magazine for Rangvellings which bridges the gap between Rangárvalla district and Skaftafell district, a truly wonderful magazine in every way, especially the old issues, as always, I was a subscriber for a bit, kept it a secret from my wife, who thought it too extravagant to subscribe to both journals, even though she buys tons of magazines, ones that are for the sake of the household, she said, useful magazines everyone could enjoy, magazines one could look at but not just ones for me alone, my magazines were magazines for eccentrics and oddbirds, my wife said, and there was little point saying I got neither pleasure nor use out of her Life, Modern Living, The Week, Betrayal & Treachery, House & Dwellings, Massage & Home Living, Drink & Luxury, Seen and Heard, Scent & Smell, Domesticity, Improvability, The Ball of Yarn & Its Fate and so on and so forth, this bloody woman’s garbage, what’s more, she wanted to subscribe to Channel 2, that’s where I had to draw a line! What about subscribing to National Geographic? I asked, isn’t it fascinating? but she indicated that it isn’t … I want to tell Sigurður from Tvísker that Skaftfellingur is an outstanding magazine and I found his articles the most interesting, most informative and best written, I would like to tell him without any posturing, without buttering him up or getting caught up in affectations, I want to tell him this sincerely because I feel this is so profound, always, one is always playing some role, no matter what one does, no matter what one says; I will absolutely be putting on a pose, to my own inconvenience, when I tell Sigurður how much his writing affects me; I need to make sure I’m understood, to get the truth across I need to play a certain role. Strangely, when I’m castrating and killing I need to be in a role, identity is nothing but a role, I’m not the same at work as when I’m home with my family, sometimes you take the embers of your work-self home, which doesn’t sit well with those playing their home roles—it’s like a character caught between plays, but these are always our roles, oh, how exhausting they are, each role altering with each repetition, becoming a distortion of itself: something existed once but repetition has distorted it. I gear myself up for the role of speaking with the Minister of Agriculture and the Minister of Agriculture gears himself up for the role of talking to me, this preparation takes place backstage. Being yourself is definitely a role. I can only castrate and kill when I’m in my work role, a government service role, a domestic service role, talking to my mother, or making love, I can only castrate and kill if I am in my work role, and believe me, I am quite trained in this, one role takes over from another, you don’t like yourself in every role, in my home I’m barely a person, my wife sucks so much energy that I can’t wait to leave home for work, the worst thing is that I’m my best self in the role of the veterinarian, castrating and killing, in those moments I’m so strong, straightforward and purposeful, no nonsense, all the world in its right order, things working logically by themselves, the universe stable … of course the world is not at all in safe order and nothing is logical and nothing stable, I do what I need to, though deep down I despise my veterinarian role above all, perhaps that’s how it is with everything, that what you most love you hate in your heart, a subject authors understand, don’t they have a love-hate relationship with their fictions? So I’ve heard, and I thought it strange at first but now I understand it, for that’s how I am these days, my friend, a person in a role, empty inside from having devoted her life to castrating and killing, all as part of her own dream … I’m not a veterinarian, I’m an executioner …

It was Hrolllaugur from Mæri, the Interpreter interrupted, Hrolllaugur from Mæri settled Skaftafell district.

What’s that!? … Hrolllaugur! Wait there, I’ll write it down immediately, said Dr. Lassi, I knew that, surely, it had just been taken from me … Hrolllaugur … with three l-s? really? Meaning “shivering-in-a-pool”? Where’s the pen and notepad, it’s sopping, covered with the tourist’s blood … Hrolllaugur from Mæri … my friend … the hot spring must have been cold in Mæri so the little guy got chills … the dick … his dick shrank, ha ha ha, that’s why he called Hrolllaugur, I’m going to put this theory in the report, but how fares the patient and where are the sandwiches? Seems like he’s doing fine, the buttery butyric acid has helped him settle his own new land … and Sigurður? … did you hear, he’s shivering, fetch a blanket! The right thing would be to fill Flosalaug full of chlorine and alcohol and throw him in the deep end with a barrel and a life preserver, as I speak his leg and buttock are being incinerated so the pool should be warm and cozy, that would take the chilll out of the settlller … might we not say that the penis is addicted to colonization? … well, what’s the deal with that … no dicks in my life, fortunately, when they come my way I tend to cut them off and throw them in the trash, interpreter, you queen of language, are there many words in Icelandic, or any other languages, with three l-s in a row? I can think of one: loyalty points, no no no, there’s only one l at a time, where did that come from? I don’t even know what loyalty points are or how they’re relevant, I’m falling into a trance … it is best to have a pen and notepad handy, yes, I know that loyalty points are what people get when they leave the country by plane, which makes them doubly contrary to Hrolllaugur from Mæri, since Hrolllaugur reached land by ship … with his three ellls …

Ballless, said the Interpreter.

What about being ballless? Dr. Lassi asked, is the patient saying something about being ballless? Maybe he wants to know where his balls are?

There are three ells in ballless, said the Interpreter, like in Hrolllaugur from Mæri. Though I think it’s spelled with just two ells, Hrollaugur …

Shiver-eyes! cried Dr. Lassi, by which I infer that his eyes experienced tremoring, perhaps from light-sensitivity or suffering from chronic myoclonic twitches? …Anyway, you were saying?

I was just going to say that Hrollaugur was the brother of Hrólf, Duke of Normandy, the one known as Hrólf the Expeditionary, the subject of many stories in the ancient Nordic legendary sagas.

Oh yes, they’re so entertaining! You have them here?

This fellow Göngu-Hrólf, or Rolf the Walker, the brother of the Hrollaugur who settled in the Skaftafell district, Dr. Lassi’s report explained, is one of France’s national heroes, known as Rollon—he was called Hrólf and he spoke Icelandic but the French could not say Hrólf in a normal fashion, and called him Rollon, likely because he always smelled clean and fresh. Hrólf the Expeditionary was a great viking and outlaw; with his army he gained control of part of Russia, as told in Heimskringla by Snorri Sturluson and the Sagas, and he toured various lands, accruing gold, marrying princesses, fighting for England, storming into France, waging war in Paris, becoming Earl of what is now called Normandy, owing to the fact that the area was settled by Norwegians. Hrólf the Walker was Rúðu-Earl, the Earl based in Rúðu, which the French call Rouen; he defended France against an invasion of Danish Vikings, and from Hrólf the Expeditionary descend Norman earls and all the English kings—so Hrollaugur’s brother is a French national hero, the ancestor of the British royal family …

Hold on, what’s that the little punk is muttering, interrupting our scholarship? It’s about that horny hussy he met in Skaftafell? Horny-Edda, the park ranger, I think she’s hanging about down here still in the dining room, feeling like it’s her duty to watch over him—but I will not allow people to press on in here, teeming with bacteria and filth, who knows where their fingers have been, visits must be controlled, remember Dr. Semmelweis! But the little hornbud will get to meet her eunuch, we don’t stand in the way of love, isn’t that so, my Interpreter? … no matter how trashy she is … oh, what glory to be a lesbian!

I arrived in Skaftafell by bus from Reykjavík on Friday 11th April, Bernharður said, Dr. Lassi wrote in her report, the air was relatively cool and a warm sun shone that day in Öræfi. I wheeled my trunk to one edge of the campsite, which was largely empty; I had plenty of space. I was having a very impressionable day, and when she came by to charge me for the night on the campsite, I was immediately brought outside myself, transported by the uncontrollable beauty confronting me, and I don’t know if I’ve yet fully returned to myself, I feel like I’m still out in the other world into which that beauty cast me, where I want to be, unleaving: there is love, everything there transcends explanation, everything becomes feeling, everything is muteness, deafness, sightless, I hardly knew whether I was in this world or another, I was intoxicated, absolutely beside myself and yet right up close to the core of my being; how remarkable that when a person is outside themselves they also become the very kernel of their own existence. I looked at the ground so it wouldn’t be quite so obvious to her how desperate I was, desperate because of something immaterial, an emptiness which came upon me, and she came to me and I felt a stinging, tingling sensation amplify in my stomach, I had no time to recover or gather myself, I ran a comb through my shock of hair, she was asking for my payment and the evening sun was on her face, Hvannadalshnúkur in the background, her cheeks flushed and glowing in the spring scents, nature come to life, she is the beauty within beauty, I thought, and I dived into my trunk, hunting for money to pay her—I invited the park ranger inside my trunk for caraway liquor while she waited, so she wasn’t standing there shivering, the weather cold though the sun shone, and she agreed, she said there was no need to hurry, there wasn’t that much to do this early in spring, I let the way she spoke go to my head, her voice ever so slightly broken, husky, seductive, I said I had been introduced to this liquor the previous day and was taken with it, I love caraway, said the park ranger, she introduced herself as Edda, I do not know what came over me, maybe it was a fear of science, I don’t know, my heart raged violently in my ribs like a caged mink, like a mink driven crazy by cruelty, like a mink which wants to bite the farmer in the throat and kill all birds and destroy the Icelandic ecosystem! … I introduced myself and there was this abominable burning in my chest and I began to tremble, succumbing to spasms, tugging at anything I could reach, this always happens when I’m infatuated, surely she has a boyfriend called Snorri or something, I thought, you cannot touch her, you must not think about it, I said to myself, unless she touches you first, first, I have to stop trembling, my teeth need to stop clattering so I can talk, I was looking for my money but I had no idea what I was doing, I was going to split asunder with all this emotion, I could not keep myself together, my rift plates were transverse, I myself was the glowing magma and I was running in all directions, the kernel that is missing from the upper atmosphere … Edda blushed and smiled, she is a Nordic beauty with perfect teeth, I thought, though I did not want to think it, a fine-figured bird, I was on fire with infatuation and death, charm gusted off her, I had invited her into the trunk and she had accepted. My penis is getting hard, I said, and she began to laugh. That night we lay together in the trunk and I fervently longed for the new day to never come, wishing I could stay in her arms until the destruction of the earth.

Kindly fetch the strumpet if he is so infatuated with her, Dr. Lassi told the Interpreter, it’ll help with his recovery. The eunuch doesn’t lack an erotic sensibility! We also have to allow some damn visits since we have transformed the hotel into a hospital … then we can change the hotel in Freysnes into a research center, too, because this is the site of an ancient farmstead and I am planning to finish the report while we wait for the amputee and his paramour … it’s just as good to have a visitor now as at a later time … it makes sense to let Edda be the first to tackle him today, he seems obsessed with her, he is always mentioning her in his delirium, she clearly occupies a place in his heart, remind me to have a section in the report about love, I tend to forget it and go directly to the erotic.

In the trunk, Edda got all steamed up, breathing excitedly. I had not been with a woman for quite some time and was worried I wouldn’t measure up, wouldn’t be able to perform adequately, to lick her up until she was all done, I couldn’t quell my thoughts, relax, said Edda, sensing my tension, telling me to be calm, I lay on my stomach and she massaged me, massaged my tremors away, I tried to plot out my moves, the techniques I should use, but that terrified me, the park ranger told me to relax, enjoy it, enjoy it, said Edda, just to hear her speaking those words in that voluptuous voice, it was like all the liquid had been wrung from my brain and sucked out of my head, down my spine to spit out my penis—all the burdens, the despair and anxiety, the evident embarrassment. Contentment flourished in my heart and joy filled my breast with its perfumed fragrance; in my mind I began to cartwheel up Mávabyggðir where I threw myself into a hidden crevasse to wait out a happy death worshipping the marvelous monstress Horny-Edda and all the world’s goddesses! … Sorrow gets stored up in the scrotum, Edda said, lying in the trunk, as does joy. After a brief moment, something took shape in my body, a feeling deep inside me that resembled swamplight; it slowly grew into a veil of mist, will-of-the-wisp enveloping me, then the fire broke out again and momentarily lit up the trunk from within, and then came the pyroclastic flow and so did I, utterly … ash and gravel … Edda spent the night with me in the trunk, but I woke her with my mouth’s caresses and she sighed loudly as she came out of her dream, she asked me to come inside her at once, I slipped my penis in and kissed her firm breasts and in response her nipples hardened and reddened, I nibbled at her nipples, Bernharður was saying, I nibbled at her nipples, he kept repeating, I nibbled at her nipples! That’s what he’s shouting, the Interpreter said … please stop, said Dr. Lassi, go on … Edda’s body tremored in response and she wrapped her legs around me, I thrust deep into her and she sighed so loud it rang out in the night’s silence across the Skaftafell campsite, she yelled yes, she screamed, she orgasmed and began to cry, we held each other tight, lying in a still embrace; some mysterious barrier, some dam inside me, had weakened, I felt I could no longer be as objective as I once had been, no longer a body; instead, I’d become subjective, a spirit, I felt I’d touched some ancient ecstasy, had left my body, up to now I’d been a bound manuscript but I’d become oral folklore … Ek em súbjektíf, I said to Edda, and tremblingly clutched for the caraway liquor, serving us drinks in two cups. She clinked my glass and said: better than prayer. I shook so much Brennivín slopped from the shot glass and Edda had to tip my head back and pour it down my throat. I was trembling all over and shaking, spitting the liquor out my nostrils—but then I swiftly calmed, my emotions bursting out so that I felt like I’d vanished into her wonderful being, disappeared from my own being, become the core of myself, I shook with fear, the slightest movement sent electric currents streaming through my mind, we locked eyes and I found security and beauty and terrific sexiness in her sensual eyes, she was so sturdy and compact, soft and firm, we were in thought and then she was on top of me, I was worried whether she was satisfied, she shook herself and groaned softly, then the sighs increased until finally the violent shaking overtook the trunk once again … we fell asleep wrapped around each other. Mávabyggðir could wait.

After resting, satisfied, I found myself brimming with a great store of ideas and noted them frantically in my notebook through the night while Edda slept. I lacked an introduction to my essay on Mávabyggðir and sat on the bed in the morning sun beneath the glorious mountain. Place names often describe the terrain or soil, I wrote in the notebook, place names can describe local conditions or landmarks themselves; really, one could say the place names are the landmark, symbolically; they are often formed by the lay of the land or its landmarks, the shape or relation of one place to another, they often give the hint of mineral strata or some other geological formations, or vegetation, they might describe color, can be metaphorical names, symbols, they are boundary markers, shore markers, the boundaries of pastures, they are taken from livestock, wildlife, from farming, from work methods or procedures, shipping routes and anchor points, trails, plentiful resources, travelogues, sundry incidents and events, battles, weather patterns, temporal markers, legends and oral histories, the names of people, doppelgangers, references to pagan religion, to Christian faith, the Church, political assemblies; place names are set upon landmarks and landmarks show people the way; place names are a testament to the people who settle a land or region, to their life, work, and thoughts; place names are precious cultural histories documenting ancient eras, our attitudes today, and a view to the future; place names are themselves people.

I heated up some coffee and put a big layer-cake on the table to mark the occasion of this glorious day of the Lord. A breakfast for heroes! I shouted to wake up Snorri’s-Edda. She stirred and said in a low voice: How many books you have in your trunk … She fumbled about, as though trying to get her bearings with what had happened. What, are they all national studies? Yes, I said, I got them at the used-and-rare bookstore, Bragi, my friend helped me choose them, more or less chose them all for me. A lot was going on around the Skaftafell campsite. Are there many people at the campsite? I asked. She answered that there were, relative to the time of year. It’s good to sleep in a tent, I said but Edda was staring dejectedly at the tart, her expression somewhat ambiguous, though you need a good tent, emerging from a tent is like being born, which makes sleeping in a tent the closest thing to undoing our amnesia about the time we spent in our mother’s womb; it’s important that the tent is good, made of decent material, who wants their mother’s womb to be made of nylon and to crinkle relentlessly? What about this trunk of yours? asked Edda, isn’t it like being born from your father’s asshole when you clamber out into the new day? … the trunk is made of beech, it’s a durable wood but lightweight, I said, pouring a cup of coffee for her, cutting a large cake slice for that amazing body, then I asked her, suddenly sniffling: Is it fun, being a park ranger? …Yes, said Edda, it’s decent when things are going well, and it always goes well; you meet all kinds of fun people at the campsite, and get to observe the country’s economic development and the deterioration in taste, how the more a person moves away from nature, the more he desires it. At first, everyone came with cotton tents or tents made from sailcloth, natural materials that breathed well and kept the wet away; at one time, the tents didn’t even have a floor, and that’s how people slept best—they were A-shaped, so no pools of water formed on them, and they broke the wind well—but then they were no longer good enough and people began to bring all kinds of deformed tent shapes, an imitation of the mistakes of the city suburbs during the ’80s, domed bays here and outcroppings there, it was a difficult task, tenting such tents, people spent all day at it, not to mention packing them back away; it was a significant commitment, the whole weekend was spent attending to the tent. Next, one began to see pop-up campers, trailers attached to the back of a car out of which one unfolded a tent, in theory with a single gesture, although in reality that one gesture became a thousand; the advantage was that the tent didn’t take up space in the car but hung there behind it. A year later, the nation became slightly richer and pop-up campers became shelters, that is, much larger trailers, sometimes larger than the cars themselves; you hauled the shelter directly out from the trailer with a crank instead of flipping it open. The people in these shelter houses were so elegant that they looked down on the people in pop-up campers, who must be poor folk unable to keep up with the times; the shelter people couldn’t begin to imagine the era of national shame when families had stayed in ordinary tents on their travels, with all those incomprehensible poles and pillars; now you just gave it one crank et voilà—but many people got trapped in these shelter-houses when they lay down together and a lot of well-to-do people lost fingers; for a time, it was absolutely a status symbol to be missing a finger, it meant you probably had a shelter-house. But economic development outpaced status symbols, Snorri’s-Edda said, and the shelter-houses were still a kind of tent the men had to fold out from a trailer and the women were always afraid of them, worried about getting pinched by them or crumpled up into the structure or even shut inside and the men stopped bothering to listen to their nagging, and they very well did collapse in and the whole family was stuck in the trailer, a very scary experience, I’ve had to rescue many people from their trailers. A year later, no one had them, except caravaners, which left people free of the banality of tents and all that fussing, is it the case that now things are made from plastic and take people ever further into modernity? A year later, one could see more and more mobile homes, where the trailer is merged with the car; some people feel that’s a step down, that the mobile homes have a boorish quality, that it’s just more plastic rubbish designed for tropical weather, but we have seen it blow up everywhere, exploding all through the district, and now the situation is marked by a certain uncertainty: people do not know how to sleep when traveling. Who knows; perhaps everyone in future will have a trunk like yours.

Ever since Bernharður Fingurbjörg, as a young boy, saw the discussion in National Geographic about Öræfi, Vatnajökull and its expanse, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, he dreamed of going to Iceland. The magazine featured large images of Jökulfell, Skaftafell, Hafrafell, Svínafell, and Sandfell; interviews with ancient farmers; pictures of sealers and the skin-curing process; of bird-hunters, abseiling and taking eggs (they were poor farmers in remote areas getting hold of what food they could); there were discussions of handicraft and homemade work equipment; of horses on the sands; of the dying art of riding horses through the glacial waters. It was like the end of beauty, Bernharður says, though I didn’t think so back then, I discovered it inside me later, it is only now that I’ve put that feeling into words. And then the ring road was opened up and bridges crisscrossed the sand and Öræfi was run together with the world after 1100 years of solitude: the district was opened up and simultaneously destroyed. I have to go to Öræfi, I kept telling myself and later I managed to create a link to my studies. I have always subscribed to National Geographic; its spines were the yellow glow of my childhood. The Iceland issue summarized glacial exploration history, documenting the first trip the doctor Sveinn Pálsson took onto Öræfajökull; he was my boyhood hero simply because of this one short passage about him in the issue, a passage I read a thousand times—I was probably the only kid in the whole of Austria who was bothered about the 18th century Icelandic physician Sveinn Pálsson, the only one who had him as a hero or knew who he was, even. My father had a great affection for him, owned his books, quoted his diaries and his travel narrative, which we had in our home. I decided to start keeping a diary, too, and become a bit scientific in my own life. I began to write small travelogues on the way to school, all the names of the streets I passed, what time I arrived at an intersection, when I left and when I arrived at my destination, I recorded the weather, light, temperature, distance, all the detours home, I wrote down all the names of the streets in Innere Stadt, first it was all extremely imperfect, but gradually I trained myself, I wanted to become a doctor and explorer and naturalist like Sveinn Pálsson, the first to walk on Öræfajökull. The Iceland issue quoted old writings, included old black-and-white photos of research expeditions from the early 20th century, discussed J. P. Koch’s surveying of Skeiðarársand and Öræfajökull in 1903 and his collaboration with Dr. Wegener, the situation of the tectonic plates in Iceland, how the country is at the fracture between the North American plate and the Eurasian plate, all those frightful volcanic eruptions which destroyed settlements and human beings through the ages—ever since then I wanted to go to Iceland and walk around the mountains in Öræfi, the Wasteland, get into all of it … I later saw that behind all of this lay, of course, the father of mountain-going, Benedict de Saussure, his alpine spirit hovered over the waters of my youth, Benedict de Saussure was a contemporary and model for Sveinn Pálsson, this poor Icelandic farmer’s son wanted to be like Benedict de Saussure, the true aristocrat among Geneva citizens who sacrificed his working potential and intelligence for mankind. I also found out that Sveinn Pálsson check-mated his mentor on one crucial point, though never received recognition for it: Sveinn Pálsson was the first to grasp the nature of advancing glaciers, a problem with which people had long wrestled. He presented his theory in his book Glacier Writings along with a study of glaciology; if it had been printed right away in 1795, it would have become the foundational article for the academic community; Sveinn Pálsson is the secret father of glacial studies. In Glacier Writings it states, according to National Geographic, that farmers in Öræfi had for centuries known the glaciers’ character; though it was said that Sveinn had been the first to set foot on Öræfajökull, the Öræfings had long gone out onto the glacier, though only if they had an errand, not for fun like nowadays; they knew the languor which seizes you as you head over the top of the crater, what’s now called Antarctic stare. Sveinn was first and foremost a doctor, he translated Core Questions in Health by Dr. Bernharður Faust, which came out around 1800 and was on my father’s bookshelves along with Travelogue and Glacier Writings. In Faust’s book, in a chapter about traveling that I used to prepare for my Iceland journey and glacier hiking, it says: What should you do if you get frostbite? Avoid going into a warm building, or near a hot flame. What instead? The frostbitten limb needs submerging in ice-cold water, or to be packed in ice and snow, until it has completely thawed, and life and feeling return to it. Wouldn’t the pain be intense? Yes, deeply painful, but you must do it anyway, because the limb, which otherwise might have been forfeit, will come to life again and heal completely if you follow this method.

From National Geographic I got a love of maps: the magazine often came with maps that I hung on my wall while my peers hung posters of singers and band photos from magazines like Bravo and Popcorn. I was teased for my interest in maps, always being asked if I needed to find my way home to my mother, which often upset me. The map of Öræfi held the place of honor: it was drawn by the Danish captain J. P. Koch in 1903. One gloomy day in my room, I saw my name on the map; I was startled, uncontrollably happy, afraid. Fingurbjörg, it was within Mávabyggðir, inside Vatnajökull, in Öræfi; J. P. Koch had been there and there I too would go, I want to go to Fingurbjörg in Mávabyggðir, I later said to my professor in the Nordic Studies Department at the University of Vienna. I read up on local knowledge, I groped around in the books in the library of the Nordic Studies Department, in one source or other I stumbled on the fact that, despite the name, no gulls live in Mávabyggðir, and I had trouble believing it, there must formerly have been some avian settlers who gave rise to the place name, in the 18th century Travelogue of Eggert and Bjarni, which the library had in Danish, German, French, and English, I found out that there had still been gulls living at Mávabyggðir back then, and I also read about wild sheep, how there were two strains still alive in Iceland, in Núpsstaðarskógar and far out on the glacier at Mávabyggðir. I felt a burning need to study the history and the meanings of the place name Mávabyggðir, I would defend my doctoral thesis on this, resolve all the uncertainty, go to Iceland and climb Fingurbjörg and investigate Mávabyggðir deep inside the glacier, taking samples of rocks and soil, looking into the relationship of folklore and place names, and also conduct, if it warranted space in the thesis, a comparative grammatical study of mountain place names in Öræfi and Týrol, using the teachings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure as a guiding light. My professor at the Nordic Studies Department jumped head height with joy when I brought him the topic, Bernharður said on his sickbed in Freysnes, wrote Dr. Lassi.

So far I had been considered eccentric for having Iceland on the brain: a certain shame has afflicted Nordic Studies since the Nazi era; the field has been cursed since that time. Now, though, interest has re-arisen around the world, mainly in medieval Icelandic literature and Nordic mythology, although these topics are not absolutely the foundation of the State like they were the last time they were in fashion. I was always fond of Burnt-Njal’s Saga in my classes in the Nordic Studies Department; my father had the Halldór Laxness edition of the story in Icelandic, featuring large, beautiful pictures that enchanted me; he had given me it in German, Die Saga vom Weisen Njal (1978), when he became aware of my interest through National Geographic. I became obsessed with Suðurland, I pored over the map, I dreamt dreams about Flosi, the ruler of Svínafell, I dreamt dreams about Flosi’s dream when the giant Járngrímur appeared to him and said that poisonous serpents would rise up, how he enumerated all those who were doomed, except in my dream he named the names of the classmates who teased me, I told them that they would all die and I believe that has for the most part come to pass. I felt connected to Flosi from Svínafell, how he was sucked into a scenario that he did not understand and how he responded by putting on traveling pants, a sort of medieval leggings, and headed off on foot from Svínafell across the lava and sand and glacial lakes for several hundreds of miles—my professor in Nordic Studies was astonished at this and danced with joy and fury and went pirouetting down the columned hall, up until now Flosi has been a villain! ha ha ha! said the professor, Flosi who went on the journey to torch the dwelling at Bergþórshvol, burning up Njal and his wife and family and many other people, Flosi’s an arsonist and villain! the professor retorted and laughed loudly and rolled around the room, but I maintained Flosi was human, perhaps all too human, he goes along with or rather gets caught up in the plot and acts against his better judgment, he is forced to bow before customs and habits that actually displease him, he is out of keeping with his time, under the yoke of civilization, I said to my professor who now had stopped dancing and giggling and was stood bent over the pages on the big lectern, the time still hasn’t come for a Nietzschean interpretation of ancient Icelandic literature, he said, nor Freudian neither … Flosi is by nature a chieftain, a bellwether, I said, that makes him an empath …Well, said the professor, have it your way. So I went and wrote a master’s thesis about the place names in Burnt-Njal’s Saga.

I wanted to wend my way onto the glacier, standing down on the plain near the Visitor Center in Skaftafell and looking at the mountains and glaciers towering over the country, this beautiful monster that could destroy everything at any moment, I went out on the sand, watching from there; I pored over the map in my trunk, stored the place names in my memory, went out and matched the map to the territory; the glaciers had retreated drastically in the hundred years since Captain Koch measured Öræfi in 1903. I had read that the way up to Mávabyggðir is to follow the so-called moraine streaks in the glacier that originate at Mávabyggðir and reach down to the plains, known as the Mávabyggðarönd, although they are really a belt of rocks which the advancing glacier ferries from the mountains down to the lowlands; you can establish the direction of glacial movement using these streaks. There was no hope left and I knew I had to study my maps well to orient myself better for the trip.

Hafrafell is a hideous mountain, I said to Snorri’s-Edda when I re-entered the trunk and pored over the map, Bernharður said, and the author of this report can agree with that, Dr. Lassi wrote, having subsequently gone on a journey to hunt the wild sheep with the farmers in Öræfi, as discussed in greater detail later in this report. Hafrafell separates Skaftafellsjökull and Svínafellsjökull, but until almost the middle of the previous century the glaciers proceeded together in front of Hafrafell and sealed off the mountain, creating a very good highland pasture, which is still the reality, but the glaciers have now retreated to such an extent that Hafrafell protrudes into the country, surrounded by moraine; sky-high, sheer, rough-edged, like a rusty knife thrust out of the glacier. In Hafrafell there is a treasure trove of place names for you to investigate, said Snorri’s-Edda, because animals have gone about there since the settlement. I go on the livestock round-up there every autumn and am beginning to know it a bit; it’s impossible if no one knows place names, for then shepherding is pointless and hopeless.

We opened the trunk up and gazed out at Hafrafell. Evil rocks, for sure, said Snorri’s-Edda, impassable, up there on the mountain ridges are pillars known as the Upper Men and the Front Men because they seem like people standing there, visible far and wide, the key characteristic of Hafrafell, some people call them the Upper and Lower Men but that is not right, it’s Upper and Front Men, although the front men are below the upper men. I tried to note down everything Snorri’s-Edda said, looking at the mountain and the map and scribbling, there is also Illagil, or Evil Gully, and Einstigir, the Narrow Stair, and Stóraskarð, the Great Chasm, and Langagil, Long Gully, you need to know that when herding in the round-up, if you want to send someone somewhere quick then everyone needs to know what direction to go in, there’s Grjótdal, the Stony Valley, and in Grjótdal the extremely high cliffs are called Svarthamrar, Sheer Black, they face westward, under which is Ból, the Shaft: once, two youths of around twenty from Svínafell went hunting animals one winter, one of them plunged from the precipitous cliff, falling hundreds of meters, but he landed in a snowdrift which was piled high; he escaped with a shattered foot, but there was too little daylight left to get help from home at Svínafell and the boy was not equipped to lay out in the frost overnight so the story goes that his companion took him on his back and carried him all the way to Svínafell, what’s more the Svínafellers are as strong as giants, said Snorri’s-Edda, said Bernharður, wrote Dr. Lassi, sweaty and barely keeping up. First you think: why would animals live on this mountain where there’s nothing but scree and stones, after all, on the way to the mountain there are many grassy slopes, for example, one that’s simply called Torfur, or The Turf, on the east side of the mountain and not visible from here, then there’s Meingil, where a man once plunged to his death when his staff broke, he fell all the way down the glacier, then there are also the grassy Kviar and Rák over there, where the path goes up from Svarthamradal and over to Svarthamra, from where the boy fell, further in, the place name opposite to the west is Fauskagljúfur …What is fauskur? I asked, I don’t know the word. It’s rotten wood, said Snorri’s-Edda, sometimes they say about old men that they are fauskar if they are somewhat stiff and formal, in Fauskagljúfur they have unearthed the remains of an ancient forest. High up between the Upper and Front Men lies Fles, there are awe-inspiring views from there and you are among giant-settlements, Fles is springy turf, it’s good pasture so the sheep seek it out. Far away from Skeiðarársandur, Hafrafell seems small, a tuff protruding from Öræfajökull, but when you get nearer Hafrafell appears impossible and untouchable, all cut up by precipitous ravines which are rightly called Illuklettar, the Evil Rocks, it is impassable, starvation and a death sentence await you there, no one does go there, you can see from here that transverse from Illuklettar there’s a mysterious X, a symbol marked by a guardian land-spirit so that no one may pass; when we herders go up to Svínafellsheið and over the glacier to Hafrafell, although it’s possible to go right up the ridge between the Front and Upper Men, I would never chase sheep into Illuklettar, said Snorri’s-Edda, I’m greatly fearful of this mysterious X, what is it a symbol for? On Hafrafell, tourists are in grave danger of being swept down in a landslide from above to a death deep on the glaciers that flow either side of the mountain—once the mountain was encircled by glacier completely, but the glacier’s retreated so it’s possible to drive up to it—these glaciers have swallowed their share of tourists and experienced mountaineers; their metallic equipment comes to light 50 years later, flattened and crumpled, an indication of the ice’s power. No human remains ever come to light. It’s as though the ice wants to hold onto bodies but to spew back metal; the metal debris is all on display at the Visitor Center in Skaftafell, and people are drawn to look into the display box, to see death itself, the abyss arranged in a clinical display case: your powerlessness in the face of nature spills over you, and you just want to crawl into your tent and never come out again … the glacier gives back, or so say the Öræfings, said Snorri’s-Edda in the trunk.

After hearing this, all that wonderful information about Hafrafell and the mountain’s death grip attached itself to me, reeled me in, as we lay there together in an embrace in trunk, I dozed and as I did the mystical X in Illuklettar appeared to me, gleaming, butter was gushing from it, I jumped up and went out while Edda slept, the dusky night wrapped the surroundings in silence and stillness, all was still and quiet, it was just starting when I reached the glacier, I put on my crampons and went up on it, dark cracks swallowed me hook line and sinker and I breathed the cold rising from the depths, this great serpent occasionally hissed and sputtered, how coarse and uneven his scales were, he was going to snatch me, and I was ready, I was happy, I had nothing left to do in the world, I could fall into the crevasse, go into the mountain, settle down in Illuklettar and walk with the dead and with herders’ ghosts and alongside angels and monsters … I saw something glittering on the ice and went over, it was some object, an old tent peg, an old dented tent peg on a glacier, I looked up at the rough serpent-scraper as he crawled down the cliff belt on top of the breadth of ice, he’s traveled a long way, I thought of the men in the tent the glacier swallowed, those for whom this tent peg had served some role, they disappeared up there somewhere, now nothing was left of their existence save a single tent peg, old and dented; perhaps these men had climbed all the major peaks of the world, used the best equipment, here they were now, eaten out of their skin and hair, the glacier returning only this one transformed tent peg … Creeping glaciers crawl along like living creatures, I thought about the glacier, contemplating the tent peg while Edda slept in the trunk, these creatures breathe, move forward, recede, they moan and groan all of a sudden; when I came back I awoke Edda, I told her that glaciers were serpents.

Where were you? asked Edda.

I went to look at Hafrafell and Illuklettar and the mystical X, I went out looking for my mother.

To look for your mom? Is she lost there? Shall we call the rescue team? she asked sleep-addled, the Dragon, the armored tank? … huh?

She was attacked, a long time ago, when I was little, she and her sister were here on a trip and her sister was killed, my mother savagely beaten, she never recovered, in truth it destroyed our lives, my father says she was never the same again after the attack … I found this on the glacier, I said, and handed her the tent peg.

That’s horrible, she said, and took the tent peg, began to examine it distractedly, then with great awareness and intent, what did you say, your mother was murdered …

Her little sister was murdered, my mother savagely beaten, I said, and shakily cut a cake slice, my teeth chattering; I had fallen in love. You should have the tent peg, I said.

I’m not going to put it in the display case in the Visitor Center though it’s my duty to, she said, I don’t plan to send it to Þórði in Skógar either, nor the Settlement museum in Höfn, nor to the National Museum, I’m not going to show it to anyone but I’ll keep this mysterious treasure here with me instead and think of you, said Snorri’s-Edda in the trunk, Bernharður said, and the Interpreter interpreted, Dr. Lassi wrote in the report, or so Bernharður wrote to me in a letter, spring 2003.