“Not yet. I have some things to finish.”
She smiles.
Then she remembers something.
“By the way,” she says, “the house has been connected to the water supply. Water started spurting into the sink. So things are looking up.”
If I were to ask her what she dreams about, what would she answer? Of light springing on the horizon again?
A man only dies once
They let me use the phone at the reception desk.
It takes a few seconds for Waterlily to answer:
“Is that you, Dad? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, everything is fine.”
Her voice is tearful and she says she’s been beside herself with worry since she found the letter and I disappeared.
“It was impossible to get hold of you.”
She says she found my mobile phone on the bedside table, and the wardrobe in the bedroom was empty.
“Yes, I gave away the clothes.”
I hesitate and add:
“I didn’t need them anymore.”
I try to remember the letter and what I’d written. She enlightens me:
“You said you were going on a journey without saying where or for how long.”
She says I’m inarticulate and once more asks if everything is okay. Where am I exactly? What am I doing and when am I coming home? Did I get into some trouble? I hear she’s fighting back the tears.
“Mom is worried too,” she adds.
My voice wavers when I ask:
“Really, was Mom worried too?”
“Yeah, Mom too. She’s not indifferent to you,” she adds after a moment’s hesitation.
She says she received the postcard yesterday, with a picture of a mosaic wall and the name of a hotel, but that no one answered at the phone number she found online. She adds that she and her mother are not happy about the fact that I chose to go to the most dangerous country in the world.
“Not anymore. The war is over.”
She rephrases it:
“Well, certainly one of the most dangerous countries in the world.”
I hear her blowing her nose.
“Isn’t everything in ruins?”
“Yes.”
“And land mines everywhere?”
“Yes, that too.”
Should she catch a plane? Can she come to me?
There is silence at the other end of the line. Has she started to cry?
I take a deep breath before I say it:
“Your Mom says you’re not mine. She had a boyfriend when we met.”
I could have added, just before we went on the mountain hike on which you should have been conceived. With ptarmigans, a sheep, and the mountain as our witnesses.
“After the mountain, there was no one else but you,” Gudrún had said.
“Yes, I know. At first I was angry, but now it doesn’t matter. I’ve got no other dad but you.”
“And the other one?”
“Am I to swap dads after twenty-six years? Are you really going to disown me? And abandon me?”
There’s silence on the phone.
“Is that why you went away?” she then asks. I say nothing.
“Why is there so much money in my bank account?”
“I sold Steel Legs Ltd.” And add: “I’m trying to simplify my life.”
“I suspected something was up when you asked me whether I was happy,” she says finally.
Before I realise it, I hear myself saying:
“I’m going to extend my stay. I’ve got a job.”
“Job?”
“Yes, sort of. It’ll delay me. For several weeks.”
“Several weeks?”
“Yes, I’m helping some women here to fix up a house.”
“Some women?”
Now she’s the one repeating what I say.
“There’s a girl here the same age as you. She has a young son.”
“Does she have a crush on you?”
I hesitate.
“I’m not sure. Maybe.”
“And you, do you have a crush on her?”
“Like I said, she’s your age. A few years older,” I add.
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“No, it’s not like that. There’s a shortage of handy men who own drills.”
“Did you take it with you? The drill?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
Then I say:
“I feel a responsibility.”
It’s as if I could hear Svanur’s voice: “He who knows and does nothing is the guilty one.”
I can hear her breathing, so she hasn’t hung up.
She is still on the line.
“Do you remember, Dad, when we lay on our tummies over the frozen lake and looked down at the vegetation below the ice?”
“Yes, I remember that.”
“Promise you’ll phone.”
“Promise.”
“Happy birthday, Dad,” she says finally.
Few men kill, most just die
I see from a streak of light in the corridor that the man’s door is open. He’s in a robe and waiting for me.
“There’s no point in getting the police involved in the case” is the first thing he says to me when I stagger down the corridor after finishing the green pea soup Fifi cooked for me.
The world keeps on turning.
Still.
He says this nonchalantly, as if he were talking to himself.
“Aren’t you curious to know why you weren’t killed?”
“No.”
“They thought you were someone else.”
I don’t ask who else, nor do I tell him that it’s quite possible I may be someone other than who I am. That I don’t know where I end or begin.
“Were you afraid of dying?”
“No.”
“No, you’re the type of person who would rather be killed than kill. You’re not the kind of guy who has grazed knuckles at the end of a fight.”
I don’t bother answering him.
He continues:
“If you should have been killed, you would have been killed.”
One man is no competition for a contractor. A man with a drill doesn’t stand a chance against a bulldozer.
“Has the sewage system been sorted?”
“They can thank you for that, the ladies.”
He changes the subject.
“Apart from that I quite like you. Per se.”
He knows Latin.
“But I immediately saw that you were in some kind of trouble, in too much of a hurry to get away from yourself, a man with no luggage, we all know what that means.”
The order of things
I quickly browse through the last diary. At the back there are several scattered, undated sentences. One per page:
Is it true that the year 525 immediately followed the year 241?
And two pages later, I wrote:
Not everything happens in the right order.
This is followed by several blank pages. And then this sentence:
Everything can happen. It can also be different than what one expected.
In the evening there is a knock on the door, low down. Adam
