Free The Greenhouse by Audur Ava Olafsdottir Page A

and very famous film star that I saw in a movie once.
    After a while, the actress rolls up the script, points it at me, and kicks off the conversation by asking me where I’m from.
    So I tell her.
    —Are you really? she exclaims, shifting position on the seat by placing her right foot on the floor, dragging her left leg under her, and slipping the seat belt under her armpit so that she can face me better as she continues the conversation.
    —What’s it like there?
    —There isn’t an awful lot to say about the place; there aren’t many things you can grow there.
    I’m not sure I have much to add to that. She only speaks her language, which I’ve actually studied at school, although I’ve never had to express myself in long sentences with an actual native before.
    —Tell me something about it.
    —Moss.
    —Cute.
    As soon as I spurt out the word moss , I know I’ve gotten myself into a jam. Moss is such a nonstarter and impossible to develop into a topic for discussion. At most, I could list off the different types of moss, but that’s not much of a conversation.
    —What’s moss?
    If I only had the vocabulary, I would want to tell this budding movie star that moss is a lichen, and time-consuming to walk over. It’s all right for the first ten steps, but if you’re going to cross a vast, moss-carpeted lava field, it’s like walking across a trampoline all day; it can be really tiring on your hamstrings to be sinking into moss for four hours in a row. It can take more out of you than climbing a high mountain. If you rip up moss, you leave a scar in the earth and soil dust gets blown into your eyes. I’d really like to be able to tell her something unusual that no one has ever told her before, but my limited grasp of the language cramps my style. If I were to mention the different shades of moss and the smell it gives off after a shower of rain, I’d be entering the domain of feelings, like a man on the point of proposing to her. I therefore give nothing away to her and say no more than I can grammatically handle:
    —A plant that’s like a trampoline.
    —Weird, she says. She doesn’t give in—Tell me more.
    —Tussocks.
    I’m surprised at how well I’m doing at finding words, at my ability to express myself in an alien language, but at least I’m myself when I talk about plants.
    —What’s a tussock?
    It’s not easy to explain how a tussock is formed, to express the repeated temperature changes of the earth and how they alternate between frost and thaw. I have to think of every single word I’m saying; nothing comes automatically.
    —It’s difficult to put up a tent on tussocks.
    Then I switch topics.
    —Swamps.
    On the point of swamps, Mom told me more than once the story of one of Granddad’s favorite horses, which sank under him in a swamp and then popped up again as a skeleton several springs later. I’ve seen photographs of Granddad on that horse, and although I’m no expert, that favorite horse of his looks pretty much like all his other horses to me, with rather short legs, even when you take into consideration the fact that my granddad and namesake, Arnljótur Thórir, was a tall man.
    After swamps, I rattle off the names of other types of vegetation without any further explanations, which the actress seems to accept. The Latin names of the plants help me through the most difficult parts of the conversation, and she nods, so I manage to give her an overview of the main features of the local vegetation. I’m on home ground now, with the situation well in hand, and I realize that I’ve tapped conversation material for the next thirty to forty miles: a revision of the Latin names of plants. I mention the clusters of yellow grass, blueberry heaths, and moss campion.
    —Then there’s geraniums, meadowsweet, mountain avens, sheep sorrel, prickly rose, burnet rose, and lady’s mantle, I say.
    —Hang on, lady’s what? What lady?
    I don’t have to go into the botany in any depth, but