The kid flips swiftly through drawings to show me various versions of bird wings, finally pointing his index finger at one image:
“Eagle wings are the most popular.”
He could have added, what man doesn’t dream of being a bird of prey, drifting solitarily across the globe, soaring over mountain lagoons, gullies, and marshes, hunting for a prey to snatch?
But instead he says:
“Just take your time.”
And he explains to me that he has another customer in a chair on the other side of the curtain and that he is just about to finish the national flag, complete with flapping and shading.
He lowers his voice.
“I told him the flagpole would bend if he put on two kilos but he insisted on having it.”
I was planning on dropping in on Mom before her nap and wanted to wind this transaction up as quickly as possible.
“I was thinking of a drill.”
If my request has taken him by surprise, he shows no sign of it and immediately starts searching through the appropriate folder.
“We might have a drill in here somewhere under domestic appliances,” he says. “Anyway, it’s no more complicated than the quad bike I did last week.”
“No, I was joking,” I say.
He looks at me with a grave air and it’s difficult to decipher whether he’s offended or not.
I hurriedly dig into my pocket and pull out a folded sheet of paper, open the drawing, and hand it to him. He takes it and irons out all the corners before finally holding it up to the light. I’ve managed to surprise him. He is unable to conceal his incertitude.
“Is this a flower or …”
“A water lily,” I say without hesitation.
“And just one colour?”
“Yes, just one colour, white. No shadowing,” I add.
“And no inscription?”
“No, no inscription.”
He puts the folders back, says he can do the flower freehand, and turns on the tattoo drill.
“And where do you want it?”
He prepares to dip the needle into a white liquid.
I unbutton my shirt and point at my heart.
“We’ll have to shave the hair first,” he says, turning off the drill. “Otherwise your flower will be lost in the darkness of a forest.”
I mention the state where the slow suicide of all men goes under the name of “life”
The shortest route to the old folk’s home is through the graveyard.
I’ve always imagined that the fifth month would be the last month of my life and that there would be more than one five in that final date, if not the fifth of the fifth, then the fifteenth of the fifth or the twenty-fifth of the fifth. That would also be the month of my birthday. The ducks would have completed their mating by then, but there wouldn’t just be ducks on the lake but also oystercatchers and purple sandpipers, because there would be birdsong on the nightless spring day I cease to exist.
Will the world miss me? No. Will the world be any poorer without me? No. Will the world survive without me? Yes. Is the world a better place now than when I came into it? No. What have I done to improve it? Nothing.
On my way down Skothúsvegur I reflect on how one should go about borrowing a hunting rifle from a neighbour. Does one borrow a weapon the same way one borrows a hose extension? What animals are hunted at the beginning of May? One can’t shoot the messenger of spring, the golden plover, who has just returned to the island, or a duck hatching from an egg. Could I say that I want to shoot a great black-backed gull that keeps me awake in the attic apartment of a residential block in the city centre? Wouldn’t Svanur find it suspicious if I were to suddenly turn into a spokesman for ducklings’ rights? Besides, Svanur knows that I’m no hunter. Although I’ve experienced standing in the middle of a freezing cold river in my crotch-high boots, alone up on a heath, and felt the cold pressing against my body like a thick wall and pebbles on the spongy bed under my waders, and then felt how the river swiftly tugged at me below, how the bottom deepened and vanished, while I stared into the gaping, sucking vortex, I have never fired a gun. On my last fishing trip I came home with two trout, which I filleted and fried with chives I trimmed off a pot on the balcony. Svanur also knows that I can’t bear violence after he tried to drag me to see Die Hard 4. What does one shoot in May apart from one’s self? Or a fellow Homo sapiens? He would put two and two together.
Svanur isn’t the kind of man who asks questions, though. Or who generally contemplates one’s inner life. He isn’t the kind of guy who would mention a full moon or comment on the northern lights. He’d never speak of the rainbow colours at the outermost ends of human knowledge. He wouldn’t even point out the colours in the sky to his wife, Aurora, the rose-pink hue of daybreak, he wouldn’t say, “There she is, your namesake.” No more than Aurora would mention the sky to her husband. There’s a clear division of tasks in their household and she alone drags the teenager out of bed in the morning. He, on the other hand, takes care of walking their fourteen-year-old border collie bitch who hobbles lamely in the front. No, Svanur wouldn’t mix any feelings into the issue, he’d just hand me the rifle and say, that’s a Remington 40-XB, bedded but with the original lock and barrel, even if he suspected I was going to shoot myself.
The navel is a scar on people’s abdomen, which formed
