Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

Nothing more was said about the trip to Hveragerði; that topic of conversation wasn’t taken up again until the day’s events were recalled much later, after Jón and Fanný had separated, when those peoples’ worlds — as Sturla describes it to himself, sitting in his father’s living room on Skólavörðuholt — had changed completely. But in order to go outside (as he’d been told to), Sturla had needed his mother’s help to move the living room table away from the front door: he got outside by climbing over it — without creating a way to open the bathroom door (which, unlike the kitchen door, only opened outwards).

Later, Sturla would connect this peculiar memory about his childhood home to a poem he’d once translated from English, a kind of hotel poem by some Eastern European poet (he had entirely forgotten the name) in which an ageless gentleman (he especially remembered the word “ageless”) walked into his closet (which was how the poem described his hotel room) from the rainy street outside. Later, another ageless person entered the poem, an elegant woman who was emptying a laundry basket while the gentleman threw his cigar into the street, and together they entered another closet off from the rainy street, a closet which had a curtain, a washing bowl, and a hook. Although Sturla had long ago lost the translation, and it had never been published, the poem remained in his mind, not least because he could compare the image to the outside of the bathroom door at Mánagata, which had an iron hook. Fanný was always intending to remove this (but never getting round to it) because Hallmundur, Jón’s brother, tended to hang his overcoat on the hook when he came to visit. Every time Hallmundur had left, Fanný always complained — Sturla remembered clearly — that she hated having an overcoat hanging on the wall between the bathroom and the kitchen.

About three hours later, when Sturla comes home because he has fallen out of a tree and given himself a bloody cut on the leg, Fanný has to move the chair and table away from the bathroom door: the child needs a band-aid and she doesn’t have any rubbing alcohol handy to disinfect the wound; both these items are kept in the closet above the bathroom sink. Jón strides out of the bathroom, gets himself some milk and cookies from the kitchen, and covers himself with a blanket on the living-room sofa.

For the rest of the day, silence reigns. Fanný looks after Sturla and, to make up for missing the monkey in Hveragerði, she calls Hallmundur, Jón’s brother, and gives the two young friends, Jónas and Sturla, money to go to a movie at the theater on Snorrabraut. But although what happened that day seems to have been for the most part forgotten, especially after Fanný comes home one day with a new record player — a better model than they’d previously had — one thing stands out like a neon sign: a few words Jón wrote in lipstick on the wall above the bathtub, words which stuck fast in Sturla’s memory, for he’d managed to read them when he went into the bathroom with his mother to get a band-aid and rubbing alcohol. She hadn’t gotten him out of the room quickly enough. Long afterwards, Sturla would associate a piano sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, which he heard by chance on the state radio station when he was younger, with his father’s message on the bathroom wall— a message which, even as a child, Sturla had thought pretty childish. And this had played a huge part in his beginning to feel that it was worthwhile to create things which at first glance didn’t seem to have any value, either for him or for those around him.

“You make it sound like you were listening to Dýrin í Hálsaskógi or Peter and the Wolf ,” Fanný calls out to Jón once she has cleaned the words off the wall and come out of the bathroom.

Her comment immediately lodges in Sturla’s mind because two years before the whole family had gone to a performance of the Thorbjörn Egner play at the National Theatre, and Sturla has considerable difficulty connecting Lilli the climbing mouse and his companions with the music that had screeched out from the record player in the living room four hours earlier.

And so Fanný stands in the doorway of the living room and asks brusquely: “Murder which child?” But she doesn’t receive any response from Jón, who is now lying under a comforter in the living room.

“You’re visiting her tomorrow, you say?” Jón asks, snapping his son out of his revery.

“Yes, I’m planning to stop by tomorrow,” replies Sturla.

As often happened after Fanný was mentioned, they fall silent for a while. But just when Sturla appears to have lost himself in the book about Pasolini which was lying on the table, Jón inquires about the journey to Lithuania and advises him — without being asked — to buy himself a cell phone before going abroad. His new book has just been published, and it is important first of all because it is likely someone will want to get hold of him — something even Sturla has to admit, if only to himself, is an astute observation — and, what’s more, he’ll be able to get in touch with home from wherever he is, without having to rely on extortionately priced hotel telephones or that phenomena which is rapidly vanishing from the streets of the world: phone booths.

“You also ought to take some U.S. dollars with you,” continues Jón, and when Sturla points out to him that in the independent state of Lithuania people aren’t any better off waving American banknotes around — there are no longer two bars in the hotels, one for domestic currency and another for foreign — Jón interrupts, arguing that this isn’t true: a society which has spent fifty years believing that its own currency is worthless needs another fifty years to persuade itself of the contrary; whether Lithuania was a self-governed state or not, Sturla should nevertheless travel with some U.S. dollars. Moreover, he will need a suitcase on wheels. Jón could get a case like that for him from his friend Örn, which he never uses anyway, but hearing his father’s suggestions, Sturla realizes he’s had more than enough advice.

“Relax, pop,” he says, asking whether he can’t instead lend him some movie or other to watch this evening; he has a brand new suitcase at home for the little luggage he plans to take overseas.

Jón stares at his son as if he’s trying to guess what movie might suit this fifty-one-year-old man who he’d had a hand in shaping. That, he concludes, will be a movie from the library by an Iranian director, a pretty smart movie which he actually needs to return to the library the following day (it has been reserved). It would be fine for Sturla to stop by with the video around 10:00 tomorrow, since he won’t take the bus into Hafnarfjörður before 10:30.

Sturla picks up the video and reads the text on the back of the case. Apparently, the movie is about a middle-aged man who decides to commit suicide, and has to find someone who will bury him after he’s accomplished his task.

“An uplifting movie,” quips Sturla, but Jón doesn’t see any reason to respond. “Everyone tries to get him to change his mind,” Sturla reads from the case, and his father nods his head in agreement. Sturla puts the movie in his plastic bag.

“When were Gogol’s Petersburg stories published?” he asks his father as he takes his overcoat from the back of the chair in the kitchen and strokes the surface to see whether it has dried.

“I reckon that must have been around 1840,” replies Jón.

“No, I meant the new Icelandic translation. The one that came out last year or the year before last.”

“Wasn’t it published last year or the year before that?”

“That’s what I think, yes”