“No, your dad didn’t know about it. And doesn’t know about it. What’s more, it’s none of his business.” She takes a sip from her shot glass and moves it in Sturla’s direction to clink glasses before she sets it down.
Sturla lifts his shot glass to touch hers.
“Have you seen him recently?” asks Fanný when she has finished her drink. “I want to show you the picture,” she adds, standing up.
“I don’t need to see it,” replies Sturla.
“You don’t need to see it? I know you don’t need to see it but I want to show you it anyway.” She goes into the bedroom and comes back with a black plastic folder which she places on the kitchen table before she fetches the cold bottle of schnapps from the counter by the sink. She sits down while she takes a black and white photograph from the folder — it’s of a young woman with light, wavy hair and small but beautifully-shaped breasts; there is no doubt it is Fanný, and no doubt that the model had warm feelings for the person holding the camera.
Sturla takes the picture from his mother’s hand and looks at it a little while. And as if to show that contemplating his mother’s naked chest doesn’t make him uncomfortable he lifts his cigarette and sucks in a long drag of smoke while he examines the picture. Then he places it on the side and gives his mother — and, in the process, the photographer — his opinion that it is an elegant picture. “But when is it being exhibited?” he asks.
“You’ll have to ask Helgi,” Fanný answers, smiling absent-mindedly, as if she wants to recall the feeling she remembers — or imagines — having felt when the picture was taken. “I don’t know anything more about it, other than that he intends to ask our little Örn to write something for the exhibition program.”
“To ask Örn to write about the pictures?” Sturla tries best as he can to make her understand, without using so many words, that this isn’t a particularly good idea.
“Yes, what can I say? I’m just the model,” says Fanný in a dramatic, cloying way, which suddenly annoys Sturla; he finds the whole thing quite disagreeable.
“I don’t like it, mom.” He finds it strange to hear himself say the word “mom” to his mother. “Örn and Dad meet almost every day.”
“And what about it, my dear son? Did your father turn you into such a great prude? Don’t blame that on me.”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with this.”
“But you are pleased with the picture, right?”
“Yes, mom, it’s an elegant picture, you look beautiful in the picture.”
“Those are the very same breasts you suckled at when you were little,” says Fanný smiling, and she waves Sturla’s cigarette smoke away from her. “When you were little. When you were a shrimp. Newly born like a. . infant.”
“Do you remember the folder you gave Jónas?” asks Sturla, replacing the photograph in the plastic folder.
“You always looked away when I pointed you towards my breasts,” continues Fanný, though she takes back her words, saying she was only joking. “Why should you have been shy about such matters? You who ended up having five children, a whole kindergarten, and who was present for all the births, isn’t that right?”
“Do you remember the folder you gave to Jónas?” Sturla repeats, replacing the black plastic folder by the wall at the end of the table.
“Do I remember the folder? What folder?” Fanný picks up the plastic folder, takes the photograph of herself back out, and contemplates it as though she’d forgotten to scrutinize some particular detail.
“The one grandfather had,” says Sturla. “The folder he always kept on his writing desk. It was a leather folder you could open up; there were some compartments in it, almost like envelopes, and inside it was some sort of dry, thick paper which was designed to be an underlay for writing on.”
Fanný sets aside the photograph and takes off her glasses, which are lime-green in color and also shaped like two horizontal limes or lemons. She bends her head and strokes her temples like she is trying to hide some pain that she can’t keep the lower half of her face from revealing. Sturla watches her replace the picture in the folder and put it on the kitchen chair at the other end of the counter.
“Why are you bringing this up?” asks Fanný when she has put her glasses back on. “What about this folder?”
“Don’t you remember giving it to him?”
“Are you sure I gave Jónas some folder?” She drinks from her red wine glass and dries her lips with a napkin from the counter.
“I know it because, among other things, I was quite upset that you gave it to him.”
“And what about this folder? Why on earth would you be upset about some folder?”
“Because I had always wanted to own it. But right after grandfather died you all of a sudden gave the folder to Jónas. Because he was such a wonderful student.”
“A wonderful student?” Fanný smiles half-sadly, and looks around pensively.
“All I wanted to know was whether you remembered this. Not that it makes any difference now.”
“No, my Sturla, it doesn’t make any difference at all. How many years has it been since poor Jónas died?”
They are silent for a while. Then, when Sturla says that it mattered a lot, that it matters even more to him today, Fanný suddenly loses her patience.
“Sturla. If you want a folder exactly like that, you can take this folder here.” She indicates the plastic folder on the kitchen counter. “I don’t need a special folder to cover my breasts. They will be on public display anyway soon. I even think the show will be at the Art Museum of the Icelandic Federal Labor Union, or whatever it’s called.”
“Mom, I’m not mentioning the folder because I need a folder. I’ve had grandfather’s folder ever since Jónas died.”
Fanný shrugs her shoulders, as if to show there is no need to discuss the matter further.
“I am talking about it now because there were things in the folder that belonged to each of them, both grandfather and Jónas. There were papers from grandfather from when he was in Norway, and some photographs, and a whole manuscript. .”
“I remember pictures of you and Jónas which your grandfather had on his desk,” interrupts Fanný. “You were on a swing in the playground across from Freyjugata.”
Sturla looks disappointedly at his mother, who continues:
“I always went there with you, when I was looking after you boys those years Þeba worked at the office. Don’t you remember the photo?”
Sturla says he remembered it.
“I took it myself using your father’s camera. The one he never allowed me to use. You were on the right swing and Jónas on the left and behind you was that nurse who killed herself.”
While his mother spends a long time telling him — perhaps it seems longer because Sturla has heard it all before — about how the young nurse at the kindergarten on Freyjugata cut her life short; about how Þeba, the wife of Hallmundur, Jón’s brother, made her family very unhappy by taking a job (even though Hallmundur earned more than enough for the family); and how it fell to her to care for the young Jónas as well as her own children, Jónas who fifteen years after the picture was taken at the playground cut his own life short using the very same method as the woman who had stood between him and Sturla in the picture — the whole time Fanný’s narrative grows from moment to moment like a dark and sinister flower, watered by the wine, Sturla smokes one cigarette on the heels of another and has another two shots of schnapps; he doesn’t make a fuss when Fanný opens another bottle of red wine, though it isn’t yet five o’clock. He regards this woman, recalling the conversation he’d had with his father two days earlier, and is amazed that he almost described to her what the folder she gave to Jónas contained. Why on earth would he tell her about that? He must never tell anyone.