Sölvi Sigurdsson - The Last Days of My Mother

Morphine, Ukrain, Ecstasy. . in my mind’s eye I saw Mother not only fit and strong, but cruising the racetracks of happiness. “I’ve got it!” I exclaimed, bursting into her room. “We’ll go to the Netherlands!”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ll go to Libertas and meet with Dr. Frederik.”

The light in the room deepened and faded away with each word Mother didn’t say, and my belief in the perfect solution choked on her silence. Nearly all her life she had lived with an unpleasant fascination with death, but now, when a thorough examination of her bone marrow confirmed that it was finally time, it was as if she’d never heard that people could actually die. She was in shock.

“It’s not as if I haven’t been dying all along,” she finally said and whimpered a little because all of this started as the tiniest tickle in her belly in Berlin, the night I first made myself known and Willy Nellyson ran off to Italy. “And there I was all alone, Trooper, and then I had you.”

“So the story goes.”

“It’s no story, Hermann, these are stone cold facts. Why did he just up and leave like that? Didn’t even leave a note.”

“I don’t know, but about this clinic—”

“And me, there, all alone in Germany. Look how beautiful he was, tall like a prince and sharp as a sword.”

She handed me the photograph of Willy Nellyson and I remembered why I’d always doubted that this man was my father. Such a paternity claim was as absurd as two weeks of abstinence on Spítala Street. If my looks were a work of fiction, the outcome would be War and Peace or some other endless novel, bulky and thick yet strangely lacking in mass. A paperback. Willy Nellyson, however, was a tall, willowy man with a few stray hairs growing out of his chin, reminiscent of some sort of academic catfish, so peculiarly hunched that he seemed to have had his bones removed, perhaps during the war, so that he could be conveniently folded into a carry-on bag. He had betrayed Mother by running off after I was conceived and, according to her — this was something she said over and again — something within her died after his getaway, something she never got back, scarring her for life. Her epic death flowed like a branching river through my childhood, in different versions that all confirmed the same thing: men were a dubious species poisoning the lives of striking women. Only one thing distinguished Willy Nellyson: he had the perfect cock. This I deduced from a carved ebony dildo Mother kept on the top shelf of the living room cupboard, and which she’d taken down on my thirteenth birthday, handed it over with gusto and said: “This, Trooper, is your father’s penis.” I fondled the wood as if it held promises of a great future and waited, for years and without reward, for my father’s heritage to manifest itself between my legs.

“How strange a lifetime is. Over sixty years and then. .”

She looked defeated. I retreated out of the room and started to ramble dead drunk around the apartment, my mind wandering aimlessly, to Dublin, Moscow, and the distant features of Zola. The next morning I woke up hung over; Ukrain and Libertas only scattered images in a saturated mind. Mother? Dying? Amsterdam? The silence of the room grew in proportion with the stench of my bed sheets and for three, four — perhaps five — days, depression inhabited Spítala Street.

But as Mother said every so often: One week is Yang and the other Yin. Sometimes you just need time to put things in perspective. I had almost given up on the idea of the Netherlands when I saw a TV report on how lively Amsterdam was. Bit by bit things started to look up again. I contacted Libertas and received brochures with information and rates, spent my savings on a five-star hotel in Amsterdam, and finally sat down with Mother to discuss things. It took a few days to explain to her what this trip really entailed; leaving Iceland once and for all — the final journey. Her heartbreak was unbridled for a couple days, but then she composed herself. On Saturday evening she appeared in the attic, a bottle of sherry in hand, and told me that she’d browsed through the brochures. The lightness that had engulfed me that first night made a cautious comeback with a touch of grounded strategy. Great expectations swarmed beneath the surface.

“I got out my cards and let them decide. I don’t expect to recover, Trooper. I’ve come to terms with the inevitable. The end is near, but not here yet. I’ve never seen cards like this before. Do you think that your dreams can come true, even moments before you die?”

I squeezed her hand and the next morning I confirmed our booking with Libertas. The following days were spent preparing for departure. Now we stood groggy in the airport terminal rubbing the last remnants of sleep from our eyes. For a second I tried to imagine what lay in store for us on the other side of the ocean, but the thought flew away before I could catch it.

“Ahhh,” Mother sighed, walking into the Duty Free area, as if she’d just repeated the Feat of the Long Walk to the Irish pub on her fiftieth birthday. I was becoming increasingly depressed by how much everything had changed since I was last here. The Duty Free store had been moved to another part of the building, I wasn’t going away to Ireland with Zola. My face drooped involuntarily, stunned by the ruthlessness of the separation.

I was still at the mercy of such fits of melancholy. The slightest reminder of Zola had similar effects as cannabis poisoning: I’d grow pale and become inconsolable without the omnipresence of high-calorie snacks. Remembering Zola’s obsession with ballet and folk music did nothing to ease the pain. For seven blissful years she’d filled my life with a buoyancy that transported me from one place to another, without the anguish and defeat that usually defined my existence. She was relentlessly horny, like a fly that only has a single day to procreate, and she made me try all sorts of things I had little to no knowledge of beforehand.

My fascination with her body didn’t fade, even though she suddenly had enough one day, diverting her impulses and appetites instead toward confectionaries, dismissing me as a graduate from the university of love. The fun and games were over. We’d have sex on a monthly basis, going through the motions out of duty or to avoid a bulletproof reason for going our separate ways. I’d see the female form everywhere, in the most mundane things, like a toothbrush, but Zola was lost to me. It never crossed my mind that these were symptoms of a dying love, that I would stumble naked around hotel rooms where some of the most meaningless sex acts in the world were performed with my involvement. What followed were attacks of self-pity, overeating, and intensive staring into refilled sherry bottles during the months I moved back into Mother’s attic.

“Hermann!” Mother shook me as I stood shuddering in the camera department. “Are you lost in space?”

“Yes. Well. No.”

“I’m going to have a drink at the bar. Knowing you, you’ll be here for a while spending money on junk.”

We parted ways and I wandered around the camera section where a tanned couple straight out of a magazine glided between the shelves. The boy looked like a professional athlete and the girl like Miss California, lean and blonde with endless legs. Their appeal was so conventional that they could have been off-the-rack, like her short denim dress. I almost bumped into them when she suddenly charged and snaked her body around the boy’s, who reacted like a defense basketball player to swiftly secure a position for them between the Samsungs and the Sonys to swap spit. I was relieved when the whiff of animal fat seduced me into the Food Market, where I bought gum and a newspaper, then filled out a questionnaire on Icelandic lamb. I did this in part to make up for Mother’s loathing of any and all surveys, which she regarded as an evil of capitalism and mass surveillance. When I found her at the bar she was staring into the mirror, sporting huge sunglasses.