Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact,” replies Jón, and Sturla can tell that what he is about to hear now would be no more pleasant than the story he’d just been told over the phone. “He was quite amazed by the whole thing.”

“By the whole thing?”

“He said he’d read the article you gave him for the magazine.”

“And what? Was he a little amazed by it?” Sturla looks up at the girl who is still hovering in front of him and indicates with his finger that he wants coffee, orange juice, and toast.

“He said he didn’t understand a word in it,” continues Jón. “He spoke about how you were tearing strips off some festival which you had been at but hadn’t yet been held. What festival were you writing about? I didn’t understand what he meant.”

“And what else?” Sturla nods his head when the girl points questioningly at the word marmelade on the menu. “Why was he telling you about it?”

“Weren’t you asking me whether he’d mentioned it? Given the things he told me about this story of yours, it actually sounded to me like the piece deserved some praise: how you were speaking ill of the Nordic countries and poetry and. .” The tone of Jón’s voice becomes a little cheerier, and for a moment Sturla feels proud that an article of his has given him space to criticize things he knows his father doesn’t think much of. But immediately after he feels on the other hand anxious that Jónatan might not want to publish the article. “He seemed pleased,” continues Jón, “that you were taking some American poets down a peg or two and finished up your article with a dig at African-Americans, or black Americans, as I think he put it, Jónatan.”

Through the phone Sturla then hears a young, rather shrill female voice calling to his father, and Jón calls back — though not right into the phone — that he is coming, he is talking to overseas on the phone. Then Sturla hears the female voice shout that she is going, and he allows himself to ask his father who the “young voice” belongs to. The question makes his father happy, while Sturla doesn’t really find it so promising to hear and know that his sixty-seven-year-old father has a young girl visiting him. He didn’t like to ask who she was or how they had met — he suspects he knows, and his mental image of that liaison doesn’t make him happy. And when he imagines the absurdity of his father and the girl watching a movie together in the living room at Skólavörðustígur the evening before, some movie which could appeal to people of completely different natures and of such different ages, he is pretty sure that the girl is the reason his father has forgotten to mention the Iranian movie.

“She’s gone,” says Jón, after the sound of the door slamming travels all the way from Reykjavík to Vilnius.

“But what was the movie?” asks Sturla, kicking himself for having asked.

“What movie?”

Sturla repeats his question about the owner of the female voice, and he stumblingly asks if Jón was with a student for a private lesson at this early hour of the morning.

“And what would I be teaching, my dear son?”

“But what about the movie?” Sturla asks in response, but he goes straight back to the previous topic of discussion, which seems to be the reason for the phone conversation: the rumor about the poetry book.

“Why is some guy on the street complaining about a newly published poetry book? It’s absolutely absurd.”

“I don’t know anything else about it,” answers Jón, and Sturla can tell he is thinking about something else. “I don’t know the world of poetry,” continues Jón, but he interrupts himself and asks Sturla to wait; she has returned, the girl, and he needs to let her in.

Sturla shakes his head at his father and nods his head to the waitress, who has brought him breakfast. He places the telephone on the table for a moment while he puts sugar in the coffee, and when he returns it to his ear his father is asking if he is there; he will have to call him back, “he just needs to see to his student.”

The bread turns out not to be toasted, though Sturla asked for toast. It’s actually ice-cold, as if it has just come out of cold storage, and he calls over the woman who greeted him when he first came in, asking her to fetch him some toasted bread. Until she comes back, Sturla plays with the cell phone and thinks about what his father told him; he looks towards the window and forgets he is abroad on a sunny day: he has arrived back in Iceland, there’s a gray cloud over the country, and the images which occupy his mind are of the past, Snorrabraut, Mánagata, Meðalholt, the Grammar School in Reykjavík — from there he heads into an imaginary editorial office (Sturla has never been to an editor’s office).

“But this is toasted bread,” says the waitress when she comes back to the table.

“Are you completely sure?” asks Sturla, then he decides he won’t complain any further about the bread — other, that is, than asking why it is ice-cold, literally frozen, if it is toast.

The woman has no other answer to the question than to shrug her shoulders, and Sturla thanks her with a smile; that will be all.

He promises himself not to let what his father told him destroy the bright day that is waiting for him outside the cafeteria window. He eats the other slice of bread, orders himself an espresso (which he has to pay extra for) and smokes a cigarette before standing up. Outside the window he notices that, despite the shining sun, the people who are traipsing along the sidewalk are fully-clad in winter clothes, either coats or windbreakers, and on the way out of the cafeteria Sturla puts on his overcoat; he sniffs at the shoulders to see if any odor has settled into it from the strip-club.

When he comes into the hotel lobby, intending to nonchalantly greet Henryk, a short man with a moustache and a thick, tightly-cropped goatee — a man who is actually quite tall compared to Henryk — is standing in reception, and he suddenly throws up his hands when he sets eyes on Sturla.

“Hello, hello!” he cries in English. “You’re the Icelander, isn’t that so?”

Sturla says that is correct, and in response the man beams and stretches out his hand towards the Icelander.

They say hello. Sturla is happy to shake this cheerful man’s hand. Even though he doesn’t need comforting, the man’s demeanor is calming to Sturla; for the first time since he arrived in the city he realizes he doesn’t have to be on his own.

“Welcome to Vilnius,” says the man and strokes his goatee. “I recognized you from your picture.” And he asks Sturla if he hasn’t been well taken care of, if Jonas and Renata hadn’t come to fetch him, if he wasn’t satisfied with the hotel-room, and just as Sturla is running out of positive responses to the man’s questions, he finally asks one which calls for a negative:

“They managed to show you the Writers’ Union, didn’t they, Jonas and Renata?”

“No.”

“No?” The man strokes his moustache with his index finger and thumb, and then places that hand on Sturla’s shoulder. “I asked them to take you there before you came to the hotel.”

Though Sturla appreciates the man’s friendly manner, he finds his physical closeness a little uncomfortable; he runs his hand through his hair, and this movement is enough for the Lithuanian — if he was in fact Lithuanian — to remove his hand from Sturla’s shoulder.

“I’m pretty sure that it’s still in the same place,” he says with a smile, and proceeds to describe how the Writers’ Union is on the next street; he points out the window to a stately house at the bottom of a street which meets Gedimino Prospektas almost directly across from the hotel. Yet it seems like he hadn’t forgiven Jonas and Renata for failing to take Sturla there on the way to the hotel: he starts talking about how important it is when you come to a new place — as he assumes Lithuania is for Sturla — that the first building a person enters be someplace worth visiting because it is this building which will stay in your memory: not the airport (the airport is more or less the same wherever you land) but the first building in the body of the town (or, as he puts it in English: the city organism). For example, the first door he went through in the mega-city of London, when he went there for the first time, a few years ago, was the door to an old bookstore across from the underground station he first came out, after his journey from Heathrow airport, and this old bookstore was still in his mind when he thought of that metropolis, London; everything else in the city had been forgotten and buried, even St. Paul’s Church was nothing but a basement cellar compared to that entrance to the glorious world on the ground floor of Charing Cross. It is just like when a child first enters the world. His first experience is what he sees when he goes out the narrow door of his mother, and after that, everything up to old age, all his thoughts — whether the child is a man or woman — are about the environment which was first in front of his crying eyes: the navel and everything above and below it.