Jón Gnarr - The Pirate

The English teacher was called Sprint because he walked fast. He was a neat and decent man and a good teacher. Sprint put himself about, was enthusiastic and patient, and showed us respect. He was gay, something that was a great embarrassment at the time. Everyone knew, but it was still a secret. If his sexuality had been official, he would certainly have been fired. Sprint proved to be a true supporter of mine. There was finally a person in my life who understood English. I asked his opinion about books and phrases, and he taught me about British culture. He had even lived in London and was able to explain the class system and the structure of British society. There was so much that was sung about in punk songs that I didn’t understand; he taught me, among other things, that Brixton is a neighborhood in London, Cockney is a dialect, and Ulster is a county in Ireland. These words came up often in punk songs. Patient and gentle, this fastidious, middle-aged homosexual sat reading with me lyrics by Stiff Little Fingers and Crass. English classes were no problem. I saw a real purpose in learning English because it was the key to the solution. By knowing it, I could understand lyrics and read books in English and even one day move to England. I got ten on all my exams in English and was far ahead of my classmates. Books that were meant to take three months to read, I finished in a few days.

Besides English, there was only one other subject in which I applied myself. That was Christian Studies. I’d totally lost all faith in any God, and as a devout anarcho-punk, I was opposed to religion. I found all those holy stories revolting. Anarchism was against religion and so were punks. Religion was just another system that had to be overcome. And though I didn’t believe in Jesus and thought this all extremely childish and lame, I colored in pictures of him and studied at home and was well-behaved in class. The reason was simply that the teacher was such a kind and wonderful man that I couldn’t bring myself to disrupt him. He showed me consideration and respected my atheism as an opinion. He was totally free from sentimentality and pretentiousness and was simply down-to-earth. He was the only teacher without a nickname; he was just called Ingólfur. What’s more, Ingólfur Jónsson from Prestbakka was famous because he’d written the poem “Bright Over Bethlehem.” So I colored and I read everything I had to read and I never got up and went out. I never aired my ideas about divinity with Ingólf and never ever asked him whether God could create a rock so big that he needed to get me to help him lift it, which was a favorite question I always asked of believers.

But in the middle of winter, Ingólfur fell ill and stopped teaching, and a new teacher replaced him. I thought he was an arrogant and annoying dude in every way. On top of everything else, he was a priest. He talked down to the kids and was clearly unable to stand me from day one. I stopped coloring at once and didn’t study at home. There were only two people in my life that had

gotten me to see something good and positive about faith. They were Grandma and Ingólf Jónsson from Prestbakka. Everyone else seemed to be an idiot who preached Christianity but was unable to live that way themselves. What I had heard and read about Jesus seemed in glaring opposition to all that was done in his name. I found people who seemed totally infatuated by him were almost always snobbish and pretentious and, most of all, boring. Christian Studies changed absolutely. The priest kicked me out of class on the smallest provocation, and I asked fiendish questions. The question of God and the stone came up time and again without answer. I didn’t stop, and when I asked if Hitler had believed in Jesus, I was sent to the principal.

The principal had a nickname like most other school staff. He was called Baglet, and I was a regular visitor to his office. Baglet was an elderly guy, bald, with particularly prominent, large ears and eyes that were on stems like they were about to pop out of his head. He didn’t ask me anything, but in a screeching voice announced that I was rude and a dunce, untidy to boot, and it was only a matter of time before I would be expelled from school for my attendance. Then I was allowed to go. I never said a word; I sat quietly while he recited over me, then stood up and went. But one day I got expelled from Christian Studies forever. It was a class about the creation of the earth according to the teachings of the Bible and how God created humans and the animals. I thought it was absolute nonsense. Someone asked who had created God. The teacher wriggled skillfully out of it by saying that God was eternal and had always been there. I couldn’t resist.

“That’s not we learned in biology from Gandý.”

“And what did you learn there?” he asked, patronizingly.

“We learned we were descended from monkeys.”

He grinned sarcastically.

“And who created the monkey?” he asked.

“They simply evolved from animals.”

“Well, yes, and who created the animals?”

“They evolved from more primitive animals, according to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.”

The Christian Studies teacher clearly did not care about Darwin.

“And who created these primitive animals?”

I thought and remembered.

“They evolved from fish.”

“And who created the fish?” he asked.

“They evolved from lizards.”

“Who created these lizards?”

I recalled a clear image of Darwin’s system that hung inside the biology room.

“They came into being from insects, which came into being from organic matter.”

“And who created this organic matter?”

We locked eyes. He grinned and waited for a response. He clearly had played this game before, and I saw where it was headed.

“I don’t know,” I replied after some deliberation. “Maybe it’s simply eternal.”

Someone giggled. It was like I had hit him with a wet rag in the face. His face distorted with anger; he steamed over to me, and I thought he was going to beat me. I froze with fear.

“You’re repugnant, boy!” he yelled.

He pulled me to my feet and threw me out of the classroom with so much force that I struck the wall opposite the door.

“Never let me see you in here again!”

Then he slammed the door behind him. So concluded my formal studies in Christianity.

One noteworthy teacher at Rétto was the biology teacher, probably the most memorable teacher I’ve ever met. Gandý was an odd bird through and through; there were no drugs or alcohol or fundamentalism involved. He was middle-aged, rather thin and short, but highly educated. His eyes were slightly slanting, and he had a small mouth and large teeth, misaligned and protruding. He was bald but combed his hair over his bald crown and gathered it at the sides. When he got a bit overheated, his hair got all rumpled and stood on end. In our first class he distributed the textbook. It was a light yellow book with the inscription biology on the front.

“Do you know what book this is?” he asked with a sarcastic expression.

“Biology,” someone said.

Then he grinned and shook his head. There was no other way to guess, so we just fell silent and waited for him to tell us the name.

“The sequel to Little Yellow Chicken !” he cried and beamed.

The teachers’ pets who knew their lessons smiled as though they understood the joke, but most of us just stared at one another. Then he rolled out a full-size skeleton of a man standing on a wooden podium. Someone had written Gandý on the skeleton’s forehead in black marker, and it hadn’t been possible to clean it off properly, so the outline of the letters was clearly visible.

“And do you know what this fellow is called?” he asked, and grinned again, full of expectation.