The kids who were laughing at the table are now sitting in silence and don’t seem to notice Sturla as he goes past them. Still thinking about his failed attempt to order coffee, he looks to see what the Nordic guy is drinking, and isn’t very surprised to find that it’s tea. Though Sturla had considered saying hello to the man, he now decides not to; he raises his head and pushes open the glass door which swings into the hotel lobby. As he does, he thinks about how a coffee shop like this one doesn’t deserve better customers than those who make their own cigarettes and order nothing more than a single cup of tea all evening.
“I couldn’t get any coffee to take up to my room,” Sturla tells the redhead at reception; she is now sitting and talking with another young woman in an identical uniform who is putting on make-up. She seems surprised that Sturla couldn’t get any coffee, and she says she will fix it right away; he can go on up and she will bring him some coffee. Sturla thanks her gratefully and asks her to order him an espresso; he prefers coffee without milk.
What are my children doing right now? he wonders as he goes upstairs, and is immediately amazed that he is thinking about his offspring so unexpectedly, here in this distant place. Is it possible some of them were thinking about their father at the same moment, perhaps worrying that he is alone, so far away from everyone he knows? Are they are also worrying whether he will succeed in the assignment he has been given, an assignment on behalf of his country: to represent it in the narrow but vital world of poetry? No. Hardly. It had not occurred to him once to mention his role here in such grand terms. As he climbs to his floor he begins imagining what his five children are doing at that moment. He pauses and tries to picture them for himself, in the same way the omniscient narrator of a realistic novel would if he wanted to describe Sturla Jón’s sons and daughters:
Egill is sitting by the kitchen table with his mother, Hulda, and his girlfriend Puri. It is evening, as it is in Lithuania, but it isn’t the same time: there’s a three-hour difference between Iceland and mainland Northern Europe. It is uncomfortably bright in Hulda’s kitchen: sixty-watt lightbulbs in the ceiling lights illuminate every corner and every surface, but in the window is the deep darkness you find out in the country. Símon, Hulda’s partner, a store manager, is probably still at work. Hulda tells Egill how happy she is to have all five of her children at home with her; it doesn’t happen often. But Egill, who lives in London and is visiting Egilsstaðir briefly, is immersed in thoughts of Reykjavík: he longs to be in the capital city where he knows — or ought to know, since even his father knows it — that two American neo-country-and-western bands are playing concerts this weekend. The Spanish Puri undoubtedly also wants to be in the capital city, if what Egill told Sturla is true and she is a songwriter and singer who has put out a few CDs — something Sturla knows isn’t necessarily any indication of success or fame nowadays.
The interplay of these two facts — that he is enjoying his freedom in a hotel away from home while his son is imprisoned with his mother and Símon — causes Sturla to feel a little guilty; he never told Egill that he and Puri could stay at his place on Skúlagata if they went to Reykjavík before going back to London. But Sturla isn’t especially keen to loan his apartment to his oldest son. Three years ago, when Egill came home to Iceland unexpectedly with his then-girlfriend, an Irish artist who was ten years older than him, Sturla was staying in Stykkishólmur, in a house he’d rented through the Writer’s Union. When Egill let him know that he was looking for a place to stay for a few days, Sturla was happy to tell him he could get the key to Skúlagata from his grandfather Jón and that he could stay in the apartment while Sturla was away. Sturla wasn’t quite so happy when he returned from his trip to Stykkishólmur, more than a week after Egill and the Irish woman had left. Judging by the mess, it seemed like they had needed to abandon the apartment in a hurry, after holding a party. It later came to light that six CDs had vanished from Sturla’s collection: three by Incredible String Band, two by Joni Mitchell, and the CD which Sturla considered probably his favorite in his collection: It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best by Karen Dalton. And when he called Egill to let him know that his acquaintances, that rabble he’d invited into the apartment, had cleaned out his CD collection, Egill suddenly remembered he’d borrowed the CDs; he would return them next time he visited.
Notwithstanding the disorder that had characterized Egill’s life since he was a young man, and notwithstanding his lack of success in finding his own sound as a musician — a sound he could call his own and which didn’t remind him of many other people — Sturla still had faith that his son would eventually “find the right note” and stand out, just as he, the father, had succeeded (at least in the opinion of the so-called literary establishment) with the publication of his fourth book, which came out when he was thirty-five years old. However, the works in that book hadn’t been “written themselves” like the poems he’d written until then. Sturla’s experience working as a prison warden for two years before sitting down to write free from freedom had invigorated his poetry, and his method of describing the prison experience appealed so well to the Icelandic literary scene that not only did the book sell a thousand copies when it came out, but it even continued to sell the next year, better than the books Sturla had published after that. And just as that book, based on his specific experiences as a prison guard, earned Sturla Jón a lasting reputation (even if men like his neighbor on Skúlagata, Láki or whatever he called himself, don’t know he is a poet), so Sturla expects something similar awaits his son Egilclass="underline" he will be able to utilize his own unique experience living in a major city overseas and getting to know people of different backgrounds. Sooner or later he’ll work out how to shape that experience into a form people will understand.
Gunnar, Sturla’s next-oldest son, had on occasion asked to stay with his father while he was in Reykjavík, and one weekend, when he was flying south to compete in a table-tennis tournament, he’d stayed in the apartment alone. But his interests and sense of duty were so unlike his brother’s that Sturla would even trust Gunnar with his work as super if he needed to. On the other hand, their relationship as father and son is a long way from being what Sturla thought the relationship between close family members ought to be. Soon after Gunnar began working for his step-father in the grocery department of the Cooperative regional store, his relations with Sturla had become merely civil — stiff, even. In the four years Gunnar had worked with Símon (instead of continuing his studies, as it had always seemed he would), it would be fair to say his entire world had shrunk to what he had to say about the two- or three-thousand square-meter storeroom of Samkaup Selections, his workplace. As a teenager, Gunnar had shown some interest in his father’s poetry, had at least read his books, and had once written a little essay about a few poems from the first one, but in recent years Sturla’s next-oldest (or next-youngest) son had expressed his strong disapproval of “that hobbyhorse, poetry,” as Gunnar once let slip out in his father’s company.
Those words had possibly had a worse effect on Sturla than they should have: the accusation was made at a gathering of Hulda’s family, a gathering which Sturla’s mother-in-law had insisted he come to, despite (or because) he hadn’t seen Hulda’s relatives since they’d separated almost ten years before. And although Sturla had generally not spoken much with the mother of his children after the separation, the change which had come over their son Gunnar was motivation enough to talk to her. Hulda, on the other hand, absolutely refused to talk about how their twenty-four-year-old son’s behavior and mentality had come to resemble a sixty-year-old grocery store manager’s, as Sturla put it bluntly — Hulda was, in fact, offended by Sturla’s comments, and possibly reasonably so.