There was no way that the painter S. B.’s daily pottering could take my attention from these two men. I had to know the ending. There wasn’t long to wait, because soon one of them got up and left the hall. The other sat a little longer and looked down his lap before he followed suit. For a moment, I was on the verge of running after them to see if there was a sequel to the show outside the hall, but I let it suffice to look right down at the bound books on the shelf in front of me and wonder what in the world had just happened. What manuscript they had fought over. Whether the conflict had its roots far back in history.
I do not remember how long I sat there staring straight ahead, but when I finally came to my senses I quickly looked at my manuscript. And then at my transcript. Day 221 was in the computer so I moved on and wrote down day 222: This day, after I was redie, I did eate my breakfast and so on. A very dull day indeed.
Approximately five years later I sat there with this new page in front of me: Day 221. The second of two. The page that had been lying on the table in front of me while I watched life happen in the reading room, wondering at the history of people’s behavior and movements, at a middle-aged woman’s noises, at a strange conflict between two older men. The page I flipped past without transcribing and without reading, the page which overturned in just a few sentences my entire hypothesis, back then still taking shape, a hypothesis I was about to spend the next five years developing further and putting down over the six hundred pages that were waiting to be written. And none of this I realized until I was finetuning the thesis, checking one single word in one single sentence.
I looked at day 221. The second. And it was then that everything started to move, the lines running together, the letters starting to roll down the pages, changing to numbers, to monetary amounts. Pounds. Tens of thousands of pounds. How many days had it been? Six years. No, eight years, in fact, adding the two spent preparing for my failed entrance exam at the art school. A precious time for a woman my age. I was at the starting blocks, unsure if I’d ever have the mental endurance to get going again. I felt a heavy bang inside the right side of my head, my hands clenched. And then I put my thumb on top of the manuscript page, creasing it along the spine with my nail, drawing it down from a small hole that had formed at the upper seam; I put my trembling palms next to the opening, pressed one of them firmly down to the side, and somehow, barely voluntarily, moved the other to the side so that the page came loose. I pulled my hand back and looked around. The young custodian was nowhere to be seen; the elder one was at the front desk talking to Professor Barrington. What was he doing here? Were they talking about me, each smirking to the other? I put my left hand back on the page and then drew my hand off the table, the paper sticking to my sweaty palm as it vanished under the table top, traveling down to my skirt where the journey continued along my thigh toward the hem and under it to where it found my right hand, which had reached itself under the waistband ready to slip the page under a second layer, into my nylon tights.
And so this old paper lay pressed up against my flesh from where it did not come loose the whole time I made the long walk past Barrington, who seemed not to recognize me on sight, shaking his head and vibrating with the attempt to hold in his laughter over something his interlocutor had been telling him. But my journey had no plan waiting at its destination. The sky-high walls seemed to travel with me, stretching out and bending down and toward me; I felt the books pouring out their shelves and coming down on me by the thousands; my miserable life would end buried by books, a 365-year-old manuscript leaf inside my pantyhose. No panties.
Suddenly all this devastation stopped. Hell took over. A new guard had clearly started on the job, a young woman, rather irritable. But what happened was more than irritation: when I reached her, it was like she’d received an order from above, or some other indication that I was heading in her direction. She looked right into my eyes and extended her hand, indicating she wanted to check my handbag. And she took her time. Opened all the compartments in the bag, flipped through the books. She opened up my laptop. Then she looked forcefully ahead, at me, but not into my eyes like before, she looked at my chest, leaning to the side of the front desk to size me up. But just when I was about to sink to the floor, she finally put the computer in my bag, gave it back to me and thanked me. I must have run out of the building, out the courtyard and onto the street where I gathered my breath. Then I left, getting swiftly out of the ancient city toward the suburbs.
The manuscript page kept its place at first but as I walked further, it gradually moved down my body to place itself between my legs. It was both uncomfortable and somehow felt more criminal than the theft itself. I could not really stick my hand under the waistband and tug the page upwards as I walked along the main street, so I decided to duck into an alley behind a supermarket across the road. When I got there the pain in my head was almost unbearable; I felt like I had to throw up. I leaned against a dumpster standing there. I lifted the big lid. The nausea increased and then everything came up from inside me and flowed onto the rotten fruit and other food remnants. I had nothing to wipe myself with, no paper in my bag, but that wasn’t why I dug my hand under inside my skirt, into my pantyhose, and grabbed the manuscript. I was just trying to make my body more comfortable, but before I knew I had pulled it out of my tights, held it over the English garbage, and let go, grasping a box of expired cod fillets in breadcrumbs, and stirring the trash until the page couldn’t be seen. I let the container lid drop and I ran from the alley—but as I stood on the sidewalk on my way back across the street, I realized that maybe this was not such a good idea. I had not meant to hide the page but to make it vanish, and of course there was a much better means to achieve that. I turned back. I was eager to recover the paper and, after stripping most of the dirt from it using the wall of the alley, I dropped it down into my handbag and went straight home. My bag clutched to my breast like a thief-fearing old lady. But when I reached home, my neighbor seemed to have some issue with me, about some things, beer bottles and other waste, that had disappeared from his backyard. It took me some time to get rid of him, and I was worried Hans would come home before I got inside. Then, when I was finally standing there alone at the kitchen sink with a match, I thought of Professor Shandy, Lucy’s colleague, who had originally “found” the diary. Wasn’t it likely that he’d browsed a bit in the manuscript, could it possibly be that he remembered day 221? The second 221? What if his memory of the entry was refreshed when the story of my theory began to circulate, maybe with the thesis already published in book form? Undoubtedly, it would be possible to tell from the diary that a page had been ripped out. The thread would lead back to me. Would I go to prison? But I wasn’t trying to profit from the past like others who steal historical relics. How would my intention be defined in court? And who was the victim? The truth? History? The English? Was my larceny and sabotage a victimless crime?
I decided to think the matter over until morning. I gently caressed the page with a damp kitchen towel, wafted it back and forth for a moment, and placed it in a book lying on the table-top: Sex, Gender, and Subordination in Early Modern England. And, inside that book, the document was eventually exported to Iceland, because the next day never brought any answers to my questions.
The woman’s bony hand has released its hold on my shoulder as I lie on all fours on the roof’s edge, notebook under my palm. It’s safe to turn around. But what’s facing me I already knew deep down. Yet my first reaction is to retreat, and so suddenly that I lose my balance as I get up from my squat position; with a single motion I fall backwards. Back over the roof’s edge. It happens with an awful alacrity, but it’s like the mind cannot immediately grasp the journey it’s on. Not until I feel the muscles of my body tense, feel my breath get short. I start to fumble with my hands in the air, so vigorously that for a moment I’m sure I’m heading up and not down, following my notebook that slips from my grip as soon as I start my flight. But, of course, I’m only headed for the ground, fast,
losing my breath as I see the book take to the air and head out toward sea. And luckily so, because at this speed I don’t think I’m going to survive; better that the whole notebook’s contents blow out into the blue yonder. But I cannot look down, I just watch the sky over the city while I try to catch at the air. I think about my sister-in-law’s words about mindfulness and the importance of the moment, about the art of being present with which my friends, except perhaps Bjarnfríður Una, had become so familiar. No, there’s no way to bring it all together, everything runs ahead of me, the question of how it ends horribly inevitable. What does history tell us? It’s my father-in-law asking. What history? World history? I don’t know, I’ve never read it!
And then it happens: I stop mid-air, float a little ways back up, flutter back and forth. My thinking becomes clearer, my perception stronger than ever before, and when the sky above me tears a hole in itself and the glittering sunshine descends to the ground it’s like someone has set their palm under my nape and I’ve found perfect safety, like a young child floating in the bathwater with his mother’s smiling face above him. Of course, Mom had had no intention of covering up a crime, but she will take care of things. As she always does. She whispers in my ear: “Mom will fix things.” I have no idea how she will do this, but her words bring me a strange sensation. A peace and quiet I’ve never felt before and nothing could have disturbed save for the small fuchsia pink dot in the distance, in flight with the north wind toward the city. My notebook has changed course! And then I am back on my crash course to the ground, knowing that it doesn’t bode well.
For my mother
Is the woman screaming more from excitement or terror? Impossible to say, but once she falls silent, it’s more comfortable for anyone who heard to imagine her hullabaloo resulted from some kind of agitation, otherwise the silence might have meant force being applied, something held against the woman’s mouth. If so, something would have to be done. Or the silence might indicate that she had been murdered. And so it’s too late to respond.
Did anyone hear the noise she made, that awful sound? It’s not at all clear, because there aren’t many folks out and about in the stormy rain of this Sunday afternoon, and below the attic where the noise came from, there’s no sign of life. The lights are off. Yet in the basement apartment far below, someone fiddles with a rusted window clasp. The glass is single-paned, rimed with sea salt, but through the pane you can see an old hand trying to open the window. The hand emerges from behind thin gray curtains; on a dust-covered window ledge, underneath brown flakes of paint, stand two plastic dancer figurines. Beside an old skyr tub full of mold. Once the hand has managed to push the frame out, the wind probes in through the window and the trash that blows along the sidewalk, light as leaves, lands variously on the pane or slips in through the cracked window. A paper cup rolls along the street and past the window and, following this, in the sway of a sudden strong wind, a small notebook. The book skitters across the ground, light enough for the wind to push it forward, but too heavy to launch it. The book is a little wet, so when the gust dies down, it comes to a halt right in front of the open window. The wind calms for the night.
The morning brings with it visibility. In the dead calm, a young man comes walking along the street. He catches sight of the little book. He reaches for it and without opening it or turning it over, he places the book on the ledge inside the wide-open window. Nonetheless—it was definitely not on purpose—the book lies half on the windowsill itself. And lies there late into the day until another hand appears from under the curtain. A child’s hand. She holds a rather sickly plant in an old yogurt pot; it pushes the book back until it seesaws on the sill before finally falling back down to the sidewalk. And there it lies through the night and is still there the next morning when the hand, the old one, reaches out for the window clasp and closes the window.
The book lies there all the way to the next weekend. Before noon on the Saturday, a young man—not the same one who first set the book on the ledge—stands on the opposite sidewalk from the house where the hands live. The young man crosses the street, pushing a stroller before him; following him at a short distance is a little boy on a tricycle. The man looks back at the boy as he crosses, but once they are both safely over he turns and walks past the basement window. He rolls the stroller right over the book, but when he has passed the house, he suddenly turns around. He realizes the little boy is no longer keeping up with him. When the man sees the boy stretching his hand out for the book—its pink color caught his attention—he shakes his head and gives him a signal to let “it” be. At this very moment, there’s an awful scream, some screeching from the attic window of the house: “Gummi!” The man involuntarily glances up but since nothing more can be heard, he indicates to his son to come along. The boy rides toward his dad and together they head west along the street. The child with the book in his coat pocket.
When the father and son get home, the boy has forgotten his plunder. He also does not notice when the book falls to the floor the next day at daycare as one of the teachers fishes the child’s mittens out of the coat pocket. He is momentarily surprised, but puts the book back where it was. And where it will remain until the boy’s mother puts the garment in the washing machine. That’s at the end of the same week. By then the story of the tragic incident a few days ago at Reykjavík harbor has come to light. But when the mother opens the book in the laundry room and reads the owner’s name, there’s no way for her to know it’s connected to that affair: the deceased’s name has not yet been published. But on Monday, when the woman’s name appears in a death notice, the young mother somehow realizes she is, or was, the owner of the book … the right thing to do would be to return it to her relatives. By then, the book has been thrown in the trash, but what makes the woman go out to the garbage and dig it up are the manifest connections between the obituary and the news story about the tragic incident: the owner of the book was the deceased, and the deceased had died from an accident which simply must be the incident at the building down by the harbor. This connection, the suspicion that the book might contain important information about the “matter,” is essential, because recovering the item is not particularly pleasant; the young mother had not slipped the book in to the recycling bin, for the obvious reason that the leather binding and the gold thread did not belong there. Instead, she’d thrown it in a plastic bag full of food scraps and other trash.
When the mother goes to look up the family of the book’s owner, she finds two Hanses with the same surname. Neither shares a phone number with the deceased. In fact, the deceased is not in the phone directory, though her parents are. The woman writes their address on a piece of paper and puts it with some other papers in a little pocket inside the back cover. But after she has placed the scrap inside and is about to close the book, she claps eyes on the ink sketch on the final page. A picture of a woman. Her hair frames her face and covers one eye. The image is cut off at the chest and arms, one of which the woman in the sketch extends so she can inspect what’s in her palm. A tiny little girl. That brings a smile to the young mother’s face, and before she knows it, she’s reading the writing under the picture:
I suddenly lost my balance. I stretched my hand toward Mom, knowing it would not prevent my head from colliding with the sharp edge of the table in front of me. But everything happened differently than I thought; when I landed I lay in a soft hollow. I got up and looked around me, and suddenly the ground took to the air so quickly that I got a flutter in my stomach. I stumbled when I looked down into the murky abyss below this surface, which I could not figure out. Not until I looked behind me and saw how I was being supported. I was standing in the palm of a giant’s hand. In order not to fall off, to God knows where, I wrapped both hands around its thick finger. I turned around, cautiously, toward his face. An awesome brightness struck my eyes, but using my hands as a shade I saw that the giant was not troll-like at all; he was somewhat delicate in his magnificent size, with silvery hair down to his ja
w, smiling at me as he caressed my head so carefully with the index finger of one hand, cupping one hand over the other, a small roof, so that I did not pitch out when he started moving. He walked straight ahead and then went up to a slope. In the distance, I looked at green hills and still further off a mountain peak bathed in clouds. And above me, the sun in the cloudless sky.
We walked for a long time and finally reached the top of the mountain. Then the giant stretched his hand out into the sky, up over the clouds and pointed into them. At first, I did not see anything but gradually a picture appeared inside the vaulted ceiling, as though the sky was a mountainside and the picture lay at the foot of the mountain. For one moment, I thought it resembled a small village, though I did not see any houses. This phantasmagoria was illuminated but not by electric lights. Indeed, the light was so intense that I had to look away, back into the giant’s face. The light behind him had been extinguished so I could now see his face better than before. I saw who he was. And at the same time, I realized who were behind him, though I did not make out any of the faces in the crowd. The men, neither giants not Lilliputians, were standing on tiptoe looking searchingly up into the sky. But only for a glance. Because they seemed completely untouched by this phenomenon beyond the clouds that could neither be set down in words nor drawn because it was completely illogical in its arrangement. But when I looked back, it was gone. The giant carefully upturned his palm and set me on the cloud. Plucked a fragment from it and spread it over me.
History. a Mess. Page 12