Pets Read online

  I thought that he would begin to realize the frivolity of the conversation and give up. But he stubbornly carried on.

  “Yes, you can,” he said, “just as hot and cold are completely different concepts. It’s feasible that there are no other entities in the world as strongly opposed as heat and cold. One goes up while the other goes down.”

  “Not at the same time,” I objected. “Though the temperature goes up somewhere, that doesn’t mean that the cold goes down at the same time. Unless you mean that while the heat goes up in Bolivia, for example, there will be more frost in Norway, or something like that.”

  “That is just what I mean,” Armann replied, very pleased with himself. “Just like the example with the flat; the greater the number of inhabitants the less space there will be.” His serious expression—and the pause in his argument—hinted that we had reached a certain level of agreement in our discussion, “a certain landing,” if one could talk in those terms. But, even though the discussion had come to a close, I couldn’t resist adding one more comment.

  “But the temperature goes down too,” I said and emphasized the word down.

  “Is that so?” Armann said. I couldn’t make out whether his question revealed his lack of interest or lack of confidence.

  “You can’t deny it,” I said.

  “Only up to a certain level,” he answered. “When the temperature is so low that it reaches freezing point, then it begins to . . .” He hesitated, and, in order to gain time to think, he waved to the flight attendant, who was still too far away to be of any assistance.

  I, for my part, began to wonder, as a result of our conversation, what decision the captain would take when the plane approached Keflavik airport. Would he go up or down? Would we, Armann and I, and the rest of the passengers, succeed in landing?

  8

  When he emerged from the bathroom, he stayed on the threshold for a little while, lifted his hands up to his face to sniff them, then took hold of the doorknob without turning around, and quietly closed the door. He looked about for the woman, but when he didn’t catch sight of her, he went into the next room. The door was partly open, and, after giving it a gentle push, it revealed a child’s bedroom. He smiled and looked around the colorful little room; it was full of toddlers’ toys which were jumbled together with things that belonged to a slightly older child, obviously a boy. Then he walked over to a small desk with a computer on top. The computer seemed to be too big for the table; there wasn’t room for anything else on it. He pressed a letter on the keyboard and a soldier in a camouflage uniform—holding a big machine gun, with a helmet on his head and a fierce, pitiless expression on his face—popped up. He was startled. He jerked his hands back and shook them, like he was also holding a vibrating machine gun, though he didn’t add the appropriate sound effects. Then he tapped the computer, as if he was patting a child on the head, before turning to the large birdcage beside the desk.

  There were two little budgies in the cage. He bent down to it, tapped on the rails, and clicked with his tongue in an attempt to attract their attention. The birds just looked at him, nothing more; they seemed completely uninterested. He picked up a yellow pencil which was lying on the desk beside the computer, poked it carefully in between the bars of the cage, and waggled it, but the birds took no notice. So he poked the pencil into the stomach of one of the birds. That resulted in both of them flying up with loud squawks; they seemed to crash into each other or the sides of the cage. It was difficult to see exactly what they were doing, but the noise they produced brought Hinrik’s frightened wife running into the room and she asked him what on earth was going on. He answered that he had unexpectedly found himself in this room; he had no doubt gone in the wrong direction when he came out of the bathroom. The birds seemed to have calmed down.

  The woman directed him out into the hall. While he followed her, he praised the child for his attractive bedroom, or were there perhaps two children, he had noticed that there were bunks in the room. At least they were animal lovers, it was years since he had seen a budgie in a cage. She didn’t reply, just waited by the hall door with her arms crossed. He walked into the hall, and when he bent over his shoes he seemed to remember something suddenly. He straightened up and asked the woman if he could make one phone call, he needed to see if another friend of his was at home before he set off again in the taxi. She sighed impatiently, said something about it being quite sufficient that he had been allowed to use the toilet, she wasn’t sure that it was normal allowing some stranger to come in, he must be able to understand that. He said he did, of course she should never open the door to a stranger, but, as he and Rikki were such good friends, she could trust him one hundred percent. It was obvious from the expression on the woman’s face that she didn’t quite know how she should react to this last comment, but after thinking a little, staring worriedly at the floor, and puffing as if she was exhaling cigarette smoke, she gave in and said he could make one call, but it had to be short. She was busy, had no time for this. He thanked her.

  As he picked up the receiver, he called out to her that he just had to dial information first; he wasn’t quite sure of the number. When he got through to the operator, he asked for the number of Emil S. Halldorsson, Grettisgata something or other, he wasn’t quite sure what the number was. While he was pressing the numbers that he had been given, there was a loud knock on the front door and the woman went to answer it, swearing under her breath that there was no peace here at home, during lunchtime in the middle of the week. The cab driver stood on the doorstep and asked the woman politely if his passenger was by any chance still inside. She said he was coming, he was just making a phone call.

  He had let the phone ring for a good while without getting any reply, and when he came back and saw the taxi driver in the doorway, he smiled and said well, well, so he had come to fetch him. The driver said he had just wanted to check if he had disappeared off the face of the earth. While he put on his shoes he thanked the woman warmly, he had expected such kindness from the wife of his friend Hinrik, who was such a fine fellow. His last words were that no one had answered at his friend’s house, he was no doubt working, just like poor old Rikki, and then he followed the driver down to the parking lot. Once inside the car, he said he wanted to go down to Austurstraeti, where the driver would be rid of him. He wouldn’t have to worry about him any more, at least not for the rest of that day. He took the leather-bound book out of the plastic bag and was busy turning over the pages as the taxi drove out of the car park and along the road.

  9

  Probably half an hour had passed since take-off. The woman in the window seat asked the flight attendant for two little bottles of white wine and said no thank you when she was offered a liqueur to have with her coffee later. I had made up my mind not to drink anything on the way; I was going to wait until the evening when my friends, Saebjorn and Jaime, were going to drop in. Those plans were altered when Armann ordered four little bottles of red wine and told the flight attendant to put two of them on my table. I didn’t want to decline his offer, and after a few minutes’ thought—which involved changing my plans for the rest of the day—I decided to take an active part in the wine purchasing by ordering four miniature bottles of Cointreau to have with our coffee; two for me and two for Armann. He seemed really pleased at that. But later it became apparent that the red wine was free—part of the service, Armann said with a smug smile, rephrasing the information he’d been given by the flight attendant—while I needed to pay for the liqueurs with my credit card, which I had to fetch from the overhead bin. While I was standing up, Armann turned to the woman in the window seat and asked her if we couldn’t offer her a liqueur with her coffee. By using the word we he had made us into comrades. She thanked Armann for the offer but no, she wasn’t very partial to strong drinks. Armann seemed almost offended when she declined; he repeated what she had said, “not partial to strong drinks,” and when I sat down again I heard him mum
ble something to the effect that it was her choice.

  “These bottles don’t hold much,” he observed and lifted one of the red wine bottles up to eye-level. “Perhaps it’s about one glassful. Maybe slightly more.”

  I replied that he was probably right but didn’t want to say any more, in case he was going to start another discussion like the one on heat and cold. Armann opened the bottle he was holding, poured the contents into his glass, and then put his hand into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a paperback. I couldn’t imagine him shutting himself off in a book and, of course, that was not quite what he had in mind. He opened the book and while he turned the pages (rather roughly for my liking) he said he wanted to show me something. He had bought this book in Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road and discovered, afterwards really, that it was exactly what he had been looking for.

  “That was lucky,” I said and poured red wine into my glass.

  “Yes, you could definitely say that,” Armann answered. “It’s always a pleasure when life takes one by surprise. It doesn’t happen that often, does it?”

  He pulled his glasses case out of his jacket pocket. Like the Opal box, it appeared to have been sat on. However, I was rather surprised at how modern the shape of the frames were, and I noticed that the woman by the window watched Armann’s clumsy movements—he put on his glasses and replaced the case in his pocket—with a smile. He seemed to be having trouble finding what he was going to show me, and the woman, who had taken out Harper’s Bazaar from her bag, appeared to be rather shocked at the way Armann thumbed his way back and forth through his book. She, on the other hand, turned the pages so carefully that I imagined she had bought the magazine for someone else at home and wanted it to look untouched.

  I asked Armann what the title of the book was.

  “It’s a really remarkable volume,” he said, but was too engrossed in turning the pages to answer my question. I hadn’t noticed what was on the cover but from the little diagrams—some kind of calculations with words instead of numbers—I guessed that it was of a scientific nature, no doubt some complicated, advanced grammatical text.

  Although I didn’t expect to have peace for long, I used the opportunity to replace my headphones and switched on Miles again. The fair-haired girl in the T-shirt was resting her bare elbow on the armrest, her head leaning to one side as she gazed along the aisle. She had her index finger on her cheek and let her fourth finger play with her lips as if she was deep in thought over what she saw. I couldn’t see if she was drinking anything but imagined she had white wine like the woman beside Armann. I thought it was very likely that she was traveling alone; I hadn’t seen her talk to anyone except the flight attendant and the person on the other side of the aisle.

  I looked at her for quite a while and began to wonder how long I could carry on gazing without her being aware of me. No doubt, she knew already. I think I always notice when someone is watching me; it doesn’t matter whether the person is sitting beside me or is further away.

  All at once I felt Armann nudge me gently with his elbow. At the same moment the fair-haired girl turned round, as if she had heard something further back in the plane. Our eyes met for a moment. She had clearly begun to smell the food, which I also smelled now as the trolley came nearer, but, though our gazes had met, it was impossible to say if she had noticed me.

  I took off the headphones to attend to Armann.

  “See here,” he said. He held up the book and pointed with a thick, short finger at the upper right hand page.

  “What?”

  “Look.”

  “What is it?” I asked, my mind still on the fair-haired girl.

  Armann tapped the tape player on my table and then pointed at the text in the book. He read out:

  “Since the Sony Walkman was introduced, no one has been sure whether two of them should be Walkmen or Walkmans.” He looked at me and asked if I had ever considered it.

  I shook my head.

  Then he carried on: “(The nonsexist alternative), that’s in brackets here,” he added, “(The nonsexist alternative Walkpersons would leave us on the hook, because we would be faced with a choice between Walkpersons and Walkpeople).” He stopped reading out loud but stared at the page as if he was still reading silently. He nodded, looked at me and then at the educated woman, no doubt hoping that she was listening too.

  “That’s a question,” he said.

  “Yes, it is a question,” I agreed and took the tape out of my Walkman, not to turn it round but just to keep my hands occupied.

  Armann took a good sip of red wine before he continued, and as I picked up my glass to keep him company the woman at the window did exactly the same, although she didn’t seem to be aware that we were drinking simultaneously.

  “That’s the crux of the matter,” Armann said. “They produce one instrument, for example this one here,” he tapped my player again, “but as soon as they use technology to produce a second player and then number three and so on, they no longer know what to call their invention in the plural. They are faced with a grammatical problem that no instrument has been invented to solve. Of course it is the same dilemma that parents have to cope with when they give birth to twins or triplets. Really they should all have the same name, that is if they are identical and the same sex; they come one after another from the same producer, they are as identical inwardly as two such instruments from Sony and the only thing that differentiates them is—at least superficially—the same thing which differentiates one Sony instrument from another.”

  At this point he paused and looked at me over his glasses; he obviously expected me to be keen to find out what it was that differentiated one instrument from another.

  “What can that be?” I asked.

  “What differentiates identical twins is the treatment they receive, at least how they are treated as children and teenagers; what they are fed, what noises, words and music they hear. In other words: upbringing. I don’t mean just musical upbringing, rather upbringing in general, which I have always thought should be called treatment.”

  “Isn’t that too clinical a word?”

  “Treatment?” He almost seemed to snort at my comment. “It could well be that it is clinical but I think it is more suitable to express upbringing, at least from a general point of view. Most children are of course not brought up in any way, instead they just undergo some sort of treatment from their parents. Naturally, the treatment varies, but quite a few of them simply just get such rough treatment that they will never be anything else but children. I know about that.”

  He paused again and in the meantime I imagined that something had gone wrong in his upbringing, something that he realized had had an effect on him as an adult. Then he carried on:

  “But whatever happened; if you had an identical twin brother, which I doubt you have, then he should really be called . . .?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize that I was being asked a question.

  “Emil,” I said. Just as I had expected, he didn’t remember my name.

  “Emil. Yes, that’s as good a name as any. Emil Jonsson.”

  “Emil Halldorsson,” I corrected him. “Emil S. Halldorsson.”

  “You know who Emil Jonsson was, don’t you?”

  “Can’t say I do,” I answered.

  “It can be useful to know about famous people who share your name,” he said and sat up straight in his seat. “Emil Jonsson is not the worst namesake one could think of, I am quite sure of that.”

  “I don’t think I have ever heard him mentioned,” I said, and it occurred to me to mention my namesake in the Swedish Smålands, but I changed my mind.

  “But perhaps you are no better off knowing about someone who bore your name in the past,” Armann carried on. “Least of all if he is dead.”

  For a moment I wondered whether my namesake, whom I had thought of mentioning, w
as still alive or not, and whether characters in stories grew old in the same way as, for example, their authors.

  “But you aren’t a twin, are you?” Armann asked. He smiled and waited for my answer, as if he wanted to make sure that I had come into this world alone, was one of a kind and so on.

  I said I wasn’t.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not to be a twin.”

  This last comment made me think that he was hinting at his own personal experience of being a twin (could he even be an identical twin?), and yet it was unthinkable that there could be another version of such a man.

  “Then it mentions slightly further on,” he went on and turned over the page of the book. “It states here: ‘Fearing that their trademark, if converted to a noun, may become as generic as aspirin or kleenex, they,’ that is Sony, of course, ‘sidestep the grammatical issues by insisting upon Walkman Personal Stereos.’ In other words they avoid the issue by removing the grammar from the name of the instrument. Or the name of the technology, to be more exact.”

  “Is that so?” I said. “The company directors have started controlling how we talk?”

  “There is no question about it,” Armann answered, clearly very happy that I showed interest in the subject. “They cut out the grammar in the name of their product because they don’t have a good enough grasp of language. One who knows that he is in the wrong naturally tries to convince everyone else that he is in the right; that is usually the way that information is passed on from man to man. They can produce an instrument that enables you to enjoy your favorite songs at thirty thousand feet above sea-level but when it comes to giving this remarkable instrument a name, they haven’t the ability to name more than a single copy; all the other copies are left in some problematic limbo. People all over the world who own the instruments are totally helpless because they don’t know how to name them when someone asks. But there is also the other possibility: that each copy is different.”