counting through all the bank notes they receive from the cashiers on the ground floor.
Suddenly a flood of hundred-kronur coins crashed into the coin tray. Sturla had been too immersed in the past to notice three oranges line up in a row on the screen of the slot machine, and he’d not realized that he only had one hundred-kronur coin left in his hand. He looked around instinctively, mainly to determine whether the young student who was supervising the place had heard the rattle of the coins, but in order to see for sure he had to get up and take a few steps across the carpet. He looked with some embarrassment at the shower of coins in the tray, slipped off his chair, and tiptoed carefully out onto the middle of the floor. The service booth was empty; the young man had probably gone to the bathroom. Sturla hurried back to the slot machine, picked the plastic bag from the bookstore up off the floor, and began counting coins into it. There were seven thousand kronur. What’s more, he still had the one remaining hundred-kronur coin in his sweaty palm; he slipped the coin into the slot and pressed the button, setting the fruit wheels in motion. He peered into the carrier bag, as if to reassure himself that his winnings were still there, and at the same moment he looked up from the bag he heard a now familiar noise: another consignment of hundred-kronur coins falling into the coin tray, not as many as before, but, at a quick glance, another few thousand kronur or so.
The first thing that came to Sturla’s mind was an analogy with the student Rastignac, would-be suitor to the daughter of Old Goriot in Balzac’s novel, who had won twice in a row at a roulette casino in the Palais-Royal neighborhood: seven thousand francs followed by an additional thousand francs—enough to pay off Madame de Nucingen’s debt at the dressmaker and a large enough sum to buy her affection.
Would the money that had found its way to Sturla be enough for him to buy something equivalent to the affections of Goriot’s pretentious daughter?
Without taking time to count the money, Sturla swept the coins into the plastic bag, took the paper cup, now half full of coffee, down from the slot machine, and left the room. Although the young man was still missing from the booth, Sturla looked in the direction of the counter as he went past, and he gulped down the leftover cold coffee before he placed the cup back beside the Gevalia machine. He had been too occupied with the slot machine for the last few minutes to pay attention to whether the weather outside had changed; it had gotten worse, with large hailstones that descended on him like . . . like . . .
He was much too confused at that moment to complete the simile. “His words surrounded him like scales on a fish”: he satisfied himself by recalling, as he went past the fish shop, Maxim Gorky’s description of his comrade Lenin.
His father’s house on Skólavörðustígur was no more than two or three minutes walk away, but in that time the sleet was able to soak through Sturla’s overcoat and turn his dark brown hair even darker. He was also weighed down by the suspicion that his actions had somehow robbed the university: he’d gone into the place expecting to lose fourteen hundred kronur, but he’d won at least ten thousand kronur from the school, without giving the school the opportunity to win the money back.
“In other words, you’ve profited by the five thousand kronur bill I lost there the other day,” says Jón, when Sturla had come out of the bathroom and told his father about his winnings from the games hall. “Plus another five thousand some old codger lost in that black hole.”
Sturla had intended to show his father the new overcoat he’d hung on a chair in the kitchen—if he hadn’t already noticed it for himself—but with his unexpected windfall as food for thought he clean forgot.
“I only hope you’ll use the money to good effect, my fortunate son,” Jón says as he begins to make coffee, even though Sturla had turned down the offer, saying he would make himself a cup of tea. “It is indeed a considerable responsibility to have ten thousand kronur,” continues Jón, and while Sturla watches his father shovel coffee powder into the paper filter, he toys with his cigarette packet and lighter, asking himself whether all men in their late sixties communicate with their sons using the same sarcastic tone as his father—whose routine more often than not reminded Sturla of a younger man pretending to be nearly seventy:
Of course, you’ll throw your sense of responsibility overboard and use your swiftly made profit to buy an hour with some prostitute in Lithuania. Something like that won’t cost more than ten thousand kronur, I reckon. And most likely you’ll have some money left; you could offer the lady some champagne.
I’m not going on a sex trip to the Baltic, if that’s what you think. I’m not a soccer hooligan or some investment banker.
Ha, what do you know what’ll take place once you’ve arrived? You can’t say for certain that some woman with big, rolling breasts isn’t going to come up to you—perhaps when you’re completely lost in the city—and offer to accompany you to your hotel, since, naturally, she knows the area better than you, and then she’ll show you some motherly concern once you’ve arrived. I’m not sure you know beforehand how you’ll react to such kindness. You do know, however, that there’s ten thousand kronur in your pocket you haven’t done anything to earn, and you also know that you won’t need to explain it to anyone if the money disappears as suddenly as it appeared.
I don’t think you know your son particularly well. Besides, I didn’t win quite ten thousand kronur in the games hall; I’ve yet to count it, and the fourteen hundred I put in needs to be subtracted from that total.
Maybe that’s true. But, that aside, you haven’t been close to any woman since you and Hildur separated, am I right? What have you been up to since then? That was six or seven years ago.
What do you know about it, Pop? Would you like me to introduce you to every woman I get to know?
Perhaps you shouldn’t get too close to womenfolk in general; it’s not worth taking the risk of ending up with a sixth little bastard.
All at once Sturla Jón comes to his senses, standing in the kitchen doorway and half-listening to Jón; he’d been imagining the whole conversation. He wonders whether his father would really call his grandchildren—Egill, Gunnar, Grettir, Hildigunnur, and Hallgerður—bastards, but he gives Jón the benefit of doubt and answers his own question in the negative.
“When are you going to Latvia?” Jón asks once he has finished preparing the coffee and is waiting for the kettle to boil.
“I’m going to Lithuania,” Sturla corrects him, trying to remember whether Sæunn, the young woman he had been in a brief relationship with three years ago, ever met his father. They probably never met, but it startles Sturla that he can’t be sure about it. Is he getting too old to remember whether or not he’d introduced his young girlfriend to his father not long ago?
“And what exactly are you are going to do there?” Jón wants to know. “In . . . Vilnius.”
“Both in Vilnius and in a little town some place near to Vilnius. I am going to read my poems. It’s a poetry festival.”
“You’ve gone to one of these festivals before, right?” Jón’s question is laden with disapproval at his son’s dalliance with poetry, but Sturla decides not to let that get on his nerves. He’d learned to rise above his father’s needless sermonizing about the “minor art form” that is poetry. Poetry was a reminder that the son was currently working in his chosen artistic medium, while the father, the internationally educated film director, hadn’t come close to completing his “great form,” the movie, for three-and-a-half decades; the nearest he’d gotten was arranging some books about directors and movie-making in the library in Hafnarfjörður, where he worked. That said, he’d recently mentioned that an old schoolmate of his, a chemist, was going to finance a movie which Jón and his
