After Dad's funeral I returned temporarily to France and kept my mother company at her expense. Then, ever on the move, I headed back to New York via Reykjavik, Iceland, on Icelandair, in those days the airline of choice for penurious trans-Atlantic travelers. A blizzard was blowing as the plane landed at Keflavik Airport, and increased in intensity as the hours passed. Finally an announcement was made that it would be impossible to fly onward and that all passengers would be housed gratis in the airline hotel in Reykjavik for the duration. Well, it suited me. Nothing especially urgent or appealing beckoned me back to New York, and there I was in remote, mysterious Iceland of the Eddas. 

     In Reykjavik in the permanent gloom of midwinter I went for a stagger through snowdrifts and patches of ice and helped a native extricate his VW Beetle from the snow. And I received in return a handshake and heartfelt thanks expressed in Oxbridge-accented English. Then I came upon a bar in which I discovered a local concoction called Brennivin, brandy wine; or (they said, dramatically) “Wine of the Black Death,” a reinforced aquavit that flows smoothly and warms unctuously but, when taken in sufficient doses, utterly transforms one’s personality. As evidence of this, I later found myself on the dance floor of a discotheque, stripped to the waist and doing a kind of limbo dance, with wildly flailing limbs, surrounded by cheering Icelandic youth smoking joints and passing around another bottle of the lethal stuff. They urged me on with Old Norse exhortations, in an oddly lilting accent, like the dialect of Sutherland or the Western Highlands, I thought, in my remote mental state; but I couldn’t hear much because of the thundering bass rhythm electronically enhanced to levels guaranteed to render deaf, or at least permanently damage the hearer’s timpani. Above and around me swirled red and blue lights. It was the dawn of Reykjavik’s dance-club era—and, yes reader: I was there. Indeed, I may have initiated it.

      Also present was a doctor named Magnus Magnusson, a general practitioner attached to the national airline. When I fell semi-conscious to the floor for the third time, he took out his stethoscope, checked my pulse, and offered to drive me back to my hotel. He too was quite drunk but had passed through the looking-glass into that state of meta-drunkenness that so closely mimics sobriety; as, after another infusion of brennivin, had I.

     The doctor’s Skoda made slow headway against the snow and wind of an Icelandic winter’s morn, so after awhile Dr. Magnusson pulled the car over and offered me a drink of Scotch whisky (I forget the brand, I’m afraid) from a bottle in his glove box. I accepted. We drank and smoked and watched the sifting of the snowflakes in the headlights.

     “Sind sie aus Deutschland?”

      And it’s true that my prominent nose and faintly bulging blue eyes have many thinking me a German, especially when I’m also sporting a goatee of the Germanic variety and drinking a mug of lager beer. Well, it would be no dishonor to be a German, certainly, and on that occasion I would have happily donned the Teutonic identity for the good doctor’s enjoyment, but my command of the German language was (and is) disgracefully negligible, especially for the author of three German novels, so I sought refuge in being Scottish.

     “Ah yes, you’re Scottish? My wife is, too. From Edin-barrow? You probably wonder, how did I meet her? Well, I went to Scotland to study, you know,” he said, revving up the relentless engine of autobiography. “I was young and I wanted to be a great doctor, like Albert Schweitzer. Or you, mein freund.” He was too kind, but I was not a German doctor, I protested. Never mind: The bottle was soon empty. “Listen, we must urgently get back to your hotel where they will have more to drink.” He tossed the empty bottle out the window and we continued on our hesitant way, slipping and sliding quietly back and forth across the frozen wastes.

       Through the dark half-moons carved by the wipers in the snow on the windshield we gazed glumly at the night.   The Skoda plodded onward, skidding in the bends.

    “I loved Edinbarrow but in the first year I studied hard and hardly ever went out,” said Dr. Magnusson. “It was all work, work, and more work for the future Icelandic Schweitzer I hoped to be. Doctor Albert Schweitzer, you know, the man of Africa with negroes. Tell me, is he French or German, this Dr. Schweitzer who sounds so German but is born in France?” I shrugged. “I agree,” said he. We narrowly missed sideswiping several parked cars and lurched into a snowdrift. Dr. M. slumped forward, slammed on the brakes, pulled over, snatched off his seat belt, and, half-hanging out the door, vomited loudly and elaborately into the blizzard for a few minutes; then, with a violent shake of the head, like a wet dog drying off, he resettled himself in his seat, closed the door, fastened his seat belt, and wiped his mouth with a Kleenex, which he tossed through the window.

    “Entschuldigen sie, herr Doktor. Where was I? Ah yes. Edinbarrow, where I met my wife. One day I was in a lecture hall and I heard someone laughing at me. It was Cordelia! I loved her from that moment on,” und so weiter. By the time we arrived at the hotel, after what seemed like very many hours and miles, I’d taken the opportunity during the good doctor’s soliloquy, the merest sampling of which I offer up here (the original went on longer than the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlsson, another outstanding bit of Nordic long-windedness), to feign unconsciousness. It seemed the only way to be spared.  

     I spent another two nights in Iceland: sober ones, what with drinks going for what they go for up there. For the remainder of my stay I kept a weather eye out for a) the snow (diminishing) and b) Dr. Magnusson (glimpsed once, from a distance, at the wheel of his begrimed Skoda), and on the afternoon of the second day, when my hangover started relinquishing its grip, I rode a tour bus out to Thingvellir, the site, so say the Icelanders (a really rum bunch, now that I think of it), of the world’s first parliament, where shaggy Vikings with beards, horns, etc., sat in the year 962 and debated the day’s crucial issues of roof-thatching, wife-swapping, and horse-and-cow distribution. I saw nothing there but standing stones, the steady snowfall, and patches of bright emerald green clover around a bubbling hot spring that maintained, said the guide, a steady 78 degrees Fahrenheit, just right for a dip, if anyone cared to…? I shook my head no, although she was winsome, with her blonde braids and upturned nose. But she was a Viking herself, and the norms of her life were at variance with mine.

     Thingvellir is a splendid, barren place, a touch of steamy-greeny water amid rugged Arctic nothingness. I shivered. From the north came the cold blast of my old nemesis, the wilderness. I made out a red farmhouse and adjacent barn in the distance. How could people live here, I wondered? They were madmen, those Vikings, plying unwanted trades at the fringes of the world and offering unsolicited salvation at bargain-basement prices. And yet their descendants—the descendants of the Vikings, at any rate—are quiet, friendly, even meek. Iceland is a country of smothering hospitality (as in the case of the well-meaning Dr. Magnusson), as I suppose is normal when you live in great comfort with all your siblings and cousins and rarely encounter strangers to whom you can display your standard of living, or your wares, or your undies.

      Great white wings of snow swept across the purplish sky, stained only faintly by the struggling sun, for it was winter and the dark was in command. A low-level gray luminosity dribbled through, enough to enable me to discern pools and hot springs and outcroppings of rocks and the odd tundra scrub jiggling at ankle-height in the steady force of the wind. Steam billowed from the springs. A pair of German lads from the bus, after brief but intense discussion, took up the guide’s invitation to go for a paddle, stripped off and gingerly entered the swirling steam, ponytails tied back, balls contracting in shock.

     “Scheisse!”

     “Es ist heiss!”

    Giggles all round from the ladies, but this frolicking caused no real consternation, for all Nordics, living as they do most of the time beneath cold boreal skies, drop their rags at the slightest provocation. Hence Scandinavia’s reputation, in more-repressed Latin societies like Italy and France, as a place of nonstop sex orgies.

     And anyway, in Iceland the natives are nuttier by far than any backpacking German nudists. God bless ‘em for it, too.