Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

Sturla remembers having checked into the boarding house under a Greek name which he made up while he was filling out the form at check-in. It’d occurred to him — more out of fun than in earnest — that he would be hunted in all the city’s boarding houses: thanks to his enthusiastic cultural investment in the Baltic countries, Darryl Rothman has acquired a right to the Lithuanian police’s personal assistance if he feels he had been violated, no matter how insignificantly, as small as it is, and for her part Jenny Lipp won’t let the hullabaloo die down before the organizer of the festival, Gintaras (who was, according to himself, formally responsible for the welfare and the property of the participants), has managed to hand back the item whose disappearance has so unnerved her fellow countryman, even though Darryl Rothman isn’t actually a participant in the festival. Sturla hadn’t expected the old woman to ask to see his passport, but when she did — very courteously — he’d tried to describe to her that he had dual citizenship. He had no need to, as her sole interest in the passport was looking at the photograph of the holder, which could easily have been taken to be a photograph of a different man than the one who was standing in front of her, smiling apologetically.

“You are another,” Sturla thought he heard the old woman say, and he’d chosen to understand from that comment that she thought it was time to update the photograph; it was no longer a picture of the person standing before her.

But had she really said those three words? Given the poverty of her English, Sturla suspects it unlikely that the word “another” was in her lexicon, but his image of her changes soon enough, once he’s finished breakfast: the word “cybercafé” comes out of her mouth when he asks her to help him to find a coffee shop which offers a connection to the internet. He is getting impatient to check his e-mail account.

Although he knows he needs to be careful with the money which he has left — not counting the slot-machine money he has earmarked for something special — he takes a taxi to midtown, and soon after midday he’s retrieved Brynjólfur’s letter, printed it out (it stretches to three pages), and is sitting at a pub downtown, reading the letter over and over. He is concertedly trying to figure out the motives behind the information — or invention? — he finds in it.

Brynjólfur begins his letter by apologizing for “the mess he’s caused” by “spilling the beans to the media about his discovery” that Sturla’s poems reminded him of poems by his cousin Jónas. He says he deeply regrets that the journalist he’d talked with, a man he knew very well “but no longer thought much of,” hadn’t let him read the article about Sturla’s book and Jónas’s manuscript before it went to print. He would never have agreed to the ideas the journalist put in his mouth. But having said this — and not before — Brynjólfur wanted to introduce himself a little: he said he was a district court lawyer in Reykjavík and he’d known Jónas since their first year in Grammar School. They had quickly become good friends, not least because of their shared love of poetry, something which, for his part, he isn’t yet cured of, which was why, for example, he’d been browsing through Sturla’s new book. He and Jónas had distanced themselves from one another soon after graduation. Brynjólfur had become tired of Jónas’s outlook on life, his view that everything a person learned was dangerous, except for the things he learned from himself. Perhaps the idea had been amusing at first, while they were still young men, but it had quickly lost its creative potential when the learning Jónas most wanted to experience for himself mostly concerned life’s undergrowth.

In the last six months of his life, Jónas and he had had a few conversations, but their relationship had never been natural or relaxed: Brynjólfur had started a family, and Jónas wasn’t at that time a popular guest at any home with children, given his habits and behavior. Brynjólfur had on the other hand clearly perceived that Jónas was asking him for help, without saying so directly; although he’d demanded considerable attention and time, Jónas had never asked him for money. “What’s more, I certainly wouldn’t have given him money,” writes Brynjólfur, and he allows himself to dwell on his “home-brewed philosophy” that if a person really wants to help others, he’ll give them his time; if, on the other hand, a person wants to ruin someone, he gives him money. The idea that time is money amounts to a grave misunderstanding: while you can buy time with money, earning the money to buy the time takes so long that the investment doesn’t pay dividends.

Jónas got his money from the bank employee on Austurstræti, thinks Sturla, and smiles at the printout, which he has decorated with two beautiful rings from his beer glass and a sprinkle of cigarette ash. And as he lights another cigarette, he shakes his head over Brynjólfur’s smug posturing about time.

Many of Brynjólfur’s memories about their shared acquaintance, Jónas, found their way into his poetry manuscript. For example, Brynjólfur says, he can remember Armann Valur’s Icelandic lesson at the Grammar School very well, the lesson Jónas had recalled in his poem titled “Icelandic Lesson,” an obvious allusion to Dagur Sigurðarson’s prose poem “English Lesson,” from which Jónas had swiped a few words. Sturla had re-named the same poem “the lesson” in his book, and Brynjólfur actually praised him for the poem’s closing lines (as they appeared in assertions ), lines which suggest that the speaker of the poem is made from materials that are not meant to last, and won’t survive, a lifetime. He recognizes that these lines are an addition to Jónas’s poem, that they come from Sturla himself and “had had the effect on him” as though Sturla had composed an obituary for his unfortunate cousin. Brynjólfur had always had the feeling that Jónas “would soon rush ahead;” he’d never been like “those folk who let the time go by on this earth, just waiting for it to pass,” as Jónas described it in one of the typed poems he’d given Brynjólfur. Brynjólfur was, in truth, amazed that Sturla hadn’t used that poem in his book.

The way Brynjólfur’s letter discusses Sturla’s alleged theft of his cousin’s manuscript as though it is an entirely natural thing — the exact opposite of the discussion he’d started in the newspaper — greatly surprises Sturla. But right now, as tired as he is from yesterday’s exertions, he knows he doesn’t have the powers of concentration to determine whether this overly-industrious attorney’s presentation of his case is motivated by sincerity or sarcasm.

At the same time, Sturla thinks it likely that the narrative at the heart of the letter—“something which Jónas trusted to me (Brynjólfur) three days before he died”—is meant as some kind of poetic compensation for having involved Sturla in this damaging newspaper scandal. Alternatively, it isn’t out of the question that Brynjólfur was deliberately telling Sturla something that he knew ought to be left forgotten and buried — that Jónas’s old schoolmate knew very well the identity of the person who Jónas hadn’t wanted to expose.

“Perhaps no good can come from blowing the dust from the past.” This is the way Brynjólfur prefaces his recollection, followed by a quotation from Friedrich Dürrenmatt (of all people): “Those who try to unveil the secrets of the dead belong to the dead themselves” (something Sturla finds totally predictable from the type of man who is a district court attorney). “But still,” the letter continues, “I think it is best if I tell you something I believe hastened the death of your friend Jónas, something that led him to despair.”