Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Suddenly, while Sturla was taking a sip from his glass of sparkling wine, Yuri jerked him out of these thoughts by nudging him and pointing at the dancer Salomé, who was looking right at him. For a minute or two Sturla had watched her rub herself tightly against the column, but now she had let go of her hold — and Yuri was spot on, she was looking Sturla directly in the face as she stretched her hands into the air, not unlike a flamenco dancer, and let her fingers play with each other, as if they were debating what they should do with the fifty-something Icelander who had evidently come here for the first time. Sturla realized he had tensed. And it didn’t help that Igor began to whisper English words to him which sounded like old-fashioned poetry (wasn’t he and not Yuri the poet?): “Wherefore doth she look at me with her golden eyes, under her gilded eyelids?”

The Belarusian dancer continued to stare at Sturla, and when she took a step in his direction and slowly lowered her hands, Igor continued: “I know not who she is. I do not wish to know who she is.” And Sturla looked around, as if he feared that everyone in the place was expecting that he was going to suffer the same fate as the Swede; when Salomé loosened the fourth veil, the one that was wound about her stomach, and let it fall to the floor, Igor leaned closer to Sturla and whispered “Bid her begone.” This sounded like a warning, for at that very moment she was heading in Sturla’s direction, at that moment she was just about to step down from the stage — but then, without warning, the drunken Swede sprang up from his seat and leapt onto the platform. From the way his hands were placed on his waist it looked like he was going to dance like a Russian Cossack, but he also looked a bit confused, as though he was well aware that he was about to embarrass himself but had nonetheless resolved to let it happen. Salomé had frozen in place and was looking at the Swede with a startled expression, and before anyone was able to do anything about it the guy — who Sturla was going to have to thank later for taking attention away from him — had unzipped his fly and begun to slip his hand inside. But just as quickly as he had dashed up onto the stage, three others from the audience followed suit: one of his companions, another man (clearly an employee), and also Yuri. Watched by Salomé’s frightened gaze they dragged the drunk Swede down from the stage without the slightest resistance. His other two companions at the table had clearly had enough of his antics; they stood up and led him out of the hall towards the bar and the exit, as the employee, a huge, broad-shouldered man in a pinstripe suit, turned at once to the dancer to reassure her and to encourage her to continue now that he’d disappeared.

“Scandinavians,” Igor said brusquely to Sturla, a sharp comment which accorded little respect to people from the Nordic lands. “You are not Scandinavian,” he continued, sounding as though he’d forgotten to pay attention to his English pronunciation.

To the sound of a noticeable murmur through the hall, Salomé began dancing again, and she seemed — to Sturla’s great relief — to have forgotten what she’d been about to do the moment before the disturbance took place. Igor clapped Sturla firmly on the shoulder. “I’ve known other Icelanders,” he said; there had been young students in Moscow in the sixties, lively men whose hearts were in the right place, as Igor put it, and he concluded his positive summary of Icelanders by saying: “And they are not Scandinavians.”

“Stupid tourist,” barked out Yuri when he sat back down at his table, having watched the Swedes leave. Then he said something in his own language, something Sturla told himself must have hewn closely to his own, rather negative characterization of Nordic people in his article about the poetry festival.

It was difficult to tell whether or not the dancing of the Belarusian Salomé had really aroused the admiration of the men in the hall, but everyone’s attention was grabbed when she loosened the fifth veil, the one around her waist. According to the voice which had announced the dancer, and the story of Salomé which the dancer alluded to, there should have been seven veils around her body, but after she took off the fifth there was only one veil remaining, the color of an orange in shadow, and this veil concealed the last part of a woman’s body to ever be revealed; it was wrapped around her like a cloth diaper on an infant. Sturla saw that both his companions had noticed the discrepancy, and they exchanged curious glances. Had the girl miscounted, or was the discrepancy intended to make the audience speculate as they waited: Was there a seventh veil underneath?

For a moment, Sturla feared that the pale, naked dancer would decide to come up to him. At least he noticed her looking tenderly towards him for a while as she rubbed herself up against the pole on stage, but then the man in the striped suit came back onto the stage, holding an object about the size of a basketball in his outstretched hands; the object was concealed in a silk scarf. According to the script, this object was supposed to grab the Belarusian’s attention — or, as Igor put it, “Here comes Jokanaan,” and just then Salomé untied the knot on the sixth scarf, let it fall to the floor, and whipped the veil from the object the pinstripe-wearing guy held out. With that tug she pulled away all the mystery from everything on stage that mattered. In Salomé’s assistant’s hand there was a tray, and on the tray the head of a mannequin, wearing a slightly-askew wig, its neck blood-red. Salomé held the tray with both hands and led it, and the assistant, towards the audience, all the way up to the edge of the stage, only about a meter from the table where Sturla and the Russians sat.

Then she bent forward, her back to the hall, so that her most private parts were on display to anyone who didn’t look away, and when she kissed the decapitated head on the tray, a peculiar expression crossed the face of her assistant, the man in the jacket. It took Sturla a fraction of a second to realize that his facial expression was meant to indicate sexual bliss. Immediately a glimpse of a memory occurred to Sturla, an image from his youth: his mother drunk at Mánagata, at a party which had made an indelible impression in young Sturla’s mind because one of his father’s friends had dared him, at the age of ten or eleven, to drink a sip of Bols liqueur (the name Bols had stuck in his memory then and never left), and Fanný—who had planned to take Sturla to her sister Jenný’s in order to save him from the loud, hectic gathering of his father and his acquaintances, had never left; she had been behaving very inappropriately with his father’s close friend Örn Featherby and another of the guests, the accountant Magnús Hall. When Sturla, who was sitting in the lap of one of the opera ghosts (that was what he’d started calling his father’s friends), broke loose and tried to get out of the living room, he saw his mother pressing her half-naked breast up to Magnús Hall’s face, and thrusting her ass (which might well also have been naked, under her thin nightgown) in the direction of Örn Featherby, who smiled uncomfortably at the frightened child, this boy he had held in his hand while he was baptized and who now ran out of the very same room in which the baptism had taken place, pretending he didn’t hear his father, who was standing, glass in hand, at the kitchen-table, in conversation with another of his friends, calling in a drunken voice to “Sturla mine.”

“You can tell that she is from Belarus,” Igor whispered to Sturla, twitching his head in the direction of the dancer’s ass.

Yuri laughed at his companion’s comment and declared that now the time had come for a real bottle of champagne. But in spite of his “bubbly” suggestion he couldn’t hide the fact that he wasn’t comfortable at all; contrary to Sturla’s expectations, the uncouth Russian was trying to avoid looking at what the Belarusian woman seemed absolutely determined to display.