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