Читать книгу The Ambassador - Bragi Ólafsson - Страница 11

“You’re all wet,” says Jón Magnússon as he lets his son, Sturla Jón, into the apartment on Skólavörðuholt and watches him remove his wet overcoat in the hallway before draping it over the back of a kitchen chair, in front of the oven.

“May I use your bathroom?” asks Sturla. His right hand is dripping wet from running it through his hair, and he looks as if he needs to dry himself off before doing anything else.

“May you? You’re in your own father’s home, Sturla.”

Sturla goes apologetically into the bathroom and locks the door.

He has come from a bookstore on Austurstræti, having bought himself a hotdog and a cold Pepsi from the kiosk opposite Lækjartorg. At the bookstore he bought a folder to keep printouts of ideas for stories he intends to write. Now that he has published his latest collection of poetry he has made a deal with himself, or so he describes it in his head: he won’t write any more poetry. Instead, the lines on his page will reach the margin and form blocks where previously there was an irregular collection of uneven lines pointing towards the margin but never quite touching it. And, on the way back up Bankastræti—as if to suggest the folder is going to come in handy straight away—Sturla Jón has an idea for a story, a short-story. It was, he thought, basically about everything he’d done in his life in the past fifteen minutes: a middle-aged poet goes into a bookstore to see, for the first time, his newly-published book sitting with all the other newly-published books, tightly-wrapped in glistening cellophane, on display with its price tag facing the literary-minded folk and other customers of the bookstore. This book has become a commodity to be bought and sold, the value it acquires destined to be measured not against a price tag stuck on a copy, but against each individual reader’s opinion as to whether it was a worthy item or not.

In Sturla’s opinion, there is an irony to this that results from a deception the poet himself perpetrates: when it comes down to it, his value is only ever evident from the price tag on the book, and every year will bring a new sticker and a lower price until, in the end, when the last copies of the book finally sell at the Icelandic Discount Book Fair, twenty or thirty years later, the price on the sticker will have dropped under 100 kronur, down as low as double-digits. Because of this, and in order to make the distance between the author and his subject matter clear—or else the reader might somehow start imagining he was describing his own experience—Sturla had come up with an idiosyncratic character, a poet, who gets very angry in the bookstore because his newly-published book isn’t on display at the front of the store with the other brand new books. Instead, it has been placed in the back, among books from a year, or even two years, ago: on its left is an Icelandic translation of Gogol’s Petersburg stories, and on its right a selection of poems by an older Icelandic poet which Sturla believes came out three or maybe four years ago. Sturla had prized this poet highly as a young man but had been ready to dislodge him from his respected pedestal—ideally unceremoniously—ever since Sturla recited his work with him at a poetry event in Kópavogur several years back. The older poet had shown Sturla Jón a complete lack of respect: he stood up in the middle of Sturla’s reading to get a coffee at the bar—and not just an everyday Icelandic coffee, mind you, but one of those special coffee drinks (he was eighty-something years old) which necessitates the use of the espresso-machine and which created an incredible racket. This had happened right in the middle of a poem, and continued for the rest of it, so that Sturla’s reading went down the drain, lost in all the coffee-making noise.

As Sturla had headed from Bankastræti into Skólavörðustígur, a heavy downpour suddenly broke out, and in order to protect himself, and his new overcoat, from the downpour, he’d slipped into a nearby doorway, into Háspenna, one of the gambling and games halls run by the University of Iceland. He’d debated going into the spick-and-span fishmonger’s next door instead, but Sturla chose the games hall over the fish shop since he’d been given a lot of change when he bought the folder at the bookstore, and it occurred to him that, rather than straining his overcoat pocket, he could use the change to support the university, an institution which, among other things, has as its mission fostering in the youth an ability to appreciate and interpret exactly the sort of texts Sturla himself has published. What’s more, he worried that stopping in at the fishmongers would cause his new overcoat to soak up the smell of fish—though this fashionable fishmongers, which only offered freshly cooked dishes, never really seemed to smell of fish; the smell was suffocated by cooking the fish in all kinds of seasoning and oils, unlike traditional fishmongers who sell ordinary fresh fish, which somehow always give off the sweet smell fish have.

Often when Sturla reads or hears about fish or fishmongers, it brings to mind an image of a Portuguese fisherman dragging a light blue boat up onto the yellow sand, brimful of gleaming, newly caught fish which a short time before thrashed about as they fought for their lives. Sturla no longer knows whether this picture originally came from a poem he’d read or from a painting or a photograph, but it always conjures up the phrase “Art of Poetry,” capital A, capital P. The fish represent the idea the poet captures, the image which moves restlessly in real life until it can be fixed onto paper; from then on it is firmly held in place for the reader to resuscitate later. Sturla knows his analogy for the art of poetry isn’t new or especially fresh, but he still thinks it is beautiful; it illuminates the art for him, just like the flashing, brightly-colored slot-machines which shone in the darkened space of the games hall.

The place had a comforting feel, something that wasn’t a new discovery for Sturla. He’d been here before; the building had been built about twenty years ago to replace a wooden structure that years before had housed a second-hand bookstore, “The Book.” Sturla had been a regular customer of that store as a child and young man, and he owed the foundations of his own library to it, the pillar, as it were; it was the place where he began choosing books for himself. First, it was books like Prince Valiant by Hal Foster; after that, he’d picked up all kinds of translated thrillers, and moved on from those to educating himself in the classics—in books that have long been known as the classics. During high school, towards the end of The Book’s existence on Skólavörðustígur, Sturla had purchased books by Halldór Laxness, Þórbergur Þórðarson, and the Icelandic poets, like Jóhannes úr Kötlum and Steinn Steinarr. He’d devoured these books with such enthusiasm that in recent years he’d come to believe he’d gotten burned-out from throwing himself into their writing with such admiration; he ended up losing interest in the poets he once absolutely adored.

With the exception of the old poet he’d read with in Kópavogur, he continued to respect the old Icelandic poet pioneers. He often had reason to remind himself that those poets had enriched and deepened his view of the world; they had doubtlessly improved the quality of his lyrical palette, though that spectrum couldn’t compare to the complex electric rainbow of slot-machines that greet punters at Skólavörðustígur 6. He could, though, say that the used books of Þórbergur, Jóhannes, and the others he had bought at The Book were among the last purchases of Icelandic books he had made; from then on he almost exclusively bought books by foreign authors, in English and Danish.

On the right side of the entrance to Háspenna was a Gevalia-brand coffee machine. On the front of this was a very visible sign inviting customers to get themselves a free sample in a paper cup before heading into reception to get their bills changed to coins, or simply going on down two steps to the games hall. Although Sturla had only recently drunk a rather strong espresso in the clothing store, and as a rule didn’t drink more than one cup of coffee after midday, he still obeyed the Gevalia machine’s silent command: he put a paper cup in the tray under the coffee nozzle and pushed the cappuccino button. While he waited for the jet of coffee he watched the university employee behind the glass counter: a dark-haired, thin man who Sturla thought looked like he had as a young man. He had a thick book, the spine firmly creased, and was deeply absorbed in reading it, though he took time to nod his head to the middle-aged man who’d just come in.

There was no one in the games hall. Sturla preferred the place that way.

Sturla had four hundred kronur in spare change in his pocket. He disturbed the supervisor from his reading and gave him the small change, telling him he wanted hundred-kronur coins in exchange. He also changed a thousand-kronur note for some coins. Then he followed the path of lights down to the carpeted games hall and sat on a high stool in front of a machine in the far corner, where there was a view out the window along Bankastræti. Before slotting the first hundred kronur coin in the machine, he looked at the traffic on Skólavörðustígur: a car, a woman, two men, another woman, a few more cars, two young boys, a woman with a dog, a black Hummer which idled at the crosswalk in the street below. As soon as the first coin disappeared into the machine the Hummer began moving along Bankastræti, and by the time it became clear Sturla was a hundred kronur poorer, the gleaming black monster had vanished from sight. Seven hundred-kronur coins later, Sturla’s gamble paid off, and a few coins could be heard dropping into the winnings tray; Sturla had got five hundred kronur back.

While he kept feeding the slot machine with coins he recalled a conversation from fourteen years ago between his father and Hallmundur Margeir, his father’s brother, which had taken place one Sunday in front of the old brick house at Skólavörðustígur 4. The conversation was etched in his memory like an engraving in stone. Sturla had been at a children’s matinee in the old cinema with his father, Jón, and his late brother, Darri Örn. They had seen The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and as they were going along Skólavörðustígur towards their home at Mánagata (where the boys’ mother, Fanný, was busy preparing Sunday lunch) they met Hallmundur and his son, Jónas. The two were on their way to a five o’clock showing at the same cinema, a movie Sturla knew was only for children older than sixteen. Perhaps that fact—given that his cousin Jónas was only twelve at the time—had stuck in Sturla’s mind along with, almost word for word, the brothers’ fairly ordinary conversation, in part because they talked without their sons saying anything at all to each other. After Jón and Hallmundur exchanged a few words about the movies they had seen or were about to see, Hallmundur had started talking about the house at Bankastræti 7 (one of the houses Sturla had walked past half an hour ago, after he bought the overcoat). What had aroused his uncle’s interest in the house was the image he had of the owners, when, in 1932, the house had first been built and they’d looked around the empty rooms. Hallmundur found it quite magnificent to imagine Icelanders from the early thirties looking around the brand new, empty, two hundred square meter stone apartment house; he didn’t, though, think his image fit the time period, since Reykjavík’s inhabitants lived then, by and large, in hovels of various sorts, as he put it. The conversation had ended with Hallmundur saying that, of course, the bank always ends up possessing anything that has any value—value in material terms, that is. The bank directors of Samvinnubanki were even now sitting at desks on the upper story of this magnificent house, with its view over Bankastræti, moistening their fingers and counting through all the bank notes they receive from the cashiers on the ground floor.

Suddenly a flood of hundred-kronur coins crashed into the coin tray. Sturla had been too immersed in the past to notice three oranges line up in a row on the screen of the slot machine, and he’d not realized that he only had one hundred-kronur coin left in his hand. He looked around instinctively, mainly to determine whether the young student who was supervising the place had heard the rattle of the coins, but in order to see for sure he had to get up and take a few steps across the carpet. He looked with some embarrassment at the shower of coins in the tray, slipped off his chair, and tiptoed carefully out onto the middle of the floor. The service booth was empty; the young man had probably gone to the bathroom. Sturla hurried back to the slot machine, picked the plastic bag from the bookstore up off the floor, and began counting coins into it. There were seven thousand kronur. What’s more, he still had the one remaining hundred-kronur coin in his sweaty palm; he slipped the coin into the slot and pressed the button, setting the fruit wheels in motion. He peered into the carrier bag, as if to reassure himself that his winnings were still there, and at the same moment he looked up from the bag he heard a now familiar noise: another consignment of hundred-kronur coins falling into the coin tray, not as many as before, but, at a quick glance, another few thousand kronur or so.

The first thing that came to Sturla’s mind was an analogy with the student Rastignac, would-be suitor to the daughter of Old Goriot in Balzac’s novel, who had won twice in a row at a roulette casino in the Palais-Royal neighborhood: seven thousand francs followed by an additional thousand francs—enough to pay off Madame de Nucingen’s debt at the dressmaker and a large enough sum to buy her affection.

Would the money that had found its way to Sturla be enough for him to buy something equivalent to the affections of Goriot’s pretentious daughter?

Without taking time to count the money, Sturla swept the coins into the plastic bag, took the paper cup, now half full of coffee, down from the slot machine, and left the room. Although the young man was still missing from the booth, Sturla looked in the direction of the counter as he went past, and he gulped down the leftover cold coffee before he placed the cup back beside the Gevalia machine. He had been too occupied with the slot machine for the last few minutes to pay attention to whether the weather outside had changed; it had gotten worse, with large hailstones that descended on him like . . . like . . .

He was much too confused at that moment to complete the simile. “His words surrounded him like scales on a fish”: he satisfied himself by recalling, as he went past the fish shop, Maxim Gorky’s description of his comrade Lenin.

His father’s house on Skólavörðustígur was no more than two or three minutes walk away, but in that time the sleet was able to soak through Sturla’s overcoat and turn his dark brown hair even darker. He was also weighed down by the suspicion that his actions had somehow robbed the university: he’d gone into the place expecting to lose fourteen hundred kronur, but he’d won at least ten thousand kronur from the school, without giving the school the opportunity to win the money back.

“In other words, you’ve profited by the five thousand kronur bill I lost there the other day,” says Jón, when Sturla had come out of the bathroom and told his father about his winnings from the games hall. “Plus another five thousand some old codger lost in that black hole.”

Sturla had intended to show his father the new overcoat he’d hung on a chair in the kitchen—if he hadn’t already noticed it for himself—but with his unexpected windfall as food for thought he clean forgot.

“I only hope you’ll use the money to good effect, my fortunate son,” Jón says as he begins to make coffee, even though Sturla had turned down the offer, saying he would make himself a cup of tea. “It is indeed a considerable responsibility to have ten thousand kronur,” continues Jón, and while Sturla watches his father shovel coffee powder into the paper filter, he toys with his cigarette packet and lighter, asking himself whether all men in their late sixties communicate with their sons using the same sarcastic tone as his father—whose routine more often than not reminded Sturla of a younger man pretending to be nearly seventy:

Of course, you’ll throw your sense of responsibility overboard and use your swiftly made profit to buy an hour with some prostitute in Lithuania. Something like that won’t cost more than ten thousand kronur, I reckon. And most likely you’ll have some money left; you could offer the lady some champagne.

I’m not going on a sex trip to the Baltic, if that’s what you think. I’m not a soccer hooligan or some investment banker.

Ha, what do you know what’ll take place once you’ve arrived? You can’t say for certain that some woman with big, rolling breasts isn’t going to come up to you—perhaps when you’re completely lost in the city—and offer to accompany you to your hotel, since, naturally, she knows the area better than you, and then she’ll show you some motherly concern once you’ve arrived. I’m not sure you know beforehand how you’ll react to such kindness. You do know, however, that there’s ten thousand kronur in your pocket you haven’t done anything to earn, and you also know that you won’t need to explain it to anyone if the money disappears as suddenly as it appeared.

I don’t think you know your son particularly well. Besides, I didn’t win quite ten thousand kronur in the games hall; I’ve yet to count it, and the fourteen hundred I put in needs to be subtracted from that total.

Maybe that’s true. But, that aside, you haven’t been close to any woman since you and Hildur separated, am I right? What have you been up to since then? That was six or seven years ago.

What do you know about it, Pop? Would you like me to introduce you to every woman I get to know?

Perhaps you shouldn’t get too close to womenfolk in general; it’s not worth taking the risk of ending up with a sixth little bastard.

All at once Sturla Jón comes to his senses, standing in the kitchen doorway and half-listening to Jón; he’d been imagining the whole conversation. He wonders whether his father would really call his grandchildren—Egill, Gunnar, Grettir, Hildigunnur, and Hallgerður—bastards, but he gives Jón the benefit of doubt and answers his own question in the negative.

“When are you going to Latvia?” Jón asks once he has finished preparing the coffee and is waiting for the kettle to boil.

“I’m going to Lithuania,” Sturla corrects him, trying to remember whether Sæunn, the young woman he had been in a brief relationship with three years ago, ever met his father. They probably never met, but it startles Sturla that he can’t be sure about it. Is he getting too old to remember whether or not he’d introduced his young girlfriend to his father not long ago?

“And what exactly are you are going to do there?” Jón wants to know. “In . . . Vilnius.”

“Both in Vilnius and in a little town some place near to Vilnius. I am going to read my poems. It’s a poetry festival.”

“You’ve gone to one of these festivals before, right?” Jón’s question is laden with disapproval at his son’s dalliance with poetry, but Sturla decides not to let that get on his nerves. He’d learned to rise above his father’s needless sermonizing about the “minor art form” that is poetry. Poetry was a reminder that the son was currently working in his chosen artistic medium, while the father, the internationally educated film director, hadn’t come close to completing his “great form,” the movie, for three-and-a-half decades; the nearest he’d gotten was arranging some books about directors and movie-making in the library in Hafnarfjörður, where he worked. That said, he’d recently mentioned that an old schoolmate of his, a chemist, was going to finance a movie which Jón and his friend Örn Featherby had been planning for quite some time, but Sturla took the news with a large pinch of salt.

In answer to the question about whether or not he’d gone to poetry festivals like the one he was going to in Lithuania, Sturla curtly replies that he’s been both to Belgium and to the Faroe Islands roughly ten years ago.

“But you weren’t impressed by the festivals, correct?” his father asks.

“No, I wouldn’t say I was,” comes the response, and as Jón is asking, in a surly tone, why he expects this festival to be any better than the others, it occurs to him, from somewhere in the depths of his brain, to use the coming trip to Lithuania as material for an article he could write for Jónatan Jóhannsson’s literary magazine, From E to F. Why not expose the things that would take place at the international festival before they took place, and set up the possibility of writing a second article about the same material after the festival ends, in light of what had happened—in other words, what he actually experienced. The idea, which Sturla at once becomes convinced is a fabulous idea, reminds him of that famous story from the world of cultural journalism in Reykjavík, about a music critic at an Icelandic newspaper, a man better known as a composer—indeed, rather well known as one—who published a review of one of his colleagues’ concerts in the paper, a concert which had been postponed at the last minute and didn’t take place until after the review appeared.

But while this critic had so clumsily deceived his readers, people reading Sturla’s article, on the other hand, would be just as aware as its author that it deals with future events, that it presents honest speculation about how things at the poetry festival would turn out. It would really be no different from what you find in the mass media every day, with people predicting what will happen in sports or the stock market. Following from his thoughts about the article and the composer’s advance “review,” it occurs to Sturla to tell his father how he’d been in a clothing store earlier and had heard a story about N. Pietur, the old acquaintance of both Jón and Örn Featherby who, firstly, happens to be the half-brother of the editor Jónatan Jóhannsson and, secondly, is the very composer about whom the premature review was written. But Jón breaks the silence first, asking Sturla whether he is going to read from his new book in Lithuania.

“They are translating some poems from it, yes,” answers Sturla. “But I’ll read mainly from the older books.” He tells his father that in addition to the ten or eleven poems which had been translated from Icelandic into Lithuanian (by a Lithuanian who had lived in Iceland for half his life), one of the poems from the new book, “kennslustund,” has been translated into Lithuanian via Sturla’s own translation from Icelandic into English, “the lesson.” The translator, a Belarusian poet from Minsk who was also participating in the poetry festival, had in turn sent Sturla one of her own poems, translated into English, which he had then hastily translated into Icelandic.

“And the point of this was?” asks Jón.

“To foster some personal interaction, so the festival’s participants know each other a little before they meet up,” Sturla replies, thinking he’s given his father a good answer.

“But you are not your usual self in this new book,” Jón says, almost accusatorially, and when Sturla asks him to explain what he means by this, Jón replies that the tone of some of the poems seemed to him a little out-moded. It wasn’t so much that he felt Sturla was composing in the fashion of the older Icelandic poets, but more that some of the poems sound like they were written by a young poet from thirty or forty years back.

Sturla looks thoughtfully at his father and lights a cigarette. “Do you have any particular poems in mind?” he asks, blowing out a cloud of smoke.

“I don’t know how to answer that. But which do you think I prefer,” asks Jón, looking meaningfully at his son, “pipe smoke or cigarette smoke?”

Sturla lets his father answer his own question:

“Pipe smoke. Örn comes here with his pipe and pipe-cleaner and all the accoutrements of pipe-smoking, and though there is often a revolting odor when he draws the pipe-cleaner out of the cylinder, I’m now more able to enjoy pipe smoke than the acrid cloud which comes from a cigarette.”

Sturla looks off into space, then glances back at his father and smokes.

“There are a few lines in one poem which I put a definite question mark next to,” Jón continues. “And they are, I think, the only lines which rhyme. Or seem like they rhyme, at least.” He reaches out for Sturla’s book on the sideboard and contemplates the image on the front cover for a moment: a rather blurry picture of an old-fashioned document folder lying on a table; a fountain pen lies open on the folder. While Jón searches through the book he mumbles its short title, assertions, and he repeats it twice more until he finds the page he is looking for. He reads aloud: “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” Glancing up, he asks, “What were you aiming for in those lines? Why not go all the way, if you were going to rhyme? Why didn’t you say, for example, “the mother in the window,” or “the mother at the window, dark in the shadow?”

As Sturla explains to his father how he’d deliberately avoided the rhyme—how he looks upon rhyme in serious poetry as a foreign body (he didn’t, of course, use the word serious)—he suspects the quoted lines were strong and vivid after all; it seemed quite clear they were able to move the reader, given that both author and his father had thought of them on the same day, less than an hour apart.

“Did you find something strange about this half-rhyme?” Sturla asks. “Did you find it stuck out like a sore thumb?”

“Half-rhyme?” asks Jón.

In Sturla’s mind, a positive response to his own question about the half-rhyme hadn’t been totally out of the question. But if he is honest with himself, he has repeatedly found something peculiar about these lines, without being able to put his finger on exactly why, or to convince himself to either cut them or ignore the issue altogether.

“What does it mean?” continues Jón, who hasn’t understood the term “half-rhyme.” “Or does it mean anything?”

“I’m implying that the person at the window, looking out, is the mother,” answers Sturla, “and what are shadows made of, other than darkness?” When he realizes that his father isn’t satisfied by this response, he continues: “I didn’t set out to explain the poems in this book.”

“So it isn’t supposed to mean anything specific?”

“No. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to mean: nothing specific. The reader asks himself what it might mean. I’m not publishing a book of poems in order to force meaning on people.”

“Perhaps then it’s Norman Bates’ Mother, this mother in the window?” asks Jón with a smile. And when Sturla doesn’t say anything, Jón repeats his question: “Well? Is it her? You know I met Anthony Perkins once.”

Sturla lights himself another cigarette.

“I still don’t understand why, all of a sudden, you’ve started rhyming,” continues Jón. “Or half-rhyming, as you put it.”

His father’s smile always reminded him of the American movie actor Robert Duvall. It had some fine, intelligent irony that caught Sturla off-balance: he had not expected his father to show any enthusiasm for his poems—though it was rather ironic to call his observations “enthusiasm”—or to reveal his worry that his son might not be on the right poetic path. Sturla hadn’t yet told Jón that he was done writing poetry, that he was intending to turn to prose, but regardless of that, he found his father’s observations quite unnecessary. He was interrogating him about the significance of a lyrical metaphor, which Sturla had let stand in the book—and, on top of all this, he was questioning lines about the mother which weren’t really his, they were someone else’s. And at the same time Sturla is reminding himself that these lines are someone else’s, his father quotes the very poet who had, after his death, built his reputation in large part on assertions that he was actually someone else.

“One must be modern,” Jón says, and once again the shape of his mouth makes him look like Robert Duvall. “So says your father, and so said the foremost poet of the poetic renaissance of the nineteenth century.”

Sturla places his cigarette down amidst the unsmoked pipe tobacco that is in the ashtray, and looks at his father who comments, seeming very pleased with himself, that he can make out the aroma of Prince Albert tobacco.

Jón Magnússon is only sixteen years older than his son Sturla Jón Jónsson. Jón was in his second year at the Grammar School in Reykjavík when Sturla Jón came into the world, but he definitely wasn’t going to let that interrupt his studies, as Sturla remembered his father advising him when he himself started Grammar School. Jón and Fanný Alexson, Sturla’s mother, still lived at that time with their parents, but shortly after the birth of their son they moved into a little apartment on the east side of town which Fanný’s father, Benedikt Alexson, at that time a politician and later an ambassador in Oslo and Stockholm, rented for them. When Sturla was born Fanný had completed one year at the Business School of Iceland. She’d intended to continue her studies, but she wasn’t able to fulfill her ambition: Fanný and Jón acquired another boy, Darri Örn, two years after Sturla was born; Darri was born the day Jón graduated from Grammar School. When he was one month old Benedikt bought a little apartment on Mánagata for Jón and his daughter, an apartment they lived in throughout their cohabitation, twenty years in all, and which they sublet during the three years they spent in Prague while Jón was studying film.

As Fanný had told Sturla, something in Jón Magnússon’s character had touched a sensitive nerve in her shortly after they had met; she had begun to sense a kind of mental imbalance, a malaise, which among other things made her almost pathologically dependent on Jón. It led her to develop a great impatience about all kinds of minor details in her relationships with other people, especially Jón. She had never before displayed such neuroses, and they began to swell inside her like a malignant tumor, having a growing influence on her behavior towards others, no matter whether they were close relatives or complete strangers at the supermarket checkout. That “devilish condition” of hers, as Jón described it long afterwards to Sturla, increased dramatically following the birth of Darri Örn, and in their last months in Czechoslovakia Fanný and Jón’s relationship unraveled because of these notions hidden inside her, feelings someone who shared a roof with two young kids shouldn’t entertain. Jón had for his part already withdrawn from Fanný and the boys, moving deeper and deeper into a private world he was creating with his graduate project—a rather strange story, to say the least, about an individual who is faced with eleven doors—but fortunately Jón and Fanný were wise enough to make an agreement to separate for a time; that was their way of saving the relationship, a relationship which became marriage a year after Jón came back from Prague, and lasted, at least on paper, until 1977, the year Sturla Jón graduated from Grammar School, two years later than his peers.

During Fanný and Jón’s separation, it was her habit to make up theories, theories that Jón believed later came to poison every single moment of their relationship. That habit culminated in her idea that one day during their time together, in June 1957, she had had a son who came to nothing—that is, he died—while Jón was on an all-night bender with his friends, celebrating the completion of the very exams she’d never allowed herself to take because of her children, “the most idiotic stupidity a person can get mixed up in,” as Sturla later heard his mother say when Hulda, his ex-wife and the mother of his five children, was pregnant with their last child, Hallgerður.

Fanný had been placed in a psychiatric ward three times, due to what Jón called “chronic daily confusion”—once while she lived with Jón, and twice during the three years she lived with another man—but since she had decided to live alone, and had moved into a little basement apartment on Nýlendugata where she still lived, she had managed to maintain a mental balance “with the help of the liquor which I never touched during the twenty years I lived with Jón Magnússon,” as she described it to her son. It was, however, a balance that anyone who didn’t know Fanný’s past would be more likely to call a chronic imbalance.

Wasn’t it somewhat unusual, Sturla thinks, as he and his father sit facing each other in Jón’s living room and Sturla runs his eyes over the bookshelves, that at nearly seventy years old his father is occupied by the relatively new art form of the cinema—with all the enthusiasm of a childlike quest for learning—while it could easily be said that Sturla is overburdened by old-fashioned literary interests, which his father maintains need reinventing in the spirit of that young man who famously gave up poetry one-and-a-half centuries ago. Among the books on Jón’s shelves is the newest edition of the Time Out Film Guide, a thick-spined book about the 1001 movies the reader ought to see before he dies; a biography of Billy Wilder; and a long row of black paperback screenplays from Faber and Faber. However, most of the space on the shelf is taken up by videocassettes and DVDs. On the coffee table lie a few oversized books about the movies of Pasolini and Milos Forman, and two smaller books by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Sturla has no doubt that his father consciously chose to put these particular books on display as a demonstration of his antipathy to what one always sees in architecture magazines: the handsome coffee-table books in people’s living rooms—books which are meant to suggest highly-refined taste.

One of the photographs in the second Nobuyoshi Araki book was a black and white image of a hooker in Tokyo; she sat, wearing a depressed expression, her thighs wide open, her hands bound at her feet, her eyes staring despondently at an electric dildo which someone else—perhaps Nobuyoshi, imagined Sturla—had placed in her vagina. Another picture was of a huge, steaming pool of piss on the floor of a train station; others variously depicted distressed female sex-workers (usually naked) and their fully clothed customers; or tired-looking office-workers on board the express train. A few pictures were images of the photographer’s wife; in one she was alive; in another she was lying in her coffin, her final resting place. Sturla had flicked through the book the last time he visited the house at Skólavörðustígur 46. This time, he satisfies himself with placing it on the table and contemplating the color photograph on the back cover, an image of a younger Japanese woman in a kimono sticking a blood-red slice of watermelon between her lips, a slice shaped—or so Sturla Jón thinks—like an erect penis.

His thoughts turn to the Mother. With a capital M. And for a moment the word myrkur, darkness, occupies his mind. Although thirty years have passed since the publication of Sturla’s first book, The Flip Side of Words, he is still troubled by his decision to use capital letters at the beginnings of poems and after periods; in some of the poems he’d gone so far as to imitate that peculiar custom by which English poets put capital letters at the start of lines. Except for the title of the book, Sturla still considered his first collection a worthy part of his oeuvre—although some of the poems were juvenilia, on the whole there was nothing to be ashamed of—and for that reason he was disturbed that the orthography of the book—his use of capitalization, etc.—hadn’t been in keeping with the rest of his publications. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to change that, even if this first book of his was one day reprinted. Long ago he had set himself the rule that he wouldn’t change anything in his work once it left his hands. Only a few weeks after the publication of The Flip Side of Words Sturla had found out that, to put it baldly, using capital letters in poetic verse was wrong, as every word—two letter conjunctions as much as nouns or verbs—had equal weight and one shouldn’t visually isolate words from their neighbors with these larger characters.

But now, when he thinks about the mother—his own mother and the one who stood by the window and stood for darkness and stood in the shadows—he discovers that the shape of the words calls for capitals, contrary to his assertions, and when he goes over in his mind the conversation he’s just had with his father about poetry, the following imaginary exchange takes place, which he finds just as important and just as worthless as his life’s work at this very moment:

Sturla: There are no more than forty-two people in this country interested in poetry. And not many more in other places.

Jón: Are you sure? Only forty-two?

Sturla: Forty-two or forty-three, the difference isn’t important.

Jón: Then why are you stubbornly writing what you call poetry? Why not trick these works of yours into other kinds of text? I mean texts that call themselves something other than poetry.

Sturla: I am no longer stubbornly fixated on one or the other. I let others do the verse writing for me these days.

Jón: But why don’t you just quit?

Sturla: I have quit.

But Jón would be totally unaffected by Sturla’s declaration. He wouldn’t hear it. If you were to compare the two things, then Bezdomny’s decision to stop writing poetry, in Bulgakov’s novel, would doubtlessly affect Jón more deeply than his own son’s decision to do the same; the latter was not a character in a novel by a Russian writer; he was not even a character in a novel. And to avoid irritating himself further over his father’s lack of interest, Sturla thinks about the new overcoat he has hung on the chair in front of the oven in the kitchen. He imagines how the color of the overcoat will look against the color of the apartment building he lives in on Skúlagata when, or if, a photographer from a newspaper makes him stand in front of the white building and shoots at him like a madman, as photographers tend to, snapping photos as if this is the last subject they’ll ever get to shoot in their careers. These wouldn’t be snaps of just one more poet staring at the camera, like someone with absolutely no interest in being photographed or talked about on the pages of some rag. But when Sturla measures the beige-colored overcoat against the white walls of the apartment building, he feels like cream has been splashed on caramel pudding, a splashing that’s accompanied by some splurting sounds which remind him of something—he isn’t sure exactly what—from the kitchen, or from the cowshed of the farm he’d lived on one summer when he was a child. Sturla hates all metaphors from the world of food for their bad taste, especially when someone describes a work of art as being hard to swallow or digest. Sturla always ends up picturing the process of digestion, and more than once had been prevented from enjoying a work of art because someone had smudged it with a metaphor from the digestive system.

“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: