Читать книгу The Ambassador - Bragi Ólafsson - Страница 14

The soft winter sun lights up the classroom. Jónas Hallmundsson looks out of the window over Lækjargata and appears not to be listening as the teacher, Armann Valur, begins joking with his pupils that they are now one month into the new system of dating time, a system that began with the eruption on Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands, on January 23rd of that year. He starts talking about the time he stayed in the town of Westman Islands ten years ago, when he visited a schoolmate of his from “this very school, this distinguished school,” and stayed at his parents’ house for a few weeks. At that time, in 1961, he’d been sure a huge volcanic eruption would take place there, and even though Surtsey Island had erupted a couple of years later “in that vicinity,” he’d never lost the faith that the Devil would bring the blesséd Westman Islands to world attention by spewing his powerful essence over the place.

“And because of that,” he continues, “I’m now giving myself permission to invite you up to the board, one at a time, and ask you a few questions about these famous islands of the Westmen, the Vestmannaeyjar.” He turns back to them, flexes his shoulders and stretches his arms out on both sides. Then he lets them fall quickly down to his sides and calls the name of a girl in the class, asking her to be so good as to “trot up to the blackboard.” The girl’s name, Ljótunn, always had an effect on her classmates, the girls no less than the boys: everyone would look up or show some other indication that they had heard her name mentioned, not just because it was an unusual, embarrassing name but because it was so ironic: her facial beauty—not to mention her physical beauty—was undeniable (if you can describe beauty in such terms). Just as people tend to look at the light rather than the dark, they tended to look at Ljótunn rather than the person next to her, if they could.

“How many islands comprise the Vestmannaeyjar?” asks Armann Valur when the girl has come up to the board and stands facing the class. “Do you know?”

“Aren’t there fifteen?” replies Ljótunn.

“That’s what I’m asking,” says Armann Valur, smiling. “You have to answer.”

“I guess it’s fourteen.”

“The number gets lower,” says Armann Valur.

“There are twelve.” Ljótunn corrects herself; her final answer.

“Not bad,” says Armann Valur after thinking for a moment, and addresses the girl by name again; he enjoyed saying her name. “Not bad, Ljótunn; there are exactly twelve. When you fly over them. Seen from land, there are perhaps no more than one or two, but when someone flies over them, I mean on a big iron bird, he needs the fingers of both hands, plus two of the fingers of the person sitting next to him, in order to count them. There are exactly twelve.” He asks the girl another question which she can’t answer, then he asks her to sit back down. She is now out of the game, this is a knockout round.

As Ljótunn goes to her desk and sits down, Armann Valur follows her to her seat with his eyes, even though he knows the other pupils will notice if he indulges his temptation to watch her. Then he scans the room and settles on Jónas Hallmundsson, who is still busy thinking about what is happening down on the street outside the school building.

“Jónas Hallmundsson,” says Armann in a commanding tone. “Would you like to be next in our Vestmannaeyjar quiz?”

Jónas nods his head and glances at the person sitting next to him, his friend Brynjólfur Madsen, who shakes his head, as if to say that he wouldn’t take part in this nonsense himself. Brynjólfur looks away from him to Armann Valur as he begins asking Jónas his first question:

“What is the temperature of a simmering lava field?”

Jónas looks out the window.

“You won’t find the answer out in Lækjargata,” says Armann Valur, his arms folded and an amused expression on his face.

“A hundred degrees,” replies Jónas.

The picture which Armann Valur made of himself, with his arms across his chest and a boastful expression on his face, momentarily calls to mind Benito Mussolini on the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, talking to his people. “Very good, very good,” he says, nodding his head quickly. He removes his arms from his chest, and when a pupil in the next row starts to make a comment about Jónas’s reply, Armann stops him with a wave of his hand. “But tell me this, Jónas: How many inhabitants lost their lives when that awful eruption took place on the islands?”

“Everyone,” replies Jónas, without hesitation.

“Everyone, you say?”

“Everyone but one.”

“The number keeps getting lower,” says Armann Valur, smiling.

“Then I’ll subtract the one,” Jónas says, repeating his original answer.

“You’re exactly right, as ever,” says Armann Valur cheerfully, indicating to one of the rows of students that they should quiet down. “For the Islanders, the most wonderful thing about this astonishing eruption is that none of them was killed. They can thank their God, Betel, for that, the ones who survived.”

Stifled laughter can be heard from the back of the room. Armann Valur casts a meaningful glance at two longhaired boys who are sitting side by side, his eyes questioning whether he has said something funny, whether they have found a reason to start giggling like little girls. Then he turns back to Jónas Hallmundsson who is once again looking out the window.

“And now we come to your third question, Jónas. If you answer it correctly, then you’re in the final. That, I reckon, would be a great victory. The prize—so you know now there’s definitely something to strive for—is a plane trip for one to the Vestmannaeyjar; a plane-trip, obviously, which the victor has to take in his imagination, because as you well know the principal has lately disapproved of schoolteachers sending pupils out of the country, even in the service of knowledge. But the question is–” Armann looks at Brynjólfur leaning towards Jónas so he can whisper something to him, and he jabs his index finger in the air to add emphasis to his next words: “Now, Brynjólfur, you aren’t allowed to slip him the answer before I pose the question.”

And both Jónas and Brynjólfur smile at their teacher.

“The question is this,” continues Armann Valur. “What nickname do the island boys have for the puffins they kill? And do they use their stately animal, the puffin . . . ?” He hesitates a few moments while he works out how to continue. “This question has two parts: What is the nickname the Westman Islanders have for the puffin, and do they use it—that is to say, the bird, once they have stuffed it—to promote their islands abroad? I must admit this is a complicated question, but we are at the Grammar School in Reykjavík, where things tend to be complicated.”

Jónas looks thoughtful. Armann Valur reiterates to Brynjólfur that he isn’t allowed to help his companion, and then Jónas answers:

“‘Professor.’ They call the puffins ‘professor.’ And yes, one could say that the stuffed puffin is a kind of ambassador for the people who live on the island.”

Armann looks at his pupil. He takes off his glasses, breathes on the inside of the glass and puts them back on. “Perhaps ‘provost.’ But ‘professor’ . . . I’m not of the opinion that professor is a better name for this strange bird. This wonderbird.”

“I’d be fine with provost,” says Jónas.

“Yes, no, well, we should think a little about ‘professor.’ Let us—those of us who are gathered here in this room at the Grammar School in Reykjavík—decide that the island boys’ stuffed puffin is called ‘Professor.’ That’s quite logical, since those island boys and girls are a well-educated bunch.” Armann Valur clears his throat and traces his index finger in the air to summon his pupils’ attention. Then he starts speaking as though he’s giving a lecture: “In the Vestmannaeyjar everyone has a university degree. The young as much as the old. At any given moment one-quarter of the residents have doctorates in this and that from the university on the mainland. It may be that they call their bird provost when it’s alive and on the run from the pocket nets of the over-educated islanders. But when it’s stuffed, that black-and-white bird of wisdom—which is the type of bird we are now considering—is better called professor. It is a professor of taxidermy, to be precise: it has studied its own stuffing. After all, it knows all about the straw which is packed in its head as soon as its brain has been removed. It yearns for its eternal existence on a plinth of lava; every movement of its wings, every single take-off, it is always aiming to achieve its fate as soon as possible.”

A pupil towards the end of the middle row raises his hand to ask for permission to speak but Armann Valur continues without stopping:

“You have to find out for yourself,” he says, and then directs his words straight to Jónas, who is busily taking notes on a sheet of paper while obviously having difficultly holding in his laughter. “I notice that you are taking notes, Jónas. That is good. Notes can find you in surprising places—they’re not tied down the way they would be when they’re written into paragraphs.” He hesitates and weighs his words. “Because we are not simply written words. Við erum ekki . . . ‘We are not the stuffed men,’ to quote the poet. To misquote the poet. We don’t get an eternal life on a plinth of lava.” He glances around, clears his throat again and turns back quickly to tell Jónas, “You will have a career in the diplomatic service.”

Jónas has a questioning look in his eyes.

“One day you’ll be a representative for our people. And possibly for the Vestmannaeyjar too.”

Jónas Hallmundsson is the Icelandic teacher Armann Valur’s favorite student, as is evident from the way his classmates react to this declaration: they, especially the boys, are irritated. Besides, Árman has a closer relationship with Jónas than he has with his other pupils.

Armann had once invited Jónas to his place, to his apartment on Rauðarárstígur. One afternoon immediately after final exams at the end of Jónas’s second year at the school they had met by chance on the upper part of Laugavegur, and after talking together and realizing that Jónas’s uncle, Jón Magnússon, was Armann’s former classmate and an acquaintance, Armann seized the opportunity to invite Jónas home to see photographs of the old friends when they were at Grammar School. And to make sure that his young pupil accepted the offer, Armann said he wanted to give him a small volume of poetry written by another friend of his; he was sure Jónas enjoyed poetry.

This was true, though Jónas barely indicated it—it was almost as if he wanted to hide his interest.

The host’s generosity exceeded what Jónas considered appropriate for a teacher to his pupil. After Armann had offered him a pilsner (which he stored on the windowsill), showed him some photographs from a drinking party (with the face of Jónas’s uncle, Jón Magnússon, smack in the middle of them), and given him a faded photocopied booklet of poems by Jónatan Jóhannsson (whose nickname was Jójó), he absolutely insisted that Jónas let him buy them a meal at Matstofa Austurbæjar, a cheap and cheerful diner close to the corner of Snorrabraut and Laugavegur. Jónas had to use considerable skill in turning down the invitation, but Armann reacted with no less cunning by making his guest promise that he could invite him to Matstofa some other time—he considered it an honor and felt that, in the natural course of mentoring his promising pupil, they ought to share a meal. They kept that promise, but not until much later, about a year after Jónas had graduated from the school, when he met Armann in the Lindargata liquor store one Friday and went with him to Hressingarskálinn, where they had coffee (with measures of schnapps) and Danishes.

Jónas later told his cousin Sturla Jón about that afternoon over coffee at Hressingarskálinn, after Jónas had stopped in to visit Sturla at the Útvegsbanki one lunchtime. The conversation had remained with Sturla Jón; he would remember it every time he went into the McDonalds that was later installed in the building which formerly housed Hressingarskálinn.

“And you, Brynjólfur Madsen,” says Armann Valur after he’d informed them all that Jónas had reached the final. “I’m going to ask you the next question, since you’re sitting beside Jónas. What are the letter markings those Islanders put on their ships?” There is no doubt that Armann Valur gets some satisfaction out of pronouncing the name “Madsen,” though the way he exaggerates the Danish sound of it is entirely at odds with the bearer of the name. But before Brynjólfur can answer, Armann jumps in with a sudden gesture, saying “Forgive me, Brynjólfur, but I believe it’s better to ask your colleague Völundur Ermenreksson this question.” He turns to a boy who had been trying to join in the quiz a moment ago and says, “Völundur Ermenreksson, you should be able to tell me what letters they use on the prow of their fleet, the Westman Islanders.”

He has barely spoken when the school bell rings.

Armann Valur, who stopped teaching at the Grammar School in Reykjavík the year after Jónas graduated, went on to teach Icelandic to Sturla Jón at the university, where Sturla began studying the same year he stopped working at the bank. And that same winter, in April 1978, Jónas Hallmundsson took his own life. It happened the same day—possibly the same hour—that Sturla Jón bought himself a used (and very badly treated) copy of a record by the English electric folk band Steeleye Span, All Around My Hat, in a collector’s shop on Laugavegur.

Even though one could say, without hesitation, that those two contemporaries and cousins, Sturla and Jónas, had been brought up almost as brothers until they were twelve or thirteen years old, Jónas’s suicide didn’t effect Sturla the way he felt it should have, given that Jónas was a close relative. During their high school years they began to grow apart, and even though they had common interests in their formative years, not least an enthusiasm for poetry and politics, other aspects of their personalities began to clash, which led to a greater and greater rift between them. This rift was deep and difficult to overlook in the eyes of their fathers, the brothers Jón and Hallmundur, on account of the friendship and close relationship they had shared since childhood. The insurmountable gap was formalized when they each registered for graduate study: Jón at the Grammar School in Reykjavík and Sturla in the Icelandic Business School.

In fact, they didn’t really understand this—least of all Jón Magnússon—because the Icelandic Business School was an unexpected choice for Sturla Jón. When he was questioned, often jokingly (why did someone who couldn’t tell the difference between kronur and aurar, dollars and cents, need to know which was debit and which credit?) Sturla would answer that he bore a grudge against the complacent and arrogant Grammar School; he wanted to associate with a different kind of people, so he was throwing his lot in with the enemy. Additionally, there were cute girls in Business School; the daughters of company owners went there. But whether or not Sturla learned to arrange sums of money in columns marked “debit” and “credit,” he completed the final exams at Business School. Though studying there didn’t get him into the apartment of the daughter of prosperous parents, nor did he sneak himself into the enemy’s confidences, he managed to learn that he ought to avoid everything in life concerned with money, for as long as possible, and he also learned to type—something which he later used when writing and which made a difference in the work he was able to get at the bank once he’d completed his studies.

Soon after Sturla started “working with money,” as he described his business with the telex machine at the bank, Jónas showed up suddenly one morning in the doorway of Foreign Business Transactions, wanting to invite his relative for coffee at Hressingarskálinn. Although it wasn’t the appropriate time to take a coffee break, Sturla got permission from his supervisor to step out. Apart from meeting once in a while at family gatherings, which were rare events, and running into each other in the city center while they were in school, the cousins hadn’t really talked since high school. Even though it turned out that Sturla had to pay for Jónas’s food and drink at Hressingarskálinn, he still appreciated that Jónas had decided to drop in on him.

But the renewal of their friendship soon made Sturla unhappy. When Jónas started dropping in on him regularly during office hours (instead of visiting him at home, since Sturla was living with his father at the time) and when the motivation for a friendly visit was more often than not to ask Sturla for money, it became clear to Sturla that the cousins had nothing in common, and he began to wish that his connection to Jónas could be more like the imaginary acquaintances he’d had with characters in novels that were in vogue that year, promising unfortunates who seemed to despise everything around them, but who mostly just hated themselves. It became clear that Jónas was drinking more than was healthy, and what sat even worse with Sturla was that Jónas, somewhat passive-aggressively, looked down on his cousin Sturla’s fledgling attempts at writing poetry.

As for the “financial aid” he gave his once lost, now found-again cousin, Sturla was quite sure he had, to put it baldly, provided the capital for the liquor and pills which Jónas used to put an end to his life in April, 1978. He had loaned Jónas five thousand kronur two days before he died, and if what Sturla had heard was correct—that there were two empty bottles of Black Death and two empty containers of Magnyl painkillers on the table by the bed where Jónas was found—it was difficult to imagine anything other than that the fatal dose had been bought with the five thousand kronur. Fanný said she had seen Jónas going past her kitchen window at Mánagata the day before he committed the deed, and he’d been holding a black plastic bag, which meant he’d come from Ríkið, the state liquor store on Snorrabraut, on the way home to his rented basement room on Meðalholt. Fanný was, in other words, the last family member to see Jónas alive, and news about his suicide had dealt her such a blow that she didn’t trust herself to go to Jónas’s funeral, something which Hallmundur and Þeba, Jónas’s mother, never forgave her for.

Sturla often thought about his father’s comment that he couldn’t understand why Fanný hadn’t knocked on the window as Jónas went past that day—why she hadn’t invited him in, given how enamored she was of their young nephew and how much she longed to have visitors in her solitude on Mánagata.

As cynical as it sounds, Sturla had calculated a rather simple math problem—a relatively clear debit-and-credit situation—in which, as a repayment of all those little amounts of money he’d loaned his cousin, he deserved to inherit a particular item Jónas had possessed, something which originally belonged to Sturla’s maternal grandfather. Fanný had given the item to Jónas when her father died, and it was something Sturla had longed to own. He’d always thought he would inherit it himself, never imagining that anyone else would lay claim to it when Benedikt died—or that his mother would think to give it to her brother-in-law’s family. The item in question was a high-quality light-brown leather folder which the ambassador Benedikt always kept on his desk in the embassy in Oslo and later, after he moved home, in his office on Reynimelur. It wasn’t so much the tired, strange beauty of this Norwegian document folder that had attracted Sturla when he was a child peering into his grandfather’s office: what he had found thrilling was that Benedikt, the esteemed public servant, had used it as a base when he wrote letters and reflections, and he put all kinds of papers into the leather folder, papers that, in Sturla’s mind, were certain to contain crucial information about relations between the Island in the North and the Rest of the World.

Jónas had probably admired the folder too when he and his parents visited Benedikt and Anna at Reynimelur, but Fanný’s decision that he should inherit it was indicative of her nonsensical belief that he was the promising intellectual in the family: such a jewel ought to be in the hands of a thinker. It was true that Sturla ended up making use of some of the ideas Jónas had thought up and kept in the folder, and it was also true that Sturla’s grandfather’s folder had contained those ideas, but in other respects Jónas’s life turned out to be a poor model. He never became the promising and self-assured ambassador Armann Valur had predicted he would in the classroom on Lækjargata the year Heimaey erupted. He was never sent overseas on behalf of his country.