Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller

by Guðberger Bergsson

  That step is dangerous, she said. I have often tripped on it. All steps should be the same height.

  The basement appeared, sound-deadened, doorless, and with wiring poking out visibly from the walls like rusty nails. Seven inner and outer walls divided this sarcophagus into compartments of various sizes. One had a door and she led him to it over the uneven floor. Inside the door there was not too much.

  Here is the room, she said. It is spacious and heated with twelve elements, which is plenty. You should be snug. And the central boiler is on the other side of the wall—feel.

  They placed their hands on the wall and said simultaneously:

  It is hot.

  They looked at each other.

  The window faces the street. It is a great advantage. We just happened to have carpeted the floor. If a house is new, it is rarely debt-free. Am I being too casual?

  No.

  You can hire someone to do the housecleaning or clean yourself. It should not be a hassle for you.

  This will be great, he said.

  You can put pictures on the walls to liven them up. Our daughter is into art and can lend you some. Reproductions irritate her, but they are convenient and cheaper, I think. You can also wash them.

  It’s fine as it is.

  Yes, and here, she said, and led him down the hall to the next compartment, which was tiny. This is the bathroom. You can temporarily hang a carpet over the door so no one can see inside. The girls are here all day playing ball.

  Then he said:

  It won’t be necessary. I never defecate during the day.

  She was taken aback and dropped her chin, but bore up and said:

  That is damn convenient.

  I piss during the day with my back to the door. The lack of a door is not a problem.

  She ducked her chin so tightly to her neck she got a double chin and said:

  Perhaps you were born to live in unfinished houses. Look, a sink with a cold tap; the hot water supply has not yet reached us. god knows when we will get it.

  It’s not a problem, he said.

  If you need hot water to shave or wash your head on Saturdays, you can get hot water from us. We have a heat can. That does not include access to bathing. There are drafts, of course. That is always so in a basement—it has a new and basic building character throughout.

  No problem.

  Well. I feel like I’m in a windy hell. But you’re young. Are you opposed to cursing?

  No, I curse when I need to. I use obscene language, too. Obscenity is in my eyes a spiritual defecation, a cleansing.

  Good. I like people who curse. They’re cleaning themselves with damn, hell, go stick your head up the devil’s asshole. My husband never curses. He says I frightened his curses away with my own. Very strange. The worst thing is that you have no closet. We do not want nails in the walls.

  Maybe I can get what’s know as a gentleman’s closet.

  And he thought of Tómas’s closet, he had a gentleman’s closet.

  I am accustomed to cellars—to living under others’ feet.

  Don’t be so agreeable, it’s not healthy. A person progresses by complaint and dissatisfaction. That’s the root cause of progress. The basement doesn’t shock you?

  No, no.

  Well. You were born in the war, right.

  More or less.

  Perhaps you’re a kanakrakki, a child of circumstances.

  I suspect, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m just ahead of myself.

  I had to settle for the basement. We are now on the second floor. Everyone advances.

  She coughed and asked:

  Yes, but which of you am I to rent the room to?

  Having said this, she turned to me.

  Me, he answered.

  I was silent. This was his chapter in the book Tómas Jónsson—Bestseller.

  The man trailed down the stairs and announced himself at the door. He said:

  I see you are showing the boys the room.

  This is my husband, the gem.

  Not in front of others, he said, and extended his fingertips toward us.

  What is your name?

  Hermann.

  You’re a soldierly young man.

  And you?

  Svanur.

  Even worse.

  Do you drink?

  Sometimes.

  All young people drink.

  The man chirped. Then he coughed. His wife was coughing too.

  We are not renting to this one, she said. We are renting it to the other one.

  The man chirped and gave a flabby laugh.

  She poked him several times with the head of the scrubbing brush, then with the end, prodding him like a dangerous animal, ready to run away at any moment. Hermann twisted from the pillow, and looked at the chart on the wall, and said:

  Do you remember any Monroe movies?

  No, I forget movies as fast as I see them. It means I can go to the movies and see the same picture over and over again.

  She made maps and did not know where she was from, but marked routes to destinations in lipstick. The way I made schedules.

  What do you think?

  Paris—Moscow; who knows, he said with an ironic expression. Like the great writers of the past marking the end of their publications with: London, Paris, New York, Moscow, Rome, Barcelona . . . now, one only gets to write Sauðárkrókur, 1960-whatever.

  Simply yuck, she let out.

  Over which are you yucking? What makes you yuck at Moscow and Paris?

  She closed her eyes then looked at him and said:

  You ought to pay attention to what I am doing. It is not often I give you a good cleaning.

  She sat with stretched legs on the rug.

  A woman who wasted the best years of her life working to wash fish, ending her worst years over a bucket.

  Hermann fumbled obtusely about his forehead and tilted his head.

  Did I finish what I was saying? . . . Did I?

  He looked at her with his head on the edge of the divan. One arm lay down on the floor.

  Have you cleaned many places? he asked. I am not trying to make you into some heroic figure; just asking.

  Countless places, she said proudly. I’d be happy with more. No one complains; just the opposite: I’m sought after. Some are difficult—others easy. I am not difficult, just the floors are.

  Do you think that the floors in the Kremlin are more difficult than other floors?

  Depending on the materials. In my house there are tiles. I will not touch wooden floors.

  I assure you that the floors in the Kremlin are made of marble.

  They will clean up nicely.

  I don’t know about that. The streets of Athens are made of the same material.

  And you have been there to survey them.

  Often, many times. As recently as yesterday.

  I saw you on the divan Saturday, no indication you were traveling. No luggage to be seen. Here there’s nothing, not even a table, just a divan. You didn’t travel to Athens.

  The woman looked confusedly around and stroked her finger on her half-parted lips. She smoked intensely and smoke came in columns out her mouth and nose.

  Can you smoke through your ears.

  Sometimes I stick a cigarette up my nose and smoke like that, she said, and struck the ashes into the sewage pail.

  White eyes rolled in his head. He thought:

  This old woman is sexy, only missing one tooth, and not her sex appeal

  But he said:

  One time, I traveled from Ibog to Dal. There are crossroads on the highway.

  Didn’t you get lost. I can find my way. I would happily get lost. I have night vision. god knows a bus could take me anywhere in the country providing I had a seat and could keep track of where I am. I have a crooked back and cannot bend except at my knees. It’s impossible for me to see in a crowd. I need to decide where I will get out. A lot can happen if I am unobstructed in a vehicle for a whole day.

 
Stop. I know you could be lost a whole day. Stop. I am trying to tell you that at the crossroads there is a road sign with four branches that point in the four cardinal directions. Along the streets so no one gets lost. There is no chance of getting lost. Getting lost is frustrating.

  If you can’t get lost, roads are boring.

  The woman shook her head, rubbed her nose, and asked:

  You are smart; is that true.

  How can one be smart when he has no money to buy vitamins and so develops abrasions on his body. I need money to be intelligent.

  I guess you are really deprived, seeing as you’re drunk every day. I’m not looking for payment, just surprised to see a grown man lying carelessly on his divan, sometimes immoderately so, a man who turns everything around him into a pigpen and has walked away from a credible job.

  You are a strange hen.

  The woman giggled, grimaced, smoothed her hair, and adjusted her braces.

  A goose, because no sane man is attracted to hens.

  But I am totally prepared to wash shit. I take my scrubbing brush, take some alkali soap to the straw with my fingers, and scrub and work devilishly hard—you never offer me wine.

  She sniffed hopelessly and snorted through her nose.

  The women who clean hotels and wine shops are lucky. They sip from glasses or collect it in a bottle. By contrast, someone living in a basement where you can party and have fun in peace is lucky; others bring them a liquor stash—is it not true?

  True!

  He laughed and poked at the old woman on the floor with a ruler.

  Don’t you have a girlfriend, loser?

  Why?

  Just to have and to play with.

  She sighed, her breasts fell. She hunched over and coughed. The cough flushed her face.

  A person will never have anything unless they have something to buy it with. If you own money, you will own money—if you own a girl then you get other girls. If you’re in a good position you get offered a better position. And if you have nothing, nothing gets taken from you.

  A man always has something. If you say something, you have something.

  Stop thinking. Your lips have gone deathly blue from thinking. You are . . . how old are you?

  Sixty-three, I say. Sixty-eight, my sister says.

  He reached out. He said:

  You are a fossil from the Quaternary Period, totally unable to understand your environment, used to keeping mastodons company. I, however, am from the last period of geological history, the Pecuniary Period—do you have some fetching mastodon somewhere?

  I have neither a mastodon nor anything, just the clothes I am wearing; however, I had the good fortune to be raped. I clung to my chair during my labor pains and my belly shook. I could hardly think balanced thoughts. There was barely jealousy, I said. The kid is coming early. She came out. I held her head. It was a girl. She died.

  Nothing else. First: I have no money. In other words, I’m bankrupt. Unemployed. Do not bother to work in a bank. Be wary of becoming a new and endless Tómmas. I.e. nothing. In most ways a rather poor draft of a man. Only doctors, engineers, pilots, and imbeciles get women. This is an enormous change from what once was, when people lived in a fantasy of mastodons with two-meter tusks pushing at your tambourine belly. Now you say: I want you all or you will no longer get to touch my trumps.

  What will you do if all hope is lost?

  I’ve done something. Written Tómas Jónsson, Bestseller; I will wait for my returns.

  When?

  I do not know exactly.

  If you knew, you would be able to pay me at some point.

  And so the fossil awakes from its hibernation to life in the Pecuniary Period next to a sewage bucket of red plastic.

  If you’re not going to go out and find a wife, the couple cannot bring you prepared food from the butcher free of charge, and I cannot clean your crap and get paid in bullshit. You make an art of laziness.

  Get to the privy, he ordered.

  She immediately got up, scrambled to the privy, drew back the curtain, and disappeared in.

  I do not bring an old woman to my room for her to use foul language! he cried.

  The woman sobbed. The privy was an area in the corner demarcated with a brown carpet. He came to it and lifted the opening. She lay there among the buckets and sobbed.

  Keep quiet and lie in your place, he ordered.

  Do you think I am some show animal?

  The woman had left her clothes in the middle of the floor. He slipped his fingers into his pants opening. He thought:

  I hate that voice

  When the woman heard the water gurgling she yelled

  For shame! For shame!

  Shut up, he said. Shut up, he repeated, laughing.

  I dozed in a pile on the floor under the radiator. I rolled to my side and pulled my jacket around me.

  He went unnoticed along the hall in the basement and up the stairs by the potato storage. He strolled unsteadily down the street. A short time later, he discovered that the sea was not far off, lapping in stacked crests, colorless and spread out before him. From the ocean came a coolness. Hermann looked at the bay and said:

  Look, the sea is blue.

  And he thought:

  the sea is never calm the sea is always in motion streams excite the ocean and winds too

  He noticed the salt smell of the ocean. His ears heard the voice of the sea.

  He thought:

  there are six senses one additional one missing there are six senses nothing exists without them without them the sea is and the sea does not know that it is though the animals know it the animals become frightened

  His thinking went no further. He followed the street along the shoreline. The street came to an end. At the end the harbor and in the harbor a ship. He went along the harborside. A considerable way away he saw two men in a hurry and thought he knew both, so he jumped and cursed his feet for doing nothing but slipping off his shoes and socks. The overcoat coiled around him; his overshoes. He stumbled. At the corner of the warehouse, he managed to produce some sounds, but the wind scattered them. He tried again in the shelter of a large D.F.D.S. shipping crate.

  Guys!

  They looked over their shoulders and strolled to meet him and he saw they were not Svanur (how could it have been me if I lay there on the floor) and Óli Iodine (how could he escape the house unless his old woman lay dead). It was Doddi and Viggó. Still, they greeted him and said:

  Where did you saunter over from?

  Viggó cracked his knuckles. Both stared at Hermann a long while until Doddi broke the silence:

  You look awful. Are you hungover? Seems that way. You’re cooked.

  Where did you come from?

  He did not feel like saying that he had seen them slip by and made a beeline along the harbor. He was silent. They grinned. A car drove past them and they moved over to the crate.

  We came from a lair although by boat, said Doddi. That’s the ship docked there. You recognize the man on the jetty, Uncle Stein.

  The man stood on the jetty with a box in his arms. He set the box down. He stood there straddling the box across his crotch. The man bent his knees at the jetty and supported his right hand on the box. The man appeared to stumble. He disappeared down past the edge.

  Now a boy must take his chance. We will not sail with Kristján this time. We were gone just over a week.

  They looked at the box on the pier. The man scrambled up to it and brought the box closer to the edge, then he leaned back, jumped down, and disappeared. His hands came up and snatched the box. The box budged. The man jumped back up to the jetty, lifted the box, and looked at the bottom. He set the box down. The box was on the jetty, but the man jumped into the boat. Then another one came out of the boat and lifted the box and staggered with it a few steps up the pier. There he bent his knees and disappeared, but after a little while his torso surfaced, hands snatched the box, and it disappeared along with the man. Then he came up to the
jetty, looked around, and disappeared as before.

  You are blind drunk; you can hardly stand on your legs.

  Hermann felt faint. He stuck out his tongue and shrieked.

  My mouth feels like smoked fish, he said.

  He added:

  Why don’t we sit under this crate or lean our shoulders against it.

  One might believe you had sea legs, said Kristján.

  No, a man shall not deceive himself in vain, said Viggó. Listen, don’t you believe it, we were sitting calmly in the car, then Stein came and said to Doddi: Pay attention, do you have any porbeagles; there is money to be made. And we had all our equipment in the car—tape recorder and all—for an article. Everything already in the trunk.

  I don’t recognize you, Hermann said, and leaned against the box.

  They stood in front of him and Kristján said:

  One would know you a mile off; we’re always hearing stories about you, when people come to town to make something of their lives in books. You are hungover and they see you hungover. Are you done with banking?

  Hermann waved that away:

  Now I recognize you. What news from home?

  From Tanga? asked Kristján.

  We were just saying. A man makes a fine fox of a plan, then Stein turns up—boom-boom and drags you porbeagle fishing, as if nothing happened, said Viggó.

  Take the next bus, said Kristján impatiently and tore into Viggó. Take the next bus and don’t loiter here over a man who is past drunk, as out of shape as a badly made thing.

  Yes, replied Viggó.

  They walked away, hands in pockets.

  You are like newborn surrealists, said Hermann. Let’s get coffee.

  No, they replied. We should drag ourselves home.

  They came back to the D.F.D.S. crate.

  People are getting scared, said Viggó. The man has been wandering a week or who knows how long and out to sea. And the sea is large. He has quite a story.

  No, I’d rather you tell it, Viggó said. It’s impossible for me.

  The box offered shelter from only two directions. They set another small box under the D.F.D.S. crate. While they prepared they smoked and beat their heels on the jetty. Hermann thought:

  now it would be good to go get a hotdog