Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller
Page 7
From there, where I sit, I monitor Miss Gerður’s slightest movement. My table is at the outer edge, to the right of her cheeks. I am content to watch Miss Gerður. Her countenance has a very set shape, almost harsh at the corners of her mouth, her nose straight and determined. She looks at people with sharp eyes, enunciates all her vowels, and her ears stick out of her thin hair. She must be endowed with great focus. (Of course, I only know her at work and at the refectory table.) One might consider her extremely cold, though her knick-knacks of friendship attest the contrary. On Monday morning, and not for erotic purposes, I stoop over as she counts notes, to see if I can make out her smell. But I never detect a scent other than a faint sour milk odor mixed with perfume. She stocks a high-end cognac, vodka, and juice for her guests, but she drinks soured milk. Her every movement is precise; no nervousness. No neurotic agitation like with the nurses; but they are widows. Away from Miss Gerður’s supple, flexible, slender fingers I slip my eyes over my own fingers, bringing them together while she skillfully counts bills (she is usually in the counting department), measuring each bundle with a ruler. My fingers resemble wet icicles, my joints long since become stiff and senile. My hands move only at the wrist. At night, when I’m home and there’s nothing special on the gramophone, Tómas plays with himself creating bird and animal heads from shadows on the wall. He creates majestic whooper swans, stately, swan-white swan heads with Miss Gerður’s long and slender neck, when she was still new to the job. I open and close the long beak, my thumb and index finger, the soft lips Leda kissed. Miss Gerður longed to sing at our coffee gatherings the way moor whooper swans do in a still estuary, impressing with their singing and giving bystanders goose bumps; come autumn one manner of thinking would be to return home from the countryside my Tómmi, can’t you just keep on until autumn christmas after they tried to assimilate you to the animals sheep you cannot assimilate with fish you cannot chickens not any of them you don’t look at the clouds look at the grass don’t stroke because then you will acquire the markings of a criminal but Miss Gerður’s voice is that of an aggressive beetle, one he fears. Perhaps here we find the only evidence that Tómas was ever a young man. His play is truly ignorant. One eye in his head is almost milky white, the other powder blue like fishskin, his fishskin eye gaping into air. No one knows for sure whether his vision is gone. His face forever shines this strange apologetic blind smile, a mix of stiff and bitter. Not a smile but a grimace, his eyes fragile. Often Tómas Jónsson gathers shadows with his fingers shadows of light a whole garden of bellowing and twittering animals he moves with incredible facility to the keyhole then blows the troupe away with his lips. He keeps the animals in a keyhole cage, all except the elephants. The wardrobe is full of elephants. Some he keeps in medicine tins. Dóri invented playing cards for the blind. He took two decks, cut the hearts from the nine in one deck and glued them to the hearts on the nine in the other; but Tómas did not want to play with Dóri. He locks the closet carefully so the elephants won’t wander around the apartment at night, and draws the screen over the window. I will not display myself to the world. He chirps in his den, decrepit and probably playing a whooper swan that knocked out a lamb with its wings, or howling like a coyote. He knows a coyote’s scream.
I envy the animals I could probably become one and live in their company animals do not lie awake in the dark darkness until silence lulls them or mourns their sins for hours he watches animals animals are true to themselves which leads to a life perfected India is the widespread braying of elephants from Kipling’s books he plays a haulage elephant with a nose-hand fastened to his head he swings it like a fast trunk that might pluck sewing needles from the ground animals in cages animals that jump across grasslands animals who watch endlessly from a lonely tree in savanna grass still in a picture and other animals who look at shadows and the garden trellis which is a chairback tree that looks at animals with its crown and animals and the tree hopping around each other on the grass
I look smiling at Miss Gerður. I wave fingers damp with hand lotion in her direction. I clasp my locked fingers around a large bundle of bank notes and stick them in my pockets, which I pat with a well-satisfied expression. She bobs up from counting, stretches her head down and so forms two double chins, screws up her face and looks at me with expressionless and empty ripped fishskin eyes through the glass in the cashier’s cubicle. She strokes the tip of her tongue rapidly over her front teeth, purses her lips like she’s sucking food scraps from between the teeth and her fingers go back to racing though bills. Her facial features express neither wonder nor joy unless over some amazing news in the newspapers or on Thursdays when her friend, who works as a detective, has gone carefully over the card file that weekend and indicated to the young miss, i.e. Gerður, “the goings-on in some homes over the weekend,” then Gerður whispers to Friðmey and Einarína, who come storming along the corridor out of the mortgage department toward the bathroom: Listen up. And the corridor and the bathroom reverberate with whispers and the slosh of waters in the toilet. (Now it’s forbidden for two or three girls to go to the bathroom together.) She spends her breaks in there, leaving the door open a little so no one can sneak up on them by surprise. While she speaks in a torrent, Einar and Friðmey alternately attend her, scraping dandruff from their hair with a fine-tined comb or giving life to their hair by pressing their fingertips to their scalps. Sigurður calls Tuesdays dandruff days. They seem to have developed a complete network in order to know everything about everyone, at the Health Clinic, in criminal court, with city doctors, and the police force. Everyone is repelled by these mysterious sure women who know all about all the city’s major scandals and drug-use according to certain files—except for Sigurður’s; he claims to be a political ambassador—the police liquor file and also various private individuals’ additional files. I first entered into World War II in the file of Henna Ottós for alleged Nazism; now I am in the file of the U.S. ambassador for my alleged communism. I have the honor of being the most registered person in iceland: I am even in the marked file, bitten behind the left ear like a tagged sheep. His sense of decency is no more sensitive than Sigurður’s is proud. Next to me, he is on file as one of the work-shiest people the company has employed since I started there. Miss Gerður is unflappable. You could even break wind in her presence. She has been trained to a certain refinement in her deportment and is said to be “neither shocked nor servile in manner.” She is as dry and hard as reinforced concrete. She almost certainly knows she will not be the subject of harmless masculine teasing, at least not while she is note-counting. However flawed Miss Gerður is known to be—and she is certainly a very flawed person—she is still excellently qualified in her areas. As a wife, she would certainly stand in good stead running the apartment, keeping it hygienic and clean: she would brush dust from the baseboards daily, wash the kitchen down after every meal, open a window when she fries, go into all the corners with a floor cloth, clean the cobwebs from all the crannies, and wash her underwear nightly—but surely would neglect me, forgetting to tighten my oxygen mask at the right time. She has unlimited banking records for her note counting (both new and used notes), winning the medal in the Employees’ Festival competition in 1942, and working to later possess the 1951 Cup. I took pleasure in closely scrutinizing her, back when it was a “dry finger” competition (contestants were forbidden from wetting their fingertips when counting). She also won many contests between banks even when she ended up in the first heat, counting new notes, which are cumbersome and stick together from the pressure; it didn’t matter a bit. Behind the scenes, Útvegs Bank offered her tremendous money, but she said she would remain loyal to her old bank, proud thing. Now her work is obsolete following the introduction of the new banknotes, which get counted in the machine. Soon it will even be possible to count crumpled notes in the machine.
I remember how she competed before a packed hall. And I remember two departments sitting diagonally from her. As she entered the competition line at the ta
ble Ólaf was manning, the contestants with a timing clock and the crowd from our department shouted:
bills and mortgages teams
work together, one for all
now, now
And we got even more into the song:
the bank will soon be shut
after the shift Omega arrives
she strikes three
ready ready
We constantly barracked the Búnaðar Bank girl, who lost in her heat, pale and sweaty and apologizing for having started counting on the wrong fingers. All the tables in the serving-hall were densely populated; we cleared the calculators and typewriters and set them clattering.
Employee festivals got really lively after the liquor began to take effect. But we were all on guard, especially Sigurður. We, the middle-aged, sat by the radiator away from the draft. Some smoked cigars, others had cards or played with króna in each fist, or casually regarded the rotation of people on the counting floor. Then the women got their break and we struggled away and brayed laughing when Einar or Friðmey tried to haul us into the dance line by saying: Yes, but it’d be good for you to dance just once. We just laughed at this womanly fun. I would pass the time watching Miss Gerður. I wanted to be able to crawl inside her head for a moment, lurk inside her thoughts. We could only guess how her brain worked during her leisure time, the ways it plunged a chemise over itself at night. The ways people go around thinking: on the street, in the bank, scheduled to drive the last bus, having driven the same route his whole life. (If a bus driver should read this, I kindly beg him to start corresponding with me.) Maybe they fight against forgetting by calling up street names: Cape, Ace. How tantalizing it would be to have people’s thoughts on tape. I would like to insert a little camera in Miss Gerður’s nape. I would love to know what I would get from the picture. All that is remarkable in the world: movements across a street or through an open door. One has to get a lot from the smallest of things. I am utterly consumed by curiosity. Curiosity is my gasoline. Miss Gerður hastens over to the next person; perhaps she says: nothing to nab at the firm today. Her fingers squirming continually as though she’s counting invisible banknotes. Maybe she’s thinking, there and then: oh god I wish the employee festival was tomorrow so I could improve my former ranking; I am in the mood for countingShe perches one ass cheek on the desk’s edge beside me, dangles a foot, her thickened thighs vibrating and jarring at her old, rusty, arthritic groin. I momentarily become a street urchinher legs have no fatI think, Tómas Jónsson this beauteous man. But I don’t perhaps make time to attend to her, to discuss her lumbago; I might say: would it not be a good idea to exercise your back and thighs on skis. Some good advice for one’s morning routine is to imagine you are snuggled in a twin sleeping bag up on some magnificent mountains, preferably around Landmannalaugar. Such tomfoolery is my sauce. Teasing is an evil habit. All of a sudden the Valkyrie has flown from my desk’s edge to her seat. I hear papers click under her fingers, which have started to resemble a king plover’s talons from all this eternal counting. She shuffles bundles and stretches a band quick around them. The whole time I was as a joker and mockingbird; a jolly companionship. Our Tómas is becoming a comic, I make people think about me. I watch her behavior and gestures which are nothing because Miss Gerður as a woman has been pasteurized. From now on, I will only write badly of her.
Jump down to the floor d’you want to or not I am not asking you to loiter here with me as though in a lair I will allow you to as if you are the best you degenerate cat you have probably become so feminine in habit that you are repelled by rats and eating rat
Aren’t you going to drink your morning coffee Tómas now Anna is at the door I act like I’m asleep
Tómas are you somewhat out of sorts are you somehow maybe sick she asks I do not answer I am free to keep quiet and self-determine whether I answer dimwitted questions
I want the mask, I say. I am short on oxygen.
I discover a rubber odor the mask over my mouth and nose hardened rubber she screws the bottle and checks the dial after a short while I’ve got enough oxygen to continue writing and draw breath and after this gift I live on in all of my body
1. Sic. T. J.
2. Lýkafrón is a man’s name, and perhaps the author is suggesting that the farmer’s housekeeper was a man under a spell, which explains her reluctance toward the farmer and her interest in manly farm work and how she was eager for her chastity’s lock to be shattered, which would shuck the spell from her, but the author fails in his effort to make this evident in the story, whether from lack of ability of knowledge –T. J.
3. The alliteration of the cows here is wrong:
never sick in herself
All this rather flat writing indicates little knowledge of the work of icelandic farmers in the countryside. Why would a farmer plan to loiter by the cowshed door instead of looking after the sheep? –T. J.
4. What is this aforementioned enclosure doing here? I’m asking. Do icelandic farmers typically herd cattle in the summer? –T. J.