Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

It felt to me like I was playfully tearing banknotes in half. The feeling was painful and tender at the same time.

I imagined some crazy rich rapper in Los Angeles excitedly setting down his gun and beginning to tear dollar bills apart in front of a photographer who has come to visit him.

Why don’t they invite this sort of larger-than-life guy to Lithuania for the festival?

Someone people know. Someone who can compose on the spot and actually has something to say about the situation in the world. Or the situation in South Central.

I can imagine this rapper sitting at the breakfast in Druskininkai, his baseball cap on backwards and thick gold chains dangling into his oatmeal.

The organizer of the festival is standing outside the breakfast room, and he has taken up smoking again.”

When he opens the door to room number 304 in the Ambassador Hotel in Vilnius, it’s not the television set which seems to hang from thin air high above the curtains, but a darkish stain on the light brown carpet in the entryway that Sturla first locks eyes on. The stain is the same size as the hazelnut Sturla had earlier slipped into his overcoat pocket while he was waiting to be picked up from the airport. It was a beautifully shaped and colored natural object, something that would serve as a kind of lucky charm while he was staying in that country.

Sturla had been told in an e-mail from the organizers of the festival that a person by the name of Jonas would meet him at the airport. “One of our most renowned poets” had been included in parenthesis in English after the man’s last name — a very strange name which Sturla had not tried especially hard to remember. At first, Sturla wasn’t sure what he ought to feel about the fact that his welcoming party had the same name as his long-dead cousin poet, but when he had shaken this Jonas’s hand, after the latter had eventually found him on the sidewalk in front of the airport terminal, he felt it was appropriate that a poet with this name would welcome him to his final week as a poet, or so he told himself.

“Nice to meet you, Jonas,” Sturla had said, and Jonas replied, “Nice to meet you soon, Mister Jonsson.”

Just as with Jonas’s last name, Sturla had difficulty remembering the name of the woman who was with him, a dark-haired, striking woman in her forties who kept her eyes hidden behind unusually large, coal-black sunglasses. Jonas the poet’s appearance didn’t give any indication that he was a writer. He wore a short, light gray leather jacket, jeans of some unknown origin, and his unkempt hair looked like it was full of plaster or dust. Sturla saw why when they got into the car: it was a twenty-year-old red Datsun which appeared to have long been used for some sort of construction jobs.

Other than his greeting when they met, Jonas seemed unwilling to trust himself on the slippery ice of English; the woman handled the introductions. She started by apologizing for Jonas, who spoke German but not English; Sturla would have to ask her if he wanted to know something, and then she immediately said something strange about Vilnius: “But what is there to know? It’s only a city.”

Sturla shrugged his shoulders; he wanted to ask something so that it didn’t seem like he was agreeing with this woman’s opinion of the city, but nothing came to mind. She asked Sturla a few polite questions about whether his flight had been okay and what the weather was like in Iceland, then turned her undivided attention to Jonas; they seemed to be in the middle of a discussion, and forgot him completely for the quarter of an hour it took to drive to the hotel. In the meantime, Sturla listened to the Lithuanian coming from their mouths — a language which maybe wasn’t as stiff-sounding as he had assumed in his article’s jokes about the festival (in a disrespectful fashion, he now realized) — and he wondered whether or not finding a hazelnut on the bare concrete at the entrance to the airport terminal was a little strange. Wasn’t such an unlikely occurrence on his arrival in the country a sign that something unexpected was going to happen, something that would never happen on, say, Skúlagata?

As soon as Jonas and the woman finished their conversation, Sturla was going to ask them whether they could guess what the little hazelnut had been doing in the concrete airport landscape. He imagined the question as a humorous little remark which would allow him to perhaps form a very tiny connection with these people: truth be told, he found it a little uncomfortable that they didn’t pay more attention to him, a newcomer to their country. But Jonas and the woman (Sturla thought she might also be a poet) didn’t stop talking for a single moment until the three of them arrived at the hotel reception, where a long and seemingly complicated discussion took place between the woman with sunglasses and the hotel employee, a young red-headed woman in a dark blue uniform who ended the conversation by turning to Sturla and saying, in English, “I will take care of you now.” This declaration appeared to lift a heavy load off Jonas and his lady friend; they smiled — something Sturla realized he hadn’t seen them do yet — and Jonas suddenly remembered to give Sturla an envelope with information about the festival. They said their goodbyes, and Sturla found he was relieved to be out of their care.

“You’re in room number 304,” the red-headed woman had told him, and she had then told him several things about the hotel, pointing out the stairs with her index finger and telling him, apologetically, that there was no elevator; he would need to climb two flights and then go to his left.

Sturla was therefore still out of breath when he stepped over the stain on the carpet of the hotel room, with his suitcase in tow and his briefcase in his hand. When he was past the stain and stood beside his bed, what drew his attention next — other than that the room was cramped — was the lamp on the bedside table between the narrow beds; it had an orange-colored plastic shade which seemed to have come from a pizza parlor he once ate at in Budapest exactly twenty years ago; he’d stayed there with Hulda for a weekend, after visiting an old, distant aunt of hers in Vienna. But when Sturla switches on the lamp, and dims the overhead light, there is a soft and pleasant glow in the room, which reminds him of a particular habit he’d adopted when traveling abroad: the first thing he would do on entering a hotel room — even before turning on the television — was pour himself a shot of whatever alcohol he’d bought in duty-free.

As if welcoming himself to the new place.

On this occasion, Sturla had bought himself a half-liter of twelve-year-old scotch whisky. He lifts his briefcase up onto the table below the mirror, opens it by arranging the numbers into the combination 666, and looks at himself in the mirror as he opens the briefcase. He decides to take a shower after he’s had a drink, then change his clothes and work out whether or not to order coffee up to the room to refresh himself, before he has another measure of whisky and goes into town to look around. He remembers seeing a door to a cafeteria or some kind of bar midway between the hotel entrance and the reception, and he allows himself to imagine that the young man who was sitting inside, next to a window that looks out onto the street, is one of the festival participants. “I’ve evidently arrived at some kind of Scandinavian family gathering,” Sturla says out loud to the mirror; he decides that the man he’d glimpsed looks like those Nordic poets who enthusiastically recite their works in a dramatic manner, with musical accompaniment; he must be a Norwegian or Swede, Sturla thinks, as he scrambles the numbers on the lock again. Then he takes the whisky bottle from the briefcase (wrapped in a black v-neck sweater he’d bought on his layover at Kastrup airport in Copenhagen), a paperback (which he’d also bought at the airport), a cigarette packet, and the in-flight magazine from the AirBaltic Fokker airplane.