Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

For the next three hours Sturla sits in the sun and loses himself in the activity that occupies anyone who is facing certain death: recalling his life, from his first memories to the current moment. And he makes sure he doesn’t drink too quickly, since he doesn’t want to be drunk when he finally meets Liliya. He decides to go for a little walk before they meet up at this same place, but while he is waiting for the waiter to bring the bill his phone rings — but only twice, too quick for him to answer. He sees his father’s number on the screen, and when the waiter appears with the bill, Sturla asks him for another beer. He wants to hear his father Jón’s news, this character who played a starring role in the trip down memory lane he’s spent the past hours taking: the cuckolded movie director on Mánagata who is now a librarian on Skólavörðustígur.

“I wanted to call Örn,” replies Jón when Sturla asks him whether he’d meant to call him. “I wanted to let him know that I’ve managed to get a commitment from this guy Alfreð about the grant.”

“For the movie?” Sturla remembers his father telling him not long ago about how an old friend of his from school had promised to finance the movie that he and Örn Featherby had long been planning to make together, as director and scriptwriter. “Who is this Alfreð?”

“Alfreð Thorarensen. Alfreð Leó Thorarensen. We went to school together. He’s a chemist and a businessman. And a complete villain.”

“And you intend to collaborate with this villain?”

“A man needs to look past the hand that feeds him,” replies Jón, and Sturla regurgitates the phrase:

“Look past the hand that feeds him?”

“I was going to tell Örn all about it,” Jón presses on, “but there was no answer at his house; he’s not the sort of person who has a cell phone.”

“Smokes a pipe and won’t use a cell phone? Congratulations on the grant.”

“Thank you. You’ve got a reason to be happy, too.”

“I do?”

“Do you still have the money you won at the University games room?”

“It so happens I’ve just spent it.”

“Did you meet up with a woman?”

“I bought some movies.”

“That reminds me: you don’t need to worry about the movie I loaned you. I’ve already ordered it. .”

“I’m not worried about the movie you loaned me,” interrupts Sturla, a little irritated about how distracted and self-centered his father is being. “But why should I be happy?”

“Didn’t you get the e-mail from that. . what was he called, that. .?” Jón had obviously expected Brynjólfur to let Sturla know about the “letter of apology” which, he says, appeared in yesterday’s paper, but he is so “completely wrapped up in himself over the chemist’s dirty money” (as Sturla phrases it to himself) that he doesn’t hear Sturla when he says he has no idea about any “letter of apology”: Brynjólfur had briefly talked about the “mess” he’d caused the book, but he was more concerned with dredging up the family’s past and telling some of the strangest stories Sturla has heard in a long time.

But Jón doesn’t have any interest in finding out the details of these stories; instead, he asks Sturla which movies he bought (if it is actually possible to buy movies in Vilnius) and, after praising the choice of Night at the Opera , Jón asks his son whether he ever told him about his and Örn’s ideas for the scene in which pandemonium breaks out in a restaurant — it now looks more likely than not that the movie will get made.

“Yes, Dad, you told me all about it,” replies Sturla, although he doesn’t remember any particular details about the idea; instead, he conjures up a memory of Pelléas and Mélisande and what commotion that piece of music had caused on Mánagata, a memory he has just spent a good amount of time recalling.

After Sturla has said goodbye to his father, he still doesn’t know why he has any reason to be happy about this item in the paper — this news — which, according to Jón, has been published and which claims that people were too quick to accuse Sturla of plagiarism: the theft was more a matter of personal opinion than had been first described. Although you might say that the judgment has been reversed on appeal, Sturla still feels the image of him that will linger in people’s minds — people interested in poetry and perhaps even people whose interests leant against poetry — will be of an author who forgot to cite the sources he’d used — and intentionally so.

Sturla drains what’s left in the beer glass before strolling in the direction of Pilies Street. The sun has disappeared behind the clouds and it is getting chilly when he turns into a street called Latako, intending to keep a safe distance from Gedimino Prospektas. He starts imagining that he’s on Mánagata. He imagines that he has just come out of the long-gone branch of the State Liquor and Tobacco shop, where the wine bottles were kept on high shelves behind the employees and sold over the counter. He is holding a heavy, black plastic bag which clinks when he weaves around the traffic on the wide Snorrabraut, and he eases himself round the corner of Mánagata, making sure the contents of the bag don’t make a sound as he goes past the second house on the street from the corner of Snorrabraut number 4, which is where one of his best friends lived. When he reaches his childhood home, on the corner of Gunnarsbraut, he stops and looks towards the kitchen window with the light yellow curtains — which used to be white — drawn across it. There’s nothing in the window, nothing except shadows; indeed, there’s nothing in the other windows, and no one on the street — unlike the riot of colors that is the foot traffic on the corner of Latako and Rusu (the street which meets Latako), and it’s not until Sturla has reached Héðinsgata, which goes all the way up to Rauðarárstígur, that some signs of life can be seen in Norðurmýri; there is a young woman standing with a used dark blue Silver Cross buggy, rocking the buggy with one hand and holding a lit cigarette in the other, and as Sturla goes past she blows smoke from the cigarette and smiles at him as though she knows him — maybe she’s read something by him — and at the next moment Sturla is walking up in Rauðarárstígur, where the pharmacy advertises itself in a red house, and he crosses the street, past the fishmongers on the corner on the same side as the pharmacy, and up Háteigsvegur and from there into Einholt, which is a narrower street than Maironio, which takes over from Rusu — Maironio, which Sturla remembers is the name of the street in Druskininkai — and when he has gone a few meters down that street, a street as long as it is from Einholt to the north corner of Meðalholt, the hotel whose card Darryl Rothman had in his overcoat pocket is right in front of his eyes: the Mabre Residence Hotel, a stately white structure which might recall an orthodox Russian monastery with its four wide pillars that stretch over two stories up to the roof. It’s a completely different image from the pebbledash houses of Meðalholt, where piebald laundry flutters on a washing line in a front yard, beside a light blue trampoline, and where he can see the window of the basement apartment where the student Jónas ended his life.

When Sturla walks up to the hotel the sun has come back out from the clouds, and he catches sight of himself in a little pond in the car park. He looks at himself on the reflective surface, among the fall leaves that look like they have been specially arranged on the surface of the water by hotel employees. And he is content with what he sees. He decides not to go into the hotel to take a look around, as he intended, and instead walks in the opposite direction; it won’t be long before he and Liliya meet up. He goes down to the river which gave its name to the city and enjoys wandering the streets, wearing the face he saw in the hotel pond.