The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

Aksel. In the sunlight he was shaggy, his color was not so good, but he was beautiful, a beauty. His clothes smelled of smoke. He seemed a victim of more than recreational Vikinghood.

“You’re on vacation,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d become a professional Viking.”

“Ah, no. I am a software developer. Flora, she is a foot doctor. And you?”

“Bookkeeper.”

He nodded. “You were always a keeper of books. Let us discuss what you have brought me.”

The minute she pulled the watch from her purse she missed its weight. She opened the Ziploc bag, suddenly worried that watches were supposed to breathe.

“Ah!” said Aksel, mildly. He took the watch and put it instantly inside a pouch he had tied to his belt, as though any sign of modernity were shameful. “Walter knew I admired this watch. That is what you came to give me?”

“It’s what my father wanted you to have.”

“And only this.”

He started walking, and she followed, her long-ago husband, her lost love, to the banks of the sacrificial bog, if bogs had banks. Aksel said, “But not the boy.”

“Not the boy what?”

“He isn’t my son.”

“What? No! He’s ten.”

“Ah!” said Aksel. “My mother said you were coming with a boy, and Flora thought maybe. She has a keen sense for these things.”

She saw on his face an old emotion, disappointment shading into woe. “What did you think?”

He turned to the bog. “I might have liked it. Flora has a son. It might have saved me.”

“Saved you? Viking you, or you you?”

The bog said nothing. Aksel said, “I can love anyone,” and took her hand. It was the first time he had touched her. A moment ago she’d thought that would be the last step of the spell, the magic word, the wave of the wand. But it wasn’t.

I could lie, she thought. She’d never really lied, not like that, a lie you would have to see through, a first step on the road to a hoax, an entirely different life, where facts and dates and numbers were fudged. Leo did exist because of Aksel. He would not otherwise.

But then Aksel dropped her hand, as though he’d been joking. “Women are lucky. God puts an end to their foolishness. But men, we are bedeviled till the end of our days.”

She said, with as much love as she could muster, quite a lot, “Fuck off.”

“All right, Johanna.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t want—” But there he stopped. The Viking village was all around them, smoke in the air, the bleating of sheep who didn’t know what millennium they were in, either. Or perhaps they were goats. She couldn’t always tell the difference.

“What didn’t you want?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “A fuss.”

“Jesus. I want the watch back.”

“We might have married,” he said. “But then it seemed as though we should have done it at the start.”

“Give me the watch. I’ll sacrifice it to the bog.”

“It’s worth rather a lot.”

“Then Leo should have it. My son. I mean, we spent four hours at the railway museum. I don’t know what I was thinking, giving it to you.”

He retrieved the watch from his pouch, his Viking pocketbook, and weighed it in his hand as though he himself would throw it bogward. Instead he wound it up—later, when Leo did become interested in old watches, she would discover this was the worst thing you could do, wind a dormant watch—and displayed it. First he popped open the front to exhibit the handsome porcelain face, the elegant black numbers. “Works,” he remarked. Then he turned it over and opened the back.

There, in his palm, a tiny animated scene, a man in a powdered wig, a woman in a milkmaid’s costume, her legs open, his pants down, his tiny pink enamel penis with its red tip tick-tock-ticking at her crotch, also pink and white and red. It was ridiculous what passed for arousing in the old days. She was aroused.

“Old Walter,” said Aksel. “He lasted awhile, then. He started taking care of himself?”

“No. He got worse and worse. He was eighty.”

“He never wanted to be,” said Aksel in a sympathetic voice.

“I know it.”

He offered the watch. “In four years, perhaps your boy will be interested.”

Ah, no: it was ruined. Not because of the ticking genitalia, but because it was somebody else’s private joke, and she the cartoon wife wanting in, in a robe and curlers and brandishing a rolling pin. Even a cartoon wife might love her rascal husband. She did.

“He wanted you to have it for a reason,” she said.

Flora’s son and Leo played a Viking game that involved rolling iron hoops down a hill. Flora’s son was sullen and handsome, with green eyes and licorice breath, terrible at mime, and so he put his hands on Leo’s to show how to hold the hoop and send it off, then looked Leo in the eyes to see if he’d gotten it, all with a kind of stymied intimacy that Leo understood as a precursor to grown-up love.

I will learn Danish, thought Leo. I will never learn Danish.

He turned to let the hoop go, and there was his mother, striding up the hill. Bowl her over for ten more minutes with this boy, ten more minutes in the Iron Age—where they had no concept of minutes—ten more minutes of this boy scratching his nose with the back of his wrist then touching the back of Leo’s wrist with his Viking fingers. Bowl her down and stay.

No, of course not. The stride told him that they were leaving.

Would he have wished her away? Only if he could wish her back later.

And would she, Joanna, have wished her beloved Leo away? Only if she could also wish away his memory. To long for him forever would be terrible.

“See you later,” said the Viking boy, who spoke English all along, and ran to gather the hoops.

Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darling

“Who died and made you boss,” Sadie asked Jack, and he answered, “Nobody. Everybody. How do you make somebody boss