In the square there is a flock of grey pigeons. I remember what the cabdriver said yesterday:
“Even the birds vanished in the war.”
Machinery can be heard in the distance, some construction is being done in the town. I meander down narrow streets and feel like I’m always turning at the same corner. Some of the houses look intact, but others were clearly abandoned in haste. There aren’t many people about, but in some odd way many of the faces look strangely familiar. There’s a woman who looks like my ex-sister-in-law, Gudrún’s sister, and for a moment I think I catch a glimpse of Svanur’s back. I scrutinise the people but they don’t look back at me. Many of them are missing an arm or a leg or some other body part that others normally possess as a pair.
Then I remember when Gudrún asked me out of the blue whether I would donate her a kidney if she ever needed one. I said yes and asked if she was ill, but she said no. I thought, what if she asks about my heart? Would I then tell her that I’ll gladly give her anything that I have more than one of?
“Those are the kind of questions women ask,” Svanur would have said. “A sign of them putting you to the test.”
Ultimately, I must reach the wall peppered with bullet holes. Sure enough, I reach the wall that faces my hotel-room window and examine it up close, standing in the very footsteps of those unsuspecting people shot at on some afternoon or starlit night. I stroke the lukewarm stone, slipping my fingers into the bullet holes.
“People dream simple dreams,” Svanur would say. “To avoid getting pointlessly shot and hoping your children will remember you.” Judging by the density of the holes, it does not seem unlikely that executions happened here. But the cabdriver had said they were carried out on the soccer fields.
The hotel is in my direct line of view, and when I focus my gaze on the second floor, where my bedroom window is, for a moment I get the feeling that someone is standing behind the glass and observing me, someone who turns on the light and then turns it off just as swiftly again, as if playing with the switch or sending important Morse code messages to the town: No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking.
Time is full of dead cats
Since I’m not dying today, I need to eat.
It isn’t difficult to find Restaurant Limbo, which the young man pointed out to me on the map. It’s located on the main street between the town’s hair salon, which is closed—although two hairdresser’s chairs and a large photograph of a young Sophia Loren are on display in the window—and a children’s boutique, which is also closed, like most of the other stores on the street. I try to decipher the signs in the windows to understand what was housed where. Some of the brand names are international and I recognise a poster of a well-known brand hanging inside a shuttered shop window: “Life is short, let’s buy jeans.” Opposite the restaurant there is another children’s clothing store, and beside that a sign reads Pizza Verona and another reads Café Amsterdam, both places deserted and closed. On my way I pass a boarded-up cinema displaying a poster of Bruce Willis, with bulging biceps and soot on his forehead, in a broken display case by the entrance.
The red curtains in the windows of Restaurant Limbo are drawn, so it’s impossible to see inside, but as soon as I approach, the doors open wide.
The man who escorts me to a table by the window tells me they phoned from the hotel to let them know I was on my way, so that the “dish of the day” is already in the oven.
He places a handwritten sheet marked “Dish of the Day” in front of me with no further clarification and a ridiculously low price beside it. I realise that I could survive several weeks in this country on the money I exchanged at the airport.
“Very good,” says the man.
He places a fork, a glass, and a cloth napkin on the table and gets me a beer. “Neptunus,” the label reads on the bottle.
I’m the only customer in the place.
“You won’t be disappointed,” he adds. “Speciality.” I wait half an hour for the food while the man chats with me, an apron tied around his neck and a tea towel tossed over his shoulder. He wants to know what I’m doing in town and, like the cabdriver, asks if I’m on a special mission.
I tell him I’m on vacation and by way of emphasis point a finger at the map of the town I have spread out on the table.
He wants to know where I’m from and whether there have been any recent wars there.
“Not since 1238,” I say.
“So you didn’t participate in the air raids?”
“No, we don’t have an army.”
He then says that he’s heard that I fixed a wardrobe door at the hotel this morning.
“That kind of news spreads fast,” he says, and I notice he is wearing impeccably polished, elegant black shoes, like many of the men I have seen on my walk.
He doesn’t wait for any confirmation, but instead informs me of what the young man at the hotel has already shared, that the hotel is owned by the aunt of the siblings who run it. That she—that is to say, the aunt—is a widow who inherited the hotel from one of her husband’s relatives and that she has left the country.
“Many people died in the war and so it is not always clear who owns what.”
I notice a curled-up cat in a corner of the room. He’s the first four-legged creature I’ve encountered in this town. When the man moves away to fetch my food, the cat stands and coils itself at my feet. As I bend down to pet the animal, I
