Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

When they’d sat down, well inside the western room in Hressingarskálinn, Jónas said that Sturla’s mother, Fanný, had phoned his father, Hallmundur, the day before and asked after him. He added that he didn’t often hear from his father (something Sturla already knew) and that they didn’t have an especially good relationship (which was no less familiar to Sturla) but that Hallmundur had dropped by his place on Meðalholt to let him know that Fanný had called and that she wanted to talk to him. Jónas didn’t have a phone in his cellar apartment. He had no idea what Fanný might want to talk to him about, and Sturla, who thought he knew that his cousin was half-scared of his mother — others were too — told Jónas that it was entirely safe to talk to her; perhaps she wanted to ask him something. Jónas said he would visit her, and he began talking about Norðurmýri: some days he would go past Sturla’s parents’ house at Mánagata 10, and on sunless days the neighborhood seemed to him to correspond to Megas’s first album, to the sweet, cruel mood of his peculiar version of Come and Look Into My Coffin , a mood he described as the gray, shingled eclipse of the mind ; (Sturla later saw those words typed in the manuscript Jónas had been talking about that time at Hressó.) Going into Norðurmýri from a westerly direction he always recalled the lyrics that came from inside the coffin: my tongue is stiff it offends no one any more / although the liquor store is close, / I can’t make it there or make a purchase . The State Liquor Store was on Snorrabraut, a relatively short distance away from Meðalholt, and Jónas tended to buy his alcohol there, although sometimes he would go to the Lindargata State Liquor Store — for example, the time when he met Armann Valur, his old teacher from high school, two years ago, and they went to Hressingarskálinn together.

Shortly after Jónas died, Sturla had asked his mother why she tried to call Jónas — Jónas had heard about it from his father — but she didn’t remember why. To this day, no one knew what she’d wanted from Jónas.

Discussing Norðurmýri indirectly led Jónas and Sturla to start talking about poetry as they sat in Hressó having coffee and rolls, and it turned out that Jónas had written an entire manuscript of poetry. He had begun it during his penultimate year in grammar school, but he’d never shown it to anyone and didn’t expect to find a publisher for it — the manuscript wasn’t anything more than some crappy imitations of dusty old modernists, and it consisted in part of ironic attempts to poke fun at the collectivistic, regimenting wise-ass criminality of those commie Fylkingin Poets who dominated the poetry scene these days. But perhaps he would show Sturla the mess one day, though he wasn’t allowed to laugh at him. “I would be very keen to see the manuscript,” Sturla had said. And he still remembered, word-for-word, Jónas’ response to his sincere interest: “Perhaps you could use something from it. Some lines might be useful to you.” And he had promised to bring “that garbage” the next time he looked in on Sturla at the bank.

Although at the time Sturla hadn’t published poems in magazines, let alone a book, Jónas knew about his interest in poetry and knew that he wrote poetry. When the inspiration seized him (meaning: when he was drunk), Jónas would make belittling remarks about poetry, saying that the phenomenon of contemporary poetry was solely for people who couldn’t admit they had no talent for other pursuits, for tasks requiring concentration or discipline. Because of this, Sturla was surprised by what his cousin said about sitting on a complete manuscript, whatever that meant.

And yet, it turned out that Jónas never showed Sturla these secret papers — papers which later came out of Benedikt’s folder — because two weeks after the conversation at Hressingarskálinn, Jónas was dead. On the two occasions they’d met in between those events, Jónas hadn’t been in any state to remember what he’d promised. It was on the latter of those meetings that Sturla lent him the money which he fully believed Jónas had used to buy his overdose: his Magnyl pills, which he probably bought from the pharmacy on the corner of Rauðarárstígur and Háteigsvegur; and the bottles of Brennivín, Black Death, which he must have carried in a black plastic bag along Snorrabraut, through Norðurmýri, and up to Meðalholt.

That Jónas’s manuscript — which was surprisingly close to complete, especially given the disapproval the author had expressed about it — ended up in Sturla’s hands was in fact the greatest blessing (or the worst misfortune?) that could have resulted from the way Benedikt’s leather folder was an inch away from being discarded.

For in fact it had been discarded. A few months after Jónas’s death, Hallmundur called Sturla; he said he’d been going through his son’s belongings, and he was ready to get rid of those that were of no value to anyone, but he wanted to make sure Sturla got a chance to look at the books, records, and other things which he might have a use for. Sturla had long wanted to find a way to ask his uncle if he could take a look at his cousin’s belongings, but he never had. And when he went to Hallmundur and Þeba’s house in Breiðholt, into their garage where Hallmundur had stacked the cases with his son’s possessions, it soon became apparent that all the loose items — paper, stationery, and other small items — had already been thrown out; among these items was the folder, which Hallmundur remembered had gone into the charity container at the trash dump. Once he’d found this out, Sturla didn’t stay in the garage long; he collected, somewhat hastily, a few records (including the first record by Megas and some five or six CDs by T-Bone Walker) and a few books which Hallmundur clearly didn’t care to keep. He turned down an offer to have coffee with the couple and took the next bus to the trash dump.

It took quite some toil for Sturla to find the case Hallmundur had thrown into the container, and it was no less difficult to begin to understand how his uncle could have abandoned — in the cold and foul-smelling dump — such a well-treated item as the ambassador’s beautiful document folder, something which had not only laid on his son’s writing table for many years but which also held all kinds of his personal items: photographs, old report cards, sketches, and, last but not least, the typed manuscript of a book he’d composed. It seemed like Jónas’s parents had neglected to look inside the folder, and for a few moments Sturla deliberated whether to collect only the manuscript and folder, and let Hallmundur and Þeba know about all the other things it contained; perhaps they hadn’t known that the folder was full of their son’s personal effects. But given that they would still not be interested in keeping those things, it would be quite awkward, Sturla reasoned, if he pointed the items out to them. With that in mind, he decided to keep them himself — as well as an old, Russian-made chess timer which lay in the same cardboard box as the folder and a yellow Waterman fountain pen which he remembered Jónas had received as a confirmation gift.

But was it possible that Jónas had shown someone else his poetry, poetry which had caught Sturla so much by surprise on the first read? It was true that some of the poems had borrowed things from the modernist works of earlier times, and that some of the poems showed a clear sarcasm towards the so-called radical poets of the mid-seventies, but Sturla thought he immediately perceived a personal quality in them that he truly believed was valuable. And over time, because he would often browse through Jónas’s typed sheets, the poems began to take front seat in Sturla’s mind, and he often recalled a line of poetry here and there from the manuscript at unlikely times, until finally Jónas’s lines had not only become part of Sturla’s lyrical storehouse — as he phrased it — but some of them even ran together with Sturla’s own thoughts. Or did he have it backwards: Did his thoughts spring from Jónas’s texts? The result was that, almost three decades after Jónas’s nameless manuscript came into Sturla’s possession, its contents formed the backbone of his latest book, assertions .