Pets

by Bragi Ólafsson

“I thought you were going.” Greta sounds startled to see him in bed.

  “Come and sit down,” Havard says and tells her to take the pants off the chair. “I’m going in a minute, I was just so cold in there.”

  Since the sheet has been lifted up from the floor I can see Greta walk to the chair. She picks up the pants and puts them on top of Halldor’s toy box. As she sits down I wriggle as far as I can towards the wall, so that she is less likely to notice me.

  “How do you like this suit that I bought today?” Havard asks.

  “This one? Did you buy it today?”

  “I bought it on Laugavegur. Just before I came here. The jacket is in the living room.”

  Hasn’t she noticed his underwear on the floor? Isn’t she going to say anything about him being in bed?

  “See here,” he says. I feel him roll over in the bed, and he seems to be getting something from the floor. “This is what I was going to give back to him. I came all the way from Sweden to return it,” he adds proudly.

  Greta stretches towards the bed. The chair creaks; I imagine that she takes the book and the ship.

  “Moby . . . Dick,” Havard says with a laugh and then asks: “Were you calling home because of your daughter?”

  Greta says yes; her daughter has to go to school the next morning and didn’t fall asleep straight away when her grandmother was looking after her. She was rather excited because her mother had just come home.

  “I know all about it,” Havard says.

  “Yes, of course, you have a daughter too. How old did you say she was?”

  “My daughter? How old do you think she is?”

  “I would guess about nine or ten, from seeing the photo.”

  “She is ten,” Havard answers.

  “But, wait a moment, didn’t you say just now that she was eight?”

  “She was eight. Now she is ten.”

  “Was she never nine then?”

  “She’s no normal child,” Havard answers with a laugh. “You noticed that she was holding the Bible, didn’t you? Completely of her own free will.”

  “But where can I have seen you before?” Greta asks. “I’m quite sure I have seen you somewhere before. You don’t have a brother who looks like you, do you?”

  “Well, I am a twin,” Havard says. “The other Havard lives here in Reykjavik.”

  “Where in Reykjavik?”

  “Somewhere in the eastern part of town. Somewhere near Hlemmur, I think.”

  “You think?” Greta asks with a laugh.

  “I haven’t a clue where he lives,” Havard answers with typical carelessness.

  “What, do you mean to say that you don’t know where your brother lives?”

  “Hey, am I supposed to look after my brother?” he says and repeats that he lives somewhere in East Reykjavik.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had a brother?” Greta asks and is no doubt referring to the time, just after she arrived, when she said that she thought she recognized him. “Then I must have seen your brother in town, I was so sure I had seen you before.”

  “You mean that you remember my face from having seen my brother somewhere in town?”

  “It must be that,” Greta answers. “What does your brother do?”

  “He’s in some dodgy business. I have no idea what he does, I haven’t heard from him for a long time.”

  “What’s he called?”

  “Havard.”

  “No really, what’s he called?” Greta repeats in disbelief.

  “Havard.”

  “You aren’t both called Havard?”

  “No.”

  “What are you called then?”

  “Gisli.”

  “Come on.”

  “Gisli Norstedt,” Havard answers.

  “And your brother is called Havard?”

  “Havard Norstedt.”

  “Are you identical twins?”

  Havard laughs rather nastily at Greta’s question.

  “You must really be, seeing you are so alike.”

  “Yes, we broke out of the same shell. We both came from the same rotten egg.”

  Greta laughs, and Havard asks if Armann is still in the living room.

  “Of course Armann is still there,” she says. “Hey, I’m going to fetch my glass.”

  She is going to fetch her glass, I tell myself, and Havard asks if there is enough red wine left for a second glass. She says she thinks so, stands up from the chair, and goes out.

  “Don’t be long, I’m so terribly frightened of the dark,” he shouts after her.

  I hear her open a zip in the living room and then she seems to be rummaging about; I imagine her with her hand in her bag looking for something. I don’t dare to imagine what she needs from her bag. Havard moves about in the bed. I notice his underwear on the floor and recall one morning at Brooke Road.

  It was our third or fourth day in England. I woke up about nine o’clock. The sun was shining and, as I couldn’t get back to sleep, I went down into the kitchen to fetch some Alka-Seltzer. We had been drinking whisky and beer late into the night, and I hadn’t gone to sleep until six. Havard was still wide awake at the time, and he was playing music from Orn’s or Osk’s collection. When I entered the kitchen in the morning, newly wakened, I saw him standing out in the garden in his underwear—I was sure he hadn’t gone to sleep—and he was holding Moby, the albino guinea pig. There were two empty beer cans beside the sink. He didn’t see me there beside the window; he had his back towards me, and he lifted the guinea pig up like he was holding a trophy. Then he cuddled the animal and seemed to be stroking it. I remember the music coming from the living room; it was something similar to what he had been playing when I went to sleep earlier that morning. He seemed to be about to put the guinea pig down, and when he turned round suddenly I ducked back behind the wall by the window. But when I looked out again I saw that he hadn’t put the animal down yet. Now he was holding it at arm’s length and was talking to it. Then he cuddled it up to his naked chest. When he put it gently down on the pavement, I grabbed hold of the Alka-Seltzer box and rushed back upstairs to the bathroom to get a glass of water.

  I didn’t see Havard again until about two o’clock that day, soon after I had woken up. He was lying asleep on the sofa in the living room, still just wearing his underwear, with the sun streaming in. On the table in front of him there was a squashed Holsten beer can, and in a large ashtray lay the crumpled wrappings from the second cigarette carton he had bought in the duty-free store at home. I remember I couldn’t bear to look at him lying there in the bright sunshine, with his weak mouth hanging open and one of his hands dangling down to the floor, and I think it was Elvis that I put in the CD player at full volume in order to wake him up. But he carried on sleeping, and he barely made a sound when I took hold of his shoulder and shook him. I couldn’t bear to stay in the same house as that smelly lump, so I went out to the book bar for a little while, then took the seventy three bus to town and went into the cinema in Leicester Square.

  It wasn’t until I got home, at around nine o’clock in the evening, that Havard woke up. He jumped up like a dog when he heard the door slam, met me in the kitchen where he fetched a can of beer from the fridge, went back to the sofa, lay down, and put Elvis on again.

  However, here on Grettisgata at the moment, there is gentle piano music playing in the living room. I don’t recognize it right away; I imagine it is something that Greta brought with her, but then I hear it is Alicia de Larrocha playing music by Enrique Granados. Greta pours red wine into the glasses and mutters something quietly to herself, which probably means she has spilled some wine. Havard begins to whistle “Habanera” and stops suddenly when Greta comes back into the room.

  She is barefoot. I had tried to pull the sheet very gently, hoping to hide myself better, but considering how much
I see of Greta as she tiptoes carefully towards the stool by the desk—she is no doubt trying not to spill anything from the glasses—the sheet seems to be just as high above the floor as before. When she has only one or two steps left to reach the chair, she accidentally puts her right foot in Havard’s underwear. She stops and gives a little kick to try and shake them off her toes, but they seem to be glued to her. She bends down and places the glasses on the table, probably beside the keyboard.

  “What?” Havard asks with a laugh.

  “Nothing,” Greta answers and uses her left foot to loosen the underwear from the right one.

  Bragi Ólafsson is the author of several books of poetry and short stories, and four novels, including Time Off, which was nominated for the Icelandic Literature Prize in 1999 (as was The Pets), and Party Games, for which Bragi received the DV Cultural Prize in 2004. His most recent novel—The Ambassador—was a finalist for the 2008 Nordic Literature Prize and received the Icelandic Bookseller’s Award as best novel of the year. Bragi is one of the founders of the publishing company Smekkleysa (Bad Taste), and has translated Paul Auster’s The Glass City into Icelandic. He is also a former bass player with The Sugarcubes, the internationally successful pop group that featured Björk as the lead vocalist.

  Janice Balfour was born in Scotland and relocated to Iceland in 1972, where she studied literature and Italian at the University of Iceland. She began translating articles and texts for museums shortly thereafter. In addition to Bragi Olafsson, she has translated two collections of short stories by Gyrðir Elíasson (currently unpublished in English).

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