Sturla nods his head and opens the door.
“But Iceland?” the man hurries to add. “It’s fucking cold, I presume?”
And Sturla asks himself, before he answers, where the man got hold of his English. And when Sturla answers affirmatively, the man shivers as though it has suddenly become freezing cold, and he blows into the air to emphasize his opinion of Iceland. And, before he starts the next tune, he raises his jacket collar around his neck, flashes a smile which gives Sturla an uneasy feeling, and waves to indicate that their conversation is over; Sturla is free to go in through the door of the restaurant, if he wants.
Never talk to strangers, Sturla says to himself, and he remembers suddenly that these words are the name of a chapter in a book he has read, though he can’t recall what book that is at the moment. He wonders if this deep-voiced Rod Stewart fan is as ignorant as Áslákur in the lift on Skúlagata, who didn’t know about Iceland’s support for Lithuania’s fight for independence fifteen years ago. Surely a Lithuanian person of this man’s age, old enough to remember the events of the past fifteen years, ought to express thanks to an Icelander he meets by chance for their support in making life bearable in his homeland, rather than venting his opinion that Iceland is intolerably cold?
There is no one in the place, and the clock shows it’s not much past eleven. The dark brown wood fixtures remind him of something German or Austrian, and the sound of the music which is coming out of little loudspeakers, including one by the coat hooks, is in keeping with the fixtures. Sturla thinks some more about what he read describing the founding of Vilnius: among the artisans who Count Gediminas enticed from the small towns in Germany to settle in the new city, there must have been some musicians, perhaps like the bass player outside on the sidewalk in wide-brimmed hat, tall leather boots, and torn jacket — musicians playing tunes by the Rod Stewart and the Faces of their day and age. Besides the music, the first sign of life that Sturla discerns is an old man in a cook’s uniform who trots out one of the doors, which looks like it leads to the kitchen, and in through another, which he guesses is the bathroom. Sturla takes off his overcoat and hangs it on the coat hook in the entryway. Then he goes into the two-room dining room, where finely checkered cloths lie on all the tables, and he chooses a seat in the far corner of the room. He reaches for the breast pocket of his jacket, to check if he’s got his cell phone, then remembers the hazelnut in his overcoat and decides to get it; he wants it nearby.
When he turns back from the coat hook, carrying not only the nut but also the overcoat, which he has decided to keep at his table since he is alone, a young waiter is standing in his way. He gives Sturla a friendly smile but also shakes his head, offering another kind of smile that somehow convinces Sturla not to protest when the waiter takes his overcoat, saying he will hang it on the coat hook. He then invites Sturla to sit in the outer room, but Sturla tells him he’s already chosen a seat in the inner room — he wants to be more isolated — and he orders a large beer and some good liquor; the waiter proposes cherry brandy.
“That sounds good,” says Sturla, and he watches as the black-clad waiter takes the overcoat towards the coat hooks. He goes back to his seat and rests his arms on the arms of the chair, which he feels embrace him like a flesh-and-blood person. He lights a cigarette. He is pleased with the place and resolves not to let himself be affected by the everyday matters his father might later report from Iceland. The lyrical version of reality — no matter how tough he knows the real situation to be — looks much better among these surroundings. This place’s walls have certainly never belonged to an American fast-food joint, while the old, traditional eateries in Reykjavík were giving way to cheap, soulless international restaurant chains. That said, the impossible had happened: Hressingarskálinn in Austurstræti had gone back to being Hressingarskálinn again after the McDonald’s hadn’t done very well in that location. But Sturla could still see before him the plastic fixtures of the fast-food franchise; even though the management of the place had changed a long time after he and Jónas used to meet up there, he places himself and his cousin in red and yellow plastic chairs as he recalls (and invents) their conversations about the latter’s poetry manuscript and the “northern moors” melancholy which Jónas had said he perceived in the tunes and lyrics of the musician Megas.
It was about two weeks before Jónas died. He had shown up at Sturla’s workplace right at midday, to make sure he could catch the bank employee before he went for lunch, and Sturla, who was not especially eager to meet up with his cousin — he was, sad to say, becoming very annoyed at Jónas’s visits to the bank — asked him to wait at Hressingarskálinn while he finished some telex-messages which needed to be sent before midday. It turned out that Sturla enjoyed chatting with Jónas on that occasion; he found that his cousin shared numerous details about himself, details which it was natural and healthy for them to share. He even, totally unexpectedly, surprised Sturla by paying for lunch — that had never happened before, and didn’t happen the two subsequent times they met up there.
When they’d sat down, well inside the western room in Hressingarskálinn, Jónas said that Sturla’s mother, Fanný, had phoned his father, Hallmundur, the day before and asked after him. He added that he didn’t often hear from his father (something Sturla already knew) and that they didn’t have an especially good relationship (which was no less familiar to Sturla) but that Hallmundur had dropped by his place on Meðalholt to let him know that Fanný had called and that she wanted to talk to him. Jónas didn’t have a phone in his cellar apartment. He had no idea what Fanný might want to talk to him about, and Sturla, who thought he knew that his cousin was half-scared of his mother — others were too — told Jónas that it was entirely safe to talk to her; perhaps she wanted to ask him something. Jónas said he would visit her, and he began talking about Norðurmýri: some days he would go past Sturla’s parents’ house at Mánagata 10, and on sunless days the neighborhood seemed to him to correspond to Megas’s first album, to the sweet, cruel mood of his peculiar version of Come and Look Into My Coffin, a mood he described as the gray, shingled eclipse of the mind; (Sturla later saw those words typed in the manuscript Jónas had been talking about that time at Hressó.) Going into Norðurmýri from a westerly direction he always recalled the lyrics that came from inside the coffin: my tongue is stiff it offends no one any more / although the liquor store is close, / I can’t make it there or make a purchase. The State Liquor Store was on Snorrabraut, a relatively short distance away from Meðalholt, and Jónas tended to buy his alcohol there, although sometimes he would go to the Lindargata State Liquor Store — for example, the time when he met Armann Valur, his old teacher from high school, two years ago, and they went to Hressingarskálinn together.
Shortly after Jónas died, Sturla had asked his mother why she tried to call Jónas — Jónas had heard about it from his father — but she didn’t remember why. To this day, no one knew what she’d wanted from Jónas.
Discussing Norðurmýri indirectly led Jónas and Sturla to start talking about poetry as they sat in Hressó having coffee and rolls, and it turned out that Jónas had written an entire manuscript of poetry. He had begun it during his penultimate year in grammar school, but he’d never shown it to anyone and didn’t expect to find a publisher for it — the manuscript wasn’t anything more than some crappy imitations of dusty old modernists, and it consisted in part of ironic attempts to poke fun at the collectivistic, regimenting wise-ass criminality of those commie Fylkingin Poets who dominated the poetry scene these days. But perhaps he would show Sturla the mess one day, though he wasn’t allowed to laugh at him. “I would be very keen to see the manuscript,” Sturla had said. And he still remembered, word-for-word, Jónas’ response to his sincere interest: “Perhaps you could use something from it. Some lines might be useful to you.” And he had promised to bring “that garbage” the next time he looked in on Sturla at the bank.