Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“No, I’m going a bit too far now,” he adds, and he literally bursts out laughing.

“But are you sure a newborn child can see with its eyes right away?” asks Sturla, feeling at once that the question sounds rather pedantic.

The bearded guy seems not to hear the question. Laughing, he again says that he has taken the metaphor about the crying child too far, but his expression suggests that he thinks Sturla is a bit of a killjoy; the guy apologizes by saying: “But we’re allowed to say whatever comes to mind, we poets, isn’t that so? Whatever rubbish it is.”

Sturla nods along with his new companion; he hadn’t realized he was yet another poet. Some people are no longer strangers as soon as they look you in the eye: this bearded chatterbox is one of them, and Sturla considers it a possibility that they’ll get better acquainted at the poetry festival.

“But it’s not every city where the Writers’ Union can be seen from the hotel that hosts a foreign poet,” he says, and Sturla admires the way he arranges his words in flawless English. “And it’s there, later today, at three o’clock, where we’re holding a reading, a few native poets, including me. . Of course, I’ve forgotten to introduce myself in all my endless prattling-on. . I am called Jokûbas Daugirdas and I’m one of too many poets in this city. .” and while he tells Sturla about the program, and continues talking about the reason the Writers’ Union of Lithuania got the use of such a splendid old house — a story which he perhaps goes through in unnecessary detail — Sturla contemplates, in light of what Jokûbas maintained about the permanence of a person’s first acquaintance with a new environment, whether or not the Ambassador Hotel will live on in his thoughts, and he’s quite convinced that it will. At least, he realizes he’s already forgotten the appearance of the airport terminal, and he decides to reconcile himself to the idea that, rather than the entrance to the Writers’ Union of Lithuania, the reception of the Ambassador Hotel on Gedimino Prospektas will remain in his memory as a souvenir of his trip to Lithuania: Elena’s face, the pamphlets in the stand on the way past reception — and an image of the dwarfish Henryk, who he can see just beyond Jokûbas’s shoulder at this moment, a friendly guy who it is impossible to imagine betokens bad luck for anyone.

“And it’s not every Writers’ Union which is also the home of the best bar in the city,” continues Jokûbas. While he adds more than a few words about the arrangement — which Sturla finds strange — by which the Writers’ Union of Lithuania is licensed to serve food and drink, Sturla tries to imagine what sort of poetry this man writes. He is a man who clearly has a tendency to lose himself in needless details: Sturla pictures him writing long lines and putting lots of them under a single title; he imagines that even his suggestion that Sturla have his morning beer at the Writers’ Union bar (it’s open at this hour of the morning) has already found its way into one of his poems. Sturla, however, says that he wants to begin the day by nosing around town: he still hasn’t had the chance to see downtown Vilnius in daylight, having only been able to see the shadowy side of the city so far. Last night, he’d inadvertently stumbled into a “manly” entertainment spot, as he tries to put it in English, but this confession doesn’t seem to pique Jokûbas’s curiosity; he begins telling Sturla about a few places in the city which he might enjoy exploring, and he recommends especially fervently an eatery on Pilies Street, a street Sturla realizes he knows about, since he remembers it as the title of Liliya Boguinskaia’s poem that he translated, the Belarusian poet who in turn had translated Sturla’s “kennslustund.”

Before they say goodbye, Sturla asks Jokûbas if he knows whether Liliya from Belarus, Liliya Boguinskaia, has arrived in the city.

“Do you know her?” asks Jokûbas, and when Sturla explains to him that they were asked to translate each other’s poems as part of a scheme to get unfamiliar poets acquainted with each other before the festival, Jokûbas tells him he expects she will be at that very eatery around midday today. He met her last night and she had, like Sturla (though this clearly hadn’t been the case) asked for a good restaurant in the city. She’d been here many years ago, during Soviet rule, and had actually written some poems about the city; when he directed her to the restaurant on Pilies Street she said she was going to go there today: she remembered the street after having written a poem about it.

“That’s probably the poem I translated,” says Sturla, and Jokûbas replies:

“My brother runs the restaurant. Tell the waiter that I told you about the place; you won’t be sorry.”

While Sturla takes the last sip of his coffee, he watches Jokûbas, in green corduroy jacket and baggy blue jeans, going along the avenue, down the street towards the Writers’ Union. Sturla’s overcoat rustles comfortably when he raises the collar before heading out onto the sidewalk and into the cool October sun. For a moment he pushes away his thoughts about the phone call he’s just had with Jón and is pleased with himself for having bought the overcoat before heading to Lithuania: if any item of clothing was right for this climate, it was this Aquascutum overcoat. There’s no question about it, he thinks, and then admonishes himself good-naturedly for letting himself — a poet who should be skeptical about everything — be so sure about his choice as to declare that there is “no question” about it.

In contrast to the dazzling brightness of the sun which could be seen shining on the faces of Vilnius’s residents, there is, on the other hand, no question that the conversation with Jón has cast a heavy shadow from Iceland; it doesn’t fall across these citizens, of course, only their guest, Sturla, who goes along the sidewalk on the sunny side of the avenue, Gedimino Prospektas, towards the cathedral square — that is, if he can trust the city map he is looking at.

According to written sources, the city of Vilnius dates back to 1323. An ancient folk tale tells how the Lithuanian count Gediminas (the forefather of the Jagello family that ruled Lithuania and later Poland for two and a half centuries) loved to hunt in the extensive, dense forest on the tract of land where Vilnius now stands. He lived in a nearby castle in the town of Trakai. At the end of one particularly successful hunting trip in the forest, Gediminas and his retinue set up camp at the banks of the rivers Neris and Vilna, and stayed there drinking late into the night. During the night, Gediminas dreamed a strange dream: that high in the mountains above the river Vilna there stood a gigantic iron wolf which howled with the sound of a hundred wolves. And when Gediminas awoke he sent for the heathen priest Lizdeika, the one who guarded the holy fire, and asked him to interpret the images he had seen in his sleep. The priest read in the dream a message from the gods, requiring Gediminas to erect a fortified castle up on the slopes where the iron wolf had howled. This building should be just as magnificent as the animal had been, and an industrious city would arise around it. This city would be very beautiful, and her glory would be lasting in the surrounding districts, like a wolf with the sound of a hundred wolves. Count Gediminas took Lizdeika’s interpretation of the dream seriously and sent invitations to craftsmen and merchants in small towns across Germany to construct buildings in exchange for various privileges, including, among others, complete religious freedom. And so the city of Vilnius was born, the same city that now sounds under Sturla’s hard soles as he goes towards the cathedral square wearing his overcoat.