Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“Now, are you going to let the newspaper know about the mistake with the picture?” Jónatan asks when it comes time to say goodbye.

“What picture?”

“Of that brother poet of yours.”

“I’m no longer sure I follow what’s going on in this conversation,” Sturla replies, and he tells Jónatan again that he’ll receive the article the next day.

“Didn’t you see the newspaper today?” asks Jónatan. “Did you see the announcement?”

“What announcement?”

“You’ve published a book, right? Your father told me that you published a new poetry book. You told me about it yourself when we spoke the other day. I even know the title. And I know that because it was in the paper today.”

“I didn’t know they had written about it. I haven’t looked at the newspaper. Did they include the wrong picture with the announcement? An image of my namesake, Sturla Jónsson?”

“It don’t think it’s the first time it’s happened,” answers Jónatan, happily. “That seventy year-old writer of quatrains becomes more and more well-known as a modern poet every time you put out a book.”

Sturla asks Jónatan to wait while he grabs the paper (he had picked it up at the same time as the letter from Cambridge) but the editor says he can’t, that he will wait to hear from Sturla in the morning.

While Sturla looks at the picture of his namesake Sturla Jónsson, a farmer and politician, he asks himself how Jónatan could have been the first to point out this announcement to him. It is late in the day; someone who knows him better must have glanced at the announcement and the picture — even his children should have seen it.

But they aren’t in the habit of calling him; it would take something more than the publication of the wrong picture in a newspaper. And as Sturla gets himself another drink from the kitchen he asks himself whether he ought to bother giving them a call before he goes abroad.

“You’re wearing a new overcoat,” is the first thing Fanný says to Sturla Jón after she opens the door on Nýlendugata.

For a few moments now he has been standing next to a meter-tall, weather-beaten statue of a gnome that is on the sidewalk in front of the door, waiting for his mother to invite him in. When no invite seems forthcoming it occurs to Sturla that perhaps she is in a state of mind where she is amused by watching her son stand beside a garden gnome; perhaps she wants to enjoy the sight as long as possible. The expression on her face doesn’t indicate this, though, and suddenly she declares she should get rid of him; and when she adds that she means that miserable-looking smurf by the door, Sturla is relieved. The image before him in the doorway, on the other hand, brings to mind the same reflections as every other time he has looked at his mother, this sixty-seven-year-old woman who looks like time divorced her in her seventh decade and left the least possible mark on her countenance.

She is a pretty woman but her facial features always remind Sturla that a skull is right under the skin, and although he’s a little ashamed of letting it pop into his mind, the following metaphor surfaces, a metaphor he wishes he connected with someone other than his mother, who is “a picture of death, if it were possible to photograph death.” But as badly as she treats herself, with liquor, smoking, medicine and “an incessant lack of activity,” as she herself describes it, it is as though nothing can spoil her outer beauty. She still uses some clothes which she has owned for twenty or thirty years: well-made clothes she allowed herself to buy while she was married to Jón Magnússon, despite the fact that she and Jón had limited funds; clothes which still show off how shapely her body is, and how dignified and graceful her movements are, an impression which stands in sharp contrast to her personality — she is liable to be absolutely unpredictable, not only under the influence of liquor or medicine, but also when she yearned for but didn’t have any liquor or medicine. The make-up on her face is always in the right place, and in the right amounts, and her hair always looks as if she’s just come out of a hairdresser’s: light gold, glistening, and carefully brushed.

Sturla stands facing his mother outside the basement door on Nýlendugata; her apartment is two steps below street level, and he can’t get used to having to look down on his mother when she opens the door, a further two steps down. In spite of the decline she’d chosen in her life — or which life had chosen for her — she has a certain dignity that should at least be accompanied by a few steps that go up.

“You’re wearing a new overcoat,” she’d said, and Sturla nods his head; yes, he is wearing a new overcoat. He takes a step forward to kiss his mother. She on the other hand moves away from him and continues talking while she beckons him to come in: “Beautiful.” She means the overcoat.

Based on Fanný’s demeanor, it seems like she hasn’t started drinking yet. But it’s more than possible that she’d had a drink with breakfast and a few drinks after that; nothing is the way it seems where Fanný Alexson is concerned. For example, her apartment is only thirty square meters, at least ten square meters smaller than Jón Magnússon’s apartment on Skólavörðuholt, but when you enter it from outside, the tastefully-decorated kitchen and living room immediately give the impression of wealth, the impression that you’ve entered some rich person’s attractively decorated home. The only things which aren’t immediately visible are the small bedroom off the living room and the tiny bathroom off from the kitchen, on the left-hand side of the front door. Originally, when Fanný bought the apartment nine years ago, the only place to wash was a shower cubicle in the laundry room, which she shared with the family who lived on the second story of the house. But because Fanný could never adjust to having to stand up to clean herself — something she’d never needed to put up with other than during the three years she and Jón lived in Prague — she got permission from her upstairs neighbors to put a bathtub in the laundry room; after this, it was impossible to use the room for laundry. As a result, their laundry facilities, both the upstairs family and the “family of Fanný” (as she called her own company), had to be moved into their kitchens. Therefore Fanný got the laundry room all to herself, although she allowed (gladly) the daughter of the couple upstairs to use it whenever she wanted; her parents didn’t seem to have any need for a bathtub. This seventeen-year-old girl had immediately become close to Fanný, and in many ways she had become a surrogate daughter to the ambassador’s eccentric daughter — much to the chagrin of the girl’s actual mother.

“What matters most is that it is made out of good material,” Fanný says when Sturla lets her examine the overcoat. “And of course good needlework,” she adds when Sturla repeats the sales assistant’s claims about how the seams were sewn so they would last a lifetime: he is going to own the overcoat until he is ancient, without ever needing to get it repaired. Fanný asks Sturla if he has eaten anything, and he says he has, though he doesn’t mention that he got himself a hotdog on Austurstræti (hotdog number two in just three days). “Well, it’s okay to get you a wine glass, then,” she says, as if she’d wanted to make sure he doesn’t start drinking on an empty stomach, and when Sturla accepts the offer but says he’d prefer white wine, if she has any, his suspicions that she has an open bottle handy are confirmed: “I’ve only got this open bottle of red wine from yesterday. Halla, my girlfriend, came over around noon yesterday, and I invited her to have a little red wine.”