A large toolbox lies in the centre of the floor, containing various tools I rarely use: a selection of chisels, a ball-peen hammer, a number of Phillips screwdrivers, handsaws, putty spatulas, a fretsaw, a carpenter’s plane, an angle, a compass, rasps, files, three carpenter’s rulers. I have a claw hammer and screwdrivers of various types and sizes in the toolbox I keep under the sink or in the trunk of the car. It also contains a drill, the first tool I bought after I met Gudrún. We rented a basement apartment in the Furumelur district that had a ruined linoleum floor, so I read up on it and managed to lay down a parquet on my own. Once I’d learned that, I found out how to tile, wallpaper, and change the plumbing. I thought in metres, length and width, 170 times 80 or 92 times 62. I agree with my mother when she says it’s easier to express suffering in numbers than in longing, but when I think of beauty I nevertheless think of 4,252 grams and 52 centimetres.
Far in the corner lies a battered cardboard box, carefully taped and labelled THROW AWAY with a black felt-tip marker. If I remember correctly, this is the box that was also supposed to be thrown away in the last and second-to-last move and it has remained unopened in several cellars. Why is it still here then? I fetch a box cutter from my toolbox, splice through the tape, and lift the lids. It seems to be mostly university books from my only year at university. I pick up Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche and skim through a pile of typed essays and handwritten glossaries. In the middle of the box there is a brown envelope. I open it and pull out a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper cutting with a yellowed obituary about my father. It’s written by one of his friends, who offers condolences to his surviving wife. He also mentions his two sons, Logi, the living image of his father, doing his final year in Business Studies, and Jónas, who has his mother’s talent for music and is taking his first year in Philosophy. It occurs to me that in just two weeks I’ll be the same age as Dad was when he collapsed on the doorstep. Maybe the same genetic defect will spare me the bother?
“I looked out the kitchen window and saw your father staggering and I thought he was drunk,” said Mom. “When I came out he was lying on the path. They took him away and left me on my own.
“Some people don’t follow you all the way,” she added.
That same evening, Mom removed Dad’s shirts from the hangers on his side of the wardrobe and piled them up on their bed.
“Don’t you want to wait with that, Mom?” I asked. “At least until the funeral?”
We gave all the clothes away and because Mom didn’t want to run into anyone wearing his coat, I was sent off with four bags of his clothes to a neighbouring town.
It used to get on my nerves when Dad would ask how I was getting on at school, I even suspected he was secretly researching the subject. That hunch was confirmed when we were going through his stuff; he had ordered a book entitled How to Ask Clever Questions about Nietzsche.
I slip the obituary back into the envelope and dig deeper in the box. At the bottom there are three worn-out notebooks. I open one of them and recognise the immature handwriting. Scrawled. Are these the diaries I wrote when I was around twenty? I skim through them and according to the dates, they span three years—with intervals.
THROW AWAY. That box is going into the garbage. I pick up another and rapidly browse through it, pausing here and there. As far as I can make out, it’s divided between descriptions of clouds, weather, and trips with women. The philosophy student’s quotations from Plato’s Symposium immediately set the tone on the first page and show that I managed to focus on the essentials in my studies:
“All men possess a procreative instinct, both physically and mentally, and when our bodies reach a certain age they feel an urge to reproduce.”
Each entry starts with a date followed by a description of the weather, like an old farmer’s almanac: March 2. Still, sunny, temperature -3 degrees. April 26. Strong winds, temperature 4 degrees. May 12. Gentle southeastern breeze, temperature 7 degrees. Closely connected to these weather reports are entries in which I describe various types of cloud formations and contemplate heavenly bodies. Wind-sculpted altocumulus. When did I stop thinking about clouds? Followed by: It is considered possible that a new moon may be circling the earth. However, several experts believe it is more likely to be the fragment of a rocket in motion.
And among the long-extinguished stars in the middle of the cosmos, a shopping list rotates on an elliptical path by the celestial pole:
Buy strawberry yogurt and condoms.
But I don’t have to go far to realise that descriptions of female bodies and relationships with women make up the lion’s share of the entries. It seems I refer to girlfriends by their initials and thank them for sleeping with me. Thanks, K appears on one page, Thanks, D on another. Sometimes the initial is underlined. Thanks, M. M appears twice and so does K, with some months in between. Was it the same K? The accounts contain parenthetical asides. L (pure virgin). I had spent several summers in the country at my maternal uncle’s sheep farm and drew my analogies from the valley of the glacier:
