Pets

by Bragi Ólafsson

  “So that was the prize for being sensible?” Havard says disgustedly. “Death.”

  “It at least resulted in my friend Nicholas starting to smoke and drink in his teens; he couldn’t bear the thought of having some creepy crawlies swimming around in his intestines.”

  “Evil shall be swept out with evil, as the saying goes,” Havard crows. I can just imagine how this fellow Nicholas appeals to Havard.

  “Yes, that’s the point,” Armann agrees. “Force against force!”

  “Steel against steel,” Havard adds.

  “An eye for an eye,” Armann says and giggles like a little boy.

  He sounds very relieved now that he has finally told his story, which has taken him half a day to tell me, although he naturally has no idea that he has just done so.

  12

  I never really liked the lizard—the ancient green lizard or iguana which Orn kept in his study upstairs. He had asked us not to let it out of the room—it often nibbled things that lay on the floor—and he told us especially not to let it into the kitchen; there was always a danger that it could have salmonella. Because of that risk, he added, we should always wash our hands after petting or holding it. I’m quite positive that Havard made a point of taking it into the kitchen, just because Orn had emphatically so asked us not to.

  That day—by which I mean the second to last day Havard spent in the house—we took the bus down to Tottenham Court Road at lunchtime. Havard, who was more or less broke after betting heavily the previous weekend, brought the ukulele with him, which he intended to sell back to the shop he had bought it from or perhaps take to another shop on Denmark Street. I had suggested as a joke that he take it down to some underground station and try to strum it there to collect a few coins, and had to literally hold him back when he took the suggestion seriously. However, Havard didn’t get as far as trying to do either—selling the instrument or playing it to make money—because he left it on the bus when we got out just next to the Odeon theatre on Tottenham Court Road.

  Anyone other than Havard would no doubt have seen the incident as suggesting something like a bad start is a good omen, but, since it was Havard who was involved, the loss of the instrument was rather a taste of what awaited us that day.

  While I went into a Virgin Megastore to pick up two CDs I had ordered the week before, Havard waited in a bar on the corner of Oxford Street; he said he needed to cheer himself up after leaving the poor instrument on the bus. Besides, he had already had two beers before lunch and the effect must have started to wear off after the forty minute bus ride.

  I spent more time in the record shop than I had intended to. When I entered the bar where Havard was waiting, he was sitting beside an old man in a scruffy raincoat. They were at a narrow table by the wall opposite the bar. There were four empty glasses in front of them, which had clearly contained Guinness, and two smaller ones which had also been emptied. Havard introduced me to the man, who was an old, well-known chess master, and asked me to buy the next round—he had run out of money. He had had to pay for his friend, whom I thought looked like he didn’t need any more to drink. I wasn’t keen to join them, so I told Havard—in the language that no one understands, least of all he who was not meant to understand it—that I had not come into town just to drink, and told him that I was going to visit more shops. I left him with a ten pound note and some change for the bus fare home. Then I walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and had a beer on my own before going into Ray’s Jazz Shop.

  While I sat with my cold beer, I began to think that it was incredibly sad that I had left Havard with a penniless drunkard who, at a glance, didn’t seem to have anything to offer except that which was enough for Havard: he was a foreigner. Havard always got a kick out of talking to strangers, not least if they originated from a country other than England. No doubt he and this silent chess master were gulping down one more beer or—which I thought was more probable (considering they only had ten pounds to spend)—they had bought some cans of stronger beer and were sitting somewhere in the sun, smoking and drinking, no doubt quite content, at least Havard, to be free from that boring fellow who didn’t seem able to relax over a glass of beer.

  I had always known that Havard and I would never become very good friends but during the days we spent in London an unbridgeable rift had developed between us. I was the healthy one, the one who had interests and wanted to be constructive, even if just in terms of building a collection of CDs or books; Havard, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be interested in anything, unless it was forbidden or contained the highest percentage of alcohol.

  I bought him a pack of beer before I set off home later in the afternoon, probably in the hope—at least subconsciously—that he would fall asleep early in the evening. And that’s exactly what happened. But I have to admit that the main reason I stopped at the liquor store on the way home was because I had found two CDs in the shop on Shaftesbury Avenue—CDs that I had been looking for for a long time—and I was so childishly happy that I felt I had to celebrate when I got home. Besides the beer for Havard, I bought a flask of whisky and several bottles of beer. However, it was a different sort of happiness that I found when I walked into the house on Brooke Road; Havard had invited his drinking pal home. The curtains were drawn, there was no music on the hi-fi, and the television was off. A thick cloud of tobacco smoke and silent misfortune hung over them.

  It only took me five minutes to get rid of Havard’s guest; after all the hospitality Havard had shown him, the pitiful man was too weak to show any resistance. Havard protested at first but then realized that it was best to let him go. I had to lead him out of the living room and into the front hall, and I gave him two pounds to help him on his way. I think I also gave him a bottle of beer.

  Even though I found out that they had finished a whole bottle of port that I kept in the kitchen, I couldn’t be bothered to make a fuss. I expect that I had already decided that I would ask Havard to leave.

  After I had hidden the whisky flask and most of the beer, I sat down with Havard and gave him two cans of Special Brew, warning him that he would get no more as he had drunk enough already. Besides, I thought I had made it clear to him that I wouldn’t tolerate his behavior any longer; we were really meant to be working here in London—we were getting pocket money that we, of course, had to work for—and already half of the animals who had been entrusted to us were no longer alive. While I shut myself in the living room to listen to my new CDs, I imagined that Havard had finished the beer and gone to bed upstairs. But suddenly, in the middle of Peter Kowald’s bass solo, a scream came from the kitchen, and I jumped off the sofa and rushed into the kitchen like a streak of lightning.

  If I was beginning to feel the effect of the whisky (which I had smuggled into the living room with me), I think it vanished as soon as I entered the kitchen and saw what had happened. Havard was frozen in the middle of the room and holding a bloody meat knife; on the counter beside the sink lay the lifeless body of the iguana. Although I noticed straightaway that it was considerably shorter than before, I didn’t fully understand what had happened until I got nearer and saw its head in the sink. I’m sure that I’ll never forget the expression in Havard’s eyes when he put down the chopping knife and looked up from the blood-bath: it was like he needed me to protect him from all the evil powers that were threatening him.

  I hadn’t intended to give him any of my whisky, but when I saw the state that he was in, I told him straightaway to take a swig. After this latest incident in our peculiar household in Stoke Newington, I even had to have a good few mouthfuls and a cigarette to calm down.

  I was actually too numb to be angry. Before we cleaned up the mess in the kitchen we sat down in the living room and I tried my best to stay calm, in the hope that Havard would explain why this had happened; really there was no point in getting excited.

  He had gone upstairs to bed—I was right there—but he said he couldn�
�t fall asleep because I was playing music so loudly in the living room. He had become restless and thought he would take a look at Ahab in Orn’s study. Then he had begun to feel bad in the dark and because—as I knew—he always felt better on the ground floor after dark, he took the lizard down into the kitchen. He needed company (strange though it may sounds in this context), and as the cat only made him feel worse in the dark and I was listening to this weird music of mine, Ahab was the only one he could talk to.

  There was nothing to drink in the fridge, so he had had to make do with water. He had put Ahab down on the counter to the right of the sink and while he was waiting for the water to run cold he petted the lizard as he usually did. But on this occasion Ahab didn’t like being petted and suddenly—“it was just as if I had been struck by lightning”—bit him. His reaction (that is his neurosis which, of course, had not been improved at all by the amount of alcohol flowing in his blood) was to grab hold of the big chopping knife that hung over the sink. Before he realized what he was doing, he had delivered the fatal blow.

  When I recall the incident now, I don’t think I realized the gravity of the matter until the following day. Before Havard fell asleep that evening, I tried to make him understand that he could no longer stay in the house; the magnitude of his blunders far outweighed our small responsibilities and so on. I remember that while I tried to get him to understand our situation—or more precisely my situation—I felt it was utterly unrealistic. It was almost as if we were on a ship without a captain. Ahab, the captain, was dead, and since the crew could not agree which direction it should take, then half of it—that is the half that had killed off the captain—would have to disembark at the first opportunity. Although Havard was upset, I am not sure he realized the full implications of his deeds. I suspect that he fell asleep without worrying too much, not to mention the fact that the alcohol which he had consumed over the course of the day would have been sufficient to knock out a much bigger creature than him. But when I finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, I had made up my mind to kick him out of the house the following day.

  He had been up for two or three hours when I awoke at around lunchtime. And it was obvious that he had searched the house high and low for alcohol. He had found the cans of beer, which I had hidden in a bucket in the vacuum cupboard and covered with a smelly floor cloth, and was finishing the third one when I came across him in the kitchen. The cat was there too, hunched over its dish and tearing at the tinned food as earnestly as Havard gulped down the beer. I thought I had prepared him the night before for what I was about to tell him, but he reacted badly, said he was offended, it had been a pitiful accident and the other accident with the rabbit and the guinea pig had come about because he was trying to help them. I said I couldn’t be bothered arguing with him, and when I gave him four hundred pounds and told him to leave, his behavior changed instantly. And yet he tried to see how far he could push me. He was obviously already enjoying the money in his imagination when he asked for twice the sum and promised not to show his face again; he smiled as if he had the upper-hand in some very important business transaction.

  I hadn’t looked at the matter from this perspective before, but of course he had taken the model of the whaler Essex and the original edition of Moby-Dick as some kind of compensation when I refused to accept his offer. Exactly how he had managed to preserve these valuable objects for five years I couldn’t possibly understand. Perhaps his loss of the ukulele had taught him to take better care of things; he may have learned something since then, although the conversation that is currently going on in the living room doesn’t really give that impression.

  13

  “But, tell me, Armann, you have a degree in Icelandic, don’t you? What does the phrase ‘to hold a function in the house’ mean?” Havard farts and apologizes with a laugh.

  “‘A function in the house,’ you say?” Armann sounds as though he has to give this some thought.

  “Take this for example: a person has a party in his house, say I have a party here at Emil’s place and invite some people, then one doesn’t talk about ‘having a function in the house,’ am I right? That is something different, isn’t it?”

  “Yes . . .” I hear Armann drink, perhaps to jog his memory. Then he clears his throat and tries to explain:

  “‘To have a function in the house’ means to have a party, just a normal party, but I suspect that the phrase ‘function in the house’ is more often used in connection with public functions or gatherings that are held by politicians for example, or . . .”

  “Oh, I was beginning to think that we were taking part in some gathering in the house,” Havard interrupts. “That a party in the house was perhaps a party that a host held—in this case Emil—without being present; in other words whilst out of the house.”

  “You are such a comedian,” Armann says, laughing. At this point the phone rings and Havard answers.

  “Hello, who’s that?” He is silent for a little while. “My name is Havard. Your name is Vigdis? Emil is unfortunately not at home. No, he hasn’t come back. Yes, he came home, but he just hasn’t . . . come back again.”

  Armann giggles.

  “Well, it’s difficult to say. Perhaps he had to rush out and . . . yes, it looks as though he will be late getting back, at least it seems that way.”

  Armann giggles again at Havard’s comments.

  “No, I am just an acquaintance of his,” Havard carries on and tells Vigdis his name. “No, I was just coming back from abroad, like Emil, and happened to be passing by. You are in Akureyri, aren’t you? No, I . . . yes, Emil told me. He said you were in Akureyri. Yes. Really? What, shall I . . . yes, I’ll tell him to phone you. As soon as he comes. OK? Yes, I’ll let him know. Auf wiedersehen.”

  “That was Vigdis,” he informs Armann. “The other woman,” he adds in a rather insinuating manner.

  Havard has just finished talking when the phone rings again. He is probably still holding the receiver, but he seems to wait a little before answering. He clears his throat and says in a husky, masculine voice:

  “Guten Tag.”

  Then he keeps quiet, much longer than he usually does on the telephone, and I imagine that the person on the other end of the line is explaining something to Havard, or takes all that time to introduce himself.

  “In a little while?” Havard asks when he finally gets the chance to talk. “She is asleep then? Oh, really? And you are close by here? Yes, he must be coming home any minute now. Yes, yes, at least . . . we’ll be here. I just say willkommen, madame.”

  In other words it’s Greta. She’s tucked her daughter into bed, has probably had a shower, and is on her way over long before I myself am expected. I am rather surprised that Armann doesn’t ask who was on the phone and that Havard doesn’t mention it to him. No doubt he thinks of Greta as some surprise guest; he is about to treat Armann to an unexpected female visitor.

  It is obvious that Armann has been thinking about something else while Havard was talking to Greta. As soon as the phone call ends, Armann points to something he wants him to look at and says:

  “That’s a rather impressive mustache.”

  I try to guess which mustache he is referring to. I imagine that he is pointing at the cover of a CD, book, or video, and when Havard says that no decent music can come from such a man, I feel reasonably sure that the man in question is Joe Zawinul.

  “Why don’t we just carry on with Elvis?” Havard suggests.

  “That’s up to you,” Armann says. “I wasn’t thinking of playing this, it was just the face that I thought was rather striking.” But he still seems to be thinking of the photo when he suddenly blurts out:

  “There is nothing quite so ugly as a handsome man.”

  “What?” I hear Havard say. “Nothing as ugly as a handsome man? Is he a handsome man?”

  “I didn’t mean that man in particular,” Armann an
swers, and I suddenly see the Austrian pianist from a new, unexpected perspective; he has become a example of masculine good looks.

  “But tell me, how can a good looking man be ugly?” I hear Havard fiddling with the CD player. “Am I ugly? Would you say I was ugly, for instance?

  “I’m not deciding who is ugly and who is handsome. What I am trying to say is that . . .”

  “But I am asking you, Armann,” Havard interrupts. “Do you think I’m ugly?”

  Armann hesitates for a few seconds and then says: “I think you harmonize quite well.”

  “Harmonize!” Havard doesn’t think much of this remark; I have to ask myself what his comment means exactly. “What kind of answer is that, Armann! Does it maybe harmonize? Is it some new grammatical term?”

  I have to admit that sometimes I am surprised at Havard’s expressions. Perhaps my low opinion of him has blinded me to his ability to express himself, an ability which is of course not confined to the “righteous.” If anything, it has more often been used, or abused, to obstruct the progress of righteousness; I consider myself to be a true spokesman for these virtues, at least compared to the misogynist, alcoholic, compulsive gambler, and, most recently, burglar Havard Knutsson (although he hasn’t stolen anything since he broke into my flat yet).

  “What I was trying to tell you,” Armann begins to explain “is that the good looks of the handsome, that is of the most handsome men, very often work against them.”

  “You’re talking about me, then!” Havard bursts out laughing.

  “They are isolated by their own beauty, is perhaps a better way to put it,” Armann corrects himself. “Not only are their good looks worshipped by others, but they themselves become absorbed in their own admiration. They imagine that their beauty will transport them into some little paradise, but one day, when they are serving a teenager in a fashion shop, they suddenly realize in a flash that they won’t get any further; they have reached their peak, serving penniless teenagers in some fashion store.”