JR Gunnarsson — From Death of a Forest — translated by Mark Ioli Curated & introduced by Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Introduction to Death of a Forest, translated from the Icelandic by Mark Ioli:

THERE WERE BOMBS beneath our forest. Here is a rough sketch:

They were shaped like thermos bottles with fins—in case that isn’t clear from the picture—and covered in rust, as they were from the Second World War. I had been dancing on top of these instruments of death my entire life without even knowing it.

What the hell were bombs doing under the trees?

Chalk this one up to the army. The Brits held training exercises in that area during the war. Choir practice, as my father called it, because the soldiers were so young and inexperienced, with ruddy cheeks like choir boys.

I don’t know what sort of drunken revelry led to these bombs being left behind. But as time wore on, they sank down into the ridge of turf and were gradually covered over. Then along came Mom and Dad who planted some larch trees. The roots wrapped themselves around the bombs like fingers, tickling them.

Their presence came to light shortly after the forest was destroyed, that autumn when it wouldn’t stop raining. When the earth ran down the hillside and crumpled up like a blanket at the bottom of the slope, leaving behind a small, horseshoe-shaped grove.

No precipitation in the forecast here in Spain, and yet I listen for the rain. I begin to think about that other night I lay awake, back home, when the downpour began.

Hildur had turned up the heat. She prefers keeping the bedroom like an oven. I’d waited for her to fall asleep, snuck out of bed to open the window, then lay back down and listened to the rain singing on the roof. The sound of rain has always spoken to me, which makes sense, given the body is mostly water. It’s easy to forget. Flesh is the vocal minority of our anatomy.

At first, I could make out individual drops. They splattered onto the roof, one after another. Then the silent intervals between them began to grow shorter. Water spilled down the roof, along the windows and walls and down the driveway, bathed the moss and weeds in the cracks between the pavement before running like a stream along the sidewalk and down into the sewer. Raindrops jingled off the overturned paint can lying on the patio, and the tarp covering the flower beds sounded like a poorly tightened drum. The yard had become a trash heap. I had forgotten to clean up; there were tools left lying out and pieces of lumber I still needed to apply sealant to.

The wood is going to warp and crack, I thought to myself, and the tools will rust. But I didn’t feel like dragging myself out of bed in the middle of the night to save them.

Hildur wants the yard kept neat and tidy. She is generally more sensitive to mess than I am. Probably due to my upbringing; my mother hoarded all kinds of trash, and my father was too cheap to throw it out, especially after Mom died. Hildur, on the other hand, grew up surrounded by such compulsive asceticism that rarely more than three days passed between full-scale purges of their house. She has tried to sever ties with her childhood and teenage years, barely speaking to her parents anymore except on the kids’ birthdays, but this cleaning obsession still slumbers within her.

After we bought the land and built our house, Hildur wanted to tear out the vegetation and completely level the yard. I had a hard time convincing her otherwise. She doesn’t like being told what to do, it reminds her too much of her childhood. We argued about it for several weeks, until we finally had the alder and willow tree removed, installed cotoneaster and fencing around the entire lot, and contented ourselves with this as a tidy solution. The rowan tree up on the hill was allowed to remain, however, and was in fact joined by another. Likewise, we left the aspens in peace, along with the birch on the west side of the house. I tried to keep the yard in good shape, but projects sometimes dragged on, and I flitted from one thing to another until it all ground to a halt and the yard filled with trash. So I was glad Hildur was asleep beside me and couldn’t hear the rain hitting the empty paint can or the wheelbarrow filling with water.

Hildur would never struggle with insomnia. Falling asleep is like child’s play to her.

Different tree species give off different sounds, both in wind as well as rain. It is possible to identify them with your eyes closed. I heard the birch trees clearly and could picture the bark, shiny like a new magazine, then the wind blowing its leaves as though flipping through pages. I began to think about my forest, even though none of its trees had leaves. But the rain can also play a mean conifer.

In the introduction to the book A History of Palaeozoic Forests, which I read more than a hundred times in my youth, water and plants are said to enjoy the most poignant love affair on the planet.

IT ENDED UP BEING a blessing in disguise that I never managed to drag the family there for picnics, I thought, after the bombs in the forest were uncovered. But I wouldn’t say this revelation had made me feel any better. It wasn’t a particularly enjoyable way to cope, having to witness the destruction of our forest.

On the other hand, it was a great time for all the pundits who purported to have seen it coming. Not the bombs, but rather the forest sliding down the hillside. These sages acted as though they weren’t in the least surprised by what had happened. They said it was common knowledge that the land was incapable of supporting forestry, since it was so steep and the soil so shallow. It hadn’t been a question of whether, but when. Even my father’s oldest friend took part in this, one Haraldur, the most unsuccessful prophet in history. For decades he was convinced that all future international relations would be conducted in Mandarin. English was on its way out; this was obvious based on the population growth statistics. So he tortured himself trying to learn Chinese. Scrounged up some cassette tapes and textbooks from Denmark, though he struggled with Danish and needed a Danish-Icelandic and a Chinese-Danish dictionary just to make any progress. Toiled away on his own like this for over a year.

And what sort of international trade opportunities are available to a self-taught auto mechanic in Iceland? he was asked.

Well, they’ll need someone to interpret, he said.

Ni hao, the little punks at the gas station would say when greeting him, and at work they called him the Chinaman. When I was a kid, I believed everything he said as though it were the word of Jesus Christ. I had nightmares that everyone in the village spoke Chinese except me.

I think Haraldur wanted to make up for all the nonsense he had spewed over the years by needling me about the forest. But it was tiresome having to listen to him while I was trying to mourn.

NOT LONG AFTER my grandfather died, Mom and Dad started planting trees. It was the second death in the family in a week. Grandma died first, and it was when Grandpa followed her that Dad bought the trees. These were his parents who passed in such a short span of time. The hillside was on their land.

In hindsight, I think my mom and dad had planted these trees as a way of working through the psychological trauma, or maybe just as a distraction.

One time, right after they had begun their cultivation of the hillside, they set me down against a berry bush, hoping I would be quiet. I cried a lot as a baby, but I loved berries. While my parents were planting, I sat beside the bush shoveling crowberries into my mouth. They were at it until the sun set behind the cliffs, when my dad strolled over and asked whether there were any berries left for him. Then he gave a start. I had been eating lamb turds.

This was my dad’s favorite story. It always warmed his heart, the memory of me eating sheep shit. I imagine he also looked back fondly on this period of his life, when he and Mom were at their best, having recently become parents and finally out on their own.

Aunt Herdís, on the other hand, was none too pleased when she found out about her brother’s newest escapade, that he had begun planting larch trees on their land. They had listed the plot for sale in its entirety, and the deal was nearly done when Dad decided he wanted to hold on to the hillside. This complicated matters considerably. By the time the siblings finally managed to conclude the sale, they were no longer on speaking terms. A rancher from down south took over the farm and pasture, excluding the hillside. Dad had to buy it from Aunt Dísa. He gave up a lot to see this through, and in the end was forced to sell our house, since he was building a new workshop at the same time. He got rid of the lawnmower when we moved into the new house, said it wasn’t needed with such a small yard. Instead, he cut the grass with a scythe that belonged to his grandfather. As a result, the kids in the village calling him the grim reaper. They called me son of death.

I didn’t find it funny at the time, not at that age. They never spoke again though, Dad and Dísa. She died of cancer after moving to Reykjavík.

I flew down to visit her before she passed. I met Hildur on the same trip, but that is another story.

I went to the hospice ward to see Dísa and barely recognized her. It was as if her flesh had been removed from her body and the skin stretched over her bones. It was the eye sockets that bothered me the most. There was no question she wasn’t long for this world.

Dísa asked whether Dad was going to visit before she died.

Yes, I said. He is coming.

Hopefully he isn’t still mad at me about the hillside, she said.

I told her not to worry, Dad was on the way, of course he would visit her.

To say goodbye? she asked.

Yes, I said, he’s coming to say goodbye.

I tried not to look at her. She could tell I was lying. When I finally dared to look her in the eye, it was as though she were looking straight through me. I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my entire life.

After Mom died, you might say the forest became like a stepparent to me. Dad never remarried, but instead allowed the forest to fill the void Mom left behind. Naturally this wasn’t a forest in the strictest sense of the word, not by foreign standards anyway. It was just a small patch of land with a handful of trees, though looking at it per capita (two people: me and Dad) it might be considered a forest, so that’s what we called it. The plants remained small for a long time, and I couldn’t imagine they would one day turn into actual trees. I was doubtful they would ever get enough nourishment. But then they took off. Shot up. Dad and I began to weed and slash, we created walking paths between the trees and pruned the double trees to encourage their growth. The forest began to take shape, and before I knew it, the trees were taller than me. It had become a small but dense larch forest that you could still get lost in. Not one of those random assemblies of birch that some like to call a forest, Dad said, who was incapable of praising something without bringing something else down. He felt leafy trees were best kept in gardens.

Why didn’t they plant pine or spruce as well? The question would often come up. The answer was that Dad considered evergreens too arrogant. They are pretending to be immortal, he would say. I think this was just an after-the-fact explanation for the homogeneity of the forest. But he had a particular respect for larches. They are stubborn and independent, just like him. They refuse to behave like other conifers. They lose their needles in the autumn, which are so soft they might be better described as a pelt.

Larches were well-suited to the shallow ground of the hillside. They grew tall and thick. Perhaps too tall, considering the weight required to pull down an entire slope.

I always think about Mom in connection with Dad. They were always a single unit in my eyes. My memories of them, their nerve trees in my brain, have intertwined. Maybe that’s always how it is with parents, in your mind one only exists in the context of the other. But things get complicated when I think of my dad, because his longest relationship in life was with the forest. It is impossible to think of him without thinking of the forest, or of the forest without Dad coming to mind. They were one and the same phenomenon. And just as with Mom, he was forced to look on while his better half died, when the forest ran down the hillside. If it had been up to me, Dad would have died first.

Jónas Reynir Gunnarsson was born in 1987 and grew up in the town of Fellabær in the East Fjords of Iceland. He received an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Iceland and has written four novels, as well as the award-winning play We Die on Mars (Við deyjum á Mars). His first two books of poetry were A Village Manual (Leiðarvísir um þorp) and Big Oil Tankers (Stór olíuskip), the latter of which won the Tómas Guðmundsson Poetry Prize in 2017. His most recent book of poetry, Laundry Day (Þvottadagur) was awarded the May Star Award (Maístjarnan) in 2020. Death of a Forest (Dauði skógar), his third novel, was published in Iceland in October 2020. It was nominated for the Icelandic Literary Prize and The European Union Prize for Literature.

Mark Ioli is a literary translator who called Reykjavík home for four years. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he studied Russian, Polish, and Spanish before becoming fascinated by Icelandic, and in 2017 moved to Iceland to continue exploring the language and rich literary history of this remote island. His translations have appeared in Asymptote, Iceland Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. His website is https://markioli.is