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Home life is terribly silent. When I wake up, Dad’s gone to work. He eats his pickled meat and porridge for breakfast. I eat Cheerios.
Dad doesn’t come back home until late in the evening. He watches the news and falls asleep. Sometimes he talks to me in the evenings, when he’s about to take his nap.
I love chatting with Dad. He knows so much and there’s so much I want to know. We watch The Latest, which is about new science and technology, and he explains to me what I don’t understand.
Mom doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t want to know how planes can fly and why ships don’t sink even though they’re overweight.
— I don’t know, she says, sadly.
— But don’t you want to know?
— Not if I don’t need to know.
She talks to me in short, direct sentences. When Dad isn’t home I ask her the things I don’t understand.
— I don’t know, ask your Dad, is her answer.
But Dad is usually very tired when he’s done working. He works all day and sometimes at night. Sometimes he has to work on Christmas. He just comes home to eat then goes back out to work.
When Dad is that tired, it’s like he doesn’t hear me even though I’m right in front of him.
— What’s quicksilver, Dad?
— Yes, he replies, looking at a spot in the air.
— Anton says that quicksilver is a stone that’s like water.
— Well, that’s good.
Dad’s odd. He is often distracted.
Gummi once asked me whether he’s deaf. He was outside in his garden with his dad when Dad walked past. Gummi’s dad said hello but Dad didn’t respond. He raised his voice and said hello again but Dad still didn’t answer.
He isn’t deaf. Mom took him to have a hearing test. Dad is not deaf. He’s just a bit distracted.
Dad also often confuses people. Sometimes when he’s reading the paper, he’s convinced one of his friends has died.
— Kristján’s dead, he says suddenly.
— Kristján who? asks Mom.
— Kristján Einarsson, my friend.
Then Mom shakes her head and rolls her eyes, goes over to him, and looks at the paper.
— That’s not Kristján!
— It says so right here.
— That’s another Kristján. That’s not your cousin Kristján.
— Isn’t it? Are you totally sure?
— Yes, I am totally sure.
— How can you tell?
Mom gets irritated.
— Just by looking at the picture. It’s not him.
— Well, says Dad and smoothes the paper as though he’s sorry his cousin isn’t dead.
He never remembers anyone’s name. Sometimes he calls my friends names they aren’t called. I have three friends. They’re called Gummi, Stebbi, and Anton and they all live on the same street as me. Dad’s met them many times. He thinks they’re all called Siggi. I don’t have any friends called Siggi. I don’t know why he thinks I have a friend named Siggi. Maybe he had a friend, when he was a boy, called Siggi. Perhaps he thinks all little boys are called Siggi.
My father is a Communist. Mom votes for the Independence Party. My dad is opposed to the Independence Party. He calls them conservatives or, sometimes, the damn conservatives. Conservatives are the enemies of Communists. A conservative publishes The Morning News.
Mom doesn’t have the same interest in politics as Dad. She doesn’t care that they’re enemies. She simply opts for the Independence Party because her mother and father did, and so do all her family. She thinks traditions and customs are important.
When Mom has made a decision, she very rarely changes her mind, and doesn’t ever feel like talking about it. She has no interest in innovation and ideas. She’s happy when things are as they always have been. If everything is OK, in her opinion, and things work, there’s no need to change anything; ideas and speculation and that sort of thing are an unnecessary waste of time. But Mom likes people. She tells stories about them and likes to wonder what they’re up to. Though she’s not a gossip.
Mom has strong views about people too. Some are good and others are not. She is not snobbish and does not pick favorites by class or status. But she has her opinions about people she doesn’t know or doesn’t have information about from a reliable source. She also judges people based on her personal experience of them. And when she’s judged someone, that becomes her opinion of them. If Mom doesn’t like someone, there’s little chance it will change. If she clashes with someone, she stops talking to them.
Sometimes when I get into an argument at school, I try to talk to my Mom.
— He’s so irritating.
— Then stop talking to him.
— What do you mean?
— Just never talk to him again.
— What if he talks to me?
— If he tries to talk to you, you should walk past him. Leave like you haven’t seen him.
Mom doesn’t complicate things for herself. She doesn’t mind that Dad’s a Communist. It’s all the same to her. He occasionally makes feeble attempts to draw her into political debates, on some specific issues, but always without success.
— It’s the conservatives who support this war, they’re the ones who dragged us into it — against the will of the majority of the population.
— I don’t know anything about war.
— You vote conservative, though.
— Yes, sure.
— Isn’t it your personal responsibility, then, to inform yourself about what you’re voting for?
— I don’t see that it matters either way.
— Doesn’t matter?!? How can you say that?
— I don’t care a bit. I just say what I want.
— You don’t care who runs the country or how they do it?
— Absolutely.
— But when these same people jeopardize our security, don’t you think it’s time to make a decision, time for each and every voter in the country to reflect on the consequences of their voting?
— I don’t know anything about that.
— Why don’t you study it, then?
— Because I’m not interested in it, Kristinn!
— You’re not interested in it?!
— No.
— And you think that’s logical?
— Enough! Stop bugging me. I’m tired of this stupid debate.
— So that’s the end of it?
— Yes, I do what I want and I vote how I want and I don’t have to explain it to you or anyone else!
Mom reads Danish newspapers. She occasionally gets a pile of them from her friends.
I think the news in them is boring. It’s nothing but recipes and interviews with princesses and people who are famous in Denmark. All the images are of women in ridiculous fashion get-up.
I read Youth. That’s a cool paper, especially because of its comic strips. Mom gets it for me, and sometimes she also gets Duck Tales. I think Donald Duck is great. He’s my favorite character. He’s like me. He has great ideas that usually fail. Donald is a good person but keeps making inadvertent mistakes. That’s me, too. He’s always working for Uncle Scrooge but he still always owes people money. Scrooge is miserly but he’s alright because he’s loaded and often invites Donald and Huey, Dewey, and Louie to accompany him on exhilarating adventures, to countries that perhaps no one else has ever gone to, even far out into space. I also like The Beagle Boys. They’re always trying to steal money from Scrooge. I’m confident that I’ll be like Donald Duck when I grow up.