Pets (2 page)

I introduced myself to the fellow but got the feeling that he didn't take much notice of my name. I didn't fasten my safety belt straight away, as I half expected him to stand up and take off his dark blue overcoat. He was wearing a suit and a jumper underneath. I took the flight magazine out of the seat pocket and found an article that I could pretend to be engrossed in for a while. It was about the world's most northern golf course, at Akureyri, where Vigdis is staying at the moment. But, just as I feared, I got no peace; the man beside me pointed at the flight attendant who was approaching down the aisle and reminded me to fasten my seatbelt. The “dears” are coming to make sure everyone is strapped in. I expected him to carry on talking, but when he paused I used the opportunity to get my portable tape player out of my bag in the locker. I was back in my seat with my belt fastened before the flight attendant walked past with a smile and checked (in a rather unconvincing manner) that the belts were fastened. I was quite sure that she was laughing to herself about the overdressed fellow beside me.

From the corner of my eye I saw that the woman in the window seat was slyly watching him—a dark haired woman in her forties, clearly well-educated and likely, I thought, to see the comical elements in the linguist's appearance. I, on the other hand, had put a tape into my portable player (remixes of several Miles Davis recordings) and was busy rewinding with my headphones already in place. I gazed along the aisle while I waited for the tape to rewind. All at once I noticed a young, fair-haired woman who was sitting several rows in front of me. I felt as if I recognized her, and when she turned her head towards the person on the other side of the aisle—she had obviously been asked a question—I remembered who she was. I didn't know her name but I had first seen her fifteen years ago, at a high school party in Hjalmholt. Her unconventionally beautiful face had caught my eye, not to mention her almost perfect body, which seemed just the same today.

This memory from Hjalmholt is still very clear, although I was only sixteen or seventeen at the time. There I was sitting on the sofa between two classmates, probably drinking to pluck up enough courage to chat up some girls from my class, and gazing in adoration at this girl I had never seen before but who was, I think, a friend of the people who were throwing the party. It wasn't just her appearance that made her seem exciting; she was even more memorable for having disappeared with a boy, whom I knew vaguely, into one of the children's bedrooms slightly later in the evening. She reappeared half an hour later, red-cheeked and—making no attempt to cover up what she had been doing in the bedroom—with her fair hair tousled (and even prettier), clearly after some kind of “friendly combat,” as one of my classmates put it. But the boy, who had gone with her into the bedroom, didn't come out again, and we found out shortly afterwards that he was fast asleep. My friends and I joked that she—the one who was now sitting just a few meters away from me on the plane, in jeans and a T-shirt—had completely done him in.

I never found out any more about this girl—she didn't live in my district nor did she go to the same school as me—but each time I have caught sight of her since then, something begins to happen inside me, something disturbing; I somehow grow smaller and bigger at the same time. In other words: I have fancied her ever since she came out—tousled and flushed, much more mature and exciting than all the other girls—of the children's bedroom. But it's highly unlikely that she remembers me. She left the party soon after she had finished with the boy; she was too smart—too experienced and intelligent—to hang around with children, as I thought my classmates and I were at that time.

Without realizing it, I had begun to compare her beautiful profile (at least what I could see of it from my seat) with that of
Vigdis, and, for a few seconds, I seemed to lose my senses; I couldn't remember whether Vigdis had fair or dark hair.

4

The barmaid brought a glass of dark beer and put it on the table for him. She had large breasts, bigger than you would expect on a little body like hers. He gazed at them. He picked up his glass when she put it down on the table and moved it nearer, without taking his eyes off the girl, who turned around and walked back to the bar. Her behind was neat and small compared to her breasts. She took a magazine from the bar, walked behind the counter, and turned up the music. Then she sat down with it, crossed her legs, and began to turn the pages. He carried on looking at her. He lifted his beer glass, put it back down on the table, and dipped his finger in the thick froth. He licked the froth off his finger and groaned. It wasn't easy to guess what emotions the groan was meant to express. The girl seemed to hear him despite the music; she looked at him casually and then turned back to her magazine. After a little while he lifted his glass again and took a long draught. Half the beer had disappeared when he put it down again, wiping the line of froth from his top lip with the back of his hand. When he had swallowed it, he let out a long, loud sounding “ah” and called out to the girl, asking if he could get something to eat here. She said he could; they had sandwiches and soup. He said he wasn't going to have any soup but wouldn't mind a sandwich; what choices did she have? She closed the magazine, stood up without saying a word and brought a menu which she put down on the table. He had finished his beer and passed her the glass in exchange for the menu. She asked if he wanted another one. He nodded and asked for a Jägermeister to go with it, and just some kind of toasted sandwich with ham and cheese. She could put other ingredients in it too, but not asparagus or whatever it was called.

When she had gone off with the glass and the menu, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, tapped out one cigarette, and lit it. The girl brought him the beer and the Jägermeister and then disappeared into the kitchen. He had only had a sip of beer when she came out again with the sandwich, but his schnapps glass was empty. He had taken off his anorak and laid it on the next table. Underneath he was wearing a light yellow shirt and a dark, double-breasted jacket. The barmaid sat down again and carried on looking at her magazine. He gulped down the sandwich and finished off the beer. Just as he was asking the girl to bring him another one, the door opened and a young couple walked in. She was wearing a baggy parka and a dark brown furry hat, while he had on a long overcoat with a strange looking hood. He stood up and asked the girl for another Jägermeister to drink with the beer, then he disappeared into the men's room.

The girl took the drinks to his table and met him as he came out of the toilet. He smiled at her but didn't get a smile back. Then he put on his anorak, picked up the plastic bag, and peered into it to make sure that everything was still in place. He swallowed the schnapps, screwed up his face, as if he was in slight pain, and downed about half the beer in one gulp. He zipped up his anorak, took several steps in the direction of the outside door, looked back towards the kitchen, and then went out. An icy blast blew into the bar, and the door took a good thirty seconds to close again. An uncanny silence fell on the place; the couple at the table stared at the door in wonder, and when the girl came back in from the kitchen he had gone. The only signs of his presence were his half empty beer glass, cigarette stubs in the ashtray, bread crumbs on a plate, and a crumpled napkin.

He now stood with his plastic bag on Hverfisgata, just opposite the Danish Embassy, and looked around several times before he carried on down the street. He walked up Ingolfstraeti and turned down Bankastraeti. The sun began to shine when he got near Laekjargata but had disappeared again behind a cloud by the time he reached the taxi stop below the little old houses of Bernhoftstorfa. He pushed down his hood and squeezed into the first taxi. He didn't answer when the taxi driver commented on how cold the weather had been that month but asked to be driven up to Breidholt, to Sudurholar; probably it was Sudurholar. He would recognize the place when they got there.

5

Armann Valur nudged me with his elbow and placed the open flight magazine on my table, beside the tape player. The German model Claudia Schiffer gazed up at me from the page. I removed one earphone so I could hear what Armann was trying to say. He kept his eyes fixed on the magazine as he tapped the picture of Claudia with his finger. Then, lowering his voice as if he didn't want the woman by the window to hear, he said:

“She's not bad, this one.”

I said no in agreement, waited a few seconds before I put the earphone back in place, and sat up straight in my seat, as if to state that I wanted to be left alone. A new track was playing when I started listening again and, as I tend to do when I listen to music, I tried to harmonize it with Claudia's face, which was still gazing at me from the magazine. I could easily imagine the slow, relaxed drum beats of Miles's music being used as background music in a photo studio in Europe while some model shifted positions or pouted and ran her fingers through her golden locks. Vigdis came to mind. At this moment, she was probably changing sheets in the hotel just by the church, and was no doubt wondering if I would call her as soon as I got home, as I had promised. I hadn't made up my mind if I was going to call her straight away or relax and listen to one or two records in the living room first. The only thing I was sure of was that I was looking forward to coming home to my own flat; unpacking the CDs, books, and videos which I had bought; and arranging the wine bottles, cigars, and cigarettes from the duty-free store on the table in the living room. I decided to postpone answering the questions that popped up in my mind: whether Vigdis and I were really in love, or if the exciting feeling I experienced when I imagined her, in a short black skirt, changing sheets in the hotel up north, had anything to do with her personally, or if this imaginary figure could be anyone, even the blonde from Hjalmholt.

Armann didn't seem to have understood that I wanted to be left alone. I had shut my eyes and was trying to look as though I was concentrating on the music in the headphones, but it didn't seem to make any impact on my neighbor; he nudged me again and wanted me to look back at the magazine. On the right-hand page, beside the conclusion of the interview with Claudia, there was an ad showing all kinds of Icelandic products that were ideal to buy for friends and business colleagues abroad: for example Icelandic sweaters, Black Death, cheese, smoked lamb, and, last but not least, Opal lozenges, which was exactly what Armann was trying to draw my attention to. I nodded and wondered whether my fellow passenger—despite his linguistical education—had different values and manners than other people, or if he had suffered some kind of mental breakdown recently. Perhaps his studies had made him strange. I was thankful that at least he didn't smell of alcohol or sweat, as I had feared, but what I found strangest of all was that he didn't seem interested in talking to me. Instead he was trying to get my attention by pointing to something that he obviously wanted me to share with him.

I saw that the woman by the window was watching us and noticed that she had a reddish-purple mark on her neck. It's a hickey, I said to myself. I saw her as an educated woman of around forty who was on the way home after spending a few days with her foreign lover, and who felt no need to cover up the hickey on her neck; on the contrary, she was very happy with it. She would gladly have paid tax on it, if demanded. I tried to imagine her lover, and pictured an Italian or a Greek, a well-built, stocky man in an expensive black suit and a white shirt, with an open neck, revealing the shiny dark hairs on his chest. In other words: the complete opposite of the man who sat between us, and who was, at this moment, probably considering what goods the world of aviation (if one can use such prosaic terms) was offering and if it was necessary (seen from a more general point of view) to conduct all that commerce in the air. I was quite sure that if I gave him the chance the floodgates would burst open and I wouldn't be left in peace for the rest of the trip.

“Maybe this is something one should try,” he said. “They are those giant sized packs, much bigger than these here,” he added, shaking the half-full box of Opals he had fished up out of his coat pocket with some difficulty—the seat belt was still fastened over his stomach. He didn't offer me a lozenge this time, just helped himself to one and began to tap the box with his index finger while he examined the catalogue more closely.

I tried to imagine what kind of music this overdressed Opal eater listened to at home and came to the conclusion that some sort of learned silence reigned there, broken, at the most, by the evening news and the occasional program on very abstract subject matters. Probably he had never heard anything like the music that was now playing in my headphones: “On the Corner,” from 1972 when Armann was somewhere between twenty-five and thirty years old and, no doubt, still a student. I had started to put together a program of music that I would listen to when I got home and emptied my bags. “Lonely Fire”
from Big Fun was number one on that list.

6

While the car waited at the traffic lights at the corner of Laekjargata and Hverfisgata, he took a thick old leather-bound book out of the plastic bag, opened it, and gazed at the first page for a few moments. When he closed the book again he stroked it with his hand, put it down on the car seat, and knocked on the hard cover twice with his knuckles. Then he opened up the plastic bag and examined a beautifully carved sailing ship that was wedged into an open wooden box.

Once they reached Saebraut he asked the taxi driver to stop at a store, where he could buy cigarettes. The driver didn't make any comment, just stopped at a drive-in store a little later. While he waited for the cigarettes he put the book back in the plastic bag beside the ship, closed the bag carefully, and put it down on the seat.