After dinner, while I’m washing up, Jósef makes some popcorn, as he normally does when he visits on weekends. He fetches the usual big pot in the cupboard, measures exactly three tablespoons of oil, and carefully sprinkles the contents of the packet into the pot until the yellow corn covers the bottom. Once that’s done, he places the lid on the pot and puts the plate on at full heat for four minutes. Then, when the oil begins to simmer, he lowers the heat down to two. He grabs the glass bowl and salt and doesn’t take his eyes off the pot for a single moment until the task has been completed. Then the three of us watch Newsnight. My brother holds my hand on the sofa; the glass bowl is on the table. An hour and a half into my twin brother’s weekend visit, he hands me the CD with the songs. It’s dancing time.
Three
I’m taking very little with me, and Dad is surprised to see what little luggage I have. I wrap the rose cuttings in moist newspaper and place them in the front compartment of my backpack. We travel in the Saab that has been in Dad’s possession for about as long as I can remember. Jósef sits silently in the back. Dad is sporting the beret he always wears on his longer journeys out of town. He’s way below the legal speed limit and, since the accident, never goes over twenty-five miles an hour. He’s driving so slowly across the rugged lava field that I have time to contemplate the birds perched at regular intervals on the pointed violet crags of the crust of the breaking dawn, for about as far as the eye can see, one after another, like a melancholic musical score mounting in a crescendo. Dad is also unused to driving; Mom did most of that. There is a long trail of cars behind us that are constantly trying to overtake us. Not that my father allows this to distract him. I’m not worried about missing my flight either, because Dad always gets everywhere with plenty of time to spare.
— Would you like me to drive, Dad?
— Thanks for the offer, lad, but no. Just sit back there and take in that landscape you’re about to say good-bye to; you’re not likely to be driving through lava fields for a while.
We both remain silent for a moment while I take in the landscape I’m saying good-bye to. Later, once we’ve passed the side road that leads to the lighthouse, Dad wants to chat a little bit about my plans for the future and what I intend to do with my life. He isn’t satisfied by my interest in gardening.
— I hope you don’t mind your old man asking you a few questions about your plans for the future, Lobbi. I don’t mean to be nosy and you know I mean well.
— That’s OK.
— Have you made up your mind about what you’re going to study?
— I’ve got a gardening job.
— A man with your academic abilities…
— Don’t start, Dad.
— I think you’re squandering your talents, son.
It’s difficult to explain this to Dad; the garden and roses in the greenhouse were an interest that I shared with Mom.
— Mom would have understood me.
— Yes, your mom pretty much approved of anything you put your mind to, he says. Still, though, she wouldn’t have minded if you’d gone to university.
When we first moved into the new neighborhood it was nothing but a flat stretch of barren land with rocks surrounded by wind-scattered pebbles. There were new buildings everywhere, or building sites, half saturated in puddles of yellow water. The low, scraggy bushes didn’t come until much later. The neighborhood was exposed to the sea and frequent blasts of wind from which it was impossible to create any shelter in the gardens. People had given up planting flowers in the soil. Mom was the first person who tried to plant trees in the area and, in the early years, was viewed as a bit of an eccentric for attempting the impossible. While others contented themselves with creating lawns or, at the very most, low hedges between the gardens, to be able to bask in the breeze for those three days in the summer, she was out there planting laburnum, maple, ash, and blossoming shrubs on the more shielded side of the house. She never gave up, though, even if she had to plant the scions straight into the rocks.
The second summer Dad built a greenhouse south of the house. We first placed the plants in the greenhouse and then took them out into the garden in the first or second week of June when there was no longer any frost at night. Initially we were only going to keep them outside for the summer and then move them back into the greenhouse, but eventually, if there was a mild autumn, we’d prolong their stay outside by another month or so. Then one winter we even let our plants rest under a six-and-a-half-foot-high blanket of snow. In the end there was nothing that wouldn’t grow in Mom’s garden; everything seemed to blossom in her hands. Bit by bit, the patch grew into a fairy-tale garden that attracted attention and wonderment. Since Mom’s death, the women in the neighborhood have sometimes asked me for advice. It just needs a little bit of care and, most of all, time, my mother would have said — that was pretty much her gardening philosophy in a nutshell.
— I admit you and your mother had your own world that Jósef and I weren’t a part of; maybe we didn’t understand it.
Lately Dad has been referring to himself and Jósef as a unit — Jósef and myself, he says.
Mom sometimes felt an urge to go out and work in the garden or greenhouse in the heart of midsummer nights. It was as if she didn’t need to sleep the way other people did, especially in the summer. When I’d come home in the early hours after a night out with my friends, there would be Mom on the flower bed with her red plastic bucket and pink floral gardening gloves while Dad was fast asleep inside. Naturally there wasn’t a soul in sight, and everything was so incredibly still. Mom would say hi and look at me as if she knew something about me that I didn’t. Then I would sit beside her in the grass for a few quarters of an hour and pull up some weeds as a token gesture, just to keep her company. I might have had half a bottle of beer in my hand, which I’d prop up in the flower bed while I lie down, rest my chin in the palms of my cupped hands and gaze at the drifting puffs of cloud. Whenever I wanted to be alone with Mom, I went out to her in the greenhouse or in the garden; that’s where we could talk together. Sometimes she’d seem distracted and I’d ask her what she was thinking and she’d just say, “Yeah, yeah, I like what you’re saying.” And then she’d give me an approving and encouraging smile.
— There’s no great future in gardening for a brilliant student like you.
— Since when am I a brilliant student?
— I might be old, lad, but I’m not senile. It so happens that I’ve kept all your exam results. Top of the class at the age of twelve. Top of your year at the age of sixteen, graduating with flying colors.
— I can’t believe you keep that stuff. It was on top of a box somewhere in the basement. Throw that garbage away, Dad.
— Too late, Lobbi, I’ve asked Thröstur to frame it for me.
— You’re not serious?
— So are you thinking of a university degree then?
— No, not at the moment.
— How about botany?
— No.
— Biology?
— No.
— Then how about plant physiology or plant genetics with an emphasis on plant biotechnology?
Dad has obviously been reading up on this stuff. He keeps both hands firmly gripped on the wheel with his eyes glued to the road.