Hallgrímur Helgason, “The Hitman’s Guide to House Cleaning”

Nice nails

She looks at her hands. They’re resting on her knees. She has long nails, freaky long. They’re painted light pink. I remember the hand from the mass grave in ADV. It was a girl’s hand, the hand of a teenage girl, and it had those same long nails. And as we were trying to finish the grave, it always stuck out from the dirt. We tried hammering it with our shovels and jumping on top of it, with no success. It always popped up again — this chubby, white girl’s hand with long green nails. And it looked so ridiculous. It did not fit the circumstances; it just didn’t belong in a mass grave. A mass grave was a thing of the past, something that you associated with World War Two or whatever. People in mass graves were old women with dirty headscarves and poor peasant kids dressed in worn out clothes and wooden shoes. And here was this hand, waving to us from the goddamn grave, that was more like a graveyard, really, and it was so fucking modern. It was so very much a today’s hand. You could almost see that two hours ago it had been pushing the Play button on a Walkman with a Michael Jackson tape inside it.

Out of respect, I had started humming “You Are Not Alone”, the perfect psalm for a mass grave. Still, I couldn’t sing the hand to rest. And after trying for the tenth time to get the fucking palm into the ground, I totally freaked and pulled out my knife, chopped the hand off with some effort, and then threw it away. And this was one of my worst war moments: as I was working on it with my knife, I thought I heard something beneath my feet. Something like a girl’s cry muffled by dirt.

“Nice nails”, I finally say, looking at Gunholder’s hands.

She looks at me as if she wants to bury them. In my face.