— There, he finally says, walking toward me with a tape in his hand. You can learn a lot about women’s feelings by watching Antonioni. Have you got a video player yet?
Seventy-four
I sense a mounting restlessness in Anna. Yet everything seems normal on the surface. Even though she’s behaving pretty much as she should, I suddenly feel I’m running out of time.
— What? she asks. You’re staring at me so intensely and look all kinds of worried, and you’ve got that same accusing expression that Flóra Sól has when she’s looking at me.
— Are you leaving? I ask as nonchalantly as I possibly can, but I feel my voice is trembling.
— Yes, she says.
To be honest, I was starting to believe that my hunch was groundless. But life has a habit of surprising you like that: when you’re expecting something good, something bad happens; when you’re expecting something bad, something good happens. I’m quoting from a movie, a boring western in this case that I saw before I started watching quality movies with the priest.
— When?
— The day after tomorrow. I’ve done as much as I could here; I’ve reached a conclusion.
I don’t dare ask her what conclusion it is, whether it’s linked to scientific research or our relationship, so I stick to film dialogue instead. I long to say to her that, if she’s willing to give our relationship a chance, then everything might be different than she expected. Everything is crumbling inside me, but I don’t let on.
— Sorry, she says softly. You’re a wonderful guy, Arnljótur, kind and generous; it’s just something with me, I’m so confused.
I feel dizzy, as if I’m losing touch with my surroundings, and my nose suddenly starts to bleed. I drag the stream of blood, like a red veil, behind me to the sink. I suck it up my nostrils, lean my head back, swallow the blood, and hold on to the edge of the sink. There’s a torrent of blood, like some sacrificial ritual is taking place and an animal is being led to the slaughter.
Anna gets a wet cloth and helps me to wipe the blood off. She looks worried.
— Are you OK? she asks.
I sit down at the kitchen table and lean my head back. Anna stands on the floor in front of me; she’s wearing a fuchsia sweater, a very special color I’ve never seen before.
— Are you absolutely sure you’re OK? she asks again.
We’re both silent; then looking down she hesitantly says:
— I feel there’s so much I have to do before I become a mother.
I take the cloth away from my nose; it seems to have stopped bleeding. There’s no point in me telling her that she already is a mother.
— I’m just not ready to have a child straight away, she says, as if we were still a childless couple planning our future. She’s silent for a brief moment.
— I’m incredibly fond of you, but I just want to be alone — for a few years — and find myself and finish my degree. I feel I’m too young to found a family straight away, says the two-years-older genetics expert.
I clutch the cloth in my hand; it’s red from the blood and there are splatters of red on my shirt, too.
— You and Flóra Sól get on so well, much better than I do, she adds. You immediately became so close and are always doing something fun together, and you’ve created this world for the two of you that I feel I’m not a part of. I mean, you’re both left-handed, she swiftly adds.
— But she’s just a kid.
— You always agree with each other.
— What do you mean?
— You even speak Latin together. I feel I’m one too many.
— It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say she speaks Latin. She knows a few words, five or ten, I say, probably seven, I add after thinking it over a short moment. She just picked up a few words at the masses. Kids do things like that.
— Ten months old?
— Of course, I don’t have any experience of other children.
— I don’t get as much out of the mother role as you do out of the father role.
— Maybe I just wanted to attract your attention, to impress you.
— By teaching her Latin?
— By taking good care of her. And you, too, I say very softly.
— You’re a great guy, Arnljótur, she repeats, good and intelligent. Then she says she’s very fond of me.
— These forty days have been wonderful, she continues, but I can’t expect you to hang around waiting for me, she says, burying her face in her hands, while I’m finding myself, I mean.
— No, I say, you can’t. Still though, she could always try asking me to wait, I think to myself.
Seventy-five
The last night is like a long and excessively slow memory. It’s a blue night, and I move cautiously in the bed to avoid waking Anna. She’s breathing deeply. I try to slow down my own breathing to bring it into sync with hers, without falling asleep myself. I’m right up against her, but no matter how tightly we lie together, there’s an ocean between us because we’re not one. I feel like I’m losing her like I lost Mom on the phone, like black sand running through my fingers, no, like a wave leaking through my fingers. And I’m left sitting there, licking my salty fingers.
I can’t sleep a wink, but instead try to slow down time and devise something that will stop her from leaving. I can’t lose Flóra Sól either. I feel like I have to guess something, anything really, to be able hold Anna back. I might unexpectedly get the right answer, like on those TV quizzes, and end up taking the jackpot home.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, I try to reason with myself. I feel like I’m in the middle of a swarm of crazy arctic terns, being assailed from all sides and unable to think of any way of protecting myself. Since I can’t chain myself to her like a pacifist to a tank, it occurs to me that I could maybe show her some place she would be unable to resist and that would make her quickly change her mind.
She has to get the train at nine, but at seven she’s still mine to hold, and I grope under the sheets, stalling the menace of the rising dawn. Day breaks through the curtains in the same violet as that of the skinned wild boar at the butcher’s. Then she’s suddenly awake and I haven’t slept all night. She seems confused. Our daughter is still sleeping soundly.
— I had a really weird dream, she says. I dreamed your were in new blue boots with Flóra Sól in your arms and she was also in identical new blue boots, except they were tiny. You were in the rose garden but there was no other color in the dream, not even the roses, just the blue boots. Then I was suddenly in a narrow alley and I could see you going up a long stairway and disappearing behind a door. I knocked on the door and you answered with Flóra Sól in your arms and invited me in for tea.
Then it just blurts out of me without warning:
— Maybe we’ll have another child together, later. I say this without daring to look at her.
— Yeah, she says. We might.
We both get out of bed. I’m standing right in front of the mirror and I take Anna’s arm and gently tow her until we’re both reflected in the mirror, like a studio family photograph, set in a carved gilded frame, as if we were formally acknowledging our forty days of cohabitation. I’m pale and skinny and she’s pale, too. Our daughter stands behind us, having just woken up in her cot, and smiling from ear to ear, with her rosy cheeks and dimples on her elbows, so the whole family is in frame now.
— You can have Flóra Sól, she says suddenly in a low voice, as if she were reading a new script for the first time, as if she were trying to fit the words to the circumstances. She’s looking me in the eye through the mirror.