The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

by Sjón

  The Tiger gave a bus ticket to a drunk, turning his face away because the man’s clothes smelled so rank. He looked for the fat man, but couldn’t see him. He spat out one of his rants at the road in front of him: “Roads … roads … all the roads we have walked, when the world is done for. Where are you, fatty? Where are you? Do you think the Tiger’s frightened? A tiger who’s seen all the roads, afraid of a sheep!”

  He hadn’t prepared a specific plan for getting rid of the fat man. All he’d decided was that he’d bury him and rid himself of the ghost of his shitty past forever. Once, when the fat man spoke to him, he’d made a strange request: that the Tiger take him for a drive around a forest by night—it didn’t matter which particular forest. At first, the Tiger tried to ignore this man’s weird and foolish words, but his appearances and disappearances so unnerved the Tiger that he asked his Moroccan friend to get him the pistol.

  The Tiger drove the bus back and forth along his route. His shift was due to finish at two o’clock in the morning. The fat man appeared, just before midnight, at the bus stop close to the public swimming pool. The Tiger kept a close watch on him, in case this ghost disappeared again.

  The last passengers got off at the final stop. When the fat man tried to alight, the Tiger closed all the doors and moved off quickly, changing course. The fat man laughed and asked, “What are you doing, man?”

  The bus’s absence would soon be discovered. It was a stupid, reckless act by an ageing tiger; there was only an hour before the bus had to be back in the depot. But the Tiger was in another world. His anger blinded him and paralysed his thinking.

  From the back of the bus, the fat man shouted out in derision: “Are you going to kidnap a dead man? Well, if we’re going to the forest, then fine.”

  The Tiger didn’t really answer, just threw him one of his rants. “Dead, alive, it’s all the same. I’m dead and alive. You’re alive and dead. So what? Do you think you’re a scarecrow and I’m a crow? It’s amazing, these questions of the dead and the living. They don’t repent and they never learn … Today I’m going to teach you!”

  The bus crossed the main road towards the dirt track that led to the forest. The man moved up and sat close to the Tiger. He rambled on about various subjects—the past, coincidence, water, war and peace. The fat man said that over the past years he’d not only been interested in looking for the Tiger but also in piecing together the events that led to his murder. He said he’d often spoken to others about his death. The fat man put a cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it. Then he took it out of his lips and started to tell the Tiger his story:

  “That night I was driving my old Volkswagen, with a little pomegranate tree in the back of the car. The branches were sticking out of the window and the cool night breeze was refreshing. My only daughter had leukaemia and we’d been taking her from one hospital to another. But her condition was deteriorating as time passed. I tried getting blessings from holy men, and when I despaired of them, I went to fortune-tellers and magicians. An old woman well known for her psychic powers told me to plant a pomegranate tree in an orchard where pomegranates already grow, and that I should do this at night, without telling anyone. ‘Give life its fruit so that it will give you its fruits,’ the old woman said.

  “‘And why a pomegranate?’ I asked her.

  “‘Every one of us is also something else—a pomegranate, a flower or some other living thing. He who knows how to move between himself and his other lives will have the doors of serenity and well-being opened for him,’ the old woman answered.

  “‘Excuse me, but why can’t it be an orange tree or a grape vine?’ I asked her.

  “‘Oranges cure nightmares and grapes are for treating grief, whereas the pomegranate is the pure blood of your daughter,’ the old woman said, and then asked me to leave.

  “I would have liked to ask her some more questions, but the psychic said that too many questions undermined the power of mystery. I didn’t understand what she meant. I was thinking about the requirement that I plant the tree by night and in secret. I was desperate, and willing to do anything that might improve the health of the flower of my life, my only daughter.

  “I drove there by night. I parked the car and took out the pomegranate tree and a spade. I cut the barbed wire and went deep into the orchard. I chose a suitable place. While I was digging, I heard gunshots. I didn’t pay much attention because the farmers in those parts used rifles every now and then. It might have been a wedding. I was kneeling next to the tree and levelling the soil when you suddenly appeared between the trees and aimed your pistol at me. It was pitch black. But you opened fire and killed me. Why?”

  The Tiger didn’t believe the fat man’s story. That night, he’d chased and killed a member of the water gangs. Yes, it was true that the wretch had begged for mercy and said something about his tree. But the Tiger hadn’t seen his face in the dark, so why should he believe it was the fat man? Confused, the Tiger summoned up his courage once more. He had only one thing in mind: getting rid of this ghost of the past that had risen up from underground. The Tiger held his tongue for the rest of the journey.

  Inside the forest he stopped the bus, waved his pistol in the fat man’s face and forced him out. He was inclined to stick the barrel in the fat man’s back there and then, but he was frightened of doing so. Could he really shoot a ghost?

  The fat man made fun of him. “You’ve already killed me, man,” he said. “What are you doing?” Then he made a run for it.

  The Tiger opened fire, but the fat man didn’t fall. He was running like an athletic young man. The Tiger chased him between the trees and in the darkness a shiver ran across his skin and he felt that he was back in the pomegranate orchard that night, as if the fat man, the bus, the snow, his son and Finland were just a waking dream in his head, as if he were still there, a strong Tiger, hunting down his victims in the vicious water wars, without hesitation.

  Through the open window the Tiger caught sight of a shadow in the orchard. He fired a bullet into the head of the girl in the kitchen. Then he jumped through the window and ran after the shadow of the man who had escaped. He heard the sound of footsteps breaking dry twigs. Then he caught sight of another man sitting, levelling the soil around a pomegranate tree. He ran past him and continued to chase the man who had escaped.

  The forest came to an end and opened out onto the frozen lake. The Tiger kept chasing him over the icy surface. Finally the man who had escaped came to a halt. The Tiger came up to him, aiming his pistol at the man’s face. The man from the water gang quickly raised his hand and pointed his own pistol in the Tiger’s face, and shots rang out.

  Blood flowed across the icy surface of the lake.

  TRANSLATED BY JONATHAN WRIGHT

  ZOMBIELAND

  (extracts from the novel)

  SØRINE STEENHOLDT

  MOTHER IS JUST A WORD

  IT IS UNCOMFORTABLE to stand so close. They must live simple lives, these people, who are here to send my mother off on her final journey. I start to feel angry. I can see that the man standing next to me has not bothered to shower. He still has bed-head. I can see that he has sleep in his eyes, yellowish gunk stuck in the corners because he hasn’t washed his face yet. The woman on the other side of me has at least tried to do something with herself. Her hair has been washed and tied up tightly into a ponytail. She coughs, and I see her teeth, which haven’t been brushed for many years. She smells of smoke, and her fingernails are brownish-yellow. Standing next to her is a man, who I’m sure is wearing his best jacket. It’s too nice to wear just any day. It’s too big for him, though, and it makes him look comical in a sad way in contrast to his threadbare, washed-out jeans with holes in the knees. He pulls a small bottle of schnapps out of his inside pocket and takes a drink.

  I’m being choked by my Greenlandic national costume as well by my thoughts. The heavy beaded collar is making my brow sweat, the dark thoughts are making me claustrophobic. I can’t bear the beads any longe
r.

  When I unpacked them this morning, I admired their colours and felt the immense love I have for my country. My country. The clear colours, distinct colours. These colours are not transparent, not half colours. My country is painted with the colours of love, painted with warm colours.

  Since I put them on, the heavy weight has made me feel that all my country does is weigh down on me, that my people weigh down on me. I feel like taking a gulp from the man’s bottle. I want to live like them. To fall. To give up. To live without the weight of the world, just existing and being there. I want to seem as if I’m OK. I want to rely on people to take over. I want to be able to count on other people to deal with all of it. I am fascinated by the people who have given up, but continue to live. I could let myself fall down with them. Leave here with them, go drink with them, forget about the future and live by the bottle. Stop working, stop having an opinion about myself, stop paying the rent, stop having a place to live. I could just spend the nights wherever. I could just drink and be happy. How easy life would be: to be the living dead.

  There isn’t a single man in a white anorak here. I get angry. Not one single man wearing an anorak! If just one man had an anorak on, I would feel better about the future. But now the men’s anoraks swill around instead inside of them, so they need to wear jackets that are far too big for them with inside pockets filled with more floating anoraks. They are no longer men; they are empty containers with floating insides.

  It is one of those days again. I am a little girl, and I go to bed. My mother stays up. She sits alone in the kitchen and drinks. I can hear her getting ready to go out around eleven, as I expect her to, despite it being a weekday. I close my eyes and try to fall asleep, but I can’t because I keep listening to her, even though I don’t want to. I hear every single movement she makes. I can hear by her walk how drunk she is. How many bottles she has drunk. And I hear by the way she fumbles putting her glass down how hard she is trying to keep her head clear. I can hear by the way she talks to herself that she is in a good mood. I can even work out how the night will go. Many years, many nights of practising, have made me capable of predicting whether I will be able to sleep peacefully through the night or if I need to spend it constantly sleeping with one eye open. She needs to hurry now if she is going to make it to the bar, even if she does, perhaps, have a couple of bottles left still.

  I hear them come in on Saturday night, and there are a lot of them. Sounds of laughter, of jokes and of people trying too hard to laugh at them, reach me through the wall. I feel calmer knowing they are happy, even though I won’t get any sleep as long as they are here. They move into the living room and start drinking, and I can hear that they have kept their shoes on. It will be me who will have to clean up after them in the morning. The music is turned on and turned up high, and they talk, and yell and laugh. I cover my ears with my pillow, but it doesn’t help. My mother is talking louder and louder as she gets more and more drunk. She gets this hoarse voice that doesn’t sound like her own. I hate that voice more than anything else in the world. It’s a voice that changes when it has taken a swig of what it likes. A voice that becomes friendly. A voice that sounds like the voice of fearlessness. A voice wearing a mask. Even her greeting has changed. Hi. I have listened to that voice all too often.

  I start to nod off, because I am so sleepy, and when, a little while later, I wake up again, I can hear that there are fewer people in the living room, and that they are calmer now. I can’t hear my mother; perhaps she has passed out somewhere. I can hear two Danish men. One of them is about to leave, and the other one will follow. Once the first one has gone, the second man goes over to my mother and tries to wake her. He calls to her softly. I know very well what he wants. When he can’t wake her, he goes over to the door. I prick up my ears and listen to every step he takes. He continues moving towards the door, but just as I allow myself to relax, I hear him creeping even more quietly back towards the living room. I lie down in my bed and pretend to be sleeping heavily. I can hear him approaching my room. A thousand thoughts seem to whirl around me. I know very well what could happen. Somehow, I have to prevent it. He moves into my room, and I can hear him quietly placing his jacket and his large rubber boots on the floor so as not to wake me. But it is not until he walks slowly over to me and starts taking off his damn belt that it truly dawns on me what he wants. I open my eyes, lift up my head and stare directly into his eyes. “Shhh … calm down,” he says quietly, as he puts his hand out and moves closer. I sit halfway up and shake my head. I am angry, terrified. But I know it won’t help to act like that. It is not enough. It takes all my courage to say something: “I’ll scream.” He steps closer, and I repeat: “I’ll scream!”

  When, many years later, I look back on that night—and so many others like it—I wonder over the scale of the courage and the strength of the will I possessed. Thin and fragile; an easy prey for the horny, drunken men in my mother’s life. But no. I could not accept a fate of being a rape victim. I knew that my womanhood, my life, my future would be ruined completely by such an act. I would not let that happen to me. If it happened, I would never be able to forgive myself. When I grew up, I would give up and become an alcoholic. My life would be over in a split second. I could scream, I could fight against it, I could bite, I could kick, and I would do anything to protect myself. No one was ever going to break me.

  I can see that the Danish man understands what I mean, what I’m saying. I can see that he understands that I’m ready to do whatever it takes to fight back. He starts moving backwards as he repeats, “OK … OK …” He picks up his jacket and his rubber boots and walks out of my room. Shortly after, I hear him going out of the front door. As soon as he has gone, I hurry over to the front door to lock it, checking in all the rooms on my way back to see that there is no one in them. I want to know if I can sleep safe and sound for the rest of the night.

  Sometimes, when my mother was drunk, she would call for me, so she could tell me things. She would cry, sometimes, while she was telling me them, and you could see in her eyes that she had slipped back into her memories. Her father had worshipped his four sons. They were destined to be fishermen like himself. His only daughter was a thorn in his side. She was good for nothing. He took to hunting her around the house with a knife, but fortunately many years of fishing had worn out his body and made him slow. He would yell at her. Tell her that she shouldn’t go to school, because it was her brothers that would earn the money, so she ought to be making food for them, washing their clothes and making sure they came home to a clean house. My mother stopped going to school.

  Several times I have been woken in the middle of the night because I was being choked by smoke. The smoke would be large and greyish and would have gathered into a bank of fog that grew larger and heavier, until it sank from the ceiling to the floor. I would wake with a shock, without knowing what awaited me out there, how it would look, how much damage there would be, and the adrenalin would start pumping around my body. Luckily what had usually happened was that my mother had passed out cold while she was making food, and I would awake just before the food burned to a charred, black crisp.

  One night I awake at dawn to the smell of fire. My throat stings. I get up and walk out of my room, but I can barely see anything for the smoke. When I come into the living room, I get a glimpse through the smoke of my mother’s legs on the floor. She has passed out again. I go directly into the kitchen, over to the oven. As I get closer, I can see that she has put some food in the oven and then fallen asleep, and that the legs of meat have burnt away to nothing. I go to set the oven door ajar and turn off the oven, when a thought hits me … I could leave the oven on. I could leave the oven on and walk away. But where would I go? I could go to my grandmother’s, but then she would ask why I was over there in the middle of the night. When she discovered that there had been a fire over at our house, wouldn’t she then ask me what had been going on when I left, and how would I answer?

  As I stand and thi
nk about whether I should leave the oven on, a mass of memories pop up. I decide to turn it off. If I let her die, I would end her suffering, and I have no wish to help her. Let her suffer. Let her battle her own shitty life. When she can no longer handle it, when she finally gives up, then she can end her life herself. I will not help her.