Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  One server was a Danish girl named María. She served the Board in the inner room. The other was a German, Edeltraud, who waited on the front room. People didn’t really know Edeltraud, only that she had come over on a trawler with other German workers after the war and had become pregnant the first night in iceland. Edeltraud missed Germany somewhat because back home she had been able to choose from five types of coffee available on the black market. People’s diets were as varied as possible if you had money to stand by a barrel at the railway station and eat hot dogs with mustard all night—“there is much more air and trees outside the city.” She was in a relationship with an icelandic fishermen she met on the trawler and they were in love (on the way over the girls slept in the bunks in the ship’s hold while the men slept on deck under sail stretched between the hatch covers), but when they came ashore the seaman wanted nothing to do with her, except when he was drunk. “A woman just has to wait and be patient,” said Edeltraud. The loyalty and patience of this German girl earned the Board’s admiration of German persistence, they took it upon themselves to never give up even though they had lost everything. Yet the Board was convinced that Edeltraud would never get anything from the fisherman except frustration; she was by nature submissive as Germans partly are and would let him wipe his feet all over her kindness, spending her savings and even ordering her to fetch booze for him from the State Liquor Store. “Such things do not happen in Germany,” said Edeltraud, yet she didn’t want to toss the fisherman overboard; he had entered her heart and so she would listen to the shipping news on the radio to find out where he was and she waited for him. “She would no more than anyone else cut out part of her body and her heartsong,” said the woman who usually filled in for Edeltraud on Wednesdays, when she had her day off, which she used to clean the home that belonged to the mother of the fisherman, who of course lived with her and drove everyone insane when he came back from the sea and wanted to relax.

  María had a heart out for herself. She was very tall, light-haired and blue-eyed, and with a crooked nose, which she got when she was three, the time she fell from an open window in Silkeborg down into a barrel full of chicken feathers that saved her life. The nostrils of her crooked nose were full of dark blackheads from the sweat. She used every free moment to shut herself in the toilets and squeeze the blackheads in front of the mirror. The girl’s appearance was so poor, “except for the bright eyes,” that it was hard to believe that she had become so crooknosed in the land of the actress Vivi Bak, whose achievements in film and on stage wore endlessly in newspapers, along with the fact that she was on her way to iceland with a Danish blockbuster. The Board considered María’s conduct polite and restrained; “she has apparently had a good upbringing and inherited the Danish cheer.” A troubled smile played increasingly on her lips, which she half-opened to suck in the air as she spoke. She had difficulty understanding icelandic, contrary to Edeltraud; she studied the language for three months and had only a broken version of it. Because of her difficulties understanding, María always placed her ears right above people and they worked out that she probably sucked her breath in during conversation because of her halitosis. The Board could not decide on the halitosis smell she had and whether she was in fact three women, one at each seating: rotten before midday, oniony at coffee, and sour for dinner. “Uvv,” she drew in her breath and disappeared into her shell whenever someone said: “María dear, did you want me to eat with my fingers today.” “I’m probably forgetting something, being lovestruck,” she would say quietly and return with a fork on a plate. “That must be so, María dear, you are always so absent-minded.” The dining matron complained bitterly about María’s apathy which was so different from Edeltraud’s efficiency, but she kept her in service out of a scarcity of options. “Getting rid of María now when everyone has gone to work for the military,” she said, “I just call her names in icelandic, but if she were to move, possibly to Canada, I would probably lose half the people. You cannot assign both rooms to Edeltraud, no matter how diligent and conscientious she may be.” The other teacher used every opportunity to practice her Danish with María’s help. She had such difficulty getting the sounds right in Danish. Everyone was warm toward the girl. “There’s something so sweet and gentle about her despite her mishaps.” And the womenfolk seemed to feel she had a reliable build for motherhood.

  The pensioners received two dishes, a main course first and then porridge. This dining arrangement had passed without incident until María came and the porridge made her laugh: in Denmark, the usual experience was a hearty soup with berry porridge for dessert. As she offered porridge dishes she always giggled. “Is María laughing?” said one of the teachers who was sensitive to ridicule; one of the porcelains lifted her hair from her neck with a light, backhand movement. After three months of much giggling María could no longer torture herself and said: I find it so strange you eat porridge after your food. But what of it? said the other porcelain as she smoothed her hair and lifted it from her sweater’s collar. They were apparently frustrated by the fact that the dining hall held to rituals that were not customary in the land of ALT for Damerne and Vivi Bach. The Board discussed table manners with great passion, and following a Saturday vote (the result was 7: 2, the two being Tómas and Ásmundar, but many were absent, including the engineers, who normally ate on Saturdays with their old classmates from MR, ’46) approved a new practice, having hearty soup instead of porridge, and they made the argument that, really, porridge was a base food, which people with light office jobs need not necessarily have instead of hearty soup, to be brought out before the main. And this achieved an end to María’s giggling.

  The teachers (who taught young children to read and used the Isaac method, which is considered the best way to transition a child from kindergarten unscathed from the earlier pedagogy, because it was easy to achieve in three months and it established reading fluency before school in the spring) were experts in handicrafts, and wanted to herd the Board to craft workshops and folk dances with Sigríð Valgeir—“who is outstanding in her field”—but the Board, especially the men, did not want such child’s play and would hit the hard stuff come weekends. They found they met most opposition from the engineering bloc on the left corner of the table; they had an Olympian contempt for common entertainments, domestic squabbling, and politics—“the world will end when times run away from the technologists’ control and the plebs will become null and the politicians nix.” Everyone would have to sit and stand according to the orders of the technology centers. It seemed these men chiefly sustained themselves on strong beer. The engineers were variously preparing a new project, delivering a project, or undertaking a particular project which would, if implemented by the right parties in the right places, overthrow everything. Occasionally they would be inexplicably between projects and they would hold protracted, deep conversations about relationships in Höfn, debating certain taverns, certain men in certain taverns and their relationships with the strong beer they wished were brewed here, how in such confined relationships people changed and Icelanders could sit with bowed heads, drinking like at Bedraggled Hens in Höfn. But as many projects as they steered to their conclusion, it never occurred to them to engage in any marriage projects. They were teased—by the teachers—about this, implying they were making eyes at either porcelain lady, sucking their pipes intensely, laughing a stifled belly laugh, sputtering smoke at them from their lips, happily striking the flats of their palms on their shield-like bellies, which they claimed to have gained from drinking strong beer, so nurturing was it, and remembering countless relationships with taverns that they dived into stone sober with Magga Einars—“you remember Magga; what? MR, ’45; what’s that?”—and returned and got involved with whores, drinking, the whole caboodle. They gave up all pretense of insinuation and said in their Laxness voices (they all had practiced doing Laxness carefully): Are you reprimanding us a little with women, ahahaha? Reprimanding with women seemed to tickle the engineers’ sense of m
anhood and sexual orientation in a particular way that seemed directed mainly at ugly old crones in certain taverns in certain relationships, crippled and weeping and with vaguely husky tobaccoed voices, women who had to screw a wooden leg under themselves or tighten hook paws on their arms before they threw themselves down hoarse with wine weeping on a comforter some place up in an attic rafter in Nýhöfn and waited for some member of the group to take them, smelling like fermented skate from the dirtiness. The pole of their sexuality was centered on the young untouched honeys in their cohort, MR, ’46. Judging by their descriptions these honeys were barely earthly; their classmates worshipped their mystical talents, how they tilted their heads, how they held cigarettes and looked at you with every sentence and touched their lips. Sometimes it seemed that the engineers had achieved the bliss of “being alone with her in her room” and they were planning to slip a hand under her sweater or clothes—“though that is not the final stage, one wants more and more, and it costs years of toil and word-wrestling that can destroy simply months of work, even years, if the person is too forward.” They were always too forward, neither running nor walking in their love affairs: when the moment of triumph came the honeys turned out to be frigid and many either had a virgin complex or fierce lesbian tendencies that were impossible to overcome trying to “get in touch with chicks.” All Saturday night they sat in City, met acquaintances from their year at MR, ’46, talked about pipe-smoking, reminisced about old relationships and forest walks and relationships at Gullin, a wonderful place in Copenhagen. The conversation was often carried out question-and-answer style: Have you run into Magga Einars? No, Magga Einars is nowhere to be seen these days. Has he got some woman? I don’t know jack about Magga, not that Magga has changed. They sat with heads bowed over the vanished world until the relationship of life drove them out into life’s hoarfrost (away from the country) to oversee the construction in the herring industry. But wherever they went, they took with them, in their heads: the-once-and-future-relationships-with-cohort-MR, ’46.

  The Board very much enjoyed being liberal both in politics and matters of sex; it tolerated all robust speech and plain-spokenness. The porcelains were slightly scandalized at first, splashing their hair and stroking their angora sweaters and appendices, but tried to conceal it because they lived in the half-hope that one of the engineers would take them on at some point after having lived outside the country calculating the strength of concrete—but their hope was in vain. They dried like concrete, became little by little harder in countenance despite the Pons cream, their latent lesbian tendencies ever more visible at the corners of their mouths. On the other hand, Ólaf proposed to María one fine day, leaving the Board astonished and sufficiently horrified to a one. Their relationship began silent and soundless and evolved; no one understood how. As a group the Board composed a “wedding poem in the old style.” While the composing happened, Tómas Jónsson pricked up his ears but without submitting his own verse. Who could have imagined that he had taken upon himself the insurmountable effort of studying for his diploma exams outside school, although he couldn’t benefit from it in any way. Tómas was always regarded like any other drooling old man and irredeemable onanist.

  In the outer room, the death of iceland continued in quieter, more moribund ways, with minimal spiritual trappings. The pensioners there sat stone-silent over their plates. Before dinner the engineers loitered at the empty table with their soup spoons in their hands ready to bolt down the porridge as soon as it was put on the table. Their lunch hour was short, and if the porridge was not served right away after the main meal they could be heard braying bitterly in an uncoordinated chorus: What’s this? Will here be no porridge today. We lose a chance to inhale it after dinner.

  Edeltraud would let no man harry her. She had set the table carefully: the second week she began to carry the porridge from pedestal to wall, then from wall to pedestal. From there, she ladled out the food to the porridge plates, feeding everyone at the table according to her own system. But the engineers weren’t slow to fault her system, even if she was German. She protested and said they always got their porridge last. “The middle always ends up in the middle,” said the middlers. After much hassling, Edeltraud restructured the sequence of her tasks, carrying to the middle first, and then out from it toward both ends of the table. This lasted a few days, until the engineers once again became aware of a shortcoming in the system. They beat their empty spoons on the table and demanded a flexible system that everyone could agree on. Edeltraud stood in the middle of the floor, clasped her fists and everything turned to porridge before her eyes. “No porridge for you, then,” she announced. “I will eat the porridge myself.” And they answered: “You have porridge for brains. Start at either end or in the middle, carry to each end across the table in rotation for a week, and then from the pedestal to the middle for the next week, then the week after from the wall to the middle, and then across the table each person can take his plate to hand to the person opposite.” Edeltraud stood still in the same stance while the engineers explained their system, ready with the phrase: “No porridge for you.” Suddenly she began to sob, all turned around over this icelandic simplification, this ferocious know-how. The dinner matron intervened, rushing into the hall like a prow-heavy ship and striking her hands together. “Each and every one of you can wait for his porridge. There’s no crowd in danger if someone has to wait a while,” she said very firmly. The engineers piped down, grumbled quietly, and beat their empty spoons on their fingertips. After getting their porridge they each shoveled it down as if in solitude, rushed back off to work with a glow in their eyes, and farted. They propelled themselves on a bumpy and choppy pigeon-toed gait, more from desire than ability, sparing themselves bus fares and “went as far as to tramp the short distance down to the harbor,” always on a quick journey to find food and from food to their workplaces. If there was any time left over after eating, they would coil themselves up to rest for a few minutes in a cloth bag by a cement stack, stretching their body on the factory floor, lying in a pile of shavings with ropes and equipment or trying to nab a chicken-nap in the back seat of a vehicle on the forecourt, feet out the door and heels up on the lubricant dispensers. As soon as time was called they leapt up, braying, their stomachs heavy and weary with undigested food in the upper duodenum, continually giving them heartburn or drowsiness, yet all the same they worked furiously. But if the rest and everything else failed in their lives, they still lived in eternal hope of the time after their working hours, and even if that hope was extinguished in the evening at five o’clock like a ray of winter sun, it awakened immediately in the morning as the sun rose, having completed her circle around the hemisphere of heads slumbering somnolent cement-and lubricant-dreams. She woke at six in the morning, when most older men get to their feet, especially if they are uprooted farmers who suspect the imminent death of iceland is approaching after a rather pointless, sad life in pursuit of money. These men lived an absolutely positive life: the desire to maintain reasonable health with reasonably cheap food so they could put in a reasonable performance until evening, get a reasonable recompense at week’s end and die a reasonable death. Often they’d get their wish, getting to die at work. They were crushed in the mud under high and heavy piles of cement bags, died on the way to the hospital, or were knocked into the ship’s hold, breaking their skull. News of an accident at work aroused in them a similar curiosity and pleasure as an incurable disease excites in women. Sometimes one of the workers would unhook himself from his work thoughts and ask to look in the papers, once the Board has finished with them; it was fond of newspapers. If they could find news of the accident, which was not often easy, they went stooping around the table with the paper in their hands, sticking it between people, pointing to the news or the picture and saying, This one I recognize, he worked with me in the same crew. Fatal accidents lifted them far from the anonymity of the front room to the extent that they tried to interest the Board in the fact that they might have
been crushed, were practically the one who died.