Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

The conversations between father and daughter, Sturla and Hallgerður, often turned to what was at the top of Grettir’s CD pile, or what he had recently discovered in the world of visual art. Sturla thought it was especially funny to hear how a poster of Picasso’s Three Dancers was hanging on the bedroom wall, a picture which, it so happened, Sturla remembered well because of the shadowy figure who looked eyelessly to the left, an open-mouthed profile in the balcony window, midway between two dancers on the right side of the picture. To Sturla’s eyes, that figure was his uncle Hallmundur rather than Picasso’s friend who had died while the picture was being painted.

Among the musicians Grettir liked, according to Hallgerður, he listened most to David Bowie, Mark Almond, Morrissey, George Michael, and Scott Walker, but when Hallgerður gave Sturla the news over the phone that she’d seen a CD bearing the name Gérard Souzay, Sturla almost couldn’t stop himself from bursting out laughing. He thought it was both endlessly funny and delightful that his nineteen-year-old son at Egilsstaðir had found his way to lieder and opera songs. But, of course, he had to refrain from laughing because, despite the fact that he and Hallgerður liked to smile at Grettir’s tastes in arts, Sturla hoped that his daughter would perhaps be a little infected by him.

During the weeks and months after the French baritone singer was discovered in Grettir’s room, he added CDs from the library with names like Hans Hotter, Nicolai Gedda, and Benjamin Gigli, and after them came French chamber music — French only. On the other hand, in the last eighteen months Grettir had, according to Hallgerður, completely fallen for singers and lyricists like Antony and the Johnsons, CocoRosie, and the Canadian Rufus Wainwright — names Sturla recognized from the music section of the newspaper but hadn’t paid much attention to, except for the last one, which he connected more to his own musical tastes than those of his son, since Rufus was the son of a musician Sturla had prized for thirty years, Loudon Wainwright. This fact had made Sturla want to hear how the young Rufus sounded but after having listened to a few tracks in a record store on Laugavegur he realized that he would be happy enough with the father of the family.

But even though he seemed to have great enthusiasm for, and a strong feeling for, the delicate — feminine, even — when it came to music and the visual arts, Grettir had given his father’s poetry no more thought than courtesy required; even Gunnar had expressed himself more fully about Sturla’s poetry.

The reason why Sturla thinks about his sons first is not so much because they are sons — nor because of the sequence of their ages — but more because he has unconsciously saved his daughters for last, in the same way, he thinks, that a man keeps the best of the assorted chocolates until last.

He has reached his hotel room by the time he lets his thoughts rest on Hildigunnur, his older daughter, the child he admits to himself he feels the most affection for (though it’s forbidden, of course, for a father of five children to have such thoughts; children ought to be — according to what the books say — equal in the eyes of their parents). But more than once — not just twice, but a few hundred times, if not a thousand — Sturla has been amazed at the fact that his eldest daughter, who is certainly a poet’s daughter, has chosen to do things which Sturla considers diametrically opposed to lyrical thinking and to delight in the beauty of life, things like weight-lifting, fitness training, and trying to make herself darker than when she was born. Hildigunnur’s friend, a very promising swimmer who died at just sixteen years old from an overdose of steroids, had managed to interest her in sports and strength-training shortly before her death. Hildigunnur’s newfound enthusiasm had actually increased after her friend’s passing and had led, over the course of several years, to a behavior Sturla couldn’t think about as anything other than an unconditional worship of appearances and surfaces — a behavior Sturla (and, indeed, Hulda as well) considered unnatural and false, and, even more than that, dangerous to her health, especially her mental health. But the uncompromising program which his older daughter had trapped herself in — and which it wasn’t easy to pull her out of — naturally changed nothing in Sturla’s feelings for Hildigunnur: she is still the child who he has the most respect for. He can’t exactly explain this to himself; it is often the case that what a person experiences most strongly is also the hardest to articulate in words.

Both of Sturla’s daughters are somewhat darker than their brothers. It is largely because of this that Hildigunnur’s parents have great difficulty understanding their older daughter’s resolute desire to improve her skin color by engaging in that dangerous, even life-threatening habit: tanning. Hallgerður, Hildigunnur’s sister, actually already has the look their parents (and probably also their brothers) wish Hildigunnur had, and the reason is simply that Hildigunnur had changed herself. She has altered herself through strength training and an almost debilitating competitive temperament which little by little has given her eyes and mouth a determined look; her father — who still wants to picture the face of the girl he fathered — constantly has to wipe the more recent image from his imagination when they talk.

Sturla imagines that Hildigunnur is at the fitness center in Egilsstaðir, and as he turns his thoughts to Hallgerður, to where she might be at this minute, he introduces Símon, Hulda’s partner, into the picture. Símon comes into the kitchen and reaches in the kitchen cupboard for the coffee mug with his name on it. Then he blends himself some kind of milk drink with coffee and a large quantity of white sugar from one of those sugar containers you find on tables at country diners and gas stations. His lumbering movements and weary sighs — sighs which sound almost half as loud as the physical labors that cause him to complain — arouse even more hostility in Egill than he ordinarily feels towards this country town; the sounds intensify the uncomfortable feeling which accompanies being seated, motionless, in an overly-bright rural kitchen when he should be in a warm, dark music venue in Reykjavík, among people who have no idea where Egilsstaðir is, who have never been into a co-op. Símon sits down with them, Egill, Puri, and Hulda, and says something about his job before lifting the coffee mug to his thin lips and beginning to slurp.

Even though Sturla has only met his children’s stepfather twice — at Hallgerður’s confirmation four years ago and then a year after that, when he went east to stay with his children while Hulda and Símon went abroad — and though he’s seen Símon dressed in a black, pinstripe suit, Sturla always imagines him in a white butcher’s apron that’s stained with blood and viscera from the animals at the meat counter. Sturla pretends not to know that Símon has had nothing to do with meat processing since he began working his way up the company as a young man, when he was completely unaware that he would one day be the surrogate father of five rather good-natured and promising children — instead of father to his own children.

The first thing Sturla does when he gets back to his room is to see whether the toilet paper has managed to soak up the liquid from the stain on the carpet. It turns out that it hasn’t made so much of a mark that the paper needs changing. He lights himself a cigarette, pours some whisky into a glass, and acts on his idea of placing one of his shoes on top of the paper, in order to press it down onto the wet spot. While he is up, he hangs his overcoat and suit in the closet in the entryway; he strokes the material of the overcoat, letting it rustle as he does, then fetches the whisky glass, raising it so he can see the color of the twelve-year-old drink against the light brown shade of the coat. The color of the whisky always reminds him of the caramel wrappers in the tins of Quality Street chocolates at his grandfather the ambassador’s house, tins which never seemed to get empty. Those were the candies he always saved for last, the most exciting ones. The color of the overcoat, on the other hand, is the color of dry earth: of the rational, of stability, of permanence. As he takes a sip of the drink Sturla realizes how much he longs to have a coffee on the side. A few days ago he was being offered expensive coffee in a clothing store in Reykjavík, but here in the Ambassador Hotel, in the capital city of Lithuania-land — as he calls it at this moment — he seems unable to get any coffee up in his room, even though the cafeteria is open, even though there is a high-quality espresso machine, which looks like it is brand-new, perhaps even unused, waiting to be put to use downstairs.