Pets

by Bragi Ólafsson

  Armann flushes the toilet and goes back into the party without washing his hands. I’m about to try and make contact with Saebjorn before he leaves the room—I am even considering whispering to him—but he suddenly turns away from the bookshelf and rushes out. He is still talking to my mother. He tells her that there are two other people here, a young woman and a slightly older man who was with me on the plane. They are fine, just some people whom I seem to have invited home. Then he goes into the bathroom and asks my mother if I could have gone to visit Vigdis. It’s not very probable but there must be some reason for me taking so long. It doesn’t seem that he and my mother come to any conclusion. As soon as Saebjorn has said goodbye to her, he turns on the tap—probably to have a drink of water—and then goes back into the living room.

  The piano quartet has started again, and as far as I can hear Armann is lecturing the other visitors on the music.

  “Yes, wasn’t it seventy-six?” I hear Saebjorn say. It sounds as though he had some doubt about the year and has now received confirmation that it was right.

  “That must make all the difference,” Havard says scornfully.

  “Eighteen hundred seventy-six,” Armann confirms.

  I think of my son Halldor. Now he is lying in his bed in Amager, fast asleep in his Danish bed with his twin teddies by his head, completely ignorant of the fact that his father is lying awake under his own bed on Grettisgata and doesn’t dare to come out because he has this dread of something that is impossible to explain.

  Why don’t you just go and say hello to your friends, daddy?

  What are you doing there under the bed?

  I’m just resting, Halldor. Just go back to sleep. No, I know it’s not the most comfortable place. One mustn’t always think of what is most comfortable.

  “He was only sixteen,” is yet another piece of information that Armann gives the others.

  “And how old are you?” Havard asks. He’s totally uninterested in Armann’s precise age, but he’s very eager to confirm his suspicion that once one reaches thirty everything starts going downhill.

  They all seem the same age to me at this moment.

  6

  I feel as though almost a whole day has passed since I sat beside Armann in the plane. And yet it is only three or four hours since I came home, the same length of time it takes to play four CDs of average length. I’m getting a bit tired of the limited view I have, but by lifting the sheet about ten or twenty centimeters off the floor on my left I can see out of the bedroom window. The curtains are only half closed. Although the lampposts and the windows of the houses on the main street cast a little light, the darkness outside seems to be thick and viscous. I don’t know why—perhaps hunger is bothering me—but when I look out into the darkness, I think of the black bean soup that I once ordered by mistake in a Brazilian restaurant in New York a few years ago. I was with Anna and her parents. They had invited us for a weekend trip two weeks after we had told them that we were expecting a child. That trip turned out to be an absolute disaster. Not because my in-laws were difficult in any way, I always got on well with them, but at that time Anna and I didn’t have a penny to our name, and despite the fact that she was pregnant, or maybe exactly because she was, we didn’t get on very well; we fought over every little detail. Just before we set out we had to hand over our Visa card into the demanding hands of the bank, and I felt awful—just like Anna did, not being able to buy herself clothes—flicking through the CDs in Tower Records without being able to buy even a couple of them. Or almost. I managed to hoard a few dollars and brought home one CD that I bought without telling Anna; it was a disc that I literally had to own and would never have forgiven myself for not bringing home, considering I had managed to find it in the first place. Today I brought home thirty-six discs, more than the years that I have lived. And probably more than the years I have left to live.

  If time has some special role then I think it is two-fold: to take things away from one (if one can speak about Anna and Halldor having been taken away from me) and to give one something else instead (for instance the lottery prize I won)—something that doesn’t replace the loss, but helps one to forget now and again what one has lost. Perhaps one can rely on time in these functions, but in all other aspects it is not possible. Suddenly a new age has dawned, the age in which one will disappear into one’s grave. I’ve passed thirty, and as midnight is approaching on this day of my homecoming from abroad, I am lying under my bed and there are people in the living room biding their time until I appear. It seems as though time is going to disappoint them.

  When I look out of the rather narrow bedroom window and see the lampposts that shine between the houses on Laugavegur, I remember a story that I read once about the first street lights in the city. Towards the end of the nineteenth century several lights were purchased—no doubt they were some sort of oil lamps—and the first one was set up on the lower slopes of Bankastraeti. I think it was in autumn or the beginning of winter, at least it had started to get dark in the evenings, and on the very day that the first street light was set up it was broken by someone who threw a stone at it. I can just imagine some Havard, some dirty lout in homespun pants, tramping down Laugavegur in the dark and not realizing what kind of light is down the hill on Bankastraeti. He walks faster towards it, and when he is standing in front of the lamppost, the first lamppost in the town of Reykjavik, he wonders why on earth someone is trying to light up the town; it’s completely unnecessary to illuminate what goes on in the dark. He looks around, and in the dim light he sees a stone—just the right size to fit into his fist. He bends down, picks it up, gazes for a little while at the flame burning inside the lamp, and then steps back several paces, to avoid being under the broken glass when the stone shatters it.

  The piano quartet has been removed and Elvis’s voice comes out of the loudspeakers. Someone goes into the toilet and this time the door is closed. It sounds as though all the men are in the living room; Havard is talking (something about stereo equipment) and I hear Armann offer Jaime and Saebjorn a cigar, so it must be Greta who has gone to the toilet. I let the sheet fall to the floor and shut my eyes. I imagine her pulling down her black skirt—I try not to see the wet patch left by Armann on the floor beside the toilet—and then her panties; they are black too. Will she check to see if the seat is clean before she sits down? I try to hear what she is doing in the bathroom, but the music is so loud at the moment that I can’t make out a thing. I suddenly feel as if these four men have become good friends, that they know each other well and have met to discuss something they have in common, something that only men talk about, something that Greta has inadvertently given them permission to talk about by disappearing into the toilet. After “Suspicious Minds” comes “Don’t Cry Daddy,” and that song adds to the relaxed atmosphere that seems to prevail in the living room. For a moment I long to take part, to be on friendly terms with all the inmates of the place one lodges in, but the next moment I am really glad that I am alone, all by myself.

  There is a knock on the front door. I hear Greta flush the toilet and then another knock. Then there is a more insistent banging, like some sort of drumming practice. Saebjorn says he’ll answer and I hear him walk towards the door. The drumming is still going on when he takes hold of the door knob.

  7

  “Does this place belong to Emil S. Halldorsson?” the person outside asks, and two or three men, whom I imagine are standing behind him, begin to laugh, like he said something really funny. It sounds like drunken laughter to me.

  “Who are you?” Saebjorn asks, and I tell myself how ridiculous it is that I know who he is though I have never seen him.

  “I’m looking for Vardi,” he answers and the laughter, which it would be more correct to call giggling, carries on.

  “There is no one called Vardi here.”

  “Are you sure?” the stranger says in disbelief. Then he shouts victoriously: “Who is th
is then!”

  “Hi, Rikki,” Havard says. He has obviously come out into the hall, but he clearly doesn’t know quite how enthusiastically he should welcome his friend.

  “If you didn’t know,” his friend says, “then you know now that he is Vardi. Havard Knutsson, criminal.” All emphasis is placed on the last syllable of the word criminal.

  I picture this Hinrik as a rather dubious character, but I am probably drawing an unnecessarily black image of him in my mind. One isn’t necessarily bad just because one is an acquaintance of Havard; I was his acquaintance for a little while, and I imagine that some people have seen me in this light too. But I’m quite certain that it annoys Havard to be called a criminal in front of people who haven’t the slightest idea that he actually is one.

  The bathroom door opens. I turn my head quickly and lift up the sheet—far too abruptly I realize—but I’m too late to catch sight of Greta, she has gone into the hall.

  “Aren’t you going to invite us in?” Hinrik asks, and one of his mates adds in a rather childish whine, “Yes, how about it. Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

  “Who are they?” Saebjorn says and then Greta asks what is going on.

  “It’s alright, he’s just a friend of mine.” Havard explains, and I can imagine he is silently cursing Hinrik for dragging the whole band along too.

  “What’s up, Vardi?” Hinrik says, and I can just picture Saebjorn standing in the doorway blocking the entrance. “Aren’t you going to let us in?”

  “No one else is going to come in here,” Saebjorn says decisively.

  “They aren’t stopping, it’s alright,” Havard says. “Just let me talk to them.”

  “What nonsense is this?” Hinrik says pitiably, and Havard asks him to be patient.

  “If anyone has patience, I have, Vardi.” My impression of him doesn’t improve with hearing his voice.

  Greta asks Havard to talk to her for a moment, and a few seconds later they appear in the bedroom. Hinrik asks Saebjorn if he is this fellow, Emil S. And while I listen to Havard and Greta, I can hear Hinrik explain to Saebjorn that Havard had called him earlier this evening and invited him to look in at the flat on Grettisgata.

  “You’re not to invite anyone else in,” Greta says angrily to Havard, making sure that no one else can hear her. She tells him he has to understand that the flat is no dance hall, besides, I am not even at home and I’m the one who lives there, not them. Havard is quick to understand that she is right; he mumbles some kind of objection but then says he’ll talk to Hinrik. He is just like that, this fellow. She can calm down. The front door is obviously still wide open, even I am getting rather cold, and I hear Greta shiver when she goes back out into the hall.

  “What’s going on?” Hinrik repeats. And Havard answers that there is nothing going on, he just can’t let them in, something has come up. This friend of his doesn’t seem quite ready to accept the fact that he can’t come in.

  “We have come all the way from Breidholt, Vardi,” he says accusingly. “There are forty degrees of frost outside, and we are freezing to death here.”

  I can imagine how they are dressed, and I’m not surprised that they want to come in.

  “You are going to play somewhere, aren’t you?” Havard says. “I’ll look in afterwards.”

  “I haven’t seen you for several years and I’m not even allowed in. What kind of pussy lives here anyway?”

  “I’ll see you later, Rikki. Sorry. I’ll come along later.”

  “OK?” Saebjorn says, clearly getting ready to shut the door.

  “Nothing is OK,” Hinrik complains, and Saebjorn shuts the door in the middle of Hinrik saying that they didn’t come all the way here, to Grettisgata, just to be sent away. The drumming on the door begins again, and despite the fact that the door is locked and the music is on, I can hear angry voices outside; a whole band making a scene late at night in the freezing cold in the middle of a residential area. One of them shouts out swear words in English and another sings something that sounds like a football supporter song. That’s wonderful, I think to myself. Before they finally go off, they drum something on the kitchen or living room window, and for a moment I wish that they would break the window, so Saebjorn would take action and send Havard off with those troublemaking friends of his. Though he has said he is going to meet them afterwards, I have no real hope that it will be soon.

  “Who were those gentlemen?” Armann asks, unable to conceal the fact that he is rather drunk.

  “An old friend of mine,” Havard says, as if he doesn’t want to discuss it further.

  “An extremely polite fellow,” Saebjorn says sarcastically.

  Only two or three minutes have passed since Hinrik and his friends left when there is another knock on the door. That must be me, I say to myself; I can’t think of anyone else who could be on the way here.

  “Here he comes!” Armann calls out, and I’m sure that all the others here are expecting it to be me. “Our friend on Grettisgata!”

  As the front door is opened, the music is turned down and a glass, or something fragile, falls on the floor but doesn’t break.

  “Armann!” Greta shouts.

  “Good evening,” Havard says, and I hear Greta tell Armann that he can’t just empty the ashtray on the floor, it’s bad enough that he has dirtied the whole table.

  “Yes, that’s possible, I came here at lunchtime,” Havard agrees with the person standing outside. “No, it is alright. They were just some guys, they won’t come back.”

  I can’t hear who he is talking to, only the frail voice of an elderly man, but there is no doubt that it is my neighbor Tomas. He must have heard the noise Hinrik and his friends made and has come to see that everything is alright.

  “Yes, you spoke to him today, didn’t you?” Havard continues. “Yes. No we are just waiting for him, he nipped out. You live next door, yes? I’ll tell him. Alright.”

  Then he shuts the door.

  “It’s good to have neighbors who keep an eye on you,” Havard says cheerfully when he comes back into the living room. “At least one isn’t all alone in the world.”

  “Who was that?” Saebjorn asks.

  “Some fellow in an anorak, one of Emil’s neighbors.”

  “Good,” Armann says, and it seems that he is falling asleep, his voice sounds so tired. “That’s good.”

  “Yes, don’t you think you would make a good neighbor for Emil?” Havard asks, and I hear a cork being removed from a bottle; it is either cognac or Greta’s red wine.

  “Not in the state you are in,” Greta says with a laugh. “Armann, my friend, won’t you lie down? I think you are rather tired.”

  Armann mumbles something weakly, Greta’s assumption is obviously correct, then he barks suddenly, and quite clearly, considering the state he is in:

  “Let this be our final will at the great noontide.”

  “Wait a minute?” Havard exclaims. “What was that? Our final will, what?”

  “Our final will at the great noontide,” Armann repeats. Now his voice is more in keeping with his condition.

  “But Armann, aren’t you just a little late with it? It’s nearly midnight. The time is ten, nearly eleven at night.”

  “Noontide . . . midnight.” He drawls as if these big words were full of lead. “Who was that outside? Who is . . .” He seems to be completely collapsing.

  “Relax, Armann,” Greta says encouragingly.

  Jaime suggests that they help him into the bed, but Greta would rather he rested on the sofa. I can tell Saebjorn is disgusted that such an elderly man has drunk himself stupid, and I tell myself that my friend’s rationalism can sometimes be utterly unbearable.

  “He didn’t need much,” is the only comment that Havard has to make about Armann.

  “Noontide . . . noon can’t come round unless there is midnight
first.” Armann carries on.

  Another antithesis from the mouth of the linguist. Noon, the warmest time of day, the opposite of midnight, the coldest time, when people search for warmth, when they want homes, alcohol, duvets, embraces, to enter one another.

  “Evening comes for each one of us,” he carries on with equal difficulty. “Our last will . . . we have high hopes at noon . . . but all hope has died by midnight.”

  “That is really profound, Armann!” Havard is amazed at what seems to be Armann’s grand finale.

  “The glasses . . .” he asks. Greta answers by saying “there, there,” and tells him to lay his head down, everything is alright, he should just rest.

  “Have my glasses been found?” he repeats in a weak voice. Havard reminds him that he came here to fetch them; they are lying on the table.

  “Please help yourselves,” Armann groans. He sounds as if he is talking in his sleep. “Help yourselves, my good friends.”

  8

  I think of what Armann said to me on the plane: that he often felt he was in some kind of limbo. Reflecting on it, I feel it is strange that he should talk about limbo being his favorite word; that word has always made me feel rather uncomfortable. Apart from its cheerful sound, which is reminiscent of words such as bimbo and mambo or something of the sort, its meaning isn’t exactly positive, and the first image that arises in my mind is of little children playing some innocent game. Then I hear heavy music and all at once the children are inside some dark limbo, from which they never escape. Armann is too old to take part in this strange game, but when I picture him on the sofa, I think it is probable that he is in some other kind of limbo, perhaps the one he tried to explain to me on the plane without me understanding what he meant.