Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

What’s more, he isn’t just a poet who has published some books: he has been selected on the merit of those books — and probably because of his character, too — to be sent to another country as the appointed representative of the people. This fact is foremost in Sturla’s mind when his neighbor asks:

“A cell phone, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Sturla answers.

“I don’t know where we’d be without those phones,” the man continues, asking Sturla with his eyes whether or not he pressed the right button.

Probably in the same place, Sturla thinks to himself: here in a lift on the first floor, about to ascend to the upper floors. But instead he says, without pause: “I only got this phone just now, because I’m going overseas.”

“And where are you traveling to?” his neighbor asks.

“To Lithuania.”

“Lithuania?”

“It’ll be cheaper to use a cell phone abroad than to use the phone in the hotel room,” Sturla adds. He realizes immediately that he’s just given his neighbor, who’s practically a stranger, the mental image of him lying in a hotel room, far away from home.

“A hotel in Lithuania?”

But before Sturla can decide whether he ought to confirm the picture which has clearly popped up in the man’s head, there is a new question:

“Isn’t Lithuania some place near Russia?”

“It’s by the Baltic Sea.”

“Yes, it’s by the Baltic Sea,” says the man.

“It’s between Poland and Belarus.”

“Belarus?”

“It’s like a part of Russia,” Sturla hears himself explain. “Or of the Soviet Union, to be precise. It was part of the Soviet Union.”

“Lithuania? Didn’t the Icelandic people sign a petition on behalf of Lithuania not that long ago?”

“I couldn’t say,” answers Sturla.

“Three hundred thousand signatures. I think that our Foreign Minister went over there and delivered it to the president of Lithuania. Or the prime minister.”

“What was the reason for the signatures?” asks Sturla. “Did you sign?”

“No, not me.”

“I didn’t know anything about it,” says Sturla. “It’s rather unlikely that there were enough Icelanders for three hundred thousand signatures, if both ours were missing, right?”

“That’s true. Unless I’ve got it backwards, and Lithuania signed something for Iceland.”

Although Sturla is quite content to keep talking about topics on which he, Sturla, is clearly better informed, he decides to steer the conversation away from geography and the collecting of signatures for petitions and towards something his interlocutor will surely know more about: “You could say I’m going on a business trip of sorts,” he says, looking around nonchalantly, as if the business he is going to conduct isn’t at all remarkable.

At that moment the elevator door opens, but the information Sturla has just announced makes his neighbor press the button that holds the door open and turn to Sturla; he looks like someone who has just been told something he long suspected.

“You’re going on a business trip to Lithuania, you say?”

“Yes, kind of,” replies Sturla Jón, realizing that the explanation “business trip to Lithuania” suggests he is involved in a drug deal or prostitution, or maybe both. He feels he’d better correct the misunderstanding, but he doesn’t want to directly state that misunderstanding — in case there isn’t one. But his neighbor jumps in first, accompanying his words with a smile that is clearly meant to be ambiguous:

“Then it’s what’s called in English ‘business and pleasure?’” And with that he releases the button and waves his open hand as he leaves.

Sturla doesn’t feel that this is the way he wants to end the conversation, but when he hurriedly adds that the business in Lithuania concerns his job, his everyday affairs, his comment is cut off by his neighbor bidding him goodbye with the words: “Well, enjoy the trip.” And it immediately strikes Sturla that Þorlákur (if that is his name) has the impression that he is headed to a conference of supers, or something of that nature. He decides to make it quite clear, before he leaves the man on this floor, that he, a poet, is not going to be part of a congregation of supers, whatever that peculiar assembly is like.

“I am going to a book festival,” he blurts out, and he imagines that he looks like a dog who has heard his owner calling.

Sturla’s words have a magnetic effect on the man: his free hand, the hand which isn’t holding the broom, thrusts out to block the open elevator door from closing, and he asks, surprised:

“What did you say? A book festival?”

“A poetry festival, to be precise. An international poetry festival.”

“Listen, don’t go anywhere,” says the man; he stays in the elevator and once again presses the door hold button so the elevator won’t move. “I just remembered I’m supposed to get the laundry from the dryer for my wife. Is it okay if we head back down?”

Sturla has no idea where he stands anymore, and because he doesn’t know how he ought to reply he simply says, “Yes, okay,” and so the elevator goes back down, when it ought to instead be going two floors up, to Sturla’s floor.

“So you write poetry,” his neighbor wants to know.

“That’s what I’ve been up to, yes.”

“And have you published anything?”

“My new book was published a few days ago.”

“Your first book?”

“I’ve published a few books,” Sturla answers, looking searchingly at the man.

“I clearly don’t keep up very well,” he says, apologetically, and asks Sturla what the book is called, saying that it isn’t out of the question that he might have heard about it. “No, I don’t recognize the title,” he says when he has thought about assertions for a few moments.

The elevator comes to a halt.

How long did the tormented pianist Ryder, the character in Ishiguro’s novel, spend in the elevator during his first elevator journey on his mysterious concert tour? Sturla recalls how irritated his colleague and friend, the poet Svanur Bergmundsson, was with Ryder: how he, Svanur, had practically pulled his beard out (he was, indeed, bearded) because of his bewilderment at the way the author had allowed a character to have a conversation with another character for what seemed like half- or even three-quarters of an hour, even though the actual time they spent conversing, according to the narrative, could only have been a minute or two at most. Could it be that poets — with Svanur Bergmundsson at the head of their ranks — wouldn’t put up with novelists playing around with and twisting the concept of time; is poetry alone allowed to challenge the reader’s perception of logic? Does this particular method mean that the novelist’s work falls to pieces, that it doesn’t hold water in the eyes of a perceptive reader, one who feels that he deserves — as compensation for the effort and generosity which reading a long book requires — not to be sent out into the wilderness and abandoned there, alone, insecure, and lost?

At that moment — as Sturla thinks about the information he has given his neighbor about his published books — he has the quite amazing realization that the whole flock of books he’s published under his name (if you can call seven a “whole flock”) are in circulation: in libraries, on the shelves of literary-minded people, in bookstores (at least his two most recent books). But has he contributed something to that form, a form he has by now spent roughly a quarter-century devoting the bulk of his spare time and energy to — or is it a formlessness (which one could also say about time and energy)? How widely held, for example, is his father’s opinion that if he really wants to continue with poetry — composing, as he’d called it — then he should ball the poetry up into one continuous text and hide it there, because this impatient world no longer has the appetite or attention span for irregular linebreaks and for words that come in outfits which remind one of frayed rags (prose, on the other hand, wears a carefully-cut, broad-shouldered suit) — in other words, for a dense, weighty book wrapped in a beautifully designed jacket which will protect the poet’s work from dust, from the passage of time, and from use.