Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

“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 a striped scarf once around his neck before he leaves.

When Sturla comes back home from town roughly two hours later, having taken the machine in for repair on the east side of town and having bought himself a cell phone on Laugavegur — that least expensive one he could find — he finds in his mailbox, along with the daily newspaper which gets delivered free of charge, an envelope from an institute called the International Biographical Center in Cambridge, England.

“That could make a good scene in a novel about me,” he thinks as he looks at the envelope while waiting for the elevator. When he reminds himself that he still hasn’t written a novel — hasn’t even made up his mind yet what sort of novel he will write — he argues back to himself that the scene he has just experienced would be perfect as a key moment in the story he feels sure he will write, eventually: the protagonist one day receives a letter from overseas which unexpectedly casts a new light on his life; in the reader’s mind, this establishment would offer a complete contrast to the character. “I, the superintendent of an apartment building, the person the residents of other apartments rely on when something goes wrong in the building, am waiting for the elevator while holding a letter which I have received from the International Biographical Center, alþjóðlegri ævisagnamiðstöð .” He translates the sender’s name on the envelope into his own language and, as he is wondering whether it is only by mistake that a letter from such an institute could be sent to Mr. Sturla Jon Jonsson, Skúlagata 40, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland, one of his neighbors appears, a man of a similar age who — going by what Sturla has read on his mailbox — is married with four children.

“Hey,” says the man.

Sturla returns the greeting and notices that his neighbor is holding the handle of a broom — a broom Sturla bought on behalf of all the residents a few weeks ago to keep in the basement laundry room; he’d received complaints from one apartment in the building that they didn’t have anything for sweeping away snow in winter.

“Listen, tell me something,” the man says, “how is it that. .”

As Sturla waits for him to continue he ponders whether the man is planning to take the broom up to his apartment permanently or whether he will return it afterwards. But nothing more comes of the man’s question; the elevator door opens and the man — who Sturla remembers is called Þorlákur — points at the plastic bag in Sturla’s hand, asking whether he has bought a phone.

“Yes,” replies Sturla, and he asks himself whether the residents of the building think it is perfectly normal to ask their super what he is up to. Wasn’t it a little bold of the man, who doesn’t know him at all, other than in passing, to inquire about the contents of the bag he is carrying into his house? Does the man know, for example, that Sturla is a poet? Had it come up at one of the tenants’ meetings Sturla is required to attend? No. He is not listed that way either in the phone book or on his mailbox. Even though the attendant in the clothing store the day before — the man on the street — had known his line of work (that is, his other job, not as a super) Sturla reckons it unlikely that many of his neighbors know he is involved in writing poetry. He likes that idea: living alone in a huge apartment block in Reykjavík and sending out a body of literary work which, perhaps, none of the people from the building had any idea could be bought in the bookstores.