Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

The interplay of these two facts — that he is enjoying his freedom in a hotel away from home while his son is imprisoned with his mother and Símon — causes Sturla to feel a little guilty; he never told Egill that he and Puri could stay at his place on Skúlagata if they went to Reykjavík before going back to London. But Sturla isn’t especially keen to loan his apartment to his oldest son. Three years ago, when Egill came home to Iceland unexpectedly with his then-girlfriend, an Irish artist who was ten years older than him, Sturla was staying in Stykkishólmur, in a house he’d rented through the Writer’s Union. When Egill let him know that he was looking for a place to stay for a few days, Sturla was happy to tell him he could get the key to Skúlagata from his grandfather Jón and that he could stay in the apartment while Sturla was away. Sturla wasn’t quite so happy when he returned from his trip to Stykkishólmur, more than a week after Egill and the Irish woman had left. Judging by the mess, it seemed like they had needed to abandon the apartment in a hurry, after holding a party. It later came to light that six CDs had vanished from Sturla’s collection: three by Incredible String Band, two by Joni Mitchell, and the CD which Sturla considered probably his favorite in his collection: It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best by Karen Dalton. And when he called Egill to let him know that his acquaintances, that rabble he’d invited into the apartment, had cleaned out his CD collection, Egill suddenly remembered he’d borrowed the CDs; he would return them next time he visited.

Notwithstanding the disorder that had characterized Egill’s life since he was a young man, and notwithstanding his lack of success in finding his own sound as a musician — a sound he could call his own and which didn’t remind him of many other people — Sturla still had faith that his son would eventually “find the right note” and stand out, just as he, the father, had succeeded (at least in the opinion of the so-called literary establishment) with the publication of his fourth book, which came out when he was thirty-five years old. However, the works in that book hadn’t been “written themselves” like the poems he’d written until then. Sturla’s experience working as a prison warden for two years before sitting down to write free from freedom had invigorated his poetry, and his method of describing the prison experience appealed so well to the Icelandic literary scene that not only did the book sell a thousand copies when it came out, but it even continued to sell the next year, better than the books Sturla had published after that. And just as that book, based on his specific experiences as a prison guard, earned Sturla Jón a lasting reputation (even if men like his neighbor on Skúlagata, Láki or whatever he called himself, don’t know he is a poet), so Sturla expects something similar awaits his son Egill: he will be able to utilize his own unique experience living in a major city overseas and getting to know people of different backgrounds. Sooner or later he’ll work out how to shape that experience into a form people will understand.

Gunnar, Sturla’s next-oldest son, had on occasion asked to stay with his father while he was in Reykjavík, and one weekend, when he was flying south to compete in a table-tennis tournament, he’d stayed in the apartment alone. But his interests and sense of duty were so unlike his brother’s that Sturla would even trust Gunnar with his work as super if he needed to. On the other hand, their relationship as father and son is a long way from being what Sturla thought the relationship between close family members ought to be. Soon after Gunnar began working for his step-father in the grocery department of the Cooperative regional store, his relations with Sturla had become merely civil — stiff, even. In the four years Gunnar had worked with Símon (instead of continuing his studies, as it had always seemed he would), it would be fair to say his entire world had shrunk to what he had to say about the two- or three-thousand square-meter storeroom of Samkaup Selections, his workplace. As a teenager, Gunnar had shown some interest in his father’s poetry, had at least read his books, and had once written a little essay about a few poems from the first one, but in recent years Sturla’s next-oldest (or next-youngest) son had expressed his strong disapproval of “that hobbyhorse, poetry,” as Gunnar once let slip out in his father’s company.

Those words had possibly had a worse effect on Sturla than they should have: the accusation was made at a gathering of Hulda’s family, a gathering which Sturla’s mother-in-law had insisted he come to, despite (or because) he hadn’t seen Hulda’s relatives since they’d separated almost ten years before. And although Sturla had generally not spoken much with the mother of his children after the separation, the change which had come over their son Gunnar was motivation enough to talk to her. Hulda, on the other hand, absolutely refused to talk about how their twenty-four-year-old son’s behavior and mentality had come to resemble a sixty-year-old grocery store manager’s, as Sturla put it bluntly — Hulda was, in fact, offended by Sturla’s comments, and possibly reasonably so.

Thinking about how unalike Egill and Gunnar are, Sturla Jón imagines Gunnar coming into the kitchen while Egill, Hulda, and Puri are sitting there with their coffees, talking about music or movies. Gunnar takes stock of the kitchen table: this and that much remain of the two boxes of cookies his mother has put out on the table, so there’s no need to order more yet — orders should be made as close as possible to the moment supplies run out. And having made his decision, he disappears from the kitchen with a milky coffee drink in a water glass, without anyone who is seated at the table under the ceiling lights having spoken to him.

The youngest son, Grettir, is currently on the next floor of the house, in his room. He is studying (this strikes Sturla as very plausible). Grettir had begun studying at the Grammar School in Reykjavík, where his younger sister Hallgerður had recently started her second year, but before he finished the first year — after badly breaking his leg and ankle on the steps in front of the school, an injury that confined him to bed rest for a month and a half — he decided he wanted to continue his studies at the Grammar School in Egilsstaðir.

Grettir, who is nineteen, has always been the most sensitive of the siblings, not only physically but also to the words and glances of other people, as Sturla describes it to himself. But though the boy is clearly fascinated by art, especially music (like his brother Egill) and the visual arts, he had never shown any inclination towards creating art: he is happy just enjoying it. This interest keeps him so occupied that little else, his studies included, has any place in his head.

Though nothing directly indicated that Grettir was physically attracted to his own sex — nor to the other sex, for that matter — it seemed, on the other hand, that nearly all his enthusiasm for artists was directed at those artists who were openly homosexual or else radiated something more delicate than their colleagues. Among visual artists, for example, he highly prized David Hockney, Egon Schiele, Giacometti, Modigliani, and Gustav Klimt, and, for some reason, Francis Bacon, who according to what his mother said stares down at anyone who enters Grettir’s room from a huge framed photograph on the wall above his bed. Hulda hadn’t told Sturla this because she found it funny but because it aroused her alarm — more even than Bacon’s self-portraits did.

Although the description of his youngest son’s room had come from his mother, Sturla got regular updates about Grettir’s private world — his tiny bedroom — from his daughter Hallgerður. Shortly after hearing about the picture of Francis Bacon, he’d tried to wheedle out of his son what he was listening to these days and what had recently caught his attention in the other arts, but when he had little success — it was as if Grettir didn’t want to share his private world with anyone, not even his father — Sturla asked Hallgerður if she could tell him what Grettir’s room looked like; if she could “spy a little for him.” And when she found out how happy her description of Grettir’s room made her father, she began to explain her brother’s unusual and sophisticated tastes, and by and by she came to enjoy telling her father about Grettir’s newest acquisitions, the things he’d ordered on the internet or brought home from the library.