often thought about his father’s comment that he couldn’t understand why Fanný hadn’t knocked on the window as Jónas went past that day—why she hadn’t invited him in, given how enamored she was of their young nephew and how much she longed to have visitors in her solitude on Mánagata.
As cynical as it sounds, Sturla had calculated a rather simple math problem—a relatively clear debit-and-credit situation—in which, as a repayment of all those little amounts of money he’d loaned his cousin, he deserved to inherit a particular item Jónas had possessed, something which originally belonged to Sturla’s maternal grandfather. Fanný had given the item to Jónas when her father died, and it was something Sturla had longed to own. He’d always thought he would inherit it himself, never imagining that anyone else would lay claim to it when Benedikt died—or that his mother would think to give it to her brother-in-law’s family. The item in question was a high-quality light-brown leather folder which the ambassador Benedikt always kept on his desk in the embassy in Oslo and later, after he moved home, in his office on Reynimelur. It wasn’t so much the tired, strange beauty of this Norwegian document folder that had attracted Sturla when he was a child peering into his grandfather’s office: what he had found thrilling was that Benedikt, the esteemed public servant, had used it as a base when he wrote letters and reflections, and he put all kinds of papers into the leather folder, papers that, in Sturla’s mind, were certain to contain crucial information about relations between the Island in the North and the Rest of the World.
Jónas had probably admired the folder too when he and his parents visited Benedikt and Anna at Reynimelur, but Fanný’s decision that he should inherit it was indicative of her nonsensical belief that he was the promising intellectual in the family: such a jewel ought to be in the hands of a thinker. It was true that Sturla ended up making use of some of the ideas Jónas had thought up and kept in the folder, and it was also true that Sturla’s grandfather’s folder had contained those ideas, but in other respects Jónas’s life turned out to be a poor model. He never became the promising and self-assured ambassador Armann Valur had predicted he would in the classroom on Lækjargata the year Heimaey erupted. He was never sent overseas on behalf of his country.
Skúlagata
The clock shows seven minutes on the way towards 12:00 when the telephone on Sturla’s nightstand rings. He was up until about 4:30 in the morning; he sat at the kitchen table, practically without getting up, from 10:00 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning, drafting a narrative of the poetry festival. And then, between 2:00 and 4:00, he sat in the room with the printed text in front of him on the table, only moving to get a beer from the kitchen. He later listened to some John Martyn songs while he drank his last beer and collected his thoughts, before falling asleep on the living room sofa and waking around 9:00 to go to the bathroom and from there to the bedroom. He is not particularly well rested, therefore, when his father wakes him by calling.
“You never came by with the tape,” are the first words Sturla Jón hears said on this bright October day. And immediately he runs through the mental to-do list he had prepared for his next-to-last day before going to Lithuania. He’d meant to get into the list earlier in the morning: he plans to buy a cell phone (Jón had told him that before starting to use such a phone one would need to charge the battery for a full twenty-four hours); he plans to talk to Jónatan Jóhannsson, Jójó, about the article for the magazine; and he plans to visit his mother at Nýlendugata—he knows she will be devastated if he doesn’t go to say goodbye before he leaves.
“It got stuck in the machine,” Sturla answers, watching his alarm clock change to 11:08.
“What do you mean, stuck in the machine?”
Sturla Jón gets out of bed and starts dressing himself while describing to his father how the tape of the Iranian movie had held his attention for half-an-hour without him actually getting to see any of the movie. He’d put the cassette in the VCR (the way a person puts a cassette in the VCR) and after the tape had played for a few seconds it stopped, and didn’t just stop: the tape had been wrenched out from the black plastic case into the bowels of the machine, and so there was no way to get the tape out of the machine without cutting it or taking the machine itself apart. Neither option had seemed promising.
“There’s a man here waiting for the tape,” Jón says, and he reminds Sturla of something he already knows well, even though he is poorly rested and has a headache: he had planned to return the tape to his father at Skólavörðustígur before he went to work.
“Didn’t the library only just open?” And Sturla asks himself a question he hadn’t really thought much about before: shouldn’t his father have retired and be collecting his pension, now that he is in his sixty-eighth year?
“Yes, it opened ten minutes ago,” answers Jón.
“Isn’t the time in Hafnarfjörður the same as in Reykjavík?”
“You ought to have someone untangle the movie from the machine for you, if you can’t do it yourself,” says his father, scoldingly. “He’s waiting here for it, that man.”
“What type of person waits for the library in Hafnarfjörður to open in the morning to get himself an Iranian movie?” Sturla asks his father, realizing straightaway that this remark has only managed to slip out because last night’s alcohol is still in his bloodstream, and that there’s a chance drunkenness might have played a role in the powerful inspiration which had gripped him when writing his article.
“There are people, even in Hafnarfjörður, who are interested in movies which aren’t American or British,” replies Jón. The man who was waiting for the movie had ordered it from the library yesterday; he should have known it was a total mistake to lend Sturla a movie that someone was going to borrow the next day.
Sturla says he will take the machine to get repaired this afternoon; Jón will have to give the man a different movie instead.
“Did you just wake up?” asks Jón.
Sturla glances at the clock and tells himself it is absurd for the sixty-seven-year-old father to scold his fifty-one-year-old son for not waking up early enough. Without it having occurred to him before, Sturla begins thinking about another father and son relationship, and he answers his father’s question by saying that he wrote his Judgment last night—his own Urteil—which took him exactly the same amount of time it took Kafka to write his, from 10:00 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning. He is going to let Jójó have the text for his magazine before he leaves for Lithuania. It is in a way a “departure” from the things he has written before: it isn’t only a judgment against himself but it’s also a well-reasoned, constructive article about the current state of poetry.
Without making a dig at his son’s accomplishment—without even making a sarcastic remark about the editor Jónatan Jóhannsson, as Sturla expected him to—Jón tells him to have the movie ready by tomorrow. Then he says goodbye, hangs up, and immediately calls back to remind his son to buy a phone, as he advised him the day before. “I can show you how it works when you bring me the movie in the morning,” he adds.
Sturla sighs deeply and shakes his head. When he goes out of the bedroom into the living room, buck-naked, he notices the living-room table is covered in white sheets, books, and empty beer bottles which he’d arranged at one end of the table. “Two hours away from the city.” He strokes his stomach and then his hand travels down to scratch his crotch. He picks up a sheet of paper from the table and reads aloud: “Two hours away from the city. By Sturla Jón Jónsson.” Then he goes back into the bedroom and puts on dark blue, rather baggy chinos, a wine-red shirt, a brown cardigan, and white socks. He goes to the tall living room window and looks out at Akrafjall mountain, Esjan, and the gas station on Skúlagata, and he repeats to himself, quietly, the title of the article, Two hours away from the city.
He gets himself coffee and cookies. Next he clears the beer bottles from the living-room table, disconnects the VCR and places it in a plastic bag. He stands for a minute in front of the coat hooks, debating whether to go out in his new overcoat or his blue duffel coat, and after looking at the weather out of the kitchen window he opts for the latter, wrapping