He hangs up, walks into the bathroom, and copies the sound of the drums — or rather the drum machine — that is coming from the music in the living room. I lift up the sheet a fraction. I can’t see a cigarette in his hand, but I detect the faint smell of tobacco smoke. He stands there for a little while, and seems to be stretching his face towards the mirror above the sink. For a few seconds he taps one of his feet on the floor, though not in time to the music.
Although he has already been here twenty minutes or half an hour, I still find it strange; I still can’t believe it. I tell myself that I may be having a nightmare. But just maybe. There is so little chance that it is impossible. In other words, it is reality. It is reality with a capital R; the most emphatic R I have ever experienced in reality.
What Havard does next makes the reality — at least the reality that I experience from two and a half meters away — even more meaningful, although I don’t know whether there is any meaning in reality. By lifting the sheet slightly higher, I see him take off his jacket, put down the lighted cigarette on the edge of the sink, and begin to undo his belt. Then he drops his pants to the floor, lifts his shirt and pulls down his white underwear. I can’t see his face — I would need to lift the sheet dangerously high — but I get a full view of his penis in profile (if one can talk about such things in profile); it’s thick, though not very big, and strangely dark, as if it had been sunbathing on its own. Havard lifts it with the palm of his hand, pulls it out, and moves it up and down until it begins to stiffen. My heart begins to beat faster. Now I feel like I am prying into Havard’s life, but I know that if I let the sheet fall he is likely to notice. So I am sort of forced to watch. When his penis has started to stretch upwards, Havard suddenly stops playing with it. He lets his shirt fall down, turns his back to the door, and opens the toilet. Before he sits down on the seat I notice how white his legs are, especially compared to his dark penis.
While he is sitting I let the sheet fall down carefully to the carpet. Though I have the opportunity to see his face while he is sitting on the toilet, there is more chance that he will look into the bedroom from that position; besides, I have had enough of prying into his life, at least for the time being.
I can’t help hearing the noises that accompany what he is doing. He takes his time, though he doesn’t seem to be having any difficulty, and when I hear him stand up and flush the toilet, we are halfway through another track. Then, suddenly, I become aware of the smell from the toilet, and when it gets stronger — I could say disgustingly strong — I think of a sentence from Herzog: “Do you think I could give myself to a man whose shit smells like that!”
While Havard is calmly doing up his pants, I suddenly feel a tickle in my nose and realize that I’ll have to sneeze sooner or later. I ask God to let Havard turn on the tap, or do something noisy, when I hear water start pouring forcefully into the sink; God seems to be listening to me. I bury my face in my hands and smother the sneeze as well as I possibly can. Then I wait in suspense for Havard to turn off the tap and search the bedroom, but nothing happens. The water keeps pouring into the sink and I begin to hear heavy sighs from Havard, sighs that soon change into rapid groans. I lift up the sheet one or two centimeters — enough to see up as far as Havard’s waist — and watch him press his thighs against the sink. His right hand goes up and down; he is masturbating. Not only is he about to soil my sink but he drags Vigdis’s name into it too; I think I can hear her name being called between groans. He wants her “to come here,” he wants to show her something, she will have to bend down, and then, all at once, as if he wasn’t quite expecting it, he comes; he lifts his body up and presses even harder against the sink. Compared to his previous groans, the sound he makes when he ejaculates is half choked, as if he is disappointed, as if Vigdis hasn’t done what he had told her to do.
I try not to imagine how he will clean up or if he will bother to at all. I lay my cheek down on the carpet and shut my eyes; I feel like I have been straining to do something difficult too. The water continues pouring into the sink, and when it finally stops Havard goes into the living room and plays the first track of the CD again. Soon he starts singing — or rather talking — along to the music from the loudspeakers:
Interpol and Deutsche Bank. FBI and Scotland Yard.
Then I hear him pouring something into a glass and lighting a match. He is still muttering the lyrics to himself:
Business. . numbers. . money. . people.
7
When I hear Havard giving a toast in Spanish — he is no doubt rewarding himself for his achievement in the bathroom — I recall our visit to a little Spanish bar in a narrow lane off Oxford Street. It was around the time when he bought his ukulele. I remember the visit particularly well because it was almost the only occasion on which Havard and I had a sensible talk. He told me about his mother and father, who didn’t consider themselves capable of looking after him when he was small because of their drinking problem, and how he grew up more or less with his grandmother who lived next door. When he told me about it I felt that I was listening to a sensitive, sincere individual, and I imagine now that he must have felt unusually well that day and was perhaps genuinely grateful to be there with me in another country. I don’t remember his exact words, but there in the bar he spoke about people at home not understanding him; sometimes he felt as if he lived in a different world from Icelanders in general, but in the same breath he mentioned how comfortable it was to be in England and speak a language which no one else could understand.
Except me of course.
I told him I understood what he meant, and while we laughed at the idea that he should perhaps speak English in Iceland — as there would be a chance of someone understanding him then — I thought he was cheerful and ready to make the best of our stay in London.
But then, exactly a day later, it seemed that Havard had gone off the rails emotionally and intellectually, and with each day that passed he seemed to move further and further away from the equilibrium that he had enjoyed that afternoon. It is probably ridiculous to talk about mental equilibrium in a person who has just arrived in a new country and spends a large amount of money on a musical instrument which he has never heard of before, but, considering his behavior during the rest of his stay, he seemed comparatively normal as we chatted in this friendly bar — even though that was the place where he decided to call himself Howard and to introduce me as Email from then on. Emil was far too Scandinavian a name for the British Isles.
It was also in this Spanish bar that Havard explained to two native bank clerks why we were in London. When he had finished telling me about his past, he took out his new instrument to have a look at it and handle it, and the men at the next table became very keen to find out what kind of guitar it was. One of them thought it was a toy guitar, and when Havard told him it was a ukulele, they admitted that they had never heard of anything called that. We were both rather chatty after the beer and the Spanish brandy that the bartender had recommended and were quite willing to talk to these city men. All Havard knew about the instrument he had been told by the man in the shop. It was a special guitar from Hawaii and originated in Portugal, and, when he mentioned that Elvis held a similar guitar on the cover of his album Blue Hawaii, the men remembered it and thought it was quite remarkable. Then they were curious to know where we came from, were we from Holland or Germany? Their interest didn’t diminish when they heard that we came from Iceland, and they asked what we were doing in London, since we weren’t just ordinary tourists, as Havard put it.