Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

“Let the matches be,” Sturla suddenly hears Jón say, interrupting his thoughts by indicating to his son that there is no need for him to use up the box of matches he has been playing with.

“Why do you have these matches out here?” asks Sturla, closing the box and setting it away from him on the table.

“Örn left them here yesterday,” replies Jón, and when Sturla asks how things are going with the script he and Örn Featherby were working on — are they still working on the same script Jón had talked about before? — Jón stands up from the chair and asks Sturla to wait; he is going to get him a drink, they need to drink a toast of schnapps before Sturla goes to the Baltic.

“Have you talked to Fanný?” Jón calls from within the kitchen.

“I’m planning to drop in on her tomorrow,” replies Sturla Jón, opening the box of matches again. “I’m going to let her have another copy of my book; she wants to make a gift of it. She’s not in very good shape at the moment.”

“‘Not in very good shape?’ You can be so old-fashioned, Sturla!”

Sturla considers it inappropriate for his father to speak to him that way (especially right now, just after he’s finished criticizing the out-moded style of Sturla’s poems). He’s never gotten used to his father’s need to always refer to his mother by her first name, rather than simply saying, “Have you talked to your mother?”

While Sturla lights another match and Jón repeats from the kitchen that the matches are Örn’s, so he isn’t allowed to light them, Sturla thinks about how the name Fanný conjures up in his mind the image of some woman out about town, a woman from the west side of town, on Nýlendugata. And as if to correct the formal wording which his father had mocked him for using, as though he were a small boy, he keeps on talking about his mother when Jón returns to the living room with shot glasses and schnapps. He decides to tell his father about the new methods Fanný is using to get alcohol, incomprehensible methods that the most ingenious of engineers or developers could be proud of, but Jón answers that this doesn’t surprise him. Even though Fanný is Sturla’s mother and she and Jón were married for twenty long years, the two of them, father and son (though he doesn’t use the words “father and son”), will never understand anything that Fanný does or thinks. How could you explain, for instance, Fanný locking her husband in the bathroom for four hours? While Jón shakes his head over the memory, stands up and goes to the bathroom, Sturla recalls his father’s account of the time he was shut out of family life in his own home, while the other family members moved freely about the small but roomy apartment on Mánagata. Sturla, who was only ten or eleven years old at the time, well remembers the atmosphere at home created by the following course of events:

It is Saturday. The family has borrowed a car from Fanný’s older sister Anný, and is planning to use the opportunity to drive to Hveragerði to see the monkey in the cage at the greenhouse restaurant, Eden. The idea, which had been discussed the previous evening, is to set off around noon and stop for lunch on the way: hotdogs at Litla kaffistofan, the coffee shop on Hellisheiði. This all took place shortly before Jón started working in the library; at the time, he was working as an assistant cameraman for the newly-established State television station. During the previous weeks he had been listening to Debussy’s opera, Pelléas and Mélisande , with an eye to studying the atmosphere of the work and writing a script for the movie which would become his first production since he completed his film studies in Prague.

The mysterious and impenetrable French opera music has resounded through the apartment practically every minute Jón is home over the past weeks, but on this Saturday morning Fanný finally tells him she’s had enough of this Symbolist sound world. She longs to hear some light music, some pop songs: they are, “for God’s sake,” about to go on a car trip out of town, which isn’t an everyday event, and she doesn’t want to sit in the car with the weight of French opera on her head. Jón’s reaction to Fanný’s complaint is initially positive. He says he will stop when this side of the record is done playing, but when Fanný asks him to stop at once, arguing that he doesn’t reasonably need to listen to such music on a Saturday morning when the family is about to go and do something fun together, Jón replies that he doesn’t want to remove the needle during the middle of the record; Fanný will have to wait ten minutes or so to get her way.

But she doesn’t. Without any further warning she storms from the kitchen into the living room. She goes straight to the record player and yanks up the lid. And when she jerks the arm from the record there is a fearful screech of destruction: she has not only lifted the arm up but she has actually liberated it from the player. Fanný stands there for a few moments, looking at the narrow, oblong object as though she has no idea what purpose it serves.

With his long and trying experience of Fanný’s tantrums, Jón sits still in his seat, looking at his wife as she holds the torn-off arm with its diamond needle, a needle which just moments before was releasing the sublime music of Debussy from the black vinyl. She declares — making it sound like she’d had a purposeful plan based on a rational appraisal of the right and wrong of the situation — that this (and by “this” she means what she’s done to the record player) is what happens when someone isn’t listened to, when that person’s patience is taken as collateral for some ten minutes of opera music.

Sturla’s reaction to this sudden household war is much the same as his father’s. Sitting at his writing desk in the bedroom (they had one bedroom between them, which shared a wall with living room) he immediately knows what has happened, and he also knows that it pays to show self-control. Once Fanný gives up waiting for her husband to react — after they have both given themselves sufficient time to think about it, Jón in the easy-chair, Fanný standing in the middle of the floor — she puts down the arm and the needle and goes back into the kitchen. Just then, Sturla hears his father clear his throat, and shortly afterwards the sound of the bathroom door being locked.

This has happened before: his mother would stop something with her hands, something which could have been more easily stopped with words, and his father would disappear into the only room in the apartment that could be locked with a key.

A few minutes later, when Fanný has finished with the provisions, she bangs on the bathroom door, tugging at the handle and demanding that Jón produce himself; she will have the record player repaired. Sturla can’t detect any great remorse in his mother’s words, but whether it is there or not, she has no success; his father wants something more, perhaps something else from Fanný or perhaps simply more time and space alone in his locked bathroom. By the time he has been in the bathroom for fifteen minutes Fanný has finished getting everything ready for the car trip. The only thing missing is the driver. But whatever she tries, she gets no response, either to her repeated apologies or to her beseeching, and when another quarter of an hour has passed it becomes clear what is happening: Jón intends to remain there in peace and quiet, which isn’t a surprising outcome when you think that all Fanný wanted was peace and quiet.

Fanný’s next move is to tidy the living room; she whistles some pop tune as she cleans, as though declaring she has nothing remarkable to think about, but then Sturla hears her moving the furniture around. This evidently requires some effort, and as if to cement the dynamic that has been created in the household, she sets the chair which Jón was sitting in just half-an-hour ago against the bathroom door; she then places the coffee table between the chair and the wall opposite the bathroom. As a result of her labors, going through the hall now means climbing over a high chair-back then along the full-length coffee table, which extends most of the way towards the front door (which opens in); this makes it impossible to leave the apartment, unless you move the table further into the hallway, closer to the kitchen. The next thing Sturla hears from Fanný is an indirect order to go out and play by himself: You shouldn’t hang about inside in such fine weather.