Читать книгу The Ambassador - Bragi Ólafsson - Страница 12

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.

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.