she went in, but I couldn’t help imagining what she was doing once she had disappeared inside the plastic door and bolted the lock. I was in no hurry to get to the toilet and I rather hoped that she would take her time. I enjoyed standing there, making sure that no one disturbed her.
“It’s alright for you to enter,” she said with a smile when she came out, but I was partly wishing that she had left some kind of smell behind. Then she thanked me, and as she walked off in the direction of her seat, I noticed that she was carrying a little toilet bag.
I’m not sure if I imagined it but I felt as if she had given me some kind of signal with her eyes when she smiled at me. I was quite certain I wouldn’t be able to shake this woman out of my mind straight away. There was a rather heavy, heady perfume floating in the air that appealed to me straight away; she had brought her perfume in her toilet bag and had decided to use it after our conversation.
She looked back at me once, later on in the flight, and we smiled politely at each other.
Armann didn’t wake up until the captain announced that we were descending and that there were fourteen degrees of frost in Keflavik. Several passengers shivered at the very thought of it. But Armann didn’t seem to be very cold, he had clearly sweated while he slept, and I noticed that the woman by the window, who had just woken up too, couldn’t help smiling when she saw the beads of perspiration on the forehead of this overdressed man.
Armann didn’t say a word until we were just about to touch down. Then he suddenly started talking, and it was quite obvious that he was nervous. Out of the blue he began to tell me about a bartender he had met in his hotel in London. He had been chatting to him late one evening and the bartender—who had the same surname as both the Prime Minister of England and the author of Animal Farm (that is, before he assumed his “nom de plume”)—had told him a little story that explained why he had turned to heavy drinking and smoking as a young man. One of his teachers in secondary school had been a strict teetotaler, and just before he bade farewell to his pupils, who were going off to grapple with life or on to other educational institutions, he wanted to show them once and for all the destructive nature of alcohol and tobacco. He placed three glasses of water on his desk, and added alcohol to the first and nicotine to the second, leaving the third uncontaminated, just pure water.
“If one can talk about pure water in England,” Armann added in an aside.
Then the teacher opened a little cardboard box, and pulled out a black insect, which was about the size of a cigarette filter, with a pair of tweezers.
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