Pets (18 page)

Although I had told Jaime and Saebjorn about my stay in London with Havard, I have no idea if they remember his name. I got to know Saebjorn shortly after I came home from that trip and Jaime about two years ago, so we have never really spoken about him.

Jaime says good evening to Greta and Armann and they return his greeting. I'm impatient to find out what it is that Havard ran into the bedroom with before he opened the door, and I wriggle a little in the direction of Halldor's toy box in order to get closer to it. I pull it carefully in my direction with my left foot; the dust gets stirred up with each movement I make and settles on my face like a cement.

“Are you the Spaniard?” Armann asks cheerfully, as if they are waiting to complete a group and only the Spaniard is missing. “We are here, Emil's flight companions, all we need is our pal, Emil.”

“Were you on the plane with him?” Jaime asks.

“Yes, we were,” Armann answers proudly. “Not
him
though,” he adds. No doubt he means Havard, who takes over:

“I was just coming from Sweden. You know: Sverige. Volvo. Abba.”

“So everyone has come from abroad, it seems,” Jaime says—I can just imagine his boyish smile—and then he corrects Armann: “I'm not really Spanish, I come from Chile.”

“That's even better,” Armann says. “It's not every day one talks to—how is it again—
un chileno
, isn't it?”

“
Si: un chileno
. You have obviously learned some Spanish.”

“No, I haven't,” Armann answers, almost as if Jaime's praise was an insult.

Behind the toy box I discover the sailing ship and the book. I don't have to wonder much about Havard's reason for removing the objects from the living room; of course he doesn't want my friends to find out who he is, at least not while he is the host here (if one can speak in those terms). He naturally assumes that I have told them all about him, and he hopes that they won't recognize him. With some difficulty I manage to reach the book with my foot, but I get a terrible pain in my hip; it feels like I've strained something, which wouldn't surprise me after lying here for so long. Normally I would shout out in pain, but with the discipline and concentration I have been forced to master the past few hours, I‘m able—admirably I think—to suppress the shout.

It feels rather special to be handling the book again. I think that Orn paid around five thousand pounds for it. And though he didn't let me suffer in any way on account of its disappearance from his collection, just the same I suspected all along that Havard sold it for a song in some second-hand bookshop. I put the book on the carpet in front of me and find the first page of the story:

Call me Ishmael
.

By removing the letters
s
,
h
, and
a
from the name Ishmael, one is left with the anagram of my name:
Imel.
And the removed letters form another anagram for the English word
ash.
I smile to myself
.
Without intending to take these word games too seriously, I think first of the word cremation and then the thing for which I would almost be ready to give this original edition of
Moby-Dick
: a cigarette. White, new, and fresh smelling from the carton on the table in the living room. When I glance quickly over the first chapter, I recall the first time I read the book many years ago. As I approach the end of the chapter, my eye pauses automatically at the word
horror
. I read the whole paragraph and get the feeling that the contents are appropriate at this point in my life:

Not ignoring what is good, I am quick to perceive a horror, and could still be social with it
—
would they let me
—
since it is but well to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in.

All of a sudden there is a sound of breaking glass. I hear Havard swear and then Jaime declines a drink when Havard says that he had intended to give him whisky, but he had just let the glass slip to the floor.

“There are more glasses,” Armann says, but Jaime insists that he doesn't want anything to drink, he can't really stop, he has just come to see if I had brought back the CD he had asked me to buy. To tell the truth I am quite surprised; I did buy him a CD—exactly the one he asked for and it took me some time to find it—but I understood that both he and Saebjorn were going to come and have a drink and chat with me this evening. Of course I am aware that I don't seem to be there, but I think Jaime could at least wait for Saebjorn, who is bound to come any minute now.

“Can't I offer you a little red wine?” Greta says. I nod on Jaime's behalf. I can imagine that Greta would like him to stay for a little while; in a way it must give her more hope that I will turn up.

“Thanks, maybe just one glass,” Jaime says after a little thought.

“Of course, you prefer wine down there in Chile, don't you?” Armann asks. He seems to be very pleased that Jaime is staying.

“Yes, perhaps,” Jaime answers. “Emil was on the plane today wasn't he?” he asks with a laugh. I am rather astonished at this stupid question; the CDs didn't come by themselves.

“Oh yes,” Armann answers. “We were all traveling with God today; Emil, Greta here and I
. . .
”

“Wait a minute,” Greta interrupts from the kitchen, where I imagine she is opening the red wine bottle. “Who was traveling with God?”

“Well, weren't we? Weren't we on the un-explorable path high above civilization today? On
God's path
as our friends in the church say.”

“Don't count me in, for God's sake,” interjects Havard, who sounds rather tired.

“But, on the other hand, I have never understood what is so un-explorable about God's path, as they say,” is heard from Armann. “It's not until we come down to earth that we begin to get lost. Take today for example; no sooner had we landed in Keflavik than my glasses were lost. Then I was led all over the airport building until I was completely lost and had no hope of finding my way at all.”

“Is it possible that it had something to do with the loss of your glasses?” Havard asks and Greta laughs in the kitchen.

At almost the same moment as she pulls the cork out of the red wine bottle, the phone rings; it seems to be in the kitchen too.

“I'll get it,” Greta calls, but she has to ask Jaime to help her to get the connection.

“Good evening,” she says. “Yes, this is Emil's place. On Grettisgata, yes. Hello, I'm Greta. No, they are just Emil's friends.” It's obvious that the person on the other end of the line—whom I guess is my mother—can hear male voices coming from the living room. “Yes, there is also a man who was on Emil's flight today, I think he came to fetch his glasses. What? Me? No, I'm just Emil's girlfriend. Since
when
? What do you mean? I'm just his girlfriend.”

She sounded rather annoyed just then and I begin to suspect who she is talking to.

“No, he has obviously left his cell phone here at home,” Greta continues. “No, I have no idea where he has gone. Yes. No. Eh? Yes, I'll tell him to phone as soon as he arrives. At the hotel? He knows where it is? Alright. Goodbye.”

“Well!” Greta says to herself when she hangs up.

“Who was that, then?” Armann asks. “It certainly wasn't Emil.”

“No, it was some Vigdis,” Greta answers.

4

She says she is at the hotel. Vigdis, who is now just
some
Vigdis. Most probably she called from the reception or the pay phone in the foyer, but I imagine her in one of the bedrooms, lying on a double bed, still holding the receiver in her hand; she has made up her mind about what this Greta is doing at my place. Vigdis could be in the same room where we (Halldor, my son, she and I) stayed last summer, in the suite that she booked for us. She is telling herself what a pathetic little shit I am—wondering why I can't call to let her know that I have met someone else, and why she has to go to the trouble of calling herself, just to have this new girlfriend of mine answer.

No doubt she has given up all hope of getting the clothes she asked me to buy. She probably imagines that I bought them for her but have given them to this new girlfriend—this new girlfriend who is so blatantly lying when she says that she doesn't know where I am. Of course she knows nothing about the bottle of cognac and the box of chocolates. But the bottle is no longer presentable as a gift, and I suddenly realize how hopeless it is to give her the box of chocolates; it would be the same as buying her a banana and a bottle of ginger ale. I guess that she is wearing her black hotel skirt at this moment; she lies with her legs sprawled out on the bed and curses the memories that the room holds for us.

The music has been changed. In place of Viennese waltzes, I hear Arthur Blythe blow his horn above a strange combination of tuba and bongo drums; Jaime has chosen this. He turns up the volume a bit, and I hear Havard complain about something. Then Greta says that it sounds just fine.

Vigdis invited Halldor and me north to Akureyri one weekend last summer. She had just started working in the hotel, and Halldor and I were quite surprised when she met us at the airport and told us that she had booked the suite for us; she got it with some staff discount. I had just been telling Halldor that she worked in a very fine hotel in Akureyri, but I had imagined that we would stay in the room she rented in the town center.

Our weekend up north was in many ways quite memorable, especially for little Halldor. Amongst other things, we counted the steps leading up to the church and got a different number than we had been told was right; we visited Nonni's House; and we went to meet some relatives of mine whom I hadn't seen for ten years. On Saturday, Vigdis gave Halldor a game—a beautiful, well-made wooden box with marbles in it—which I suggested he keep at Grettisgata because it was so big. He was allowed to make the final decision though, and he took the game with him when he returned to Denmark three weeks later. The climax of the weekend, at least for Halldor, was when we went out on Eyjafjord in a speedboat with a waiter from the hotel, a man of about forty. I heard just before Christmas that the waiter had hanged himself in the hotel laundry room; he had been betrayed by a woman who happened to work there.

When I called Halldor last New Year to wish him a “Happy New Year,” I told him that the man in the boat had hanged himself in the hotel, the same hotel that we had stayed in. I know I wouldn't have mentioned it to him if I hadn't been drinking, and I really regretted doing so when Anna, his mother, called me later on New Year's day to scold me for telling a six-year-old child stories of suicides.

These three days up north left an almost uncomfortably strong family feeling, especially in Vigdis's mind, I think. The whole time we were together I could see in Halldor's eyes that he felt he would never be a real part of it. I remember Vigdis saying “We must meet again more often” to both of us when we said goodbye at the airport. I don't think Halldor would have objected; he seemed to like my girlfriend, although I can never decide if I want our relationship to become more serious. And now that a strange girl answered Vigdis on my phone, I am rather afraid that our relationship is about to end. After the weekend at the hotel in July, we met several times before New Year, mostly in Reykjavik, but this year we have only spoken over the phone. I was beginning to hope that Vigdis's feelings, which she displayed so openly when Halldor and I were visiting, were cooling down.

While I imagine Greta, instead of Vigdis in the hotel room up north, I am quite sure that she knows that the caller was my girlfriend. She has probably decided not to make any excuses and thought that since I wanted to meet her—even though I had a girlfriend and hadn't turned up where we had agreed to meet—she at least has the right to call herself my girlfriend, more of a right than some woman with whom I probably had a relationship earlier, someone from my past. I can't deny that Greta is very much in the present, especially now that I have undressed both of us in my mind and we are in an imaginary hotel room, no longer in Akureyri. I have checked us into a hotel here in Reykjavik, one which has no connection whatsoever with Vigdis. We are going into the bathroom together, the steam from the hot shower has made the mirror as useless as I am here under the bed, and then there is another knock on the front door.

Armann is convinced that it is me. “Better late than never,” he says cheerfully but when it becomes apparent that it is not the person he expected, he refers to the proverb that some people never seem to turn up.

Jaime opens the door to Saebjorn, and one of the others stretches over to the stereo and turns down the volume. Saebjorn starts by asking Jaime why he didn't phone him before coming and is very surprised to hear that I haven't come home yet.

“Well, what is all this then?” Saebjorn asks once the door is closed; I can feel the pleasant fresh air that they have allowed to enter. I expect he means all the people he doesn't know and the wine on the table and the cigarette smoke that I imagine is already very thick, since I'm beginning to breathe it in the bedroom. “Is there a party here and Emil isn't even at home?”