Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

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 her such a blow that she didn’t trust herself to go to Jónas’s funeral, something which Hallmundur and Þeba, Jónas’s mother, never forgave her for.

Sturla 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.

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.