Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“She is gone,” replies the girl, letting him know he will have to wait until the morning. “Will you be staying after tomorrow?” she asks.

“Yes, I will be here,” answers Sturla, and straight away the photograph from the back of the record sleeve of Will You be Staying After Sunday by The Peppermint Rainbow pops up in his mind: three rather ungainly young men in white shoes, light blue pants, and dark shirts with light blue neckties, and two black-haired, sun-bronzed women in white leather boots and light blue, short summer dresses, the same color as their companions’ pants. This makes him think again about his five children — Egill, Gunnar, Grettir, Hildigunnur, and Hallgerður — and when he repeats to the girl at reception, once she has repeated her question, that he will be here the next morning, he smiles to himself, thinking that not only will he find out tomorrow morning what the word prospektas means in Lithuanian, but he might also get a cup of coffee up in his room; better late than never. And he delights in the thought that Elena herself will bring him that cup.

He goes past the cafeteria; the Nordic man has disappeared. Presumably he is sleeping after his tea-drinking. Sturla opens the door to the street, and this reminds him of an Icelandic poem which often comes, unbidden, into his thought when he opens an outside door — a poem about the world which “opens out onto the street.”

When Sturla wakes up the next day he is still thinking about what happened the evening before at a club downtown called the Old Town Erotic Center. The course of events had accompanied him into a deep sleep, and he knows he will always remember, as long as his mind is able to store things, everything from last night, the things he has made up and those he actually experienced. Sturla had enjoyed sleeping on the white hotel linen; he hadn’t been so tired in a long time, and now when he wakes from his excellent rest he is glad he didn’t have a cup of coffee the evening before, as he had planned; instead, he’d drunk a single beer, then two glasses of red wine at the club, and also the sparkling wine which was included in the cover charge. And when he gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom he is able to think up a title for the memorable events (which he had decided right away to note down in his notebook, with the intention of possibly using them in a short-story later):

“Beneath the Gaze of Salomé.”

Soon after he left the hotel the evening before — once he’d spent a few moments breathing in the invigorating atmosphere which larger cities than one’s own usually offer — he had gotten himself a beer at a small, likable pub nearby. He had taken a copy of his book assertions with him, and, as he often enjoyed doing on a trip abroad, he had sat down with his own book and a beer, and selected some poems to read. As peculiar as it sounds, seeing the poems in print in different settings from those where they’d sprung up gave him a certain distance from his own work. In the case of this new book, which had come to him in an entirely different way than his earlier books, this “foreign” reading affected the poems even more powerfully for him. Between choosing the poems and reading them he looked around inside the pub at the few people who were there, and when he’d just finished the first beer and was about to order himself another he overheard four young Swedes at the next table talking about going to some bar in the old part of town, some really exciting place they had been told about, and he’d decided to follow them, to let them lead him to the old quarter of town.

The Swedes decided to stay at this pub a little while longer. They ordered a round of some strong spirit in shot glasses and toasted themselves: four young men from Scandinavia visiting the Baltic. When they stood up to go out one of them suggested that they should have one more round, and just then — totally without having thought about home — the idea occurred to Sturla that his first work as a prose writer, not counting the article he had written about the poetry festival which had yet to happen, would be a kind of manual for foreigners who were visiting Reykjavík: a work of fiction which in content and appearance would be published as though it was a guidebook that introduced strangers to Iceland’s capital city — but it would do exactly the opposite, in fact. It would lead the reader astray and give him a completely opposite, but possibly just as interesting, picture of the more than two-hundred year-old city. Sturla imagined the Swedes were drinking a toast to his new idea as they gulped down the contents of the next shot and either bellowed or shrugged off the bite of the taste. They swaggered boldly out onto the sidewalk.

Sturla followed the Swedes out and trailed them at a suitable distance for about ten minutes. They had obviously gotten Dutch courage from the drinks they’d downed, and their conversations on the way oddly reminded Sturla of the interactions of people in a dance club, a place where no one can hear anything at all but the loud music. In contrast, the noise they were making here allowed Sturla to especially notice how great the silence was that ruled the streets of the city, even though they teemed with life. It all suggested a very beautiful, dream-like condition, the scene in a movie which prepares the viewer for something unexpected, something which alters the perspective of those watching events unfold, like the impact of a well-executed short-story. And just like earlier in the evening, when he was sitting in the car on the way from the airport, Sturla thought about how handsome the Lithuanians were; it was, though, as Sturla admitted to himself, a somewhat fanciful thought. He simply wanted — he felt he had a duty — to be positive towards his hosts.

As he was following his unsuspecting tour guides, they vanished through the door to the place they had talked about (a place which was obviously targeted towards men) and he reckoned that, since these young men — who definitely looked like they’d had good upbringings back home and whose appearance suggested they were a socially acceptable bunch — were allowing themselves (without pause for reflection or preface at all) to step one after the other out of the fully-clothed and safe world they were used to and to head inside, towards the uncertain moment when you find yourself standing, dressed, in front of naked strangers: given all this, it could hardly be harmful for a fifty-something father of five to watch young women taking off their clothes. What’s more, he thought, it would be a useful experience for a middle-aged poet who is trying to train himself in a more revealing literary form to get to know the sort of underground cultures in which people pay for nakedness. He’d certainly be able to get himself a table a good distance away from the stage.

That plan turned out not to be so easy: the only free table was right next to the stage. When Sturla entered the club — having gone through some kind of ceremony at the entrance he could only describe as a weapons search, paid the rather hefty cover charge, and read on a placard hanging on the wall in the coat-check that the club’s atmosphere was supposed to evoke the Middle Ages — the Swedes had already sat down at a table right in front of the stage, with a direct view of the glistening pole which the dancers would hold onto as they stripped.

As Sturla was looking around the hall at the variously hairy heads of the men who had gathered together there, a young bare-breasted woman in a white miniskirt and black Chinese slippers came up to him, and she indicated politely that he should sit at a table with two middle-aged men by the right side of the stage. Sturla planned at first to decline her offer, but when he saw that all the other tables in the hall seemed to be occupied he reconciled himself to sitting with two men who, to tell the truth, didn’t seem to be on their first visit to such a place. The bare-breasted woman asked Sturla whether he wanted champagne or vodka. He said he wanted champagne and when he slipped his hand into his jacket pocket to make sure his wallet was still there the girl told him that the champagne was included in the price; he didn’t need to pay anything, she would bring it to him before the show started. Sturla nodded that he understood but told her he nevertheless needed to go and get his wallet from his overcoat in the coat-check. The woman offered to accompany him, as if she expected he wouldn’t find the way.