Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

Can it be, thinks Sturla, that despair comes after death?

According to the letter writer, Jónas had been dropping in on a married woman of around forty for close to three months, a woman he was too closely-connected to for it to be appropriate of him to visit her when not in the company of their other relatives, “whatever that signifies”—or so Brynjólfur had phrased it. The visits had started one day when he was coming from the State Liquor Store on Snorrabraut and decided to go a different route through Norðurmýri than he usually took on his way home to Meðalholt. And as he was going past the woman’s house, and was in fact wondering whether she was home — he knew that she didn’t have a job — she had knocked on her kitchen window. It seemed she had happened to be standing there as Jónas was going past, and she indicated through the window that he should stop walking and come to the front door. Jónas had felt like he had to obey, and when the woman opened the door she asked him if she couldn’t invite him in for a cup of coffee; she also wanted to ask for his help with something, if he could get a nail out of the wall for her and then nail another in its place. He sat down in the kitchen with her and when she started asking what Jónas had in his black plastic bag — as though she hadn’t figured it out — he fished out his recently purchased bottle of Black Death schnapps and they both took some in their coffee, though it wasn’t past one in the afternoon. The repair work was soon forgotten in favor of drinking, and the woman craftily tricked Jónas into her bedroom, where she as good as violated him: he hadn’t been able to put up any meaningful resistance because of the drinking.

He was a little over twenty; she was close to forty.

Sturla looks at the printout, takes a swig of beer, lights himself another cigarette, and convinces himself that a story of the sort he is now reading for the fifth or sixth time couldn’t originally have come from someone who was despairing over a doomed love affair, unless you imagined the whole thing playing out in some people’s court on television. The person recalling the story — this guy who calls himself Madsen — must have added some color to it himself. He’d used material from someone who was no longer able to give his own report and reshaped it himself. Was this Brynjólfur doing the same thing to Sturla’s family that he’d managed to get Sturla accused of a few days ago: taking advantage of Jónas Hallmundursson’s experiences and memories for his own sake?

Was Brynjólfur Madsen adding himself to the group of individuals who indulge in the peculiar need to let Sturla know that they, no less than Sturla, have a talent for creating art? Sturla’s suspicion doesn’t lessen as he looks further down Brynjólfur’s e-mail:

Two days after Jónas had been seduced by the woman in Norðurmýri, he had been on Laugavegur, on his way home, and instead of going past the Station and taking the route which went up Meðalholt, he’d decided to turn onto Snorrabraut and then onto Mánagata. He had promised himself not to go anywhere near that street (except when necessity demanded, that is), given his unavoidable relationship to the woman — when “other related folk” were present — but, as if some alien power was working on him, he found himself going along Snorrabraut, against his own wishes, and before he knew it he was knocking on the door in Mánagata.

And Jónas had afterwards decided to make a third visit to her and they’d indulged themselves with an illicit love affair, which Brynjólfur wanted to believe symbolized his friend’s unhappy ending. But as often as Sturla reads Brynjólfur’s petty retelling of Jónas’s confession in the e-mail, he isn’t bothered by it, except when he starts thinking back to the past which “that damn Brynjólfur” has now muddied with his gossip. And Sturla’s thoughts turn to what his mother is doing at the moment on Nýlendugata: has she perhaps invited her neighbors’ daughter down from upstairs, and is she showing her the picture of her breasts? Or is she sitting by herself, alone with her memories in her minute but finely decorated living-room, sipping on the calm promise of wine which is the same color as the upholstery of her furniture?

Why should he be bothered by what his dead cousin and his still-alive mother had gotten up to together in a life lived thirty years ago? The imagery of that life had, Sturla thinks, been described plenty of times in books and songs; these new descriptions in an e-mail did nothing to alter it.

Sturla blows the ashes off the printout and runs his fingers over the beer stains. He folds the pages together and puts them in his overcoat pocket. And when he stands up from the table he decides, out of nowhere, to buy Liliya something with his slot-machine winnings; he wants to offer her some little token of his gratitude for the friendly way she’d treated him in the short time since they’d met — some tangible object to take the place of what he’d been unable to give her: namely, something of himself.

And he walks all the way back to the boarding house.

For the rest of the day he stays in his little room and reads the detective story that he’d bought in an airport bookstore in Copenhagen. He is so absorbed that he doesn’t stop reading except to briefly run out to a nearby supermarket for a sandwich and a bottle of red wine, and lets a character in this thick book, the mother of one of the main characters, remind him about what this complete stranger, Brynjólfur, has just told him. He wonders to himself if it wasn’t a bit callous not to let it affect him, this new knowledge that Fanný Alexson, the alcoholic woman in the cellar on Nýlendugata, was the last woman in the life of his similarly-aged cousin — and possibly the only one: Sturla had never known Jónas to be in a relationship with any woman, although various poems in his manuscript gave the impression that he was.

When Sturla wakes up the next day and opens the window in the room that looks onto a desolate street, he finds it noticeably cooler than the day before; it is without doubt weather for both an overcoat and a scarf. He decides to go into town, and to go ahead and wear the overcoat without fear. But just before he is about to leave, he makes the decision to try to reach Liliya in Druskininkai; he feels that she deserves it, after he let himself disappear in such a sudden fashion the day before. He asks the old woman if he could use her phone to make a domestic call; she directs him to a room off of the living room and brings him tea shortly after he begins to talk.

He doesn’t have much hope that he’ll reach his female Belarusian friend — he is expecting her to be busy with the events in the festival program — but when his hope is rewarded just two minutes after he asks to speak with Liliya Boguinskaia, participant in the festival, Sturla figures that it is most likely the greatest succès of his whole stay in the land of the Lithuanians. He gets through to the office at the residences on Mairono Street, and he says he is Liliya’s relative and needs to speak to her urgently.

Liliya is, naturally, worried when she comes to the phone.

“Hello,” she says, questioningly.

“Hello,” replies Sturla and it takes Liliya a moment to work out who she is speaking to.

“Is everything OK?” she asks, and he answers by saying that this is precisely why he called: he wants to let her know that everything is indeed OK; he regretted not having been able to fully explain his sudden departure to her.

“Where did you go?” As Liliya tells him he was sorely missed at the performance the evening before, especially by the “Swedish Rolf” (Sturla interjects to say he is from Argentina), he realizes that she seems to think he is still in Druskininkai.