I’m not thinking of anything in particular, which is when I’m struck by this preposterous idea, which comes to me like a cat lying on its back with its rubbery pink paws in the air, begging for its belly to be stroked. All of a sudden I can easily see myself as a married man, getting married even, in a church, and see that being with the same woman for the whole of one’s life might be a goal worth pursuing, not necessarily to do anything in particular, but just to be in the same room as her. I’d be willing to bathe the child, change diapers, and have her in her pajamas when her mom came home from the research institute. Then I’d rub almond oil into my daughter’s rosy cheeks so that when she was kissed, my wife would smell the almond oil on her. Then one of us would walk behind the other’s coffin. Unless, of course, we both departed at the same moment, like that couple on the country road; there would be rain and mist on the windshield, and I would be on the point of turning the fan on full blast when, at the same moment, a truck would swerve onto the highway.
I see the trader talking to me, but don’t immediately hear his words.
— Do you want the bigger one or the smaller one? he asks, daddy hare or mammy hare? He is holding the hooked pole he uses to take down the hare carcasses when customers request it. Flóra Sól is all eyes as he yanks the hairy animal off the hook.
— Oh, oh, she says when she sees the animal isn’t moving.
I’m so absorbed in my own uncensored and premature fantasies about marriage that I’m seriously thinking of buying a hare. My gastronomic skills are far from being good enough to be able to handle anything as complex as that, though.
But the trader categorically affirms that it’s easy to cook.
— A two-year-old could cook this blindfolded, he says, if I understood the dialect correctly. I suspect that might have a deeper meaning in the local vernacular.
He says he’ll prepare the animal for me so that all I have to do is butter it with mustard and stick it in the oven.
— That’s it, he says, with a very convincing air as he sharpens his knife.
— For how long?
— Between one to two hours, depending on when you get home, he answers, skinning the animal.
Two hours before dinner I unwrap the skinned violet animal enveloped in wax paper and start cooking. I follow the man’s instructions to the letter and butter the animal with mustard both inside and out. But the thing that takes the longest is figuring out how the gas oven works. Because this is such an unfamiliar recipe I can’t try out any adventurous side dishes. Instead I boil some potatoes and vegetables and make a red wine sauce, similar to the one I’ve made several times with the veal.
When I place the dish with the hare on the table, I sense my female friend is surprised by this evening’s menu.
— Food smells good, she says, looking hesitantly at the meat. Is that rabbit?
— No, hare, I say.
My daughter is visibly excited and claps her hands.
— Twi, twi, she says, miming a bird with her hands.
— Our little harlequin, I say, wondering how I’m supposed to go about cutting the animal I’ve just cooked into consumable units. Anna saves me the bother and cuts the meat; then she cuts it even farther into tiny morsels for eight teeth.
The mustard hare isn’t exactly bad, but it has a peculiar bland taste, that’s exactly the way Anna words it.
— Special, she says, having a second helping, nonetheless. I think it’s quite possible that Anna will eat anything that’s put in front of her.
— I’m sorry for being so busy over the past weeks, she says. I haven’t cooked anything since I got here. I’m no match for you, you’re a fantastic cook. Where did you learn how to cook?
She’s in a dress; this is the first time I’ve seen Anna in a dress. Our daughter is also in her yellow floral dress and best shoes and she’s wearing a bib. They’re both wearing hair clips and look as if they’re celebrating something together. It occurs to me that Anna might have a birthday, that I know practically nothing about her, I don’t even know when my child’s mother’s birthday is.
— No, she says, I had my birthday just before I came here, in April. There was just that kind of food smell in the air that made us decide to dress up for the occasion.
Sixty-six
Then I can’t explain what happens next, no matter how many times I go over it in my head. As often as I’d fantasized about the possibility of this happening when I was alone, wrapped under the covers of the sofa bed in the living room, I just can’t fathom what came over me. I’m inclined to think there was no thinking behind it at all.
Anna has washed up when I reenter the kitchen after putting our daughter to bed, and is picking up her toys. For once she isn’t sitting with a book in front of her. She’s in a dress with her hairclip and I sense she’s looking at me in a new way, as if she had something personal to say to me. So I start to pull off my sweater and then unbutton my shirt and loosen my belt. As if I were going to bed or undressing for a doctor. There’s nothing premeditated about it, in fact, I can’t explain why I felt the time was ripe to strip off in the middle of the kitchen floor. She looks at me and I sense a kind of agitation in her when I start to undress out of the blue. In my mind I’ve already gone farther than her, gone the whole way, and I know as soon as I start taking my clothes off that I’m making a mistake. Nevertheless, I keep going, like a man who’s got to complete an embarrassing but urgent task, until I’m standing there naked in the middle of a pile of clothes, a bird in its eider nest, an ostrich that has shed all its feathers. At the same moment I realize that Anna is holding a pen in her hand. It is only at that moment, and not before that moment, that the possibility dawns on me that she might have just intended to ask me to help her with some Latin terms in her genetics book, like a fellow pupil asking for some help with a Latin essay. Would a woman who had other intentions than scribbling notes into the margin of the book that is lying on the table — a woman who, let’s just say for the sake of argument, wanted to make love to a man — be holding a pen in her hand? She looks at me exactly as if she had been on the point of asking me something about the genome and my response had taken her by complete surprise. Next she’ll be asking the Latin genius:
— Do you know what this means? and stoop over the book to read out some tortuous Latin word in the text.
In any case, I’m stark naked, and rather than not do anything at all, I pick up the pile of clothes and dump it on the kitchen chair. Even though my predicament at this moment is a slightly awkward one, I nevertheless don’t feel it’s ludicrous. I’m fortunate enough not to take myself too seriously, not in that sense, not in the naked sense. I’m helped by the fact that my body is still somewhat alien to me. Nevertheless being a male can be tremendously embarrassing; I would sacrifice my entire plant collection including my last six-leaf clover just to know what she’s thinking.
Instead of walking over to me and pointing out the word she doesn’t understand, she smiles from ear to ear. I don’t get women. It’s the most beautiful smile in the world. Then she bursts into a giggle. I’m relieved. I laugh, too. Thank god I’m impervious to ridicule. Now that the body has made such a blunder of things, words have to take over, and as the sand rushes through the imaginary hourglass of my mind, I stumble to find the words to rescue myself. I’m terribly fond of Anna and don’t want to lose her, I don’t want this to make her leave. One word and everything’s saved. One word and everything’s lost. I’m hot. I’m cold. What words could be potent enough to delete this whole naked male body incident from her mind and to turn this situation around? Back to square one in my quest for the truth. No, I’m in the middle of a river with a powerful current sucking me into a vortex, and can’t see the banks; I obviously haven’t learned anything in my twenty-two years.