That’s how far a woman’s imagination can take her. His voice is clearly too deep for a man of this world.
“Are you travelling east?” it asks. It’s painfully obvious that I’m heading east, since the road runs from west to east, like a coffin on the floor of a church.
“Could you take me some of the way?” he asks, “I’m stranded here.”
He pulls out a silver flask and offers it to me first, as a token gesture, before taking a sip. As I drive, he tells me tales about country folk, most of them containing some supernatural element, stories of departed souls, guardian spirits, premonitions, shipwrecks. In between stories he praises my driving and tells me that, when he was a boy, he intended to grow up to be something other than what he is today.
“Are you a fisherman?” I ask.
“I don’t practise my casting in the winter or make my own flies, if that’s what you mean. Blood and entrails aren’t really my thing, although I can gut a fish and stuff a bird. They’d probably put me in telecommunications if we were at war, or directing operations from some safe shelter away from headquarters. No, I was just helping a friend of mine who’s cultivating a patch of land up there by the dam. We were planting dwarf apple trees under the cover of night.”
As he’s sitting there beside me, for a brief moment I feel a peculiar familiarity between us, as if he were closely connected to me, and my mind was trying to recall what my body clearly remembered. Once we’ve passed the mudslide, I know what he’s going to say:
“Come with me, I want to show you something,” he says in a very persuasive voice.
I stop the car. The boy is asleep in the back seat and will sleep until dawn. The headlights illuminate a stretch of path through the lava field. The glistening blue pumice squelches under the soles of his hiking boots as he walks. A woman in high heels would have a hard job keeping up with him.
I follow him blindly through the lava field, as naturally as one would follow a clerk to the screw and bolts section of a hardware store, without, however, ever taking my eyes off the car on the side of the road.
He is wearing a red shirt under his coat. The weather has cleared, with puffs of vapour hovering over cavities here and there, and tips of lava rock piercing through the moss. The moon follows us like a balloon, bouncing from the rim of one crater to the next, rebounding against our heels, rolling over the undulating igneous rock and swelling with every change of direction, like the pupil of an eye, with the golden glow of its sclera reflecting on our necks.
Suddenly, the moon vanishes behind a cloud and the world plummets into darkness again.
“I can’t be long, seven minutes at the most; I can’t stay away from the boy for too long.”
“We’re almost there.” He scans the rocks to find a spot where he can relieve himself, since he has been drinking on the way.
We forge on, step by step, with about fifty metres behind us now. I would never have believed that darkness could be this black. It’s as if I were walking across that creaking wooden beam back in my old gym, and were trying to hold my balance at its centre with both arms, the other girls watching me in silence. This is how far a woman’s feelings can lead her.
I can no longer see anything, nothing but the hot vapour of my own breath in front of me. I grope forward, but my hands grasp nothing but a vacuum, the pitch darkness ahead of me is a thick wall that can’t be followed because it delineates nothing, protects nothing, there is no way of distinguishing the outline of the world or its edges, the rugged lava field gives off no scent. Nevertheless I sense there is something extraordinary just a few arm lengths away from us, but what?
“What do you want to show me?”
“This,” he says.
“This what?”
“The darkness.”
“The darkness?”
“Yes, you’re a city girl aren’t you?”
I sense a colossal human construction in the middle of the darkness, and try to conjure up an image in mind. What kind of picture is it, though? A gothic cathedral that suddenly rises to the heavens in some old red-light district abroad, suddenly standing there, sky-high, at the end of a narrow paved road with dark, smelly corners. I’m standing on the edge of the imaginary, on the edge of the fear of darkness. The only thing one can do is grope for another human being. Suddenly I feel it is perfectly natural for him to slip his arm around me and for me to lay my head on his shoulder.
He has started to undress me in the drizzle, with swiftness and skill, ankles and wrists, zippers and tight necklines are no challenge to him. He spends the most time wrestling with my panties, which become entangled in his hands. It’s a little cold, but he throws a coat under me and rolls me over back and forth. A lava bed may seem like an odd mattress, but in his own way this man has created a secure shelter for me, with the heavens above us and the earth below, and the two of us sandwiched in between — could one ask for more security?
Afterwards we linger a moment, sitting in the middle of the lava field. He rests his head on my shoulder and I kiss him, as if he were a child about to doze off. When he stands up he hands me a little stone containing the bright shape of a horseshoe in its centre.
“Next time, it’ll be a silver belt or crock of gold.” He smiles at me.
“I can take care of myself from here on,” he says to me, once we’ve retraced our steps. “But I’ll come looking for you later,” he adds, “you’re the best thing that’s happened to me today by far.”
FORTY-TWO
Many consequential events can occur in a woman’s life in the space of less than twenty-four hours. Most mistakes are made in a fraction of a moment and can be measured in seconds: taking a wrong turn, stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake, saying a yes instead of a no or a maybe. Mistakes are rarely the outcome of a logical sequence of decisions. A woman can be on the brink of total surrender to love, for instance, without even pondering on it for so much as a minute.
The black desert is no longer ahead but behind us, and the summer bungalow isn’t far off now, just one more little fjord and a heath. As I’m driving through yet another low-hanging cloud, all the way down to the lava rocks, it suddenly dawns on me that I am midway between the beginning and the end. I can’t quite decide whether to measure the distance in years or kilometres. There certainly seems to be enough space ahead of me and plenty of time, and ample time behind me too. By not following the movement of the hands on my divorce watch, and by circling the island anti-clockwise, I have not only gained a head start over time, but also managed to constantly surprise and even, ultimately, catch up with myself.
If one were to summarize my experiences so far on this journey, one could say that I have caused the death of four animals (five if the city goose is to be included) and that I have successfully crossed forty single-lane bridges, tackled some difficult slopes and become intimately acquainted with three men over a stretch of little more than 300 kilometres, most of which was unpaved and literally wedged between the mountains and the coastline. Even though the first 100 kilometres were fairly uneventful in this regard and I expect no major surprises in the last 100-kilometre stretch, it was nevertheless almost equal in intensity to the past ten years of my life combined. The fact that I couldn’t tell you how many churches we passed on our journey may be indicative of my moral standing. I would have bought the souvenir glued to my dashboard no matter what it was, even a carved wooden model of a police station or a bank.
Analysing my existence from a purely statistical point of view, this works out as one man for every 160-kilometre stretch, which should be considered a fairly high level of activity in a country in which each inhabitant shares one square kilometre with his fellow man. According to my estimates, calculated on the basis of the length of the national Ring Road, which is 1,420 kilometres long, that should amount to 17.7 men before the journey is over. In terms of square kilometres, this corresponds to vast expanses of lava fields per person, extensive stretches of desert, reservoir basins, eroded land and withering lupin fields, as well as countless bridges, squawking seabirds and hamburger joints as one approaches the coast.