The Pirate

BLACK DEATH

There was a knock on my bedroom door. I looked up. Mom opened the door. She had a downcast expression.

Come have a chat with me, Jón.

She wasn’t angry. I hadn’t done anything. I’d even been unusually quiet. But whenever I heard that tone in her voice it meant she blamed me for something, like the time she found cigarettes in my pocket. Her voice sounded dry and windy. This time, though, she clearly wasn’t angry. She was almost friendly. She must have some news. I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table. What was up? What did she want to tell me? Was she about to tell me I was adopted? That I wasn’t my father’s son, but the son of the famous Icelandic author Þórbergur Þórðarson? I’d long suspected that. I was so very like Þórbergur. Maybe Dad was always so weird around me because he wasn’t my real dad. And maybe he was always so annoyed at Mom because she’d cheated on him. Understandable. Perhaps I had other siblings out there. But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Could she be about to tell me they were going on vacation, and they were inviting me along? I never got to go anywhere with them because I was so much trouble. Recently, though, I’d been very calm. Could it be that Mom was rewarding me for being good by inviting me abroad? But where? Mallorca, perhaps. I’d need to get myself some cool swimming trunks and a necklace with my name on it. I’d go to the beach and have my picture taken with a parrot on my shoulder. Or were we going to London, instead? Mom had visited her friend in London several times. Now, perhaps, I’d get to go along with her. I’d rather go to London than Mallorca because I might get to meet a real punk and go to some gigs. And then I’d be able to buy some proper punk gear. I couldn’t imagine punk stuff was easy to find in Mallorca. I waited and waited for Mom to start talking. But she was just silent, friendly but awkward.

What? I asked, excited. I almost started laughing in anticipation.

Grandma’s dead.

My dreams of sunny beaches and bustling urban life vanished with the wave of a hand. I wasn’t going anywhere. Þórbergur was in all likelihood not my dad. And Grandma was dead.

Is she? I asked to say something.

Yes, she died during the night.

I hadn’t thought about Grandma much, or at all, since she went into the nursing home. I hadn’t been keen to visit; it seemed distinctly discomforting, going to see her. Not least because she’d become a bit confused by the end. She’d gotten so old that she’d started dying a long time back.

I’d known for a while Grandma would die soon. I knew it would happen. My grandmother was named Guðrún Guðmundsdóttir. She was born on April 1, 1888 at a place called Arnkötludalur, in the Strandir region. I don’t know where that is exactly. She had eighteen siblings. All of them were dead. Most of them died soon after being born or when they were still children. That’s how life was in the old days. People died all the time. When Grandma was seven, she lost her mother. She was from another world, a shadowy, ancient world where it was always cold and everyone was wet and either hungry or very ill the whole time. So they tended to die sooner or later. The men drowned, one after the other. Those who survived were hunched by life’s adversities. Like Grandma. I never knew how she made it through such a miserable life. Maybe it was because she was so good. Maybe it was her faith in God. Maybe she didn’t know anything better. Whatever it was, I counted myself lucky to have been born when I was. I was horrified when Grandma told stories about life in the country and about when she was young. She had been dying for a long time. Pitiless old age ferried her away—her spark weakened and flickered. She grew ever more tired, had trouble walking. She started to forget things. Sometimes, she forgot who I was. Sometimes, she thought I was my dad. It’s me, Jónsi, I’d say again and again to remind her. Sometimes she’d realize, but more often she didn’t. She’d keep asking for news about the farms or tell me she’d seen people I knew were long dead. She’d wandered back to a time that seemed to me like seventeen hundred and sour cabbage. It distressed me to see Grandma ebb away like this. Sometimes she got anxious about something she imagined was going to happen. Those times, she’d want me to ride out to some farms to warn people. I felt awkward, not knowing how to respond. I tried explaining that it was just her mental deterioration, but that didn’t compute. So I just tried to play along.

Where are the children?

Um, they’re outside, playing, I said, encouragingly.

They’re not allowed to go down to the estuary. The current is too strong.

No, they’re nowhere near it, Grandma, I said, still being encouraging.

She was sure the woman sharing her room was plotting to go through her stuff and steal from her. It was very awkward when she talked about that, but also a bit funny. Funny in an absurd, tragic way: the woman who shared the room with her was, in reality, paralyzed—she lay motionless in her bed. But Grandma was blind, so she couldn’t see that.

What are you doing there?! Grandma hissed.

I’m not doing anything, Guðrún, dear, the woman wearily answered.

I can see you! What did you take from the drawer? The paralyzed woman sighed sadly while I shook and trembled, stifling laughter at life’s absurdity.

And now Grandma was dead. I didn’t know what to say.

Don’t you find it upsetting?

Of course.

But I didn’t think it was upsetting. I thought it was just normal. People get old and die. Grandma had looked forward to dying. She wanted to die. So it definitely wasn’t upsetting; if she were alive, she’d be very pleased to be dead. It’s one thing when people die young or from a terrible disease like my uncle Gulli, who got lung cancer. But even he was fairly old. It was still miserable, though. I was actually almost glad that my grandmother was dead. It was what she wanted. I was more sorry we weren’t going abroad together. Death has three stages. The first is the physical death, which occurs when the heart ceases beating. The second stage is the wake, when friends and relatives see the dead person for the last time. The third and final stage of death is when someone mentions the name of the deceased for the final time.

Funerals are weird rituals. Death unites people. It’s like the pain of having lost someone to death stops being rote and distant—suddenly, it’s present and for real. People’s eyes meet, they cry together, and embrace one another. At a funeral, people reveal sides of themselves they never show anywhere else, except perhaps at home, behind closed doors. They openly weep in front of each other. They give deep hugs, even if they’re not the kind of people who usually embrace. At Christmas and birthdays, everyone says hello with a handshake. Not at funerals. Death draws forth the life in people, forcing them to take down their masks and show their true faces. People who haven’t spoken in years start talking to one another again—facing death, people often realize that their everyday concerns are inconsequential. Old enemies make truces and new friendships blossom. Death is something we all share. He ambushes us all. Eventually. No matter how rich, beautiful, or strong we are. No one escapes death.

I went to several funerals over the years. Many of Mom and Dad’s siblings have died. I preferred being at funerals with Mom’s family. Especially once people start drinking toasts: they’d begin to laugh and tell stories about the deceased.

I was never aware of Mom or Dad expressing grief. I’d never seen them cry from grief. Perhaps they’d both seen so much sorrow over the years that they’d stopped being affected by it. Maybe they were just mourning in their own way. Mom would be silent and reflective. She’d sit and listen to the radio, chain-smoking. She was quite the tough cookie. She didn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve—she always tried to take life’s shocks with equanimity. Dad just got even weirder than normal. He’d seen and experienced so much unpleasant stuff at work for the police. For example, he’d come across dead people who had either killed themselves or been murdered. He was repeatedly the first man on the scene after a terrible accident or fracas. He sometimes told me about it. Once, he told me about a time he went looking for a man who’d been up in the mountains in winter. Because of the roads and the weather, they didn’t find him until spring. When Dad found him, finally, ravens had eaten his face. The poor man completely lacked ears, eyes, and a mouth. Dad also told me about a friend of his, another police officer, who was locked in an isolation unit with an insane man. Dad was supposed to relieve him and take the next shift, but when he arrived, the psychotic had beaten his friend and colleague to death. Dad had been struck by the silence that met him when he arrived at work, and felt it was odd. He’d expected to hear the men talking. When he didn’t hear anything at all from inside the cell, he called his colleague’s name but got no response. When he went into the cell, he found the miserable spectacle of his friend lying dead on the floor, covered in blood, and the psychotic guy sitting motionless on the bed. Dad often told me stories like that from work. I had no idea, though, why he told them to me. They didn’t have a moral or message. Dad never felt the need to talk to anyone about the terrible things he’d experienced at work—he simply said that he was always able to forget. But he never did forget those experiences. Perhaps he believed he’d put them behind him, but no: the events remained vivid for him.

Grandma’s funeral was great. It was her farewell ceremony. She was finally dead. I didn’t feel the need to cry or to hug anyone. I was distant and distracted. I thought it all just made perfect sense. Grandma hadn’t been a bit apprehensive of dying. She’d frequently talked about it with me. She believed in God and believed she was going to meet Jesus when she died. I seriously doubted that. Why would God get involved with a person after death given that he hadn’t while they were alive? Wouldn’t it make more sense if he was kind to my grandmother while she was living? If Jesus was going to meet her, why not while she was alive? And since God had made Grandma blind, why hadn’t Jesus healed her? He could have. The whole time, Jesus could have gone to the Gufudalur region. He could have taken some earth from the ridge, mixed it into a paste with his spit, and rubbed it in Grandma’s eyes. I don’t understand the purpose of Jesus meeting someone once they’re dead. Grandma’s hardly going to be blind when she’s dead. For me, once you die, you disappear. Like a candle flame that’s been put out. You simply no longer exist. There’s nothing terrible about it. It doesn’t matter. Being dead is no different from not yet existing. There is nothing more mournful about being dead than about not having been alive during the Middle Ages. Grandma’s asleep and has no knowledge of herself. I don’t believe in God.

I don’t know Mom and Dad’s families at all well. I recognized Mom’s sisters. Dad’s family I was even less familiar with than Mom’s. His family was also much weirder than hers. Mom’s relatives were normal. My dad’s family have marked peculiarities. Some of those at the funeral were his siblings. I looked at many of them, but recognized no one. The truth was I had no idea what most of these people were called, and even less what they did. Some were cops or prison guards; others were criminals. I didn’t know who was just a friend and who was a relative. There was one man, for instance, who I thought was my father’s brother, but who turned out to be just a good friend of his from the Barðaströnd Association. I met these people so rarely, at best once or twice a year. Mom rarely took me to family gatherings when I was little. I was usually stuck in childcare since you couldn’t possibly bring me along: I was naughty, a prankster. Mom couldn’t even sit down for a cigarette if I was there. She always needed to be running after me; she couldn’t let me out of her sight. When I was a kid, I simply did everything I thought of: breaking lots of windows, setting things on fire, climbing on roofs and throwing stuff off them.

All funerals are the same. First, you sing: pitifully sad and annoying songs about flowers. Then the priest talks about the corpse’s life, though you know he has no idea what the dead body got up to while it was alive: he’s just reading something the deceased’s family wrote for him. Still, he talks like he knew the person in question well, telling everyone how entertaining and wonderful the corpse was when it was alive. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Then there’s a sad song about Jesus that makes lots of people cry. When the coffin is carried out, people stand up and follow it. Some cry a lot, so others put their arms around them and comfort them; everyone follows together at a distance behind the coffin, which gets put inside a hearse that drives to the cemetery for the burial. Once people are done crying, they have a cigarette and sniff loudly. Some people go to the cemetery, but others go straight to the reception and start drinking toasts. It’s always the same. When I die, I’m not going to have any songs. No sad hymns and not any bull about Jesus.

It was fun when we went to parties that involved Mom’s family. There was lots of laughing and storytelling. Everyone smoked and drank wine. Dad’s family was another matter. Those gatherings were quieter. People were just silent, then perhaps someone in the group would awkwardly say: Yes, indeed, like you say. If people started talking about anything, the discussions were mainly about jobs, even if there wasn’t much to say. The most lively discussions happened about things that had been in the news. That revived everyone. Especially if it meant talking politics. They were all strident in their agreement or disagreement, and many of them got a bit overexcited.

A few days later, a small van came from the old people’s home with Grandma’s worldly possessions. Everything was put into her old room. A chest of drawers, a rocker, and her personal effects were thrown into two cardboard boxes. When Mom and Dad were out, I snuck into the room and rummaged through the stuff. In the chest of drawers I found a bunch of things. I opened the drawers and grubbed around, examining old photographs and postcards she’d received from people. I didn’t know anyone in the pictures. They were old and black-and-white. Everyone looked serious, no one smiled. Judging from the pictures, back in the old days all men wore suits and all women wore the national dress. Grandma had also collected containers. The drawers were full of iron tins that had once held candy, wooden boxes that had held cigars, empty chocolate boxes with pretty pictures on the front. In the tins, my grandmother kept small objects: figures, coins, pictures, letters, and all kinds of crap like keys, broken jewelry, thimbles, and sewing stuff. I recognized some of the tins, remembering them from when Grandma lived with us.

I also found an envelope containing money. A lot of money. To me, at least. I took some and put it in my pocket. Grandma had no need of it anymore—she definitely would have been willing to give it to me. She didn’t need the money. I, however, needed it to buy cigarettes and LPs.

The next few weeks, I lived like a king. I bought some records and punk badges from the Thousand and One Nights store. I got a bum to go to the state liquor store for me and buy me a pint-size bottle of Icelandic schnapps: Brennivín. I gave him enough to buy himself a bottle, too. I got plenty of cigarettes. The next weekend, I went on my first bender.

I’d tasted wine before, obviously. I’d often get a swig from older boys in the Scouts, and you could sometimes sponge a gulp of this or that downtown, outside the food court at Hallærisplan. But I’d never before had my own bottle. Most kids drank Brennivín or moonshine. It was easy to get hold of moonshine. The regional officer in my Scouts troop brewed it and sometimes sold it to the oldest boys, though he wouldn’t sell it to us younger kids. I’d also tasted Anheuser and Christian Brothers white wine. That was quite good. But you didn’t get as drunk on that stuff as on Brennivín. Brennivín was cheap, but it had a disgustingly bad taste. Mom brewed alcohol. Inside the closet were two large cylinders. In them, Mom brewed rosé and beer, which she put in bottles and capped with a special pressurizing machine, then put in a cold closet. There were cases of beer on the floor and shelves full of unidentified wine with screw caps. At the time, beer was banned in Iceland, and you could only buy it in duty-free or on the black market. Everything that was banned, fishermen smuggled into the country. I’d sometimes managed to sneak bottles from the closet and take sips from them, but I’d never gotten drunk. Possibly what I was sipping hadn’t even fermented. It was decidedly repulsive. But now I had a whole pint-size bottle of alcohol.

Alli went into town with me. It was Friday night, and we went to Halló. I was wearing my favorite torn jeans, a leather jacket, and military boots. Under my jacket, I had on my brand new Sid Vicious T-shirt I’d bought with the money I stole from Grandma. I’d hidden the bottle inside the garage then snuck it out with me, making sure no one could see it. Especially not the cops, who would immediately confiscate it. If older kids had caught sight of it, they would have demanded a drink and threatened to tell the cops if they didn’t get one. We kept the bottle entirely to ourselves, wandering aimlessly and smoking. Every now and then we’d slip behind some trashcans to swig Brennivín, safely sheltered. The burn was so bad I retched after each swig. The bitter cumin flavor gave way to a strongly alcoholic taste, but I was looking forward to getting drunk and finding out what that sensation felt like. Drunk people seemed to be at ease. They were carefree; they sang and danced with joy. But how much did you have to drink to get loaded? I didn’t know. Hopefully, no more than a single bottle. I was scared we’d run out before we got drunk.

The Brennivín made me feel comfortable and gave me confidence. I stopped being shy. I was warming up and I felt amazing. I even stopped kids and talked to them before they spoke to me. If someone called out fucking punk, I didn’t look down like usual, but challenged them back: Shut your mouth, fucking disco freak! Death before disco. I talked loudly. I liked talking loudly and making myself heard. I had an uncontrollable desire to do something extraordinary, something spectacular. I wanted to sing in a band. I tried to climb the statue of Jón Sigurðsson so that I could get a piggyback ride from him. After I’d fallen down his trouser leg several times, I gave up and ran to the entrance of Parliament, positioned myself there, and sang Anarchy in the UK as loud as I could across Austurvöllur, the public square. Someone yelled at me:

Shut your mouth, stupid punk.

I replied defiantly:

Shut your own mouth, disco shitfreak!

I wasn’t afraid of anyone. I wasn’t afraid of anything. No one could do anything to me. I wasn’t ashamed of anything. I was free. Free to do and say what I wanted. When the police arrived to investigate what was going on, Alli and I ran into the Parliament garden and hid behind a bush. Once we were confident no one