CoDex 1962

by Sjón

  He used to tell this story to medical students visiting the CoDex headquarters, generally concluding by reminding them that several years after this encounter, with what might be regarded as poetic justice, the champion bone-crusher had been diagnosed with serious brain damage himself. This punchline invariably went down well with his audience, seeming as it did to offer the moral of the story, though it should have been clear to all that Muhammad Ali’s fate had been neither poetic nor just, and personally the geneticist despised this kind of fridge-door philosophy.

  The gravel crunches.

  — I found this in the boathouse. Wrap it around you, man.

  A great northern diver laughs out on the lake. There is a creaking from the chair next to the dictaphone. Another chair is drawn up and a man lowers himself into it.

  — Anthony Theophrastus Athanius Brown.

  — Hr-Hrólfur, Hrólfur ‘the Second’ Magnússon.

  For Christ’s sake, why did he have to answer with that cheap joke? Why the insane desire to compete? Was he so jealous of the man’s impressive name that he had to big up his own? Now he would have to explain that it had been a joke, that for his last three years at Laugarnes School he had been nicknamed ‘Hrólfur the Second’. Their teacher had been a kindly, well-meaning man who tried to keep up with the latest trends in education. At the start of every week he used to get one of the pupils to read out the register. This usually went well. They were all quite good at reading by then and besides they knew the names of their classmates. Then, the autumn they were ten years old, a new boy joined the school, recently moved to Reykjavík from Akureyri in the north. The first time he read the register he did so with flying colours – he had a clear northern accent and took it nice and slow, crisply enunciating every word, three qualities that the teacher used to bang on about in his war on the sloppy speech of the Reykjavík kids, many of whom drawled as if they had a mouth full of chewing gum; yes, he’d lost count of the times he’d stuck his finger in a child’s mouth to hook out the gum, only to find nothing there: the tongue had simply grown slack from the ceaseless rumination and would need vigorous exercises to strengthen it, whereas the correct pronunciation came naturally to the northern boy, and for the rest of their time at school the teacher would hold him up as a shining example whenever he was scolding the other kids for their lazy speech – until, that is, the new boy came to Hrólfur’s name, at which point he hesitated. He hadn’t expected to encounter the handwritten initial of Hrólfur Zóphanías’s middle name, and because the teacher hadn’t crossed his zed, it looked more like a number two than a letter, so he read out in ringing tones: ‘Hrólfur the Second!’. And of course the name stuck.

  The geneticist sighs, wondering how to explain all this: Laugarnes School, his old teacher Skúmur Áskelsson, the sad fate of the clearly spoken boy, it’s just too complicated, so he decides to change the subject.

  — Blood. I sometimes think about blood.

  He breaks off abruptly.

  The memory of his Icelandic lessons at school has prompted him to enunciate so clearly that it sounds as if he’s saying ‘plud’. To test this, he silently mouths the word ‘blood’, checking whether he’s saying p or b. But the moment his lips part to form the vowel oo he is assailed by the memory of the teacher’s nicotine-yellow finger in his mouth. He can remember, no, he can feel Skúmur grabbing hold of his wet little tongue and lifting it up in search of the dreaded cud, poking thick fingers between his teeth, the hairy knuckles rubbing against his palate, jabbing him in the gullet, a broad nail bumping against his uvula, leaving behind a sour taste of tobacco.

  The geneticist retches, then, getting the reflex under control, says again, this time with a voiced b:

  — Blood.

  Silence. Anthony shifts in his chair.

  — Yes, I guess that’s hardly surprising. For a man in your profession.

  Anthony continues:

  — I know you, though you don’t know me. I live nearby. I’ve been here for sixty years and five more, to the day. Yeah, man, who’d have believed that a poor boy from Nigertown would get to spend his life as the in-house Negro in the Theology Faculty at the University of Iceland?

  — I know who you are. I’ve seen you wandering down by the lake and in the birch woods ever since I was small. You live in the old summer house that belongs to the Faculty of Theology. My father used to talk about you. I remember him telling my mother there was only one man in Iceland who had a tweed suit to equal yours. And you can guess who that was. Us kids used to be shit-scared of you. But do you know something? Do you know that if you were to drain Lake Thingvellir, which contains 2 billion 856 million cubic metres of water, and then tapped the blood of everyone on earth – a human being contains around 0.005 cubic metres of blood, yes, just multiply that by 7.1 billion – and poured it into the empty lake bed, it would only be enough to fill one-eightieth of it? One eightieth! And this is just one bloody lake!

  The geneticist is beginning to recover from his drunken snooze on the shore. Although he can’t actually remember the exact calculation in cubic metres of blood and water, he did at least manage to produce this thought more or less ungarbled. He fumbles for his glass. It’s empty. The whisky bottle is lying on its side. It looks as if there’s a drop left in the shoulder. Picking it up, he leans back and turns it upside down, waiting for the last drop to trickle down the clear neck into the mouth of the bottle, before falling on to his waiting tongue. But by the time the liquid has dripped from the bottle’s neck and down his own, he has forgotten the rest of his meditations on blood. To conclude the matter somehow, he waves the bottle towards the lake and says:

  — Yes, mankind amounts to no more than that.

  Anthony Theophrastus Athanius Brown:

  — Brrr, I always get the shivers when a Nordic type starts talking about blood.

  Silence. He claps his hands together to warm them.

  — I’ve talked to your wife a couple times. When she was passing my summer house. I hope you don’t mind.

  The old man winks at the geneticist.

  — We were only chatting.

  — My wives can do what they like. Was it Anna?

  — No, we introduced ourselves. Her name wasn’t Anna. I’m sure of that.

  — Bryndís? Was she tall? When was this?

  — I think it began with a C. I remember thinking there aren’t many Icelanders whose names begin with a C.

  — Then it must have been Cara Mjöll.

  — Quite a bit younger than you, blonde. It would have been about five years ago.

  — That would fit. You haven’t met Dóra then?

  — Not yet. But Cara, Cara Mjöll, some of her interests overlapped with mine.

  — Aerobics?

  — Voodoo.

  ‘Be the author of your own life!’ It was the motto the geneticist’s father had drummed into his sons. Whatever the occasion, he always managed to slip it in. That’s not to suggest that this philosophy of life was all he talked about – he didn’t have a one-track mind, no, he was an old-school polymath who was forever reading, whether it was nature, people or books – but he could steer the most straightforward subject round to it. Whether his conversation with his sons dealt with mundane matters, such as his thoughts on the planned change from driving on the left to the right or the price of records, or major issues of the day, such as the atom bomb, the war in Indochina or Nordic unity, it would invariably lead to the same conclusion: the equality and fraternity promised by the socialist movement would never be achieved unless those who aspired to fight injustice in their homelands, wherever they were in the world, were in command of their own lives. Before they could intervene in the course of history, they had to have their own affairs perfectly under control. International capitalists, and their pathetic Icelandic counterparts, feared such people more than anything else in the world. For, when they encountered overwhelming odds, such as the unbridled violence of the toppling capitalist monster, these people had in thei
r arsenal what you might call the poor man’s weapon of mass destruction: self-sacrifice. In these lectures, the pronoun ‘they’ meant ‘you brothers’, and the message could be a little hard to swallow if all that had prompted it was a simple request for money to go to the school disco.

  Later, the youngest son of Magnús Ágústsson, journalist, MP, writer, singer and trout nemesis, was to realise that his father’s motto had been no more than a sort of Übermensch take on the AA serenity prayer: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’ Minus the God bit, and with as much booze as anyone could tip down their neck.

  Children learn by example, and the geneticist could boast that he was the author, not only of his own life, but of his nation’s life as well. He had shown his countrymen their own worth by harnessing their genomes, their book of life, in a digital database for the benefit of all the inhabitants of earth. A tiny minority had offered resistance through newspaper articles and books, but there was little they could do against a man who was the author of his own life. The only aspect he had never had any control over was his wives, who, by some quirk of fate, had come to him in alphabetical order. First there had been Anna, the love of his schooldays, who had shelved her plan to become an engineer so he could pursue an education and build up CoDex. She had given him his three eldest children. Next had come Bryndís, who had been raised and educated in her father’s supermarkets. When they embarked on their life together she was the second richest woman in Iceland. People used to whisper that they had both profited from their dead countrymen: he from the medical records of deceased Icelanders, she from the grocery empire that was said to have its roots, quite literally, in the illegal cultivation of vegetables in the graveyards of Reykjavík and the surrounding area. The third had been the personal trainer, Cara Mjöll, who’d given him twins. And finally there was the Professor of Economics, Halldóra Oktavía Thorsteinson, known as Dóra, who he’d married purely out of scientific curiosity. This alphabetical order was, admittedly, a bit of an embarrassment. But what was he supposed to do? Avoid all women called Eirún, Engilrád, Efemía, Emma, Einarína or Elísabet?

  — Voodoo?

  — My particular area of interest is the development of African religious practices in the New World—

  The geneticist interrupts:

  — If you thought Cara Mjöll was interesting, you should meet my new wife.

  — I’d like that.

  — Dóra’s what we in the medical profession call a ‘chimera’, after a grotesque monster of Greek mythology. Her DNA is derived from five individuals, her mother and four fathers. It’s not immediately obvious, but, for example, she has two distinct blood types and she’s a redhead on one side and a blonde on the other. She was the first child born in 1962—

  This time it’s the old man’s turn to interrupt:

  — You don’t say? One of the strangest things that ever happened to me in this country was the time I was asked to help out with a home birth at a house in Reykjavík, late in the summer of that year. The child born then wasn’t normal either.

  — In 1962? Tell me more. I’ve been scouring the database in search of genetic mutants born in that year.

  The footsteps of Hrólfur Z. Magnússon, geneticist, and Anthony A.T. Brown, theologian, recede into the distance.

  (End of recording.)

  VII

  Completion

  (23 October 2012–15 April 2013)

  16

  Aleta switches off the dictaphone.

  ‘I’ve got enough now. I don’t need any more for the study.’

  She puts the machine in her bag.

  ‘It’s all been very – what’s the word? – educational. It’s the longest I’ve ever spoken to an individual Icelander. I’ve learned a lot.’

  She starts to rise to her feet, but before she can straighten up properly, Jósef seizes her wrist. Arrested in this awkward position, she glances down at his hand. The pale, thin skin on the back is stretched tight over the bumps that have sprouted from his bones like mushrooms. His deformed forearm is just visible where his checked shirtsleeve has fallen back. He must have something important to say as every sudden movement increases the risk of injury. Every physical exertion causes him untold suffering. He tightens his grip.

  ‘Even if you did come back, I wouldn’t be here.’

  She lays her hand over his. He looks away.

  ‘I’m going into hospital in two days. For the last time.’

  ‘I’ll visit you.’

  ‘No, don’t do that. That’s not what this is about.’

  As unexpectedly as he had seized her wrist, he lets it go and the white imprint of his fingers lingers briefly on her skin. An instant later the blood has refilled the capillaries and it’s gone. Aleta straightens up.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t repay you properly for listening to my story, in the way my father taught me, by listening to yours. There won’t be time. I’m sad about that. I hope you’ll forgive me.’

  ‘Of course, of course. What kind of story would there be in my life?’

  ‘No less than there was in mine.’

  He gestures with his chin to the bedroom behind her.

  ‘In there. Under the bed, on the side by the window, there are some banana boxes with books in them. In the box at the foot of the bed there should be a copy of the Icelandic translation of Karel Čapek’s War with the Newts. Inside, you’ll find a brown envelope with my name on it. It’s sealed. You mustn’t open it until you get home.’

  ‘But I don’t need anything. I’ve enjoyed this.’

  ‘Oh, please, do it for me.’

  Once Aleta has gone into the bedroom and Jósef is satisfied by the sounds that she’s busy searching for the envelope, he edges his way closer to the chair she had been sitting on and pulls over her bag. Finding the dictaphone, he switches it on, raises it to his mouth and whispers:

  ‘There’s one thing I have to correct, Aleta. When you were here the other day, I compared being born to rising naked from a cool forest spring on a hot summer’s day. I was wrong.’

  * * *

  ‘CLUB DES AMATEURS

  The man arrived at his destination shortly after the sun had reached its noontide zenith. Because he was unused to travelling on foot, the walk from the railway station at Vr— had taken him longer than expected and he was rather late for his appointment at the remote spot in the middle of the forest, out of sight of the birds in the air and the fish in the ponds.

  Only to a select few is it granted to set foot in the legendary building, so he had carefully memorised the top-secret map he had been shown at the final meeting in preparation for the trip. On it, a route had been marked from the station, through the village, to the edge of the forest, then through the forest to the hall – yes, he imagined a handsome estate, encircled by a high brick wall, a cross between the mansion of a nineteenth-century industrialist and the country residence of a Prussian philosophy professor, with a cosmopolitan staff (drawn from the European imperial powers and their colonies), headed by a strict couple, a fifty-five-year-old Englishman with a speech impediment he covered up with practised, dignified gestures that took the place of the words he found so hard to pronounce, and his Russian or Hungarian wife, a little younger, with red hair and green eyes – where, once he reached the iron gates bearing the name of the place, which he assumed he’d find there, a guide would be waiting for him.

  Throughout the time it took the train to rattle from the central station in Sn— to Vr—, he kept going over the route in his mind. He pictured a red strand of wool, laid over the landscape in loops, with knots to represent the chief landmarks. Like a dancer at a provincial opera house rehearsing for a performance in the belief that a world-famous choreographer will be in the audience (under an assumed name, of course, and in disguise), he repeated every step, every turn that would bring him to his goal.

  In spite of all these rehearsals,
the man was, as we’ve said, a little late in reaching his destination deep in the realm of the pines, firs and spruces, and as time wore on he felt a growing fear that the person awaiting him there would tick him off and remind him what a privilege it was to be chosen for this journey. But, in the event, his fear proved groundless. In the heart of the forest – where the foliage was so thick that it rose before the eyes like a cliff face – he was greeted not by a human being with the power of speech but by a small dog of uncertain pedigree. It was rather long in the body and short in the leg, with a curly, tasselled tail, a glossy, rough-haired, wet-look coat, and a head so large that it would have sat better on a wolf, which meant that its lower jaw trailed on the ground and could be lifted only with difficulty. Its brown eyes glowed like black pearls.

  The man was so taken up with staring at the beast that it wasn’t until his confusingly proportioned “guide” had shown him into a shadowy hall and the door had closed behind them that he realised he hadn’t seen the building from outside. The impenetrable wall of greenery that had blocked his path must have been growing on its façade. The dog signalled to the man to follow in the manner of its species, not with a bark but with meaningful dartings of its black-pearl eyes. And the man pursued it through the dim hall and up a staircase that rose four storeys into darkness.