Iceland 50 Aurar: Dragon, Shrimp and KM26a History

At the end of the school day, Rúna found twenty-seven coins on her desk and twenty-eight children waiting for the door to open. She counted again without moving her lips. Twenty-seven.

The lesson had sounded simple when she proposed it. Everyone would examine the little bronze-colored coin, draw both faces, and decide which marks identified its country and value. Now it was Friday in 1989, her bus left in twelve minutes, and one pupil would not empty his pockets.

“I haven't got it,” said Ari.

“I didn't say you had.”

“You looked at me.”

Rúna had looked at him because he was holding one pocket closed. That was evidence of something, though perhaps only the terrible condition of the pocket. His mother had asked her not to let him carry scissors home again.

“Everyone check the floor,” she said.

Twenty-eight children bent at once. A pencil rolled toward the radiator. Someone found an orange peel. Someone else announced a coin, but it was a button with four holes, which produced laughter from people Rúna wanted to remain useful.

She put the twenty-seven coins into their paper envelope. The drawings lay beside them. Most children had copied the shrimp successfully. The dragon had become a dog, a bicycle, several dragons, and an animal whose classification its artist refused to discuss.

Ari's drawing was blank on one side.

“Couldn't see it,” he said when she picked it up.

“You had a coin.”

“I had that side.” He indicated the shrimp. “The other side was bad.”

She remembered his request to exchange it. She had told him to work with what he had, because lending out the clearest examples had already become a negotiation about who deserved them. Looking now at the surviving coins, she could see that some faces were much harder to read than others.

She should have paired the children differently. She should have left herself more than twelve minutes.

“Did you take somebody else's to look at?”

“No.”

The answer came so quickly that several children turned toward him. Ari pulled his coat on, covering the hand at his pocket.

Rúna could demand that everyone remain. She could ask the head teacher to search bags. She could miss the bus and walk, carrying a stack of exercise books in weather that had already darkened the windows. None of those possibilities would improve the missing dragon.

“Mine's in the radiator,” said Lóa.

The classroom became quiet.

“How?”

“I put it on top. Then I moved my book.”

“Why didn't you say so?”

“I thought it would come out.”

Rúna knelt. The gap beneath the radiator contained dust and an eraser flattened by many shoes. Farther back, something circular caught the light. It might be a coin. It might be another button, which she would take personally.

She could not reach it. The ruler was too short. Her pencil pushed it farther away.

Ari took his hand out of his pocket. A short piece of string came with it, attached to a small magnet.

“No,” Rúna said.

“I didn't break anything.”

“Where did you get that?”

“Home.”

He had brought it to test things during the lesson. He admitted this in stages: first the magnet, then the testing, then the fact that he had tied the string around it so it would not fall somewhere he could not reach. It had spent most of the lesson stuck beneath his chair.

Rúna held out her hand. “May I borrow it?”

He hesitated before giving it to her.

The magnet bumped against the radiator, clung, and had to be pulled free. She lowered it again, this time keeping the string taut and away from the metal above. The little coin came out wearing a soft gray fringe of dust.

Lóa took it to the desk and cleaned the loose dust away with a sheet of paper. Nobody cheered. The others were already putting on their coats, unwilling to lose another minute of freedom to the discovery.

Rúna handed Ari his magnet. “Monday, bring it again.”

“Am I in trouble?”

“Monday, we find out what else these coins can tell us.”

He looked at the blank half of his drawing. “Can I finish that?”

She placed the clearest dragon beside his book and gave him her pencil. At the door she asked Lóa to tell the bus driver she would walk home. Ari began with the wing.

The horse had been on the label for eleven years, and Elín had been employed at the museum for eleven days. She put her pencil beside the little coin and tried to find a hoof.

There was a projecting snout, a curled body, and something that could be a wing. Turned sideways beneath the desk lamp, it still refused to become a horse. On the other face, a shrimp waited above the number fifty.

At noon the case would close for the summer opening. Elín had promised the director that all the new labels would be ready. She had also promised herself that she would stop correcting people merely because she could.

The old label read: HORSE AND SHRIMP. Gift of Jón Sigurðsson, 1977. The coin beneath it carried the date 1986.

She checked the drawer. Its envelope held three small coins and a folded receipt. One of the coins belonged to the earlier gift. Somebody had replaced it in the case with the brighter example, then returned the original to the wrong pocket. The mistake was almost tidy enough to be intentional.

Jón arrived carrying a thermos. He had donated the fishing photographs along the entrance wall, the cracked compass, and the chair in which he now sat without asking. He poured coffee into its lid.

“Your horse is a dragon,” Elín said.

He looked toward the case. “I haven't owned a horse since I was fourteen.”

“The label.”

“Then you can mend the label.”

She had rehearsed an argument, and his agreement left her holding it uselessly. She showed him the date. That was when he stopped drinking.

“Not my coin.”

“No. Yours is here.”

She tipped the older coin onto a square of clean paper. He leaned forward but did not touch it.

“I remember that one,” he said. “The stain beside the edge.”

“We can put yours back. Or show both, with separate dates.”

“Put mine back.”

The brighter coin would photograph better. The director had specifically asked for something clear enough for visiting children to draw. Elín had spent the morning arranging the light, and the photographer was already somewhere on the road. She explained this without mentioning how badly she wanted her first display to look competent.

Jón tightened the thermos lid. “You can use a different name under the bright one.”

She took a fresh card. Under its heading she wrote the denomination and year, then crossed out a word so forcefully the pencil nearly pierced it.

The director came downstairs carrying a ladder. He had to paint a patch above the entrance before the visitors arrived, and he listened while keeping the ladder balanced against his shoulder.

“Use the bright coin today,” he said. “We can change the donation line afterward.”

Jón stood up.

“Or leave the donation line off,” the director added.

“That would be accurate,” Elín said.

“Good. Done.” He began turning toward the entrance.

“But it wouldn't show the gift.”

He set the ladder down. “We cannot put everything in one case.”

Elín looked at the shrimp. Its tiny legs remained distinct even through the glass. All morning she had been treating the clearer coin as the correct coin, as though clarity settled ownership as well as identification.

“Give me the lower shelf,” she said.

“It has the compass.”

“The compass can move beside the photographs. The coins can sit together, and the children can draw the one they can see.”

“That means another label.”

“I can write another label.”

The director glanced at the clock. “And move the compass?”

“Yes.”

“And no story about the coin belonging to a fisherman unless we know it did.”

Jón gave a short laugh. “I was a fisherman. That doesn't mean every thing in my pocket was at sea.”

Elín cut two cards from the remaining sheet. One identified the older gift. The other identified the 1986 example without giving it Jón's name or inventing where it had traveled. Beneath the dragon she put the word she should have looked up before she spoke.

The photographer arrived while she was carrying the compass. He asked which coin was the important one.

“Both,” she said. “For different reasons.”

Jón took the ladder from the director and held it steady. When the first children came through the entrance, he was still there, looking upward and telling the man with the paintbrush that he had missed a corner.