Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

the darkness of the shadows

Sturla — the purported author of the poem — isn’t sure whether these lines actually describe the very educational institution he is now looking at or whether they describe another kind of institution: the mother who sees everything, a dark figure in the kitchen on the other side of the window’s glass, standing and watching her progeny play on the sidewalk.

Is there a connection, indeed, between the first two lines and lines three and four, between the house and the mother? Does the house symbolize the father? In my Father’s house are many rooms: Sturla’s father’s flat, at the top of Skólavörðustígur, opposite the church on the hill, is a one-bedroom which, besides the living room and bedroom, has a hall, kitchen, and bathroom (which Sturla is planning to use when he drops in on his father after running a quick errand on Austurstræti). In this case, the son, Sturla, has even more rooms than the father, since Sturla’s apartment on Skúlagata is technically a two-bedroom.

Suddenly the rain gets heavier. Sturla stubs out his cigarette, puts up the collar on his coat, and presses on in the direction of Lækjargata. As he goes past the Prime Minister’s office a sharp gust of wind blows from the north. The weather, in all its bitterness, emphasizes the warm practicality of Sturla’s new overcoat, an overcoat that is only lined with thin, red-patterned cotton yet offers considerable protection from both wind and water, and which — as the name of the coat implies, no less significantly — would protect one’s shoulders from the dust which falls from above, the way a dust jacket protects a book.

“You’re all wet,” says Jón Magnússon as he lets his son, Sturla Jón, into the apartment on Skólavörðuholt and watches him remove his wet overcoat in the hallway before draping it over the back of a kitchen chair, in front of the oven.

“May I use your bathroom?” asks Sturla. His right hand is dripping wet from running it through his hair, and he looks as if he needs to dry himself off before doing anything else.

“ May you? You’re in your own father’s home, Sturla.”

Sturla goes apologetically into the bathroom and locks the door.

He has come from a bookstore on Austurstræti, having bought himself a hotdog and a cold Pepsi from the kiosk opposite Lækjartorg. At the bookstore he bought a folder to keep printouts of ideas for stories he intends to write. Now that he has published his latest collection of poetry he has made a deal with himself, or so he describes it in his head: he won’t write any more poetry. Instead, the lines on his page will reach the margin and form blocks where previously there was an irregular collection of uneven lines pointing towards the margin but never quite touching it. And, on the way back up Bankastræti — as if to suggest the folder is going to come in handy straight away — Sturla Jón has an idea for a story, a short-story. It was, he thought, basically about everything he’d done in his life in the past fifteen minutes: a middle-aged poet goes into a bookstore to see, for the first time, his newly-published book sitting with all the other newly-published books, tightly-wrapped in glistening cellophane, on display with its price tag facing the literary-minded folk and other customers of the bookstore. This book has become a commodity to be bought and sold, the value it acquires destined to be measured not against a price tag stuck on a copy, but against each individual reader’s opinion as to whether it was a worthy item or not.

In Sturla’s opinion, there is an irony to this that results from a deception the poet himself perpetrates: when it comes down to it, his value is only ever evident from the price tag on the book, and every year will bring a new sticker and a lower price until, in the end, when the last copies of the book finally sell at the Icelandic Discount Book Fair, twenty or thirty years later, the price on the sticker will have dropped under 100 kronur, down as low as double-digits. Because of this, and in order to make the distance between the author and his subject matter clear — or else the reader might somehow start imagining he was describing his own experience — Sturla had come up with an idiosyncratic character, a poet, who gets very angry in the bookstore because his newly-published book isn’t on display at the front of the store with the other brand new books. Instead, it has been placed in the back, among books from a year, or even two years, ago: on its left is an Icelandic translation of Gogol’s Petersburg stories, and on its right a selection of poems by an older Icelandic poet which Sturla believes came out three or maybe four years ago. Sturla had prized this poet highly as a young man but had been ready to dislodge him from his respected pedestal — ideally unceremoniously — ever since Sturla recited his work with him at a poetry event in Kópavogur several years back. The older poet had shown Sturla Jón a complete lack of respect: he stood up in the middle of Sturla’s reading to get a coffee at the bar — and not just an everyday Icelandic coffee, mind you, but one of those special coffee drinks (he was eighty-something years old) which necessitates the use of the espresso-machine and which created an incredible racket. This had happened right in the middle of a poem, and continued for the rest of it, so that Sturla’s reading went down the drain, lost in all the coffee-making noise.

As Sturla had headed from Bankastræti into Skólavörðustígur, a heavy downpour suddenly broke out, and in order to protect himself, and his new overcoat, from the downpour, he’d slipped into a nearby doorway, into Háspenna, one of the gambling and games halls run by the University of Iceland. He’d debated going into the spick-and-span fishmonger’s next door instead, but Sturla chose the games hall over the fish shop since he’d been given a lot of change when he bought the folder at the bookstore, and it occurred to him that, rather than straining his overcoat pocket, he could use the change to support the university, an institution which, among other things, has as its mission fostering in the youth an ability to appreciate and interpret exactly the sort of texts Sturla himself has published. What’s more, he worried that stopping in at the fishmongers would cause his new overcoat to soak up the smell of fish — though this fashionable fishmongers, which only offered freshly cooked dishes, never really seemed to smell of fish; the smell was suffocated by cooking the fish in all kinds of seasoning and oils, unlike traditional fishmongers who sell ordinary fresh fish, which somehow always give off the sweet smell fish have.

Often when Sturla reads or hears about fish or fishmongers, it brings to mind an image of a Portuguese fisherman dragging a light blue boat up onto the yellow sand, brimful of gleaming, newly caught fish which a short time before thrashed about as they fought for their lives. Sturla no longer knows whether this picture originally came from a poem he’d read or from a painting or a photograph, but it always conjures up the phrase “Art of Poetry,” capital A, capital P. The fish represent the idea the poet captures, the image which moves restlessly in real life until it can be fixed onto paper; from then on it is firmly held in place for the reader to resuscitate later. Sturla knows his analogy for the art of poetry isn’t new or especially fresh, but he still thinks it is beautiful; it illuminates the art for him, just like the flashing, brightly-colored slot-machines which shone in the darkened space of the games hall.

The place had a comforting feel, something that wasn’t a new discovery for Sturla. He’d been here before; the building had been built about twenty years ago to replace a wooden structure that years before had housed a second-hand bookstore, “The Book.” Sturla had been a regular customer of that store as a child and young man, and he owed the foundations of his own library to it, the pillar, as it were; it was the place where he began choosing books for himself. First, it was books like Prince Valiant by Hal Foster; after that, he’d picked up all kinds of translated thrillers, and moved on from those to educating himself in the classics — in books that have long been known as the classics. During high school, towards the end of The Book’s existence on Skólavörðustígur, Sturla had purchased books by Halldór Laxness, Þórbergur Þórðarson, and the Icelandic poets, like Jóhannes úr Kötlum and Steinn Steinarr. He’d devoured these books with such enthusiasm that in recent years he’d come to believe he’d gotten burned-out from throwing himself into their writing with such admiration; he ended up losing interest in the poets he once absolutely adored.