He thanked Emil’s mother and ended the conversation. Later on. He repeated the phrase to himself and replaced the receiver. He picked up his glass, tipped it up slowly to his lips, as if he hadn’t quite decided whether he should drink it, and gulped down what was left without screwing up his face.
15
I wasn’t particularly surprised to see the couple from the duty-free store get on the bus. I waited outside on the pavement with the blonde woman until the driver announced that he was ready to leave. We smoked another cigarette together and she told me that the customs officials had searched her. They had carried out quite a thorough examination, she said. To me, she didn’t look the type that customs officials would have reason to pick on. She was wearing a neat black leather jacket on top of her T-shirt — she must have bought the jacket on this trip — and she had wrapped herself in a thick, black scarf.
I was just about to tell her that we had met before (though we didn’t really meet), about fifteen years ago, but changed my mind. I would tell her later, if we ever got to know each other better, which I really hoped we would.
The driver had seen to all the baggage and had locked the luggage compartment. We put out our cigarettes and climbed into the bus. I didn’t expect to see Armann in there — I hadn’t noticed him come through customs — but I looked around for him before I sat down. He would obviously have to wait for the next bus; somehow I couldn’t imagine that he would be picked up in a private car.
It seemed natural that we sit together, the blonde one and I; the only seats that were vacant were near the front of the bus.
“My name is Emil,” I said when we had sat down. I thought it was about time I introduced myself.
“Greta,” she replied, combing her hair back with her hands and tying it into a knot. “What were you doing in London?”
I told her that I had been shopping.
“For some company?”
While I explained to her what kind of shopping trip I had been on, I took two cans of beer out of my duty-free bag and offered her one. I was pleasantly surprised when she said yes.
“But what were you doing?” I asked.
“Smuggling dope,” she said with a grin. “No, I was just visiting my sister who lives in London.”
I hadn’t noticed how beautiful her smile was and how full her lips were when she smiled at me on the plane. Despite the fact that fifteen years had passed, I thought her face seemed younger now, and I secretly tried to imagine her with ruffled hair, as she was when she emerged from the children’s bedroom. There was something very sexy about her eyes, as if she was drowsy or, at least, not very wide awake, which, on the other hand, was a contradiction, because she seemed to me to be very smart and clearly had a sense of humor.
“Were you there for long?” I asked, just to say something.
“Yes and no,” she answered. “I would have liked to stay longer but maybe not with my sister. I like being in London.”
“But not at your sister’s?”
“Yes, of course it’s good to stay with one’s sister in London. But I wouldn’t have minded if she was sitting here now beside you instead of me.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to this.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, as if she had read my thoughts. “I would just have liked to stay longer in her flat, that is without her being there as well. But, what did you say, were you just shopping? Not doing anything?”
“I was visiting a friend who is at university there,” I said. “Just disrupting his studies, he’s learning economics. But besides that, I was just wasting money. Or converting it into something else; one doesn’t really waste money by buying something with it, of course it is still in circulation.”
“It’s still in circulation?”
“At least it doesn’t disappear,” I said, beginning to regret my stupid attempt to be clever. “I mean the money I took with me, it’s in London now,” I explained and tried to sound as if I was deliberately making a poor joke. “I didn’t really waste it, I just exchanged it for something else.”
“I see,” Greta said with a good-natured smile.
“Well, I won the lottery a few weeks ago,” I was quick to add, trying to steer the conversation away from this silly remark about wasting money. I realized straight away that I had made matters worse; it was stupidly naive to tell a complete stranger that one had won the lottery. But her reaction didn’t seem to indicate that I had made a fool of myself:
“May I ask how much you won?” she asked keenly.
“A million.”
“A million?”
“Yes, one million.”
“Then what? You went and wasted the lot in London? I mean, did you take it all with you to London?”
We both laughed. I answered that I hadn’t wasted it all, and we began to laugh again at the verb “waste,” which is difficult to avoid using when talking about money; we had made a new version of the word game The Lady in Hamburg. While Greta told me about her unsuccessful shopping trip, as she called it — she had spent a whole day in town, from ten in the morning till seven in the evening and hadn’t managed to buy a single thing for herself — I began to wonder if I had bought enough in London, if the trips to the music stores and book stores had been as productive as I had expected them to be, if one can use such professional terms in this context.
As I started thinking that, instead of meeting on the plane, we had bumped into each other in London, maybe walked into the same bar and one heard the other order a drink, Greta asked — not in the imaginary bar but beside me here in the bus — if I lived alone or with someone. I was surprised that she asked me this — I thought that these kinds of questions came later on, after you got to know a person better — but I told her the truth: I had lived alone for a little while now but had a seven-year-old son who lived in Denmark with his mother and came to visit me in the summertime.
“I’m in a similar situation,” she said. “I have a five-year-old daughter, and I live alone. Or almost, I live in the basement of my mother’s house.”
We carried on talking for the rest of the ride, and I think, considering how we had only just met, we were quite frank about ourselves. I didn’t mention that I had a girlfriend and thought it was very likely that she was keeping similar information to herself. It looked like the romantic comedy I had imagined outside the toilet on the plane might actually reach its happy conclusion. We agreed to meet in the evening, she would call me after she had had her supper, taken a bath and so on.
Of course Vigdis cast a large, dark shadow over the excitement and nervous fluttering that I felt inside, but it had to be like that; I wasn’t going to stop now, I couldn’t do it to myself nor to this interesting woman whom — however illogical it was — I continually imagined changing the sheets and scrubbing bathrooms in the hotel rooms in Akureyri where Vigdis worked. I wouldn’t see Vigdis for several days and told myself that I had to wait and see what would evolve with Greta. I couldn’t even be sure that anything would happen. It could be that whatever was meant to happen had already happened. If she called, it might just be to say thank you for our conversation on the bus; she had to spend time with her daughter this evening and maybe she would contact me later.
Her mother came to pick her up at Loftleidir Hotel. I had already declined the offer of a ride with them. I would take a taxi as I had to stop at a certain place on the way. Despite the fact that I was impatient to spend more time with this new girlfriend, it was too much of an insult to Vigdis to ride in Greta’s mother’s car. While I watched mother and daughter drive off, I suddenly felt that the clothes that Vigdis had asked me to buy in London were unbelievably drab. I thought that it would have been a real waste of money to have bought them.