Reykjavík Grapevine - 01.03.2013, Blaðsíða 16

16The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 3 — 2013
Iceland | Literature
Evil
Eiríkur Örn Presents A Taste Of Evil
Agnes was raised on Hófí – Miss World, ’85 – and Jón
Páll – The World's Strongest Man throughout most of
the eighties. Hófí was so pretty and Jón Páll was so
strong. She so modest and he so bold. She so innocent
and he so honest. She so petite and he so barrel-chest-
ed and swarthy. Both of them blond and blue-eyed, she
like an angel, he like a viking. Both of them so perfect.
By comparison, Lithuania just seemed slightly pitiful,
somehow. It wasn't until Agnes had finished high-
school that Lithuanians became serious contenders in
the World's Strongest Man tournament, and not until
the summer of 2009 did they finally clinch the title. By
then Agnes had lost interest.
Beauty contests were illegal in the Soviet Union.
Everything seemed so hopeless in Lithuania. Some-
how, they always just seemed slightly pitiful. In Ice-
land, by contrast, lived the world's strongest man, the
world's most beautiful woman, and they were every-
where – advertising Svali fruit juice and The Non-
Smoking Team and all things pure and good, not to
mention Iceland itself. But above all, they were virtu-
ous.
Hófí wanted no part in any sort of jet-set life, and
the moment she had discharged her duties as Miss
World she went back to being a babysitter at her old
daycare center. As far as anyone knows, she's still
there.
***
Agnes had written half a page. She tried to express
her stance on nationality. On herself as an Icelander.
She tried to answer her own question on whether she
was a second-generation Lithuanian immigrant in Ice-
land, or a first-generation Icelandic immigrant from
Lithuania. It was raining outside and the temperature
had dropped sharply since yesterday. She was fully-
dressed, wearing a thin, white jumper and jeans, and
she tried to recall the ads with Jón Páll and Hófí. Be-
cause that's how she remembered them. In the ads. She
remembered the ads for Svali and she hazily recalled
the Non-Smoking Team – or maybe the B-League
World Champions in handball appeared in that one?
Weren't they always kind of hanging around the edges
back then? And that made her suddenly remember
Bogdan Kowalczyk, the Polish coach for the Icelan-
dic national handball team in 1989, the year Iceland
won the B-League World Championship. B-League?
Agnes wasn't completely clear on what that meant, but
it didn't sound quite as glamorous as it should have.
***
Bogdan Kowalczyk was a former handball champion
from Poland. He belonged to that clique of role-mod-
els for Icelandic youngsters – but in a sort of marginal
way. Bogdan appeared in no advertisements for Svali,
not as far as Agnes could remember. He smoked ciga-
rettes perpetually, and was mostly known for being
nasty to “our boys”. Or – it wasn't called being nasty.
It was called instilling discipline. Icelanders were
children of nature, and in order to harness all those
primal forces (from volcanoes, winds, glaciers and the
sea), we needed to extend our search as far as Warsaw,
Poland. We needed a man who could get angry. Very,
very angry. Who could give the nature children what
for. Mould them into bona-fide warriors. We needed
Iron Curtain discipline.
And anyway, if Bogdan got angry no-one minded,
because he spoke such funny Icelandic. And no mat-
ter how angry he got, he was never so angry that he
wasn't also funny. He was imitated in every breakroom
in every workplace, all around the country. Comedians
would work him over at annual gatherings, and occa-
sionally, someone would even have a go at him on the
country's only talk show, Tonight With Hemmi Gunn.
But it was all in good fun, of course.
Bogdan Kowalczyk was the closest thing to a
Lithuanian role model that Agnes had. But he was Pol-
ish, not Lithuanian. And now, perhaps, she had Dorrit
Moussaieff, the President's wife. She was of Jewish
descent, not Lithuanian. Agnes hadn't given a thought
to this until now. She'd never felt a connection to either
Dorrit or Bogdan. When she was a child, Bogdan was
just the weird foreign guy who couldn't speak proper
Icelandic. Like her parents. Like Dorrit was now:
“Iceland is the giantest country in the world.” All that
stuff. After the fall of Communism, Bogdan returned
to Poland. Like Agnes' parents. Although he left only
one year later, while her parents waited for almost a
decade. But still. In retrospect, Bogdan owned a bigger
part of her than Hófí or Jón Páll.
But none of this had anything to do with her thesis.
***
Agnes awoke with a start. She couldn't remember what
she had been dreaming about, but she had the feeling
someone was watching her. She got out of bed and
went to the bathroom to pee. The feeling was unbear-
able.
She felt as though someone's eyes were drilling
holes in her back. But behind her was nothing but the
toilet seat. She wiped herself, flushed and went back
into the apartment. She secured the door with the bar,
looked out the peephole, closed the balcony doors and
lay down in bed again. Goddamn jitters. Whatever had
she been dreaming about? Something had whisked
away her feeling of security. And though she knew it
was just a dream, she couldn't shake it off.
It was six o'clock. After lying in bed for almost
an hour without feeling any better, she decided to get
back on her feet and try to get some work done.
***
Lithuanians were a thieving lot. They smuggled drugs
and raped people. Things hadn't always been that way,
but maybe they already were when Agnes started her
thesis, two years ago. When she was little, there were
maybe five to ten Lithuanians living in Iceland, not
counting her parents. They would sometimes meet to
celebrate the Lithuanian National Day – during the
first year it was the old one, February 16 (the found-
ing day of the Democracy of Lithuania in 1918), after
1991 they'd meet to celebrate the new one, March 11,
and eventually it was both dates. When the Estonians
and the Latvians were also invited, the total number
might sometimes reach 30. One time, Jón Baldvin
Hannibalsson, the foreign minister who was the first to
acknowledge the Baltic States' independence, showed
up. Some people felt he drank rather heavily and was a
bit high and mighty, but nobody ever spoke ill of him
aloud. During the nineties, he was next to God in the
eyes of Icelandic Lithuanians.
***
The Lithuanians grew fast in numbers after the turn
of the millennium. According to official records, they
were fifteen in 2000. Three years later they were 254.
A year after that, Lithuania became a full-fledged
member of the European Union, and Lithuanians
could freely travel and work within it. Now they were
over 1,500. Half a percent of the nation. Like a re-
spectably sized Icelandic town. Suddenly, Lithuanians
started popping up in the Icelandic media. All of a
sudden Icelanders, who hadn't shown any interest in
the country once they were done patting themselves
on the back for acknowledging its independence, be-
gan exhibiting an unfettered interest in the citizens
of Lithuania. Lithuanians broke other people's knee-
caps, swarmed around in organized crime gangs and
robbed stores. They strong-armed honest youths into
becoming drug mules. They cohabited, dozens of
them to each apartment, drinking and doing drugs and
brawling, so that upstanding citizens were positively
aghast. It got to the point that you could hardly open
a newspaper without seeing some sort of rundown on
the “Lithuanian Mafia.”
***
Agnes was angry at this rap. How Lithuanians were
isolated and made into monsters. She was angry that
there was never any talk of “Icelandic” pedophiles and
“Icelandic” leg-breakers and “Icelandic” rapists. Most
of all she was angry at the way that Lithuanians were
turned into a faceless, nameless mass of bad intentions.
Even Icelandic criminals were named something, were
something. They were small-time crook Lalli Johns,
leg-breaker Annþór Karlsson, pedophile Steingrímur
Njálsson, rapist Bjarki Már, drug dealer Franklín
Steiner. The Lithuanians were just the Lithuanian. The
two Lithuanians. Five Lithuanians. Nine Lithuanians.
Fourteen Lithuanians. And somehow, they all seemed
to be jammed, ass-to-nose, into the same apartment,
even though they were big-shot international criminals
who smuggled dope, hookers and weapons for multi-
millions per day. Where was lovable small-time crook
Vytautas? Rolandas the friendly thug? Raimondas,
pimp with a heart of gold?
***
Worst of all, thought Agnes, was that it was all true.
Nobody was lying about anybody. Not that she could
see. They had assuredly raped, stolen, assaulted and
battered – maybe worse. But so had many others, she
thought, without being singled out especially – and
above all, Icelanders had never needed any help when
it came to rape and violence. They had always been
perfectly capable of raping their own and beating up
their own. Perhaps these were the jobs that populists
were so afraid the foreigners would steal? Agnes knew
she was bitter. She just didn't care.
And this, of course, was one of the main reasons
for her thesis. Stemming the tide of the xenophobia, el-
evating herself above her own society. As if though she
could, by ascending from these atrocities, cancel out
her own nationality and absolve herself of the (shared)
guilt that the newspapers seemed to imply that she car-
ried. She wouldn't be just one more faceless head in an
anonymous mob of Lithuanians. Lithuanian number 8.
Lithuanian number 27. Lithuanian number 1,589. But
the thesis wasn't supposed to be about Lithuanians. It
was supposed to be about populists.
***
Agnes fell asleep shortly after dinner, so she was back
on her feet a little past three AM. It was pitch black
outside, and the temperature close to freezing. She
hadn't seen the Colosseum yet, or applied for an audi-
ence with the Pope. She hadn't even ordered a pizza.
The simple act of staring at a blank computer screen
consumed her entire attention. Occasionally, she wrote
a page or two, but she'd always move the results from
the main text into a separate document, since these
digressions of hers had nothing to do with a master's
thesis in history.

***
Once, someone asked how I perceived myself. Wheth-
er I was who I thought I was, or who others thought
I was. The answer to that question, that time around,
was that I was she who I thought others thought I was.
Philosophers speak of the Other, with a big O, the
imaginary party sitting somewhere on-top an imagi-
nary mountain, looking down on us, mouth agape in
ceaseless, judgmental wonder. He is a figment of our
imagination, no less real for all that. He represents
what we think that others think of us – the Other is
the eye on the wall, the keyhole, peephole, webcam.
If there is anyplace he acquires solid form, it is in un-
marked and hidden surveillance cameras, the suspi-
cious eye watching over us, but never offering an opin-
ion, never asking for the time of day or a light, and yet
haunting every street corner.
***
When the Israelites hunched up, exhausted and ha-
rassed, in Babylon, God said to them: You are my
witnesses, the guiding light of eternity, and I am God.
In the Jewish midrash his words are interpreted thusly:
When you are my witnesses I am God, and when you
aren't my witnesses I am, so to speak, not God.
For not even the God of the Israelites exists, if there
is no one watching.
Translated from the Icelandic by Steingrímur Teague
Patrice Helmar
Evil (Illska) is a new novel by Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl about Agnes Lukauskaité, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, and her obses-
sion with the Holocaust and the extreme right. This is a shortened version of chapter 14. Agnes is alone in Italy on her way from Iceland
to Lithuania, trying to put together something towards her Master's thesis on the extreme right in Icelandic politics.
Illustration by Fanney Sizemore