“Did mother mention anything about a folder?” asks Sturla.
“What folder?”
“You remember my folder, the one I always used at my writing desk; the one I got from Jónas.”
“Sturla.”
As soon as she says his name in that admonishing fashion he knows exactly what she will say next (even though it has been a long time since this last happened); she will tell him how nothing remains of their past but the five children. She doesn’t remember some folder Sturla had hunched over when he should have been caring for the children. And then she adds that she is uncomfortable talking to Fanný because it always reminds her of the atmosphere of the past. She doesn’t have anything against his mother, but she feels it is more important that she talks to her grandchildren than to her. The problem was that Hulda, about two years ago, had scolded Fanný for calling while drunk and wanting to speak to the children — not, of course, a good model — and so Fanný had practically ceased talking to them; instead, she’d largely focused her drunken speculations on Hulda, as the previous evening’s conversation indicated. Had Fanný needed to tell her, Hulda, something about how she’d tried to invite her young nephew up to her apartment? There was no other way Hulda could understand Fanný’s remark that Jónas “had not been up to the task.”
And this is also true for Sturla, as he asks Hulda to say goodbye to the children and puts down the phone: he gets himself a glass of water from the bathroom, and then he grabs his wallet and goes down to the cafeteria, where he orders two cold bottles of beer and a double cherry brandy.
On the way back up, cursing the hotel for not having an elevator, he thinks about Áslákur, his neighbor on Skúlagata. That’s what a poet does, he thinks, as he remembers his neighbor’s curiosity about what poets do at a poetry festivaclass="underline" they fetch a few drinks from the hotel bar, because at the place they’re staying the minibar is empty, and they struggle up four flights of stairs with the drinks on a plastic tray because the hotel can’t accommodate an elevator.
Sturla is having difficulty breathing by the time he gets to the fourth floor, which leads him to contemplate a ridiculous idea: that perhaps he would benefit from the sort of fitness training his daughter Hildigunnur participates in. When he has reached his room, put down the tray, picked the overcoat up off the floor and set it on the bed, he looks at the hotel information brochure, which is contained in a faux-leather folder. And when he turns the illustrated page he finds, to his surprise, that he’d lied to Hildigunnur: there is a gym at the hotel. In a low-quality photograph one could see a white-painted room with bikes and weight-lifting machines, but what occurs to Sturla about that photograph — and the thought makes him happy — is that this is fitness training for loners. Due to the small size, it’s only right for one individual at a time.
Half an hour later, when he has finished the drinks from the cafeteria, Sturla makes up his mind to go to Druskininkai the next day, however he gets there. He calls the front desk and asks Elena — she says her name; she’s the one who welcomed him when he first arrived at the hotel — to find out for him whether any buses go to Druskininkai, and when they leave. While he waits for her to call back with the information, he begins imagining a good-looking woman of around forty, completely unconnected to Elena, who looks out from the dim, first-floor window of a three-story pebbledash house: this woman is a mother, not Norman Bates’s mother (which his father Jón had suggested as an interpretation for the mother in Sturla’s poem) but his own mother, not at Nýlendugata, but at Mánagata.
DIPLOMATIC DUTIES
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” said Hallmundur, who was at the wheel of the dark brown Cortina he and Þeba owned. Hallmundur and Jón, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, had been talking about a movie — the topic of discussion they most enjoyed because they always ended the discussion with different opinions — and Jón answered his brother’s proverb with another one:
“But the person who pauses to rest on a rock will be happy twice over.”
This wasn’t the first time they’d ended a conversation by citing contextless and variously unintelligible proverbs.
Sturla was sitting behind Hallmundur in the car; beside him was Þeba, and next to the window on the other side, folded-up like an insect cocooning itself away from the world, sat Jónas, who during the entire drive along Ártúnsbrekka had been accusing his mother of taking up too much room on the seat and pressing up on him while “Sturla Jón” (even Jónas had never called him Stulli) had an unfairly large amount of room on his side. Jónas complained so much that Þeba asked Hallmundur to stop the car at Litla kaffistofan, the coffee shop on Hellisheiði, where she changed seats with her son, so he was sitting next to Sturla. That arrangement didn’t work any better; Jónas soon began pinching Sturla’s leg, and when Sturla called out in pain, having endured his cousin’s torture as long as possible, the car was approaching the ski lodge at Hveradalir; Þeba took the opportunity to ask Hallmundur to stop in the lodge’s car park so that she could change seats again with “the monster,” his son.
They had driven to Hveragerði, where Sturla and Jónas had had their hopes dashed: the monkey at Eden “was being fixed” (as Jón thought he’d heard), and then, on the way home, it had started pouring rain, provoking Jónas’s whining about being squeezed in the back seat. That led to his mother getting genuinely angry. As a result, Hallmundur had asked his brother Jón to drive the car, and he himself got in back, between Þeba and Sturla, while the grumbling Jónas was seated up front where he started to read a manual about the car he had found in the glove compartment; this finally quieted him down.
While the rearrangements in the car took place by the side of the road, shortly after they had driven up Kambarnir, Sturla hoped they’d forget to fasten Jónas’s seatbelt. Then he asked why his mom, Fanný, had not come along with them instead of Jónas, who didn’t even want to go for a drive out of town. Jónas pretended not to hear his cousin’s remark — he seemed absorbed in teaching himself about the technical details of the Cortina — and so Hallmundur began describing how he’d wanted them all to go, that it was possible to fit six people in the car (a peculiar assertion in light of the difficulty they’d only just managed to solve with this new seating arrangement), but Þeba had disagreed, insisting that it was a non-negotiable rule: no more than five people could travel in this type of car at once, and to suggest otherwise was not only illegal but also irresponsible. Jón didn’t defend Hallmundur; he knew all too well the real reason Fanný hadn’t come with them on the trip was because she couldn’t stand Þeba. For her part Þeba, who wasn’t blind to Fanný’s feelings about her, had no particular interest in spending time with her sister-in-law.
When Sturla emerges from his recollections of that car trip from long ago and looks out the window of the stationary bus, he immediately notices an old, bent over woman who he saw a little earlier in the bus station. She is wearing a baggy, dark blue coat and standing outside the bus holding a jam jar with a white lid. She stares at him with a wrinkled brow, and just as Sturla is waiting for the half-full bus to depart for Druskininkai, the woman seems to be waiting for something — perhaps the same thing as Sturla.