Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

Ought I also to understand what Dad’s doing?

Towards evening a strange, bluish half-light descends on the streets, while the sky remains bright and clear. This is probably due to the exhaust fumes from the cars for the most part, but it’s quite beautiful.

“You’ve got to rebook my ticket,” I said.

“It’s a discount ticket,” she replied. “It’s not possible to rebook it.”

“Then you’ve got to buy me another one.”

“That will cost an awful lot of money.”

“I expect he can afford it.”

She looked at me in amazement. “Your father, you mean? What makes you think that?”

I thought of saying, “Because Mum said so,” but restrained myself.

“Look around you,” I said instead, “this places reeks of money.”

She was silent for a while and looked at the floor. Then she said, “This is my apartment.”

“So where has all Dad’s money gone?”

She didn’t answer. She drew on her cigar and looked at the floor.

This was unpleasant, as if she thought I ought to know the answer to my own question.

“I shall have a ticket by tomorrow,” I announced.

She sighed. For once she appeared worried, almost sad.

“He’s not going to like this,” she said.

“Who cares what a dog thinks?” I replied.

During the night I heard careful, padding footsteps on the landing outside my room. They weren’t her footsteps, but lighter and more shuffling.

Someone put a key in the lock. Someone opened the door of the room next to mine.

Someone turned on the light. Someone opened a drawer.

If it isn’t a burglar, I thought, then it has to be him.

And he’s walking upright.

The dog is walking on its hind legs.

The wall seemed to be made of cardboard. I could hear someone breathing hoarsely and heavily, just like Dad.

Then there was another clicking sound, as if someone had switched off the light, left the room, closed the door, locked it and shuffled away along the landing.

Carefully and stealthily, I got up.

Someone had left the key in the lock.

I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night, either.

I have packed my things and in a few hours’ time I shall be leaving, so this letter, you see, Mum, will get to you quicker in my own inside pocket than it would if I put it in the post.

I’ve thought about a lot of things in the night.

There are one or two things I’d like to ask you about.

This, for instance: why did she say she’d got Dad from a lady who didn’t want him any more?

That can wait, anyhow. I’ll soon be seeing you.

The room alongside mine was a museum. There were photographs on the walls, drawings and letters which had been written on small pieces of paper, all framed; a lock of hair in a box on the writing desk, a toy car, an old school exercise book and some tattered children’s books.

All the photographs were of me. They were my drawings, my lock of hair—everything was mine.

I was standing, in person, in a mausoleum dedicated to myself.

There was a small bed by the wall. My dark blue winter coat with its fur collar was on the bed, as if someone had just recently put it there.

It was much smaller than I remembered.

There was an air ticket on the table in the lounge. Dad was lying on the sofa in the same position he’d been in when I’d first gone into the room.

I made one last attempt. I got down on all fours in front of him.

“Look, Dad, I’ve turned into a dog too!”

He didn’t move. He looked at me and was silent.

I got up and put the ticket in my pocket.

He began to blink. He uttered a pitiful whine, as if sobbing. Then he was quiet.

And there wasn’t much more to say.

Melaine looked tired.

“I’m sorry it turned out like this,” I said.

She didn’t answer.

“You’ve got to take him to a doctor,” I continued.

“He’s seeing a doctor,” she said abruptly.

I opened the rear door of the car, in order to bundle in my suitcase.

“Turning into a dog is just madness,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” she retorted. “That way he managed to see you before he…”

She broke off into silence.

The suitcase suddenly felt so heavy, I had to put it down on the pavement.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

She looked unhappy. “He forbade me to,” she said.

I sat on my suitcase and looked up at the house, and there he was, upright at the window. He waved. He pressed his face against the windowpane, his lips moving as if he were speaking.

Mum dear, this long letter I’ve been writing during my stay will now have a completely different ending from the one I’d imagined. I’m afraid the post is going to have to take charge of delivery in spite of everything.

I must ask you to ring Hanken and say… well, say what you like.

I don’t know when I’m coming home. Dad and Melaine say I can live with them as long as I like.

Just say that certain things tend to happen which seem to throw one’s life into turmoil, as it were, like one’s dad becoming a dog, for instance.

They’re not going to understand a blind bit of it.

Don’t ask me for explanations. I don’t have any.

BY THE POND IN REYKJAVÍK stands the National Gallery of Iceland, right next to the Independent Church, which my grandmother built, discreetly tucked away, in a building that once burnt down, the same building where hippies created a civilization once upon a time. On the pond swim hundred-year-old swans; the ducks are younger, and above them web-footed seagulls fly and steal bread from the others. Around the pond rise: a preschool; the town hall; a former theatre; the Downtown School, which was an elementary school that became a high school, but I don’t know what the building is used for now; the Girls’ School that boys now get to attend; and the house of the man who is considered to be the first magnate of Iceland.

At the National Gallery, they are exhibiting the work of a foreign artist who has lived in Iceland and is a representative of conceptual art. In the small attic, the Gallery exhibits its treasure— son trésor —works by artists born in Iceland forty to seventy years ago or thereabouts. In the basement, female artists in their forties exhibit videos of parties they held in a cramped room of an international artists’ building in Paris. There the guests played famous and fallen philosophers, movie stars, human rights’ apostles and writers. The female artists played animals with movie cameras attached to their heads.

The woman at the reception asks me to take my coat off when I’ve looked at the exhibitions—12.03 p.m. on a Saturday in the autumn—and show her the sweater I’m wearing. I throw the coat onto the floor, stand tall and show the woman my front and back. She asks whether I sewed the design onto the sweater afterwards, or knitted it in as I went. My sweater displays a picture of an anchor: here is where I live. She tells me about her difficulty in knitting a sweater with a picture of a jeep. She shows me her knitting. I’m the knitting woman’s escort, I confess, she uses this type of knitting needles too, like you—they’re the best needles you can get in Reykjavík, but I don’t know anything about the pattern. The woman smiles and looks at my sweater for a few minutes, before opening the door and letting me out into the autumnal air. I walk up the slope, the same slope my mother walked up daily when she was little, but there were throngs of people on the slope back then, my mother told me, whereas now everyone goes by car, and the people appear in the graffiti on the house walls where the embassies’ flags fly.