“You’re telling me to find myself a project so that I won’t drown myself.”
“I’m not telling you anything. Drown yourself tomorrow morning if you want to. The question is, do you want to?”
“Look, it’s great that naming the grasses and beetles makes you happy. I like knowing things, too. But no matter how much I learn, when I die it will all be snuffed out along with my brain, so what’s the point?”
He says something in Danish.
“That’s very helpful.”
“It’s from a novel that every schoolchild in Denmark used to read, about a schoolteacher living on a small island. In English, it’s something like, ‘This island is so small—a molehill in a field of blue. Dear God, what is that, set against the questions of the big world? Nothing! But how big are the big world’s questions, seen from Orion’s Belt?’”
Mette is not sure that he’s trying to help her so much as showing off, playing the guru. “Sure. Which is an equally good argument for you to drown yourself tomorrow morning, too.” For once she doesn’t wait for him to take the lead, she wants to deny him the pleasure, so she goes up the stairs and through the door. He follows without a word. It’s getting dark, so he switches on a shaded lamp attached to one of the bookshelves, above a reading chair. “I expected kerosene,” Mette says.
“Or maybe whale oil? Both would be environmentally idiotic, considering I make my own electricity.”
“I was trying to be witty again.”
“Repetition is the soul of stupidity.” He takes a can off one of the shelves, opens it with a Swiss Army knife, spoons glistening chunks into a bowl, and sets it down for the dog. “I want to pick up some coffee at a depot next to the ferry landing. Sanne closes at eight-thirty, so I’m going to head over there. I’ll be back in an hour or so. If you need to piss or shit, there’s a composting toilet ten meters away near the garden, you can see it from the window. The hut is insulated, paper’s in there, another astonishing electric light, and even an electric heater if your ass gets too cold.”
The dog is already done eating. “Lila, come.” He disappears out the door, the dog crowding his heels. By the time she looks from the top of the steps a couple of seconds later, they’re both out of sight. Escape artist. And your little dog, too!
She’s momentarily at a loss for what to do. Then she realizes that she does need to piss so she goes out to the toilet. She flips a switch to the right of the door and an overhead bulb comes on. The small room, as by now she would expect, is well made and immaculate. It smells of fresh dirt and peat. She pisses and returns to the mill.
She spends some time idly looking at his books, most of which are in Danish or German. He has the complete works of Kierkegaard, whom Mette has vaguely heard of, but otherwise knows nothing about. She examines the way he anchored the shelves. She also looks at the collars he built to enclose the mill shaft where it comes out of the ceiling and goes into the floor. He fashioned single blocks of wood with beveled square cutouts and circular flanged rims that rotate smoothly within rings attached to the floor and ceiling. He is quite an impressive woodworker.
She climbs the ship’s ladder to the second floor, which she rightly guessed was his bedroom. A smaller room, of course, owing to the sloping walls. There are four square windows identical to the ones below, which let in so much dusk-light she doesn’t need to switch on the lamp. The dusk here really does last forever. His bed is single, placed lengthwise along the south wall, but somewhat separated from it because the bed is too long and has to accommodate a few inches of the adjacent walls. On the bed’s far side is a set of built-in shelves holding books, an old-fashioned clock, a water glass, a small atlas. The bed’s nearer side is only about two feet away from the mill shaft in the center of the room. She wonders if at night when he’s sleepy he ever stumbles into the shaft and gets thrown to the floor by its rotation. The image amuses her. She’s aware that her motive in coming up here is malicious, as she would hate the thought of anyone examining her own room. She looks out each of the four windows at the darkness of land and the glimmer of ice. What a view this man has during the day. She will admit, she admires the skill and energy he brings to creating exactly the world he wants to inhabit. His willpower. There’s something ever-so-slightly wizardly about it.
She returns to the bottom floor, fishes Newman out of her pack, sits back at the table. She’s almost done with volume three, and has just come across a figure Newman calls a parhexagon: a hexagon whose three pairs of opposite sides are equal and parallel but don’t necessarily equal each other. Newman proposes a theorem that you can take any irregular hexagon and if you draw diagonals to the adjacent sides and connect as vertices the centroids of the resulting triangles, the figure thus created will always be a parhexagon. Which is kind of interesting. She’d like to prove it to her own satisfaction, so she takes out her notebook and ruler and starts drawing. After a while she hears a hand on the doorlatch and the old man and his familiar come in.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“No.”
“It’s almost nine, all you had was a couple of biscuits when
