Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  Should we decide? all the deckhands cried out all around the ship. We began to discuss the matter; some were for and some against. Some felt it was safer, more reliable to decide; others thought it was downright unnecessary, “all bother and nothing else.” The squabbling had gone on for a long while. Word followed word until the conversation turned into hymns and ships and the sentence was not named by name. All the ship’s crew stood in a row around the ship, lay down on it to rest, and kept discussing the equipment. When a little while had passed, the captain asked again: Should we decide? Then we returned to squabbling about it, back and forth, until a teenage boy silently hefted the anchor from the ship and so immobilized them there on the tide line. And then they all went to town, slowly and carefully, as Icelanders should.

  If any commie had written this story now, he would have made the ship a symbol for society and had the surf rinse it away in the night. The End. I could sling this at Sigurður, I said, and took his sleeve and squeezed his hand as a token of gratitude. Then he responds (Ólaf) badly: Dogs sniff at the spots where other dogs piss; no careful dog dares piss anywhere except where there is already the smell of urine.how did the first dog in the world relieve himself having no piss spot that preceded him it now occurs to me to ask when it is too late to answer good answers always come to mind afterwardSometimes there briefly appears an incomprehensible bitterness in Ólaf, most likely because his intelligence confronts miserable, despised men. He is no exception. I think this is a symptom of intellectuals. Ólaf’s behavior is questionable and bizarre. You rarely know where he stands. He enjoys confusing people as to their arguments, getting them slowly on his side but when they hang their shingle he takes the opposite view, casts down that shingle brutally, proving the opposite argument and getting everyone to agree with him. Then he will stand up and leave. That was exactly what I meant, they will say. Ólaf will grin at their approval for the way he managed to knock everyone out like freshly-caught sea scorpions. He would not throw his catch back into the sea, however, and as before sea scorpions would flock to his hook. Ólaf gobbles them up. Various kinds of rumor existed about his sea scorpions in the refectoryi and there was not anything fishy between Sigurður and Ólaf; they would smoke together. Often.

  h) I must start avoiding Ólaf, too

  Many events from this period frequent my mind. I would prefer to remember little of it. I don’t want to remember anything. No one has taken away my right to be allowed to forget.

  i.

  The refectory had for some time comprised two equally large rooms or areas, facing south. They could be converted fairly easily into a single large room by opening the triple concertina doors between the two; almost the whole middle wall was a concertina door. After two adjacent rooms, the fashion was for open plan, so the creaking concertina doors, which were made of countless small frames, were torn apart; nothing was left except the iron fixtures for the hinges in the threshold. The middle wall had been broken up so that the top and bottom parts formed plinths that demarcated the two rooms. The era of plinths reigned the whole time I ate there, now of course it has all been broken down and the house has become one great cavity. On the plinths stood the great symbol of that era, the Wandering Jew, and flowers flowed in countless braids and shoots down to the floor. Although there was no visible boundary between the rooms, except the plinths and flowers, the pensioners were divided according to their rank at work. In the inner room sat people who engaged in clean work; in the anterior were others who performed dirty work. In both, people ate at a long table in the middle of the room, perhaps set a hair closer to the outer wall. A few small tables were placed in the corner against the wall. The area between the tables was called the walkway. The small tables were for those who were eating half board, just lunch or dinner. These men came and went and gained no understanding, whereas the long table in the inner room had formed an enduring core. The walls of the two rooms were blank, painted in muted colors. At each long table sat sixteen people, fairly crammed in, people of different professions. The pensioners had little or nothing in common except a policy of living alone. They had each traveled unevenly along the path to bachelorhood. At the long table in the inner room, which in canteen parlance was The Board, there was one person less on one side than the other, at one end, because of an extensive oak buffet with an oval mirror made of ground glass. There were ledges on either side of it. On them sat solemn, great porcelain dogs who looked out in the hall with eyes so natural they resembled human eyes. The nucleus of the Board was four bank employees (I never reached this nucleus), a woman, two ladies who worked alternately in stationary stores or bookstores, a year at each place in sequence, they said, to make life varied and diverse. They were nicknamed the porcelains. Also in the nucleus were two middle-aged women and a housing adviser who never spoke to anyone, or rarely. You could almost judge newcomers by their reaction to the porcelain dogs. If on his very first day the newcomer reacted to the dogs with jokes, he was immediately classified as a lapsed Marxist; at a certain period in the history of icelandic Marxism there developed a powerful opposition to porcelain dogs, which became a tenet of commie faith. The dogs were smashed and discarded at sea or in waterfalls. This awakening against Danish porcelain dogs began with a Marxist nationalistic poet who directed canine humor at them; it reached such a tumult that soon all foreign porcelain dogs in iceland had been destroyed, and no one needed to justify himself and risk ridicule. The dogs had no refuge except in the buffets in cafeterias. But such humor was out with the changing times and those who used it were called lapsed Marxists. The dogs, then, had won. If someone sneered at them, he would not expect an uprising, but the Board would respond with one voice: Such dogs are fashionable rarities and very expensive; they are fine interior decorations. If the newcomer, however, was playful and brought the dogs over to carefully examine all their parts, the Board took to him with open arms; he was promoted to the nucleus after a short test set by the Board intelligentsia, and immediately after spiritual discussions erupted, governed by two men, Sigurður and Ólaf. They knew the whole town, not only people in high places (at least, they would say: Oh, that man was at this party at such-and-such-a-time) but also bums in the street, who lay there due to their all-round gifts, gifts that prevented them from landing on the right shelf in life, it was not suited to people of superior intelligence in the icelandic bourgeois society. The Board was considerably snobbish, looking down on we who claimed to have an all-round understanding of the human being. On the day of a new arrival, people would dispute the situation of this or that writer who was going his own way or approaching the Nobel, and then people disputed about painters who worsened with each show having gone to Paris to discover innovations, and generally writers worsened with each book that Laxness relieved himself of, and politics grew thinner every year, financial scandals increased and our tiny society, no larger than a New York City street, grew icily ominous. In the opinion of these two top intelligentsia at the Board, all books ought to be concise satires—Sigurður leaned toward the fellow-human-oriented lyrical rich imagery in poetry with a realistic ironical sheen; Ólaf was more for actual critical polemics. Everything characters ever did in books was really a criticism, even what was normal in the country like shitting in the open. They found indeed little of such criticism (only one author had done so in print) since people in books and movies never need to shit or piss; there is always too much struggling to improve and conquer the world and ending up in the mire seeking out booze or procuring a woman. One of the great rules for success for any man is combing your hair a certain way, back to your neck and smeared across the crown with wet fingers and also walking about at all times in a striped tie set with a windsor knot. Sigurður and Ólaf weighed in with moist sentences from a newly published Laxness novel. Their brains were a great catalog of citations they nimbly searched. In their judgment, style was the main thing in painting, employing the appropriate nature of form. They considered the symphony orchestra worth naught, and usually
representations of buildings in icelandic art were in ruins, except for in Laxness’s books. “Other than the lack of centralizing and storyline,” they said. “The centralizing moral stands firm with the writer’s perspective though unwaveringly outside the characters in their creations. It is essential that negative forces are gathered together in an epic manner in realistic drama and the tensions that form there in order that the total influence crystallizes at the end of the story. Point Counter Point by Huxley and Atomic Station by Laxness stand firm: mescal and Marxism,” they added.

  The Board gaped with astonishment. Both these men were approving of mescal and brewing strong beer. The result of these oddly extravagant views by two stealth commies (they were suspected of being either wholly or partly so or both but they said they preferred the National Defense or the Progressive Party alternately, after having given the Socialists a chance a few years back) was a lively discussion that quite threw the petty bourgeoisie class of humans who were right at that time settling down to eat. Such discussions were meant to prove to the newcomers that people in iceland were not entirely mentally dead, at least not those who ate at the Board. After this trial, the newcomer was free, and was registered either as not the worst or he was not the worst. The lunch hour ended and the disputations drowned in the rattle of chairs at 1:10 P.M. and everyone was bloated from having coffee after dinner, which the inner room got with an additional charge on their food account. The outer room refused coffee with the surly remark: A man is meant to have nothing remaining except for getting food after his working hours complete with his slosh of coffee.

  Each member of the Board had received some form of higher education that gave rise to discussions about tests and test results, discussions of men with grants, who had applied for grants, or who would be receiving grants. Discussions of assorted subsidies were very popular, especially scholarships aimed at improving people, and there was approval for examinations. Examination proctors were highly esteemed. At the Board, the highest educational grade was the “Simple High School Test, Reykholt” while the high school test was some test one of the porcelain ladies had completed, she worked in a stationery store along Njálsgata that had a considerable selection of icelandic books, Danish magazines, paper dolls, coloring books, and Meccano. She and her friend from the bookstore were thin, small boned, with flawless complexions, so like porcelain that their facial complexion gave rise to their nicknames. Both porcelains combed their hair in a way that never goes out of fashion, parted down the middle and let fall flowing and untamed down their cheeks. They enriched their hair with added vitamins and egg shampoo. No hair-maggots were to be found in their hair. Occasionally, they went out to dinner, had their hair cut, colored, rinsed, and layered, deciding there was nothing to it. Their hair was classically fashionable, neither too short nor too long, just right in the back where the ends turned in little curls on their nape. The following night they’d sleep with washed hair in hair-nets and happily dry their hair in the sun, if there was any sun to be found—“Sun ruins your hair.” Their clothing comprised monochrome angora sweaters and plain skirts, which they stroked from their thighs and buttocks with their right hand or even both, if their chair was spacious enough, as they sat down; the skirt’s material tended not to crease. After sitting, they shook their shoulders and adjusted the flesh of their ass-cheeks to the hard seat, lifted their hair from their sweater collar, tossing it with a move of their heads and a delicate caress from the back of their hands which they finally stroked across their appendix. Both had had severe appendicitis attacks for many years and said that the next attack would undoubtedly see them hover between life and death in the University Hospital; their appendixes had certainly affected their bowels. The women were getting to a critical age but kept their skin young with day and night Pons creams and cleansers—“to fix all kinds of damaged complexions the cream nourishes and heals the death of the skin.” They lived alone in a moderately small and cozy apartment, spent their free evenings washing their nylon socks and angora sweaters in moderately warm soapy water without any alkalis. Sometimes they went to the movies. They washed their underclothes daily, dried them on a rope in front of the oven; it wasn’t possible to dry anything in the bathroom, they only had shared access to the toilet; they sprinkled talc in their shoes and thought—“if a married woman does not want to have children, wants to be free, she must take care to look to the negligible custom of the morning ritual that befits the móderne married woman today.” An especially good vaginal salve had come on the market. In sexual matters they felt themselves liberal, but no more than average; they did not hate the communist politician Katrín Thoroddsen for introducing a condom that killed semen, which some women deemed sheer hypocrisy. “Couples have no need of more than four children: two to replenish society when they die and the others to swell the nation, vital if she is to come to full term in the international arena.”

  Although the porcelains did not know half the city, they knew several of its better citizens, if conversations ever turned to Reykjavík families. “Ah, yes, Mumi of the Engeyars, a formidable and fine soul,” they’d say. “The same can be said about Óla the ‘dolphin’: he swam too often in the wine.” Their employers were also fine souls as far as it went, though perhaps they did not pay handsomely enough, but the girls managed to augment their meager salaries via the proceeds of havoc in many marriages: they were the confidants of upstanding souls there in their humble apartment; over simple wine they would advise on what course to take, after things had come to a pass and the couple had stopped speaking to one another. And knowing how to clean up for men and discovering in him slender threads, they would reject him and his minor benefits there on the cross-stitched cushions on the sofa, open their thin thighs, raise themselves up and smoke cigarettes from a Mozart Cigarette case with no interest in what was going on between their thighs—because it was not for them, but for the man who wants to vent—and so they lived. The next day they would buy soft yarn for new angora sweaters.

  One time they were enticed out to a club to dine with a certain Board man (Sigurður), but never again. After a night at Sjálfstæðishús—“they got tipsy on wine, and then acted all shark-skinned, hard and cumbersome,” was Sigurður’s classification; he said that such women should not be allowed around men. He accused them of being prick-teases with fierce lesbian tendencies because the stationery store one had driven the heel of her shoe into his groin for getting offensively personal with her in the little cozy apartment, when she had simply wanted to invite him up to their place to be lovely and chummy, no hidden agenda. “O god, how nauseating some people are. I get goose bumps thinking of him,” they said to the teachers who listened attentively and could not understand it, Sigurður was a sympathetic character in their opinion. The teachers had a secret plan to invite the Board men home for tea or a wholesome Norwegian breakfast, and Sigurður could be charming when in the mood. But they were well aware he was a broken man; he became their intense psychological study and they, these innovative teaching women, had fun making with their independent study, quoting from the book Stature and Character. Sigurður had come—in a certain state of his soul—right out of this uniquely informing book by Kretschmer. They soon psychoanalyzed him as schizophrenic, excusing everything he did, saying: well the man IS schizophrenic. In truth, they were not desperate and peppery like Miss Gerður; they were anxious neither about ending up unmarried in old age, nor dying alone in their apartment. They had the foresight to get ownership in a cooperative apartment in the Housing Cooperative of Children’s Teachers where members in good standing had first refusal. Their hope was to get their own apartment and keep it on a full teacher’s salary after they stopped teaching, a profession that had changed them into some kind of shiny metal to which nothing stuck, they protested in vain; nothing concerned them if it did not personally affect them or their work. “No, one does not dread one’s normal share or becoming old and weak,” they said with a Mona Lisa smile.

  Two foreign
girls served in the refectory—the atmosphere was fittingly international—and two foreigners studying icelandic Studies at the University ate at the Board. The presence of foreign countries contributed to the notion that the Board must not show up the nation, but display her honor in intelligent discussion and fashionable looks. But the students would ideally have heard something from the old icelandic, which caused the Board great problems: the students wanted the sort of ideas that the Board had decided were wrong with the country, especially the cherished farming culture the students thought unique since farmers did nothing but read or write sagas. The students, prospective Friends of iceland and representatives for the country overseas, worked hard to be more icelandic than Icelanders, to speak a cleaner and more beautiful language than the Board, and they took icelandic names, mixing them together and reversing them backward so they were called one thing today and another tomorrow, for example Kormákur Snorrason or Snorri Kormáksson, but despite their infatuation they could still say: “there is no modern culture in iceland, only the farming culture from remote valleys, and it is wonderful.” This over-hasty judgment met with a protracted chorus of o-protests from the wounded and humiliated Board. Even Ásmundur, the silent owner of the place, growled an ‘o,’ and Tómas Jónsson ‘o’-ed, too, in his own way. “The world-famous Laxness, the worthy Þórbergur, they are from there? Hasn’t Laxness established the zenith for the epic novel in world literature?” The Board became mentally paralyzed for a few days then got back on track just before Lent, demanding these people who lived in the wider world admit that it mattered that one of their great men had marked the zenith either for capitalism or communism with a novel. The Board insisted on this for a few days but the students’ opinions were not shaken even on the first day of summer when a leg of lamb with fried potatoes, red cabbage, and rhubarb sauce was brought forth. One student was German, the other a Swede. The Swede always had his student’s hat on, even while eating, and he proposed little or nothing by way of conversation. The Board was fairly repelled by him and tried to watch its language as best as possible, afraid of the Swede’s focus on grammar and so said: I know that Urban (who sometimes wanted to be called Þorgeir Skorargeir) will sooner or later look up from his soup dish of fluent icelandic; he is just waiting for the right moment. Upon hearing that, the Swede laughed coldly. The German spoke by turns and was generous in his views: a nation such as iceland that has neither Don Quixote, Dante, nor Greek Tragedies in its language, not to mention the canon of modern literature, has no access to modern culture except through foreign books. Therefore, it loses its culture not because of external effects such as the American occupation and the defense of Keflavík, but eats up itself according to Toynbee’s law. “But doesn’t Toynbee say that an isolated nation can only maintain its footing if it is endowed with internal life?” said Sigurður, “and if there is no modern culture then there is no modern culture to eat. Perhaps there’s more life in the pensioners in Germany than here in the refectory?” “Just so,” said the Board. That impressed the German student, who spoke eight languages fluently, taught Russian to the soldiers at Keflavík airport, and had been shelled in the leg by communists on the Eastern front during the war—but the Board could not accept his views.