“Mom …”
Smothered by the stuffiness of the hot room I walk towards the window that overlooks the lake, a set of red lights from last Christmas blink relentlessly on the windowsill. Draped over the window, which is forbidden to be opened to allow in even the slightest draft of cold air, are the living room curtains that Mom brought with her from our old house in Silfurtún and shortened. I recognise the pattern. From that vantage point one can observe a hearse backing out with its daily cargo.
“My little Gudrún Waterlily was conceived between two tussocks at the end of May, as freckled as a golden plover’s egg, and highly educated on sea matters, and with some boyfriend who is a rapper and chews tobacco and wears an earring, not a normal earring, but some ginormous piercing with a whole spool of thread, a good-natured guy from the fishing village of Eskifjördur who watched over his granny when she was on her deathbed …”
“Mom, we get the picture …”
“Some men never recover after being jilted …”
“You can’t trust everything she says,” I say and open the window.
Then it’s as if she were about to recount something, but can no longer remember what she was going to say and she fades like a transmitter that has lost its signal. For a moment she has vanished into another world and another time, where she is trying to navigate through a foggy landscape, to find a guiding star. She is a young girl who has lost her sheep and casts her misty gaze around the room, old faces slowly filing past the barren landscape.
The girl silently ducks out the door and my mother tries to adjust her hearing aid, to tune into my wavelength, into the earth’s magnetic field, the correct time frequency.
I stand by the bookshelves and glance at the titles: War and Peace by Tolstoy, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Elie Wiesel’s Night, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, Fatelessness by Imre Kertész, Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything by Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man. I pull Paul Celan’s collection of poems off the shelf and flip to “Death Fugue”: “we drink you at night / we drink and drink.” I slip the book into my pocket and pull out the First World War.
“Since you came out of your mother’s womb there have been 568 wars,” says the voice from the armchair.
It is difficult to know when my mother is actually with us because she’s like an electrical current that comes and goes, or should I say a flickering candle. Just as I’m thinking she’s extinguished, she unexpectedly flares up again.
Once the girl has left, I help my mother into bed. I hold her under the arm and she drags her slippers along the light green linoleum. What does she weigh? Forty kilos? It would take less than a gust to knock her over, the slightest breeze, even a puff of air would completely flatten her. I push two embroidered cushions aside and sit on the edge of her bed for a moment. She lies down and her body disappears into the mattress. The perfume I gave her is on the bedside table, “Eternity Now,” because my mother likes to dab the back of her ears with the hereafter. She holds my hand, blue veins, the worldly-wise back of her hand, her nails are polished once a week.
Mom was the one who helped me with maths when I was in secondary school and she couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a piece of cake for everyone.
“Equations are a cinch,” she’d say.
And she explained to me how I could work out square roots without using a pocket calculator. She said the square root of 2 (√2) is the number that gives two when it is multiplied by itself. We are therefore looking for an unknown number x, which is therefore x · 2 = 2. We see that x is between 1.4 and 1.5 because 1.42 = 1.96 < 2 but 1.52 = 2.25 > 2. The next step is to look at the numbers between 1.40, 1.41, 1.42, and so on up to 1.49. It turns out that 1.412 = 1.9881 < 2 and 1.422 = 2.0164 > 2. This demonstrates that the square root of two is somewhere between 1.41 and 1.42.
“Have they negotiated a truce?” I hear her ask from the bed.
She gets her hair done once a week and the spring sun pouring through the western window illuminates her beautifully shaped light purple hair; she is a ball of fluff in the sunrays.
“Sixty million killed in World War II,” she continues.
Talking to Mom is like talking to no one. That suits me fine, it’s enough for me to feel the warmth from another living body. I decide that she understands me and come straight to the point.
“I’m unhappy,” I say.
She pats the back of my hand.
“We all have our battles to fight,” she says, before adding: “Napoleon was exiled from himself. Josephine was lonely in her marriage, just like me.”
On top of the bookcase is a row of framed photographs, most of them of my daughter, Waterlily, at various ages. Two are of me and two of my brother, Logi, both equally represented. In one of the pictures I’m four years old and standing on a chair, hanging on to my mother’s neck. She is wearing a light blue sweater and dark red lipstick and a white pearl necklace. I have a brush haircut, like a hedgehog, and have one bandaged arm in
