A MEMOIR
"Lost in Paradise. A Memoir"
by Mikael Torfason
Published in Iceland under the original title
„Týnd í Paradís“ by Sögur útgáfa, Reykjavík –
© 2015 Mikael Torfason
Translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
All rights reserved. © Mikael Torfason
Cover by Matthias Mielitz, München
For permission contact:
info@stroux-edition.de
eISBN: 978-3-948065-12-6
www.stroux-edition.de
“I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”
Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 10:34-35).1
For Dr. Guðmundur Bjarnason.
Thank you for everything.
translated from Icelandic by Philip Roughton
1Biblical quotations are all from the Revised Standard Version (as commonly used in The Watchtower).
Chapter 1 MOM DISAPPEARS
Chapter 2 KINGS OF SCOTLAND
Chapter 3 SEVEN YEARS OF BAD LUCK
Chapter 4 ARMAGEDDON AT LAUGAVEGUR 19B
Chapter 5 TWIGGY
Chapter 6 THE PAINTER’S DAUGHTER
Chapter 7 FEAR OF DEATH
Chapter 8 MOM AND DAD
Chapter 9 GRANDMA AND GRANDPA
Chapter 10 BLUE BLOOD
Chapter 11 THE ANGEL MICHAEL
Chapter 12 SHOCK
Chapter 13 THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA
Chapter 14 YOUTHS WHO OBEY GOD
Chapter 15 MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE!
Chapter 16 GEORG FJÖLNIR LÍNDAL’S PERSONAL CALVARY
Chapter 17 MARXISM INSPIRED BY GOD
Chapter 18 FIVE THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED AND NINETY-SIX YEARS
Chapter 19 COLLISION
Chapter 20 THE LITTLE PRINCE
Chapter 21 ÓLAFUR SKÚLASON
Chapter 22 THE FIRST AFFAIR
Chapter 23 MY GRANDPARENTS’ MASTER BEDROOM
Chapter 24 SAILORS’ FAVORITE SONGS
Chapter 25 NOT THE RIGHT TORFI
Chapter 26 ON THE THRONE OF MAMMON
Chapter 27 CAPITALIST NUMBER ONE, TWO, AND THREE
Chapter 28 WEDDING-NIGHT FIGHT
Chapter 29 THE KLAPPARSTÍGUR BARBERSHOP
Chapter 30 OUR DEBTORS ARE WHACKED IN THE MOUTH
Chapter 31 GOD, ARE THERE SUCH THINGS AS MOMS?
Chapter 32 THE CHILDREN WILL NEVER DIE
Chapter 33 THE WEAKER VESSEL
Chapter 34 A THOUSAND MILLION YEARS
Chapter 35 PAGAN CHRISTMAS
Chapter 36 TWENTY-TWO MONTHS FROM NOW, THE WORLD WILL END
Chapter 37 BABY FROM BIAFRA
Chapter 38 THE ONLY PEDIATRIC SURGEON IN ICELAND
Chapter 39 THE BOY WILL NOT BE GIVEN BLOOD
Chapter 40 IN PARADISE, NO ONE NEEDS A DOCTOR
Chapter 41 OLD STEFÁN FROM MÖÐRUDALUR
Chapter 42 THE ANGEL RAGNAR
Chapter 43 TIME TO SAY GOODBYE
Chapter 44 PLASTIC MICKEY MOUSE
Chapter 45 THE WITNESSES’ STAR
Chapter 46 A FINE EXAMPLE
Chapter 47 THIEF IN THE NIGHT
Chapter 48 THE JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES’ MIRACLE BABY
Chapter 49 WHEN MOM FAILED THE LORD’S TEST
Chapter 50 FASTING
Chapter 51 GOD SLEW ONAN
Chapter 52 GOD’S TESTS
Chapter 53 AUNT TÓTA’S WATERBED
Chapter 54 MOM DISOBEYS
Chapter 55 THE CROSS ON HALLGRÍMSKIRKJA
Chapter 56 THE TRUTH
Chapter 57 OUR LAST CHRISTMAS
Chapter 58 THE END
Chapter 59 THE WORLD’S FIRST GREAT WORK OF LITERATURE
“Then the LORD rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot’s wife behind him looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.”
Genesis 19:24-26
Mom is gone.
I recall my brother Ingvi whispering to me that we shouldn’t look back, because if we did, we’d turn to salt.
“Salt?” I repeated rather feebly, sitting beside him in the back seat of Dad’s Volga.
“Yes, like in Sodom.”
“Where?” whispered Lilja, our sister. She was sitting on the other side of Ingvi, who was in the middle.
Lilja hadn’t yet reached the age of three, and never understood anything. In my mind, I was turning five— even though my birthday wasn’t until next year. Actually, we didn’t celebrate birthdays and never even talked about them, but that was about to change in the coming days, like everything else in our lives.
It was the Second Day of Christmas,2 though we hardly knew it, because we were Jehovah’s Witnesses and weren’t allowed to celebrate Christmas. Lilja didn’t even know what Christmas was, but I’d just returned from the hospital, where everyone was in the Christmas spirit. My brother Ingvi had also told me a lot of stories about that festival of light and peace, because he was eight years old and in a real school where they celebrated Christmas, even though he was forbidden from making paper garlands or drawing pictures of the Yule lads.3
I remembered all of Ingvi’s stories, and he said I had a super memory because I knew so many Bible stories by heart. So of course I knew which woman turned to salt. And I also knew that he was teasing me, but I still didn’t dare look behind me, because I didn’t want to turn to salt like Lot’s wife, whom Jehovah God turned to salt when he sent his angels to burn the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. I knew all of it.
“Don’t you remember the picture in the Bible book?” I tried to explain to Lilja, without letting Dad hear us up front. He was irritated and angry at Mom, who’d just disappeared without a word.
“We’re going to Dad’s girlfriend’s,” Ingvi had told me before we left, because he’d heard Dad call her on the phone in the hall. He also said he’d heard Mom say that to Dad. That he should just go and live with his girlfriend. “Why doesn’t she just take the kids as well?” she’d hissed. Ingvi told me all of this before Dad ordered us to go get in the car.
“Where’s Mommy?” asked Lilja, and Ingvi shook his head.
“She doesn’t understand anything,” he whispered to me in the car, giving Lilja a stern look as she stuck her pacifier back in her mouth. “Mommy’s gone. Daddy’s going to find you a new Mommy.”
“We have to trust in Jehovah,” I added, gravely. Ingvi nodded and we listened to Dad swear at the snow. Last week after I came home from the hospital I heard Dad swear for the first time ever.
Ingvi says I must be stupid or something, because Dad started swearing a long time ago— but then again, I knew nothing because I’m always in the hospital. This morning Ingvi also told me that the last thing he saw before he fell asleep last night was Mom and Dad fighting again. Mom had grabbed Dad by the throat and ordered him to confess. Dad said she was a whore and asked if she was going to kill herself.
“Mommy? A whore?” Lilja never gives up. She can be so stubborn, but I knew she wasn’t old enough to understand that her Mommy was lost and would probably never return.
“What was he supposed to confess to?” I’d asked Ingvi this morning. He says that everyone in the family calls me Mr. Interviewer because I’m always asking about things, even when I don’t understand them.
“Adultery,” said Ingvi. “He was supposed to confess to adultery.”
Then Ingvi tells me it’s the Second Day of Christmas, which is really no big deal because nobody gets presents or anything. But if you wait a few days, then it’s New Year’s Eve and everyone celebrates the arrival of the new year, except for us, who don’t celebrate anything, of course, and eat meatballs on Christmas Eve to show everyone that it’s all the same to us what we eat, no matter the day. Because soon, very soon, the world will end, and then I’ll never be sick again and will live forever in Paradise, which will be as warm and nice as a tropical country. And I’ll get to run around there in the sunshine with all sorts of animals and Mom and Dad and everyone who believes in Jehovah.
Still, Ingvi isn’t sure anymore whether Mom will be in Paradise because if Dad has confessed to adultery, she must be a whore, which means she can’t enter Paradise with us. He isn’t worried about Dad, despite his confessing to adultery. Ingvi also says that while I was in the hospital this last time, Mom often screamed at Dad and fought with him and made him pack a suitcase and ordered him to leave, but he didn’t. Then she packed her clothes into the same suitcase but also refused to leave, before tearing her clothes out again. Ingvi says that Dad then told her she was nuts because she was always cleaning, and had never wanted to have children anyway or to live with them or raise them or anything, which is why Dad had to find a new wife.
“A man can certainly have more than one wife,” I whisper to Ingvi, because many men in the Bible have more than one wife if Jehovah God tells them to do so. Dad says that it can be expensive, because women are often so high-maintenance, and a man’s got to look after all his wives.
“Mommy?” asks Lilja again, as if she hasn’t been listening to anything we’ve been saying.
“She’s gone,” whispers Ingvi, sternly, before telling her to stop asking about Mommy.
“Do you think she’s got a new husband?” I whisper, and Ingvi rolls his eyes, despite being cross-eyed, and says that that’s one of the most stupid things he’s ever heard.
“How can a woman have two husbands?” he says, and pokes me so hard in the ribs that I can barely keep from crying out.
“How should I know how many husbands moms can have?”
2The Second Day of Christmas, December 26, is a holiday in Iceland (the Icelandic version of Britain’s Boxing Day.)
3In Icelandic folk tradition, there are thirteen Yule lads (Icelandic, jólasveinar) who come down one by one from the mountains on each of the thirteen nights before Christmas (and then depart one by one each night following Christmas). They are the mischievous sons of mountain trolls, and traditionally harass farmers by stealing things such as sausages or candles. Nowadays, the lads (i.e. parents) leave rewards or treats each Yuletide night in shoes that children leave on their windowsills
Mom disappeared four years and four months after I was born in the Reykjavík Birthing Center. On the National Hospital’s pre-registration form for expectant mothers, Dad had had the midwife write: “Jehovah’s Witnesses— minus blood,” as Mom had by then practically given in to both Dad and Jehovah, and had promised to join the congregation through baptism by immersion soon after I entered the world. This was how they were going to save their nearly hopeless marriage: through baptism by immersion and a second child.
Dad was twenty-three when I was born and Mom a year younger. She says that I was an incredibly beautiful baby, with reddish-brown hair, but Dad says that I looked like Idi Amin. He was dictator in Uganda at the time, and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own citizens. Idi Amin titled himself King of Scotland, which Dad found particularly funny because my great-great-great Grandpa was Þorsteinn the Red, the first king of Scotland. When his chieftains plotted against him and killed him, his mother, Auður the Deep-Minded, fled with his widow, Þuríður Eyvindsdóttir, my great-great-great Grandma, to Iceland. According to the medieval Book of Icelanders,4 which Dad cites constantly even now, many years later, that’s the only blue blood in our veins.
Mom remembers Dad saying: “He looks like Idi Amin,” when they finally held me in their arms. I was actually dark blue in the face and had difficulty breathing after pushing my way out of the birth canal. Dad, who’d decided that I should be named after yet another king, the archangel Michael, says that I was so fat I looked abnormal.
“Wow, he’s fat,” he said to Mom. I was the biggest baby in the maternity ward and the biggest baby that the midwife, Fríða Einarsdóttir, had helped deliver in her career. The doctor, whom Dad recalls was named Sigurður Samúelsson, had even warned Fríða about my size, and had told her as well, in an authoritative tone, that this delivery would have to go off without a hitch— “because there’s so much to do that I don’t have time for any complications.”
My birth, however, turned out to be damned complicated, and Mom berated Dad, who’d come home from work and hurriedly brought Ingvi to his babysitter before rushing Mom straight to the Birthing Center. She was immediately hooked to an IV, which calmed her down, but she felt that Dad hadn’t shown her enough understanding.
“Enough with your impatience,” he said. “You’re always so impatient. With you, everything was supposed to happen yesterday.”
“I’m way overdue,” screamed Mom crazily, because she was having irregular contractions while that husband of hers couldn’t even hold the oxygen mask properly over her nose and mouth. “It’s the only thing you have to do,” she said. But Dad was busy watching the doctor and the midwife, Fríða.
Dr. Sigurður obviously didn’t like Fríða at all. Dad says that he’d just returned from Sweden, and told him, out of Fríða’s hearing, that they didn’t have such a shortage of personnel there. Here in Iceland, he said, it was all up to God and luck, and there was no organization whatsoever. Mom insists that Sigurður’s patronymic was Magnússon, and that he’d studied gynecology in London.
“Be careful now,” Sigurður ordered Fríða, before repeating what he’d said about my size: “This is a big baby. Okay. Elbow first. Steady, steady. You’ll have to cut. We’ll have to cut. Keep it clean. I don’t have time to sit here stitching all night. Do it neatly.”
“Yes, yes,” said Fríða, and Dad watched closely. “It’ll be neat.”
Much later, Dad would end up marrying Fríða’s young niece, who’s an actress, but at that point, the actress-to-be was only twelve years old and couldn’t know that her future husband and father of her child was at the Reykjavík Birthing Center, staring at her big aunt positioning her scissors and cutting.
Mom screamed, and she’s told me so many times, ever since I was just a sprout, that she learned later in life that they’re supposed to cut the perineum at an angle so that the skin doesn’t burst open, like it’s coming apart at the seams, even down to the anus.
“I told you to be careful!” hissed Sigurður Samúelsson or Magnússon, and he pulled me out by the elbow, which, dark blue in color, was the first part of me to peek into this world.
“Where’s the baby? Where is my baby?” wailed Mom, pushing away the oxygen mask that Dad tried to shove in her face. “I want my baby,” she kept wailing, in the cursed state of hysteria that could get so terribly on Dad’s nerves.
“Relax,” said the doctor, swinging me up onto a nearby table. After failing to resuscitate me there, he ran out with me, leaving Mom and Dad behind with Fríða. She ordered the brand-new father to hold his wife still in bed. Dad actually didn’t need to hold Mom, since she was on the verge of passing out. So he stood at a distance and watched Fríða dash for a phone in the room to call for assistance. He glanced at Mom and reminded Fríða that they were Jehovah’s Witnesses and wouldn’t agree to a blood transfusion.
“What transfusion?” Fríða apparently said, before requesting assistance over the phone.
Mom was exhausted, and although she barely knew what was happening, she does remember feeling like crying. She wanted to wail, but no tears came, and she couldn’t move. She also recalls having thought about the outfit she’d knitted for me, and which she and Dad had brought with them to the Birthing Center. The sweater was white, perfectly suiting the little angel who was to be named Míkael Torfason. According to the Bible and The Watchtower, he would never grow old or fall ill or die, but rather, live forever in Paradise. Maybe she should have been baptized into the congregation before giving birth, thought Mom. But she couldn’t have brought herself to put on her bathing suit and, looking like a whale, be immersed in a swimming pool at Hátún.
She tried not to think about her impending baptism into the Jehovah’s Witnesses as she lay there trying to calm down following the delivery. Yet the possibility of her bleeding to death loomed in her mind. She felt ashamed of herself for being so worried about everything, all the time. Still, her fear was real, because The Watchtower and the Bible and Dad and the women with whom she was studying The Watchtower all told her that she mustn’t under any circumstance receive blood, because if she did, she could not enter Paradise.
Fine, she thought; it was all the same to her.
It really was all the same to her. Except for the baby she’d just delivered. If Torfi said that a blood transfusion would just make matters worse, it was better to receive no blood and die for her Lord in August 1974 rather than risk not entering Paradise.
Suddenly, the sounds of crying came from the next room, and Mom thought about the orange-colored pants that she’d sewn for me, in line with the latest fashion. Then she dozed off, floating carefree into dreamless sleep. She’d done her job, she felt, and thus didn’t hear it when Dad began arguing with Fríða about her writing the name Mikael immediately on my identification tag at the Birthing Center.
“You want to baptize him immediately?” asked Fríða in her innocence, bringing me in her arms from Dr. Sigurður.
“No, baptism isn’t even a Christian tradition,” said Dad, quoting directly from The Watchtower. “Jesus Christ was thirty when he was baptized, just for the record, but this baby is barely thirty minutes old and we just want to give it a name, just as Jesus was given a name and you were given a name and I was given a name and it has nothing to do with baptism.”
“Yes, okay,” said Fríða, proudly holding the biggest baby she’d ever helped deliver.
Dad says that I weighed 5¼ kilograms and was 53 centimeters long, but I was actually 55 centimeters and just barely over 5 kilograms. Those five kilograms were given the name Mikael, after the archangel whom Jehovah God created of old and sent to earth to be born as a child. His mother named him Jesus, and men proclaimed him Christ. More about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ conception of history later.
Dad continued to nag Fríða, and finally ordered her, plain and simple, to write Mikael on the empty tag.
“Mikael Torfason. That’s his name, and I have every right to name him myself, without calling on a priest to perform some ceremony that’s never mentioned in any book that matters.”
Fríða smiled, and the doctor reappeared. Dad says that he watched him stitch up Mom, and found it really interesting. He’s good at telling that story, using colorful adjectives, but I don’t want to retell it here.
Not now.
4Þorsteinn the Red was a late-ninth century Scottish Viking chieftain. His mother, Auður the Deep-Minded, figures in a number of medieval Icelandic sagas, as well as in the Book of Icelanders (Icelandic, Íslendingabók), a twelfth-century work on the history of Iceland’s settlement and conversion to Christianity, written by the priest Ari Þorgilsson (1067-1148) based on various oral and written sources.
Mom didn’t bleed to death at the Birthing Center. She says that when she woke and finally got to hold me in her arms, she asked herself: Is this my child?
Mom had wondered the same thing four years earlier when she gave birth to my brother Ingvi, in the same Birthing Center. She felt as if it had been an eternity since she last brought a child into the world. When Ingvi Reynir was born, she’d been frightened of everything, but now she was determined to try to believe that with the help of Jehovah, everything would be fine with her and all of us.
Four years earlier, the midwives had written in their report on her that she was an “eighteen-year-old cashier.” Now she was a twenty-two year-old housewife, and felt much older and more mature. When Ingvi was born, Dad teased her a lot as being young and clueless, despite her being only a year younger than him. Dad says that Mom had been so silly that she called my brother Ingvi “only-begotten.”
“What are you talking about?” said Dad. “Only-begotten? Ingvi isn’t only-begotten.”
“Ingvi Reynir,” corrected Mom, because she didn’t want him to be called just Ingvi. “His name is Ingvi Reynir, and since we weren’t married, then of course he’s only-begotten.”
“Ha ha ha,” Dad had laughed, and told her that a child born outside of wedlock was illegitimate, not only-begotten. “Are you saying it was a virgin birth?” he continued. He told this story for years, laughing as hard each time. Even now, he finds it a great example of how clueless Mom could be.
I was neither only-begotten nor illegitimate when I was born because Mom and Dad got married at the same time they had Ingvi Reynir baptized. Now, four years later, we were a four-person family and Dad and my big brother were on their way to visit Mom and me.
“We’ll be fine,” Mom whispered to me in her hospital bed, giving me her breast to suckle. She stroked my podgy neck and thought about the midwives and nurses who never grew tired of telling her how big I was, how proud of me she could be. Mom noticed the reddish-gold luster of my hair, which stood straight up from my big head. She snuggled her face against my head and felt a surge of maternal instincts, which wanted to take control and protect this child from all the world’s horrors.
As she was immersing herself in my hair, my brother Ingvi tripped and fell down on the stairs in the Birthing Center, breaking the mirror he’d bought for Mom. When he reached our room, he was bawling, and told Mom the whole story before handing me a toy car. This big brother of mine, whom I was to adore and admire over the coming decades, says that he got mad at me the moment he saw me. He felt I was such a letdown. There was simply too great of an age difference between us, and he’d somehow expected me to be much bigger and more interesting.
As far as Ingvi could tell, I wasn’t particularly big or handsome. To him, I was a little, pale-pink bag lying in its mother’s lap, with no apparent interest in anything. I didn’t want to play with the car that he gave me, and clearly couldn’t care less about my brother crying over the broken mirror. Neither of us knew then that breaking a mirror brings seven years of bad luck. Of course our parents knew that, but they simply didn’t care. They’d given up on Icelandic superstitions and adopted an American religion.
That religion ruled everything in our lives in those days, and after Ingvi and Dad left, they went straight to a Jehovah’s Witnesses meeting. Mom and I remained there, contented in each other’s arms; it was nice be free of them and The Watchtower those first days of my life. Sometimes Mom was terribly tired of Dad and all his talk about the Bible and the end of the world, despite her having agreed to be baptized. She often felt doubtful, and sometimes didn’t believe anything. Dad never knew whether she was coming or going; why she was so obstinate. In fact, he often wrote Mom off as some kind of idiot. His attitude fit in well with the ideology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who have no respect for women, except as babysitters and cooks. Nor did Mom have much of an opinion of Dad, finding him both vacillating and gullible. When she met him, he was always going on about a transformed social order based on the teachings of Marx and Engels, but just over two years later, he came home from work and told her that the end of the world was at hand. They could gain eternal life in Paradise.
Dad became obsessed with this newfound truth, and just as he’d previously swallowed everything printed in Spark, the official organ of the Alliance of Radical Socialists, he now believed everything printed in The Watchtower. When I was born, Dad was studying the ninety-fifth volume of the magazine, which for him might just as well have been written by God Almighty. It was there that he got all his answers, and a reader’s question published in the latest issue, August 1974, came to trouble Dad quite a lot. It was about sex, which he’s always been obsessed with. (Dad even managed, about a decade later, to publish inspired, informative articles about sex in the magazine Hair and Beauty, which, as the name suggests, was focused mainly on hairstyling). The question that troubled him concerned the meaning of the apostle Paul’s statement that it is “well for a man not to touch a woman” (1 Corinthians 7:1). The editor of The Watchtower went straight to the point: Ideally, men should not fornicate. His answer was followed by a quotation from Jesus Christ, when he said that whoever looks at a woman in a “passionate” way has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28).5
Maybe Dad never managed to become perfectly pleasing to Jehovah because all men are sinners— including Dad, not least in this area. Sometimes he felt bad about all his lustful thoughts, as if his brain were a muscle over which he had no control. Then he spoke to Jehovah and asked him to make him a good husband and father and protect him from the temptations of Satan. But he also asked Jehovah, in passing, to make Mom better and more likeable and hornier, because she was always scolding him and complaining about him and rarely or never wanted to love him as a good and obedient wife should, according to Holy Scripture.
Torfi was thinking about all of this as he lay down to sleep in the unhealthy little hovel on Laugavegur the night I was born. My brother Ingvi slept in his own bedroom as Dad prayed to Jehovah to give him the strength to endure the next fifteen months. Then the long-desired end of the world, Armageddon, would take us all by storm, and all our fears and never-ending worries would vanish like dew before the sun.
5Originally in the January 1, 1973 issue of The Watchtower.
The boy barely eats and can’t defecate. He defecated once at the Birthing Center. It was the meconium— the black, licoricey sludge that’s the first thing to fill the diapers of all newborn babies.
After that, nothing.
He doesn’t cry, this boy, but rather, shrieks at his mother as if possessed, or held captive by tormentous spells. Between outbursts, he stares blankly, as if devoid of hope. When the boy finally nods off, he sleeps lightly, his face twisted in a scowl. This gloomy expression looks odd on a newborn, although older people say it gives them character.
“He has a strong personality, the little dear,” they say.
The newly delivered twenty-two year-old mother of her second child doesn’t hear them. She knows that sooner or later, she’ll have to sit before a doctor and he’ll ask her whether the boy is eating. Whether he’s gaining weight or not. Mom can’t lie to the doctor. He’ll measure and weigh the little boy and the entire world will come to know that this big, fat boy, who reminded his father of Idi Amin, the last king of Scotland, is far lighter now than when he was born.
So go my first days in the little house at Laugavegur 19b. Mom tries to suckle me, but I spit out her nipple as soon as she does, without her understanding why. I’m not as vigorous as Ingvi Reynir was when he came home from the Birthing Center. Mom and Dad had been so young and innocent then, she felt. For their little family, they were renting the upper floor of a tiny house; it has two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. My brother Ingvi sleeps in one of the bedrooms, and Mom, Dad, and I in the other. The living room and kitchen tend to fill with Witnesses who are waiting for the world to perish. Which is exactly why we’re lucky enough to be renting; there’s really no point in buying a place, with Armageddon so close. Most important for us, this little family, is to try to save as many people as we can from certain death. And Dad’s doing his best. Still, he can’t be spending all his time spreading the good news, since he also has his job at the Klapparstígur Barbershop. Dad passed his barber exam and got his license two months before I was born, which means he’s paid a bit more now. The barbershop is owned by his brother-in-law Sigurpáll and some colleagues of his. They’re going to die, as will Dad’s sister Inga. Their souls will no longer exist when the world ends, probably next year. They’ve helped Dad a great deal, but so it goes. A whole lot of people will perish.
It was at the Klapparstígur Barbershop that Örn Svavarsson and Ástríður Guðmundsdóttir first locked their claws on Dad when they went there to proclaim the good news. (Örn told me that he’d just turned twenty when he started reading The Watchtower with Dad. Örn left the Jehovah’s Witnesses long ago, but Ástríður is still active in the congregation, patiently awaiting Paradise.) Dad was a communist when these two first came to the barbershop, wanting to argue with him about religion and international politics. They dared him to attend a meeting in a top-floor apartment on Brautarholt, and he was easy prey. In his opinion, the Witnesses were as angry and self-righteous as the “Wild Left” in Iceland,6 but they had a clearer agenda. Their “popular” character attracted Dad as well, more than the damned university-snobbery of many Communists.
When I was born, Dad had helped his brothers and sisters in the Witnesses build a meeting house (called a Kingdom Hall) on Sogavegur. Our home was often something of a community center for the workers of the Lord. These workers were of both sexes, though the women were supposed to keep silent when the men spoke. They all partook of Mom’s chocolate cake, dunking it in the coffee that she poured them. Then they praised her to the skies, and Dad as well, of course, for having such a good wife, who’d finally agreed to start studying The Watchtower when she was pregnant with me. Two sisters in God visited her regularly when she was heavy with me, to read with her and ask questions and lead her into the entire truth of Christ’s kingdom in Heaven and Satan and Paradise on earth.
At first, Mom wasn’t very excited about the Witnesses’ calculations as to when the end of the world would occur. Nor was she fond of their criticisms of other religions. The women won her over with their promise that she would never again need to be frightened or anxious, feelings that until then had controlled her life. All fear is essentially fear of death, and the sisters who sat in the living room on Laugavegur told her that death as she understood it didn’t exist:
“When you die, it will be just like falling asleep, and on the Last Day you’ll wake from that sleep and live in eternal happiness in Paradise.”
If this wasn’t what sealed the deal on Mom’s baptism into the congregation that fall, after she gave birth to me, it was the sisters’ promise of the apocalypse next year. The sisters told her that in the United States, whence the congregation was run by Jehovah the Almighty himself, the meetings and conventions would often be filled with people’s shouts of:
“Stay alive until seventy five!”
Mom didn’t speak any English, and the sisters translated these words for her in our living room, informing her that next year, 1975, Paradise would come. Probably on the fourth or sixth of October, according to the latest calculations of the leaders in Brooklyn. Of course before Paradise came the end of the world, which the two sisters called Armageddon. The world as Mom knew it was nearly bankrupt, spiritually, they said, and was on the verge of destruction. She hardly needed to do more than turn on her radio to realize that the world was perishing, and only those who professed Jehovah God would survive and gain eternal life for a thousand million years in Paradise.
Mom touched her swollen belly as I kicked and jostled inside her. She thought of me and my brother and Dad, who was already on his way to Paradise, and saw that she had no other choice. She felt both bad and small. Afraid of everything in her life, which seemed at times to be suffocating her.
She contemplated how her husband had become much easier to deal with after he turned to Jehovah; he’d actually given up drinking. She thought about how much effort he put into taking care of Ingvi Reynir. He also treated her well, and they argued much less than during their first few years. She always knew where he was, even when he wasn’t home; out spreading the good news, reading The Watchtower, at a meeting or helping others in the beautiful little community named after Jehovah.
Dad had also become much better at telling her how beautiful and good and clever she was, and that he loved her. Yet she knew very well that she was no longer beautiful, but chubby and edemic, her mouth dotted with cold sores. Every part of her that could swell, did, and the doctors said that she was far too heavy. Pregnancy never suited Mom, and that delicate woman, who usually weighed around fifty kilograms, got up to as much as ninety-four kilograms while carrying her child. It really didn’t matter how beautiful Torfi said she was. She knew she was bloated, and felt as if life had no meaning anymore, despite her saying now that she’d been happy carrying me and couldn’t wait until I was born.
In photographs that I’ve seen of her when she was pregnant, it’s as if the child inside her has taken over her body and she’s been forced to relinquish everything she had. Every time she was pregnant she had nothing left to give, neither to herself, Dad, nor anyone else. All her energy and vigor went into carrying her child and letting it grow. But there on the couch with the sisters (whom Torfi had probably loosed on her, though he would never admit it), she finally gave up and assented to the truth. There was nothing else she could do. She couldn’t have cared less about the sisters’ warnings concerning the end of the world on the fourth or sixth of October, 1975. They told her the apocalypse might be delayed by a year or two in order to wipe all except for Jehovah’s Witnesses from the face of the earth. It was unlikely that the prophecy wouldn’t hold, but “better safe than sorry.” The sisters promised the end of the world in 1977, at the very latest.
6The “Wild Left” (Icelandic, Villta vinstrið, a play on “Wild West”), is the name given to the Communist Unity (Marxist-Leninist) party, a Maoist party formed by students in the late-1970’s in Iceland. (The name is applied generally now to left-leaning parties and individuals.)
“Of course, there are those who can make rules concerning dress. Who are these? Husbands and fathers. All the members of a man’s household bear his name and what they do reflects on his name. As the God-appointed family head, he can properly rule out certain clothing as objectionable.”
The Watchtower, April 1, 1972