Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

“In other words, you’ve profited by the five thousand kronur bill I lost there the other day,” says Jón, when Sturla had come out of the bathroom and told his father about his winnings from the games hall. “Plus another five thousand some old codger lost in that black hole.”

Sturla had intended to show his father the new overcoat he’d hung on a chair in the kitchen — if he hadn’t already noticed it for himself — but with his unexpected windfall as food for thought he clean forgot.

“I only hope you’ll use the money to good effect, my fortunate son,” Jón says as he begins to make coffee, even though Sturla had turned down the offer, saying he would make himself a cup of tea. “It is indeed a considerable responsibility to have ten thousand kronur,” continues Jón, and while Sturla watches his father shovel coffee powder into the paper filter, he toys with his cigarette packet and lighter, asking himself whether all men in their late sixties communicate with their sons using the same sarcastic tone as his father — whose routine more often than not reminded Sturla of a younger man pretending to be nearly seventy:

Of course, you’ll throw your sense of responsibility overboard and use your swiftly made profit to buy an hour with some prostitute in Lithuania. Something like that won’t cost more than ten thousand kronur, I reckon. And most likely you’ll have some money left; you could offer the lady some champagne.

I’m not going on a sex trip to the Baltic, if that’s what you think. I’m not a soccer hooligan or some investment banker.

Ha, what do you know what’ll take place once you’ve arrived? You can’t say for certain that some woman with big, rolling breasts isn’t going to come up to you — perhaps when you’re completely lost in the city — and offer to accompany you to your hotel, since, naturally, she knows the area better than you, and then she’ll show you some motherly concern once you’ve arrived. I’m not sure you know beforehand how you’ll react to such kindness. You do know, however, that there’s ten thousand kronur in your pocket you haven’t done anything to earn, and you also know that you won’t need to explain it to anyone if the money disappears as suddenly as it appeared.

I don’t think you know your son particularly well. Besides, I didn’t win quite ten thousand kronur in the games hall; I’ve yet to count it, and the fourteen hundred I put in needs to be subtracted from that total.

Maybe that’s true. But, that aside, you haven’t been close to any woman since you and Hildur separated, am I right? What have you been up to since then? That was six or seven years ago.

What do you know about it, Pop? Would you like me to introduce you to every woman I get to know?

Perhaps you shouldn’t get too close to womenfolk in general; it’s not worth taking the risk of ending up with a sixth little bastard.

All at once Sturla Jón comes to his senses, standing in the kitchen doorway and half-listening to Jón; he’d been imagining the whole conversation. He wonders whether his father would really call his grandchildren — Egill, Gunnar, Grettir, Hildigunnur, and Hallgerður — bastards, but he gives Jón the benefit of doubt and answers his own question in the negative.

“When are you going to Latvia?” Jón asks once he has finished preparing the coffee and is waiting for the kettle to boil.

“I’m going to Lithuania,” Sturla corrects him, trying to remember whether Sæunn, the young woman he had been in a brief relationship with three years ago, ever met his father. They probably never met, but it startles Sturla that he can’t be sure about it. Is he getting too old to remember whether or not he’d introduced his young girlfriend to his father not long ago?

“And what exactly are you are going to do there?” Jón wants to know. “In. . Vilnius.”

“Both in Vilnius and in a little town some place near to Vilnius. I am going to read my poems. It’s a poetry festival.”

“You’ve gone to one of these festivals before, right?” Jón’s question is laden with disapproval at his son’s dalliance with poetry, but Sturla decides not to let that get on his nerves. He’d learned to rise above his father’s needless sermonizing about the “minor art form” that is poetry. Poetry was a reminder that the son was currently working in his chosen artistic medium, while the father, the internationally educated film director, hadn’t come close to completing his “great form,” the movie, for three-and-a-half decades; the nearest he’d gotten was arranging some books about directors and movie-making in the library in Hafnarfjörður, where he worked. That said, he’d recently mentioned that an old schoolmate of his, a chemist, was going to finance a movie which Jón and his friend Örn Featherby had been planning for quite some time, but Sturla took the news with a large pinch of salt.

In answer to the question about whether or not he’d gone to poetry festivals like the one he was going to in Lithuania, Sturla curtly replies that he’s been both to Belgium and to the Faroe Islands roughly ten years ago.

“But you weren’t impressed by the festivals, correct?” his father asks.

“No, I wouldn’t say I was,” comes the response, and as Jón is asking, in a surly tone, why he expects this festival to be any better than the others, it occurs to him, from somewhere in the depths of his brain, to use the coming trip to Lithuania as material for an article he could write for Jónatan Jóhannsson’s literary magazine, From E to F . Why not expose the things that would take place at the international festival before they took place, and set up the possibility of writing a second article about the same material after the festival ends, in light of what had happened — in other words, what he actually experienced. The idea, which Sturla at once becomes convinced is a fabulous idea, reminds him of that famous story from the world of cultural journalism in Reykjavík, about a music critic at an Icelandic newspaper, a man better known as a composer — indeed, rather well known as one — who published a review of one of his colleagues’ concerts in the paper, a concert which had been postponed at the last minute and didn’t take place until after the review appeared.

But while this critic had so clumsily deceived his readers, people reading Sturla’s article, on the other hand, would be just as aware as its author that it deals with future events, that it presents honest speculation about how things at the poetry festival would turn out. It would really be no different from what you find in the mass media every day, with people predicting what will happen in sports or the stock market. Following from his thoughts about the article and the composer’s advance “review,” it occurs to Sturla to tell his father how he’d been in a clothing store earlier and had heard a story about N. Pietur, the old acquaintance of both Jón and Örn Featherby who, firstly, happens to be the half-brother of the editor Jónatan Jóhannsson and, secondly, is the very composer about whom the premature review was written. But Jón breaks the silence first, asking Sturla whether he is going to read from his new book in Lithuania.

“They are translating some poems from it, yes,” answers Sturla. “But I’ll read mainly from the older books.” He tells his father that in addition to the ten or eleven poems which had been translated from Icelandic into Lithuanian (by a Lithuanian who had lived in Iceland for half his life), one of the poems from the new book, “kennslustund,” has been translated into Lithuanian via Sturla’s own translation from Icelandic into English, “the lesson.” The translator, a Belarusian poet from Minsk who was also participating in the poetry festival, had in turn sent Sturla one of her own poems, translated into English, which he had then hastily translated into Icelandic.