Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

While he fetches himself a water glass from the bathroom Sturla recalls the article he read in the in-flight magazine about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, and he thinks about how close he is to that area at the moment. Chernobyl, which is in the Ukraine, is right by the border with Belarus, itself no more than a stone’s throw from Vilnius, and the radioactive material had done most damage in Belarus, both to the people and to the arable land.

Sturla pours some gold-colored scotch into the clear water glass and holds it up to the mirror before taking his first sip.

“Belarus,” he says aloud to himself. “Lukashenko. President Alexander Lukashenko.” And he tries to imagine how it feels to live in a country which is governed by a person who describes the language of his people, Belarusian, as unsuitable for dealing with important matters; who says that the only great languages of the world are Russian or English. It reminds him of a middle-aged man from Belarus who he got to know a little at the poetry festival in Belgium, a poet and literary critic who Sturla regrets not having mentioned in his newly-written article, which he realizes at this moment casts his hosts, past and present, in a negative light. Perhaps if he’d also added one or two more generous depictions, it might have brightened it up a bit, without sacrificing any of its sting. If anyone is ripe for a generous characterization, Sturla thinks, it is that Belarusian literary guy in Liège. He’d aroused Sturla’s admiration because of his rare talent for making harsh critiques sound like they contained some praise. Talking with Sturla and two other poets at the festival in Liège, he had torn apart the unsuccessful organization of the festival in a particularly humorous fashion, but at the same time praised it generously. It had been a splendid example of constructive demolition, of the warmth there could be in sarcasm, a quality Sturla wanted most of all to characterize his own thoughts and actions as an author. And yet Sturla had never come across a more strong and pungent odor of sweat than the one which had emanated from the pithy Belarusian, and he’d done his best to avoid ending up on the same table as him at mealtimes.

Sturla remembers how, while translating the poem by Liliya (the Belarusian poet who he suspects he will likely meet quite soon), his memory of the literary critic’s body odor had been quite literally disturbing. If there was something that put Sturla off-balance in close conversations with people, it was the odor of sweat or of halitosis, and if any life experience were likely to stick in his mind, it was being forced to breathe the pollution that comes from the human body.

“Cheers, Liliya Boguinskaia. I’ll go back to Belarus with you.”

And Sturla toasts the mirror on behalf of the Belarusian poet whose poem he translated and who translated his poem from an English translation as part of the project the festival organizers had instigated in the hope that the poets would get to know each other before they met at the festival. And just as Liliya Boguinskaia has no idea who this Sturla Jón Jónsson is, this guy who has translated her poem “Pilies Street” into Icelandic, Sturla doesn’t know anything about her: only her name and that she’d translated his poem “kennslustund,” via English, “the lesson,” into her own language.

“Cheers to the unknown translator,” Sturla says, smiling. He finishes the drink and grimaces at himself in the mirror. Then he goes to the window and draws back the curtains, and as he wonders if Liliya is already in Vilnius and what she looks like — whether she is planning to arrive in the country before the festival begins, since she lives in the vicinity — he faces the whitewashed wall of a house and a well-lit yard between the buildings where two trash cans are laying on their sides and some cars are parked. He notices that all five cars are German brands. It strikes him at once how little people notice in new, foreign surroundings; not just people generally, but himself in particular— someone who is supposed to be a poet, and therefore observant, his eyes open to everything before them; provided, of course that his conception of what a poet should be is correct: someone who is the conscience of language, someone who has the duty of setting into language things that others are not attentive to or aware of.

This thought strikes him because he realizes, with some regret, that on the way into the city from the airport he didn’t pay proper attention to what the city looks like and what impression it had on him. The only thing he remembers from the trip are two or three particularly ugly high-rises, a set of dwarf skyscrapers which he suspects were built after the country won its independence from the Soviet Union. A single glance had stamped these awful structures in his mind as the symbol of long-awaited liberty from totalitarian communist rule for the natives. Those people he particularly remembers noticing from the car on his way to the hotel had seemed handsome and even well-to-do (as his mother would put it) — a complete contrast to the mournful image which the brutal present-day architecture had imposed on the city for the sole purpose of challenging the poet’s eyes.

But had he expected anything other than that people here are beautiful?

Before Sturla gets in the shower he turns on the television. While figuring out what channels are available, he is surprised at how high in the air the device has been placed, and how unsafe the fixtures seem. When he comes back out of the bathroom, in a cloud of steam that has been created because he thoughtlessly shut the door, there is a discussion about finances on the American news channel CNN. Three men are sitting in three chairs — chairs which Sturla thinks seem to be of Scandinavian design — and deliberating over the possibilities which investment in Chinese business might offer to western investors. The clock shows a few minutes to 10:00. Sturla half-watches the televised conversation while he finishes drying himself, and then he slips hurriedly into underwear, pants, and shirt and gets his wallet out of his jacket to take down to the cafeteria. He looks in the mirror and strokes the still-wet hair on his head so that it doesn’t hang over his forehead in that way which always reminds him of Adolf Hitler. He launches himself towards the door a little too quickly to remember the stain on the hallway carpet, which he’d only just managed to steer clear of stepping in earlier. He’d meant to investigate the stain by touching it, first when he initially noticed it and then before taking a shower, but he ends up doing so now; he finds out that the dark stain is wet, that the liquid seems to be oil or some kind of cleaning fluid.

He shivers a little in disgust as he dries his finger on a hand towel from the bathroom. He carefully sniffs his fingertip, as though it might be dangerous to bring it too close to his nose, and he bends back down to the carpet and touches the area around the stain. When he stands back up, he experiences a sudden dizziness, and while he waits for this dizziness to clear, he looks at the television screen: the pope is standing in his car, waving to a great crowd that has gathered in some European city. Before Sturla leaves the room he takes some toilet paper from the bathroom, folds it over, and places it on top of the stain.

He springs down the stairs. He is feeling good. The hotel experience always gives him a special sense of liberty, which he instinctively connects with his first ever trip abroad and with going camping as a teenager. A rented room always makes him feel that something unexpected or thrilling will happen, the sort of thing which seldom happens at his own apartment. Even the stain on the carpet in room number 304 at the Ambassador Hotel makes it somehow more thrilling, more strange — he ought to say more dangerous, he thinks, smiling to himself at this idea as he reaches the first floor.