Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Sturla decided he’d had enough. He applauded along with the others when Salomé finally disappeared with her assistant behind the curtain at the back of the stage, then he apologized to his companions and said he needed to step out to the restroom briefly. His real mission was to get his overcoat, leave the Old Town Erotic Center, and relieve himself in some other place before beginning the task of recalling the route back to the hotel. While he put on the overcoat he looked around for the woman with small breasts who had accompanied him to the coat check earlier in the evening, but she was nowhere to be seen. So he headed out, thanking the guy who opened the door for him, a young man in a pinstripe jacket and pants, for a lovely evening. He was a little surprised to hear himself enthuse about how beautifully the place was decorated; the words slipped out of his mouth because he was so happy and relieved to be free of those same fixtures.

And now, the morning after, as Sturla comes out of the bathroom and lights a cigarette, he finds he is still relieved to be free of the place where he’d been the previous evening. And as he draws the curtain and looks out at the yard, where the two trash cans are still lying on their sides and there are more cars, he looks forward to seeing how the city of Vilnius will appear for the first time in the light; he still hasn’t seen anything other than its pale backside.

When Sturla comes down to reception, there is a dwarfish man standing behind the desk, wearing the same style uniform the girls had worn the previous evening. They say good morning, and Sturla recalls what Svanur Bergmundsson said when the two of them were on a trip to Italy some years ago: that he was frightened of little people, especially men. He experienced their presence as a bad omen, like a black cat crossing your path on the street. When Sturla is about to push open the glass door to the cafeteria, still thinking about Svanur’s crude words, he hesitates instinctively, feeling that he ought to say something to the man at the reception, something other than good morning. He turns back, apologizes politely to him, and asks the little guy if he can tell him what the word “prospektas” means in Lithuanian.

“I am sorry but I am not from here,” the man replies. It is difficult to pin down his accent, and Sturla reads the name Henryk on his employee badge. “You can maybe ask in the conservatory,” continues the man.

Sturla gets the feeling that maybe there’s something to Svanur’s fear of dwarfish people, as absurd as it sounds. He himself has just made up a superstition that seeing dwarfish foreigners outside their home country betokens something unpredictable, some kind of mishap, as he puts it, for passersby.

“In the conservatory ?” Sturla repeats.

Henryk nods his head and points in the direction of the cafeteria.

“You mean the. . konditori ?”

“It’s the transparent door over there,” responds Henryk, smiling good-naturedly to this hotel guest who has just woken up.

Sturla chooses a table in the center of the breakfast room; no sooner has he sat down than the cell phone rings in his shirt pocket. It takes him a moment to answer because he has completely forgotten what button to press.

“Hi, Sturla.” It is his father, Jón.

“Hi, Dad.”

“You’ve reached your destination?”

Jón’s voice has a serious tone, and Sturla thinks he detects either anxiety or disapproval. The first thing which pops into his mind is that his failure to return the videotape to his father before leaving the country might have cast a long shadow over Jón’s workday. In Jón’s mind, the thought that the man who was planning to pick up the Iranian movie from the library collection was going to be disappointed would be troubling enough to render the day as good as useless. Although strangers, rather than those close to him, tend to benefit from what little scrupulousness Jón has, Sturla reckons it unlikely that this is what’s burdening his father; something else has bothered him.

“I’ve arrived in Lithuania, yes,” replies Sturla, and he says he’d planned to call the evening before, but he’d been so exhausted after his journey through Copenhagen that he went to sleep shortly after going up to his hotel room in Vilnius. As soon as he utters those words, he regrets it; he wants to share with his father everything he’d seen at the strip-club the evening before.

“You say you are in Vilnius?” asks Jón, and there is still some unease in his voice.

“Yes. Listen to this, I wanted to tell you yesterday the name of the street where the hotel is located.” Asking his father to wait a moment, he stands up and flings himself quickly out onto the sidewalk to see the street sign which he’d noticed yesterday hanging over the hotel door. A feeling of contentment washes over him at being situated here in the hotel on a sunny day, with a delicious breakfast on the way; happily, he has the whole day and all evening to spend at his leisure in this friendly city, for the festival program doesn’t begin until the next day.

“Gedimino Prospektas,” Sturla reads from the sign into the cell phone. “The street is called nothing other than Gedimino Prospektas. I don’t yet know what “prospektas” means in this context, but I’m probably going to get a private lesson today from a young woman who works here at the hotel.” Sturla thinks he probably sounds too eager, the way a young boy sounds when he knows something really exciting is about to happen, and when he tries to respond to his father’s lack of interest in his partial description of the street name by telling him about his vain attempts to order coffee at the hotel cafeteria the evening before — how his attempts convinced him that the service mentality of the fine people who lived here was the same as it had been during the era of Soviet rule — Jón interrupts him mid-word by announcing that Jónatan Jóhannsson called him last night and described something he, Sturla, would probably want to hear.

“I don’t know what it means,” says Jón, “but there is some guy here in Reykjavík who has some thoughts about your new book. And he intends, according to what Jónatan heard from a journalist at the daily paper Vísir , to share them with the public.”

“What do you mean, thoughts?” asks Sturla, who is back at the table and looking around for a waitress. “Share what with the public?”

“Like I said: I have no idea what it means these days for someone to have observations about a newly published book of poetry. Unless of course you are writing poetry about this man; I don’t know anything about that. Or “asserting” something which he feels is plainly false,” says Jón, undoubtedly feeling proud about having referred to the title of the book.

“And. . Jónatan didn’t explain it more fully?”

One of the girls who had denied Sturla coffee the evening before comes up to his table and hands him a white piece of paper listing his options for breakfast.

“He didn’t know anything other than that this man — he didn’t know at the time who he was — was unhappy about something in the book, and had spoken with a journalist at the paper, someone other than the person who’d told Jónatan about this, about sharing something that had troubled him with the paper’s readers.”

Sturla looks at the menu without taking in what is written there, and continues to do so until his father says that he had simply wanted to let him know about all this.

“Can you find out who it is?” asks Sturla, and when Jón agrees to, Sturla asks whether Jónatan hadn’t mentioned anything else; whether he hadn’t spoken about an article he’d read.