Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Sturla slips his hand into one of the overcoat pockets and gets out some of the sugar which he’d taken from the clothing store on Bankastræti. He examines the brown package for a bit and wonders whether he shouldn’t be avoiding coffee, since it is so late and a pleasant tiredness is easing throughout his whole body, promising him a good, deep night of sleep. It has been a long day. Good sense whispers to Sturla that he should let the people in reception know that he doesn’t need the coffee; he ought to brush his teeth, rest his cheek on the white, freshly-washed linen of the hotel pillow, and let himself disappear into sleep, that one dwelling place in life which you can always count on being the same, as complicated and unpredictable as it is. He decides instead to go on a short stroll around town. He reasons that it will be good to get a generous dose of oxygen into his lungs before lying down for the night. Just as he remembers he’d meant to call his father and let him know he forgot to get the VCR from the repair shop — which therefore will get in the way of loaning the Iranian movie the next day — his phone rings loudly, and it takes him a little while to find the gadget; it is a new experience, answering a phone that isn’t connected to a wall.

“Sturla dear?”

“Hi, mom.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m doing well. I’m just waiting for coffee to arrive in my room.”

“In your room? Are you going to drink coffee in your bedroom? Are you in a hotel?”

“Yes, mom. How are you doing?”

“Do you need to be at the hotel? Aren’t there coffee shops there in. .?”

“Mom.”

“Why can’t I be with you over there. .”

“I only just got to the hotel,” Sturla interrupts. “I’m going to go and nose about town.”

“Jenný just left, “ says Fanný with a heaviness in her voice. “I think she is about ready to give up on Tobbi.”

“Þorbjörn?”

“Þorbjörn Gestur, yes. That damn dog.”

“Mom, there’s no need to call someone a dog.” And to change the topic of conversation Sturla repeats his question about how she is doing.

“But aren’t dogs man’s best friends?” answers Fanný contrarily, and Sturla lets her answer her own question.

“They were in a summer house up north, Jenný and Tobbi,” she continues. “Some teachers’ residence Tobbi rented. And how do you think that this summerhouse trip ended? It began with Jenný driving back to Reykjavík, leaving Tobbi back at the house. .”

“But mom, how are you ?” He lights himself a cigarette and pours another whisky.

“I am not feeling well as long as Jenný isn’t doing so well,” says Fanný, and Sturla gathers from her reply that she is quite drunk. She continues her report about her sister and her sister’s common-law husband; the story is that Þorbjörn Gestur, the English teacher who has lived with Jenný for several years, had, while staying at the residence, offended Jenny so disgracefully on the second day that she couldn’t stand staying another minute under the same roof as him, in “some Scandinavian pine-hut in North Iceland,” as Fanný puts it; Sturla thinks this is unlikely to be a direct quote from her sister, a German translator. Jenný drove home that evening, six hours without stopping, but Tobbi remained at the house the rest of the week, and was even somehow able to make his way to Akureyri for wine and some food, to help him drink all the wine. The evening before he was due to leave the summerhouse he wrote a long message in the guest book on behalf of the next guests, a young couple and their family — the woman’s father and the man’s mother — who turned up at midday Friday when, according to the rules, Tobbi ought to have finished tidying the house and be ready to be gone.

“I think we may count ourselves lucky, Sturla dear, that we don’t live with people who don’t understand us. You are in Latvia and I am at my place on Nýlendugata; there are no other people to confuse us here, no other people hanging off us and wanting us to live the way we don’t want to live.”

“I am in Lithuania, mom.”

“I know that, dearest. And I am at Nýlendugata.”

“But how did Jenný know Tobbi had written in the guest book, since she’d already gone back to Reykjavík?” Sturla asks, admiring the way Þorbjörn Gestur had left this parting message, ranting across the white pages in the guestbook so that the next guests at the house wouldn’t need to bother.

“How did she know that?” Fanný acts like she hasn’t understood her son’s question. “She, of course, had to go and fetch the man. She had to drive six hours back and fetch Tobbi, who was planning to stay with those poor people at the house.”

Sturla suddenly realizes that he is the one paying for the telephone call, not Fanný, even though she called him. As he tries to get her to understand that they can’t talk together much longer, she starts to describe Tobbi’s written rant — how odd it was to write something in the guestbook which hadn’t happened yet, and especially to do that in the name of complete strangers. Sturla realizes that Þorbjörn Gestur has used the same method he did in his article about the poetry festival in Druskininkai; if Sturla had understood his mother correctly, Jenný’s common-law husband had described how those total strangers had spent the days they were about to stay in that very house he was refusing to leave — even though he was required to. In other words, Sturla and Þorbjörn, such different personalities, had both written about times that hadn’t yet arrived.

When Sturla imagines how his mother looks at this moment, and pictures her surroundings at Nýlendugata, he remembers the plastic folder and the picture she’d shown him the day before, and he is as amazed as before that she can’t remember the document folder she’d given to his cousin Jónas — the folder which revealed, when it came into Sturla’s possession a long time later, that it had been storing Jónas’s writings, writings which Sturla has brought into his present, where they have become a judgment against him.

At the end of the conversation with his mother, Sturla doesn’t feel up to calling his father; he realizes he needs to go out. He decides not to wait any longer for the coffee which he was promised but to get some coffee (or something else) at a bar or restaurant — to do what his mother suggested. He drains the whisky glass, puts on his overcoat, and turns off the television. On the way downstairs he remembers again that he wanted to tell his father the name of the street he is staying on; he thought it would please the socialist Jón Magnússon.

On the sideboard in reception is a tray with cold beer bottles and some glasses placed upside down. With a smile which is meant to make it clear that he is joking, Sturla asks the girl whether the bottles are meant for him — he’d let himself think she might be bringing him beer instead of coffee — but the girl replies apologetically that the beer is for a sick hotel guest who isn’t able to come down from his hotel room; she could bring some beer to Sturla’s room, but the cafeteria is also open. Sturla apologizes in turn, saying that he was just joking, but that she can still help him with another matter: could she tell him what the word prospektas meant in Lithuanian? The girl seems, however, not to recognize the word, or else she misunderstands the question; she shrugs her shoulders and tells Sturla to ask Elena, who was on shift just before.

Sturla repeats the question in vain.

“You must ask Elena,” reiterates the girl in English.

“But where is Elena?” asks Sturla, also in English, thinking how peculiar it sounds to ask after people by first name when he’s not been in the country more than two hours. “She was going to bring coffee up to my room.”