Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

But no-one had visited Fanný around midday the day before; over the phone yesterday she’d told Sturla that she’d been waiting for the plumber since midday (there was a leak in the kitchen) and she’d thought it was the plumber when Sturla called around four to postpone his visit until today. She’d called the plumber three or four times, and she’d let him ruin her day; she hated waiting, because she found herself unable to do anything else with the time but wait.

Sturla takes the red wine and offers to look at the kitchen sink. As he turns on the water, Fanný asks him to leave it alone: she doesn’t want him, a poet, to start messing around with something like that.

“You’re forgetting that I’m a super,” Sturla says, smiling. “A super ought to be able to deal with something like this, right? Or at least try to look as if he does.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Fanný contradicts him, and Sturla, knowing she is right, turns off the water, taps the faucet, and looks at his mother with an expression that is meant to indicate he should be treated like an expert, though he hasn’t a clue.

“You’re going abroad,” she says, rather abruptly, and looks out of the kitchen window, through the thin nylon window screen, at a huge black station wagon that’s driving lazily past the house.

“I am going abroad, yes,” answers Sturla, and takes a drink of red wine before setting his glass on a cloth coaster on the kitchen table.

Fanný looks at Sturla for a brief moment and their eyes meet in silence.

“I am leaving tomorrow morning,” Sturla says to break the silence, and he looks towards the living room window at the black car going slowly past as if everything outside is moving at a different speed from inside.

“Are you going to take your camera with you?” Fanný asks. She goes to the kitchen table, both hands around her glass, and looks in the same direction as Sturla for a moment. She sits at the table once the black car has finally moved past the living room window, sipping her wine.

When Sturla replies that he doesn’t own a camera Fanný asks whether she’s told him about the photograph of herself, the one which is going to be in the exhibition.

“What exhibition?”

“He sent an old picture of me which he took many years ago, he’s intending to include it in—”

“Who?” interrupts Sturla. “Who sent you a picture of yourself?”

“Helgi Haraldsson. He is an old school friend. An old friend of Örn Featherby.”

“I don’t know who this Helgi is. What is the picture of?”

Sturla is pleasantly surprised to see his mother smile.

“I never got accustomed to that name, Featherby,” she says, shaking her head and still smiling to herself. “But I’ve known Örn a little longer than almost anyone else still living. In some ways longer than your father.”

“What photograph exhibition are you talking about?”

“Helgi H. Haraldsson is going to hold a photography exhibition, and he intends to show the picture he took of me. And to mark the occasion, I want to invite you to have a shot of Danish schnapps which I got from my Halla yesterday. You’re going abroad tomorrow, after all.”

Sturla decides to let his mother take charge of things; he realizes that he won’t be able to stop her from mixing a strong drink with the red wine. He also knows that at some point she will explain the photograph she mentioned, that it is pointless to push her. And yet he asks her what it is a picture of.

“I’m bare-breasted in it,” answers Fanný, turning her head to look at Sturla as she stands by the kitchen sink pouring schnapps into two little shot glasses.

Sturla has taken the cigarette packet from his shirt pocket but remembers his mother doesn’t like tobacco smoke; she always asks him to smoke by the open front door. But on this occasion, as Sturla goes to the door, asking as he passes her what she means when she says she is “bare-breasted” in the picture, she invites him to smoke at the table; she doesn’t want the cold to get in. She means that the picture, which Helgi H. Haraldsson took of her when she was a young woman, is of her head and her breasts — when her breasts were also younger.

“And. .” Sturla doesn’t really know what he should say. “Did he ask you to do that?”

“ I didn’t ask him to do it,” answers Fanný, moving the shot glasses over to the kitchen table.

“And he’s going to show it now? In public?”

“Helgi H. Haraldsson has never had a photography exhibition before. Helgi H. Haraldsson is a biologist.”

Sturla glances skeptically at his mother. “Does dad know about this?” he asks.

“That was why he took the picture of my breasts.”

“What was?”

“Because he’s a biologist.”

“And does dad know about this?”

“Why do you think it’s any of his business if an old lover took a picture of my breasts some forty years ago?”

“Lover?”

“Old lover.”

“While you and dad were. .?”

“While your dad and I were, yes.”

“And dad didn’t know about it?”

“No, your dad didn’t know about it. And doesn’t know about it. What’s more, it’s none of his business.” She takes a sip from her shot glass and moves it in Sturla’s direction to clink glasses before she sets it down.

Sturla lifts his shot glass to touch hers.

“Have you seen him recently?” asks Fanný when she has finished her drink. “I want to show you the picture,” she adds, standing up.

“I don’t need to see it,” replies Sturla.

“You don’t need to see it? I know you don’t need to see it but I want to show you it anyway.” She goes into the bedroom and comes back with a black plastic folder which she places on the kitchen table before she fetches the cold bottle of schnapps from the counter by the sink. She sits down while she takes a black and white photograph from the folder — it’s of a young woman with light, wavy hair and small but beautifully-shaped breasts; there is no doubt it is Fanný, and no doubt that the model had warm feelings for the person holding the camera.

Sturla takes the picture from his mother’s hand and looks at it a little while. And as if to show that contemplating his mother’s naked chest doesn’t make him uncomfortable he lifts his cigarette and sucks in a long drag of smoke while he examines the picture. Then he places it on the side and gives his mother — and, in the process, the photographer — his opinion that it is an elegant picture. “But when is it being exhibited?” he asks.

“You’ll have to ask Helgi,” Fanný answers, smiling absent-mindedly, as if she wants to recall the feeling she remembers — or imagines — having felt when the picture was taken. “I don’t know anything more about it, other than that he intends to ask our little Örn to write something for the exhibition program.”

“To ask Örn to write about the pictures?” Sturla tries best as he can to make her understand, without using so many words, that this isn’t a particularly good idea.

“Yes, what can I say? I’m just the model,” says Fanný in a dramatic, cloying way, which suddenly annoys Sturla; he finds the whole thing quite disagreeable.

“I don’t like it, mom.” He finds it strange to hear himself say the word “mom” to his mother. “Örn and Dad meet almost every day.”

“And what about it, my dear son? Did your father turn you into such a great prude? Don’t blame that on me.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”

“But you are pleased with the picture, right?”

“Yes, mom, it’s an elegant picture, you look beautiful in the picture.”

“Those are the very same breasts you suckled at when you were little,” says Fanný smiling, and she waves Sturla’s cigarette smoke away from her. “When you were little. When you were a shrimp. Newly born like a. . infant.”