Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“I can look into that tomorrow morning, sir,” answers Henryk, clearly amazed by this Icelander’s self-diagnosis. In fact, Sturla admires the dwarf’s calm, collected behavior; he would be justified in treating Sturla with the same roughness as Sturla has shown. Henryk points the clock out to Sturla — it isn’t yet eight o’clock so the cafeteria is open. Sturla buys himself two cold bottles of beer to take up to his room, but he doesn’t make it to the second before he falls asleep; the bottle is standing open and untouched on the table by the window as his deep snoring blends in with the low, distant sound of an American television channel, and Sturla sinks into a twelve-hour sleep which he really needs before he travels to Druskininkai at 2:00 in the afternoon the next day.

What happens the next day, other than the bus leaving for Druskininkai from the Writers’ Union at around two o’clock, is that Sturla becomes the owner of two new items of clothing, each of which, in a different fashion, replaces the Aquascutum overcoat. One of these items cost him half the amount as he nearly ended up paying a prostitute shortly before he returned to the hotel around 8:00 the evening before. He took the other item with the stealth of a pickpocket’s hand, the same hand “that damn Brynjólfur,” Brynjólfur Madsen, seemed to believe Sturla had used to steal his cousin’s manuscript. According to the Icelandic media, he was Jónas’s school companion and was, Sturla suddenly realized (shortly after concluding his business with the aforementioned prostitute), the reason Jónas had quoted time and again, almost obsessively, Megas’s song about Ragnheiður, the bishop’s daughter: “but, fine fellows, listen up; it’s ridiculous but it’s true / that damn Brynjólfur, he’s the guy who got her fertilized.”

On the other hand, the prostitute was the source of an experience Sturla would prefer to forget. That it should have occurred to him to use his profits from the games hall on Skólavörðustígur on an alcohol-addled (or drug-dazed) prostitute is unfathomable to him now, the next day, as he recalls the conversation with his father about how he was not going on a sex holiday to the Baltic. He remembers, too, his decision — the promise of the unreliable Sturla Jón rather than the intelligent Sturla Jón — that he was going to use the money he won from the University of Iceland to buy himself something that would always remind him of his trip to the poetry festival.

But wouldn’t a brief encounter with a prostitute — one who had actually reminded Sturla quite a bit of the Belarusian Salomé at Old Town Erotic Center — have become that very memory which would have lived on from these October days in Lithuania? Sturla had never before had sex with a woman who, as they say, walks the streets, and he momentarily recalls something his friend Svanur told him: that it’s good for a writer to experience human interactions (or business transactions) which involve the double-edged pleasure of engaging in an intimacy you’ve paid money for — that is, the suffering and unhappiness that Sturla had gone through the evening before in the alley. Right now, he is glad to see the open beer bottle awaiting him on the table by the mirror. And while he looks at it in his hand, he recalls his relations with the woman on Konstitucijos Street (somehow the street’s name has stuck in his memory). He empties the bottle in a few gulps, and the pain which he had woken up with after his troubled sleep instantly goes away.

Has Svanur ever had relations with a prostitute? Sturla wipes his lips with the back of his hand; he doubts it. “Shy men of extreme sensibility are the born victims of the prostitute;” Christopher Isherwood’s words have long lived in Sturla’s mind, ever since he read them in a foreword to Baudelaire’s diaries, but despite the fact that Svanur isn’t really an outward-going character and would doubtlessly maintain that he was endowed with extreme sensibility, he could hardly be considered the obvious victim of the hooker.

Sturla had been sitting in the same bar where he’d seen the Swedes the evening before, but he didn’t stay long, wanting to avoid the risk of meeting people from the reading — it was definitely a bar recommended to festival participants, though Sturla expected the crowd was more likely to congregate after the reading at the bar in the Writers’ Union, a place he’d still not been to. The fresh memory of meeting Liliya a little while earlier warmed him, but it also depressed him: he wanted to meet up with her alone, not inside with all the other participants that he imagined would gather after the Americans’ reading, quite literally and noisily rustling their papers — and he decided he would get together with Liliya the next day. It would be clear then whether she was as warm as she’d been when they first met. But after sitting down in another bar, not far from the “Swedish” bar, and drinking a large enough quantity of beer and cherry brandy to discover that he needed some other activity than just sitting alone at a table by himself, he let himself wander through the streets of the old downtown and his imaginary course of action began to include more and more of the Belarusian poet. He was so intimately wrapped up in this that when a young woman suddenly came up to him and without any introduction told him the price of her body, in litos as well as euros, Sturla — or so he later thinks, at least — figured that doing business with this woman made sense as the logical next step in the fantasy wandering the streets and drinking had aroused in him.

Judging by her face and hair, it was like she’d been clipped from Sturla’s mental image of Salomé, but the woman’s appearance and her pushiness struck him as being simultaneously very repulsive and an indication that she was easy prey (or so Sturla described it to himself). For his part, he was drunk and looked tired, but this woman must have begun her day much earlier than he, because it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, and she was in such an intoxicated haze that it was almost impossible to imagine she’d be able to complete the task at hand. That didn’t, however, stop Sturla from showing some interest in her; he asked her what she charged for a half-hour — and also asked himself at the same time whether he was serious — and he was told that for an hour he’d need to pay what amounted to 25,000 Icelandic kronur. She charged 15,000 for half an hour, and his next question was what service he could get for 10,000 kronur. She laughed — it was a provocative, spiteful laugh — and told Sturla to follow her into an alley between a children’s clothing store and a motorcycle store. And when she had dragged him along with her through the alley they came to a paved yard outside what seemed to be the office of a bookshop or a publisher.

Once there, she shoved Sturla up against the wall, out of sight of the street, and she pressed against him, her face so close to his that despite the great stench of liquor which must be steaming off both of them, he noticed a garlicky stink which succeeded in completely chasing away his desire to do this thing in the shady yard for which he was about to have to pay 10,000 kronur. He turned his face away from the woman, and when she hooked her heel around his leg and stuck her hand down the front of his pants, he’d had more than enough of the horrible garlic smell. He shoved the woman roughly off him and instinctively lashed out by calling her an animal, a beast — employing words that were foreign to his usual vocabulary. The woman reacted by grabbing hold of Sturla’s crotch, and, tit for tat, he responded by elbowing her, pushing her away from him and onto the sidewalk. She screamed something in her own tongue, and at that moment a window opened in the house above the bookshop. Although Sturla’s wasn’t able to comprehend the shout he heard from the window, he realized that if someone was accused of violence in this little crime scene he now found himself participating in, it would in all likelihood be him, the foreigner.