Yet the cracks were starting to show. We’d moved abroad to get away from it all but somehow ended up with Icelandair’s most common export; our apartment became a haven for binge drinking friends who wanted a weekend off, worn out and overworked, tormented by sleet and something they called “Despiceland Syndrome”—one of those viral concepts from some TV show that people used and abused to express their disdain for Iceland. I had no idea we had so many friends in Reykjavik and was taken aback by the constant turnaround on our living room couch of different bodies; naked, snoring, and even fucking. When an old classmate of Zola’s from elementary school called and asked to stay while she held a three-week art exhibition on Grafton Street I was so miserable that I threw up on one of her paintings and took a thirteen-hour walk out of the city, ending up in a hotel room by an emerald lake complete with a couple of romantic swans. There was no phone in my room and I didn’t reach Zola until the next afternoon. She forgave me, but that was the beginning of the end.
I still don’t know why the move to Dublin was so ill-fated, what forces finally tore us apart. I had loved Zola with a fervor that I couldn’t put into words, but that was the gauge for all my days and dreams for the future. When she left me I broke. I cried, filling up the glasses I downed in Dublin’s hotel minibars until I returned to Iceland a ruined man, red-eyed and crushed by a despair I thought I could never shake. A couple of days later I moved in with Mother.
As soon as the plane takes off from Keflavik she turns to me, on her third drink, as if she’d been listening in on my thoughts: “You know, Trooper, nothing has grieved me more than love.”
Chapter 3
Four hours later we found ourselves outside the terminal building in Amsterdam. Shards of sunlight pierced the thick cloud lining and formed a rainbow over the parking lot. I felt like I was in an ad for a cellphone company with a theme of Nordic happiness and that I should call all my friends at fantastic roaming rates. The filtered rays cast a gray hue over the morning and reminded me of Lóa, a school friend who’d abused tanning beds and ended up with melanoma. It turned out that I didn’t have the maturity or strength of character to stand by her in her illness and she put an end to our friendship from her hospital bed, paler than she’d ever been, one foot in the grave. Years later, around the time Zola and I were breaking up, when I had as good as buried the incident, Mother pointed out that I was hardly likely to hold on to a woman when even the dying felt they were better off without me. She had a knack for putting the events of my life in context; the harsher the statement, the truer it rang. Like a veiled subconscious with make-up, she knew me better than the feet that carried me.
“I’ll wait here while you find us a car,” she said and sat down on a bench. I left her there with our luggage and walked toward an old fashioned car I’d spotted out in the parking lot. The car had a Libertas logo on its side doors and leaning against it was a short and slender man in his forties with black hair, dressed in a white shirt and khakis.
“Mister Hermann Willyson, sir?” he asked in English. “I am your driver. I shall drive you to Lowland.”
“Hello,” I said, offering my hand. “I think Mother and I need to check in at the hotel first and get rid of our luggage, if that’s okay? My mother is, well. . it’s been a long journey.”
“Very good, sir. I shall drive you.”
I walked back to Mother, who was stubbing out a cigarette on the sidewalk. The driver followed and stopped by the bench. “Mam Briem, Mam, I am the driver,” he said and smiled, picked up her bags, and walked back to the car.
“We have a chauffeur? How fancy.”
I took her arm and led her to the car, which impressed her just as much as the driver. When we drove off he turned down the Bollywood music blaring from the radio. “Mam Briem, Mam,” he said when we got out on the freeway.
“Eva,” Mother insisted. “For heaven’s sake call me Eva.”
“Eva, Mam? OK. Does EvaMam want to go to the hotel, Mam, or straight to Lowland?”
“Whatever suits you best, dear. I’m up for anything.”
She leaned back and stared out the window. The seats were soft and the view clear through the large, untainted windows that made Mother admire the vehicle even more. “We’ll go to the hotel,” I said, leaning toward the driver. “Mother needs to. .”
“Nei, nei, nei,” she said slowly but loudly, with her legs stretched out over the backseat. “No special needs, bitte schön, not on my behalf. As if we’re not perfectly fine here in this luxury?” She waved a cigarette over the driver’s head to indicate that she would like to smoke in the car, and within seconds the interior became a version of my past. The acrid smell awoke memories of being carsick in Mother’s friend’s minivan during poorly-air-conditioned road trips. I rolled down my window and breathed in Holland. Mother was in her own world so when I pulled my head back into the car I felt duty-bound to strike up a conversation with the driver and asked about the car.
“It’s an Ambassador, sir. Indian car. 1800 ISZ.”
“Oh? I didn’t know you could get them here.”
“I brought it with me from Nainital, sir. That is my town in India.”
“And did you drive all that way?”
“Exactly, sir. I drove.”
“That must have been some road trip?”
“Yes, sir.” He seemed determined not to be tricked into a lengthy conversation but after a long pause he added: “I got a new engine in Carta.”
I liked this reserved driver. A man who drove over 6,000 miles across two continents and found the most notable part of the journey when he changed his engine, had to be a very responsible driver. The traffic thinned the farther we got from the city. The driver pointed to a sign in Dutch and turned off the highway onto a narrow road that cut through a rural area. Farmhouses appeared sporadically in the fields until we came to a place where a few buildings convened around a small church building. Next to the church stood a restaurant and a large house with the Dutch flag flying high. Two men sat on the porch in front of the restaurant staring into their beers while a young woman seemed to be giving them an earful, gesturing in frustration and then walking off. Spring was sneaking into Lowland. Squirrels nibbled on seeds by the roadside while the sun baked the winding track and disappeared behind the trees. In the outskirts of the hamlet lay an even narrower trail to a gate with the name “Libertas” on it, and an alley of trees running through the grounds. The driver got out to open the gate, then got back behind the wheel and burped like he had done every fifteen minutes since we left the airport. He would later explain that people who ate spicy food every day had a livelier gastric system than salad eaters and that there was no point in trying to contain the burping.
I felt my mind and body relax as we drove under the continuous canopy. It was serene, the weather was still, and nothing disrupted the silence except the soft purr of the engine. I rolled down the window again and felt the crisp coolness left by the morning rain seep into the car. The humid breath of the foliage made the earth smell of carbon, rotting wood, and the vegetation that winter had concealed beneath snow. I found myself staring at a few extremely thin men with golf clubs standing on the other side of the tree tunnel. They were ashen and almost transparent compared to the robes hanging loosely on their skeletal frames. Once in a while they stopped in the groves and swung their clubs without discernable results, like a bunch of happy corpses.