by Sjón
Aleta cursed the intrusive memory of the mermaid’s story, too many details of which coincided with her own. Stubbing out the cigarette in the sink, she dropped it between her legs into the toilet bowl, then stood up and flushed. The woman’s voice faded.
— Shouldn’t a person die where they came into being? Like the sea trout …
Which was when Aleta remembered the geneticist’s recording. She pulled over her bag, took out the tape and put it in the dictaphone, pressing the play button and fast-forwarding to the comment:
— This is where I became the man I am …
She turned off the tap, lowered herself into the bath and leaned her head back, resting her neck on the rim and feeling the tiredness flowing out of her body as she listened to the geneticist attempting to understand himself.
This intimate glimpse into his thoughts gave her a feeling of security. It put them on a level. As far as he was concerned, Aleta didn’t exist. He might see her name on one of the questionnaires, but she thought it unlikely he would ever listen to the recordings himself. The interviews would be digitally transcribed by a CoDex minion; he would never even hear her voice.
But from that day on the geneticist would no longer be the distant authority figure who communicated with Aleta through his assistant.
Now she knew more about him than he did about her.
She would never return the tape.
* * *
Jósef Loewe stirs on the dirt-brown sofa.
Aleta bends over him and blows cigarette smoke in his face.
He starts awake and tries to avoid the smoke.
Aleta laughs:
‘You’re such a bore!’
8
‘Which brings the story back to me.’
Jósef steeples his fingers.
‘There aren’t many of us on this earth who can describe what it felt like to enter the world. Most people find it hard enough to remember what they did yesterday, let alone a week, three months or thirteen years ago. But from the moment I awoke to life on the kitchen table in the basement of 10a Ingólfsstræti to the present day, I can remember everything that’s ever happened to me, every waking moment, every thought, every dream. Whenever I choose to summon them from my memory, past events appear vivid in my mind’s eye, whether they took place on the afternoon of 27 August 1962 or the morning of 27 August 2012. Thoughts and actions return as brief glimpses – like the luminescent form of a giant squid rising from the depths to light up the night-black sea – so fleeting that it requires special training to see and hear them, innate cunning and strength of mind to catch and hold them still in one’s consciousness, patience and mental agility to untangle them.
If a handful of wool is carded until every thread lies alongside the next it will eventually cover a whole room – and so it is with memories. Gone about the right way, it will take as long to revive the past as it took to experience it in the first place.
This is my gift: to remember everything, to experience it all twice over – and to tell the tale.
* * *
From the very first moment my senses were fully formed: my eyes could see, my ears could hear, smells wafted past my nostrils, flavours enveloped my tongue, my skin perceived the touch of air and matter.
I drank it all in. And through the medium of words I can convey you to any time or place that is stored in my acid-bright memory.
I am a time machine.
* * *
The day after I drew my first breath, I woke to find Leo Loewe, my father and creator, inspecting his handiwork. To prevent me catching cold he had half-wrapped me in an eiderdown and sat cradling me in his arms, examining my small body from head to toe, stroking me all over in search of flaws or inconsistencies. He took my head gently in his hands to reassure himself that there was a skull beneath my scalp; he squeezed my arms to feel the bones under the soft flesh; putting his head on one side, he raised me to his ear and listened to my heartbeat; he palpated my abdomen to check that the organs were in place, then moved his fingers round to my back and felt for my kidneys; he tugged gently but firmly on my legs to make sure the tendons and joints would hold. When he turned me on my right side to run his fingertips down my spinal column and count the ribs, my head was thrust against his chest and I heard for the first time the beating of a human heart:
My father’s heart. It was beating fast.
Leo Loewe was in a state of high emotion, filled with elation at having successfully kindled life in the clay boy who, at great personal sacrifice, he had brought unscathed to a refuge far from the wickedness of the world, crossing the enemy-occupied Continent, the U-boat-infested seas; fearful all the while that I might not be perfectly whole, that something might have gone wrong during the nearly two decades that had passed between the moulding of the child from a lump of clay and the moment when the spark of life was ignited in the inert substance, transforming it into flesh and bone, guts and fluids, nerves and veins. Clay can dry out and crack, and although he had been at pains to keep the surface moist and soft, there was a risk that something might have gone wrong inside; after all, the clay had been kneaded with a variety of bodily secretions that are sensitive to storage, heat and damp.
Like other new parents, my father was moved above all by having taken part in the miracle of life, that perpetual process by which newly embodied consciousnesses are summoned into being in the cosmos; all different, all unique in their desire for the same thing as all those who have gone before: “to live life to the full”.
After counting my bones, not once but three times, my father laid me on my back and wrapped me in the quilt. I remember the gooseflesh prickling my limbs as the cold cotton touched my skin, and I remember too how quickly my body formed an alliance with the eiderdown and filled with a spreading warmth.
Ay-li-lu-li-lu …
Leo held me in his arms, crooning in his mother tongue:
Unter Yideles vigele,
Shteyt a klor-vays tsigele …
I tried to keep my eyes open. It was interesting, this crack in my father’s face that opened and closed, stretched and compressed with his grimaces, producing the lullaby about the white kid that traded in raisins and almonds:
Dos tsigele iz geforn handlen –
Dos vet zayn dayn baruf …
The cadence of the lullaby and the warmth of his breath caused my eyelids to droop.
Rozhinkes mit mandlen
Shlof-zhe, Yidele, shlof …
He smiled at me and crooned the last line again, inserting my name instead:
Shlof-zhe, Yosef, shlof,
Shlof-zhe, Yosef, shlof …
In his arms slept a boy-child of flesh and blood, of that there could be no doubt.
For the first few months I received all my nourishment from the milk of the black nanny-goat that Leo kept in the garden behind the house on Ingólfsstræti. I grew so hungry for it that when I heard the clatter of the lid on the pan in which my bottle was sterilised, I began to quiver like the wing of a fly, my whole body shaking with anticipation, and, had I known how, I would have bawled with impatience.
From time to time, Mrs Thorsteinson from upstairs – who, before she had her daughter, used to complain about the goat and tried repeatedly to persuade her husband to get rid of it on the grounds that it was an embarrassment to have an evil-tempered, evil-smelling beast where by rights there should have been roses and redcurrant bushes, and it wouldn’t hurt if they could get shot of the foreigner at the same time – would send her maid down to our basement to solicit a bottle of goat’s milk for Halldóra Oktavía, which was the name the couple had given to the baby Mrs Thorsteinson conceived with her four lovers on that historic night.
My father always welcomed the maid, however busy we were, telling her to take her mistress the milk with his warmest wishes for the mother and daughter’s good health, adding that he was sure Mrs Thorsteinson would do the same for his son. But despite the sincerity of his polite sentiment, Mrs Thorsteinson never offered to share
any of her bounty with me when her breasts were full – and my father would never have dreamed of demanding such a thing, though the goat’s supply had begun to dry up by the spring of 1963.
No, my hands never clutched at a mother’s breast, my lips never closed over a nipple, warm mother’s milk never bathed my tongue or flowed down my throat.
Leo wondered at times if the reason I was so quiet – yes, I was a contented child, and never wailed or raised my voice; my whimpering and cooing were so muted that he was never sure if I’d actually made a sound or if it had simply formed in his head as he watched me wriggling in my cradle – was that my body was unacquainted with the sustenance that is human milk; that a clay boy could never become human unless he fed off another person, imbibed the cannibalistic drink of life.
When he realised that all he had to offer that was in any way equivalent to Mrs Thorsteinson’s white breast milk was his own red heart’s blood, he banished these thoughts once and for all: the idea of rearing me on blood was such a travesty, would be such a gamble if put into practice. Leo was creating a saviour to deliver an important message to a new age, not an insatiably bloodthirsty monster like those who had pushed the world over a precipice while the precipice had looked the other way.
I can still feel his little finger tickling my mouth as he felt my palate and tongue to check that everything was all right: the frenulum not too taut or slack, the palate not too thick or cleft, the root of the tongue neither shrivelled nor over-grown. At other times he would rest my head in his hand, stroking my throat with the tips of thumb and forefinger, or lay his palm on my chest to measure the strength of my breathing – but all was as it should be. After this examination he would sigh heavily. All he could do was wait and hope that the day would come when I found my voice. If I really turned out to be dumb he would have to teach me other methods of communication – art, dance, literature, music – employing every means possible to ensure that when the time came I could reach a mass audience and carry them with me.’
‘Which you will. There’s still time left.’
‘Thanks, Aleta, you’re sweet. Let’s have some brandy.’
‘Only once did Mrs Thorsteinson deign to come downstairs in person to request milk for her daughter. One Sunday morning at the beginning of March there was a peremptory knocking on our door. I was lying in my cot, which Leo had rolled into the cramped living room so he could keep an eye on me from where he was sitting at the dining-room table. He was drinking tea and nibbling ginger biscuits while poring over a book of sheet music that he had acquired from an antiquarian bookshop on the first floor of a house on Laugavegur, playing in his head the silent sonata In futurum by the Prague-born Erwin Schulhoff. We both started up, I from a doze, he from the composition’s furious silences. Before he could get up to answer the door, the visitor had let herself in. Footsteps approached along the hall. A moment later Mrs Thorsteinson paused in the living-room doorway.
Her red hair was in curlers under a dark green scarf, below which she wore a dressing gown of shiny black silk with a repeated pattern of Japanese pagodas and puffy clouds woven in even blacker thread, and burgundy-coloured mules with nut-brown pom-poms and varnished wooden heels. The fifteen-month-old Halldóra Oktavía was perched on her mother’s arm like a princess on her throne, dressed in a velvet pinafore with a lace collar and sucking on a dummy with loud smacking sounds.
Mother and daughter filled the doorway as if intending to block our exit. Leo looked at the woman enquiringly. She didn’t react.
Seconds passed.
Then it dawned on my father what a ridiculous position he was in, caught halfway between sitting and standing, like a chimpanzee doing a bowel movement in its trousers.
Cheeks reddening, he straightened up, put down the sheet music and cleared his throat.
— Good morning.
Mrs Thorsteinson walked into the living room, running her eyes over my father’s spartan furnishings with a studied indifference that could be interpreted as either respect for his privacy or suspicion about what sort of “junk” he had “brought into her house”. The sheet music didn’t escape her notice. She said sharply:
— I hope you’re not in a choir, Mr Loewe.
Although I was lying there with the eiderdown pulled up to my chin, limiting my view of the room, I could sense how nervous my father was in Mrs Thorsteinson’s presence.
He was tongue-tied, tripped over his words, made grammatical errors, pronounced the Icelandic s like the Czech č, forgot how to say the most commonplace words and ordered them haphazardly into sentences – thereby confirming all the woman’s prejudices about the defective foreigner in the basement.
— Not that it’s any of my business.
Mrs Thorsteinson peered into my cot.
— Dook, Dóra, dee de dickle boy.
She leaned forwards so the little girl could see me too.
— Id dere a dickle boy in our house? A dickle boy fow wus?
Halldóra Oktavía subjected me to a searching stare. Her dummy emitted a loud pop. Her mother lowered her towards me. I gazed back, fascinated, noticing that one of her eyes was blue, the other brown.
Halldóra Oktavía paused momentarily in her sucking, her lower jaw grew slack and the dummy slid forwards between her parted lips, releasing a rope of drool from behind the disc, which oozed down her chin, collected there in a large drop, then fell on to my forehead.
The drip of saliva ran into my left eye and I recoiled like a beetle lying on its back. I shook with fright. I emitted a tremulous squeak. I kicked my legs in the air, shedding the quilt and sending the knitted bootees flying off my feet.
Mrs Thorsteinson reached out to cover me, then paused and withdrew her hand, glancing over her shoulder at Leo who was hovering uneasily behind her, and addressed him in the same language as she had used with Halldóra Oktavía:
— He’ve got fuddy big does …
She turned back to the cot, pointing at my tiny feet.
— Hasn’t he?
My father stepped up to Mrs Thorsteinson’s side.
Yes, indeed, my big toes were not as they should have been. The top joints were crooked, slanting towards the other toes, as if they had been crushed against their neighbours. Leo gasped. How could he have failed to notice? Had his boy’s clay feet been squashed against the sides of the hatbox, resulting in a malformation of his toes? Could it have happened the morning he took me out to bring me to life? But he didn’t have time to give it any further thought just then.
Halldóra Oktavía jerked her head and sucked on her dummy with a loud smack.
The Icelandic public were to become familiar with this abrupt jerk of the head when Halldóra Oktavía became temporary governor of the Central Bank during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009.’
The Dance
The stage is darkened. We hear stagehands pushing cots and oxygen tents to the front. They are clad in black from head to toe, but as our eyes adjust to the lack of light, they begin to resemble embodied shadows, alternately pushing, dragging or carrying between them puzzling dark shapes, which they arrange here and there on the stage behind the cots and the oxygen tents. After this, they withdraw into the wings.
Fluorescent bulbs click into life, illuminating those present:
Girl: 12 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 13 January 1962 –✝13 January 1962, Girl: 21 January 1962 –✝21 January 1962, Boy: 24 February 1962 –✝27 February 1962, Boy: 1 March 1962 –✝14 April 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝14 May 1962, Girl: 13 May 1962 –✝17 May 1962, Girl: 5 May 1962 –✝21 May 1962, Boy: 7 May 1962 –✝25 May 1962, Girl: 19 May 1962 –✝26 May 1962, Girl: 27 May 1962 –✝27 May 1962, Girl: 28 May 1962 –✝29 May 1962, Boy: 22 June 1962 –✝23 June 1962, Boy: 27 June 1962 –✝30 June 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Girl: 30 April 1962 –✝11 July 1962, Boy: 10 February 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 16 July 1962 –✝16 July 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝18 July 1962, Girl: 19 July 1962 –✝19 July 1962, Boy: 31
July 1962 –✝31 July 1962, Girl: 1 August 1962 –✝1 August 1962, Boy: 29 March 1962 –✝3 August 1962, Boy: 9 July 1962 –✝4 August 1962, Girl: 13 February 1962 –✝7 August 1962, Boy: 1 July 1962 –✝18 August 1962, Boy: 17 August 1962 –✝20 August 1962, Girl: 3 September 1962 –✝3 September 1962, Boy: 1 October 1962 –✝6 October 1962, Boy: 18 November 1962 –✝18 November 1962, Boy: 27 November 1962 –✝27 November 1962, Boy: 18 December 1962 –✝18 December 1962, Girl: 16 December 1962 –✝23 December 1962 …
Behind them, incandescent bulbs begin to glow in a series of chandeliers hanging low over the stage. They come in all different shapes and sizes, some made of black or white plastic, others of pale or dark grey glass, and shed a white light on the objects the stagehands have arranged there:
A raised platform, on which stand six cots, four highchairs, three prams and a play-mat decorated with pictures of moons and moths.
As we become aware of movements in the cots and prams, the stagehands carry in toddlers and seat them in the highchairs, then lay four more on the play-mat. The children have bruised heads, blue lips, bloodshot eyes, and burn marks on their arms and bodies, from water, fire and electricity.
Boy: 19 November 1962 –✝? 1963
Girl: 27 July 1962 –✝9 February 1963
Girl: 8 August 1962 –✝14 February 1963
Girl: 30 March 1962 –✝16 February 1963
Girl: 21 October 1962 –✝3 March 1963
Boy: 1 August 1962 –✝1 April 1963
Boy: 7 June 1962 –✝4 April 1963
Girl: 27 February 1962 –✝10 April 1963
Boy: 9 February 1962 –✝15 April 1963
Boy: 11 November 1962 –✝1 May 1963
Girl: 3 December 1962 –✝14 May 1963
Boy: 30 June 1962 –✝16 May 1963
