The old folks sit stooped on park benches under woollen blankets in the cold spring sun, with a flock of geese nearby, paired off in twos. I notice a bird huddled on its own apart from the group, and it doesn’t move, even when I walk up to it. One of its wings is bent backwards, clearly broken. The wounded goose is partnerless and won’t procreate. God is sending me a message. Not that I believe in him.
My mother slouches in a recliner, her feet don’t touch the ground, her slippers are too big, above them are her twiggy legs, she’s shrivelled to almost nothing, she has ceased to be flesh, as light as a feather, held together by her Styrofoam bones and a few tendons. What comes to mind is the weathered skeleton of a bird that has been left on the heath all winter; the vacant carcass remains, but ultimately disintegrates, turning into a ball of dust with claws. It is hard to imagine that this scrawny little woman, who doesn’t reach my shoulders, once inhabited a female form. I recognise her special-occasion skirt, which has grown far too baggy around the waist, far too big on her, clothes that belong to a former life, another time zone.
I’m not going to end up like Mom.
A smell hangs in the air, I walk through clouds of vapour emanating from bulging meatballs and cabbage. On the food cart in the corridor there are plastic bowls half full of red cabbage and rhubarb jam. Cutlery noises blend with the utterances of the personnel who alternately raise and deepen their voices to make themselves heard by their charges. There isn’t space for much furniture in the room, apart from an organ pushed up against a wall; the former maths teacher and organ player was allowed to keep it with her, once it seemed certain that she would never play it again.
Beside the bed there are bookshelves that bear witness to my mother’s hobby: world wars, not least World War II. There’s Napoleon Bonaparte and Attila the Hun standing side by side, and a book about the Korean War and another about Vietnam sandwiched between two leather-bound volumes marked World War I and World War II in Danish.
My visits are subject to daily rituals that are chiselled in stone and the first thing she asks me is if I’ve washed my hands.
“Did you wash your hands?”
“I did.”
“It isn’t enough to just rinse them, you’ve got to hold them under the hot tap for thirty seconds.”
It suddenly occurs to me that I was once inside her.
I’m one metre eighty-five centimetres tall and the last time I stepped onto a scale—in the locker room of a swimming pool—I weighed eighty-four kilos. Does she herself ever wonder if that big man was really inside her at one time? Where was I conceived? Probably in the old double bed, that mahogany set with the attached bedside table, the bulkiest piece of furniture in the apartment, a massive schooner.
The girl is taking away the food tray. My mother had no appetite for the dessert, prune pudding with cream.
“This is Jónas Ebeneser, my son,” I hear my mother say.
“Yes, I think you introduced us yesterday, Mom …”
The girl has no recollection of that, because she wasn’t on duty yesterday.
“Jónas means ‘dove’ and Ebeneser ‘the helpful one.’ I got to choose the names,” Mom continues.
It dawns on me that perhaps I should have asked the guy at Tryggvi’s Tattoo Parlour to place a dove beside the lily; the two doves together, me and the bird, both with a few greying hairs.
I hope the girl will have vanished before the recounting of my birth begins. But she’s not leaving because she puts down the tray now and starts to arrange the towels.
“Your birth was more difficult than your brother’s” is the next thing my mother says. “Because of the size of your head. It was as if you had two horns on your forehead, two stumps,” she explains, “like a bull calf.”
The girl gawks at me. I know she is comparing mother and son.
I smile at her.
She smiles back.
“You smelled different, you and your brother,” Mom continues from her armchair. “You smelled of clay, a cold and wet smell, cold cheeks, you were muddy around the mouth and came home with cat scratches on the back of your hands. They didn’t heal well.”
She stalls as if trying to remember her next cue in a script.
“My Pumpkin wrote an essay about potatoes when he was just eleven years old and called the essay ‘Mother Earth.’ It was about me, the essay …”
“Mom, I’m not sure she’s interested in … Sorry, what’s your name?”
“Diljá.”
“I’m not sure Diljá is interested in this, Mom …”
On the contrary, the girl seems to be genuinely interested in what Mom has to say. Nodding sympathetically, she leans against the doorframe.
“It’s incredible when you look at this hulk of a man today and think of how sensitive he was.”
“Mom …”
“If there was a bird with a broken wing in the garden he’d weep … He was an open wound … Always worried about whether people were being good enough to each other … When I’m big, he said, I want to mend the world … because the world was suffering, because the world needed to be taken care of … My Pumpkin was always so fond of the twilight … when the shadows fell, he lay on the floor by the window and stared at the clouds and sky … so musical … Then he locked himself in to make a puppet theatre … made marionettes out of wet newspapers, painted them and sewed clothes onto them, locked the door and stuffed the keyhole with toilet paper … When he was
