I blushed at the compliment, and I have for some reason never since tolerated them; I blush because compliments are disgusting. After having ascertained that the amount was correct, I said goodbye, full of myself, shamefully happy. I bought something or other in the store and went home with my purchase under my sweater. On the way I counted the money again. I knew the exact amount but in my upset over the compliment I confused my counting so I got either too little or much. I sat on a rock, took a coin out of my pocket, put it in the envelope and returned. I requested the store manager and was ushered into the office, where I said:
You overcounted. You gave me too much.
Are you sure? he asked, irritated. I never overcount.
Yes, I replied. A coin has gotten into the envelope.
Do you mean to say I can’t count, he said angrily and took the envelope, counted the notes, and shook it; the coin fell on the table, rolled off it, ran behind the cabinet and disappeared. The cabinet was heavy and the shopkeeper was called in; he and the merchant and I dragged it, but we didn’t find the coin. After this commotion I looked and saw it gleam between the floor boards. The store manager ordered me to move, in case the money disappeared into the floor, but the shopkeeper asked him to sneak out gently and get some wire to fish the coin out. He himself took off his jacket, bent to the gap with a wire so his boxy butt stood out in the air. He poked the end of the wire carefully on the far side of the coin; we could hardly breathe. The money fell down under the floor and disappeared. The store manager was outraged by anger, cursing me to the devil, not wanting to look for the coin but ordering his shopkeeper to tear up the planks and hunt for it. While they both messed around with screwdrivers he asked what I had bought and what money I had paid with. Then he ordered me to set out the remainder and asked if I had been given the right change.
Yes, replied the shopkeeper stubbornly. He got the right change.
The merchant counted the money and found immediately what it lacked. At that very moment, the shopkeeper managed to drag the money from under the floor: a fivepence, the amount from his calculation. He stopped. The merchant smiled angrily and said:
Now, I am going to keep this coin and you will be spanked for having lost it.
He pinched my ear tightly, the custom for adults when children played a prank, and shoved me out of the store.
That evening, my parents noticed some of the money I had been given for purchases was missing. My father whipped me until I confessed (maybe this happened in the fall, after my father came home and my mother had lost money all summer but never spanked me so I did not get spanked twice; either because she was a righteous woman or because my father let her do the accounting for her summer spending) then ordered me to get back what I lacked from the merchant’s clutches. I did not go; instead, I crawled under the boat and slept there for the night.
The next morning when I scrambled home there was no mention of the money. Then I realized that getting paddled and sleeping for a night beneath a boat was worth fivepence. Everything can be reckoned in money, no matter whether it is a man’s life or the nation. Realizing this, I believe, constitutes healthy knowledge for a child, saving them from the pangs of conscience or sin. To kill, rape, rob, and maim are equivalent temporal punishment, worth comparable capital amounts.
The event had no lasting impact on me and I have no idea why I remember it, but I console myself with what arises from this, what a person does or thinks has purpose. Good cheer. What use in carrying the burden of intention for every single incident in our lives. We would suffocate under the weight. Probably I would just have wanted more compliments from the merchant and an additional dose of uncomfortable joy.
others have robbed me of the apartment and myself, others are enjoying a greater benefit than I am this torments me night and day
Tómas did you callare you awakeI heard you call
Tómas
The people one associates with get more unavoidable
do you need something Tómas
the power more interfering
want me to fetch your morning coffee
in one’s life and beliefs than one himself
are you sleeping
Do not stare like this, Anna. I do not want coffee.
more unresponsive are many men than donkeys led by their ears if the donkey that wanted to get rid of its burden of salt in the parable had the sense to stretch its head up from the stream and wait calmly while the current dispensed with the salt and washed it off, he could have arisen light on his feet with an empty bag freed from birth and death and enslavement by the farmer I would have done it in the donkey’s position this parable features idiocy but not the desire to be freed from slavery by fraud as if the author wants to insinuatewriters are always terrified witless wretches and should therefore become priests
well you call for me when you’re ready
I have known
Shut up, Anna. I did not call for food. I am not hungry I have also known on life’s path the art to lying in a stream with heavy salt bags on my back and shoulders but do not intend to just let the stories about it lie in the salt rather take them with me to the grave
to say: here, but no further. I walk outside at night. advertisements for the movie theater face me. I am just on an evening walk, I say. And nothing can attract attention like walking alternately fast and slow and waving your arms about to increase the blood flow to the heart. Nothing is as capable of leading my body astray into bad company. I should be the model of every healthy man, every person seeking continual improvement. Still, I try not to write my name in the skies, as was said of Sigurður. With some dexterity it can it be assigned to Ól . . .
are you a bit poorly Tómas this nice weatherget some fresh air into your lungsDóri is going to bring you outside here by the trash cansmaybe forgot to bring a dog today
listen it won’t be good for you to be stuck inside on a Sundayhave you taken your medicationopen the door I am at the door listen up
my heart beats irregularly painful but it is not the heart itself but the heart’s nerves says the doctor sometimes I lie tearful for no reason but I also manage to beat the weeping down I shall prevail weakness you are too weak Tómas Jónsson you’ll benefit from a little bit of movement
do you want me to let Dorí bring you outside my Tómas
you are abnormally fleshy the doctor counsels me and injects liquid into my right butt-cheek so that the flesh will slough from me in my urine I would have expected a distinguished speech from him a man who is the main specialist in heart disease yet I’ll let his sauciness pass without a word I address him formally at night sir doctor you said in reply to his casual chumminess and humiliate him this way facing death is repulsive everyone dies and wakes again except the man who is stone dead and rots he continues being dead and not even his inheritance grows from his carcass a tree lives a thousand years and wakes each spring cars can be melted and new cars cast from the scrap but man’s carcass is forever void and rusted an imperfect creation of a foolish god you had to be foolish with each other were expecting help from your faith damn you and repulsive and rotting they will discover eternity before the scythe comes for me on an evening walk Tómas dear do it for me Anna get out of bed air yourself for Anna your Katrín your Títa your Tómas the holy trinity I know it they shall surely let eternity emerge from precision instruments, the discovery will be made by self-educated naturally intelligent scientists they shall surely find devices more sensitive than temperament in man all the other German Icelanders in other families or half-Danish who knows if there is a good mix like Finsen and Thorvaldsen the jews, perhaps one-third of this man could have become Tómas you know were I forming Tómas he would be born in Bingen in Germany like the nun Hildegard not Tanga in the nucleus of the imminent death of iceland Reykjavík I would not have been born there
The soul inside me is called Katrín = The Pure
now indeed I move Tómas Jónssonnow indeed joy moves begins with a drink at Hotel Borgyou ca
n fiddle away gawping at drenched roofsCount the steps of the stairs stories between floorsmoreover you can count the doors on the corridor panes in the windowone always finds something to kill timekilling time is a crime everyone can afford a generally recognized crime except by work horses and contractorstime is gold they saywhen did time make Tómas goldenin the war in the war became time became gold before it was a delusionnow a man kills gold time in restaurants our gold Tómas my gold Tómas my gemstonedo you remember the story of the black in Johannesburg who worked in a gemstone mine and swallowed a gemhe had become so skinny and subjugated that he could barely stand upright all his innards totally empty like a money safe they took him by force pressed a finger on his abdomen and found jewels in this black’s intestine but my intestines were empty and they fattened him for a week but the black would not defecate his body was seven days full of shit and feces they were going to cut him up and take the gemstone from the most valuable black in the world but were too stingy to pay the huge cost for the gemstone company even though they would have discarded the black in the trashcan afterand he fattened day by day without a bowel movement a fecal cork in his colon then the idea occurred to pump him with paraffin oil and rinse him out with a rinsing jug until he got diarrhea runs and shit the whole day but nothing the gemstone still waiting stuck fast in the appendixremember Dóri how you found the story funny as we played blind cards and Dísa said he read an interesting story in the waiting roomDísa told us about the robbery of the Yugoslavian gold reserves you remember when the Germans came across a car laden with gold killed the driver and buried part of the gold in the ground under a tree while the other portion escaped down to the shore with them in the car and out to a pleasure yacht which thieves later stole and cast the gold overboard in a storm because they were different Germans and did not know what was in the box but the ship was going to sink in the stormyou sat so long the dining matron looked at you the way an animal tamer enters the lion’s cage with his whip in the morning to spank the lions and stir them up with a cookie box to show kids tricks but charged at a mouse in the cage and Sigurður was drunk and asked if she had eaten lion for lunch given her expression and recovered quickly and spunthe story shone in their faces which glowed with sweat after the coffee as to the strange fate of gold and you shook at the knee joints by the cloakroomsoon you were so cozy you did not bother to pass water bloated with severe pain in the abdomen that plagued you the whole night longI watered the flowers you saybut then Anna said absolutely do not throw your urine over me in the flower bedsyou reached over to the windowsill and threw your water over the cactusI doubt you have had happier days than the one where you aimed your dick at the thorns of the cactus and pissed the story was told of the fate of the Yugoslav gold reserve in World War II
so I farted energetically yes you startled and you jerked and also soiled yourself under the covers was also the hope that I shoo that I foul that as it creeps forward and the wet that accompanies this dries soon Anna comes and cleans me her nursing work goes toward the rent protracted hissing from my ass it means dry weather when there’s high pressure over Greenland but distant thunder makes a hint yesterday the thunder came today rains unsettled yet yesterday I ate lamb sausage shoes indeed examine my toes I rise it creeps between my other toes is remarkable that we have these dependent nubs on our feet red and shrunken nubs like the skin-sick potatoes of Domenico Ghirlandaio it would have been a boon to paint my toes he who painted the old man with a knob-sick nose toes are the most useless and unusual parts of the body except perhaps the earlobes and dick which is strange—dick like a cactus, what does that mean—just as odd to have toes and think about this like how in Argentina it is summer around christmas while here everything is submerged in frost and snow do you see how a dick acts oddly but you get used to a dick’s gestures somehow a johnson but never the toes lambs skip high with a hope the mind escapes harm but the dick is concerned with mental harm do you see how I wave this pointless wart-lappet-tipdick and my toes uniformly coffee boiled the cork stopper in the thermos flask he is older and more fool him but however you fart from drilling your farting cat at the cacti bent at the knees or dogs lifting their leg farting horses farting and chickens farting in public now should Anna spank the man Tómas who made this ugly shame which dries on the radiatorI’m going to write something about Icelanders with literary runs not to the same extent burning asses by the oven I let my subconscious work for me indeed she comes running with a thread in an instant
A late winter night. The air unusually clear and light in the lungs.I like this sentence, it is maidenly it hides within it inspiration, poetic flightI tend to thread through the city’s least busy streets.this sentence is not as good but I’ll let it move along though I’ll get bad reviews from the critics about it, most likely.the traffic and racket, resulting therefrom, weighs on my heart. Sigurður no longer surprises me. He is currently working without flashiness, which is to say, he is being punctual. Then one day he doesn’t turn up to work. That same day he appears happy and cheerful at the dining table. A stench of wine runs off him. In the Board’s eyes, lowered as they are to their dishes, one can read: Once fallen into the wine bottle. Instead [the manuscript is illegible here.]downcast, like he is getting used to sobering up; he is shamefaced and his eyes have a glassy sheen. He vents to the men in the outer room, tries to initiate squabbles and to tickle Elinu. He converses with Ólaf, who smiles, and this unexpected drunken joy is half-fascinating, all the more so when he crashes into the door during midday coffee. That’s that: Up with iceland, down with the world! At times his chattering is almost amusing. This loose cannon of a man tickles both Elin and Dísa so he can be certain they have been tickled by him. They wail almighty jesus and put on airs: good lord, Siggi, do not do that. He disappears and is not seen for many days. The glances over steaming soup: He’s gone for good. But no one dares to speak up about Sigurður because of the presence of Ólaf. Sigurður’s last words before he disappears are typically directed at Ólaf, on his petty suburban manner, how people are cyclical, that Ólaf is not reliable, how he wants to leave. On the day he reappears, quiet and swollen, he measures each movement carefully, pulling his arms taut to his sides as if trying to keep his extremities at bay, afraid of spontaneous nerve impulses that might sling a soup spoon or a water glass from his hands. A stillness rests on him, living in the eternal anguish of his bones. He might speak about how some people need only five glasses of wine to get down to the destruction inside; someone (probably he himself) has grown tired of the daily habit of putting thin eggshells over the despair lying five wineglasses deep beneath his feet. Is this how life should persist? We listen in awkward silence to the muttering, fractured by drunken coughs of laughter, a thirst for wine. Then he hovers for two days absolutely silent as his arms lift from his sides and his fingers begin to move freely. On the sixth day, he resumes his old characterthe clock strikes ten it’s soothing to listen to the clock on the watchmaker’s workshop beat on Sunday mornings a great sound an electric din vibrating in the silence reminiscent of an electric guitarworthless drudgery for this or that “is he prattling about some boring lout now?” skimping on his existence with wine (probably this is how he feels, terrified of having said something unpleasant while drunk) but no one responds. How is he, Sigurður the Book of Revelation, legible through a magnifying glass, clear as glass. He can make himself thin as glass in a window. That evening he visited me to my surpriseno need to say I hate drunk people take a detour if I see them from a distance rarely go out Saturdays dare not risk my life the cruelty wine stirs inside folk (this icelandic berserker disease) who drink purest cruelty and Reykjavík spills screaming out onto the streets filled with drunken storm-troopers headed to the Winter Palace at Hotel Borg and she claims military protection following a fruitless defense by the doormanTryggvi actually drinks daily. He drinks in his leather chair then passes the wine back into the bottles. But he remains fully functional. Jesus changed water into wine, he says. I change wine into water
. Which is a greater miracle. Tómas, take this bottle out. I have neutralized its contents. Every minor action done to embarrass me. Even down to handling his piss bottles. For the sole reason: Tryggvi noticed the artillery in the Bank was working for me. Don’t throw the bottle out, rinse it under the tap and put it into the cabinet. The bank is not without its gold reserves. This yellow mix from Tryggva his liquid gold. I’d just turned the corner of Grettisgata and Barónsstigur when Sigurður came into my arms in the middle of the corner. Directly into me. After five days came a glance. No evading Sigurður as he flows over the edge of the soup dish. Give me ten crowns, he says casually. A ten-krónur coin, he says, hardly drawing breath, if you know what a ten krónur is. I look past him at the barber shop. I see the red comb with its neon light. I feel my heart squeeze and my left foot rustle the pavement with its paper trash, which is being pushed through the streets at night like ghosts. The comb’s light dies. A red light remains a while in my eyes. But I am silent. I’m dizzy a little at this corner by the yellow house. I took the turn too quickly. I put weight on my right leg. I must appear steady. I think: I should drink a milk mix in the evening instead of coffee. Two slices of raisin cake appear, each in front of a black cat on a side pillar. Blue grass. Sigurður, can I ask about the white garden chair standing on the lawn. A naked woman with sagging breasts sits in the chair screaming with her fingertips on her nipples. Will you give me ten crowns or lend them to me, I’ll repay them, ha. Or else I will clock you in the head knock you down your kidney looseeverything will just leak out of me and such men seem visionariesa need to appear calm particularly my nervous systemHit me and beat my kidney loose or cudgel me, I say; you’ll not get a cent from me. His gaping laugh against the white stars.and this slacker mocks me now with laughteryou will just spend the money, I know, and make yourself a worse person.these words I speak like a Christian children’s book or a warm, empathetic wife there is much I do not sing Oh my dear father come with me to the tavern do not obstruct me further and he will say: Why have money, if not to spend it. You are drunk. I cannot get out of the strange situation fearing Sigurður is my husband I am his sweet submissive wife. The wine means you do not know what you are saying and doing. What is the reason for living sober. I’m on a brief stroll, I say. You escape death, but he will knock you out with that maggoty kidney. I have no time to quarrel. You cannot escape yourself, he says, I am you. And if you let me die for the sake of ten krónur then I will drink madly through you. Perhaps you want that. I will find a way to escape you, I say.I’m always thinking about youthe blue grass and the chair have become a calendar advertisement with a scantily-clad girl drinking colaDísaif you are me, flee me.drinking humor is unbearableGive me ten krónur. I lost my wife. I have to bury her. You lost your wife, you should sit at home over the body. Give me ten krónur first then twenty more, and I’ll pay off the ten krónur debt here and now. Or do you prefer I walk the streets with a rotting woman’s body on my mind.He unbuttons his shirt and shows me a woman’s body grabbing both hands in his coat collar and running his fist under his chin but I grip the curb with rigid toesdo you presume to refuse to aid a dead woman.I become evilPerhaps this is the biggest stain on you.His tongue blows up in his mouth which he stuffs full of hair he has pulled off his chestcrazy horses rushing over the snowcrust he shouts and swings me around by the coat tail, a hen. Farting.this nightmare knows what she does, does he know I live on oxygen not the air within flowers from the mouth of flowers but the tank beside the sheets and pillow he knows that I can crash to the street and break like a pot I carry disease a carcass slope as is hecould you kill a man for your ideals. No, he replies. Then let me go. His mouth is boiled and freighted with brown sores from long years of drinking wine. Are you not then a great visionary. Kill me here at the corner; I insist on it. No wise Ólaf no Ólafy-pie my Tómmy.He knows about you Títa perhaps he has come across you Katrín dancing together whore-like at Hotel Borg he beats his fist into my abdomen I lose my breath at the house corner and my whole dinner gushes from my stomach to the sidewalk as he ambles away from the wall and I hold a death-grip on the house corner retching only white gum comes out of me and spreads over the toe caps of my newly-polished shoesI stand firm against the house. I see where the comb of light turns on and off. I wish Sigurður had thrown me in front of an automobile, but he says: I will bequeath your kidneys if I kill you. You can hang them from your earlobes like a cannibal.But taxis rattle along the street and Dísa passes over me like a heavy sea-turtle at low speed I hail a cabthe curtain is drawn over Haraldur Sóldal’s window for a brief moment my face goes gray waves a sharp tongue between its lips like a red prickI crawl through the door and sink into the seat. My body emits a cold sweat. And I am exhausted.I hold in my hand a nervous wreck a fistful of white spaghettiit was a thirty krónur journey in the taxi, but he received just ten. I go out penniless at night. One can then in good conscience deny a man a loan, even show off your wallet. I had to get the money from inside as the car sat waiting with the meter running. The driver did not look at the meter. A little ebb in the General Thrift envelope.
Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller Page 16