Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

It comes as no surprise that it is his father.

“I thought you were going to call back yesterday,” says Jón, and the way he says it indicates he’s clearly been anxious. And while Liliya leans forward and takes Sturla’s scarf between her thumb and index finger, he tells his father that he’d meant to call last night, but he had unexpectedly ended up at a social gathering with his festival companions (as he phrases it) and had momentarily forgotten everything else.

“I’m afraid I have to bring up again what I told you yesterday,” Jón says, and the accusatory tone in his voice leads Sturla to stand up and ask Liliya and the Dane to excuse him. Then he moves over to the door leading to the hotel reception.

“It’s reached the front page today,” Jón continues, and Sturla asks him: What has reached the front page today?

“The picture from yesterday, except now it’s on the front page.”

“The one with the baseball cap?”

“Yes, the one with the baseball cap.”

What amazes Sturla most about the news his father reads from the front page of the paper, and his comments about the debate “this muck-raking mass media” is having over Sturla’s newly-published book, is that he, Sturla Jón Jónsson (the poet), hadn’t only stolen poems from his relative: his relative had also ruthlessly stolen from other poets, especially Dagur Sigurðarson, the Icelandic poet Jónas held in highest esteem. The difference between Jónas and Sturla Jón’s methods was that the former had not seemed at all ashamed of filching here and there — he had even told Brynjólfur about it (and, of course, he’d never actually intended to publish the poems) — but Sturla, on the other hand, is so “bent over backwards” about his thieving that he isn’t only maintaining a wall of silence about it, he’s even chosen to absent himself from the country. This silence surely spoke volumes for the charge that the things Sturla had taken from his relative’s estate were, plain and simple, stolen.

Sturla asks his father whether or not he finds it a little odd that a newspaper of this caliber should concern itself with contemporary poetry.

“This is the very same media that maintains that news should be entertainment,” replies Jón, and adds that the paper is itself trying to compose poetry; one of the sub-headings in the article, which must be the journalist’s own words, is “The Pickpocket Poet.”

“And saying that silence speaks — that comes from Dagur’s poem, ‘Suicide,’” says Sturla. “So today you can find a picture of me, branded as a word-thief who’s been caught red-handed, in every grocery store in the country?”

“I haven’t been to any of the country’s grocery stores today,” replies Jón, and Sturla thinks he perceives in this reply that his father believes what the country is being told on the front pages of its newspapers.

“But you can find it on the net,” adds Jón, and he mentions that Sturla’s publisher, Gústaf, had called last night — Brynjólfur Madsen wanted to speak to Sturla. Gustaf said Brynjólfur regretted having gone directly to the media with the story, and he also regretted the low tone of the discussion. He’d made those remarks before the second article was published, so if his repentance was real, he no longer had a say in what the paper wrote. But, according to Gústaf, Brynjólfur wanted to explain the matter directly to Sturla. Apparently he wanted to tell him something about Jónas, about his last days, something he couldn’t say to Hallmundur and Þeba, whatever that meant.

“What a big-hearted guy,” replies Sturla.

“But it has to be said that things really aren’t looking so good,” says Jón, and Sturla, who is looking towards the hotel entrance and trying to persuade himself that he isn’t thinking about what’s going on in Iceland, asks his father to wait on the phone while he gets the hotel’s e-mail address from the woman at reception. Then he gives the address to Jón, adding that he has to hang up the phone: he is heading to “the festival, which is the real reason why I’m here at all.”

But the only thing Sturla knows for sure that he is heading towards is the cafeteria, through the lobby. Liliya seems very busy explaining something to the Dane, and although Sturla is delighted to see her — she, at least, lights up one corner of his gloomy thoughts — he is beginning to find the Dane’s incessant head-nodding irritating. He can imagine this grey-bearded man nodding his head at his nagging wife; he starts to feel sorry for the wife of this overly-agreeable poet, about whom he knows nothing other than that he is wearing a wedding band on his ring finger, that he is called Roger, and that he is on his way, together with some other mediocre poets of this world, to visit Druskininkai in Lithuania solely because he doesn’t have to pay for anything, neither for travel nor for accommodation.

“I’m telling Roger about the restaurant I went to yesterday evening after the reading,” says Liliya, and Roger nods his head to Sturla, his mouth caught in an expression that suggests he is in the middle of some great discovery.

As Sturla expected from Liliya’s comment, the restaurant in question is the one Jokûbas had recommended; moreover, Jokûbas had dropped by in person later in the evening, to check up on his brother (Sturla imagines, as Liliya tells her narrative) and to make sure he was giving his friends from the poetry festival the red carpet treatment.

“There wasn’t a musician standing outside, playing bass, was there?”

“Not that I recall, no. But at some point I need to take you to my coffee shop on Pilies Street. When we come back from Druskininkai.” And she asks Sturla whether he was going back to Iceland immediately after they return from the country.

Even though Sturla takes considerable trouble to give her a clear answer (that he has a whole free day in Vilnius after they come back from Druskininkai; he is going home the morning after), Liliya doesn’t seem to pay much attention to his response; she still seems to be thinking about the restaurant from the previous evening. And when she begins describing the food, Sturla politely interrupts her, asking her and Roger how the reading at the Writers’ Union had been. The Dane, in his typical quiet way, gives it a good review, and Liliya says she really liked the poems of one of the American women, Kelly Fransesca. They’d reminded her of a Canadian poet she thinks highly of, Dora Mistral, who had actually translated some of her own poems, including “Pilies Street”—Sturla had translated from Dora’s English version. Also, a few lines from one of the Jenny Lipp’s poems had reminded her of Sturla’s “the lesson.” She is, she remarks, more and more infatuated with this poem the longer she thinks about it. The metaphor of volcanic eruption strikes her as very fertile; she suspects that such a lyrical undertaking (or, as she puts it, a poetic exercise) must have come from a real depth.

“Thanks for that,” says Sturla (acknowledging to himself that he isn’t sure how to interpret Liliya’s remarks) and instead of sitting down at the table, as Liliya invites him to do, he says he needs to take care of a couple of things before they go to the bus; he needs to make a phone call in his room and will meet them outside the Writers’ Union in fifteen minutes: “a quarter of an hour,” he tells them in English.

The Dane offers to take Sturla’s suitcase (he has very little luggage himself) but Sturla turns him down: he needs some papers from the suitcase when he calls Iceland. Unlike the bobble-headed Dane, Sturla mentally shakes his head horizontally left and right while he listens to himself telling strangers his reasons for wanting his own suitcase with him. He drains his beer and when he says goodbye to Liliya and the Dane, he tries to make sure that the farewell doesn’t come across as though it will last more than the quarter of an hour he mentions.