Lóa must have dragged Miss Gerður into the toilet, weeping and trusting her alone with the secret. They blocked up the bathroom with their whispering, running the water continually so they could not be overheard, and if the frantic beating on the door reached them only said just a moment so other women had to use the men’s toilet and be on guard two at a time until Sigurður thought to take a chair with him and stand on it and peek over one of the cubicles and stand there until both were driven off cursing at him for his cheek, what exactly did he mean by this. The dining hall on the corner of X- and Y-street was watched attentively by everyone concerned, because it is as fixed as death, the way they walk back and forth on toilet trips and run the water, whispering and taking collections. Yes, he gives her hope. The medium can give her a wishing well of hope, but she cannot live on hope, no one lives on anything but his earnings. I will not dispose her assets. I do not contribute even my loose change to this widow’s fund so she can have more time with the medium and be serviced by reincarnation via Sigurður, a wino. And I do not care whether Ólaf would say that the deception brings her happiness so why shouldn’t she purchase it. Yesterday we discussed the agonized mother of the tiny, deceased creature who caught cold. This cleaning woman follows me, and I know what she wants. I see how she lies on her knees on the bag and divides the floor into eighteen equal tiles, wet, soaped, semi-dry, drying, and then she moves on her knees with great dexterity between the squares on the bag over the slick floor and her feet move behind her like a propeller, she strikes her toes on galosh’s sole on the floor and she whistles like a compressed air machine with her dust cloth. When she goes under our desk she tells a story for you to listen to so there’s no suspicion you are simply loafing. Who would value the joy of heaven if the dead catch cold there. Of cold, we have enough this side of the grave. I’ve been sorely sick with sinus colds for more than two weeks. Pitiful woman. Miss Gerður sighs. Somehow I find her icy. Ólaf narrows his eyes at Bjössi. But lust and darkness do not demand beauty, Ólafur says, nonchalantly. Bjössi seizes the irony and asks: And you have experience. We kick against the floor and raise hell, all except Ásmundur. Despite her ugliness I have bedded her in my dreams, examining my monogram marked with red thread on the handkerchief. Dreams are defamatory. A sea spray of dreams blows over a man and in them women sail like weighted ships. They stalk you, unbidden. Dreams fetch the world its blame. Not me. In this matter I have a clean record. But why is the housecleaning lady called Tóta in my sleep. Is it because I once wrote a poem about a Tóta. A person is rarely safe in his sleep.
Tóta
O if I should come back to visit you in your sleepi the way you floated around naked in my dream one day Lóa
i) I am hindered from getting free of the flesh’s shackles its bone marrow and life blood bound & deemed to lie as cold dreams which one dreams back endlessly to oneself
O if I should come back to visit you in dreams visit you in wet and sorrowing dream
book 13
i pluck the garments from my bodyi fold my pants across a hanger, carefully creased
in twilight
i put socks on the chair their tops turned down hanging off the chair’s edge
i tremble slightly with emotion
i do not know why i tremble undressing is pleasant
it is, however, unpleasant to be standing in the middle of the floor stark
naked without clothes or just for example wearing a single sock
or one shoe
still evening has not come
today a beautiful thought occurred to me
o days that never come to night
they come those nightless days
some days pass by without those alive coming across anything that can be considered beautiful sometimes weeks pass sometimes months or an entire year
then you die
after having caressed and cursedlovedfeared and turned all your actions around death
to alleviate it
to alleviate man
i shall go to bed
i grasp the medicine bottle
now it is late night
tonight i will not enter the same sleep
that happens to those who lie down and doze at lunchtime
when should i get this coveted power over myselfi am a long time past the age when an ordinary man has acquired power over himself (in this i resemble the people stuck forever in puberty) so sighs relievedmy wait little more than setting up a feeding trough
reaching the age when a person should be asexual and possesses unwavering calm and self-certainty asexuality bringsno need to seek out anything from anyone
my blood will run still and silent through its channels
this morning I met in the street a young girl with a round mouth red and flourishing
which she pursed like a delicate asshole
then that rose-red hole opened and four teeth appeared
connected to a sick heart
the left side of the chest under the dome of the ribs
in one apartment in a house in Reykjavík in iceland
which pushes atop the world’s body
there cowers this shriveled meat as if it had been bought at an antique
sale and hurled on the bones with a trowel
the invalid nation in a tub
i lie wide awake
powerfully i search yelling for sleep
my mind wanders about sacred and sluggish like a cow in Bombay
where the passage of days
god allows me to look at the next day’s light
probably i will never terminate the agreement only masturbate to the thought
self-pleasure to the plan
i trace my life back to ancient Norwegian kings
i lie awake at night
bedridden sweating clammy like a new body
though i shut myself up in death which comes to everyone though I want to be free and independent of anything and everything and also death
in this abominable approach of death and pleasure
of the fatherland
fourteen
Today I have been rummaging in old newspaper trash. I have whiled away time cutting out from the papers everything that somehow surprises or interests me.everything is naturalmost clippings discuss the natural bizarrities of life, the world we live in. Here we are of course discussing an issue closely linked to my nature and my pastime, my collecting urge. These sixty-two years I have lived (today the doctor said it was only forty, but his views regarding my age are irrelevant to me. I am of the turn of the century generation. I have decided so. I’m that great generation. One is what he decides he is). I collect not only money but also other valuables that daily surround me: word-of-mouth stories, legends, lists of film screenings, buttons. I have in my possession probably about fifteen hundred kinds of button. And yes I collect memories, too. The total collection of each generation is extremely diverse. She (my generation) has come to use for example countless pencil types and colors that are unpleasant; colors are another topic entirely. I give to my field in that I never make lists of people’s political opinions or sexual conduct; the embassy sees to such recording, and has a number of people in its service. Because of national enmity and the nation’s centuries-long isolation as a land people insist on every kind of research and reportmaking, not just about tooth decay and ulcers, which foreign universities have studied in recent years, but much more. This likely stems from the situation of the country, which will be of ultimate importance in the forthcoming atomic war.
Sometime long after World War II (the date is missing. I’m going to say that today I feel exceptionally good. It is easy for me to explain events in a very entertaining and simple manner and I have thought and planned everything I’m going to commit to paper here) there was a dig for a few new houses in the city of Warsaw, which is almost in the center of Poland, as many know, when the teeth of the excavator (what some call a crab) broke through the concrete shell and fell down int
o one of the many cellars buried under the ruins of the city. No one knew that there was a bomb shelter, since all the public records were destroyed in a fire in early 1943. In the fall the excavator broke the brick wall and revealed a deep pit under it. The men working the job thought nothing of this at first; their over-arching plan was too prominent in their minds, a bold course to resurrect a wasted city from the ruins into new life under the red fluttering silk flags that rose so vividly from the rubble still fresh before people’s eyes. Soon they become aware of movement in the ruins and see to their surprise a long-haired creature, man or woman, resembling those humans the infamous Soviet artist, Gerasimov, rendered so wonderfully at this time in his work reflecting a historical Marxist perspective. The creature came, or so it seemed, out of the ground and attacked with an inhuman scream the excavator and the city of flags there in the vicinity. When it had taken several steps in daylight and sunlight it grasped fumbling about its face, staggering uncertainly about the uneven ground, kicking up dust and stones with its feet; it ran into a flag pole and fell down exhausted on the brick pile. The men thought they were hallucinating, but still immediately got down from the cab of the excavator and carefully approached the creature that was howling loudly on the brick bed. They were afraid to touch it with bare hands for fear she would be radioactive—this was exactly when strontium fear was emerging—so instead they poked sticks at it. One of the men went back up into the cab and moved the lift to the creature then the other pushed her so the bucket’s teeth spread around her middle. Then the red brick bed and all was lifted as high as a man off the ground and dangled in the air against the pale-blue Warsaw sky while the men considered the situation and examined the creature by telescope. Many things came to light in the convex lenses, particularly concerning the crown of creation: the screaming and crying amounted to something that resembled a singing voice or an incomprehensible language. In the telescope one could have seen, dangling two feet down from the bucket, a spewing head and two arms swaying in the air, seeking a grip. The men screamed:
The devil take it, this is a demon.
And the demon was observed by the most talented professors and linguistic experts at the University of Warsaw, many of them maimed, some with one eye, and approximately 30% of them construction craftsmen. That badly they had fared in the war. Now they were summoned to the scene, to the ruins of the Jewish neighborhood, and wielding crutches and artificial limbs they addressed the creature methodically, each in the language of his expertise, even in Esperanto, the language of the future, as it occurred to the scientists that here had arrived, according to plan, the long-awaited man of the future which the socialist system anticipated according to Marxist teaching. And so nothing was more self-evident than that he had sprung from Polish ground like new potatoes, since all Poles trace themselves back to pure potato farmers. Now the Here And Now had arrived; no going back. What was more natural than that after a bloody war the ground had recovered. She had become as fertile as before or in a way more fertile since many had gone into her as a source. Yet everything came to nothing and amounted to absolute nonsense until the professors thought to simply address the creature in Polish. The bystanders shouted:
Long live our native land, Poland. Long live scientific Marxism and the knowledge that Polish is not a Slavic language but a mid-European tongue. Long live the collective leadership of this country. Down with mousehole perspectives toward agriculture. Head in a nonsense direction to peace and carry out the impractical.
To this cry came an answer from inside the flag, a smattering of Polish:
Is the war over. Long live Poland.
Once the shapeless mass lay on the ground again they dove over the subject, stained with feces and urine, crying and hugging and kissing and fighting like flies over cow shit. Folk dances broke out, summoned from the city. And while they jumped around in leather boots dancing and braids swaying in the air with healthy faces full of the energy of youth and ignorance, the newly-formed Youth Wing of the Socialist Reconstruction across five boroughs listening to the terrible story of the living creature which turned out to be a man, how he and his wife and five men had gotten trapped in the shelter and stayed there buried alive all through the war. These people of Judah, families who had somehow managed to accumulate sufficient reserves and hide from the German Nazi genocide, which loved cleanliness and Beauty but hated everything ugly and distorted, dirty Judah, and pornography. How can you be what is called anti-Nazi if you love beauty, who else but these good people have tried to work to clean the world of ugliness. How can it be ugly to want to abolish anything ugly and criminal and to desire to abolish crime. Nazism was a longing for Beauty. And it was a point of consideration that the people had had enough food reserves for two years’ dwelling there. Up above, there were complaints meanwhile that scarcely half of humanity had the bare essentials you should expect in an affluent country, at the most food in the fridge for a week. Not many of them could lie about in laziness and sloth, as the man later described it, a burden of taxes and duties, damn it, worse than the life available in a cellar. The food there was chiefly canned food, as is to be expected, but they had some smoked pork left. How did these people come by food during their years of hunger and deprivation (which perhaps was, when all is said and done, not as terrible as is often claimed); there was no explanation. But an old icelandic proverb speaks to this: during a fight, no one is your brother. This is all the more true when the struggle is for vital sustenance. Even innocent animals fight over bread crumbs.I laugh at how despicable human nature is.In this shut-away hiding place, the sarcophagus of hell as the newspapers put it, a woman had had children with each of the men in contravention of the laws of her faith. The youngest child was said to have never seen any kind of light or flickering, just the familiar brightness of a candle stump they eked out and never lit but for ceremonies; they on the other hand remembered the daylight like she was some viscous pulp but they concealed this from the children so they did not get IDEAS since people are healthiest without ideas. When the excavator’s jaws broke the wall and light flooded in and clattered through their cherished silence and peace, harmonious, reconciled, then ideas became connected like doors that had long had stuck locks: They saw the light, heard the sound and rushed around, wandering momentarily out of their senses from joy in their wax clothes and falling, blind as posts, about the dust of the ruins. The youngest children displayed that tranquility that mistrust and the total absence of thought in the brain provides. The dark mass in their heads had never experienced anything like it, and that saved them from blindness. In the hiding place they screamed, terrified, and refused to obey the head peeking down at them, shouting:
You are free. Come up.
They loved their dark hole, feared the dancing, the dance, bright braids of almond oil, floral raw-silk dresses, and high leather boots, but most of all their fear was aroused by the flowers that grew on the edges of their hole, sending out a faint aroma. They felt this as a stench, as frenzy and rage. For three days they defended any attempts to entice them out. They used firearms their parents had taught them to handle in the dark. Without a gun, a man is alone and vulnerable. A gun is a man’s best friend; that much they knew. In the end, things were made difficult for them and they were driven out with tear gas and caught in cod nets that had been stretched around the opening. Thereafter, they were driven to the organization assigned to bring children up in optimism, life practices, and Marxism. After their re-upbringing they came out full of an enthusiasm they had not previously known. Vocational training took over, the possibility to advance in life. They chose to work in a pit which resembled the place of their youth and was well remunerated. Now they have all gone to Nova Huta district, to single-family dwellings with gardens where stepmothers, cornflowers, marigolds, and sunflowers grow. Before sunrise they are driven to the mine and after sunset they come home; both take place in the dark. They have this to thank for their sight: that they did not come out of the hole until their retina
s had accustomed to the brightness. One permanent sign of their stay is seen in the way they sleep with heads under covers and keep rotting wood beneath their pillows, bringing it to their nose if wakefulness and boredom find them out. With that intolerable smell their home appears in their minds and the boredom dissipates. I’m going to finish this piece with an afterword, perhaps a moral. Everyone knows the following: it is estimated that thousands of people were buried alive in the war and it is not unlikely that people still live in sealed-off basements. Polish literature (with which I have of course had no acquaintance) was heavily influenced by this single incident. Polish poetry and fiction teems with people who lost their vision and their belief in the day, who acquired an animal nature in shelters and began to see with phosphorescent eyes and so to breed and so to thrive and to eat various things among one another in underground burrows of the temperament. These folk must have established a full society with its own rules and prohibitions, laws, and religion. For a thousand years this crowd, perhaps, will endure before digging up to the earth’s surface to see if there is truth to the legends that people walk on the earth overhead, as creatures unlike these people used to, people who observed another nature, transcendental like in the stories of the ancestors. After a thousand years we will reach the hidden people in the stories, the mind’s embryos, in the same way as the hidden people were the mind’s embryos, the brainchildren, of our grandfather and grandmother. Or, as a philosopher said, we are all god’s brainchildren. From all this, but especially because of the rooted superstition among Polish farmers, any farmer on his way to the beet or potato field will say, when he finds the grass on top of the bed with roots nibbled apart by worms or harmed by animals:
Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller Page 32