“Sorry, I was thinking.”
Then there are times when she looks at me like she can’t figure out who I am and is trying to work out where I belong in her black-and-white world of dust. It comes to a head when she confronts me for the third time.
I’m helping her to stretch some sheets, we’re both tugging in opposite directions and tuck the corners under the mattress.
“No one comes here on vacation,” she says, staring me in the eye.
I straighten up. I’m standing on one side of the bed and she on the other.
She wants to know what I’m doing here. Apart from helping her with the sheets.
If we were to sit down, me and this young woman in pink sneakers, and compare our scars, our maimed bodies, and count how many stitches had been sewn from the neck down and then draw a line between them and add them all up, she would be the winner. My scratches are insignificant, laughable. Even if I had lance wounds in my side, the girl would win the prize.
“No one travels here without some purpose,” she repeats.
The same thing the man in the socks said.
I haven’t spotted him for several days. Didn’t he say he had some business to attend to in the country?
“The world is full of men like you who misunderstand life,” he’d said to me the last time I bumped into him.
Even I was beginning to doubt my purpose.
Before I know it, I’ve said it.
“I actually came to die.”
She looks straight at me.
“Are you ill or …?”
“No.”
I sense she wants more information.
“To die how?”
“To kill myself. I haven’t decided how yet.”
“I understand.”
I don’t know what she understands.
Should I mention that there are people in this world who want to die because they can’t bear what happens anymore? That would be the longest sentence I’d have uttered in two weeks.
“Why didn’t you just stay at home?”
She doesn’t ask whether it wouldn’t be better to die surrounded by cold mountains.
“I wanted to protect my daughter from discovering me.”
“And not me?” she asks. “You don’t want to protect me?”
“Forgive me,” I say. “I didn’t know you would be here. Or the boy. I didn’t expect to meet you. I didn’t know you then,” I add, feeling the triviality of every word I utter.
I can’t tell this young woman, who owns nothing but life itself, that I’m lost. Or that life turned out to be different than what I expected. If I were to say: I’m like other people, I love, cry, and suffer, she would probably understand me and say: I know what you mean.
“I was unhappy,” I say.
That’s the second time I mention that, if I include Mom.
“I didn’t know how to fix it,” I add.
I can almost hear Mom’s voice. “All suffering is unique and different,” she said once, “and therefore it can’t be compared. Happiness, on the other hand, is similar.”
May stares at the floor.
“Adam’s father was an economist who played in a jazz band. Adam was born in the basement of a stranger’s house and I was alone there with his father. We both cried. Such a beautiful angel who had fallen from the sky, his father said.”
She falls silent, walks over to the window and then continues. Searches for words and chooses them carefully:
“He was shot out on the soccer field and we couldn’t reach him. Not even to collect the body because he lay in a fighting zone. We didn’t get to hold him, wash him, bury him. We saw him through binoculars, the trickles of blood down his trouser legs and jacket sleeves. We thought he was dead, but the next day he had changed position. At first he lay on his back and the next day he lay on his side, in the evening he had crawled two metres towards the goalposts. I would never have believed so much blood could come from one person. It took him three days to die. After that he lay still and we watched him shrivel into his clothes until we were forced to flee and leave him behind.”
“Forgive me,” I say again.
Should I tell her I don’t understand myself, would that not just make it worse?
She is sitting on the chair and I walk to her and sit beside her.
“Sorrow is like a piece of glass in the throat,” she says.
“I’m not going to die. Not immediately,” I say.
I could just as well have said, don’t worry because I don’t know how to die. No more than Mom can. Or I could say to this girl, who has looked down the barrels of so many guns and survived, that I’m not the same man I was ten days ago. Or yesterday. That I’m in a state of flux.
“Dad, did you know that the body’s cells renew themselves every seven years,” Waterlily had said.
“Yes, isn’t a man constantly in the act of becoming? Always being renewed?” Svanur had asked down at the harbour, by the choppy green ocean, with the whale-watching boats on one side of the pier and the whale-hunting boats on the other.
“We’re born, love, suffer, and die,” I hear her say with a long sniff.
“I know,” I say.
“Some of my friends didn’t get a chance to try love,” she continues. “Only to suffer and die.”
I nod.
“Even if we didn’t know if we were going to get shot today or tomorrow, we never stopped loving.”
She is standing again, by the window with her back turned to me. Her tight blouse
