Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

  Annakatrín.

  Now it happened that the sovereign king was dying, without having provided the state with an heir. He lay bedridden and thought about the future of the kingdom, which was occupied by a hostile army. Its bureaucracy lay in utter disorder, because originally the king did not want to have a lot to do with the victors, since they let him remain in his room at the palace, and brought him food and drink to have under the covers. He gained no other benefits. We, the defeated, attributed the king’s sadness to his introspection, blindness and physical distress. The windows of his room were covered and he thought little of hygiene. His mind often wandered to former days, to their glories, if he was alone in his apartment with its ornaments and material pleasures, gold bronze edging and polished knobs, which he contemplated in solitude. How the once-sovereign king suffered. His negative thoughts tended toward his death, making off with his gray head like a stormy cloud breaking shadows over a beautiful summer landscape, destroying it, the rain and the winds blowing the leaves from trees. Nothing pained the king more sorely than never having sired an heir so valiant that he, the young king’s son, could run this rabble off his hands and out of the state, having trained and hardened himself struggling with a hive-headed berserk dragon in an earth cave. Then a young maiden came in with a drink and a maggot-festered apple for the king to eatno the apple is not poisoned, will not stick in the king’s throat:

  – Tell me, lowly maiden virgin, why wait on an addled king before he dies? said the king, looking at the girl’s skirt, and continued:

  – He asks a boon: his request is that you fulfill just one desire, that he may sire an heir who can banish his enemies and the Valkyries and the lunatic dragons of the sky.

  The young girl was by nature rather simple, so her sympathy for the dying king began to stir.

  – Oh, king. O, vanquished and defeated. Let your will become incarnate; I will ask my knight elegantly to grant me permission; the victors, who have settled in your palace.

  And the girl went to meet the knight, who wore the magical Helm of Awe around the world, conferring power and wealth and elegant dress and a guitar.

  – I do not understand why a king who has fallen from a throne needs an heir. The palace should be for the two of us alone. The cemetery is the right place for this aforementioned king.

  The young woman grabbed him by the ears, and god had just then sown the pollen of sense between her eyes, so she said:

  – You magnificent knight, no matter how many heirs I nourish for you and let flower in the orchard of my womb, they would all be an ignoble family not legally entitled to inherit the state. But if I lay down with this elder, the lawful king, then at least one pollinated flower will earn us the state by fusing its pollen to my pear fruit. And once we are given the kingdom, it will never be taken from us.

  The knight said:

  – Katrín, which means The Pure, do not pollute the flesh beneath your clothes.

  On the oak table, ornamented with birch panels with painted common-forget-me-nots on the gold hinges lay The Holy Book. The girl opened it and said:

  – Knight, I am your shoe-drying-cloth. The holy book will justify my plan.

  She read:

  – Then said the firstborn unto the younger: Our father is old and there is no man on the earth to come in to us, as is the custom on all places on earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and lie with him, that we may preserve the seed of our father. Then they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And tomorrow the elder said to the younger, See. At night I lay with my father . . . And the elder bore a son and named him Moab; He is the father of the Moabites to this day.

  The valiant knight said:

  – If you want Moabites for yourself, first you must wash him and brew wine for him, mixed with gin, whiskey, and schnapps, and lie with a man who is more like a corpse.

  And immediately a two-headed dragon flew against the hall window and moved in a frenzy that trembled the windows in their lead frames. The knight grabbed his sword and prepared his armor while the girl bootlegged wine in a clay jar, stimulated the king with oxygen, and each of them fought their own dragon. And that is how they acquired legal control over the apartment state.

  Annakatrín

  I struggled against them but their over-weaning superiority on all sides quashed my resistance to nothing the water splashed in the distance when I grew cold I raised up shorn of my glasses and underwear tepid water pooled under my hands soap in my eyes and I cried and struggled when the water poured over my head from garments I gasped for breath I held myself stiff against the slippery rim shook my ass found a chair seat someone began to grab him dried him thoroughly sprinkled cool water over him while I replenish myself clean in my lair then sighs followed as I raised myself for a new game carried through the wind-stroked corridor in four arms in a gold chair go out don’t hang about inside strong arms lifted under my neck and hot liquor flowed in through the sides of his mouth I bite the cup let me take this from you you are shivering badly I belched but held it down sleepy after a warm bath disappeared in the calm don’t spit on the pillow greedy I thought about sleep are you dead even after your bath lay on your side do not spit you are not a man made of dough not out of cake batter your feet kick perpetually crazy you pinch me bruises let go no are you ready no I know when I am ready I found you you found nothing let me help you find you are ready for long coming find you sticky-palmed you have spit in my palm I can best find myself palm smudged over nose I took your breath take it away it is wet don’t you feel he is drenched and obnoxious oh don’t you feel you’re ready you sleep the bottleneck set in your teeth I gulped at and fumbled in the sticky palms

  The Princess sat at the troubadour’s feet in the palace. She sang:

  – Ai eu coitada,

  como vivo em gram desejo

  por meu amigo

  que tarda e nom vejo;

  muito me tarda

  o meu amigo na Guardai

  She stretched out her white hand and clasped her palm against him; they sang:

  de parecer venceu quantas achou

  hua moca que x’ agora chegouii

  She added:

  – Place your fingers across the strings, she said, and see.

  He bent closer to her.

  – In the same way as lines form a network in the palm a family becomes a net in each knot of the fifteen palaces of the world, which we have occupied; in every house we are connected by your stringed instrument, as our offspring has learned to sing our glory. In this manner the world celebrates its victories effortlessly with the dulcet tones of song.

  Toward morning they departed the palace for the next palace, startling the king and queen there with accounts of red, bloodthirsty dragons with steel claws, lying in wait on the mountains ready to spew venom over well-tended flowerbeds, gardens, and hall towers.

  – With singing, we’ll protect you from dragon venom, they said; with guitars. And that was the message throughout the winter season: they built dance halls and siege towers so they could play their two-part task: to keep the party going and defend palace inhabitants, because if there is no joy there is no defense and the defenseless man is pitiful. Wine and delicacies were served at the tables, the beds shared the sweetest loving, so no one was afflicted with homesickness. Everything that could pamper them happened, they went on long hunting trips about the woods in search of unimaginable dragons that never appeared—but suspicions grew for the tenants forgotten in their hovels.

  – Burn their farms in the name of the king, said the domestic knight, shaking his blunt sword.

  But the foreign knight appeased him and said:

  – In our holy century, the thirteenth century, everything will happen in the name of the serfs; it is a sign of the times: for those and by those are all things.

  And so they killed serfs in the name of serfs, and everyone was satisfied. Home
coming, tired, from distant forests or on erected poles where the dead dangled by their names, a sight for the sore eyes of others or a warning (they were allowed to choose between the two) the knights settled to eat, played stringed instruments, and the foreign knight taught them the electric guitar; the foreign singer taught them the tunes to all his songs.

  aquest mundo x’ est a melhor ren

  das que Deus fez el i faz beniii

  Thus the years passed, and the days, in merrymaking and imaginary fears, which made the wine sweet on their lips and gave their drinking purpose.

  I thought to myself: mine is mine and yours is yours. Neither my assets will be yours nor your assets mine. We deceive ourselves with a tremendous nonsense: that the two might be some times confused [here the manuscript is damaged]. Fixed assets, mine and yours. I am using the unscrupulous speech street urchins. Here, everything should be understood to be separate. She set her consenting hand on my prudence. She often drank coffee between five and six in the evening, standing upright at the threshold or leaning a shoulder on the doorpost, reaching out a varicose foot but silent and perhaps humming tauntingly as she raised the coffee cup screamed at her four children like a flounder

  She always wore a large floral dress inside; other clothes to go visiting.

  I remember how the man was utterly opposed to her dress, practically allergic to it. It sometimes happened, especially in winter, that they would meet by chance in the hallway early in the morning, as she tussled at coat hooks “herding the kids by their ass-ears,” as she put it, off to school (the children were not particularly eager to learn). They got a lot of pleasure from the electric guitar (and also its square meter sounds; it was astonishing to me that the man Tómas could measure sound in meters); I played in a dance band at night while studying at the university. If he should pass in the corridor during this tussle, she made sure to swing her hip into him, as he made a detour in attempt to avoid conflict and sneak out. This little contact resulted in the appearance the next day of red patches on the lower part of his forehead between his eyes; they spread around his nose and eyes. These spots gave way to gray scabs, a kind of dandruff crust. He was always fiddling with his nose and rubbing the dandruff from his eyebrows with his fingertips, blowing it away so the dust didn’t land on his jacket. He twitched and groped instinctively about his eyebrows. This chaffed skin plagued him typically for three to four weeks, then disappeared, but his forehead flushed in the cold. To me, the fighting was irrelevant, but when she asked Svanur, have you noticed this strange dandruff skin on my husband’s nose, I did not know people could get nose dandruff, I could not help but tell her my opinion about both her and Sveinn. You should give your relative complete respect—or me, she said, and rolled about laughing. I, produce dandruff—no, you are by far the genius of our family. My honesty awakened in them a blind brutality, as often with “healthy workers,” and they refused to take me as a lodger the following winter. Laughable. The first day in the refectory, I was quite surprised to see old Tómas Jónsson there, sitting next to me at the table. I partially pitied the man, how cautiously he went to dinner with that skin on his forehead it was; primarily because of the appearance of these fish-scales that his eyes seemed weary of pleasure, marked by life, though food seemed to awaken pleasure in him.