She looks me in the eye and won’t give up.
“Why are you here?”
I hesitate and stop myself from repeating that I’m on vacation. Instead I say:
“I’m not sure.”
She scrutinises me.
“Have you come to collect something? Buy something?”
“No.”
“Sell something?”
“No. I have no plans.”
I can’t tell this young woman, who has been through so much to survive with her son and younger brother under showers of bombs—in a country in which blood flows through the river beds where firing squads passed a few weeks ago, dying the water red—that I have come all this way to kill myself. I can’t explain to these people that I’ve come here with my toolbox to set up a hook, that I travel with my drill the way others travel with their toothbrush. I can’t tell her—after all she’s been through—that I’m going to saddle her and her brother with the chore of taking me down. My unhappiness is at best inane when compared to the ruins and dust that lie outside my window.
Do you know? It’s spring tears, spring tears that fall on the black sand
When I’m alone again I open up the door onto the balcony. It takes some time to wrestle with it because the hotel hasn’t been heated for a long time and the wood has swollen. It would have been best if I had a hand plane to smooth the edge, but I manage to solve the problem with a few sheets of sandpaper I brought with me. While I’m at it, I tighten two screws on the handles. On the balcony there are pots of withered flowers, so I fill the toothbrush glass with water and pour it over the plants. I do it in a total of four trips.
The sea is closer than I’d expected and gives off a scent of very ripe, sweet fruit. I don’t have to look long to realise that this is totally different than the churning ocean I’m used to, there are no giant waves here, as heavy as slamming metal doors, no swirling white mounds of surf that pull up stones and suck down boats; what appears before me from my window is a giant, salty swimming pool or a floating mirror.
I pay no heed to the recommendation to stay along the path to the deserted shore, but on my way I notice that the firewood shed is almost empty.
“No one’s willing to chop firewood,” the girl had said.
Should I walk into the sea?
How far out does one have to swim to exhaust one’s self?
A bird swirls above me.
One circle.
Will he dive down and strike me?
Two circles.
He lands. I notice the bird is limping and finding it difficult to take off again. In a country of warfare and dust even the animals are maimed; dogs hop on three paws, cats have one eye, birds one leg.
As I’m standing on the beach I suddenly remember the pod of whales Gudrún and I once drove past on the coast, where five or six of them had swum ashore and become stranded. We grabbed shovels from the trunk and dug holes at the water’s edge to try to keep them alive and get them floating again.
“It’s important,” she said when we got back to the car, “to share memories.”
Had we stopped sleeping together by then?
I remove my socks and shoes, stand in the cold mud until a salty puddle forms around me and sucks me down. When the foam reaches my ankles I turn away.
If it is possible to compare the two, me and the world
When I get back I turn on the shower, take off my clothes—the same I arrived in—and stand naked on the cold floor. The water isn’t red anymore now that I’ve fixed the pipes.
Before me is a mirror and in it the outline of an unknown male body with a snow-white water lily on his chest, over the heart. Like a stamped trademark on a pale sailcloth. I haven’t examined myself in a mirror for many years, not all of me. Have I ever done that? The mirrors back in my apartment hadn’t been designed for a man who was one metre eighty-five centimetres tall. I used the mirror in the bathroom to shave, not look at myself.
I’ve got skinny, Mom would say.
I’m exposed. Ludicrous.
I feel the muscles in my upper arms and my stomach, but find it difficult to discern whether I’m the person in the mirror or the other.
I still have all my hair, as Mom rightly points out. Like the bristles of a brush pointing in the air. And the hair barely white.
On one side there is me and, on the other, my body. Both equally strangers.
Were we together in school, did I meet that guy the summer I worked on tarring the roads, were we acquaintances? Is this the young man who pondered celestial bodies?
The sun hasn’t shone on this body for some time. Not as a whole. I haven’t sunbathed for seventeen years. It was an unusually hot June day, seventeen degrees in the shade, so I allowed myself to be in swimming trunks as I was nailing boxes around ten strawberry plants for Gudrún. I didn’t lie down because I’m a Homo erectus, an upright man who is always busy doing something.
Gudrún lay sunbathing beside the strawberry beds in the ocean breeze, ginger-haired with a pinkish-red complexion, bit by bit the freckles merged. Every now and then, she hoisted herself on her elbows to spread some tanning lotion on some part of her body. She had a book, read a few lines, and then closed her eyes in between. There was a bush nearby and, after a short while, a shadow formed and she got up with the rug and moved to a patch of the lawn with less shade.
I turn on the light in the new bedroom. All the lamps are working. Soon darkness
