I asked her how that could have happened and she answered that condoms aren’t foolproof.
I was still growing up and I was expecting a child. I lived with Mom and slept in a single bed with a linen drawer I got as a confirmation gift. The report on what my flesh produced on my behalf ends with two sentences on the next page: A baby was conceived on the mountain witnessed by a sheep. A few feet away from a dormant crater.
A baby was conceived on the mountain witnessed by a sheep
All of a sudden Gudrún had knit me a sweater and I thought, we’ve become a couple. She handed it to me, ironed and folded, and said, “It matches your eyes.” Then she started knitting a rib stitch for the baby. We sat on the sofa at her place in the evenings, watched TV and ate popcorn with her mother. I’d spent four summers on my uncle’s sheep farm and knew what was in store for her, I had lambing experience, had dragged out their slimy bodies. I remember I tried to bring a horned ram into the world, to get the horns past the canal, I can still hear the mother’s bleating.
A little over eight months after the mountain hike, Gudrún Waterlily was born on an intercalary day, two weeks before her time and with soft nails. As was to be expected, the baby lay crosswise in the womb and could not be turned, so a caesarean was performed. I was terrified when the midwife approached me with the child, she taught me how to create a shell around the tiny body, I held a life in my hands, the most fragile creature in the world, and I thought, she’ll outlive me.
I skip to the last pages in the book until I find the following sentence:
February 29. She will outlive me. Eyelids like transparent butterfly wings.
Then I had to pop into work after lunch to handle an order. Why did I do that? Because a man called to tell me he’d be collecting his order at one-thirty.
I was the first of my friends to tie the knot, which meant regular sex at home, I had access to a female body every night. I quickly got used to it. Initially, after the birth, Gudrún wanted to choose the parts of her body I had access to. I wasn’t allowed to hold her stomach, I wasn’t allowed to go near her C-section scar. “Put your hand here,” she said. “No, not like that, keep it still, don’t move or breathe so heavily.” I tried to hold onto her shoulders or to let my hands rest on her rib cage right under her breasts, but sometimes I forgot the things I wasn’t allowed to do, groping my way, searching for a path to follow along her naked flesh, and my hands slid down to her tummy.
“What?” she would then say.
“Nothing,” I answered.
“No, because you’re holding my tummy.”
Twenty-six years later my wife tells me: “Waterlily isn’t yours. I felt it was right that you should know, since we’re breaking up.” And then she adds: “I’d never met a guy who spoke about suffering and death on a first date. When you said we all die I felt that was something to build a life on. That was when I decided that Waterlily would be yours.”
The last words I write in the diary are undated.
I am flesh.
After that I stopped keeping a record of my life.
By flesh I mean everything below my head. This is consistent with the fact that flesh is the beginning and end of all the most important things in my life: I was born and the heart and lungs started their relentless work, a child was born and I shouldered the responsibility of the flesh of my flesh, and soon my body will cease to work. It’s as if I could hear Mom lecturing me on the order of the world: “You know, Jónas, the big story started long before we were born.”
Wounds heal at different speeds and the scars that are formed can lie at varying depths, some are deeper than others
It’s a quarter past two in the morning and someone is knocking on my door on the fourth floor, first lightly, then more insistently.
Svanur stands on the landing, out of breath, and glances over my shoulder. The front door downstairs should be locked, but he said that he slipped in behind a neighbour who was coming home from a binge. He has been unable to sleep and, looking at my place, thought he could see some movement behind the blinds in my attic, someone walking about, and came to the conclusion that I was awake as well. He wants to invite me for a walk with his dog, who is waiting by the caravan downstairs.
Big girl, he calls his bitch.
Can I tell him I have other plans at this time of night?
Suddenly he has stepped into my place and entered the living room. He looks around, scanning the space swiftly and methodically. Is he checking me out?
His gaze freezes on the stool in the middle of the living room floor and the chandelier I’ve placed on the coffee table, but it’s not as if I’m standing there with a belt in my hands.
I close the computer displaying the page of suicide methods of writers.
The contents of the box lie in a heap on the dining table.
“Are you tidying up?” he asks.
“Yes, I’m going through some old papers.”
Before I know it, he has vanished into the bathroom. I hear him opening and closing cabinets and, on the way back, he peeps into the bedroom. The rifle is still lying on the double bed. He then opens the coat closet in the corridor, bringing his inspection to an end.
“I want to understand Aurora better,” says my neighbour with a
