Pets

by Bragi Ólafsson

  “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?”

  “Excuse me, who are you?” Havard asks. He obviously doesn’t like my friend’s accusing tone.

  “Who am I?”

  “Yes, who are you?”

  “That depends on who is asking.”

  “Oh, is that so! So who you are depends on who I am?”

  “Come on!” Greta interrupts to prevent unnecessary ill feeling. “Can’t you just introduce yourselves?”

  “My name is Havard Knutsson,” Havard says with cold formality.

  “Armann Valur here.”

  “Havard?” I
hear Saebjorn say. It sounds like he recognizes the name.

  “I’m Greta.”

  “I spoke to you earlier,” Saebjorn says. He seems to be talking to Havard. “My name is Saebjorn, I called earlier.”

  “OK, that wasn’t so difficult,” Havard answers.

  “But what is going on here?” Saebjorn carries on asking. “Where is Emil? Why hasn’t he come home?”

  “If only we knew,” Armann answers.

  “We are all waiting for him,” Greta says, and Havard tries to explain why they are all here.

  “I came here this afternoon, it must have been around . . .”

  “But how do you know him?” Saebjorn interrupts.

  “How do we know each other? We are just old friends. But anyway, I came late this afternoon and knocked and there was nobody home. Then I looked in the window and saw that there was water boiling on the stove so I crawled in through the window and turned off the burner.”

  “When was that?” Jaime asks.

  “Around five or six o’clock.”

  “And hasn’t he been back since?” Saebjorn asks.

  It is beginning to sound like a murder interrogation. The difference is that the body is still breathing; it has followed the investigation from the start.

  “We are just waiting for him,” Havard says. “I saw that he had just come home from abroad, the suitcases have been emptied and of course I thought that he had just nipped out. I mean, he can’t have gone far, he has just been delayed. I can’t see that it’s so unusual.”

  “But I mean . . .” Saebjorn is clearly not satisfied with the explanation he gets from my unknown friend here, but really he has no cause to disbelieve him. “Haven’t you tried to find him? Doesn’t he have his cell phone with him?”

  “He left it here in the flat,” Greta answers. “It has been ringing all the time, hasn’t it?” I imagine that the question is addressed to Havard and that it is he who answers.

  “I think everyone has been trying to contact him. Both of you, of course, then his mother and some Vigdis. Is she his fiancée?”

  “Is she his fiancée!” Saebjorn is clearly still very suspicious of my friendship with Havard. “Wait a moment, aren’t you friends? Didn’t you say you were old friends?”

  “Has that got anything to do with his fiancée?” Havard objects. “I have just come from Sweden where I have been living for several years; how am I to know what Emil’s fiancée is called?”

  I can’t remember if I had told Saebjorn and Jaime that Havard was in Sweden; from what I can hear, they don’t seem to have any notion of who he is. On top of everything else it bothers me to hear them talking about Vigdis as my fiancée in front of Greta. From my point of view—however ridiculous it is in these circumstances—Vigdis and I aren’t engaged in any way, though she might think of us in those terms.

  “Alright, alright,” Saebjorn says. “You just have to understand that I find it rather strange coming here and there is no Emil around.”

  “Of course it is strange,” Havard agrees, no doubt glad that his presence in my home has finally been accepted. “Can’t you imagine how strange I thought it was to come here and there was no Emil, just boiling water?”

  “But, I mean, the man returns from abroad today,” Saebjorn continues, “and when one comes to visit him there is nothing here but his luggage! And the wine he bought has been opened . . . it’s his wine, isn’t it?”

  “Actually I brought this bottle,” Greta says, but apart from the red wine, Saebjorn is quite right. Alcohol isn’t exactly the thing I regret most at this instant, though.

  “It’s just as if he has misbehaved and run off to the woodshed,” Havard says and laughs, as if he is trying to relieve the tension in the room. “Just like his namesake at Kattholt.”

  I can’t imagine that Saebjorn finds this comment very funny.

  “Yes, or just like the ants that the elephant trod on,” Armann adds with a giggle.

  “And how do you know each other?” Saebjorn asks, like he wants to get rid of every trace of doubt from his mind.

  “We were with Emil on the way home,” Armann answers.

  “We were on the same plane today,” Greta explains.

  “I really just came to fetch my glasses and . . . wait a minute, that’s right; he called me after he got here, so it’s at least clear that he came home.”

  “Was that ever a question?” Havard asks, obviously annoyed with the linguist.

  “So he called you?” Saebjorn asks.

  “Most probably as soon as he got in,” Armann answers.

  Greta offers Saebjorn a glass of red wine, and when he has accepted—rather sulkily it seems—Greta tells Armann to look at the table.

  “Look, you have spilled ash over everything on the table,” she says.

  “I?” Armann sounds surprised, almost as if he has been accused of some terrible crime.

  “You miss the ashtray every time, I’ve noticed.”

  It is difficult for me to tell whether Greta is joking or is seriously asking the culprit to wipe all the ash off the table. I’m not really worried about the books and the CDs anymore, not now that Jaime and Saebjorn have arrived.

  “Armann doesn’t smoke,” Havard says. “He told me he never smokes.”

  “You must clean up the table,” Greta says to Armann, but I don’t hear his reply because Jaime and Saebjorn drown out his voice—they’re discussing the rest of the things lying on the table: the books, videos, and music.

  Amongst the books which I bought in London is a recent account of the fate of the whaler Essex. Though I don’t expect that it will be a likely subject of discussion in the living room, it is even more unlikely that Havard will try to show my friends the model ship and the original edition of Moby-Dick. Yet I don’t think it is wise to keep the book under my bed any longer. I close it, move it as far as I can down past my body, and push it behind the toy box, alongside the carved whaler.

  5

  “So you are all interested in music?” I hear Havard comment. I can just imagine that Jaime and Saebjorn have separated themselves from the others, though the living room doesn’t offer much space for privacy in the crowd that has gathered. They are probably discussing the things that I brought back. Somehow I would have thought that Saebjorn—or both of them, Saebjorn and Jaime—would try to find out more about me, but at the moment they don’t seem to be very worried.

  “Listen, I’m going to phone Emil’s mother,” Saebjorn says, almost as if he is answering me.

  “So, was Emil buying you some CDs?” Havard asks. “He’s a good guy, Emil. Quite solid.”

  Thanks Havard. It sounds like Saebjorn is standing up; he says he is going to check on her, meaning my mother most probably. He asks where the phone is and Greta finds it for him.

  “What did he bring you this time?” Havard continues and interrupts Jaime who is about to answer. “Just now Armann and I were playing . . . what was it again, Armann? What were we playing just now, Armann, that classical CD?”

  Saebjorn has come into the bedroom. He sits down in the middle of the bed, which sags under the weight of his long body without making the springs poke down into me, and he begins to turn over the pages of a book, which I immediately recognize as the telephone directory—the pages sound so thin. Then he mutters my father’s name as he turns the pages over, one after another, and just as I’m about to tap on his heel, Armann appears in the doorway. He makes a rather strange surprised sound, excuses himself and says he meant to go to the bathroom. He has clearly had too much to drink.

  “Armann! What’s the name of the music we were playing just now, the classical disc?” Havard shouts from the living room.

  “The classical disc?” Armann shouts back. “What are you talking about, my friend?”

  Saebjorn stands up as soon as he has dialed the number and walks
over to the bookshelf on the right of the bedroom window.

  “We were playing some music just now that you said was chamber music,” Havard shouts.

  “Yes, Mahler. We were playing Mahler. Mahler’s piano quartet,” Armann says. Just as before, he sees no reason to shut the door while he urinates.

  “That’s what we were listening to,” I hear Havard say to Jaime, “Mahler’s piano quartet. Actual chamber music, the real thing. One hundred percent proof.” Then he shouts: “Do you hear that, Armann? One hundred percent chamber music!”

  Armann starts laughing and repeats Havard’s last words. There is clearly some comradeship that connects them at this moment.

  “You are a great chamber fan, aren’t you Armann?” Havard carries on in the same loud voice.

  Who else, apart from these two, would shout from one room to another about chamber music, I ask myself.

  “Chamber fan?” Armann begins to pee into the toilet bowl, and considering the state he is in at the moment, I can’t imagine that he will be more successful now than on the previous occasion. “You are fine fellows,” he says in a low voice that can hardly be heard in the living room over the noise he is making.

  “Hello?” Saebjorn has contacted one of my parents, who turns out to be my mother. “Yes, good evening. My name is Saebjorn, I’m a friend of Emil’s. I am just checking to see if Emil is by any chance with you. He hasn’t come? He hasn’t called either? Yes, I’m at his place, there are two of us here, his friends. He was going to meet us here this evening after he arrived. What? Yes, there’s also an old friend of his here, Havard. He spoke to you? Yes, he came here earlier today, as far as I know, and saw through the window that Emil was boiling water here so he . . . yes, no, he wasn’t at home . . . so he climbed in through the window and took the water off the burner. That he forgot it? You mean that Emil should forget it? Yes, it is rather strange. He had unpacked his suitcases. It looked as if he had just nipped out.”

  Saebjorn listens to my mother for one or two minutes and nods in agreement with what she says. Something suddenly falls on to the floor, probably a book from the shelf, and Saebjorn carries on listening while he bends down to pick up the fallen object. “Yes, I think we will have to,” he says finally, and I hear that the conversation is drawing to a close.