Orren

Orren was usually a quiet man who didn't drink or do drugs, play politics or engage in arguments. As one of the few farmers who abstained from alcohol, he was frequently called upon to police local balls where spirits flowed freely and violence was the rule rather than the exception.

His two passions were Chess and Football, in the isolation of the rural north he would often wind down a busy day of farming by sitting at his desk and puzzling to overcome chess riddles in a chess magazine he subscribed to.

He'd grown up on the farm with his grandparents, as they took him in after his mother disappeared from the picture when he was very young. My mother and he met in a chance encounter at the hospital where she was working as a nurse, he had been admitted with an inflamed appendix that needed an emergency operation and she a young divorcee with two young children in tow.

He was the son of a neighboring farmer and German girl that had arrived as a refugee in Iceland shortly after the second world war ended. He never talked about her, nor did anyone else in the family.

Something must have happened at any rate, as he was raised by his paternal grandparents that lived on a neighboring farm. To me, they looked like a pixie had married a troll; she was frail and small while he was stocky and built like an ox and only lacked the fangs to fit the label the imagination of a child had applied to him.

Where I grew up in the fishing village further north, there was a strange lady that all the children knew about but none of us knew her name. The reason we were aware of her at all was that it was a game to us to sneak up to her door, knock on it and shout profanities about her dubious German heritage and alleged political opinions and then sprint away to the nearest hiding place somewhere close by and watch her come out fuming and shouting something we couldn't comprehend.

I don't think I ever participated directly on those occasions, but as a young kid it gives you a sense of belonging to be a part of a collective that is doing something together as a group - even if only a handful of the members is taking active actions.

At the time I didn't understand how unfair or cruel this must have felt to her, we were just playing a childish game and our reward from it was the rush of fear combined with the excitement of getting away with something forbidden, as we were able to provoke a response from her without suffering any repercussions.

It was only later that I started thinking that maybe this was his mother that had lived there, to a child every adult is either old or ancient and in my memories she was ancient, as would his mother likely have been by then.

Perhaps she was one of the survivors of one of the worst atrocities at the end of the war, when an overloaded passenger ship containing 15 thousand German refugees was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the middle of winter as they fled westwards. 

Only a handful of souls survived the sinking, the icy embrace of the Baltic sea in January will take even the strongest and the refugees on the ship were mostly women, children and the elderly fleeing the wrath of the Soviets who were expected to show no mercy to their invaders after four years of bloody war.

War never changes and neither do refugees, only the names and nationality of the people suffering change.

What effect this would have had on Orren's childhood, I can only imagine, growing up as a child in a foreign country with a German parent. People from the losing side of any war of aggression are rarely popular at the end of it, and children will take what signs they pick up from their parents and exaggerate them into a microcosm of emotions and violence.

It would be easy to just label him a bad person based on his actions as an adult towards the vulnerable children who were ultimately in his power after we arrived at the farm - but life is an infinite shade of grey rather than being the simple difference between black and white that we prefer it to be.

I can imagine him as a young, frightened boy being singled out for his heritage, beaten or called names no child should ever be called, or worse.

Sympathy for the devil or empathy for the evildoer, I believe we all start out with good intentions and evil is what happens when we get lost along the way to grandmas house when there isn't a woodsman to come to the rescue.

Imagining his childhood and what it must have been like, I can sympathize with him, feel empathy to a degree and come close to forgiving or at least letting go of the hatred I felt for so long.

Whether my brother and sister would have agreed with that, I cannot say.