History. a Mess. Read online

  His seat is turned so that whoever sits there only need glance into the living room to be confronted by the door. And Hans does that as he pauses amid some funny story from his laboratory, trying to recall the name of the employee in question. I look at his eyes looking toward the door, but that’s no use in working out if he sees it; his gaze is so remote, his search focused on the lost name. Suddenly he looks away from the door and straight into my eyes: “Valmundur!” The employee’s name. But by this time, I’ve already lost the thread.

  We stand up from the table and Hans concludes his story inside the kitchen, after which he strolls off and I’m left standing alone at the sink; it strikes me that the door is on the outer wall. And there is no window on that wall. I go into the living room and look out of the front window of the building, the window closest and perpendicular to the windowless side, and try to see if the distance from the corner of the room is the same inside and outside. But there’s no way to make sure from here, my face pressed against the glass. I’d better go out and check. How hollow was the sound when I knocked on the wall around the door? And where is Hans? He’s gotten into bed, his face behind a book; facing him, along a direct line of sight through the bedroom doors and hallway, is the door.

  Hardly; half the door. From his side of the bed. I see so for myself when I come to bed and find an excuse to lean in his direction, peeking up from my book about a man who paints pictures on pencil boxes and thinks about death. I turn back to the book and continue to travel the pages without knowing where the story’s heading, my thoughts erasing the meaning of the words as soon as I’ve read them. My inner turmoil constantly whirrs away, destroying all the story’s innumerable little details that should click together to form the complete meaning of this finely-wrought, dust-jacketed book’s message, a message I will not locate any time soon, for my eyes start to close and the book is on top of my face. But just before that happens, I get this brilliant idea.

  Then she smiles slyly, almost warmly, as she fetches a little book and holds it out toward me

  As soon as Hans closes the door behind him, I get up and rush to the basement. Down the steps, stroking the light-green stone wall, the paint that hides a mural I have murky memories of from having come to this house once as a child. Inside the storage space, I reach past a black plastic bag full of empty glass bottles to pick up what lies rolled up on the bottom shelf opposite the door. I take the fabric roll in my arms and hold it out in front of me.

  When I get back upstairs, I unroll the material on the living room floor, smoothing it out: Atropos, Lachesis, and Clotho have spun their thread and cut it, standing with their toes planted on their prey. Death overcomes a chaste maiden. Something of that sort. A reproduction of a much larger tapestry, something we bought right before moving back to Iceland. I lift the hanging up off the floor and remember why it’s been rolled up in storage since we moved in a week ago: I haven’t yet found a way to hang it. But now there’s only one solution; I have the hammer in one hand and five long nails in the other. I push the chest, which stands in the middle of the living room like a table, across the floor to the wall and climb up on it. I drive the nails into the wall above the door frame, clamber down from the chest, drag the fabric behind me and stretch the upper margin across the nails. The hanging does not quite cover the door all the way to the floor, but I just stack books and other stuff carelessly in front of it.

  I sit on the couch and regard the setup. I’ve hidden what can’t be seen, fearing it’s only visible to me. But I’ve also done this to nurture an old dream, wanting my living space to be more than what can be seen. Hazy suspicion about doors and mysterious nooks gets proved; beside the corner is a small staircase right up against the wall. Just a few steps, leading up to the door, the door that opens into a dim room, the room that opens out to a beautiful garden. And from there I can look out onto green fields. Until I recover my senses and face my disappointment; hazy suspicion about doors and mysterious nooks gets disproved.

  I’m bored. I look at them, The Three Fates, the Moirai. Atropos’s green-blue dress and the golden twig-belt, the flowers creamy and crimson against the night-blue background. An ancient agricultural scene that now conceals what’s probably nothing more than the door to a locked storage compartment containing flotsam from the estate to which our apartment belongs. I push the books on the floor gently away from the door, sneak my hand behind the tapestry, and tug the handle. I hold it down, but instead of pulling it toward me like yesterday, I jiggle it a bit to the side and wrest it in circles to try to better release the latch from its hole in the frame. A click. The door budges and starts to pull the fabric away from the wall, so I push it closed again. I open it a slender crack, stick my head under the tapestry and peer into the darkness. The air is thick but smells of some kind of cleaning fluid. Of old cleanliness. Taking shape before me I see a small windowless room. Empty, except for the wall opposite the door, where there hangs a golden frame. And, from the ceiling on the right, something white dangles, some material, but as I move to open the door further and stretch my hand inside to see what that is, I hear a knock behind me. Someone is hammering on the front door. Two heavy determined blows. I close the door, smooth down the tapestry, and traipse along into the hallway.

  Two older women are standing on the steps outside the house. They are dressed in trench coats. Poplin. One of the two, almost a head taller than her companion, wishes me good day and gets right to the matter, a question about whether I ever think about the amount of soap I use for cleaning and other hygienic purposes here at home. And without giving me a chance to answer, she hands me a folio sheet folded in four. On the front, there’s a pencil drawing of a man with shoulder-length hair and open arms. Jesus. Christ. The woman holds the paper in her outstretched hand, but under the sleeve of her coat I see her shirt. Polyester. Paisley. I look away, down at the floor, where the woman has stuck her foot over the threshold. A brown leather shoe, laced over swollen insteps. Custom-made? Orthopedic? I look up as I move to close the door. The woman jerks her foot out; as they are bidding me farewell, they turn out not to be as old as I thought they were at first. I take the little booklet into the kitchen and throw it into the bucket under the sink, where the fish Hans took out of the freezer this morning are lying in a sieve. Ready for the soup I’d intended to spend my day preparing. I place both hands on my head. An impending ache.

  From inside the kitchen I analyze every gesture. Mom takes off her silk-soft cashmere coat and hands it to Dad, who hangs it in the closet while Hans helps my Aunt Gréta out of her garment. It’s not a coat but a thin, crumpled windbreaker. A kind of purple. Then Hans comes into the kitchen to fetch drinks as I go into the living room and sit on the sofa next to my father. Gréta sits opposite us in a chair, but the inspector doesn’t sit right away. Mom never sits right away. She stands and scrutinizes the surroundings and watches. Now she can seize her moment, here in this apartment rented off the estate of her parents’ childhood friend: “Is this what you bought in London?” She crosses to the wall hanging and scowls when she sees the nails poking out from the top. She slides her gold-plated glasses down to the rounded tip of her nose, takes the edge of the tapestry and pulls it taut to more closely examine the image; her plump, smooth face is framed by her silver-gray bob. My mother is blunt, yet somehow still frail, unlike Gréta, who is sitting behind her sister, listening to her give a short disquisition on Flemish medieval weaving and Petrarchan poetry. Gréta is delicately built yet sturdy, with short hair; slender, cheap gold threads dangle from her ears. Her shirt fabric has indistinct pencil-strokes, but on her shoulders there is some modest padding and the garment is buttoned up to the neck; it’s a bit difficult to say whether my mother’s sister looks more feminine or masculine. She is a systems analyst, introverted and sometimes a bit rough, but still with some warmth in her manner, just like how Mom’s gentle, calculated appearance can sometimes seem distant and cold, as it does now, once she’s finished her speech and thoughtfully in
spects the ceiling, still holding the edge of the tapestry between her index finger and thumb so that, from where Dad sits beside me on the couch, the door is exposed. I stand up, walk over to her, and flatten the tapestry so that she loses her grip and the door disappears. “Dinner is served!” My words emerge from Hans’s mouth as he appears at that exact moment from the dining room.

  As I’m ladling soup into Gréta’s bowl, I call to mind the white material I thought I saw hanging from the ceiling in the room behind the door. I suppose there must have been a sheet over some stuff stored there, or so I think as I hand Gréta her bowl. She vigorously nods thanks, because Mom has started to talk so slowly and so quietly that the least sound would cause her listeners to lose the thread of her story, about a young, up-and-coming Icelandic artist. She’s mastered this style little by little since deciding to finally take her high-school exams and go to college at the age of 50, having abruptly left school as a teenager. That historical fact is the foundation of the complex relationship between her and Gréta, who was buried in books but stumbled terribly in her personal life—she’s thrice-divorced—whereas Mom thrived triumphantly with her lackey by her side, a doctor and gentle soul who seemingly has an unstoppable need to push her forward as a great intellect. Beyond logic, beyond what would be considered normal for a loving marriage. After Mom completed her university degree, achieving very good results, as a matter of fact, her strength has primarily been in her good taste for knowledge; she is a connoisseur of what one ought to know at any given moment, and liable to disseminate that knowledge to those who don’t care for it: “There is in her work a jarring clash between tradition and revolution, I think she’s working with our history in ways no Icelandic artist has ever done.”

  Although I’ve never heard my mother talk about the person under discussion, this conversation has happened before. In form. That is, if I accord the proper significance to the expressions on Greta’s lips and Dad’s head movements as Mom begins to describe the work, giant portraits of Icelandic national leaders from the past two centuries. Four times two meters in area, composed of several hundreds of mirror fragments which, by dint of the discriminating color of each piece of glass and its position in the larger image, reveal two different faces, male and female, depending on from where the work is viewed. Another part of the work is the viewer’s multifaceted reflection in the image, the figurative sculpture standing before it.

  Suddenly Mom falls silent, looking toward me; for a moment I think she might be going to use this anecdote to put my own study on the agenda here at the dinner table, thereby breaking the silent agreement that has reigned regarding my studies since Hans and I decided to return home. But luckily this does not transpire because Gréta takes the reins, asking her sister about the work’s specific message. “Is it a question about whether the vantage you look from matters?” she asks, hovering over her soup bowl, tilting it and scraping her spoon along the bottom. But it’s Dad who is first to answer; he leans back in his chair, turns to Mom with a smile on his lips, and tells us that magic resides in art just as in science. Then he lifts his glass and thanks us for dinner without reflecting on the meaning of his words. Indeed, there’s no meaning. Only a wretched, involuntary attempt to achieve peace where there is neither force nor really any particular warfare, an attempt to flatten reality, and perhaps to defend Mom. But Dad has no need to defend Mom; she can answer for herself, and does so now with a deep silence as Gréta and I talk about the alleged adultery of a minor celebrity, then move onto a television series Mom seems not to know. In fact, Mom does not say much for the rest of the evening, not until we’ve moved on to coffee and Gréta is telling me about a novel she’s just finished reading that has sold over three million copies. Then Mom speaks, quietly from behind pursed lips, reciting words that are written on her countenance, a countenance no one can read but me:

  “My poor Gréta, captivated by such tastelessness. A fiction taking its inspiration from the imagistic expositions of the American entertainment industry, rather than coming into being as a continuation of literary tradition, stemming from the written word.” And then she goes on about all the pointless efforts the authors of such books exert to tie things together, filling in all the holes, tying everything into a neat bow, without the slightest hint of subtext. To construct all these subplots with their carefully orchestrated roles in the greater elaboration of the denouement that turns the whole story upside down, and unsettles the reader entirely, butting up against his sense of justice and humanity. But the endings, like the turning points in the narrative, are not as unpredictable as they first appear because they always follow a certain formula: the pre-scripted unpredictability. Mom leans back. She seems troubled as she breathes out a final bubble: “And in the world of commercial fiction, these formulae become markers of quality, gaining traction in the useless agreement booklovers have made to revive the author’s social responsibility, the idea that an author’s work should have an agenda, should speak directly to his contemporaries and, more than anything else, be immediately in their service. But then who is going to take care of aesthetics, that’s what I ask,” Mom asks.

  And that’s right! That, at the very end, I mean, the sixpence in the pudding, is the unexpected ending of that bestseller, a conclusion that left Gréta stymied, mouth shut tight. I should read the book, she insists, promising to lend me her copy as she kisses me goodbye. Before my absent-minded mother takes me aside and tells me in no uncertain terms that I need to take better care of myself and go out for walks. Go for walks? Sounds like a smart solution to my problem, I think, and nod my head hopelessly at my mother. The way she evades my glance suggests she knows I’m in a pinch from which no turn about the streets, no plot twist, can save me.

  Once the three guests have left the apartment and are out on the sidewalk, Mom suddenly raises both hands in the air and turns around. She walks back up the stone steps and roots around in her big handbag, the one with the little gold-plated clasp. Then she smiles slyly, almost warmly, as she fetches a little book and holds it out toward me. She doesn’t allow me the opportunity to thank her, hastening off in the direction of the glistening, silvergray Jeep that my Dad has started up, the tired Gréta in the backseat. I watch the car slip along the street as I stroke the bright pink, soft leather binding. I tug at the delicate golden thread that closes it. A notebook. A luxury item from her last trip to Italy, bestowed upon her only child.

  I set the manuscript down on the table and thought to myself it was probably the last time I’d handle the old tome

  In a dream, my cheek is being beaten with a little hammer. Just lightly and high up on the cheekbone, but the noise of the blow is so loud my head shakes and reverberates. I open my eyes and hide under the blanket. Someone outside the house is using a pneumatic drill. I slide my hand gently out toward the bedside table and grab my pillbox. As I do, light sidles its way inside my cave, and I realize nothing in here can protect me from the merciless midday sun because my mom could not tolerate the old, overly ornate curtains that were up and so she tore them down. Before any replacements had been bought, naturally. I potter into the living room hugging the blanket around me. And there it appears before me, the entrance into perfect darkness.

  I put the blanket on the couch and walk toward the door. It opens easily and I angle myself under the wall hanging and go in. I close it behind me and sit down in the corner beside the door. On the hard, cold floor, wearing my thin nightdress, my knees up to my chest. But the darkness in here feels good, so strangely quiet compared to the hullabaloo outside the house. I lean my head up against the wall and keep my eyes closed as I wait for the pain to intensify.

  Occasionally, I open my eyes. Through the keyhole creeps a tiny amount of faint light, which grows brighter once I grow accustomed to the darkness. And now I can see the gold frame’s outline on the wall opposite the door. I put my arms on my knees and tilt my head down only to immediately look back up. Something is moving in the corner of the room. I have to
squint through the darkness and finally I shift myself and there, four feet in front me, is something I cannot distinguish or comprehend. It seems to come and go, then appears long enough for me to make it out: a very tiny woman, naked and entirely peculiar in her proportions, facing the wall. In her sitting position, she can hardly be more than ten centimeters tall. She seems to be sketching on a large card she has in her over-sized hand. It isn’t giant, but flat, like a broad leaf. The woman sits with her side to me but I can still somehow see both her eyes. Her nose is big and crooked, but there’s no chin. Her thin hair has been swept into a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her feet are like her hand but her breasts are neat and somehow stiff in appearance, in no way consistent with the surreal, freeform shape of her body. On the floor in front of her, a tiny mirror leans against the wall, so she is probably drawing herself. I reach my hand toward her, my index finger extended, but just then I hear my name being called. And simultaneously the woman disappears. I get up and carefully take hold of the handle. I crack the door and slip out from under the tapestry. And when I close it carefully behind me, I hear Hans slamming the bathroom door.

  I did not notice when he came out of the bathroom, only vaguely became aware of him standing behind me, how he put his hands around my sore head and kissed my crown. I’m sitting balled up on the sea-green plush chair under the window, left behind for us tenants by the house’s owners. With my back to the room, hands over my eyes, thinking of flower faeries and dwarves. Of the miniscule creatures who would glide across my bed as a little girl right before I dragged myself to my parents’ bed to share my headache. About the little officer who guarded the toothbrush in the bathroom, the miniature bullfighter who puffed himself up at whatever was on my plate, as though he wanted to rejoice that I had managed to wash down the last of the liver sausage with my milk. I would look up to observe my parents’ reactions, which were non-existent; when I looked back down at my plate the Spaniard had disappeared. Nothing to see except the many suet pellets I had industriously pulled from my sausage and carefully arranged on the rim of my plate. But the more I thought about these little people, they all felt like they must have been some dream memory that had made it into real life.