Twenty minutes later, here I am out in the middle of a new estate on the outskirts of the city, once more on my way to the house of a stranger. The neighbourhood is in mid-construction and stretches out flatly in all directions under a high sky, with patches of marshland here and there, and little to shelter the houses. It takes me a good while to find the half-finished house. The streets are barely discernible and devoid of lamp-posts, house numbers or names, chaos seems to reign with all the randomness of the first day. But at least construction seems to have started on a church. What finally draws my attention to the right house is a pile of small pieces of wood in the driveway, tidily arranged to form a bizarre pattern, some kind of broken spider’s web that must have required some thought. Scaffolding still covers the façade and the lawn is strewn with stones and, no doubt, berries in the summer.
She is nothing like the image I’ve built up of a fortune-teller and reminds me of an Italian sex bomb from the sixties. It’s Gina Lollobrigida in the flesh who greets me at the door, without me remembering having knocked, looking stunning and of an indeterminate age, wearing a close-cut dress and high heels. What distinguishes her from the common fold, though, are her piercing eyes and tiny pupils, pinheads in an ocean of shimmering blue.
Inside, the house is almost empty. Naked light bulbs dangle here and there, a few plastic flowers, an image of Christ with pretty curly locks and big blue eyes welling with tears. On one wall there is a pencil drawing of a tall Icelandic turf house with four gables. Despite the mounting darkness outside, the house seems full of light. The woman’s voice is as charming as she is:
“I was expecting you earlier,” is the first thing she says to me, “months ago.”
Her spell works on me and my thoughts immediately become transparent. Pinned to the sofa, I feel the muscles relaxing around my neck. I rest my head on the embroidered cushion and ask whether she minds if I lie down, instead of sitting opposite her at the table.
She constantly shuffles an old deck of cards and arranges them on the table, counting and pairing numbers and suits, my past and future. She can obviously read me like an open book. I find it quite uncomfortable to be browsed through in that way. But she makes no mention of adultery or the dead goose in my trunk, and doesn’t talk about what must be written all over my forehead, that I’m still carrying alien liquid inside me that I fear could leak onto the velvet sofa.
Instead she focuses on my childhood and other things I’ve no memory of and know nothing about. She mentions mounds of manure and the broken elastic of some skin-coloured breeches, and keeps on coming back to the torn thread, they could be underpants, she says, cream-coloured, or they could be a pyjama bottom. I don’t know where she’s going with this.
“I’m just telling you what the cards show me, hang on to it.”
Then, in the same breath, she turns to my future.
“It’s all threes here,” she says, “three men in your life over a distance of 300 kilometres, three dead animals, three minor accidents or mishaps, although you aren’t necessarily directly involved in them, animals will be maimed, but the men and women will survive. However, it is clear that three animals will die before you meet the man of your life.”
I wearily try to point out from the depths of the sofa that I am a married woman and, by way of proof, feebly raise my right arm to stroke the simple wedding ring between my thumb and index. She pays no heed to this information, I’m not even sure she heard what I said.
“Things that no one will be expecting will happen, people will experience a lot of wetness, short-sightedness, greed, isolation, more wetness.”
“How do you mean wetness?”
“It’ll wet more than your ankles, that’s all I can say, impossible to know anything more than that today. I do, however, see a large marine mammal on dry land.”
She pauses briefly, there is a dead stillness in the room.
“There is a triple conception,” she continues, “one of them may be a trinity.”
What does the woman mean?
“My brother had test-tube triplets, they’re two years old now,” I awkwardly interject.
“I’m not talking about them,” the woman snaps, “I’m talking about three pregnant women, three babies on the way, three women who will give birth to babies over the coming months.”
“Well, there’s my friend Auður. .”
Fortunately, she clearly has no interest in my input and shuts me up with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if I were an irksome teenager interrupting her private dialogue with some invisible being.
“And then there’s a big boy here, an adolescent, a narrow fjord, black sand, dwarf fireweed, the mouth of a river, seals nearby.”
Another one of her pauses.
“There’s a lottery prize here, money and a journey. I see a circular road, and I also see another ring that will fit on a finger, later. You’ll never be the same again, but when it’s all done, you’ll be standing with the light in your arms.”
Those were her words, to the letter, “with the light in my arms”, whatever that was supposed to mean.
“To summarize it all,” she concludes in the manner of an experienced lecturer, “there is a journey here, money and love, even though you can expect some odd twists along the way. But I can’t see which of these three men it will be.”
When I finally stand up, I notice that she has placed all the cards on the table and arranged them in a strange pattern that is not unlike the one formed by the pile of wood outside, some kind of spider’s web with broken threads.
I suddenly feel the urge to ask:
“Did you make that wooden structure outside?”
She fixes her gaze on me, her pupils piercing through an ocean of shimmering blue:
“Keep an eye on the patterns, but don’t allow them to distort your vision, it takes a while to develop a good eye for patterns. Nevertheless, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t allow myself to be led into marshland in the fog. Remember that not everything is what it seems.”
As I’m about to hold out my hand to say goodbye, she suddenly embraces me and says:
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy a lottery ticket.”
Her two adolescent sons offer to escort me back to the car, which I’ve forgotten where I parked, seemingly quite far away. Marching on either side of me, they look on with determined airs, as if they’d taken on a mission that had to be accomplished at all costs. We walk for what seems like a very long time, I even get the impression we’re travelling in circles and can’t remember ever coming this way. Then, just as I’m beginning to feel totally lost, the car materializes in front of me, close to a sea wall, in a place I don’t remember leaving it. It is unlocked, as usual, but all the papers are in their proper place, although I couldn’t vouch that every single sheet is in its pile. I see no point in checking on the goose in the trunk. As I say goodbye, I realize for the first time that the brothers are twins and notice how they both always seem to shift their weight to their right legs as they walk. There is something odd in their gazes, pupils like black pins in an ocean of shimmering blue. As soon as I turn the key in the ignition and am about to wave them goodbye, I realize they’ve evaporated into thin air.