He paused again and in the meantime I imagined that something had gone wrong in his upbringing, something that he realized had had an effect on him as an adult. Then he carried on:
“But whatever happened; if you had an identical twin brother, which I doubt you have, then he should really be called . . .?”
It took me a few seconds to realize that I was being asked a question.
“Emil,” I said. Just as I had expected, he didn’t remember my name.
“Emil. Yes, that’s as good a name as any. Emil Jonsson.”
“Emil Halldorsson,” I corrected him. “Emil S. Halldorsson.”
“You know who Emil Jonsson was, don’t you?”
“Can’t say I do,” I answered.
“It can be useful to know about famous people who share your name,” he said and sat up straight in his seat. “Emil Jonsson is not the worst namesake one could think of, I am quite sure of that.”
“I don’t think I have ever heard him mentioned,” I said, and it occurred to me to mention my namesake in the Swedish Smålands, but I changed my mind.
“But perhaps you are no better off knowing about someone who bore your name in the past,” Armann carried on. “Least of all if he is dead.”
For a moment I wondered whether my namesake, whom I had thought of mentioning, was still alive or not, and whether characters in stories grew old in the same way as, for example, their authors.
“But you aren’t a twin, are you?” Armann asked. He smiled and waited for my answer, as if he wanted to make sure that I had come into this world alone, was one of a kind and so on.
I said I wasn’t.
“Consider yourself lucky,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not to be a twin.”
This last comment made me think that he was hinting at his own personal experience of being a twin (could he even be an identical twin?), and yet it was unthinkable that there could be another version of such a man.
“Then it mentions slightly further on,” he went on and turned over the page of the book. “It states here: ‘Fearing that their trademark, if converted to a noun, may become as generic as aspirin or kleenex, they,’ that is Sony, of course, ‘sidestep the grammatical issues by insisting upon Walkman Personal Stereos.’ In other words they avoid the issue by removing the grammar from the name of the instrument. Or the name of the technology, to be more exact.”
“Is that so?” I said. “The company directors have started controlling how we talk?”
“There is no question about it,” Armann answered, clearly very happy that I showed interest in the subject. “They cut out the grammar in the name of their product because they don’t have a good enough grasp of language. One who knows that he is in the wrong naturally tries to convince everyone else that he is in the right; that is usually the way that information is passed on from man to man. They can produce an instrument that enables you to enjoy your favorite songs at thirty thousand feet above sea-level but when it comes to giving this remarkable instrument a name, they haven’t the ability to name more than a single copy; all the other copies are left in some problematic limbo. People all over the world who own the instruments are totally helpless because they don’t know how to name them when someone asks. But there is also the other possibility: that each copy is different.”
He fell silent at this point, as if he was giving me the chance to say something. Then he asked for my opinion.
“On what?” I asked.
“Whether each copy could be different?”
“That’s a question,” I said, and I realized as soon as I had said it that I had answered with this phrase before. It looked as if I had only one response on hand in reply to what the linguist was telling me and that answer had to include the word question.
“But I personally don’t believe that each individual product of this kind is unique,” he continued and pointed again at my tape player. “Isn’t it made somewhere in East Asia? Where everyone is virtually the same, whether he works with a conveyor belt or at a desk or stoops half starved over some paddy field?”
I said I thought it was produced in Korea or Japan and restrained myself from objecting to his statement that all the inhabitants of these countries were the same.
“However it may well be that they are all individual,” he said, as if he regretted having clumsily exposed his antipathy for Asians. “Maybe it’s possible to find some minute differences between one Japanese and another. But then we can also consider the opposite of Japanese technology: the Russian automobile industry! No two vehicles are the same. Each Lada, Moskvitch, or whatever it is called, is absolutely unique. Of course the Russian car comes into existence in a similar manner as most babies do, that is to say under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”
Suddenly he pushed his nose up in the air and sniffed. Then he looked back towards the flight attendant, who was approaching with the food trays, and said:
“It seems as though they are going to treat us to something.”
It flashed through my mind that Armann Valur could be as much under the influence as the Russian mechanics allegedly were. I thought it unlikely that the half glass of red wine he had drunk could stimulate those weird speculations on tape players and the book from Foyles. Not to mention the subject he moved on to next: that his favorite word was limbo. He felt that he, personally, was often in some kind of limbo, both in respect to his life as a human being, that is the life pattern—as he expressed it—and his life as a thinking individual amongst other thinking individuals, and often individuals who didn’t seem to think very much at all from one minute to the next. But whatever the outcome, and maybe exactly because of these thoughts of his, I was beginning to enjoy Armann’s company—even though he was certainly one of those personalities one would never wish to have as a lifelong acquaintance or consider inviting home.
The aroma of the food seemed to have taken complete control of Armann and he had definitely lost all interest in those forms of research into which he had been giving me glimpses. He managed to stuff the book back into his pocket with a certain amount of difficulty—although it was a paperback it was too big for an average sized pocket—and he got ready for the meal by putting the flight magazine back in the seat pocket, brushing something off the sleeve of his overcoat and rubbing his hands together, like someone who is looking forward to something good. Next he took off his glasses and put them down on the table, which was ready for the food tray.
I guessed we would get chicken.
10
The cab driver pulled up in the parking space in front of the ice cream stand at Ingolfstorg. He paid the driver and when he told him to keep the four hundred kronur change, the driver, who hadn’t uttered a word all the way, said he never took more than the rate; he pointed at the meter and said that was the price, that was what he accepted for the ride. Then it will just have to be danger money, he said as he opened the door and worked his way out. He shut the door behind him, zipped up his anorak, fitted his hood over his head, and walked into Austurstraeti with his plastic bag. When he had gone several meters along the street he suddenly turned round and went back in the direction of the square. The taxi was still in the parking lot, and he knocked on passenger’s side window as he passed by. The driver seemed startled; he watched his former passenger walk on, and then muttered something under his breath when he saw the passenger stop at the ice cream stand and talk to a young man.
He