Nothing but Ghosts. Judith Hermann
been Magnus’s best friend at school. They discover this long after all contact between Jonina and Bjarni was broken off. Magnus grew up on the west coast and Jonina on the east coast. When he was twenty, Magnus went to Berlin. Jonina went to ‘Vienna. Magnus studied psychology. Jonina studied literature. Twelve years later, they returned to Iceland at about the same time. In the end all Icelanders come back to Iceland, almost all. They study or work abroad and live there ten, twelve or fifteen years, and then it’s enough, and they come back. Almost all of them.
Jonina has never been to Berlin. She doesn’t know what that city in which Magnus lived for twelve years looks like. She can’t imagine what he looked like in those years, what he was like, what he did, can’t imagine him speaking German and spending his days with German girls.
When they first met, they talked a lot about those days abroad, how it felt to be a foreigner, and about the happiness and hardships experienced. They talked about it as if it were something that happened a long time ago and in no way affected the present. They never speak German with each other, not even for fun. They don’t even give it a try. A different Magnus and a different Jonina.
But she loves the story about Magnus’s first days in Berlin and the story about his departure. Perhaps she loves these two stories because they form a frame for the time before she knew Magnus; they enclose it and put an end to it.
Magnus was living in a one-room apartment in a rear building in Berlin-Neukölln. It is the winter of 1986 and colder in Berlin than it ever gets in Iceland, 20° below zero. His apartment has a tile stove but Magnus doesn’t know how to work it. All he has is a mattress, nothing else. When he comes home from the Institute, he lies down on the mattress with his clothes on, covers himself with a quilt, and smokes and reads. He has no curtains. His room faces the rear courtyard. Everyone else has curtains; he knows that they can see him lying in bed, smoking, alone – he doesn’t care. Around midnight he goes to a bar, annoying everyone there with his childish German, and stays till they throw him out. He knows some other Icelanders in Berlin, and he gets together with them, but he didn’t go there because of them. He’d love to meet someone, a foreign girl, just not a psychology student. But it doesn’t work; he remains alone. And then one day when he comes home, there’s a letter lying on the floor in the hall, dropped through the letterbox, a small, white, folded piece of paper. He takes the paper to bed, lights a cigarette, unfolds it and reads: ‘Hey, old man, I can see you, man. You’re pretty much alone and you lie around in your bed all evening and every weekend reading, and you really seem to be all alone, and I thought, maybe you could just drop in sometime. Side wing, fourth floor, left. Slick Chick.’ That’s all. Jonina loves this story. She loves it when Magnus mimics the Berlin accent: ‘Hey, old man, I can see you, man.’ And even though that was just what he had been wishing for, to meet someone by chance, he finds it impossible to simply drop in on someone who addresses him with ‘Hey, old man’. He never went to see Slick Chick; he doesn’t even know what she looked like. He says that sometimes he regrets it.
And then during his last days in Berlin, twelve years later – by then he had met lots of girls but didn’t yet know that these would be his last days there – he suddenly lost everything. He lost his apartment key, his money and his watch, he was fired from his job, hung out in bars with some guys he met, and had the feeling his whole life was coming apart, for no reason, inexplicably, out of the blue. He seemed to be falling and falling and there was nothing to check his fall. And then with the last of his money he bought himself the most beautiful suit he had ever owned, a pair of sunglasses, new shoes, and for two days and two nights he made the rounds of all the taverns and pubs in town. Early the third morning, at seven, he was standing at Hjalmar and Irene’s door in Schöneberg saying, ‘I’ve got to get some sleep. Would you please let me sleep here?’ And Hjalmar and Irene put him in their bed, closed the curtains and turned off the light. Magnus slept for two days, then he got up, said goodbye, broke into his own apartment, packed his things, left Berlin and returned to Reykjavíik.
‘Oh, Magnus,’ Jonina says and claps her hands when he tells her this story, ‘oh, Magnus, what a lovely story about your departure.’ Magnus hasn’t been back to Berlin since. He doesn’t keep in touch with the friends from those days any more. Jonina telephones a girlfriend in Vienna twice a year, that’s all. The past is shut as tightly as a clamshell. And then Magnus says, ‘Irene is coming to Iceland, and she’s bringing someone. I don’t know him; at any rate it isn’t Hjalmar and he’s not an Icelander.’
Irene. What a solid, compact, cold name. ‘Were you living with her?’ Jonina asks. It’s really the first thing she wants to know, and Magnus laughs a little defensive laugh. ‘No, never. She was with Hjalmar for a pretty long time; they didn’t break up till after I left Berlin.’
Irene is giving a slide lecture in Reykjavik about German architecture. Hjalmar gave her the phone number of another Icelander, in Japan, he in turn directed her to someone in California, and in California she was given Magnus’s phone number. She calls him and says, ‘Excuse me, Magnus. We haven’t been in touch for a long time. But I’m coming to Reykjavik soon and I thought we could get together.’
‘Are you looking forward to it?’ Jonina says. ‘In a way, yes,’ Magnus replies. ‘Of course I’m looking forward to it. It could turn out to be very nice. It could also misfire completely. I don’t know.’ You can’t know about anything, Jonina thinks. Dear Magnus, you can’t know about anything at all, and you always have to be prepared for the worst, and for the best too.
That year the snow came unusually early. In mid-November it is already four feet deep outside Reykjavík; the Ring Road has to be cleared daily; many of the roads leading into the interior of the island are closed; villages cut off from the outside world. In other countries the airports would be shut down in weather like this; not in Iceland. The planes of Iceland Air land even on iced-over runways. Irene and Jonas arrived at Keflavéik airport at the end of November, in a snowstorm with gale-force winds and below-freezing temperatures. Jonas will keep talking about it for the entire ten days of their stay.
Magnus doesn’t pick them up at the airport, although he has the time, but the first evening after their arrival in Reykjavik he goes to hear Irene’s slide talk. He really is interested in architecture. Jonina is driving to her parents’ summerhouse in Olurfsbudir with Sunna. ‘Ask them if they want to come to Olurfsbudir. Ask them if they’d like to drive out there,’ Jonina says. ‘Are you sure?’ Magnus asks. Jonina looks at him, annoyed. Of course she’s sure.
She’s been with Magnus for two years now. She-is thirty-five and has a six-year-old daughter who has no contact with her father any more. She met Magnus at a dinner at the house of some friends – he was described to her as someone she would surely be interested in, a psychologist, refined, a little odd, reserved and a bit mixed up, but good-looking; the description proved correct. Once they separated for four months, but now they’re together again.
She can’t stand it when Magnus asks if she’s sure. If she weren’t sure, she wouldn’t have said anything. She wouldn’t have invited Irene and Jonas – total strangers to her – if she weren’t sure that it would work out well. Or maybe not well. Why should it always work out well? They would either get along or they wouldn’t, whichever. She says, ‘I’d like to meet Irene, and it would be nice for Irene to get out of Reykjavék, so ask her,’ and then she drives off.
She has packed snowsuits, food, wine and packets of cigarettes into the boot of the car and has driven off with Sunna to Olurfsbudir. A cluster of small summerhouses on the west coast, six miles from the ocean – seventeen summerhouses on a hillside in the middle of the heath. Grassy hummocks, moss, dwarf shrubs, and on the horizon, very far away, the mountains. That is all. The summerhouses are simple low, log cabins, each with two small bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a terrace and a pool you can fill with hot-spring water.
Jonina’s favourite time to be in Olurfsbudir is winter when the snow has covered the heath and everything is white all the way to the blue mountains. It gets light at eleven o’clock and dark again at four. It is silent, vast and godforsaken – black herds of Iceland horses and the steam rising from the pool, the only things moving. And the light changes from minute to minute,