Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

For fifteen years I have carried this thing inside me. For fifteen years my dead father has been the unborn child I’ve been carrying in my womb. I guess that’s why I’ve always been on the fat side. By finally giving birth to it I can possibly stop living like an ostrich stuffed with shame. The delivery was painful as hell, but I had this great midwife: an Icelandic priest in a karate outfit. The newborn baby looks like this:

It was at the end of my first week in uniform. We’d volunteered for the big offensive out east, me, my father, and Dario, shortly after the fall of Vukovar. Our assignment was to cross the river Vuka.

But they didn’t want a whole family out in the front lines so they told me to stay behind. “Keep post and shoot every sucker you see!” I spent the cold night with my virgin rifle and chattering teeth, looking after three tents and a jeep. In the distance I could hear rifles arguing like angry insects. An occasional flame would light the leafless woods. My brother and father were out there doing their national duty in the cold forest mud. I was trying hard to distinguish the noise of our rifles from the Serbian ones, hoping the former would silence the latter. But of course we were all using the same fucking weapons. Somewhere not so far away some fat fucker was sleeping his ass off on a comfy mattress made from the profits of war.

Finally it started to snow. The flakes were thick and heavy, as if they were full of dirt already. I grabbed one with the tip of my tongue and it tasted like mud.

Close to daybreak, I heard a voice followed by some rustling of bushes. I reacted instantly, firing my first “manly” shot. I was surprised by my swift and sure reaction. Met with silence, it seemed to be a success. Still, I remained on the trigger for half an hour, for safety’s sake, watching the snowflakes fall on the rifle and my hand, building up a small snowdrift on the barrel, but melting away on my skin. Then I thought I heard that voice again, some low murmuring out in the bushes. I fired another shot. They did not fire back. But the faint murmuring didn’t stop. I remained still for another half an hour, firing a couple of more times, but the voice kept creeping through. So I crawled like an undercover snake to the bushes. Finally, I could make out a body lying buried in the naked branches, talking to himself. He seemed to be wearing our uniform. I cried out a warning before rushing through the shrubs, rifle first.

I found my father lying there with a leaking heart. The lower part of his body was covered in snow, as if his legs were dead already. His face was pale, and his eyes were as big as eggs that instantly broke upon seeing me. He managed to whisper the first half of my name, and then he was gone.

I shot my father and let him lie like a wounded deer out in the bushes for an hour, blabbing his life away. When I finally listened to him, he had only half a word left. “Tod…” The thing I became. It was like a fucking curse.

I accidentally blew off the second half of my name. And the better half of my life.

I stood there for some minutes, staring at the face so close to my own. Snow kept on falling, and I watched as the flakes slowly stopped turning into water on my father’s brow and cheeks and started building up small drifts around his screaming eyes. I was surprised how quickly his fatherly warmth turned cold. I couldn’t touch him. I just walked away from his body, leaving his big eyes open for interpretation.

I didn’t cry.

When they brought me the news of my father, they told me my brother Dario had also died a heroic death. As always, he was on the offensive when he met his destiny. He ran like a Jamaican sprinter towards the Serbian spear speeding towards his heart. It was pure Dario.

They said my father witnessed his death and that he instantly went nuts. He threw himself over his body and then suddenly started crying out my name, “Tomo! Tomo!” before running back to our post without his shotgun.

“Oh?” I said to my fellow soldiers, nodding a few times, as if they were telling me the results of some football games. “But, what about the battle?”

“We took the river bank. We hold the river bank now.”

I have seen that fucking river bank. It fucking sucks.

Hanna’s big hands are incredibly white. Much paler than her arms. It’s almost as if she’s wearing white gloves. Her long and strong fingers move softly about in a very swift but silent way. There is hardly any noise to be heard as she gathers my empty plate and glass. My mom is the absolute opposite. When she was doing the dishes, it always felt like there was a punk band rehearsing out in the kitchen. Maybe Dad didn’t give her enough sex. If that’s the reason, Torture must be biblical in bed.

“Are you feeling better?” she asks me in her homely voice that is red wine to my ears, but rotten to my nose.

“Yes.”

“That is good.”

For some mystical reason she has 100 percent faith in me. I’ll be “góður,” she says half the time. It both means “good” and “to get well.”

Once again I read the story of Saul, the self-made holyman from Tarsus, Turkey. It’s the same story as Goodmoondoor spontaneously told his audience my first night in Iceland, and now it has become the foundation of my recovery, Torture says. I get the point. Like me, this guy also changed his name. And like me he has a bloody past. Yet he became St. Paul, “the father of the church.” I’m sure to become St. Tom, father of something. Hopefully not a church, though.

Deep into my second week in Torture’s basement, Hanna brings me a letter after dinner. She lays it gently on my chest, with a nodding smile that wrinkles her skin around the eyes, and says “read it” before she silently gathers empty dinnerware from my bedside table and goes back upstairs, her great horse tail swaying behind her back, above her round and solid bottom.

I open the letter. It’s handwritten. No e-mails in the house of Abraham. Nice hand. Blue ink. “Dear Thordur.” It’s Father Friendly writing, from his house in Virginia, last October.

“Let me start by thanking you so much for your kind words and the invitation to visit Iceland. The thought of coming all the way up to your exotic island, which I have heard so many fascinating things about, I find very exciting, to say the least.

My good friend Rev. Carl Simonsen has informed me about your excellent work on behalf of the Lord, and I am aware of your friend Engilbertsson’s TV station. I would only be happy to do some shows up there.

It is therefore with great regret that I inform you, that due to my personal situation, I cannot possibly accept your good offer. Last month, my wife Judy had a terrible car accident and will be hospitalized for the next three months at least. As you must understand, this sad situation prevents me from all traveling for the time being. I have postponed everything that includes flying until early spring next year.

Please write me again in 2006.”

Professional but Friendly. The busy brother.

Poor guy. For staying at his wife’s deathbed he was rewarded with his own death. How cruel of me.

The letter is accompanied by an autographed color photo showing the Friendly family standing in front of a big white house that could either be their church, their home, or both. Here is my bald victim with the white collar around his neck and his beaming blonde wife Judy by his side, the woman I was married to for two whole seconds in Goodmoondoor’s car earlier this spring. She’s a southern semi-beauty that could pass for Laura Dern’s well-preserved mother. A Day 7 type. The couple proudly stands behind two kids, about ten and eight years old. One is black, one white. The latter sits in a wheelchair. Like only American women are capable of doing, Mrs. Friendly is smiling so hard she cannot possibly see the camera. She’s blinded by bliss. Actually, they’re all smiling with the same enthusiasm as if they were modeling for the brochure of the best hotel in heaven. The disabled kid has a bit of a disabled smile, though. A touch of disappointment with life in general.