Bragi Ólafsson - The Ambassador

“I am not used to being labeled an out-and-out criminal,” he replies. “Especially at a poetry festival. Though no one over five or six years old is totally free from guilt, my experience at other similar festivals has been that participants are treated as innocent.”

“I know what happened,” says Liliya in a whisper, and Sturla asks what she means: What happened where?

“I spoke to Gintaras.”

“And what did he say? What did that courteous fellow say?”

“He told me what Jenny told him.”

“Then you don’t know anything about what happened,” said Sturla, and realizes right away that he sounds unnecessarily certain in his accusation; he doesn’t know Liliya well enough to tell her what she does and doesn’t know. “I have to let you know you can’t trust what those people tell you.” He feels like he’s stolen the line from a B-movie script.

“No,” replies Liliya, uncertainly.

“I’m asking you not to trust them.”

“Yes.”

Sturla expects Liliya to offer him more support, but when she doesn’t he asks whether she’d talked with “that Jenny Lipp.”

“Not about that.”

“Not about what?”

“The overcoat?”

“What then?”

“I talked to them a lot yesterday, Jenny, Daniella, and Kelly. You know who they are, don’t you? Daniella and Kelly?

“No, I don’t know who they are. When does a person know who someone is?”

“You know who I am,” says Liliya, playfully.

“I don’t know who you are.”

“But do you like me?”

Sturla pauses for a moment — he never expected a question like this — before replying affirmatively: “Yes, I like you very much.”

“That’s good,” says Liliya, and Sturla doesn’t fully understand the sense behind her assertion. “That Jenny is a total cow,” she continues, and Sturla begins to laugh; he feels like he is speaking to a teenage girl who is jealous of her girlfriends.

“But why?” he asks.

“She and this guy Darryl are totally worthless idiots,” she replies, and she makes it sound like she is well within her rights to say such things about people she doesn’t really know. “Daniella and Kelly are fine. I’ve got nothing against Americans — I’m actually quite taken with Americans, partly because they once made entertaining movies — but Jenny isn’t worth the clothes she wears.”

Sturla hasn’t ever heard the saying Liliya uses. “I thought you said Jenny read well the day before yesterday. But Darryl? Is he worth the clothes he wears?”

“I don’t know how nice or expensive the overcoat was which you. . which was stolen from him. But I doubt that he is worth as much as that garment.” After having heard Liliya use the words “human being” instead of “person” once before, it doesn’t surprise him that she should talk about the overcoat as a “garment;” he finds it both funny and sweet.

Suddenly the door to the room where Sturla sits on the phone is pushed open and the old woman enters, carrying a steaming cup of tea on a floral tray, and some biscuits with marmalade. She places the tray beside the phone and says something to which Sturla nods his head in reply.

“You telephone Greek?” she asks and gives him a sharp look.

Sturla asks Liliya to excuse him and explains to his host that he is still on a call to Druskininkai; it is the same number as she’d dialed for him. And the woman pats Sturla on the shoulder in a friendly way and points the teacup out to him.

“But is it true you stole the overcoat?” Liliya asks when Sturla asks her to forgive the interruption. And there is such expectation in her voice that Sturla longs to confess his crime to her.

“Tell me that you stole it,” she commands, adding, “I expect you did.”

“But why do you expect that?” asks Sturla, completely amazed by Liliya’s thoughts.

“Because.”

“OK,” says Sturla, instead of telling her that “because” is not an answer. He looks around the room at the old woman’s world, which smells of tea, preserves, and old, dry paper, though there is little in the room made of paper besides the phone book. He clears his throat. “I stole the overcoat from Darryl Hoffman.”

“ Hoffman? ”

“Rothman.”

“Are you lying to me?” There is excitement in Liliya’s voice. “Are you only telling me what I wanted to hear?”

“You wanted to hear that I am a thief?”

“You aren’t a thief.”

“No, I am telling you the truth,” adds Sturla. “Or half of it. The other half is this: The brand new overcoat I bought myself right before coming here was stolen from a coat hook in the restaurant which Jokûbas’s brother runs — he directed you there too, didn’t he? — and though I don’t subscribe to either a philosophy or an economics in which those who have been stolen from have permission to do the same to the next man, nevertheless I felt a little justified in taking the overcoat of this ‘Darryl’ for myself. I hadn’t at the time thought that he might in fact be somehow connected to the festival.”

“But still, you did very well,” says Liliya playfully, and Sturla asks her why she is so against the American art dealer.

She tells him that Darryl Rothman came to Minsk a few years ago in order to buy some antiques, but everyone he met with considered him so arrogant and egotistical that they collectively decided to refuse to do business with him. And then all kinds of stories began spreading about this unwelcome guest, who mostly went around showing off his expensive clothes, including a fur coat which was destroyed by some street urchin with a spray can in front of the State Art Gallery on Lenin Street. Sturla imagines that Liliya mentions this particular location to add to the irony of what had happened to Darryl the aesthete. “In other words, you’re not the first person who has taken a coat from him in this part of the world,” she continues; Sturla can feel her smiling into the phone. “But even so, it looks like he has become some kind of patron in the Baltic States, pumping money into all kinds of cultural activities — money which he no doubt earns from dealing drugs and from prostitution — and leaving overpriced items of clothing behind on coat racks. Or wasn’t it a very nice overcoat?”

Sturla laughs and answers Liliya that yes, it was a very fine overcoat. He is filled for a moment with exultation over not being where he should be at this moment: he experiences his telephone connection to Liliya as a real presence, and has the strong sensation that the twenty-four hours they have together in the capital city before he flies home will not be their only time together, although nothing supports this idea. “So I will be sauntering the streets of Vilnius in a coat that belongs to an antiques and drugs dealer who has turned the whole of Minsk against him.”

“You say you’re in Vilnius now ?”

“Where else?”

“I thought perhaps you were still in Druskininkai. That you were sitting in some health-spa and letting a middle-aged woman get you peppermint tea and East Indian plant cigarettes.”

“East Indian plant cigarettes?” Sturla laughs. “I am in fact drinking freshly-made tea, but the only cigarettes I smoke are my industrial chemical cigarettes. I took the bus back to Vilnius once Gintaras threatened that he and Jenny would look in my suitcase.”

“Are you at the Ambassador?”

“No, I’m at some tiny boarding house on the outskirts of the city. I am going by the name Stavros Monopolous.”

Liliya laughs warmly, and Sturla is as much amused by the comedy of his description as she is. Once he has described the persecution theory he’d come up with for Darryl and Jenny, and got her to laugh even more, he asks what she’d meant by saying that the Americans had once made entertaining movies. She says she is a great admirer of American movies from the end of their golden age until the sixties, and she names a few titles. When she lists Sabrina as one of her favorite movies, Sturla asks if she’s seen The Apartment ; he’d noticed it on DVD in a record store in Vilnius. It turns out that the movie is one of the few well-known Billy Wilder movies she hasn’t seen, and then she answers Sturla’s question about whether she owns a DVD-player affirmatively: the two of them, mother and daughter, have “that contraption” in Minsk. Sturla immediately makes up his mind to buy The Apartment for her out of his slot-machine winnings, along with some other movies. He figures this gift won’t seem pushy or inappropriate — it is just something that came to mind because she’d started talking about movies.