Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Should he have invited Liliya up to his room? Without thinking, he rings down to reception and asks the woman who got him a replacement key if she can tell him what room Liliya Boguinskaia is in. It turns out she is in room 307, and Sturla peeps out into the corridor and sees that her room is almost directly across from his, probably with a view of Gedimino Prospektas. And now she’s sitting in the cafeteria and waiting for me, he thinks.

No, it would probably have been too bold to invite her up to the room. Sturla lights himself a cigarette and takes another sip from the whisky bottle, and while he looks for Jokûbas Daugirdas’s phone number in the festival materials, the following conversation plays out in his head:

Sturla: I just want to let you know that I went to your brother’s restaurant at lunchtime.

Jokûbas: Glad to hear it! I trust my brother treated you well.

Sturla: ( aware that he sounds like he’s had a lot to drink, but expecting his interlocutor to be less sober than he himself, if Liliya’s words are to be trusted ): Treated me well isn’t perhaps the right way to put it. I trust that you get your share of the profits from the valuables stolen from the coat hooks.

Jokûbas: I don’t know what you mean. You’ll be at the reading, won’t you? In the assembly hall of the Writers’ Union? Yes, I told you about it when we met this morning, didn’t I?

Sturla: Yes, you told me about the reading this morning. Before that, you told me about your brother’s restaurant. But what makes you think I want to go to some reading when my new overcoat has just been stolen, an item which cost me about what a workman in this country earns in three months? You probably didn’t think it was worth so much, and what’s more you’ll get nowhere near that amount in this country.

Jokûbas: It’s going to be a well-attended reading. I can promise you that much.

How could he know the reading would be well-attended? Sturla asks himself, and then he ponders another question that he mentally directs to Jokûbas: Do you think it’ll be as well-attended as your brother’s restaurant?

On what basis could this man so confidently assert that these three American poets will draw the whole world, when Sturla has decided not to attend? This very morning he’d told Sturla he wouldn’t be disappointed by his brother’s restaurant, the one restaurant in the whole world Sturla is certain he’ll never again visit. And during the day he’d claimed the three poets’ reading would be so well attended that it would be fair to call it crowded; what other assertions will slip from the lips of this roguish alcoholic now that it is growing dark?

And then the obnoxious ring of the phone clamors from Sturla’s breast pocket. He glances at the phone and sees his father’s number; he’d forgotten to call him back. Sturla takes another gulp from the whisky bottle and looks at the phone in his hand. He decides not to answer. Had this been his father’s plan when he urged his son to get a cell phone before going abroad, a plan to get a hold of him wherever he is, night and day? A man should be able to decide for himself whether he opens the door to let someone in. How many times had those free-spirited appeals to individual liberty in cell phone advertisements struck a nerve with Sturla? He’d always considered these communication devices the perfect fetters to freedom. He’d often imagined himself heading out into nature to let the seeds of some idea grow inside him, something which would later take tangible form in words, when suddenly a phone would ring in his pocket: it had occurred to someone in town that she needed to ring Sturla Jón Jónsson, but this same person hadn’t considered that Sturla might at this moment be thinking something that couldn’t withstand being broken in two. Now his father has tricked him into renouncing his freedom from this freedom: he has trapped Sturla into being reachable twenty-four hours a day. Hadn’t he spoken to him enough for one day? Did he also need to make his son suffer agony over whether to answer the phone? He would call his father that evening, or in a minute; he first needs to let Liliya know that he can’t go to the reading. While the phone continues to ring, Sturla splashes cold water on his face in the bathroom, and as he begins rinsing his mouth with toothpaste his father gives up; Sturla imagines him in the apartment on Skólavörðustígur, setting down the telephone.

Liliya is sitting next to the cafeteria window; she has a half-empty glass of beer in front of her and two full shots of something dark and red. The way she reacts to Sturla when he sits down opposite her makes him even more certain that she is a really good person. It occurs to him that he probably didn’t take sufficient care in preparing her poem in its Icelandic version; she had without doubt produced a wonderful translation of his “kennslustund” in her native tongue. She smiles warmly at him, glances at the clock as if to let him know that they ought to hurry to get to the reading, and holds one of the shots out to him. It is cherry brandy, ever the appropriate drink for focusing one’s powers of observation immediately before a poetry reading. It makes Sturla feel especially bad to let Liliya know he can’t come to the reading; he sips from his shot while she empties hers, and he tells her that he needs to work this afternoon — it is ridiculous but yet true — he needs to make corrections to an article which is about to be published in a magazine in Iceland. It can’t wait past this afternoon; he has to e-mail corrections by the day’s end.

“Perhaps we’ll see you this evening.” Liliya suggests, and Sturla considers it both good and bad that he can’t discern any disappointment in her eyes. She asks what the article is about, and finishes her glass of beer while Sturla tells her it considers the advantages and drawbacks of literary festivals (“pros and cons” is how he puts it in English, immediately regretting the phrase). He does his best to make it sound interesting, feeling uncomfortable that he isn’t being completely honest with Liliya, this person who he feels sure is going to enchant him more then he is usually enchanted by people.

“I’ll be up in my room,” he says. “I just need to send these corrections, then I’ll be up in my room.”

As soon as he starts going up the stairs to the third floor, he experiences a nagging hunger. He decides to head into town shortly and get himself something to eat; he’s not had any nourishment other than the wretched breakfast and those two or three bites of meat he’d managed to eat at the restaurant. Absent-mindedly he watches the news on television, smokes two cigarettes, and pours another measure from the whisky bottle into a glass. Then he decides to go out, and when he crosses onto the shady side of the street he realizes unhappily how valuable the overcoat had been to him — and only now senses how quickly he’s been drinking whisky over the past half hour.

When he comes back to the hotel room two hours later — with some new experiences which he wants to forget as soon as possible — the television has for some reason been taken down from the wall and has been placed on top of the closet which contains the empty fridge. Sturla realizes that he longs for something other than whisky to drink — perhaps cold beer or white wine — and he becomes suddenly angry that the fridge in the room is hooked-up although there isn’t even a lone bottle of water inside. He is well aware that his nervous system isn’t in the best possible shape at the moment, but he resolves nevertheless to go to reception, where the dwarfish Henryk is sitting on a raised office chair, and to ask when the mini-bar is going to be stocked.

“We don’t offer that service in this hotel.” Henryk responds to Sturla’s remark with something to that effect and, before Sturla knows what he is doing, he finds himself over-zealously describing how he is an Icelandic alcoholic and he must have some liquor in his mini-bar or he will need to change hotels.