MAN AND BEAST
Svanur holds onto the dog by its leash as we walk along a path that leads down to the harbour. The air is so still and there isn’t a soul around at night, apart from a young father with a stroller. Did I take Gudrún Waterlily out for walks at night when she had tummy aches to allow her mom to sleep?
Svanur breaks the silence.
“I find these bright nights so difficult,” I hear him say. He bends down to clean up after the dog.
“You can recognise the types that don’t carry a bag and think they can get away with it.”
We stand on the pier, halfway between the whale-watching boats and the whale-hunting boats, the vast sky above us.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” I hear Svanur ask.
I don’t say anything. A magnificent spring sky with three horizontal orange streaks isn’t powerful enough to provoke any longing in me; I saw the very same sky last year and the year before. I can prolong my existence or I can bring it to an end.
“We’re so small,” he says, patting the dog. Then he corrects himself:
“Man is so small.”
We walk towards the lighthouse and Svanur says he walked the same way yesterday and spotted a seal. And the seal also spotted him. They had looked each other in the eye, man and animal. He wondered whether he should take a picture of the seal with his phone, but decided against it because he said to himself, man and animal, nothing more to say, no deeper meaning. Then, when he got home, he read an article online about a seal that had learned how to use a screwdriver. “Is it a coincidence that I stumbled precisely on that article?” he asks, gazing beyond me, out at the vast green expanse.
We both fall silent.
The dog barks and wants to wade into the seaweed, but Svanur tugs on the leash. An arctic tern swirls above us and I wave it away with my hand. The nesting season has begun.
“Did you know,” he says, still gazing out at the sea, “that humans are the only animals that shed tears to express feelings such as joy or sorrow?”
I say yes, isn’t that due to the stimulation of the lachrymal gland?
“Unlike animals, we know that our lives end,” my neighbour continues. “We cease to exist.”
He looks around for a trash can, but there are none in sight so he holds the bag all the way back.
As I’m about to say goodbye to Svanur, I sense there is still something weighing on his mind.
He shuffles his feet in front of the caravan.
“Did you need ammunition as well?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“I suspected as much.”
He hesitates.
“Unfortunately it got used up on the ptarmigan hunting last year.”
He looks beyond me, the dog stares right at me.
“To be honest, I’ve never handled a shotgun before,” I tell my neighbour.
“I thought as much. That you don’t know how to fire a gun.”
He’s right, I can’t fire a gun. Someone else might end up getting shot.
Then he asks if he can come over every now and then.
“Is it okay if I come over every now and then?”
I tell him I’m a bit busy the next few days, but before I know it, I’ve added:
“I’m about to leave. On a trip.”
The idea strikes me like a bolt of lightning; I’ll make myself vanish. That way I don’t have to worry about Waterlily discovering my body. Like a bird spinning down a vortex, hovering horizontally for a few metres before it dives and perishes. One final wing flap before aiming for the gaping crevice, the whitened bones will serve as a landmark to travellers.
As I reflect on this further, however, I exclude the option of not being found; Waterlily would certainly spend her whole life searching for me, and ultimately the pain would be too much of a burden. Instead I would go on a trip abroad and Waterlily and Mom would get me back in a tidy box.
“Your father has gone on his longest journey,” Mom had said to me. I had just come home from an exam and she was standing in the doorway, waiting for me.
“Gone where?” I asked, noticing that his brown briefcase was lying in the bed of pansies.
I took the briefcase into my bedroom, opened it, and arranged the bills on the desk. The next day I told Mom I had quit university and started working at Steel Legs Ltd., Father & Son. Society’s interest in steel legs has been fairly constant over the decades.
“Don’t worry,” I said to Mom.
“The best moments in my life,” I hear Svanur say, “are when I’m lying alone inside a sleeping bag up on a heath, holding my rifle at the crack of dawn, waiting for the birds to wake up. Remaining silent and staring at the crust of snow. It’s like being inside a womb. One feels secure. One doesn’t need to be born. One doesn’t need to come out.”
What did I say to Svanur?
I repeated what he said. I said no, one doesn’t need to come out. That was the last sentence I spoke to him. Which means that my last word was “out.”
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us
I phone Waterlily and we arrange to meet. She suggests a bakery with two tables and chairs.
In our last conversation, she’d asked if I sorted my garbage and whether I’d got myself a blue recycling bin for paper. In return I asked how Sigtryggur was doing and she answered: “You mean Tristan, Dad?” and added:
“That’s over.”
My daughter doesn’t need a father, but a boyfriend. My function has become obsolete.
She is wearing the blue hooded parka with fur trim I got her for Christmas and she gives me a broad smile. I remember when she got braces and cried a whole weekend. She takes off her parka and hangs it on the back of the chair.
My daughter is an expert on marine biology and wrote her final thesis
