Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“Do you have any rooms?” he asks the woman at the front desk, the one who’d taken his key shortly before.

The woman looks at Sturla doubtfully. “But weren’t you just. .?”

“Yes,” replies Sturla. “And now I want to check in again.”

He didn’t know why exactly, but from the moment he woke up Sturla had had the feeling he wouldn’t be getting on the bus to Druskininkai. And now, as he sits by the window in the twin hotel room (number 411), he feels sure the bus has set off from the Writers’ Union and that either Liliya or Roger had run from there to the hotel to tell him to hurry — but, as he’d asked the woman at the front desk to do, they would have been told that Sturla Jón Jónsson had left the hotel at about 1:45.

His failure to show up at the bus at the appointed time means that, sooner or later, he’ll have to get to Druskininkai on his own, likely rather early tomorrow. Indeed, nothing but his own death could justify another absence.

His own death . Sturla pauses at those words. Just as a person owns his life — which possibly is the only real property he owns — he must be the owner of his death, too, even though other people have to take care of him in that situation. “It’s one thing to live, another to die.” Hadn’t he brought that sentence to life in one of his books, free from freedom , his only book so far that had sold more than the 150 or 200 copies poetry books usually sell? Sturla hadn’t thought about what that sentence might signify, something that was true of everything he’d written, but that was precisely what gave his poetry value and life beyond the first reading; he himself, and supposedly other readers too, were yet to find out what it all meant. His latest book, assertions , is of a different nature, as it wasn’t conceived in the same way as the others. As suggested by the name, the poems in the book are more determined, giving the reader less leeway for his own interpretations — in certain places he is thrown up against a wall. Sturla had feared this would also be true of the poet: it was now clear he had literally ended up against the wall, that all that was left to do was wake up the execution squad.

But since his own death would justify his absence from the gathering that the world, and all his poems, had led him to, he figures he is well within his rights to play hooky from the so-called group bonding that he knows will be in the program today in Druskininkai. “The guy ‘no longer’ needs an alibi,” or so he misquotes a line from a Dagur Sigurðarson poem. Sturla — and, evidently, Jonas, too — had managed to internalize lines from Dagur’s poems over time, almost without trying. As he looks around the spacious hotel room, which could easily house another poet too — that is, if not all the poets are on their way out to the country, to The Season of Poetry, as the organizers had somehow decided to name the festival.

Sturla gets a water glass from the bathroom (which is a lot more spacious than in room 304) and pours the remnants of the whisky bottle into the glass. Then he lights two cigarettes. He leaves one smoking in the ashtray, and he holds the other between his index and middle fingers.

What does Liliya think about me? he wonders. About a man who always vanishes from the scene just when things are about to happen. First of all, he doesn’t show up at the reading that marks the beginning of the festival, and then he doesn’t show up for the festival itself. It must have occurred to Liliya that this Icelandic poet, whose poem she’d translated (according to the wishes of the festival organizers), a poem about dying before old age — about not being meant to stay the course of one’s life — doesn’t have time to attend the events he’s come here to attend. He must be a very busy man, this man who constantly “rushes ahead,” as he’d put it himself in his poem.

Hadn’t he also stood up from his first full meal in town the day before just as he’d begun eating, and vanished from the restaurant?

Yes.

Were people having a lot of fun on the bus headed towards Druskininkai? All of the participants would be getting to know the people they were sitting next to, if they hadn’t already met, and even getting to know the people who were sitting in front of and behind them, or in the nearby aisle seats. Bottles and little hip flasks would be changing hands and occasional bursts of laughter would rise from the continuous indistinguishable babble which from time to time descends into silence while the passengers think up what they ought to say next — and in one such silence Liliya will look out of the window where she sits beside the grey-bearded Dane, and contemplate the forested countryside that’s rushing past the bus at 80 kilometers per hour, her thoughts full of questions about the expression on Sturla’s face as he said goodbye and disappeared from the cafeteria after having declined Roger’s offer to carry his suitcase to the Writers’ Union.

When Sturla opens the closet in the entryway to the room he discovers a black suitcase on wheels that the last guest must have forgotten. He wheels the case across the floor and into the main room, where he lifts it up onto one of the beds. Just then the sun lights up the room. Sturla opens the zipper on the case, and then he goes to the window to draw the curtains; he also turns on the television, which takes a little while to come on before weather reports from Australia and New Zealand fill the room. In the suitcase is a stack of neatly-folded men’s clothes, and what especially interests Sturla is that at the bottom are fifteen to twenty identical white shirts, all the same, some still in their plastic covering. Sturla considers the suitcase’s contents and sniffs a checked sweater that’s on the top. He takes a sip of whisky, extinguishes his cigarette, and smokes the other one. Before closing the case he takes out one of the shirts, puts it on the other bed, and unfolds the sleeves to see whether it might fit. Then he calls the front desk and lets them know that a suitcase has been left behind in the closet.

After closing it, he opens his own suitcase, pulls the Brooks Brothers overcoat out from under the pile of clothes and hangs it on the back of a chair by the writing table in the center of the room. Then he folds the white shirt and places it on top of his clothes, which, compared to the contents of the other suitcase, are in disarray. He rolls the black suitcase into the entryway and leaves it by the door.

A few moments later he decides instead to put back what he took. He opens his case, smells his fingers before retrieving the white shirt, and puts it carefully back where it originally came from. Then he opens a black notebook which he takes out of his briefcase.

No more than a few minutes pass before a hotel employee knocks on the door and takes the suitcase. Sturla is talking to his daughter Hildigunnur; he’d called Egilsstaðir from the hotel telephone, listened briefly to his younger daughter, Hallgerður, who wasn’t able to stop and talk to him, and asked her to fetch Hildigunnur.

“And you? What are you doing?” asks Hildigunnur.

“I am on this trip to Lithuania. I’m here at a poetry festival in a city called Vilnius.”

“So I’ve begun toning again,” continues Hildigunnur, as though she hasn’t heard her father’s last words. She’d been talking about the red sports car she bought with her girlfriend, and when she suddenly begins discussing what she calls “toning,” Sturla can’t remember her ever mentioning stopping fitness training — so why did she have to start again? “They built a new place here in Egilsstaðir,” she continues. “Do you remember how the old place looked when you last visited? They now have televisions everywhere and. .”