•
He considers hurrying back across the street with the envelope. He would be able to keep an eye on the entrance to the bookstore from the window of the post office. But he could also nip in there sometime later; he has the whole day ahead of him.
•
But what had Sara been doing with this boy who was so obviously trouble? Sara’s father was one of the most renowned composers in Iceland. Her mother, a violinist, was likewise well-known in the music world, though her fame came partly from playing her husband’s works. I mention the parents because of the way I imagine Sara was raised, and how I see her upbringing: a stark contrast to the decision to throw her lot in with Aron Cesar, this half-Brazilian ne’er-do-well, a boy who appeared to have no other aim in life than playing a role, any role, in the underworld.
•
It so happens that as soon as G. thinks of the word underworld Aron goes down into what you could call the bookstore’s underworld. After stopping a moment in the atrium by an advertising banner on the left, he descends to the basement, down a spiral staircase, to the children’s books and toy section. G. decides to wait for him on the first floor. Aron is likely heading to the restroom, which G. knows is by the children’s section. He loiters by the CDs along the wall to the right of the stairs, along past the stationery section, and examines among other things an elegant box of Schumann symphonies. Robert Schumann, who in the faster sections of his sonatas for violin and piano had keyed up the atmosphere of G.’s youth, of his mornings. It occurs to him that Sara would have enjoyed hearing about that misery. When he recalls the onset of one of Schumann’s sonatas, one which is embedded in his mind like his own name, he thinks a story like this would have provoked Sara to laughter, to at least a smile, because it was surely recognizable from her own upbringing. But, of course, they are never going to be sitting together while he tells her about his classical morning torture. No more than he will get to tell her about how he sat the whole night by her garden fence one-and-a-half decades ago, downing a pint-sized bottle of cognac. She was aware of him that evening, though not aware he spent the whole night so close to her. And, of course, knew nothing of the way he hummed lines from a folk song he would never care to mention by name, even less to listen to again.
•
He can see all the better now the great formlessness of which that period of his life had consisted.
•
Sara had told him she really liked him. In a manner that made it impossible for him to interpret it as anything other than from the heart. And so he again asks himself what business she had had with a boy convicted of a crime. A boy who would have barged over to Sara with a cognac bottle and broken it over her head, if she had declined his visit (something G. himself had to put up with)—but that would have required the cognac bottle to have been in Aron’s hands, not G’s, in the first place. He has no interest, in fact, none at all, in recalling the incident, because nothing bores him more than contemplating violence and crime. Decidedly, especially when it concerns drugs. The album by the French countertenor Philippe Jaroussky, Opium, is perhaps the only drug-related thing in his life. Perhaps his pursuit of this man Aron Cesar from post office to bookshop could be categorized as some kind of crime. Because it flits into his mind that he should trail Aron a while. He has nothing to do right now. The only thing on his agenda this dreary, rainy day is to mail his assembled package. Surely that can wait a day; it has taken him several months already to get the thing together. Of course, he could have sent the thing by email, he still could, but computer mail suffers the same way as a person traveling by air rather than sea suffers: the mind does not move at the speed of the traveling body.
•
But does he really have nothing to do? No errands? Does this man, who now finds himself in the underworld, have something more to do than G. himself? Is Aron’s undertaking more important than his? He recalls that the FIFA World Cup is going on. Because of this, so many people have so much to do these days. Their days are full, as the poem says. Even his father, an elderly man, almost fifty years older than G., follows this sport, soccer, withdrawing to the TV screen, though admittedly mainly when the German national team is on. And so that he can enjoy the game to the utmost, he goes over to see his nephew, who has in his living room a screen that covers an entire wall. G. has seen the screen himself, he once visited his cousin with his father, who had absolutely not exaggerated the size of the object, although perhaps the display only covered a half wall. His father’s visits to his alcoholic nephew are, in G.’s mother’s eyes, a source of joy, but also something to fear: for their duration, she knows where her husband is, in the literal sense, but she can also expect him to return home drunk. And because it has happened that his father returned home from his nephew’s very drunk, that reminds G. of the last time the German national team played the English; doubtlessly the match was somewhat difficult for his father, since England is no less his favorite than Germany.
•
Their days are full.
•
As resolutely as he avoids keeping up with news about sports, in the media or from other people, not that he is ever around other people, he has become aware of a peculiar fact: due to their past achievements, some soccer teams are sure to win every time they play; the struggle of the opposing team selected to play against them is a mere formality, the way a bull in the ring never has a chance against the one hired to kill it. Even when the animal manages to drive its horns in. G. imagines a game of soccer with only one team playing in a stadium, still in front of a sold-out crowd. A bullfight without the bull. Sun without shadow.
•
My days have become full. That’s the line in its correct form. But what’s the poem from which the line comes? I promise myself I’ll look it up when I get home later today, or whenever; I know which book the poem’s in. It’s a translation, a foreign poem. The book is one of two my parents’ former tenant, who lived in the basement apartment where I now live, left behind when he moved out. When someone leaves something behind, someone else always comes to gather it up.
•
Someone else; me. Him, I mean. And he is thinking about his parents. But when he thinks about them, it’s not that he’s concerned about them, or that he is thinking of them generally, as one might imagine he should, this thirty-five-year-old man, given that they, his parents, are in their eighties. When he thinks of them, it’s more like he sees a picture of them, what they look like and the way they sound when they open their mouths or stir themselves. He often imagines how they’ll look when they’re dead. Because their inevitable deaths are not so far off in the future. Close enough, even, that he’s already pondering the possibility of using the whole house, wondering whether he’ll leave Aragata, if it will give way to another address. When he was five or six years old, his mother took a photograph of him. They did not make a habit of taking pictures, she and his father. He reckons he could count on one hand the negatives they took to get developed when he was a child and teenager. But he was missing from the picture his mother took of him in the kitchen. He ended up just outside the frame. He remembers his father thinking this was funny, but he also remembers his mother not laughing. And when he recalls this incident, he realizes he has never seen his mother laugh. Not once. Such a thing would surely affect a child’s development, regardless of whether his parents are fifty or twenty. And he realizes at once that he never laughs, either. He doesn’t even smile. It didn’t help that, as a child, he was made to listen to violin sonatas, piano trios, even entire concertos every morning over breakfast. He feels certain that the continuous stress the music of Delius and Schumann placed on the nerves of all of them had considerable impact on his mood and personality. He puts it thus, “all of them,” because he knows his parents expressly used music to provoke one another, as well as him. They still do, though now they are offered fewer opportunities than before. But all the drama, all the tension in people’s relationships, has to some degree a construc
tive effect. He himself is not a man of particular drama, but where drama is to be found, he’s aware of it. For example, he is sure that his love for particular types of poetry, even his attitude in general toward his environment, is due to the delicate sections of the music that was forced upon him in his early childhood. Because precisely there, in those more delicate, sensitive parts, different strands appeared, thrashing among themselves for attention. It hardly needs mentioning that all this led him toward la mélodie française, the French version of the lieder, which is where he more or less exists in his mind from day to day. Luxe, calme et volupté. Everything he is not. Luxurious, tranquil, and sensual. A person always seeks what he does not possess, of course. Des meubles luisants, polis par les ans, décoreraient notre chamber … Had these verses meant anything before Henri Duparc took them and set them to music? In fact, as soon as he thinks about these words, he wants to return immediately to Aragata, so that he can hear them sung. In his living room. What is he doing here in downtown Reykjavík when he could be at home, surrounded by his furniture, which is, after a fashion, meticulously polished by time, as in the poem? But he is in town, on a particular mission. He had intended to mail his envelope.
•
Aron comes back up from the basement. He looks about the place for a few moments, as if he is trying to make up his mind whether he has any reason to stay here longer, then walks toward the stairs up to the main part of the store. Perhaps G. still has his father and soccer on his mind, for when he looks at the half-Brazilian going up the stairs, he suspects Aron fastidiously keeps up with the World Cup. He’s one of the busy. Right now, Aron’s days are full. Unlike his own days. Or are they? G. knows there is a match in the tournament today because he saw it in the paper this morning. It is only now that it sinks in that the competition is being held in the homeland of Aron Cesar Óskarson’s father. He watches Aron walk toward the magazines.
•
When he runs into a group of tourists in warm clothes on the stairs up to the main floor, a few lines from the poem about the redhead come to mind; they come to mind when he thinks about the red-haired Sara. Here I am before all of you, and so on. It looks like he is going to have to wait a while, because the tourists don’t seem to see him standing below them on the steps. They have closed off the passageway for his journey, closed it completely. Here I am before all of you, a man full of good sense, knowing life and death … One of the tourists tugs at another, and they let him pass. Aron Cesar is standing flipping through a magazine. G. moves toward him. Planning to give himself more leeway, so that it will be possible to follow Aron beyond the shop, he decides to allow Aron to notice him and thus remove any doubt as to whether he recognizes him. G. stands beside Aron and reaches for a magazine right in front of his eyes. He feels like he’s entering some kind of sports or pop culture world, because an impossibly powerful smell of perfume or aftershave rises off Aron, a smell which brings to G.’s mind the idea that some baseball superstar or an English boy band sells the product, have given their name to it. Before G. is able to compel Aron’s attention, he notices the magazine Aron is paging through is Haus und Garten. He knows it well. His mother buys it sometimes, although it’s never led to any changes to their home on Aragata. It is only down in his basement that the décor changes, down there with him where the magazines always end up. He clears his throat and stretches for Interior Design, a magazine of a similar type as Haus und Garten, and his plan takes material shape. Aron looks at him out the corner of his eyes, and G. can tell at once that Aron doesn’t recognize the person he is regarding: he has never seen him before. Not true. They have met in the street. They have even sat opposite one another on the bus, back in the years Aron and Sara were together, though Sara was not with him at the time.
•
If I were so inclined, I’d perhaps think it comical to see two young men standing side by side scrutinizing home and lifestyle magazines. And maybe Aron Cesar, at that moment literally choking me with his fragrance, thinks along similar lines, because at the edge of my vision I see him smile, and for a moment it occurs to me that despite everything he knows who I am, that someone has on some occasion pointed me out to him, smiling or laughing, saying that this was the guy who was making advances at Sara after Aron’s relationship with her collapsed. This is the one who invited Sara to his house that time, but she didn’t have time to stay, though she’d planned to, because her mother phoned shortly after she came inside, requiring that Sara drive her to Skálholt to play in a concert, because Sara’s father had let her down.
•
Once again, music starts up from Aron’s phone. Before he answers, he looks around, not entirely without a degree of nervousness, and briefly his eyes light on me. Once he starts talking, I take the magazine over to a display table about two feet from him. I can still hear everything he says from that distance; it’s soon clear he’s making an appointment with his interlocutor. He mentions Þingholtsstræti. At first, it’s like he does not recognize the street name, but once he has understood, he asks the person on the phone about the name on the door. I myself cannot hear the name; Aron keeps the information to himself. “What’s that? Aren’t we talking about five?” Five what? I ask myself. Five grams? “Very good,” says Aron. “Very good. Very nice.” Five grams of what? Is five grams a lot or a little of what’s being discussed? After a short pause he says: “Natürlich. But what should it be? I know. Haus und Garten.” Then he begins to explain. But the person he speaks to clearly knows what Haus und Garten means. He and Aron agree to meet in forty-five minutes, and the call ends.
•
Aron puts down the magazine, moves further to the left and chooses another magazine to look at. G. notices he picks from the music magazine shelf. He entertains the absurd idea that it’s Gramophone or BBC Music Magazine that Aron has decided to look at, not the type of magazine he’s used to browsing. G. starts to think of a certain piece of music, not a violin sonata this time, though, but a quartet by his favorite French composer, and consequently thinks about Sara, because her name sounds like the title of one of the composer’s works for piano. He loves that work, no less than he does the quartet. How much fun it would have been to chat about that music with Sara. She really would have enjoyed talking about how badly her mother and her companions played the quartet. They certainly played it once, G. knows for sure, they played it in a concert at the National Gallery. They got a terrible review in the free paper that daily drops through G.’s mail slot. G. would have tried to defend the mother from Sara’s attacks, which would only have caused Sara to heap more vitriol upon her. Would she have smiled or laughed over the terrible review her mother got? Would he have smiled, even?
•
“Of course, they were quite the fashionable couple.” He imagines hearing a certain person, who happens to be his mother’s close friend, say these words about the former couple. But wasn’t that the way most people thought about the young couple at the time? He did not need any friend of his mother to point out the obvious truth. The obvious falsity. A friend who is, moreover, dead, he now remembers. She died on board a cruise ship, she had a stroke at sea, after being in the Caribbean. In G.’s eyes, Aron is the almost perfect opposite of beautiful or fashionable. His scent, which has not lessened even after G. has moved six feet away from him, is indeed a certification of the fact that he does not have very good taste. But alongside the red-haired Sara, Aron was an impressive, youthful, promising boy, in the eyes of so many, so dark and toned and … But is he still? Is that something he was ever? His physique, the way his buttocks lift at every step, how everything around him withers and dies as he goes about his business, all seems governed by pride, all built on a misunderstanding inside his head. He does not even keep his back straight, standing there at the rack. He has become stooped from bending so long over filthy dining tables, plying his illegal trade.
•
But what sort of people commit crimes? This question raises another in his mind. What had
he himself been doing at Sara’s house? And what happened to her mother’s violin, the instrument that disappeared from her parents’ house that evening thirteen years ago, and never turned up? Should he tell the truth about his role? Should it not wait a while? The suspicion quite definitely lurked inside at least one person, because Sara was well aware what happened to the violin, at least who it was who took it from the windowsill, she knew all too well, she had not wanted to know that he, G., was outside her house that night acting like a cat trying to attract mates, spraying piss on the walls of the house, in a most desperate state. Could it be that she had not told her mother of her suspicions because she disliked her that much? But why the enmity toward her? What had caused the tension between mother and daughter? Did it have something to do with Sara’s relationship with Aron? No. But yes, too. He knows it did because Sara told him so herself, on one of the few occasions that they actually talked. It happened not when she came to his home, she was only there briefly, too briefly to have time to talk about her mother, though for sure she had cursed her about the drive to Skálholt. Their “real” chat happened on another occasion, so ordinary that he does not want to name it. The stiffness in her relationship with her mother was actually not unlike the roots causing frustrations between himself and his own parents. Music. Sara’s mother had always imagined her daughter would take the violin out of her hands, or get her own, rather, so that they could play together, presumably her father’s music, but Sara had never tolerated the dry, sawing sorrow of the violin, the sound the instrument produces in a beginner’s grip. It occurs to him now, although he doesn’t like the idea, that Sara had embarked on her relationship with Aron as some kind of rebellion against her mother.
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