I still did not trust him. Even though he looked me straight in the eyes, allowing me to see deeply into him, I never forgot that I was trespassing on forbidden territory.
‘What is your name?’ I asked him.
‘Zachary. But in our language my name is Luningi.’
My father’s name! Now I was the one who opened my eyes wide and hoped he could see through my eyes to the village where my father had lived until he was one day taken away.
‘My father’s name was Luningi.’
‘I have my name after an uncle who dreamed of a mountain. He set out to find it and never returned. We think he found the mountain and decided to stay because it was so beautiful. Perhaps he is still there deep inside it. What do you and I know, what does anyone really know? Where is it you are going, my daughter?’
‘To Sweden.’
Luningi frowned again.
‘Is that a city? I have heard the name before.’
‘It is a country, to the north.’
‘Why are you going there?’
‘Someone is waiting for me there.’
Luningi looked at me for a long time with his wide eyes. The silence around him was heavy with thought. There was a sharp smell in the shop from the cheese counter that I found calming. The smell of the cheese and the man’s white hair were real. I had hardly spoken to a person for three months. My tongue had started to feel swollen and stiff, as if it was suffering from being used so little.
‘Who is waiting for you?’
‘The country. The people who live there know who I am.’
Luningi nodded slowly.
‘It is good to have a goal. You should hold on to it. People who have lost sight of their goal often begin to live in a careless manner. I had a goal once. It was to travel to Europe and work for ten years. Nothing else, only that. I wanted to live as cheaply as possible, save my money and then return home in order to fulfil my dream.’
‘What was that?’
‘To build a mortuary.’
I had never heard that word before. ‘Mortuary’. Was that a cheese shop? Brightly coloured cloth for dresses? Or was it a restaurant with food so spicy that one started to sweat after the first bite? I didn’t know.
‘Perhaps you don’t know what that is,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps you don’t want to know. Are you afraid of death?’
‘Everyone is afraid of death.’
‘Not me. A mortuary is a place where the dead rest before their burial. It is a room full of ice where the sun never reaches in. The dead have time to cool after their battle with death, before they are placed in the earth.’
‘Why do you want to build a mortuary?’
