Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“Are you Sturla Jón?” she asks, and Sturla is astonished to hear a foreigner say his name the way this poet does: almost flawlessly.

“I am,” answers Sturla, and he knows right away that this is Liliya. She is more beautiful than he’d imagined — though how could he have known? he asks himself.

They shake hands.

“I’m glad to make your acquaintance,” she says in a rather formal English, and as Sturla feels the warmth of her handshake, she confirms her name: she is Liliya, the one who translated his poem, “the lesson”—she’d really enjoyed doing so. It had also been a nice surprise — and yet, of course, she hadn’t expected anything else — that the first Icelandic poem she read had been so wonderful.

“Thank you for saying so,” says Sturla, and while he is a little amazed at how she dashes along in her praise of him, he convinces himself that this beautiful and likeable woman is speaking sincerely. He realizes that at this particular moment he is in need of something good from other people, but it isn’t just wishful thinking that makes him treat Liliya’s words as truthful: something in her eyes stands out.

“I also had a lot of fun translating your poem about Pilies Street,” he says. But as soon as he utters the name of that street he thinks he knows Liliya has a better memory of it than he does. And yet at the same time he finds that this person’s presence warms him. He contemplates her: dark brown hair, dark eyebrows, dark, stone-like pupils in her eyes and more dark stones beaded on a string around her neck, but everything else in her appearance is bright, the word that best describes her countenance. She is the same age as Sturla; she was born, he thinks, at the same moment.

“You know that this street is here in Vilnius?” she asks, meaning the street in her poem. She smiles, and Sturla feels for a moment that something in the look in her eyes asks something of him, something he longs to know what it is — and longs to give her.

“I’ve just come from there,” he replies, moving the hotel key to his other hand.

“Seriously?” Liliya catches Sturla completely off-guard by taking his upper arm with her hand. “Were you at the coffee shop?” she asks.

“I was at a restaurant which a man by the name of Jokûbas directed me to this morning; he is one of the organizers of the festival.” Sturla is at that moment about to explain that the same Jokûbas told him he’d showed Liliya the place the day before, and that she would be there at midday, but he stops himself. It might imply that Sturla had expected to meet her there.

“Jokûbas? Is he the one with the goatee?”

Sturla confirms this, adding that his brother owns the restaurant on Pilies Street.

“He is an interesting man,” says Liliya, and Sturla isn’t sure which of the brothers she is referring to; could it be she knows them both? He is surprised that she doesn’t tell him Jokûbas pointed the place out to her, and in light of what she says next it doesn’t seem that he had. “And reliable,” she continues. “One of those men who, when you ask about something, you can trust the response. Even though he is more or less drunk all day.”

Sturla still doesn’t know which of the Daugirdases she means, the poet or the restaurateur. But he advises Liliya not to go to the restaurant; it isn’t worth it. And she laughs, saying she knows where she’d go if she fancies going to a restaurant: she wants to show Sturla the place she’d recalled in the poem, not because it had attained higher stature after being mentioned in her poem, but rather. . She stops mid-sentence and corrects herself:

“Or maybe it did, after I wrote the poem about it. And now you have translated that very poem all the way into Icelandic.” And then she continues smiling: “The reading begins in half-an-hour.” And she asks Sturla if he is planning to get a coffee here in the hotel beforehand, or whether she can invite him for a beer at the bar in the Writers’ Union; it is probably best to get there early: she expects the first official reading of the festival will be well attended.

Sturla explains he needs to make a phone call in his room, and he proposes to meet Liliya downstairs. He’d almost entirely forgotten the reading by the three female American poets in the assembly hall of the Writers’ Union. He suddenly gets the feeling that he must seem rather dry to Liliya — in all honesty, he isn’t feeling well — and when she lets go of her grasp on his arm, and he is about to head up, he asks her whether she knows these American poets. Liliya says she’s read a book by one of them, Jenny Lipp, who lives in Lithuania; she came from Kansas and had made her home in the city of Kaunas. She’d read an interview with her in yesterday’s newspaper, in which Jenny recalled how she’d moved to Lithuania three years ago, after getting to know a Lithuanian woman at a poetry festival in San Francisco, and when she found out that the old capital city of Lithuania was called Kaunas she’d resolved to have a home there, even though her friend lived in Vilnius. That way, she could tell people that she had moved from Kansas to Kaunas; it would be ridiculous but true. Sturla can’t tell if the last words, “ridiculous but true,” come directly from Liliya or from the Kansas-woman, but for Sturla they bring to mind a line which Jónas Hallmundsson had from time to time used in conversation between the two relatives, he and Sturla, as they chatted together at Hressingarskálinn in Austurstræti in the months before Jónas took his own life; a line which he had taken directly from Megas’s song about Ragnheiður, the daughter of Bishop Brynjólfur: “but, fine fellows, listen up; it’s ridiculous but it’s true.”

How well these words describe this point in Sturla’s life, when he has been exposed in at least two senses of the word.

And though Sturla has to admit that the American poet’s eccentric decision, choosing where to live based on how a word sounds, suggests an interesting character — he, for example, had had a completely different image of the American poets when he wrote his article — he knows he has no desire at this moment to go to her and her sister poets’ reading, even though he would be in Liliya’s company, someone he’d otherwise be keen to get close to and know better. He wants to call the often-mentioned Jokûbas and let him know that his restaurant-owning brother is not so reliable: customers’ winter clothes get stolen from coat hooks, even when there is only a single customer. He wants to let him know that he is outraged, but he also realizes he can’t let the festival organizers know what the stolen piece of clothing cost: such a figure could only awaken suspicions as to why he, a poet (and superintendent) from Iceland, would waste his money on an overcoat which cost three times the monthly salary of a workman in his hosts’ country.

And that leads Sturla to even more definitely resolve not to let Liliya know about the overcoat; he decides instead to face up to the bare fact that the overcoat has vanished. Just as poetry has vanished from his life, so too his overcoat — however much it cost — might as well go the same way.

Liliya repeats that she will wait for Sturla in the cafeteria. He replies he’ll be quick and heads wearily up the stairs, with a heavy heart but grateful that he’s met this sympathetic female poet from Belarus.

When he looks at the stain on the carpet in the entryway to his room, he curses the fact that he’d kept his lucky charm, the hazelnut, in his overcoat; it’s absurd not to take better care of the things that protect one from misfortune. He turns on the television, stretches for the whisky bottle on the table under the mirror, and watches himself as he drinks a decent measure and surfs channels on the screen: two English-language news-channels; a few Lithuanian, Polish, and German ones; and at the end a grayish-black screen which buzzes like an empty factory someone has forgotten to shut down. It is Chernobyl, he thinks, a direct transmission from Chernobyl, twenty years on.