When Anna gets home, I grab our daughter from the floor where she is sitting piling up letter cubes, tearing her away from a half-finished Tower of Babel, and stand her in the middle of the floor, like a strolling player in the middle of a square premiering a divine comedy. First I hold both her hands and then gradually release my grip, one finger at a time. Initially she stands there in the middle of the kitchen floor with an incredibly concentrated air, and then the miracle occurs; she shifts all her body weight onto one leg so that she can lift the other one off the floor and quickly turns it into a step forward. Then she repeats the process with the other leg and takes a total of four steps forward with growing confidence, by swinging her hips like a little robot. Her mother kneels to catch her and lifts her up in a tight embrace and cuddles her. I watch her hugging the child; that’s made my day, at least. I calmly wait for the mother of my offspring to express her amazement at the day’s achievements. I don’t have to wait long for a reaction.
—That’s incredible, she’s started to walk. You’ve taught her so many things, to sing loads of songs, to whistle, to put a twenty-piece jigsaw puzzle together, and now to walk.
She’s still tightly hugging the child. Although I’m touched by Anna’s joy, it’s like she’s in some kind of slight emotional over-drive. She seems agitated.
—I just feel it’s so much at once, to give birth to a child and then the next day she’s walking, and then the next thing you know she’s left home and maybe phones you once in a blue moon, and you’ve got no more say in the matter. There are tears in her eyes.
—Now, now, I say. It’s a bit far-fetched to say that she’s leaving home. It’s not as if I’m about to escort our daughter down the aisle.
—Sorry, says Anna, Flóra Sól is a wonderful child and I feel it’s so much responsibility being a mother. She hands me the child and dabs her tears.
—I wasn’t this worried before I had Flóra Sól. Now I’m worried about everything, I’m even afraid that you might not come back when you got out to the shop to buy goulash veal or to meet your film buff.
I’ve no control over my thoughts, because all of a sudden I long to sleep with her. I’m so troubled by my impulses that I immediately dress the child in her anorak and hood. I was supposed to be going to the garden, but instead I suddenly rush out with the child, without explanation. I feel the urge to be outside to grab a hold of myself. Still though, since we were, after all, intimate for a quarter of a night just a year and a half ago, it shouldn’t be such an incredibly big step to take.
Sixty-two
Then sometimes we all sit at the table together, Anna, the child, and I, and all are focused on our own things. I fuse my role as a father with my other interest and grab a large gardening book with two thousand five hundred species of plants in it and sit down with my daughter opposite Anna, and we browse through the book together.
I quickly skim over the chapters about plant diseases and pests, and also over the chapters on lawns and bushes, before stopping on the chapter about the building of ponds and streams in gardens, which my daughter seems to be particularly interested in. We focus mainly on the illustrations and skip the text pages. The child places three of her chubby little fingers on one of the pictures. I wonder what the monks will say about the pond, which is almost ready. Sitting opposite us, less than an arm’s length away, the child’s mother is totally immersed in how genetic characteristics are passed on between generations and doesn’t seem to be aware of our proximity. We move from streams to drawing room plants.
—Some of the most beautiful plants in the world grow around here, I say to my daughter. But back in our country you can only grow them in the sitting room window facing south. Around here, under the open sky, I repeat the words, trying to express the same ideas in different ways. That’s my contribution to the development of my nine-month-old daughter’s linguistic skills, to make her understand that reality can be approached in different ways.
—By the most beautiful plants in the world, I mostly mean roses, I say to the child.
Anna looks up from the book and observes me for a short moment as if she were trying to solve a riddle. Flóra Sól and I take notes. I mark the most important information with a cross and then put down my pencil. My daughter stretches out for the pencil and also draws a clear cross on the same page. My child’s mother looks up from her research; something has attracted her attention.
—There’s no question about it, she’s left-handed like you, she says.
The geneticist points at the child, who is holding the pencil in her left hand like her father. Her interest in her daughter and me seems to have suddenly increased. Since it so happens that I have the book open to a page about the hybridization of roses and cross-fertilization in nature, I wonder if I should mention plant genetics or plant biotechnology; it could be a way of fusing our fields of interest, the DNA of plants. Instead I ask what she’s engrossed in.
—What about you, what are you reading? I ask, and my daughter also looks up. We both look over the table at Anna with interest. She gives a brief summary of the research material, as if she only had a limited interest in the subject. In fact, you could say that she summarizes the whole thing in just one phrase:
—Deoxyribonucleic acid, she says and smiles at us.
—De-o, says the child quite clearly, standing up in my arms.
—Yeah, we’ll go to the church later, I say to my daughter.
—Why do you say that? Anna asks, giving us both a bewildered look in turn.
—It’s Latin for god I explain. Our daughter doesn’t only speak her mother tongue, I add in a lighter tone, she’s a nine-and-a-half-month-old girl and she already speaks two languages.
We both laugh. I’m relieved.
—Are you teaching the child Latin?
I tell Anna that we go to the church to look at an old painting of a baby Jesus that looks like our daughter.
—Apart from that there actually isn’t an awful lot that we can do around here.
My daughter is tuned in and wants to show her mother more things she’s learned in the church, and lifts up three fingers like the child in the painting. She’s wearing a light blue elbow-sleeve blouse, with dimples on her elbows. Then she draws a clear cross in the air. I give Anna a sideways glance; I don’t know how she’s taking this pantomime. We’ve occasionally stumbled into some of Father Thomas’s masses, and the child has recently started to mimic the priest’s gestures and repeatedly makes the sign of the cross.
—What’s she doing? Anna asks.
—She’s expressing herself with her body, I say. She mimics what she sees.
Anna laughs and I feel relieved. She doesn’t look as worried as she sometimes has before. Our daughter laughs as well. The three of us laugh, the whole family.
—Good boy, Anna then says.
I find women a bit unpredictable. Somehow I thought it was only Mom who said things like that.
Sixty-three
I’m making great progress every time I use the gas cooker, although I’m still quite slow at cooking. In a short time I’ve managed to learn seven dishes: I can fry meat, both in slices and pieces, make two kinds of sauces, boil potatoes and various types of vegetables, boil rice, make meatballs, and, more recently, fry vegetables instead of boiling them. Then I can make various kinds of porridge for the child and have once tried to make rice pudding with cinnamon, which wasn’t bad. I have to admit that it matters to me that Anna admires my genuine efforts to cook for her and her daughter.
I don’t try anything complicated, mind you, like a whole bird or anything like that; Mom wasn’t really into poultry. I’ve also popped in to see the woman in the restaurant a few times when I’ve forgotten myself in the garden and taken some of her cooked food home with me. I watch Anna when she’s eating the woman’s food, and I admit that it gives me satisfaction to hear that she doesn’t praise it as much as mine.
The moment has come for me to attempt cooking fish. I go to the market
with my daughter in the morning and try to choose something that bears some resemblance to the fish I’m familiar with back home, anything that more or less looks like haddock. There are several very small fish that I imagine might be from lakes and not the sea. You can’t buy fish fillets either, just whole fish, complete with head, tail, bones, and all its innards. Despite all my experience of braving the elements at sea, I’ve honestly no experience of turning fish into those fillets in breadcrumbs you can just throw straight into the pan. But I soon give up trying to do it the way Mom used to; some of the ingredients just can’t be found in this village, even though I’ve searched for them in all the shops, breadcrumbs, for example.
—What were you like as a child?
The question surprises me. Anna is constantly surprising me. We’re finishing eating the small fish, which I ended up frying whole, and the mother and daughter sit opposite me at the table, waiting for my answer. Even though she might be wondering about me in relation to Flóra Sól, Anna’s interest, nevertheless, seems to be genuine. Would I be on the right track if I told her I was redheaded and shied away from the sun, that I preferred a damp potato shed or shaded flower bed to being out in the sun? I was incredibly freckled as a child; my face was actually just the sum of its freckles. Dad has, of course, shown Anna the photograph collection, so the description shouldn’t surprise her.
—I was short for my age, and when I was fourteen I was the smallest in my class, I say. Then I shot up one summer and was a head taller than everyone else my age when I was sixteen.
—So you changed into a fully grown man over one summer?
—Man might be a bit of an overstatement, overgrown teenager might be more like it. What about you, when did you become a woman? Or isn’t that the kind of question a man asks a woman?
—It took a few summers, it happened gradually and effortlessly, without anyone ever really noticing it. I was one of the lucky ones.
Then she asks me if I’ve always been interested in plants.
—Yeah, pretty much from when I was a kid. Not exactly in the plants as such, not at first, it was more about being in the garden with Mom. My interest in the plants themselves came later. I started with a little flower bed south of the greenhouse, where I planted carrots and radishes and placed labels on them. I was seven years old and could see Mom through the glass clipping roses. Mom also experimented with all kinds of imported seeds and bulbs; the main thing that grew in my private flower bed, though, was weeds. I also used to read a fair bit as a child, lay out in the garden in the summer and sat in the greenhouse in the winter and read foreign books about children who had huts on tops of trees. I also went into the greenhouse later to study for my exams in the humidity, light, and heat. Even when there was snow, frost, and darkness outside, I’d run out into the greenhouse in my T-shirt with my books and trudge through the snow, knee-deep, with a pencil clenched between my teeth.
—Were you never teased about your hobby?
I ponder on how much I should tell Anna, what memories I should dig up from my past; one shouldn’t reveal everything one’s done.
—There was only one bad episode; I was ten years old and it was probably because of the color of my hair. They had been stalking me for several days, and I crunched mud with pebbles between my teeth while they rolled me over in the gravel and beat me up. I didn’t feel bad after it, even though there was a taste of blood in my mouth and sand in my back teeth. One of them was forced to phone me that evening to apologize. Then he hung up without saying good-bye. I answered and the call was so short that Mom thought it was a wrong number.
—No, I say, what saved me was the fact that I was the best soccer player. They left you in peace then. I was like the other kids my age, although I didn’t have the same urge to play soccer all day long.
Both girls listen to what I have to say with interest. The child’s mother watches me as I’m talking, as if what I’m saying strikes a chord in her that she can understand.
Sixty-four
Anna is late and hasn’t returned home from the library yet. It suddenly occurs to me that she might have met someone in the village and gone to the café with him, that the guy on the library steps might be delaying her. I can easily imagine her being accosted by a man, one of those guys who has been ogling her on the streets, inventing some excuse, and because she’s so good and kind or spaced-out even, she might sit with him at the café. She’ll only stop for a bit, she’ll say, because she’s rushing home, but because he’s such a smooth talker he might make her forget her genetics and also make her laugh and forget what time it is.
So when she appears in the doorway five minutes later, slightly drenched from the rain, and with a box of cakes from the bakery in her arms, I’m unable to hide how delighted I am. I’m totally astounded by how absurdly thrilled I am, as if I were discovering her for the first time. She hands me the cakes and I find myself saying that she’s in a nice sweater, although, of course, it’s the same green sweater that she was in at the breakfast table. Then I suddenly grow insecure and burst into a blush and, even worse, she blushes, too. I feel uneasy and, to switch topics, offer to go downstairs to the laundry room and wash some of her clothes in the machine for her since I need to wash my working clothes.
—Since I have to do a wash for Flóra Sól anyway, I add as nonchalantly as possible, regretting it as soon as I’ve said it.
She looks somewhere between surprised and relieved.
—OK, she says. Can it be both whites and colors?
—Yeah, both. I can do two loads.
I haven’t a clue of what I’m getting myself into. I could have washed the kid’s tiny things in the sink.
—Can it be underwear as well or just jeans and T-shirts? she asks from the room.
—Underwear is fine, too. Do you mind if I wash your clothes with mine?
There’s no turning back after this.
I first put the girls’ laundry into one machine, and then I throw my working clothes into the second load. It takes me a hell of a long time to read the instructions and figure out how the machine works. When I’ve finished washing, I carry the wet laundry upstairs, clutching it in my arms, and hang it on the washing lines stretched over the balcony. Here I stand in a white T-shirt with clothes pegs between my teeth, just a few yards away from the old pensioner on the other side of the street, who hangs around home in his vest all day. I first hang up my daughter’s leggings and then her mother’s panties, so that, bit by bit, I’m putting my private life on the line, like the bloodstained sheets that used to be hung on balconies on wedding nights in the olden days. The old man watches me in eager anticipation, as I expose my temporary family life to the eyes of the world. No one should jump to any rash conclusions, though, just because I’m trying to make my child’s mother’s life easier by cooking for her while she researches her thesis in my rented apartment.
Sixty-five
Once a week there is a food market in the village, which all the farmers in the area bring their produce to. Sometimes there is also walking livestock, especially hens and other feathered creatures, so I grab the opportunity to take my daughter to see them. The market resounds with voices, bustle, and the cold smell of blood.
—Twi, twi, says the child, pointing at the bloody poultry hanging over our heads.
Just as I’m standing there under the plucked hens, I have a flashback of part of a dream I had last night. In the dream I was shooting a wild bird, although I’m far from being a hunter by nature. I doubt if I could kill an animal, I certainly couldn’t kill any young ones, but if the animal were a fully-grown male animal and the purpose were to feed my family—I’m now reasoning like the father of a family—then there’s a chance that I might kill it fearlessly and even look my prey in the eye. The dream might have something to do with the inner nature of man, Mom would say, with a mysterious air. So I still have Mom by my side to chat and discuss my dreams with.
We move farther into the section where the hares and rabbits
are hanging, and I push the stroller through a forest of animals. My daughter leans against the back of the stroller to gain a better view of the hares dangling over her with their drooping heads. They don’t seem to have planned for any tall guests at this market, so I have to stoop under the hairy ears.
I’m not thinking of anything in particular, which is when I’m struck by this preposterous idea, which comes to me like a cat lying on its back with its rubbery pink paws in the air, begging for its belly to be stroked. All of a sudden I can easily see myself as a married man, getting married even, in a church, and see that being with the same woman for the whole of one’s life might be a goal worth pursuing, not necessarily to do anything in particular, but just to be in the same room as her. I’d be willing to bathe the child, change diapers, and have her in her pajamas when her mom came home from the research institute. Then I’d rub almond oil into my daughter’s rosy cheeks so that when she was kissed, my wife would smell the almond oil on her. Then one of us would walk behind the other’s coffin. Unless, of course, we both departed at the same moment, like that couple on the country road; there would be rain and mist on the windshield, and I would be on the point of turning the fan on full blast when, at the same moment, a truck would swerve onto the highway.
I see the trader talking to me, but don’t immediately hear his words.
—Do you want the bigger one or the smaller one? he asks, daddy hare or mammy hare? He is holding the hooked pole he uses to take down the hare carcasses when customers request it. Flóra Sól is all eyes as he yanks the hairy animal off the hook.
—Oh, oh, she says when she sees the animal isn’t moving.
The Greenhouse Page 18