Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  Did you dream last night, my lamb? he asked every morning. And Lýkafrón said, content and satisfied with their fate, with waking to new work:

  I dreamed that I slept like a stone, still in the bull stall.

  The farmer found nothing wrong with this answer; he felt it demonstrated an unusual resourcefulness and spousal loyalty.

  The winter laborer arrived on time. He would need a place to bed down, but it transpired Rev. Páll had omitted to send a bedroll with him, sending instead a hoof pick and five brass buttons. The merchant came at night; he was given skýr, and the farmer had an additional bowl with him. At once things flowed well between the farmer and the merchant, and the newcomer taught him to rub the udder fat on his lips, which were red and bleeding and cracked when he laughed, as farmers often do. When it was high time, the lack of beds was quickly addressed; there was no desire to drive the man out into the bull stall his very first night. All this was done with Lýkafrón’s ready approval; she was not fazed by having all three of them in one lair.

  At home, she said, we slept top-to-tail, the four brothers side by side, three sisters foot to foot. Everything worked out somehow, and we children had fun pinching each other’s noses with our toes.

  The farmer read his poems and prayed carefully and set his preparations on the nightstand, which was small and had a mail drawer; it had been inherited from the merchant at Bakka. But there was little in the way of sleep. Lýkafrón rowed up and down, her head collided with the others up by the headboard, and she was constantly stretching out her neck and peeking questioningly over the comforter at the foot end, where the winter laborer snored. The bed was one great throng, the continual kicking of feet, stifling heat under the covers. The farmer tried to halt Lýkafrón’s movements by setting his arm across her stomach, but at the weight of the arm on her stomach she flared up and only just about managed to sneak the chamber pot from under the bed before she vomited. The farmer got up and fetched her water, which she drank, groaning. During this upheaval the winter laborer, who seemingly slept the sleep of winter, lying with his head on a large pillow, sat halfway up in bed and mumbled. For the rest of the night the woman’s husband slept with a box, so if her nausea returned, it was less of a distance to the pot, and yet he could not sleep, though he was free from being disturbed by her. The farmer moved up against the partition wall . . . Lýkafrón sighed until morning, but the farmer did not sleep; all night he had to ward his big toe away from the winter laborer, who was trying to use it to scratch his groin. The toe was large with uncut nails. Finally, the farmer thought to grab the man’s clothes and yank them up, tight between his ass cheeks; the man smiled in his sleep. They didn’t see any signs of his restlessness in the morning, and none of them mentioned the night’s disturbance.

  The winter laborer endured even as the workload grew; he was brisk and fulfilled his obligation; and Lýkafrón seemed to flourish and prosper. Her earlobes took on a golden redness; the farmer enjoyed biting them in the evening, after she had turned her back to him, and he said:

  Your ears are glowing, my ewelambeweylamby

  And there we sat.

  no this end is impossible the story abandons sense unfathomable its characters all mixed up it is all over the place the author cannot deal with the material or the style lacks concentration but maybe he will do better next time be able to write something striking and memorable with a satisfying ending for what is a poet other than a poetic stallion on a racing track

  yes, yes my next story will be a variation on Chekov the transitory will take precedence a polemic on national affairs an outspoken satire about citizens a story of a man who hid under his wife’s bed every time her lover came to visitI could tell a story about a colonial merchant who married a Danish woman and got his uncle to interpret for them the merchant did not know a single word of Danish but when they started kissing and more he said, I’ll take over, but was not able to and so the uncle was the one who impregnated her for the merchant and nothing that truly mattered in the household was ever discussed without & Cothe nature of the family came into the picture by solely accumulating initial capital and collecting dividends without completing workas a result the wholesaler dissolved and every shareholder immediately demanded reimbursement for the face value of their shares and a public scandal ensued with no end in sight until the merchant fled his wife and uncle, locked himself in a tower room where he shot himself with a sheep rifle that was not powerful enough so the shot sat there trapped in the merchant’s brain without killing him his tongue and speech were mostly paralyzed so he only mewled or emitted similar sounds from the window he ended up emotionally unsound but shortly after a dog bit the Danish woman giving her rabies causing her to bark in the face of adversity and in this strange fashion they reconnected with one other after the crisis, neither of sound mind, he mewling inside the tower room, she barking at him through the keyhole, both arguing like cats and dogs until by and by their household fell to pieces the company went to seed in the region selling no textiles exactly the way Miss Gerður told me this story I remember it often having gone to this store not to buy things but to hear the fuss up the ladder and I would listen for the sounds not human beings running hard up and down the stairs but animal sounds the whole thing clearly audible from the back apartment though out on the street you would think they were both entirely normal two unflappable humans she prim and precise with a genuine silver fox fur on top of a gray close-fitting tunic and well-polished shoes with silver buckles across the tongue and he in a striped vest with a thick gold chain always wearing leather shoes that were not even dusty a far cry from a tragedy seeing the couple this way she even had a dog on a leash though slanderers said she had it to conceal the times she suddenly barked right in the middle of the street so people would think the dog had growled, one thing is for sure keeping dogs in town was prohibited but they had been exempted and people can be repugnant in their judgments about others nothing to do about it everyone considering them in the worst way especially where merchants are involved but this much is certain I saw her barking right in the middle of Austurstræti and she kicked the dog in the ass so it immediately began to bark and rage but when the three got distracted they all barked in a torrent and ended up in chaos and I could say that I felt pity for the couple she who came from overseas to have us louts on Austurstræti staring at her on these days of fine weather with the street full of people but they were hurried into the pharmacy and given injections and I think that they came out again superhuman and went about her day as if nothing had taken place yes this is a great icelandic tragedy

  The hedonist bacteria had a good day in my flesh.

  I leapt to my feet. I had to yank open the door. I had to talk to them with a commanding expression, authoritative. I must drive this disgrace out of my apartment with carefully chosen, rough words: Get this disgrace away from the apartment. Get out, electric-guitarist and prostitute! Yet I resorted to the same measures as the merchant, when he retreated under the woman’s bed, taking more pleasure listening to caresses than embracing a woman himself. Originally, this was done out of kinship, said Miss Gerður. The acquaintance began through business letters. Don’t you remember those erotic postcards. Well, the merchant received them. She worked for a Danish firm that produced them; put two and two together. Most romantic of all was that she wrote purely for fun on one card in the factory, on which was a young man smoking a cigar and a woman wearing a white shirt and holding a rose beside the smoke: Den som læser dette billedkort, han er min kærlighedssort; and she had no idea where the card would go, so it was all very exciting. And she did not imagine the postcard would be discovered by a local merchant on the lookout for an unmarried woman; he read it and became enamored. Miss Gerður smiled a distant smile, which seemed to stiffen her lips, what Sigurður calls a pepper smile. Reykjavík talked about nothing else in those days. Happy wishes rained over the fabric shop. As girls cast marigolds on the stairs, everyone was thrilled. Young girls in Reykjavík could
be so romantic. I thought such things were imaginary, he said, out in the hall. Who pays attention to this peppery old woman, said Ólaf. When it stops bubbling down there, when their hot spring hardens, all that mud transfers from between their thighs up to their heads. I heard them laughing on the stairs. When I bent down to slip on my overshoes—I held onto a hook for support and lifted a foot to my knee, putting my finger into the overshoes so the heel did not crumple—she came over to me, half-bowing, gave a teasing surprised cry, and said: I’ll be damned, well, there’s a long woman’s hair on your jacket sleeve. A blonde, for sure. She held the hair out to me and I looked at in in the daylight. It was clearly hers. This was not the first time a man had felt a barrette in his pocket, or she’d stolen over and sprayed perfume on the lapels of an overcoat (with no real difficulty: the cloakroom is opposite the employee’s restroom). Perhaps a man has no ill intentions, is just wandering about perhaps, in the hallway, all by himself, calm and in his buttoned overcoat when she comes over and says grinning: No, she uses Evening in Paris—bonjour—Tabu, vive la France. And she strides out of the corridor and sits her butt down like a small eruption has taken place in her hot spring. I don’t care for this desperate humor of hers, what Sigurður calls peppery play. I don’t know what to say, where the weather blows, especially since I can’t smell through my ferociously congested nose. At least she doesn’t stoop to the last resort and sneak lipstick into my pocket. No, she dare not, not after she slipped toilet paper with a lipstick kiss into Sigurður’s pocket, and he responded in kind, snuck a used condom into her jacket. At some point she is slugging around the coat hooks; someone comes past, she says, O!, and dives frantically into the bathroom. Maybe she is just smelling something, some change their pants in there. I envied Sigurður his sauciness. She complained to her supervisor, but since she did not want to mention any names or say what had happened—for reputation’s sake, except for that she found it terribly frightening, and a woman cannot touch such a thing, a wet condom in her pocket, she was only looking for her glove—he got away with it (I actually had my part in all of this) and the case collapsed. She was sent home crying in a taxi, her fist closed around something—the condom?—and lay with a fever for two days. Einarína and Friðmey, the oldest girls on the bank floor, visited Miss Gerður immediately that evening. She had gotten an agonizing lumbago. You should just see the finery at her home, they said, all cushions and tapestries and a liquor cabinet that plays a song when the door is opened, and she serves a high-end cognac. She offered us vodka with juice; why don’t you visit her, boys? She was lying there quietly with her lumbago for two days, but after that she returned limping to work, sat on an inflated rubber ring with a hot water bottle at her back, and was engulfed in a crying fit just before closing.

  I was going to stagger to my feet. I was going to turn out the light. (How did they have any light, given the fuses were in my possession. They had gone behind my back, were putting spare fuses in after I’d fallen asleep at night. They are making fuses from nails instead of filament.) I had counted on either of them seeing a hint of light in my room and scramming without my intervention. I was about to cough a low, suffocating cough, like having congestion firmly seated in my lungs that I would need to hack to get rid of, and I was going to walk out with a bulging mouth full of sputum, to spit in the toilet, but it occurred to me that they knew I spit into my chamber pot. So I decided to drive them off with the alarm clock. Last warning: I whistled heedlessly, I scraped a chair across the floor.

  Instead of taking direct action, I lay down in my bedclothes, which swelled around him the farmer pulled himself up in bed enjoying the intimacy and the winter cowshed laborer they used alternately he was absolutely still after animal herding the winter laborer tended the cows before he settled to sleep and threw old hay for the horses and stroked the wind-blown mare and locked the cowshed the farmer woke to a cold foot in his groin the cover had fallen off, and in the moonlight the foot resembled a corpse pale white and dead the moonlight shone on it as though it was dredged up from the earth when Jónas dug trenches in the cemetery and the dogs bore him into the air where merchants sleep he found the foot pawing there in the middle of the floor the next morning and the panicked farmer seized it deathly cold this foot with pins and needles he felt for the other and discovered a burning and sweaty foot under Lýkafrón’s knitted cloak

  Around this time, the bank opened a new branch. I expected to be appointed to the position of chief accountant. I do not know if I am the bank’s oldest employee, but I definitely have the most experience. A totally inexperienced man got the post. His appointment caused me deep personal pain, humiliating me in my colleagues’ eyes. I half-hoped someone would go to him and say: Don’t get too comfortable in your new position. Having poor eyesight is not going to handicap him too long. But no one mentioned the appointment to him. Many of you fine employees are more qualified than I, he announced with all modesty, but his colleagues lacked humility and compassion: I do not understand why Tómas was passed over. A proud, dependable worker had been hurt, he sensed, he could feel the atmosphere around the card file, in the billing department, at the cashier stands, even on the stairs down to the refractory, he ought to step out of the way, not with a fist on the table or politely getting suspended with a month’s notice and a golden handshake, and gradually his mysterious silence came to an end; he had a plan to isolate him, Tómas, Tómas, me, to conceal the responsibilities of the job, to entangle Tómas, to move me from one department to another, to bewilder me by replacing the accounting machine which he does not understand, to belittle him with friendly but impatient behavior: no, this is wrong, son, let me take the book, so no one needs to struggle and feel guilty or regret things. It’ll all work out, my dear, as naturally as it does in nature, said Tryggvi (a cunning hare). Let this man understand that he, Tómas Jónsson, of such little character, has now become an appendix to the company. I believe that they should have been bold enough to call me to management and say: The Board agreed at their meeting recently to create a new post for you. Or, inversely: The Board was unanimous, we will abolish your job, which you have toiled over, due to efficiency measures; but, as a thank-you for your conscientious work we have decided to pay you thirteen complete months of salary plus a bonus, so you can keep your full pension, as required by law, for one year from the date of this notification. A heavy castrating frustration would weigh on this Tómas’s breast, though he agreed to the solution without having to resort to defensive measures, to resign without provocation, or on account of his myopia. I endured at work undaunted. I sat at my table, though hardly using the stationery, when the message came: you are kindly asked to work the card file. So I roved between departments, and I discovered, as they did, that my flexibility had left me. The game was up. Step by step I was the audience to grumbling, corrections, complaints, complaints, innuendos: Tómas is not up to the job. How can a company move forward with antiquated personnel. Until I broke like a mirror.

  Facing my own termination it was the masses’ opinion that I must have prepared myself thoroughly for old age. He cannot have nothing in his savings book. How could anyone have imagined that I had put money under various names during the permanent staff’s summer vacation, while there were new people around, mainly students who came and went, temps. I worked the card file and so no suspicion came my way. Colleagues struck up surprised conversations at the lunch table over my sudden termination (I used my coffee time to talk about this). I must have been offered a better job; higher wages. I thoughtfully noticed the attention on their careless visages, the way people always look when someone gets a raise. We won’t see you in the refectory, then; you’ll go to eat at the best place in Reykjavík, at Hotel Borg. Termination does not mean that, that I’ll change dining spots. I hid my new pay grade and my opinion, that I felt I was the best person to fall so spontaneously into the XII pay grade, etc.; by and by I got my revenge on Tryggvi. I didn’t give him the pleasure of seeing his plot succeed, to see me me
ntally devastated. I have never heard Tryggvi mention anything conspiratorial, protested Miss Gerður. I can tell from the gnashing of teeth, I replied. There was a squabble about it, and the clique of my staff who ate with Guðrún, and who had the most powerful (if not the total) role in the bullying, finally managed to make me very thoroughly confused so much so that at one point I contradicted myself, and that was taken to mean I was wrong, even though nothing is easier than entangling the defense of a just cause, if the right techniques are used: you do not build your cause on concrete arguments or provide tangible examples. All arguments must be based on the concrete like a knitted cloak. I do not understand the concrete. I understand that usually the coarsest and most garrulous words are victorious. Jabbering away soothes their evil minds. They came to his defense through counter-arguments and launched an attack on the basis of lies: a person is too involved to understand his own dismissal, especially attacking him with insinuations of hostility. How could Tryggvi still employ you in the bank having heard all this. Tryggvi is so powerful that he can ignore the consequences of his actions, if he feels uncomfortable. But Tryggvi is an outstanding man, that is not in doubt. A very able man. Then the case was discussed in full from my perspective. Power erases any doubts about a complaint. For some reason a man who has worked the same job for thirty years suddenly feels things adversely affect him. Tómas, you have only yourself to blame for your dismissal; you boxed yourself into a corner. The loser is always to blame. I never accept injustice, I would rather lessen my years. They feel there’s more gained from the daily humiliation of a person than in getting rid of him. I suspect, having once caught a man in a trap, as the law intends, the hunter alleviates the animal’s torment not in the slightest, unless it sits tight in its anguish. Shortly after the midday news, after a half-signal, I was now irrelevant to their maneuvering; “the thing itself” was “a central issue of the case.” I did not protest that they “looked at argument and counterargument from all sides” and examined the root cause “objectively without sentimentality,” which led to their conclusion that “dismissal is a logical outcome within certain conditions,” so “the case was remarkably remarkable for its insignificance.” Initially I blamed the spontaneous, reflex nature of my decision, but as time passed and I began to consider, interpret, and make meaning out of the situation, I saw that with human dignity and honor, those rare phenomena, I had saved my colleagues from a loss of honor. And so my termination accrued considerable value. Of course, honesty and integrity are not vital; one might even feel happier without them. A normal person easily gets by engaging three appetites alone: I’m hungry; I’m cold; where can I get food and shelter. Had I listened to Sigurður’s advice, I would for sure have been paid pension, but it was a worthless salary if it meant a year of the guilty awareness that others could humiliate me on account of the offer. In a tight spot, a man’s hand is weak. Tryggvi was not given to praising his superiors (I struck that weapon from his hands): foremost against him I sent the highly-praised card file infantry, supported by an assault-gun crew from the deposits department, protected by an artillery of accountants. But faced with the complex electrical accounting machine, I shattered like a thermos. Here in my solitude I have demanded my brain reveal what my supervisors said. Everything is beautifully ordered, but where is the corpse. Does it lie dead in remainders beneath the accounting engine. No, the target made himself invisible. The cannons wept desperately, the repeating rifles falling silent from internal frustrations, the infantry spoke about their know-how; even the nursing bloc, Einarína and Friðmey, who visit people on their sickbeds to ascertain whether their patient is really sick (their intelligence is not perfect; I have heard an approved doctor’s certificate is now required from the patient), were distracted by the blood transfusion bottles at hand: Tómas, you can count on us. And the military chief’s exhortations died inside the internal speaker system, when it came out that he was taking money on the sly as compensation for the injustice of never having risen in status; the trust he enjoyed amid his department, though his lack of fitness for the job hindered him from higher office. Ólaf’s opinion was that the Board had carefully seen to it that he never rose in rank, outright fearful of the skills he had developed. A rest from work and blood transfusions in Switzerland and resuming his job again, that was the only reprieve. Maybe he knows too much, suggests Miss Gerður carefully. Yes, Ólaf answers in an authoritative tone, he even knows their underwear sizes. Ólaf rises up on his elbows and adds: they barely dip him in the water; he sinks them all. Ólaf’s epigram drew everyone’s silence. He lifted a finger: A proposition, a way of demonstrating that the wolf will never escape the department—and Ólaf draws a quick circle in the air with his index finger and sucks hard on his pipe. Thereafter, he said abruptly: The main risk for the chief lies in the new branch. And I ask myself every time a new branch is opened: How can they pay off Tryggvi now; will he throw the aforementioned bomb—you can just imagine what the man has activities in store for them, having survived three blood transfusions and his drinking at work. Four, interrupts young Miss Gerður, four with this last. I can’t speak to that, I didn’t associate with him particularly in his little nest. I reckon they are on guard against him. In a position of power, he could easily use their tricks against them. You’re really smart, Miss Gerður, says Ólaf. Don’t be like that, Ólaf. I mean it, Miss Gerður. And the poor Miss worries at her gloves, which she holds in her lap while she eats. Why. She is afraid she’ll find another condom, he says. I put the letter in a glove, not the pocket. If she hits Ólaf with her gloves he cries and turns his head away as it sinks down on his shoulders. god help her future husband if her beatings are a sign of friendliness. Why. But why. The treasurer suddenly casts large blue eyes from behind the cubicle glass. And the customers gather together to watch me at my broken machine, stuck rolling back and forth, spewing out cards. Why. I need to be working, I replied, refusing to touch the machine after the coffee break ended. The invisible man, as I called the man in the middle, came right away. Tómas Jónsson! His eyes spoke for him from head to toe. Do you want to forfeit your pension. Divide it among the lot of you. Without any particular scrutiny of my income I have been wanting to poison the atmosphere in the department before I say goodbye.I enjoyed knowing what I was going to put into writing my icelandic materialjudging by their faces I was probably a marked man.do you remember from the newspaper the unbelievable but true drawings of the aged baby boy who died of old age at seven yearsafter cleaning my desk, dusting the dust for the last time with my handkerchief and propping up against the stapler the envelope with my pension documents inside, I took my leave. Give my regards to Lóa the cleaning lady who faultlessly emptied my letter basket.