Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

When the waiter has brought Sturla his coffee and whisky, and after Sturla has tasted each of them and lit himself a cigarette, he can hear the man in black playing his bass on the street corner. Listening along, Sturla has the following conversation in his head:

Sturla: You know who I am, don’t you?

Bass Player: Yes. You’re the guy in the overcoat.

Sturla: What did you do with it?

Bass Player: With what?

Sturla: The overcoat.

Bass Player: What overcoat?

Sturla: The one you stole from me.

Bass Player: The one you’re wearing?

Sturla: No. The one I left on the coat hook.

Bass Player: I don’t remember being near any coat hook. But I do remember that you’re headed to Druskininkai.

Sturla: I went to Druskininkai.

Bass Player: And came back already?

Sturla: Gone and returned. But what did you do with the overcoat?

Bass Player: What did you do in Druskininkai?

Sturla: I asked first.

Bass Player: I answered with a question.

Sturla: I discovered that one has to hide the truth from those who want to build their lives on lies. So as not to prevent them from achieving their goals. And that leads me to ask: What did you do with the overcoat? Do you have any idea that it cost me the equivalent of three months wages for a Lithuanian workman?

Bass Player: I gave it to a Lithuanian workman who has been out of work for three months. I don’t have anything to complain about myself. What’s more, I’m allowed to bed down at night in the warm kitchen run by the Daugirdas brothers. Oh, that’s let the cat out of the bag. Yes, I know Gintaras really well, through Jokûbas. He once let me play some numbers in his poetry festival. I even know that you’ve just come from there.

Sturla: Who told you that?

Bass Player: You told me when we last met that you were heading to Druskininkai. And I simply put two and two together: someone headed to Druskininkai in October, wearing a quality overcoat like the one you wore — I see you’ve got a brand new one — well, that sort of person, someone who has grown very pale from staying indoors with European poetry, he must be taking part in The Season of Poetry.

Sturla: This new overcoat is not. .

Bass Player: (interrupting him) : I’ll never forget how nervous I was at the festival immediately before I got up on stage, following a reading by some famous American poet. It was like I was standing huddled in a group with the lambs in the slaughter house, with the feeling that the slaughterer couldn’t tell the difference between bass players and lambs, that he suffered from the same weakness as de Selby, who, in Flann O’Brien’s story, makes no distinction between men and women.

As soon as the bass player winds up his latest tune, Sturla imagines himself getting up on stage in the recital hall in Druskininkai, and he begins to contemplate using the little time he has left in Vilnius to write another article for Jónatan Jóhannsson’s magazine. This one will also be about his experience at the same poetry festival he’d written about in the earlier article, except now the festival won’t be part of the author’s future but his present; and, twenty-four hours later (when he has finished writing the piece), his past. This idea gives Sturla an excuse to order another round of drinks, and before he knows it he is beginning to really enjoy sitting in the cool and listening to the musician in black play from a comfortable distance, alongside the rumbling sounds of the jack-hammers working further down the street, and he amuses himself with the thought that perhaps he would have ended up in the same situation as the bass player if he had chosen music instead of poetry.

Poetry has at least brought him here.

As Sturla is drinking his third shot of whisky, which this time he washes down with beer rather than coffee, the bass player decides to move on, and he saunters along Pilies Street, somewhat hunched over, while the rock song You Wear It Well chimes in Sturla’s head, not because the man had played it but because it is connected to the song Mandolin Wind , which he had played outside the restaurant three days earlier.

It is close to two in the afternoon when Sturla pays the bill and gets up from the table. As he did the day before, he walks back to the guest house from downtown, and as he walks he tries to shape this new article in his head, an article which he feels fairly sure will satisfy Jónatan’s expectations of what an article about a literature festival ought to look like. Instead of shooting darts at something he has yet to experience — which he had done in the article by quoting from his earlier experiences in analogous situations — he decides to be very tough on himself in this version: to use his words to show himself none of the mercy he’d shown himself by running away like he did.

And the noose is waiting to snag the neck on which it rests.

When Sturla awakes on his second morning at the old woman’s boarding house the sun in shining through the windows. He feels much better than the previous morning, yet despite his good mood the first thing he hears in his head on this, his next-to-last day in Lithuania, is the above sentence. It is from the article he wrote the evening before, a piece which he feels quite satisfied with; he makes up his mind to go to the same coffee shop where he received Brynjólfur’s e-mail and send the piece to Jónatan, letting him know it is a replacement for the earlier article.

After breakfast, which Sturla silently spends in the company of a man who supposedly checked himself in the day before, a rather mysterious traveling salesman who introduces himself by telling Sturla what line of work he is in, without showing any interest in getting similar information from his fellow boarder, and who afterwards shows no interest in having a conversation, Sturla lies down in his room so that he can finish reading the last chapters of the detective story he began yesterday, and also read over his completed article. And after half an hour has passed, when he’s finished the book and set it down on the nightstand, he promises himself that this is the last thriller he will read; from now on, he will write them. He wants to show the reader of this very book, a book he’s already beginning to forget, that thrillers don’t need a robbery or a murder to hold your attention. They just need to create some uncertainty about whether or not the protagonist will make his Big Decision. Right from the start of the story, the reader knows that the protagonist has booked a flight home — but will he take that flight, or does the aircraft take to the skies with an empty seat (an empty seat paid for by the Icelandic Ministry of Education and Culture)?

Sturla takes a shower and shaves. He folds up the overcoat and places it in the locked extra compartment in the suitcase; he will let his jacket and scarf suffice for his trip into town. As he heads towards the entrance he sees the traveling salesman is still sitting at the breakfast table — he seems deep in thought — and the old woman is watching him with some anxiety. Sturla imagines that when he comes back that evening — or whenever it is he returns — some kind of business will have taken place between this old woman and the silent traveling salesman, something which a person usually only experiences in contemporary American movies.

If yesterday was fall, today it’s summer again: for most of his walk to the downtown Sturla doesn’t need to wear the scarf around his neck, and he flips his jacket over his shoulder.

He spends the time until midday — Sturla calculates that Liliya will get to the city four or five hours later — typing up the text of his new article in the internet café, and he then sends it to Jónatan. After he’s done this, he is even more sure than he was the evening before that this new article surpasses the earlier version, both in style and content. He rewards himself with a cold beer at the same place he’d sat down the day before. Today, there are no sounds on the street other than the noise of cars and of pedestrians walking past.