Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Sturla interrupts his daughter and tells her that he doesn’t remember visiting any fitness complex when he last went to Egilsstaðir; she must be confusing him (her father) with someone else who came to visit the countryside. He doesn’t remind her that he hasn’t been to Egilsstaðir for four or five years, since Hulda last asked him to stay with the children while she and Símon went on a week’s vacation to Copenhagen.

“Isn’t there a gym at the hotel?” asked Hildigunnur, and it is almost heartbreaking for Sturla to have to wonder if his older daughter thinks about anything other than fitness training.

“No, not that I’m aware of,” he replies, and he is informed that nowadays all hotels have gyms, “except perhaps a few hostels.”

As Hildigunnur asks him about “the weather abroad,” whether it is hot there in “what was it called again?” Sturla hears a thin voice call from behind her: “Is that your father?”

It’s Hulda’s voice, a voice he’s not heard for several months but had listened to daily for fifteen years, without ever figuring out why she needed to screech the way she did.

“Yes, it’s Dad,” Hildigunnur yells, right into the phone, and tells her mother that he is overseas.

“Does she want to talk to me?” asks Sturla, thinking the question sounds like he doesn’t expect she will.

And instead of answering, Hildigunnur takes the telephone from her ear, and Hulda greets Sturla with a different, more listless voice than the one she’d used to ask if he was on the phone:

“Hi, Sturla.”

“She didn’t say goodbye,” he replies.

“I haven’t heard from you in a long time,” replies Hulda. “Where are you?”

“Lithuania. Vilnius.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Nothing really. It’s just that I was sent here by the Icelandic people.”

“Are you really on vacation in. . where did you say, Lithuania?”

“Do you think the Icelandic nation would send me on vacation?

“I’ve no idea.”

“Why wouldn’t I be on vacation in Lithuania or some other place?”

“Do they sell holidays to Lithuania?”

“Was Hildigunnur hurrying off to something?”

“They are all always hurrying somewhere,” answers Hulda. “You know how life is for them here in Egilsstaðir; there’s no rest for the wicked. That’s the country, as you said yourself: never any tranquility. Except perhaps for Egill; he’s headed south with his Spanish girlfriend.”

“Did you see the thing in the newspaper?”

“Yes, I saw it this morning. But what are you doing over there? Are you giving a reading? Are you alone?”

“Of course I’m alone,” replies Sturla. And what he says next, in his most ceremonious tone, he does so in a way he wants Hulda to understand as self-pitying. “You know I’ve chosen to be alone, Hulda. Whether I am in Lithuania or Reykjavík.”

“You’ve always been a hopeless loner,” replies Hulda teasingly. “You can’t tell me that’s news.”

“Don’t call me a loner, Hulda!” Sturla practically yells into the phone, and he realizes just how much it irritates him that she would describe him as a “loner.” “Call me just about anything other than a loner,” he repeats, trying to control himself. “Or a gipsy.”

“What would you prefer I called you? A team player?”

“Nothing. You don’t always need to make it sound like you are trying to explain my character for some damn magazine interview.”

“That I seem to be trying to explain. .? You’re being overly sensitive, Sturla.”

And his ex-wife’s next question makes Sturla think not of the sort of candid magazine interview he feels journalists ought to be conducting with him — journalists who until now have largely shunned him — but instead the words his father Jón left written on the bathroom wall at Mánagata in the mid-sixties.

“Why would I explain your character in a magazine article?” is Hulda’s next question. “Aren’t we just talking on the phone? And yes, I saw the news about your book of poems in the newspaper. And I didn’t find it particularly amusing to read, if you ask me.”

“The book?”

“The news. By the way, I haven’t congratulated you on the book. But maybe you don’t care about that. I found it to be an entertaining book, no matter whether it is by you or by. .” She pauses when Sturla sighs wearily into the phone and continues, “Of course the book is by you, Sturla. How could you get a book published that had been written by someone else?”

“How? Scores of writers across the world publish books that have been written by other people. Why can’t I do it too?”

“Then the news is accurate?”

“If you believe it, then yes, it is.”

“If I believe it? I don’t believe one way or the other; I thought you knew me well enough well to know that.” And as she continues talking Sturla considers the accuracy of her words: Hulda was not only skeptical of all kinds of religion — a peculiar fact in light of her relationship with Símon the co-op manager, who was himself a staunch believer — but she was also skeptical of everything else in the world until she’d completely tested it. This had the effect, as she admitted, that she didn’t believe in anything in the world, something that in Sturla’s eyes had contributed to her rather rigid attitude toward personal relationships.

“You could, on the other hand, tell me whether this person is right,” Hulda suggests, “this Brynjólfur or whatever he’s called.”

But to what end? Sturla thinks. Whatever he says, she won’t believe him. He answers her with another question.

“Have the children read it?”

“Gunnar asked me about it. You know Hildigunnur doesn’t read the paper. And I’m not going to point it out to Grettir or Hallgerður.”

“And what did Gunnar ask you?”

“The same thing I’m asking you: whether you used Jónas’s poems. You’ve got to remember that they don’t really know who Jónas was; it’s been thirty years since he died, if I remember correctly.”

“You know how I work, Hulda. You read someone else’s work, and inevitably something filters into your work. Jónas understood this too; his writing was peppered with things others had written, just as my poems are filled with things he wrote. Much of what he wrote is borrowed from Dagur Sigurðarson and others.”

“But this man is accusing you of stealing whole poems from Jónas — who I didn’t even know wrote poems. Which reminds me: your mother called me yesterday, and she wasn’t what you’d call sober.”

“Did you talk about me?”

Sturla suddenly hears the shout of a booming voice from inside the single family house at Egilsstaðir: “Is that Stulli?”

It is Símon, the surrogate father of his young children, the only person in the whole world, except for some kids from childhood, who calls Sturla “Stulli”.

Hulda answers Símon, and Sturla wonders to himself whether asking someone who they’re talking to on the phone is some kind of custom out in the East fjords. And while Hulda begins telling him about her phone conversation with her former mother-in-law, Sturla imagines that the accusation (as described in the media) must have made Símon almost as wildly happy as (Sturla imagines) when he manages to catch teenagers shoplifting at the grocery store.

According to Hulda, Fanný had been really drunk when she called. She hadn’t heard from her for a few weeks — they’d always had regular conversations since Sturla and Hulda separated — and after Fanný asked for news of her grandchildren, she got right to the point. She said she was devastated by the nonsense which was being stirred up about innocent people in the media, and without naming the informant (Brynjólfur) by name she blamed Jónas for having managed to blacken the name of her son. What’s more, she’d added that “right before that thoroughly spoiled boy killed himself, she’d invited him up to her place on Mánagata, but he hadn’t been up to the task.”