Auður Ólafsdóttir - The Greenhouse

Lobbi lad. There is much to be remembered and to be thankful for over the past year. Jósef and myself send you our warmest regards and hope that these unpretentious pajamas will come in useful in those “perilous storms” (his quotation marks on the card) they have overseas.

Yours, Dad and Jósef.

He has even got Jósef to scrawl his initials underneath. What did he mean by “unpretentious”? He knows I normally sleep in my underpants; is it pretentious to sleep without pajamas the way I do?

I’m going to get out of bed in my bare feet, but the stitches hurt and I feel dizzy. I feel how heavy I am, as if I were up to my knees against a strong current, so I lie down again and doze off.

When I wake up again there’s a woman in a white coat standing by my bed, with long brown hair tied in a ponytail, but she’s not the same one as the last time. I get some sweetened teabag tea to drink and a slice of toast with cheese. She talks to me, as I drink the tea, and shows some interest in the plants.

— What species is this? she asks.

I choose words that are befitting to this new lease on life.

— Eight-petaled roses, I say, in an unrecognizable, husky voice.

— Are they all the same species?

— Yes, two of them are extra cuttings, in case one dies, to produce some offspring, I say with a thick tongue and in this stranger’s voice; my body and voice don’t seem to match anymore.

— Your voice will soon come back to you, she says, that’s the anesthetic.

I’m incredibly sleepy and feel I’m dropping off again, as if I can neither shake off my dreams nor stay awake.

The next time I wake up there are two people in white coats standing on either side of my bed talking to each other. One of them lifts up the duvet on my bandaged side, and although I manage to grasp a few words here and there, they’re talking fast and I can’t place the sentences in any context. I’m still finding it difficult to stay awake. They’re talking about me, asking me about something, and as I try to formulate an answer I start to fade again, dozing off mid-conversation.

— He’s out of it, let’s just let him sleep, is the last thing I hear.

Because I regularly fall asleep when people try to talk to me, I get to stay two days longer in the hospital. No one makes any remarks about the rose cuttings; each new shift seems to be filled in and I’m allowed to keep them in peace.

Every time I doze off I have the same dream. I dream I’m in new and pretty good blue Wellingtons and that I’m working in a famous and remote rose garden. I have a clear picture of the boots as I awaken; they’re probably one size too big. Nothing else is in color in the dream, not even the roses, just the blue boots. Then the dream takes a sudden twist, which I’m forced to follow. Looking down a narrow alley, I see Mom standing at the end of it, silhouetted against the light. I follow her in the blue boots up a long staircase and to a door she disappears behind. I knock on the door and she comes to it. She offers me teabag tea with sugar.

When I finally wake up properly, I’ve missed three days on the calendar. Now that I’m alive again there are countless options open to me. Because I wake up in a sweat after the dream, the nurse who is on duty on my last morning at the hospital wants me to have a shower before I check out. I follow her to the bathroom, taking one short step at a time because the stitches hurt. This one has brown eyes, too, but short brown hair. I would have preferred to be left alone, but she stands there watching me, in case something happens to me, I suppose; there’s no denying that the women who have been looking after me have shown great care. I shed my hospital clothes and place them on a chair in front of the bathroom mirror. When I step out of the shower she has already wiped the steam off the mirror. I contemplate my mortal flesh as she changes the bandage on the right-hand side of my stomach. Black bristles protrude from the skin. Right now, the moment after I’ve stepped out of the shower with the nurse on my left-hand side, I feel like I’m nothing more than this new body with a scar. Feelings, memories, and dreams no longer make me what I am, but I’m first and foremost a male body made of flesh and blood. Having experienced death and resurrection and communicated with three brown-eyed nurses in as many days, I graduate from the hospital and am given a box with four pink painkillers to take home with me.

I get dressed and pack the rose cuttings back into my backpack along with the plant collection and pajamas. When I dig into the backpack in search of a clean T-shirt to put on, I find Mom’s last jar of rhubarb jam, which Dad stuck in there. The nurse hands me a few sheets of newspaper to wrap around the plants, and I immediately notice they’re theater reviews.

— Do you have anyone to go to? the doctor who checks me out asks.

I tell him I’ll be in good hands.

The only challenge I face in this life right now is zipping up the fly on my jeans. I do my best to fend for myself and manage to slip into my pants unassisted, but I’m sore around the wound, and in the end the brown-eyed woman comes to my rescue.

I ring Dad from a phone booth on the way out of the hospital. I clear my throat several times while the phone is ringing and tell him as nonchalantly as possible that I unexpectedly had to have my appendix out. I do my best to strike a casual tone, but my voice is all husky and weird, as if some total stranger had stepped in to dub the first chapters of this brief autobiographical film of my life, and all of a sudden I’m almost crying.

Dad wants me to come home on the next plane. When I tell him it’s out of the question, he wants to fly out himself and take care of me while I’m recovering. I can hear he’s worried.

— Your mother would have wanted that, he says. Actually I’ve been wanting to take Jósef abroad for some time, he adds. He likes flying.

I tell him how things are, that I’ve been loaned an apartment.

— A student’s cubbyhole way up on the sixth floor, with no elevator.

— Well then, Jósef and I will just stay at the inn.

He talks like someone out of an old book, as if there were only one inn in the entire city. As if they half expected to be given no shelter because the guesthouse would be full and they’d have to sleep in a barn.

It takes me a good while to convince my father, who is just three years away from being eighty and on the point of hopping on a plane with his handicapped son, that I don’t need anyone to take care of me. I struggle to revive my voice and tell him not to worry, that I’m going to be staying with my friend who is studying archaeology here.

— You remember Thórgun, I say, the girl who was in my class for the whole of primary school and often came home with me, the one who played the cello, with glasses and braces.

She was also actually in secondary school with me, too, but had stopped coming home with me by then. Then I’d bumped into her in a flower shop when she was back in the country on vacation; I needed some fertilizer and she held a viola cornuta. On the way out she informally invited me to come over and stay with her.

— It’s a very nice apartment she has, I now say, having previously given him the impression that it was a student slum — I’ll be quick to recover there. She’ll definitely cook for me, I quickly add to appease my father, who’s always protective of his twins, his only children. What I don’t tell him is that the archaeology student is, in fact, away for a week, looking at graveyards in two towns and broadening her horizons.