Pets Page 10

  Before the Englishmen said goodbye they asked us what we were called. They weren’t particularly surprised at Havard’s new name—they seemed to think it was natural for Icelanders to have English names—but when they heard Havard say my name they were perplexed and asked if it really was Email. We managed to convince them that it was and were very pleased with ourselves after they had left the bar.

  I felt good that evening and, when we got on the last seventy-three bus heading north towards Stoke Newington, I was looking forward to staying at Brooke Road. However, things were to change and I can recall beginning to have doubts straight away the next day when I woke up just before noon, a little tired after our drinking session the night before. Havard had by then consumed two or three Special Brews to wake up and told me very proudly that he had given Ratty some beer in his milk dish.

  8

  The fact that I had witnessed, or at least heard, Havard’s acts, which could have been private if he had closed the door, made it even more impossible for me to come out from under the bed. Although Havard isn’t the type of man who normally hides things or feels ashamed of his human needs, I can’t—by suddenly appearing in the living room—admit that I have been watching him on the toilet and, even worse, that I have seen him masturbating. What makes it even more painful is the fact that he used Vigdis and called out her name to arouse himself. I haven’t just been prying into his most intimate, private life; I have confirmed what he said about me to his friend in Breidholt: I am a “real pussy.”

  To put it bluntly, I have become the guilty party, if one can talk of guilt in connection with the events that have taken place here. Whatever crimes Havard has committed in the past—which one must admit are more than a few—his entrance into my flat (if one can use that term) is far from being a criminal act. Turning off a burner on the stove that belongs to an old friend who is obviously not at home is much more like a good deed.

  There is a knock on the front door. The music in the living room has been changed once again; now one of the CDs from the bottom shelf is being played—a King Tubby CD that I bought in London five years ago. As far as I can hear, Havard is standing in the kitchen, pouring more beer into his glass. I can guess who is standing on the doorstep in the cold and know, at the same time, that it is pointless to ask God for help this time. Havard will invite Armann in and Armann will certainly accept. He knocks again before Havard goes to the door.

  “Good evening,” says the new host.

  I can’t hear what the visitor replies, but Havard invites him in, he is going to fetch the glasses. However, I hear Armann’s voice when he goes into the living room. He shouts, even though the music isn’t that loud:

  “Emil hasn’t come home?”

  “No,” Havard answers, and I can hear him moving something on the living room table. “Here, wait a moment,” he adds and turns off the music. “Won’t you wait a while and see if he comes back?”

  “Well, I wonder if I should,” Armann says, as if he has something important to do at home and has to think about it first.

  “Have a seat,” Havard says. “Can I offer you a beer or something?”

  The front door closes; I hear Armann take off his shoes.

  “A beer, you say?”

  Although I can’t say I am overjoyed that Armann is about to accept a drink in my living room, I am relieved that he knocked on the door and not the friend Havard invited. At the same time I know that this friend will come later, it’s just a question of when he will turn up. The same applies to when Greta will call, or Vigdis, Saebjorn, or Jaime.

  “What do you say, can I offer you a beer?” Havard says. “I’m pretty sure there’s one left.”

  “He wouldn’t have any red wine by any chance, would he?” Armann asks.

  I close my eyes automatically and cross myself in my mind: not only is he going to have a drink, but he is going to pick and choose what it will be.

  “I don’t think so,” Havard replies. “I don’t think he bought anything in the duty-free store other than a few beers and, of course, some whisky and . . . what else did he buy? Martini. Yes, and then there is this fine bottle of cognac, Remy Martini no less.”

  “Rémy Martin,” Armann corrects him, with such emphasis on the “r” sounds that Havard can’t resist teasing him. It was something I didn’t really expect him to notice.

  “Oh, is that right!” he says, copying Armann’s pronunciation without sounding too sarcastic. “So you would prefer cognac?”

  “Yes, thanks, just one glass. But I mustn’t stop too long. I’ll just wait for him a little while, I really must thank him for taking care of my glasses.”

  I have to smile. Does he have any reason to hurry? Do I really deserve thanks for having ruined his homecoming?

  “Here, I hadn’t thought of it but maybe I should make some coffee.” Havard suddenly begins to sound just like a homely housewife. “It’s just a question of whether old Emil has any coffee.”

  “What did you say?” Armann asks, and Havard repeats that he is going to make some coffee to go with the cognac.

  I don’t hear Armann decline the offer of coffee and I try to make out what he is doing, but I can’t hear him at all. Havard, on the other hand, has started looking for the coffee in the cupboards and, just when I remember that I had bought coffee before I went abroad, he finds it and tells Armann.

  “Just help yourself to the cognac,” he says, and, as far as I can make out from Armann’s answer, he seems to have gone into the kitchen too.

  “We have to use the proper glasses, don’t you agree? I wonder if your friend has some special glasses for cognac?”

  “I don’t know, I only drink whisky myself,” Havard says. I hear him turn on the tap and fill the coffee jug. “He must have something like that, our friend is a man of good taste.”

  The cork is pulled out of the Rémy Martin bottle.

  “And you say he just popped out for a second?” Armann asks.

  “He must have, he wasn’t at home when I arrived. He can’t have gone far, there was water boiling on the stove.”

  “And the front door was open?”

  “Not quite, no. The door wasn’t open, I had to climb through the window. I couldn’t let the water boil over.”

  “That is strange,” Armann says. I hear him pouring himself a glass and expect that they have found my cognac glasses, which I keep in the lower cupboard.

  “How did you get to know each other?” Havard asks.

  “We don’t know each other very well. I just sat beside him on the plane on the way home from London today. Or he sat beside me.”

  “So you weren’t traveling together then?”

  “Well yes, we sat together on the plane. I beside him and he beside me.”

  “But when did he call you, did you say?”

  “Just about um . . . what . . . maybe three quarters of an hour or an hour ago. Must have been as soon as he got home. He just left a message on my answering machine, I hadn’t gotten home by then. Of course I thought that I had left my glasses on the plane, so I spent rather a long time at the airport.”

  Havard asks Armann if he wouldn’t prefer to sit in the living room. They have to wait for the coffee; it will no doubt take a while.

  “And what do you do?” he asks, without mincing his words, once they have sat down.

  “You could say I work with linguistics,” Armann answers.

  I’m quite sure that he’s more than willing to discuss the latter calmly over drinks, but it doesn’t look like Havard is going to give him the opportunity to do so, at least not straight away.

  “Hey, why don’t we play some music? At least there is no shortage of music here at Señor Emilio’s place.”

  I don’t hear Armann reply and imagine that he prefers silence to anything his host is likely to play. There is silence for a minute until Armann asks:r />
  “What’s your name again? I haven’t asked you, have I?”

  Havard answers the question and then says cheerfully: “A little classical music? Shall we put a little classical music on the player, eh?”

  Armann answers, but I can’t make out what he says. Then he raises his voice and asks: “So you are called Havard? Isn’t that what you said?”

  “My name’s Havard. Havard Knutsson.”

  “Oh, yes? Knutsson? That’s not a bad name.”

  I can remember that Armann had given my name a similar appraisal. Havard seems to be engrossed in selecting music or putting it on. I don’t hear him until he suddenly offers Armann a cigar—from the boxes I bought in the duty-free store I’m sure. I wonder whether Armann will offer his new friend an Opal and then realize that he probably finished the box he had on the plane; he didn’t get to the duty-free store to buy more because of the trouble over his glasses.

  He declines the offer of a cigar, says he stopped smoking a long time ago.

  The coffee-maker makes itself heard and I swear to myself in frustration at not being able to share their pleasure. When the music starts—some classical piece that I don’t recognize straight away—I hear Havard go into the kitchen and call out on the way:

  “Here, isn’t that Mozart? I just put on some Deutsche Grammophon CD. Isn’t it old Mozart?”

  “No, my friend,” Armann answers. He raises his voice so that Havard can hear him from the kitchen. “That is not Mozart.” Maybe he read the cover of the CD, but he seems to have some knowledge of music, contrary to what I had imagined on the plane. “It’s Mahler. A rather remarkable work, it’s sixteen-year-old Mahler. Just about the only chamber work of his that has been preserved.”

  “Jawohl,” I hear Havard say, mainly to himself. “Chamber music, yes.” Then he is suddenly standing in the hallway. “More cognac?” he offers, and again I am amazed at how polite and cultured he can appear to be and how he manages to hide all traces of his character underneath the surface.

  “Let it come, let it come,” Armann barks, as if he is beginning to feel the effects of the alcohol and is ready for anything.

  I feel a new wave of hopelessness sweep over me and ask myself again what I have done to deserve this. The first answer that occurs to me is that I am paying for the unexpected good fortune of winning a million in the lottery and for deciding to waste at least a quarter of it on a trip abroad—on music, books and videos—instead of using it on something that could be considered constructive, something material, something that doesn’t just go into one’s head and end there.

  Someone turns down the heavy, emotional music—I remember now, with Armann’s help, that it is Mahler’s piano quartet—and I hear that Havard has come back into the living room when he says:

  “Haven’t we got quite a chamber atmosphere here now? It’s a pity old Emil isn’t here, he would be sure to enjoy it.”

  “It’s not bad,” Armann answers. “Not bad at all.”

  “But wait a minute, I’d like to show you something,” Havard interrupts, and I hear him lift up the plastic bag. “I’m going to show you something special, something I’m going to give my friend Emil.”

  The crinkling of plastic gets louder. Armann makes a sound that usually accompanies pain or suffering, but I realize it is caused by the cognac that I bought for Vigdis.

  9

  “And what have you got there?” Armann asks, full of curiosity.

  “This is a whaler,” Havard says proudly.

  It takes me several seconds to realize what Havard is showing him. He has the beautifully carved model of the whaler Essex—the ship that was sunk in the early nineteenth century by the mythical giant whale which Melville later used as his model for Moby-Dick. The carved ship belonged to Orn, my father’s friend on Brooke Road, until Havard stole it and an original edition of Moby-Dick from 1851.

  “A whaler, eh?” I can hear that Armann hasn’t quite followed. “You are trying to say that you have a whaler in the bag?”

  “Well it’s not a speedboat,” Havard answers, as if he thinks that Armann is trying to dispute the matter.

  “No, it’s not a speedboat, you’re right about that.”

  “And it’s not a submarine,” Havard says with a laugh.

  “No, no, it’s a whaler,” Armann answers. “I can see that now, it’s a whaler.”

  Havard’s theft of these irreplaceable objects made the last three weeks that I spent at Brooke Road after his departure completely unbearable. I had thought about making up some story about a burglary, but I decided against it at the last moment and told Osk the truth when she returned from her trip. Later on, I told Orn over the phone that my friend—the same person who had been responsible for the deaths of the iguana and the rodents—had vanished one day, without me being able to do anything about it, and had taken the valuables with him. Osk didn’t take the news particularly well, as was to be expected, but Orn’s reaction, when I called him in San José in Costa Rica, was one of surprise rather than anger. I couldn’t believe how well he took the news. He didn’t insist in any way that I find my friend; instead he advised me to stay clear of this Havard for as long as I could. The less we knew about this unfortunate character the better. He refused to consider my proposal of pro forma compensation for the objects, and when we met again two years later at my father’s house he offered me the use of his flat whenever I felt like it; his daughter no longer lived there and he only used it now and again. What I appreciated most of all in Orn’s generosity was the fact that he asked me not to mention the incident to my father; he said that we should forget about it, and so should Osk of course.

  I understand from what I have just heard that Havard has come to give me the ship, and I begin to wonder whether the book might be buried in the plastic bag too. All at once I feel it is worthwhile huddling here under the bed—it’s as if this pathetic confinement has suddenly acquired a purpose. But on the other hand, I can’t be sure that Havard will leave the ship behind if I don’t make an appearance; I am quite certain that he wants to hand over the precious object to me in person.

  “Some woman, to whom I spoke today in an antique shop, was going to give me two hundred and fifty thousand kronur for it,” Havard says. “Isn’t it right to say antique shop? Or what do you think? It’s an antique shop, isn’t it?”

  “I thought you were going to give it to Emil,” Armann answers. He doesn’t seem very interested in either the ship or the term antique shop.

  “That is just what I am going to do. You don’t really think I would give it away for two hundred and fifty thousand, do you? Oh, no, sir, that ship is not for sale. I borrowed it from Emil’s relative while I was in England a few years ago and now I have come to return it. I have this book too: Moby-Dick, the original edition. 1851.”

  The plastic bag is crinkled again, and despite my joy that the book should also come with the ship, I think it is almost unforgivable that he dragged it around in a plastic bag—I can just imagine how worn and tattered the bag is.

  “Now that is something!” Armann says and asks to see the book.

  “You must be careful with it,” Havard warns him. I find it difficult not to laugh. This advice, which actually sounds like it is meant for a child, is quite appropriate when one remembers how roughly Armann treated his paperback on the plane earlier today. I think about the woman who sat on the other side of Armann; how she turned the pages of the magazine as if it was something of extreme value.

  “And you are going to give it to Emil as well?” Armann asks. He seems to be surprised, or even amazed. “The original edition of Moby-Dick?”

  “I’m just returning it,” Havard corrects him. “I borrowed it from one of his relatives and just thought it was time to return it. I have had it for at least five years now.”

  “Maybe five years isn’t a very long time for such an old book,” Arman
n says and laughs.

  “Maybe not for such a book,” Havard answers, “but it is for me. At least these five years have passed rather slowly for me.”

  If I’m not mistaken, there is remorse, or a touch of remorse, in his voice.

  “But at least you have had time to read it, I presume,” Armann says cheerfully, and I imagine that he is handling the book.

  “Me?” Havard says in a tone that makes it clear that he is not the kind of man to read such a book. “Armann, why don’t we put something more cheerful on the hi-fi?”

  I was truly amazed at how long Havard had tolerated listening to the Deutsche Grammophon CD, but on the other hand I was looking forward to listening to the works of Alban Berg, which is also on the CD. That type of music would certainly not be very acceptable to his sensitive ears. A series of short pieces for cello and piano by Anton Webern is playing now, and I am sure Armann is enjoying them. So he answers Havard first by saying that he may change the music, he isn’t going to interfere, but he adds that he thinks it is a particularly beautiful work which he hasn’t heard for a long time.

  “But you like Elvis, don’t you?” Havard asks. He seems determined to liven up the conversation and the music.

  “I can’t really say I do,” Armann answers, obviously still engrossed in the book.

  “We’ll just have it on low,” Havard says and cuts off Anton Webern. It’s clear that he has the Elvis CD nearby, as only a few seconds pass before the first track begins. It is “Heartbreak Hotel.” Havard does as he promised; he turns the volume down but then suddenly adds:

  “Here, I am going to play ‘Hound Dog,’ you know that song, don’t you?”

  Armann doesn’t bother to answer, and I can’t help thinking that Havard’s interest in the song about the hunting dog must have been sparked by his remembering the premature death of the rodents, Moby and Dick. He stops “Heartbreak Hotel” and I have already started to hum “Hound Dog” in my mind. The volume is turned up as soon as the song begins and Armann says something. I can’t make it out, but it sounds as though he isn’t particularly pleased and feels that things could be better right now.