Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

And as Sturla declares that he is going to take the overcoat, he realizes he is wearing a broad smile on his face — the smile of a man at peace, he thinks, but then he worries it might come across to others as though he is uncontrollably proud of himself, like a child or teenager who is about to fulfill his wildest ambition. “I’ll take this one,” he says decisively, trying to wipe the smile from his face. The salesman nods gravely, as if an important decision has been reached by all, and says, “Good choice.”

At first, Sturla thinks he heard him say “Gotcha!” and he stares at the salesman in astonishment as he folds up the item, which, thanks to the stiffness of the cotton, rustles the way weighty, good quality paper does.

“Was there something else you wanted?” asks the salesman, seeing the look on Sturla’s face.

“No, that’s all,” replies Sturla.

“Gotcha,” the salesman says, and they go over to the checkout which, as is customary, is located in the middle of the shop floor, around a square column. Next to the till is a gleaming coffee machine — from the same country as the overcoat — and an artistic display of bright white coffee cups.

“Have an espresso while we’re ringing this up,” the employee offers, shaking out the creases from the overcoat.

Sturla sets one of the white cups under the nozzle he knows the coffee is supposed to flow from, and he gropes blindly about the machine until the salesman rescues him by pushing a little button, which is the same color as the machine itself and has a picture of a coffee cup on it. While the coffee is brewing, Sturla looks in his wallet and counts out thirteen 5,000-kronur bills.

“It’s not often you see this much cash,” the man says, and Sturla asks whether there is a discount for paying cash.

“Not for cash, but there’s a five percent discount with plastic.” The salesman takes the notes from Sturla’s hand and puts the coat on the counter next to the coffee cups. He licks his thumb a few times while counting the notes, and has to start counting again when he gets distracted by Sturla, who is taking off his windbreaker and unfolding the coat in order to slip it on. The salesman puts the notes in the till and, smiling a little, watches his latest customer’s awkward attempts to struggle into his purchase. He hands Sturla a bag with the store’s logo on it so Sturla can put his windbreaker inside, a bag so beautiful Sturla fears he will have to pay extra for it. The bag is a rich brown color, made from thick, waxy paper, a texture not unlike his new coat; it has orange cord handles.

While Sturla is stuffing the windbreaker into the bag, another employee calls the salesman over; a young married couple needs assistance. The couple had caught Sturla’s eye when they entered the store: they are a well-known couple from the world of theater, and he had recently heard his father’s friend Örn Featherby speak rather scornfully about them in connection with a play one of them, possibly the woman, or perhaps it was the husband, had sold to one of the two major theater companies in town. While Sturla drinks his espresso, he watches the couple and the salesman; they all seem to know one another, and they launch into a conversation that immediately breaks out in laughter. From the husband’s gestures, Sturla judges that the topic of discussion is some project the young couple is involved in. Glancing around, Sturla sneaks his hand into a white bowl full of light brown, cylindrical sugar packets, and grabs several. Looking down at them in his palm, he counts them and sneaks them into 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