Pets

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Someone, wearing an anorak, knocked on my door at lunchtime. My neighbor Tomas is out pottering in the garden and hears me when I open the garden gate. He welcomes me home from my trip abroad and tells me that some fellow — he couldn’t say how old he was — was hanging around outside my front door around twelve-thirty.

“He was wearing some kind of blue nylon anorak with a hood,” he says. “I couldn’t see his face properly because of his hood.”

Tomas himself is wearing an anorak, and has a knitted cap on his head, as well as a scarf with the colors of some English football team around his neck.

“Maybe he was at the wrong house,” I say.

“I don’t think so,” Tomas answers. “Somehow I got the feeling that he knew where he was going. He had a plastic bag in his hand, that I think he put down in the snow while he waited to see if you were at home. He knocked for a good five or ten minutes.”

At this moment I can’t think of anyone who needs to talk to me today — Tuesday, at lunchtime, when I’m not even in the country — but when Tomas mentions the plastic bag, for one second I’m afraid that it could have been Sigurvin, an old work mate, and that the bag contained recently purchased warm beer, though it would have probably cooled down a lot in February’s frost. This fellow Sigurvin was supposed to have stopped drinking, but the memory of him drunk was so vivid and terrifying that it still bothered me.

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