9
Probably half an hour had passed since take-off. The woman in the window seat asked the flight attendant for two little bottles of white wine and said no thank you when she was offered a liqueur to have with her coffee later. I had made up my mind not to drink anything on the way; I was going to wait until the evening when my friends, Saebjorn and Jaime, were going to drop in. Those plans were altered when Armann ordered four little bottles of red wine and told the flight attendant to put two of them on my table. I didn’t want to decline his offer, and after a few minutes’ thought—which involved changing my plans for the rest of the day—I decided to take an active part in the wine purchasing by ordering four miniature bottles of Cointreau to have with our coffee; two for me and two for Armann. He seemed really pleased at that. But later it became apparent that the red wine was free—part of the service, Armann said with a smug smile, rephrasing the information he’d been given by the flight attendant—while I needed to pay for the liqueurs with my credit card, which I had to fetch from the overhead bin. While I was standing up, Armann turned to the woman in the window seat and asked her if we couldn’t offer her a liqueur with her coffee. By using the word we he had made us into comrades. She thanked Armann for the offer but no, she wasn’t very partial to strong drinks. Armann seemed almost offended when she declined; he repeated what she had said, “not partial to strong drinks,” and when I sat down again I heard him mumble something to the effect that it was her choice.
“These bottles don’t hold much,” he observed and lifted one of the red wine bottles up to eye-level. “Perhaps it’s about one glassful. Maybe slightly more.”
I replied that he was probably right but didn’t want to say any more, in case he was going to start another discussion like the one on heat and cold. Armann opened the bottle he was holding, poured the contents into his glass, and then put his hand into his inner coat pocket and pulled out a paperback. I couldn’t imagine him shutting himself off in a book and, of course, that was not quite what he had in mind. He opened the book and while he turned the pages (rather roughly for my liking) he said he wanted to show me something. He had bought this book in Foyles Bookshop on Charing Cross Road and discovered, afterwards really, that it was exactly what he had been looking for.
“That was lucky,” I said and poured red wine into my glass.
“Yes, you could definitely say that,” Armann answered. “It’s always a pleasure when life takes one by surprise. It doesn’t happen that often, does it?”
He pulled his glasses case out of his jacket pocket. Like the Opal box, it appeared to have been sat on. However, I was rather surprised at how modern the shape of the frames were, and I noticed that the woman by the window watched Armann’s clumsy movements—he put on his glasses and replaced the case in his pocket—with a smile. He seemed to be having trouble finding what he was going to show me, and the woman, who had taken out Harper’s Bazaar from her bag, appeared to be rather shocked at the way Armann thumbed his way back and forth through his book. She, on the other hand, turned the pages so carefully that I imagined she had bought the magazine for someone else at home and wanted it to look untouched.
I asked Armann what the title of the book was.
“It’s a really remarkable volume,” he said, but was too engrossed in turning the pages to answer my question. I hadn’t noticed what was on the cover but from the little diagrams—some kind of calculations with words instead of numbers—I guessed that it was of a scientific nature, no doubt some complicated, advanced grammatical text.
Although I didn’t expect to have peace for long, I used the opportunity to replace my headphones and switched on Miles again. The fair-haired girl in the T-shirt was resting her bare elbow on the armrest, her head leaning to one side as she gazed along the aisle. She had her index finger on her cheek and let her fourth finger play with her lips as if she was deep in thought over what she saw. I couldn’t see if she was drinking anything but imagined she had white wine like the woman beside Armann. I thought it was very likely that she was traveling alone; I hadn’t seen her talk to anyone except the flight attendant and the person on the other side of the aisle.
I looked at her for quite a while and began to wonder how long I could carry on gazing without her being aware of me. No doubt, she knew already. I think I always notice when someone is watching me; it doesn’t matter whether the person is sitting beside me or is further away.
All at once I felt Armann nudge me gently with his elbow. At the same moment the fair-haired girl turned round, as if she had heard something further back in the plane. Our eyes met for a moment. She had clearly begun to smell the food, which I also smelled now as the trolley came nearer, but, though our gazes had met, it was impossible to say if she had noticed me.
I took off the headphones to attend to Armann.
“See here,” he said. He held up the book and pointed with a thick, short finger at the upper right hand page.
“What?”
“Look.”
“What is it?” I asked, my mind still on the fair-haired girl.
Armann tapped the tape player on my table and then pointed at the text in the book. He read out:
“Since the Sony Walkman was introduced, no one has been sure whether two of them should be Walkmen or Walkmans.” He looked at me and asked if I had ever considered it.
I shook my head.
Then he carried on: “(The nonsexist alternative), that’s in brackets here,” he added, “(The nonsexist alternative Walkpersons would leave us on the hook, because we would be faced with a choice between Walkpersons and Walkpeople).” He stopped reading out loud but stared at the page as if he was still reading silently. He nodded, looked at me and then at the educated woman, no doubt hoping that she was listening too.
“That’s a question,” he said.
“Yes, it is a question,” I agreed and took the tape out of my Walkman, not to turn it round but just to keep my hands occupied.
Armann took a good sip of red wine before he continued, and as I picked up my glass to keep him company the woman at the window did exactly the same, although she didn’t seem to be aware that we were drinking simultaneously.
“That’s the crux of the matter,” Armann said. “They produce one instrument, for example this one here,” he tapped my player again, “but as soon as they use technology to produce a second player and then number three and so on, they no longer know what to call their invention in the plural. They are faced with a grammatical problem that no instrument has been invented to solve. Of course it is the same dilemma that parents have to cope with when they give birth to twins or triplets. Really they should all have the same name, that is if they are identical and the same sex; they come one after another from the same producer, they are as identical inwardly as two such instruments from Sony and the only thing that differentiates them is—at least superficially—the same thing which differentiates one Sony instrument from another.”
At this point he paused and looked at me over his glasses; he obviously expected me to be keen to find out what it was that differentiated one instrument from another.
“What can that be?” I asked.
“What differentiates identical twins is the treatment they receive, at least how they are treated as children and teenagers; what they are fed, what noises, words and music they hear. In other words: upbringing. I don’t mean just musical upbringing, rather upbringing in general, which I have always thought should be called treatment.”
“Isn’t