“But yeah,” says Geiri. “Begin at the beginning, you say. I’ve always had a hard time telling stories, I always get stuck in the details, or to be exact, I don’t have a clear idea what’s important to the story and what isn’t. For example, when we toured the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, this Austrian came along, and he stank of deodorant. It was as if the guy had bathed in the stuff. When I think back to Bethlehem I remember this odor very strongly, I recall very little else from that day, but does it matter, should I mention it at all.”
“You don’t have to give me an exhaustive report.”
“I know,” Geiri sips tea, “but, just, I’ve thought so much about how I’m going to tell you and all it does is become more complex and convoluted in my head.” Markús drinks coffee, says:
“How was the plane ride?”
“It was just fine. I slept like a rock the whole way, I always sleep on planes, the noise affects me like a sleeping pill, just wake up to eat and go to the bathroom but otherwise I’m knocked out from takeoff to landing. Yeah, and then we arrived at Ben Gurion, went through customs and immigration. I was interrogated by a guy and a girl, maybe a little bit younger than us, two three years, for about forty five minutes or so, and you know, I could swear that both of them were hitting on me.” Markús and Geiri both smile. “I almost asked the guy if he was on Facebook but under the circumstances I didn’t think it was smart.” Markús laughs, Geiri continues, “Dóra was done when I got out. She had been interrogated by girls our age. It was apparently quite the friendly chat, one of them had been to Iceland for the Airwaves music festival. Chatted about Icelandic bands. We both thought it was kind of weird, had expected more craziness, like something out of a movie, or a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire vibe. You say you’re here to ride along in ambulances as a monitor. Is that your final answer? Can I poll the audience? There is no audience here, remember that. Is that your final answer?” They laugh. “Something severe like that. But that wasn’t what it was like at all. Then we went to the Augusta Victoria Church, or church compound I should say. It’s gigantic, there’s a hospital there run by the Lutheran World Federation. And that’s where people volunteering for Palestinian Medical Relief could stay. Oh, I don’t think I’m telling the story correctly, this is just something, you know, doesn’t matter. I could talk a long while about the ambulance rides I went on but, it was never anything very important, gallstones, an infected wound, a broken bone.”
“Was this in Jerusalem?”
“Yes, that's where we were most of the time. The only patient I have a very clear memory of was a guy in his fifties, some kind of hepatitis, who looked just like my neighbor when I was twelve years old and lived in Raufarhöfn. He was a fisherman who died a couple of years after we moved back to Reykjavík, fell overboard. But that Palestinian looked just like my old neighbor. I wondered if this was the same guy, whether he had faked his own death and moved to Jerusalem. I made up an entire movie in my head. These ridealongs were rather boring. But yeah, I imagined that this neighbor, I think he was named Atli, had managed to get onto another boat, maybe a Norwegian trawler, and wandered around Europe, maybe gone to Asia but then had a spiritual awakening and decided to go to Jerusalem and had lived there since. Jesus, why on Earth am I telling you this? What does it matter to you?”
“Don’t worry, you’re still in shock, same with me, I understand completely. Your thoughts are in chaos.”
“Thanks, yeah, I’m a complete mess. And you of course too.”
“Yup,” they both drink.
“But yeah, it was really strange to go there. Still, I got used to it very quickly, you only really understood how foreign this world is when you did something that was commonplace in Iceland. Like, one day I went on a shopping expedition with Dóra looking for black hair color for blondes, this was an insane hassle. Even though we had a man with us from the Lutheran World Federation who knew the language it always took forever to explain what it was that we were looking for. In the end she just had it done in a hair salon. While I sat and waited for her I paged through one of those magazines that are full of photos of different hairstyles and it was exactly like the ones you find back here. All of a sudden the foreignness crashed over me, the heat, smells, sounds, the language, a pile of details, like how the dogs there looked completely different from dogs in Iceland. It suddenly became utterly overwhelming. It was an extremely powerful experience. More so than, for example, when Dóra and I were in a square and all of a sudden a tank arrived. Or not all of a sudden because, Jesus Christ, these are incredibly loud thingamajigs. I’ve never heard anything as noisy anywhere. It was like how you imagine a rocket taking off. Everyone disappeared from the square instantly, except us. Remained there alone. Didn’t know what to do. And then this giant vehicle arrives, this heap of metal, into the square, stops moving right where we are, points its gun at us, is still for a moment. There was absolute silence. No birdsong. No traffic din. No dogs barking. Not so much as a squeak from a single human being. But then the tank kept going and during this we never even considered that we had been in mortal danger, typical Icelanders abroad. Nothing ever happens to us. Afterwards we were in shock though”
“Sometimes I think the entire Icelandic nation is damaged, that something about the country disables certain centers in the brain, but then I think, no, we aren’t that special, nothing unique about us,” says Markús.
“You may have a point. Yeah, I’m not so certain that Spaniards or Australians or Japanese people would’ve behaved any differently, you always feel so special abroad because you’re almost always the first Icelander that a foreigner has ever met, there are so goddamn few of us. Actually, after I had stared down into the barrel of the cannon the paranoia which is ever present there started to gnaw at me.”
“Were you in Jerusalem for a long time?”
“Yeah, ten days, then we went wandering around the West Bank, first to Ramallah then Bethlehem, to Hebron, and from there to Nablus, mostly looking at old churches, after all we were there partly for the good graces of the Lutheran World Federation. I had mentioned the Austrian in the Church of the Nativity, inside it there were mosaics that Empress Theodora of Byzantium had commissioned and they had bullet holes in them. It was very strange and somehow brought home how much damage had been done there, well, in maybe a silly kind of way. The misery didn’t affect you in the slightest but then we welled up over mosaics with holes in them, and also, all you remember are some minor details, for example, we ate once in a place called Osama’s Pizza.” They laugh.
“For real?”
“Yeah, we laughed so hard when we saw the sign that people started staring at us.
“Were the pizzas edible?”
“Yeah and then some. Damn good. Dóra grabbed a pile of napkins with the logo to give people here. They remained behind. You remember something like that insanely well but then there are whole days which are only a blur. I remember what the staff looks like, the other customers, the pizzas and how they tasted, the aroma in there. On the other hand, see, one of our main tasks was to bring pharmaceutical deliveries to old people that the aid organization supplied with medicine. I don’t remember what a single person who received drugs looked like. On the other hand I could describe garbage piles to you with detailed accuracy, cardboard and glass shards flowing out of dumpsters that lie on their side. Or I could if I knew the names of all the things that exist in Palestine but not here. At first all that trash was shocking but then you stopped noticing it, finally you got so used to it that only stuff that was peculiar caught your attention, like piles that were just one thing. Bottles of the same soda, monochrome carpet rags, stacks of the same pamphlet, like a factory shipment had fallen off a truck and putrefied as it fell. The West Bank is all like that, like someone ordered a nation state off the internet but it fell out of the mailbag and lies rusting up against a fence. The people who are born there, the people who had the bad luck of being born there, try to do their best while everything falls apart around them. Entropy grows and spreads, pushes itself into people’s homes, jobs, life, school, everywhere. What’s most ridiculous and disheartening about Palestine is how incredibly, terrifyingly, stupidly normal everything is, just, you know, people being people.”

Translation: Kári Tulinius