Elida also feels great delight. She’s been sitting here by the pool all day, while her father has been fishing and fishing, she’s been sitting in the shade under the tall trees by the mill and reading Dante’s Divine Comedy (it’s the absolute truth! she is the third person in this book to read Dante’s Divine Comedy!), even though she’s only sixteen years old. When she’s been reading for a long time, she takes a break as she thinks she deserves to daydream for a bit, she dreams of being lifted up into Viggo’s strong arms, a dream she’s had since the funeral, where she stood with her tongue out so he could look into her mouth, he was so handsome and so big, and in her dreams he lifts her up and whispers urgently in her ear that he loves her, and she feels her breasts pressing against his rib cage, and then he kisses, kisses, kisses, and kisses her. Kisses, kisses, and kisses. And then: back to Dante’s Divine Comedy. She likes it, she likes reading books that the others in her class don’t want to read. Whenever she sees a book that’s thick and looks difficult, with an unattractive cover, she jumps on it. And today, in the heat of the sun while her father fishes and fishes (something that’s touched her whenever she’s looked up from her book, that he, a fishmonger, should choose to spend his day off fishing, he must have a very strong and sincere feeling for fish, she thought, this man who is her father, she’s seen him standing there in the pool in his waders that go all the way up to his groin and watched him concentrate and look around for hours without catching a fish, and it moved her, because it gave her a deep sense that this is her father, the fishmonger), she’s been sitting in the shade and reading about what awaits those who betray their family and country, in hell—namely, to be trapped in a frozen lake. What’s also moved her is the idea that seven hundred years ago a man sat and wrote this, that the following verse, written seven hundred years ago, could make her arms freeze, and make the small hairs on her arms stand up like a see-through forest:
At this I turned and saw a frozen lake spread
Before me and beneath my feet, looking more
Like glass than water. Even in the dead
Of winter, the Danube in Austria never wore
A veil of ice as thick as this, nor did the Don
Under its frigid sky support what this lake bore.
And this:
And as to croak the frog doth place himself
With muzzle out of water,—when is dreaming
Of gleaning oftentimes the peasant-girl,—
Livid, as far down as where shame appears,
Were the disconsolate shades within the ice,
Setting their teeth unto the note of storks.
Each one his countenance held downward bent …
* * *
Were the disconsolate shades within the ice!!! And when they cried, these souls that were stuck, chin-deep, in the ice in a frozen lake that resembled glass, their tears froze and “the frost congealed the tears between, and locked them up again”! And she was horrified when Dante lost control and grabbed and pulled at the locks of one disconsolate stuck in the ice, he “pulled out more tufts than one,” he was so angry with those traitors. And right at the end of Canto 32, he and Virgil see a terrible sight: two men who’ve been placed in the same hole, one man’s head positioned in such a way that he sits like a hat on the other man’s head, “his teeth fused to another man’s skull.” And this man eats and gnaws at the other man’s skull and brain! These two are Count Ugolino, who’s the one gnawing, and Archbishop Ruggieri, who’s being gnawed. The archbishop locked the count up in a tower with his two young sons and his two grandchildren, nailed the door shut, and then one by one, the sons and grandchildren starved to death, having offered themselves as food to their father, the father quite literally eating his children and grandchildren: “Though they were dead, two days I called them. Then hunger proved more powerful than grief.” And that was why, in death, he sat gnawing on the archbishop’s skull, for eternity, in a frozen lake.
* * *
Elida! A shout in her head as she sat there dumbstruck and imagined this head gnawing at the other’s skull in the frozen lake, give me the gaff hook! She looked over at her father, who was standing with his fishing rod bending down toward the water, and it took a few seconds before she understood what the words meant, that her father was a person who needed help to catch a fish, and that she was the person who could help, she was numb in all her joints after sitting tensely reading, but she ran down to the riverbank, grabbed the gaff hook, and shouted: But what do I do now? You have to wait a little, her father puffed, and when you see the fish appear close to the bank, go into the river and hook it. But how do I do that, Dad? she shouted. I haven’t got time to show you, her father shouted back, you’ll just have to manage. Use all your strength, you have to hit it, preferably just below the head. Huh? Elida shouted over the noise of the water. The head! her father shouted. Elida gripped the gaff hook. She had to manage it, she looked at her father’s red face and his arms holding on to the fishing rod, she couldn’t let him down now, he’d been standing there all day waiting, she had to hook it, and there was the salmon, and Elida raised the gaff hook and brought it down with all her might, and felt the gaff hook hit the fish and catch—and then you pull it onto the bank! her father shouted, and Elida tried, but it was so heavy, this fish, and how it twisted and turned! Then suddenly her father was there and took the gaff hook from her and threw the salmon onto the bank. And there it lay, flapping, big and shiny, until her father pulled out the hook and bashed it on the head till it was dead. You were great, her father said, smiling, and put his arm around her shoulder and hugged her so she could smell the salt and sweat on his skin. Well, Elida said, making a point of not being too pleased about his praise, but she was trembling all over.
* * *
And then, an hour later, her father called to her from the kitchen that she had to come and see, there was a tooth in the salmon! She thought it was only fitting, that the day should end with her standing there holding a tooth in her hand, a tooth that had once been in someone else’s mouth, and a gold tooth at that! Elida couldn’t help but imagine how the person had left the dentist’s and gone out to the small waiting room with flushed cheeks and messy hair and looked in the mirror over the sink and smiled as they saw the new gold tooth flash. Perfect, the person thought. What if, the thought struck her, what if Viggo was that person? Imagine if this was the tooth he had lost down the drain and it had been eaten by a fish and now come back to her? You can keep it, her father said, and laughed, you look like you need it, you’re looking at it so intensely. Have you seen the gold cap? Elida asked. Yes, you could get it melted down and made into a pendant. Isn’t that what happened to someone once? her father said. Someone who was in the sea inside a fish and was melted down and made into jewelry? The steadfast tin soldier, Elida said. He only had one leg. Yes, that’s right. The tin soldier with one leg, her father said. They made him into a heart, isn’t that right? Elida felt her stomach flutter. A heart. But she didn’t want to melt it down. She wanted to keep the tooth. It would remind her of the day she sat in the shade and read about Count Ugolino gnawing on Archbishop Ruggieri, and how she herself, moments later, hooked the flesh of a salmon. And then, but she almost couldn’t think this, because it would show on her face, it would remind her of Viggo, of being lifted up into his arms and being kissed, kissed, kissed, kissed, and kissed. She turned away from her father and closed her eyes. She imagined she was walking toward Viggo, saying: I’ve had your tooth all the time. And Viggo would say: and I love you.