Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

The TV had almost done me in one Friday morning when the phone rang, cutting through a special report on the link between cancer and artificial sweeteners. It was Helena. She said she had been thinking about what I’d said and wanted to meet up — it was important not only for Mother and Duncan, but also for everyone involved. I didn’t ask her to explain, but agreed to meet her later that day by the main entrance of something she called “Artis.”

“You’ll find it!” she said and hung up before I had a chance to ask for directions.

*

Artis turned out to be the name of the Amsterdam Zoo, which was just a ten-minute walk from the hotel. I arrived a good half-hour before the agreed time and I sauntered through the gates. Wherever I looked there were people strolling about in the sun, little kids with cotton candy and excited school children running around yelling at their imprisoned monkey cousins. In order to avoid the commotion, I first took a seat on a bench and then got up and walked in the opposite direction of the kids.

The zoo was built in the early nineteenth century and had a cozy old-world charm. Two golden eagles stretched out from a solid brass gate at the entrance, which was sheltered by a tunnel of trees surrounded by sculptures and glass pavilions with copper filigree. Whenever I visited such places abroad, I was reminded of the ugly streets of Reykjavík. The contrast of this garden to a street like Sídumúli, for instance, was just overwhelming. Part of the problem was the dubious city planning of talking apes like Danni Klambra, who claimed that Reykjavik’s providence was embedded in the plastic houses he and his father had planned for the city center. Although there was no arguing that the Klambra boys were the human equivalent to a scrap heap, their aesthetic sensibilities were not unique. It was a global trade. Even here in Amsterdam you could find buildings that were acts of terror toward people with human emotions.

I stood in front of a menagerie of endangered European mammals wishing there was similar cage for Danni Klambra, wondering if the problem could be traced to the same degenerate hole spawning the news on TV. Two World Wars, nuclear bombs, and genocide had not sufficed to cull our numbers; we reproduced like termites and eliminated other species that stood in our way. Was there any hope? For me? For Mother? I was submerged in these pessimistic thoughts when I caught a glimpse of my watch and realized Helena could appear any minute. I walked back to the entrance and found her at the ticket booth.

“Hi.” She took me by the hand and led me to a restaurant within the zoo. “I’ve been thinking about what you said and I think you’re right: you’ll never be able to forgive yourself if you mess it up for those closest to you.”

We waited while a waiter in a green uniform took our order and brought us a couple of Cokes; then she continued.

“The thing is that I’ve always done everything my way. When I was fifteen I took off from Highland and moved into a closet with two gays on Koestraat. I felt the rest of the world could just fuck off. I had lost my mother and ended up with Duncan against my will. He took me in because no one else knew what to do with me, and I don’t know if I’ve ever forgiven him for his kindness. It wasn’t Duncan’s fault that I lost my mom, but I blamed him because he took her place. And what happens is that you get stuck in some hole that you can’t get back out of. I was just a kid, of course, but I often think that I was quite selfish. There must have been others who were sad as well.”

She seemed to be slowly honing in on the purpose of this meeting. I still didn’t quite grasp how she and Duncan were connected, but I sensed that I was a participant in the solution of this philosophical issue of having a parent.

“Maybe it’s just selfish wanting to fix things if the only goal is to be able to forgive yourself,” she went on. “But still. Isn’t all sense of morality selfish by that definition? I suppose it’s childish to think like this. I come to some conclusion confirming how mature I am, but then it makes no sense to me after a few months. I want to know. Do I think that I’m wise because I’ve really grown up or because I’m young and stupid? To be young — is that to want to change the world? Or is it all a cliché? I suppose there’s no way of knowing what the future version of yourself will be.”

I would have liked to agree, claim life didn’t map out the future in any way but kept you in constant excitement , that we floated in a happy vacuum toward the next unexpected miracle. A long time ago I had thought these same thoughts, felt the mutations in my soul, experienced diversity in the constant progression of the days, and thought that the concept of maturity was synonymous with wisdom and inner peace, long before the love in my heart outweighed the sorrow it had become.

“If you really were young and stupid you’d never imagine you were young and stupid,” I said.

“But that doesn’t mean that I’m an adult. I’m simply starting to doubt all of this.”

“To simply doubt everything is to be an adult.”

“I don’t think you’re as messed up as you claim to be. If you were that stagnant, you’d never have come on this trip.”

“Well. I do have the body of a sixty-year-old woman, according to my doctor.”

She finished her Coke and returned to the subject, talking about Duncan’s illness, which was the reason she called me in the first place. He had one of those types of cancer people somehow learn to live with, never quite at death’s door but still only half there. Now he hung out at home in Highland using his illness as an excuse for doing nothing, which was very unlike the old Duncan, who felt that everything but dancing on tables was a waste of time.

“So I was thinking — if your mom’s lonely and Duncan’s lonely, maybe we should arrange for them to meet.”

I was beginning to see the light. Milan Kundera and the Knight in the Kilt embodied in a dying lord in the countryside. .

“I know it’s a bit far-fetched,” she said, cutting off the violins that had started playing in my head, “but it wouldn’t hurt having a little party. It was Gloria’s idea. She thinks the two of them might hit it off.”

“So this is the professional opinion of a matchmaker?”

“Exactly. This is a professional opinion.”

We stood up and sealed the deal with a handshake before strolling back to the gate. We would meet in Lowland at the end of August after Helena came back from her trip and when the guesthouse restaurant would be available for a garden party, some nice afternoon when the hottest summer days were over.

I was happy to have a few weeks to prepare for the party. Ambiguous activity scratched at my core and wouldn’t let me be no matter how I tried to ignore it. Black, white, black, white, black: this sudden dazzling light in the eyes of my emotional life had steadily amplified over the past weeks. I was gripped by extreme optimism that immediately vaporized into the grayness of rainclouds until it opened up again and retreated, hovering for a moment until I came to myself and everything went still, just a slight breeze under the cloud bank; I sat down and surrendered to the gloom.

When I returned to the hotel there was a party in the lobby. My good friend Dmitri wanted me to drink a Guinness with champagne to show foreign guests how people had survived in Iceland since the ninth century, but I wasn’t in the mood.

Instead I made some chai and exposed myself to the bathroom mirror. I just had to lean a little to the right for my body to be entirely on one side. My torso actually resembled another face: the eyebrows of the red nipple-eyes had not been groomed for a very long time, the round bellybutton-mouth was slightly droopy and adorned with a moustache, surprised by an ever-expanding chin that seemed to stretch further out into the world, munching on the only organ of mine that had the slightest potential of having an impact on the future.