by Sjón
It was a huge relief when the door swung shut behind him.
Inside, the atmosphere turned out to be the same as it had been in the old basement on Laugavegur: the all-pervasive stench of the owner’s sweat, the ceaseless humming and gurgling of pumps blowing air bubbles into the tanks and stirring the green tendrils of weed, the fish looking from a distance like multicoloured moving points of light, like shining fairies flying through an enchanted forest. But it would be wrong to claim that nothing had changed. Since his last visit, the owner’s daughter had undergone some indefinable or at any rate mysterious transformation. He could see it in the way she moved as she netted the midnight-red fighting fish that lurked alone in its tank, a fish he had long coveted but hadn’t yet saved up the money to buy.
Dipping the net into the water behind the fish, she chased it around the tank with nimble movements of her wrist – movements repeated a moment later in her hips – until eventually the fish grew tired. Then she lifted it deftly out of the water, popped it in a plastic bag, twisted the opening and tied it in a knot.
The incident came back to Hrólfur Zóphanías Magnússon, geneticist and chief executive of CoDex, as he sat one night in a velvet-padded cell, on exactly the same spot as he had stood forty years before, struck dumb by the change in the owner’s daughter. After the Goldfish Bowl moved out, the premises on Fischersund had housed a funeral parlour for many years – instead of fish tanks the walls were lined with empty coffins – and after that a dry cleaner’s had moved in, replacing the coffins with washing machines.
These days the site was occupied by the strip club Bar Lewinsky and Hrólfur Zóphanías was waiting in one of its private rooms for Aleta, the Ukrainian girl he had been chatting up in the bar earlier, to draw back the curtain. He had guessed at once from her figure that she was a transwoman who, although well on the way, had not yet completed her transition. How far she had got he would hopefully find out in a minute.
The curtain was drawn back.
Aleta undulated towards the man in the armchair. She swivelled her right hand at the wrist – like the owner’s daughter long ago, he thought, like the owner’s daughter – and caught him in her net.
* * *
After she danced for him the geneticist had taken her phone number, though Aleta hadn’t attached any importance to this. But several weeks later she had received a phone call from the biotech company CoDex, offering her a job as a researcher. And now here she is, sitting in Jósef Loewe’s basement flat, waiting for him to wake up.
* * *
The recording of the geneticist had been in the dictaphone given to her by his assistant, along with a box containing twenty unused 180-minute cassettes, some folders, a Polaroid camera and other material relating to the study. Before conducting the first interview, she had removed the cassette from the machine without listening to it and put it in an envelope with the questionnaires, intending to return it when she went to headquarters to hand in the results of the first three sessions.
It wasn’t until October 2010, as she sat in the visitors’ lounge at a state institution waiting for her interviewee to get ready – inevitably, given the nature of the study, many of the participants were in hospitals or institutions – that it occurred to her to check what was on the battered old 180-M Philips mini cassette, which looked as if it had been in the machine for years. The worn label had been written on, rubbed out and crossed out so often that it was covered in scribbles, but under it all you could still make out what she guessed to be ‘Dr Magnusson’. She put the tape in the dictaphone and heard the rustle of the wind in leaves, the twittering of redwings, the lapping of waves and finally the brisk cough that removed all doubt as to who was about to speak.
The geneticist’s voice was familiar to every child in the country; even the least talented could make a decent stab at mimicking it. For years he had been a regular on radio and TV news and chat shows in his role as chief executive of the genomics biotechnology company CoDex (which had from day one been reporting news of incredible scientific advances) due to controversy over the company’s access to the Icelanders’ medical records, from which it was creating a database of the nation’s genetic information, the so-called ‘Book of Icelanders’ (an idea sold to parliament and public on the pretext of its benefits to mankind – the Icelanders’ pure genomes were to be used for discoveries that would liberate the inhabitants of Planet Earth from every imaginable disease, from cancer to the common cold – though it appealed primarily to people’s sense of nationalism and greed, and, as it later turned out, the project was bankrolled by overseas drugs giants); due to its successes on the financial markets at home and abroad; due to CoDex’s subsequent bankruptcy and the fact that so many people, carried away by the talk of genetic purity and massive profits, had bought shares in the miracle; due to his resurrection and refinancing of the company; and due to his idiosyncratic views on Iceland’s history and culture, and especially its literature, since he made a big deal of his youthful dream of becoming an author and claimed that all his tinkering with his ‘juvenile scribblings’ had, when the time came, given him the edge over his foreign competitors who were unacquainted with the Icelandic cottage industry of ‘rolling out a plot’. But since the instantly recognisable voice – with its hard cadences and strident pitch, which always made the speaker sound as if he were standing out of doors, talking into the wind whichever way he turned – was bound to attract attention, Aleta immediately stopped the tape and took it out of the machine. She didn’t know what she was to say if someone asked why she was listening to the geneticist droning on about prices and millilitres.
As she was slipping the tape into her bag, a nurse appeared at the door and helped in that day’s interviewee, a woman in her forties, wearing a long, azure dressing gown, her pure white, neatly combed hair parted in the middle and falling over her shoulders and arms and forwards on to the cotton gloves she wore on her hands, though it couldn’t conceal the symptoms of the genetic disorder that had caused the skin of her face and limbs to break out and harden into tightly packed hexagonal eruptions reminiscent of drying scales, forming a kind of ‘fish skin’ that was finest on her fingertips and the end of her nose but became progressively coarser the larger the skin’s surface area, the scales growing as big as a hand and ranging from red to green, passing through yellow and blue wherever broken veins and swelling were thrown into the mix.
She rose to her feet and held out her hand to the woman in the dressing gown.
— Hello, I’m Aleta Szelińska …
The woman didn’t answer or take her proffered hand.
For a long moment the woman studied Aleta studying her, giving her a chance to look away or steal another glance at her scaly cheeks, then announced hoarsely:
— You’re all right. You’re not one of us but we’re on the same team …
7
For two years Aleta conscientiously followed her instructions:
i) She maintained confidentiality about all aspects of the project, the client and the participants.
ii) She took a Polaroid photograph of each participant at the beginning of the interview.
iii) She went through the entire questionnaire with the participant.
iv) She entered the main information in the appropriate places on the form during the interview.
v) She labelled the tapes, questionnaires and envelopes according to an agreed numerical code.
vi) She put away the material in folders, which she secured and sealed with red wax.
vii) She handed in her work on the second and fourth Thursday of every month.
viii) She was not permitted to form a relationship with any of the participants.
Until, that is, she met Jósef Loewe, a man of nearly fifty, who was suffering from an exceptionally rare condition known as ‘Stone Man Syndrome’ or, in medical terminology, as Fibrodysplasia oss
ificans progressiva. This disorder causes the body to react abnormally when the muscles or other soft tissues are damaged by forming new bone tissue over the site. The sufferer ends up imprisoned in a ‘double’ skeleton, as stiff as a dummy in a shop window. The first sign of the disorder is a deformation of the big toes.
* * *
QUESTIONNAIRE FOR PROJECT HZM/0-23 (PRIVATE)
Tape no.: ______ Date of interview: __ / __ / ____
Time: __ / __ / __ Place: ______
a) Name:
____________________
b) Date of birth:
____________________
c) Place of birth:
____________________
d) Parents (origin/education/occupation):
____________________
____________________
e) Childhood residence:
____________________
____________________
____________________
f) Education:
____________________
____________________
g) Childhood hobbies:
____________________
h) Marital history:
____________________
____________________
i) Children:
____________________
____________________
j) Adult residence:
____________________
____________________
k) Political views (may be omitted):
____________________
l) Religion (may be omitted):
____________________
m) Adult hobbies:
____________________
____________________
n) Memorable incident:
____________________
o) Memorable dream:
____________________
_____________
Name of interviewer
(in block capitals)
___________
(Sign.)
* * *
Aleta was so exhausted after her interview with the white-haired mermaid – which was the name the participant used for herself, quite without irony, beginning most of her answers: ‘we mermaids’, cf. ‘we mermaids inflame men with lust, it’s true what the fairytales say’ – that when she got home she crashed out on her bed, fully clothed, and lay there staring at the ceiling as its colour deepened into blue with the fading daylight; as afternoon gave way to evening.
The mermaid had spoken so quietly that it had been an effort to hear what she said, and to ensure the dictaphone would pick up her voice Aleta had been forced to sit as close to her as the arms of their chairs would permit, holding the machine a finger’s length away from the woman’s withered, unmoving, red-painted lips. When, to make matters worse, the woman had answered her questions at far greater length than Aleta had anticipated (her orders were to keep each interview under 120 minutes so it would fit on a two-hour tape), her sojourn in the visitors’ lounge had developed into a form of mental and physical torture. The interview lasted for just under five hours. For the last seventy minutes Aleta’s right hand, locked on the dictaphone, had been completely drained of blood. Her breathing had synchronised to the second with the mermaid’s. Their breasts rose and fell with the same gentle rhythm. Their shoulders touched and Aleta had grown so queasy from the warm scent of vanilla rising from the woman’s dressing-gown-clad body that all her attempts to convert the relentless whisper into mental images of the backdrop to the tales of childhood and school days in the Westman Islands, in the village half buried under a black layer of volcanic ash, were disrupted by flashbacks to the white mounds by the old salt factory in Drohobych, the town where she herself was born.
Inside her an alien voice kept repeating the same formula at brief intervals: ‘She’s white-haired, you’re black-haired. You’re black-haired, she’s white-haired…’
The bedroom ceiling above her was now indigo, verging on black. Aleta reached out a hand, fumbling for the cord of the table lamp without taking her eyes off the ceiling, found it and, groping her way to the switch, turned it on; indigo gave way to yellow.
Although up to now no session had gone over three hours, and five hours was sheer insanity, it wasn’t the gruelling length of the interview with the mermaid, the concentration (or lack of it) or the pain in her right hand and arm that had proved the greatest drain on Aleta’s strength.
After all, this wasn’t the first time she had ‘cheated’ on the timing. When other interviews had required more than one cassette she had thought ‘it can’t be helped’, since the recordings would be the sole surviving witness to these lives, the only chance the participants would have to tell their story in their own words, their own voices – and, since the geneticist’s assistant hadn’t yet complained about her wasting tapes, Aleta had gone on letting the interviews overrun. As for the concentration the whispering demanded of her, the deformed jaws and damaged vocal cords of many of Aleta’s previous subjects had made them far harder to understand than the softly spoken mermaid; and as for real pain, that was something Aleta had got to know on her journey from the Ukraine to Iceland.
No, in the end it was the woman’s repeated mantra about not being ‘one of us but still on the same team’ that proved the final straw; the strain of having to be on one’s guard for five whole hours to make sure the recording didn’t contain the slightest suggestion of doubt that she was who or what she purported to be.
Aleta had thought those days were over: the mermaid had sharp eyes.
She sat up and started to undress, wriggling out of her coat, kicking her leather boots across the floor, pulling off her jumper and skirt, removing bra, nylon stockings and knickers and flinging them in the direction of the laundry basket. Then, grabbing the bag from the bed, she went into the bathroom.
Yes, during the interview the mermaid had repeatedly addressed Aleta directly, drawing her into the story, turning her into a participant in her experiences. After describing the memorable incident when, at seven years old, she had discovered that she wasn’t destined for the same kind of life as other people – during a meeting of the Bethel Pentecostalist congregation it had finally dawned on her who the pastor was talking about when he said that, although not all children in the islands were created in God’s image, the congregation had a duty to remember them in their prayers, something she’d heard the bald preacher saying every Sunday for as long as she could remember, with the result that she had been conscientiously praying for herself every evening: the little child she had pitied for not being created in the divine image had turned out to be her – the mermaid had shot a glance at Aleta and whispered:
— You’d know all about that.
Of course, Aleta could have agreed, admitting that she knew from personal experience what it was like to be struck by the realisation that mankind was divided into two kinds of children, the clean and the unclean (and which kind she belonged to), that such a moment had been branded on her consciousness too, but she didn’t permit herself so much as a nod: she had no intention of encouraging any further impertinence from the old lady; in point of fact, Aleta knew the woman wasn’t that old – she was born on 25 September 1962, which made her two years short of fifty – but the scales on her face, the colour of her hair and the arthritis that twisted her shoulders all made her seem much older than she really was, so one inadvertently thought of her as ‘the old lady’.
Aleta put her bag down on the stool by the bath, pulled out a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, lit one, turned on the mixer tap, and sat smoking on the loo while waiting for the tub to fill.
Towards the end of the interview the mermaid had lowered her voice yet further, squeezing Aleta’s knee with a gloved hand.
— I haven’t told you anything you don’t already know.
Releasing her grip on Aleta’s knee, she had raised a hand and pointed at her own breast, whispering:
— I’m soft where it matters.
At this Ale
ta had smiled sympathetically. She had opened her mouth to say: ‘Of course it’s who you are inside that matters, goodness can appear in all manner of guises.’ But before she could speak, the mermaid had whipped open her robe, revealing to Aleta the softness she was talking about.
From the neck down, over her breasts with their blue-black nipples and her flat stomach, the rough scales gave way to pale, silvery skin, with the softness and sheen of precious silk or the belly of a plaice, right down to her crotch with its dark red tuft of hair, like a tangle of wet seaweed. A strong smell of brine rose from the white skin, mingling with the scent of vanilla.
The mermaid whispered:
— This soft embrace was enjoyed by dozens of grateful sailors from the ships that docked in the islands, from when I was thirteen until two years later, when what I got up to ‘alone’ in the bait shed every night was discovered by my mother and the pastor of Bethel, who caught me in flagrante with three deckhands from the Birtingur, a capelin boat from Ísafjördur. After that I was expelled from the Pentecostalist congregation. Though, needless to say, no one thought to ask what my mother and the pastor were doing there in the middle of the night. From then on my school friends were forbidden to speak to me and my teachers stopped caring whether I turned up or not, though both were merely a formality by that stage. Shortly afterwards I was kicked out of my home and after fending for myself from Easter to the beginning of summer – the local tramp used to let me stay with him, and once or twice the manager of Hótel Heimaklettur let me lie on a mattress in the boiler room in return for being allowed to lie on top of me first – I was picked up by social services and sent to a children’s home on the mainland. I ran away whenever I could, seizing every chance I got to have sex with men. After one of these escapes they told me I was being sent for a preventative appendectomy at the City Hospital, but when I woke up after the operation I discovered that they’d removed my womb at the same time. Later, I took myself abroad and slept with a succession of men in Copenhagen’s Christiania district, in Amsterdam, Tangier and Marseilles, until nine years ago my arthritis got the better of me and I couldn’t walk any more, so I decided to come home.
