Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  The mole men have been hard at work.

  The previously referenced event was a literary windfall. According to Dr. Janos, it saved Polish literature from insipidity and emptiness and gave it momentum and deeper meaning. The transformative re-upbringing of the “people from darkness,” as it was named by Polish Marxists, most importantly, the description of how they were to use it to optimize life in the country’s mines. (In a way this also saved the mining industry.) Efficiency in the coal mines was a ray of hope at the end of the widely read book How Coal Was Delivered from Servitude to Nature, which has been translated into eighteen languages and become popular in the United States, a miracle given how hard it is to enter the American book market. But it is so striking about the Polish national mindset after the war that everything connected to people and labor has been named after underground activities. People in Poland believe, even though the country is the people’s republic led by the dictatorship of the proletariat, that under the earth and below people’s feet are concealed creatures that suck the essence and strength from the economy so people have barely a zloty between everyone. This popular superstition—or delusion—is used by the government as an explanation for frequent crop failures. Poverty is not their fault, but rather is someone gnawing the roots, something Marxist theory cannot address. I pause a moment: five minutes have gone by while I think up a new disgraceful irresponsibility for man. I, Tómas Jónsson, think: thus humankind can be turned upside down when part of it digs into war living in lightless and closed cavities where it pushes pebbles into its nose and mouth and chokes itself spiritually. It is unforgivable if we persist and give into our bestial impulses and continue to breed down inside a dark sarcophagus. Under the feet of each honest and diligent person, not only Poles but all of us, life is cut from life by a can-lid, the umbilical cord crushed into pieces with a pointed, stone tool bound with a thong. Thus it has been and will ever be. Through my consideration we can obtain evidence that people in hell would continue to breed if it were not contrary to the devil’s law. So wise is the devil and so humanitarian that he burns in his kingdom’s bath the people god in heaven throws away. The devil does this to prevent overpopulation in his home. (Anyone who kills another person should be condemned to eat the victim in order to stop the devil.) If these five people held back from their animal nature they might have reached a higher stage in the cellar and not been duped out into the day. That would have been world news, had they been found after seventy years safe and sound. Could then someone skilled in ditch digging lift the stone from the tomb and rob them of their fame. No. With his offspring his wife dispersed life, shortening one end of the thread but extending the other in order to make the whole thing thrifty as a miser does with himself. With this shrewd high-level explanation I vaguely imply, in my own way, that people have never dared kill newborns for fear of the dark. How can a blind man or a man in death’s shadow fear the dark. Maybe they see white suns flicker on convex surfaces and slide forward in the dark race of life. Whatever the case, the darkness and interiority they experienced was not any better than if they had lived the whole time on the grassy earth and managed there to establish thirty Polish potato gardens. I would never would have rushed blindly into the daylight; I would have calmly allowed my eyes to get used to it and called up into the opening:

  Bring me some sunglasses.

  Sight made the Polish blind fools. Poles have always been significantly blind.

  Sight brings human’s eternal darkness, all save a few individuals (influential ones) who refuse the versatile existence of the light that reveals, and who struggle to live on in a dark prison undisturbed knowing in their wit that freedom does not exist except as a delicious propaganda or some prattle about patriotism.

  I am forced to say:

  There is no great maternal feeling to be found in an invalid woman. Gerður groans and scrapes red nail polish from the thumb of her left hand with the nail of her right index finger. Indifference has been employed there as it has here. The people blinded like moles became aware of the long-awaited: light and sun. They ate with greedy eyes and for their long wait were rewarded with darkness. This is entirely horrible. I must say that the Nazis must have hated the Jews more than excessively if they could behave this way, sighs Miss Gerður. But what is right to believe. I do not know, one may thank his blessings for having been born in iceland. If we had not been born here, who can say that we might not have been born in Poland and have been one of them. No, people here, who have enough money to live, become much more incomprehensible in the world outside. And think of another thing: despite the warnings of doctors, Icelanders continue to smoke, knowing the dangers of smoking, that you can get cancer and coronary heart diseases, which is actually something international. Diseases are international. Man perhaps has nothing in common with other nations except getting sick and dying. For example, a single mother in Madagascar might waste away from the same disease as a woman on Báragata. She was deathly pale but no longer hated me; she had probably got past that stage.

  Behave yourself wisely or I will kick the back of your knee, I said.

  He limped to Katrín, bent over her, and pulled off her blanket.

  Where are her clothes? he said.

  She threw her dress behind the couch, I said. It’s lying on the floor. He picked up the bra and ripped panties and limped into the living room. He came back with the dress in his hand, put the clothes on her body, and spread the blanket over her again. He did it mechanically like the first time.

  How much did she drink? he asked.

  She appeared with a half empty bottle and poured it down her throat within half an hour.

  Miss Gerður reads in the bathroom.how terrible if a scientist manages to construct a machine so it becomes possible to see all types of people via a television screenshe thinks and grows thoughtfulshe has heard if a man is planning to stop thinking about and loving a girl the best piece of advice is to imagine her sitting endlessly on a toilet bowl with her panties down twisted around her feetafter Gerður pisses she dries herself with toilet paper and if a man goes to the bathroom and sees crumpled tissues floating in the water then he knows who sat there before himshe never flushesher pants should not get yellowshe stands bewildered on the floor and holds the string of her pantsmy good god can it be that all men have imagined me sitting here indefinitely on the seatthough I enjoy reading newspapers sitting there that is an overstatement but something is fishy hereI am not leavinghorrible just horribleone can have little faith in humans while they let blind impulses control them.

  If I rack my brains, consider my life path, if I make a detailed comparison of myself and others, yes, I find myself to be a very valuable pearl. I am frankly the Gemstone of the North. I will never stop being discriminating. Never . . . I would run myself into the road before I made a blunder. For example, I would stop drinking wine before I lost my judgment. I must be a special challenge, a luminous star among dead planets. One needs to consult others like an energetic man. Certainly I have never come across anyone like me at the Board in the refectory, someone who could speak to me as an equal, except perhaps the students who talk among themselves in silence, through numerical puzzles and complex chess positions and pay each other for friendship with the correct solution to the riddle over a soup dish or a hand slipped behind a back . . .

  it is ever more fun to be young and able to be a carefree fool

  (I cannot now remember if I said I sat between them.) I do not remember hearing these young generous and studious men discuss any need or lack of need via words out of their lips. Wavy-haired Gunnar 2 seems be more engaged than Miss Gerður or Gunnar the Engineer.what does Oddný Sen intend by traveling from iceland to Amoy in China is she going to tip herself now a moment perhaps higher into old age out of the divan at homewhereoverwhelmed by memories from days of youth gone by or perhaps she places her tortured brow against a cold water pipe when memories rain over her like Chekhov’s characters do with hoar-frosted tree trunks O nymphe
s regonflons des SOUVENIRS divers or does she set her palm on her cold breast and open her mouth speechless from painful memories of this and that I think she is a mysterious womanI really have no interest in turning this into a speech praising myself. But Tómas Jón . . . if you surrender your name and play with it you become a tome some maize an empty ohm mas mas = too much on a johnsonson is a unique suffix in a row of ordinary people’s names. I suspect that Sigurður has let a few words slip out about his respective history.To spell it out I must maintain too much icelandic jabbering nonsense on and on until I subside like an inflatable balloon that has developed a prick of a holeto me the much-discussed breath of life in the chest flows from the prick hole of the mouth and when the thought has gone the torso lies down in the end on the earth a ruptured balloon dead too much empty no mas deprived of lifethere were many fierce debates about the news at the time. He (who?) reckoned that in 1942 something similar happened in Hamburg on the Rhine (Hamburg is not on the Rhine but the Elba, if I remember right) and Sigurður (that’s the name that comes to mind, whether right or wrong) told a story about (personal names in stories do not change anything, only the material and exposition) a respectable German who, during World War II, solicited the love of a prostitute in a basement, entirely matter of course, then an air strike took place; a British bomb fell on the roof so the house collapsed down to the basement, and he lay on top of the girl to protect her from plaster falling from the ceiling and they were buried alive. The man became terribly afraid, as might be expected, a married man who didn’t come home for dinner (what would his wife think?). But the girl comforted him and told him not to be afraid since there were plenty of supplies of canned food, so much that they could live on them until they were dug out of the ruins, through a third world war, if it came to that, and they had no need to be anxious, they had plenty of toys to enjoy, everything that has over the sweep of history proved most desirable for humans to survive. Her words were not ridiculous. Being walled in and facing death increased the need to play in these sexually tame people. Undoubtedly both would have delighted in the circumstances indefinitely were it not for the canned food and the lack of condoms, leading to what he most feared, that the tart would get pregnant and bear him a child; he was not about to be blamed for another person being in the cellar. Months passed and they lost any sense of time in the eternal darkness; nothing bothered them but the strong stench of the used condom which they could not wash thoroughly and use again, since there was scant water other than what dripped down the crack when it rained, and then they would say: Chances are, summer is ending warmly. They shut away the odor of feces and urine which they voided from themselves in the clothes chest in the corner. No help was on the way. They cursed the stench where they lay, and the girl could not see anything but starvation unless they resulted to producing their own provisions, which the respectable German refused to accept for fear of the consequences—but she talked to him with German perseverance and worked on him, suggesting the scenario that they bury the bones in the chest coffin. Nine months later she gave birth to a child, which they stretched out as food supply for quite some time, bringing home to him the horror of war, brought close to them in a more disgusting manner than they would have been able to imagine. This was not so much because of the execution but the eating, “since this exceeds the sin of merely killing one’s neighbor to live,” as the man lamented. The girl cursed his speculations, she thought of it as a need to produce milk and exploit all the possibilities for life. She set the man at her breasts as she had read women did in the days of the Roman Empire, regularly in the morning and evening and at noon (as they did), and he regurgitated the milk to her, not all but every other drink, as it came. And so life persisted in the worst conditions—until a bulldozer cleared the ruins on top of them one day and men in leather jackets set handcuffs on their wrists and accused them of infanticide (the police had begun by examining the chest and found bones, apparently a child).

  November 21, 1967, at half past eight in the morning.

  Dream.

  I sit on a plane listening to the buzz of the engines. On the radio news, a report that hundreds of Loftleiðir planes departed as scheduled late at night with passengers and goods to America the bulk of the aircraft flying to Newfoundland to fetch Danish miners who then stayed a single night in Reykjavík at Hotel Skjaldbreið and ate steak and eggs on white bread I sit in the right plane after a difficult takeoff from a desolate airport where a couple with their daughter loiter alone in the spacious passenger cabin and having ordered breakfast at the same time I dash to break wind within the jet which rages with a vengeance and a devil mood besets the runway with its wolfhounds and its feathered rats I am heading to New York to look into the exchange rate for króna I am paid seven króna per dollar and into the bargain I get a light with perfect electrics a woman in the flight cabin gives up on our bearings she is insane and hairy from crown to soles we then find ourselves on a blind flight over the wilderness of Canada and the woman is totally lost and Western Icelanders goggle up into the clouds and yell to the Loftleiðir aircraft which yawns its mouth and screams back totally schizophrenic I plan to shout at her within this uninsulated machine of mine that we are crossing the ninetieth and first-degree northern latitude but I know being up high there will shortly be a plane accident and we will land jackhammer-crazy in a desolate airport where I see potholes and an ill-lit runway flowing against us a track on a desert island owned by Air France we come into an empty passenger cabin and meet the family I do not want to know these people especially the man who howls in agony on the cabin floor, but the one accompanying me steps inside the blue glow and makes a necessary friendship with the man within iceland’s trade relations with other Arab states he catches the man’s arm away from an old French porcelain with a blue pattern in the weekly magazine Time there is a picture of Kurosawa lying off-frame on a lush field with a knife driven high up in the chest cavity murdered by his fiancée who runs buck-naked outside into the eye of the ocean Kurosawa’s hair is rich and thick but without any stubble on his chin the image is blurred like a faxed picture in a newspaper he clutches at himself in spasmodic death cramps in front of the film studio the side is made out of ties instead of trellis and strings are strung between the pillars and the dangling tassels of thick withered grass are not dissimilar from those that barbarians bind around their calves for decoration at a sacred dance I peek into the temple door to watch the lumbering bull walking in a row over the flaming floor within the temple yard which shines with gold dust abnormally bright the bull continues to budge forward over the floor lazy-eyed in this all is infinite perspective and the temple dark and cool rises between me and the bull the decorated lines on a Chinese bowl bodies sick with death sway me from death’s power inside the temple I am hurled to and fro in a sacred dance pink lotus flowers pass slowly along the floor and arrange in open rectangles in from the walls in the middle of the floor flowers are arranged by the invisible inviolate virgin hands this is a funeral feast and lotus flowers should trap me under the midtower where I am burnt and my ashes thrown into the mouths of the flowers I value the noisy eating their lips grabbing me in anguish I dance and am hurled about the floor in violent clashes with death with upheavals that splash putrefied flesh in my face like a foul water of bones I take my dance with death through the narrow channel my god almighty between flowers out from the temple yard and lay exhausted by his side on the kitchen floor in failure I strike an unexpected knee nowhere no more nor less than in the belly of the virgin mary who explodes no quarter will be given me now I lie dead in the veil of death I feel my flesh is dead and I desperately snatch at my balls which are dead and shriveled hard on the outside like a walnut the soul cries out in anguish a little ark blown away: I do not want no no my mother stands at the kitchen table and eases the heads off fish with some blunt tool not a machete she knows I’m dead and a sheer stubbornness and a whim inside me does not wants not to burn her face deforms pale with agony the head falls from th
e fish and bounces along the floor with swollen bloody gills then I know how I died before in Sússa in Imbra in Mala I move my finger over the file of the newspaper I choose again to die in Sússa in a hot climate there where the dunes are dry and with beautiful views over the plain and as I make my request I wake and the picture of Kurosawa who was murdered by his fiancée with a knife out in a cornfield whispers to me from the pages of Time: death is a matter and problem of style and the body looks at me with the blurry eyes of a newspaper photograph