The Greenhouse (8 page)

It’s not that having another person sitting in the passenger seat beside me bothers me in itself, so long as she remains silent and just reads her words, and sits reasonably still. In any case, it’s clear that I’m going to be sitting beside this actress for the next six hours. I peep at her; right above her long, thick eyelashes there is a very fine black streak of eyeliner. In fact, she reminds me of a familiar and very famous film star that I saw in a movie once.

After a while, the actress rolls up the script, points it at me, and kicks off the conversation by asking me where I’m from.

So I tell her.

—Are you really? she exclaims, shifting position on the seat by placing her right foot on the floor, dragging her left leg under her, and slipping the seat belt under her armpit so that she can face me better as she continues the conversation.

—What’s it like there?

—There isn’t an awful lot to say about the place; there aren’t many things you can grow there.

I’m not sure I have much to add to that. She only speaks her language, which I’ve actually studied at school, although I’ve never had to express myself in long sentences with an actual native before.

—Tell me something about it.

—Moss.

—Cute.

As soon as I spurt out the word
moss
, I know I’ve gotten myself into a jam. Moss is such a nonstarter and impossible to develop into a topic for discussion. At most, I could list off the different types of moss, but that’s not much of a conversation.

—What’s moss?

If I only had the vocabulary, I would want to tell this budding movie star that moss is a lichen, and time-consuming to walk over. It’s all right for the first ten steps, but if you’re going to cross a vast, moss-carpeted lava field, it’s like walking across a trampoline all day; it can be really tiring on your hamstrings to be sinking into moss for four hours in a row. It can take more out of you than climbing a high mountain. If you rip up moss, you leave a scar in the earth and soil dust gets blown into your eyes. I’d really like to be able to tell her something unusual that no one has ever told her before, but my limited grasp of the language cramps my style. If I were to mention the different shades of moss and the smell it gives off after a shower of rain, I’d be entering the domain of feelings, like a man on the point of proposing to her. I therefore give nothing away to her and say no more than I can grammatically handle:

—A plant that’s like a trampoline.

—Weird, she says. She doesn’t give in—Tell me more.

—Tussocks.

I’m surprised at how well I’m doing at finding words, at my ability to express myself in an alien language, but at least I’m myself when I talk about plants.

—What’s a tussock?

It’s not easy to explain how a tussock is formed, to express the repeated temperature changes of the earth and how they alternate between frost and thaw. I have to think of every single word I’m saying; nothing comes automatically.

—It’s difficult to put up a tent on tussocks.

Then I switch topics.

—Swamps.

On the point of swamps, Mom told me more than once the story of one of Granddad’s favorite horses, which sank under him in a swamp and then popped up again as a skeleton several springs later. I’ve seen photographs of Granddad on that horse, and although I’m no expert, that favorite horse of his looks pretty much like all his other horses to me, with rather short legs, even when you take into consideration the fact that my granddad and namesake, Arnljótur Thórir, was a tall man.

After swamps, I rattle off the names of other types of vegetation without any further explanations, which the actress seems to accept. The Latin names of the plants help me through the most difficult parts of the conversation, and she nods, so I manage to give her an overview of the main features of the local vegetation. I’m on home ground now, with the situation well in hand, and I realize that I’ve tapped conversation material for the next thirty to forty miles: a revision of the Latin names of plants. I mention the clusters of yellow grass, blueberry heaths, and moss campion.

—Then there’s geraniums, meadowsweet, mountain avens, sheep sorrel, prickly rose, burnet rose, and lady’s mantle, I say.

—Hang on, lady’s what? What lady?

I don’t have to go into the botany in any depth, but just rattle off the different species of plants that spring to mind, which is more than enough for my traveling companion to ponder on, as I give her the full lowdown on my roots.

—Angelica, I say. It can reach human height.

—Can it really? she says.

—The grass.

—Grass?

—Yeah, the grass is green all summer, shimmering green, incredibly green.

I stroll across the moor in my mind and through the lush grass until I finally find it, a cluster of lady’s mantle. I glance at the clock and see that it’s taken me about a quarter of an hour to present the vegetation. My limited knowledge of the grammar soon leads me down a blind alley, preventing me from developing my ideas any further. I end my overview on dwarf fireweed.

—Pink dwarf weed grows on black-sand beaches, in isolated spots here and there.

I think it’s important that a person who is brought up in the middle of a forest should understand this, that a flower can grow in isolation, all on its own out of black sand and sometimes in a canyon, too. The moment I mention dwarf fireweed I find myself getting a bit sensitive about it.

—Do you pick flowers there, the fireweed?

—No, it’s put so much effort into growing all by itself, sometimes with only just one or two flowers in a whole stretch of sand.

I’m practicing the language, just nouns and verbs, and then I choose a preposition to wrap around the plants and give my traveling companion some idea of the environments they live in. I shift from the canyon down to the sea and enlarge the shore. I think it’s equally important that this foreign lass—I say “lass” just like my old man does—to picture the deserted wide expanse of the beach, with no footprints, and then nothing but endless ocean and maybe some breaking waves foaming out in the sea and finally the endless sky above. I say “endless” twice because I want to convey what it’s like to follow no other man’s footsteps on the black beach. I omit the screeching seagulls, though; they disturb the silence of the image. What’s the word for “endless”? If I could say “endless” I could elevate our conversation to a metaphysical level. The actress urges me on:

—Timeless?

—No, not exactly.

—Immortal?

—Yeah, that’s closer, I say, immortal.

—Cute, she says.

It occurs to me that I could also try to describe the sound of crunching virgin snow, the first steps of the day.

—In a way it’s similar to the black-sand beach, I say, it’s all about footprints.

The actress nods.

I think it’s absolutely incredible the lengths to which women will go to give me their undivided attention and attempt to grasp what I’m saying. Sometimes uncritically even, it seems. Not that this girl looks in any way desperate; on the contrary. I wouldn’t be surprised if I have yet to see her treading the red carpets of film festivals.

Then I can’t be bothered to talk about the vegetation anymore. I just want to shut up for the next hundred miles. I quickly try to calculate how many more miles I’ll have to share with my traveling companion. As soon as I stop thinking about grammar I start thinking about the body again. My linguistic limitations could take our relationship straight to another level, to the wordless communication of body language.

Anyway, I have to check on my plants, so I turn on the blinker, pull up on the side of the road, and kill the engine. She unclips her seat belt as well and prepares to follow me to the trunk to investigate. When she opens the door on the passenger side and I simultaneously open the door on mine, she somehow manages to lose her grip on the script, and white sheets scatter in all directions. She doesn’t go chasing after them into the thicket, but manages to catch them in a sequence of agile and collected moves, moving as swiftly as possible, though, like a wild animal poised for attack, ready to pin down its prey with its high-heeled paws as soon as it moves. I hand her some sheets as a token gesture, but once I see that she has the situation well in hand, I let her chase after the rest of
A Doll’s House
herself and open the trunk instead.

—Hey, what are you doing with these plants? she asks—Is that marijuana? She looks at me with suspicion as I water the plants with the bottles.

—No, these are roses, rose cuttings from home and two extra ones for safety here.

The actress bursts out laughing.

—Have you got a girlfriend? she bluntly asks when we’re sitting back in the car again.

—No, but I have a child.

This is the third time on this trip that I feel a compulsion to talk about my daughter.

She shifts excitedly in her seat and seems to have removed her seat belt.

—Put your belt on, I say.

—Are you joking?

—There are all kinds of creatures roaming around here. I point at a sign with a reindeer.

—About the child?

—No, I’m not joking. A girl, about seven months old, I add.

—Are you divorced?

—Her mother isn’t my ex-wife, just the mother of my child. There’s a big difference.

—Those things normally go together.

—Not where I come from.

—How long were you together?

—Half a night, I say. She’s the one who left, I say, not to give the impression that I’d kicked her out. She’s the one who got dressed and left.

My traveling companion looks at me, intrigued.

—There’s a picture of my daughter in my backpack, I say pointing at the back. She quickly loosens her belt, turns on the light, and then squeezes herself between the seats to rummage through my stuff. Her ass is pretty much against my shoulder while she digs into the top pocket of my backpack.

—In the wallet?

—In the passport.

—Is that your ex-girlfriend?

—No, that’s Mom.

I’d forgotten about the photograph of Mom.

In the picture Mom is standing against the lily-blue wall of the house with fire lilies reaching up to her waist. I’m the person who is with her in the picture, but strange as it may sound, it was my brother Jósef who took the picture. I had both set the focus and set my brother, by drawing a line in the soil where he was supposed to stand with his toes, and I’d shown him twice how the press the shutter release. It worked on the fourth attempt, and Mom and I burst out laughing. I’m a head higher than she is and have my arm around her shoulder. She’s wearing a violet sweater and a skirt and boots: Mom never wore trousers in the greenhouse or garden.

But she often wore strong colors, which sometimes had peculiar patterns, and she was fond of all kinds of materials, which she liked to stroke and sometimes invited me to touch, to feel the difference between, say, Dralon and chiffon. She sometimes came home with some material and sat at the sewing machine. Next day she’d be sitting at the kitchen table in a new blouse. Strange, that detail about the shoulders, I don’t remember holding her like that. She looks happy.

My traveling companion turns again.

—I found it.

She’s holding my passport, which contains all my main details, and the photographs of Mom and my daughter. I quickly glance at the picture she’s holding up in the air and then at the road again.

—That’s her, that’s Flóra Sól in the picture. My headlights beam straight into a rabbit’s red eyes. It wouldn’t be much fun to have scraps of meat stuck in the treads of my tires the next time I pull into a gas station. I should ask if this forest will ever come to an end.

—Cute, she says a moment later, examining the photograph and holding it up to the light. Not very like you, though.

—I don’t have a copy of the DNA test on me. I manage to make myself understood; I manage to crack a joke.

She laughs.

—Seven months, you say? She doesn’t have a lot of hair for a girl, practically bald.

I correct her.

—She’s about seven months, I say. It’s tiring to have to explain the same things to everyone, the thing about the hair. The picture is a month old; she was only six months when that was taken. It’s not immediately visible, the hair, when it’s that blond.

I make one final attempt at explaining to this unfortunate person that blond children generally don’t have much hair in the first year. Why was I such an ass to bring the child up? What possessed me to show her the photograph?

—Give it to me, I say, removing one hand from the wheel to take the picture, which she hands back to me without protest.

I quickly glance at my daughter, smiling broadly with her two lower gum teeth, before shoving the photograph into the breast pocket of my shirt under my sweater. There’s nothing in that child that indicates that she’s the fruit of a half-night stand. Even though my daughter hasn’t occupied much space in my life up until now, I expect I’ll be giving her more thought in the future. I just have to get used to her. A man is bound to feel some fondness for his own child; he’d be a poor sod if he didn’t.

—Weren’t you surprised when you discovered that you were expecting a child with a woman you didn’t know?

—Yeah, a bit, I say, but then decide to drop the subject with her.