one of the side-pockets of the overcoat.
By the time he leaves the store, it has begun to rain. It’s cold rain, one step shy of sleet. Sturla buttons his overcoat and thinks about how the salesman commented on a prospective buyer’s likely uses for this item of clothing. This customer, Sturla Jón, is not a cell phone user but a smoker. As if to prove to passers-by that that is exactly the sort of person he is, someone who wouldn’t want to be disturbed by a phone ringing while he is out in the open air, someone who instead expresses his independence with the guilty pleasures of smoking, he pauses on the sidewalk of Bankastræti, right outside the store, fishes a packet of Royales from his inside jacket pocket, taps out a cigarette, and, after lighting it, slides the packet into the made-to-measure inside pocket, but not without difficulty; the packet only just fits.
He goes down Bankastræti in the direction of the Útvegsbanki building on Lækjartorg, a bank which no longer exists. Sturla had actually worked there for nearly two years before going abroad to study; he’d been in the department that handled foreign exchange. A young woman from New Zealand had worked beside him in the bank, and her name now appeared right in front of him, on a vertical, red sign standing on the south-west corner of the old stone house at Bankastræti 3: Stella.
Sturla comes to a sudden halt directly under the sign. He looks around to see if anyone has paid any attention to him or is at all surprised that he stopped so suddenly, and he takes another few steps forward before turning to contemplate the Stella sign as he inhales the stimulating cigarette smoke. He’d stopped because a question occurred to him: Had the sign been there when he was a young man, or is it a new addition? And, along similar lines—and this flabbergasts him—how on earth can he not know for sure? One voice in his head tells him that the shop has been around at least as long as he has, that it is one of the oldest shops in town; another voice insists that the apparent age of this sign is nothing but a figment of his imagination, the subconscious mind’s way of implying that the other, New Zealand Stella—whose slender, feminine fingers had, a quarter-century before, sent amounts of money overseas on the next telex machine to his—had felt for Sturla exactly the way he had longed for her to feel at the time. It was entirely possible that, despairing at some point over whether the woman from New Zealand had any feelings for him, Sturla had looked out of the window of the Foreign Exchange and, gripped by a poetic flight of fancy—which he of all people might succumb to, since he is, after all, a poet—his eye had alighted on a sign on Bankastræti bearing her name, like a message from above, like the sun rising in the east.
Sturla turns back to look at the old Útvegsbanki building and confirms with a smile that the windows of his long-abandoned workplace hadn’t faced Lækjartorg; they had instead looked out onto Austurstræti. There was no way he would have been able to look along Bankastræti, at least not at the odd-numbered houses. He continues on his way, but stops again almost immediately to look at two rust-red, life-sized statues of people that rise up from the sidewalk, standing face to face. Only the torsos of the sculptures have been designed to resemble the human body; the lower halves consist solely of a perfect cube, which might represent nothing more than a cube but which might also symbolize the artist’s intention for the work. Whether there is a particular significance to these statues or not, they give Sturla the impression of suffering and fear. One of the statues is looking down, bowed by a weight the passing pedestrian can only guess at; the other has thrown its head back and is wearing a pathetic expression, as if inviting the viewer to cut its throat. Sturla looks between the statues, along Bernhöftstorfan in the direction of Skólastræti, and contemplates the corrugated iron roof of Reykjavík’s Grammar School in the distance. Four lines from his newly finished book of poems, assertions, come to mind:
the house on the hill
which we face towards
the mother, the window
the darkness of the shadows
Sturla—the purported author of the poem—isn’t sure whether these lines actually describe the very educational institution he is now looking at or whether they describe another kind of institution: the mother who sees everything, a dark figure in the kitchen on the other side of the window’s glass, standing and watching her progeny play on the sidewalk.
Is there a connection, indeed, between the first two lines and lines three and four, between the house and the mother? Does the house symbolize the father? In my Father’s house are many rooms: Sturla’s father’s flat, at the top of Skólavörðustígur, opposite the church on the hill, is a one-bedroom which, besides the living room and bedroom, has a hall, kitchen, and bathroom (which Sturla is planning to use when he drops in on his father after running a quick errand on Austurstræti). In this case, the son, Sturla, has even more rooms than the father, since Sturla’s apartment on Skúlagata is technically a two-bedroom.
Suddenly the rain gets heavier. Sturla stubs out his cigarette, puts up the collar on his coat, and presses on in the direction of Lækjargata. As he goes past the Prime Minister’s office a sharp gust of wind blows from the north. The weather, in all its bitterness, emphasizes the warm practicality of Sturla’s new overcoat, an overcoat that is only lined with thin, red-patterned cotton yet offers considerable protection from both wind and water, and which—as the name of the coat implies, no less significantly—would protect one’s shoulders from the dust which falls from above, the way a dust jacket protects a book.
Skólavörðustígur
“You’re all wet,” says Jón Magnússon as he lets his son, Sturla Jón, into the apartment on Skólavörðuholt and watches him remove his wet overcoat in the hallway before draping it over the back of a kitchen chair, in front of the oven.
“May I use your bathroom?” asks Sturla. His right hand is dripping wet from running it through his hair, and he looks as if he needs to dry himself off before doing anything else.
“May you? You’re in your own father’s home, Sturla.”
Sturla goes apologetically into the bathroom and locks the door.
He has come from a bookstore on Austurstræti, having bought himself a hotdog and a cold Pepsi from the kiosk opposite Lækjartorg. At the bookstore he bought a folder to keep printouts of ideas for stories he intends to write. Now that he has published his latest collection of poetry he has made a deal with himself, or so he describes it in his head: he won’t write any more poetry. Instead, the lines on his page will reach the margin and form blocks where previously there was an irregular collection of uneven lines pointing towards the margin but never quite touching it. And, on the way back up Bankastræti—as if to suggest the folder is going to come in handy straight away—Sturla Jón has an idea for a story, a short-story. It was, he thought, basically about everything he’d done in his life in the past fifteen minutes: a middle-aged poet goes into a bookstore to see, for the first time, his newly-published book sitting with all the other newly-published books, tightly-wrapped in glistening cellophane, on display with its price tag facing the literary-minded folk and other customers of the bookstore. This book has become a commodity to be bought and sold, the value it acquires destined to be measured not against a price tag stuck on a copy, but against each individual reader’s opinion as to whether it was a worthy item or not.
In Sturla’s opinion, there is an irony to this that results from a deception the poet himself perpetrates: when it comes down to it, his value is only ever evident from the price tag on the book, and every year will bring a new sticker and a lower price until, in the end, when the last copies of the book finally sell at the Icelandic Discount Book Fair, twenty or thirty years later, the price on the sticker will have dropped under 100 kronur, down as low as double-digits. Because of this, and in order to make the distance between the author and his subject matter clear—or else the reader might somehow start imagining he was describing his own experience—Sturla had come up with an idiosyncratic character,
