Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

When he approaches the bar half an hour later, a bar which has become quite a familiar sight, he sees Liliya from behind; she’s standing by the door and seems to be examining the menu. He stops at the table nearest the road and watches her. She is wearing the same tunic as when he last saw her, but different pants, and her hair is tied in a knot at the neck; she lifts one of her feet to scratch her calf, and then, as though she can feel someone watching her, she turns round and looks straight at Sturla.

“Welcome back,” he says, and she nods her head, smiling. She gives him three kisses on the cheeks; has she learned that from Darryl’s girlfriends?

“I feel like I’ve come to your home town!” she says and she looks him up and down as though she’d expected him to have changed during “his urban seclusion, following the rebellion in the countryside,” or so he imagines her describing it.

“I’m just a guy who’s not made for the countryside,” Sturla replies comically, and Liliya laughs. She hits him playfully on his forearm then takes hold of it, the way he remembers her doing when they first met in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.

“I brought you something from the festival,” she says, smiling, and he beckons towards a table, asking if they shouldn’t sit down.

The same waiter who served Sturla earlier comes over to the table, and they order beer and cherry brandy. Liliya fetches a thick white paperback from her suitcase, and hands it to him, remarking that if Sturla had stopped less briefly in Druskininkai he would have received a copy himself. It is the collected poetry of all the participants; which hadn’t arrived from the printer before Sturla left the festival, having (briefly) turned up in Druskininkai. She also gives him a little book of her own, a beautiful, signed edition which he responds to by kissing her and saying that he has his new book at the hotel — at the boarding house, he corrects himself — which he wants to give her.

“I also bought a little something I wanted to give you,” he adds, and he immediately gets the feeling that he has no business giving a person he hardly knows something he has bought specially. “Just so you can get over the poetry debates from the last few days,” he adds, apologetically.

“For me?” Liliya takes a sip of brandy and follows it with a sip of beer. “You shouldn’t have done that. .”

He hands her the plastic bag from the store.

“You shouldn’t have bought me something, Sturla.”

“Too late,” Sturla replies. “I saw this in the store when I was getting something for myself, and for some reason you came to mind.”

Liliya looks in the bag and her face breaks into an embarrassed smile. “ I came to mind?” She takes the DVD cases out and examines them one by one — wearing an expression of genuine astonishment — while Sturla explains how he’d been planning to use a small amount of money he’d won in an arcade games hall shortly before he left Iceland in order to buy something that would always remind him of his trip — he jokes that he is an incorrigible gambler — but he hadn’t found anything he particularly wanted to buy. He had thought about buying a Russian Babushka from a street vendor but he’d changed his mind: it didn’t seemed right to buy something Russian in a country that was not Russia.

“And hates Russia,” adds Liliya, without taking her eyes off the DVD cases which contain the movies. “But you must watch these with me, then” she says, putting her arms around Sturla and giving him a long kiss on one cheek. “You’ll have to come back to Belarus and watch these with me and Mommy. She loves this sort of movie.”

Sturla smiles, but he feels uneasy; what if he reacted to her unexpectedly, responding positively to her frivolous suggestion?

“Anyway, you must come back to the hotel,” says Liliya, continuing to read the back of the cases. “I just need to pop into my room before we go to the restaurant.”

Had they talked about going to a restaurant? Sturla tries to remember.

Then she thanks him again and calls the waiter over to ask for another round.

“I probably managed to ruin my liver back there in the spa town,” she says, smiling, as she watches the waiter, and when Sturla asks whether he was by any chance missed at the reading she’d told him about, she answers by saying — and he feels she’s being candid — that the three people he’d left behind at the dinner table after lunch (Roger, Rolf, and her) had regretted his sudden departure. By yesterday evening Rolf had been on the verge of “beating the brains out of that hellish imperial cow, Ms. Lipp,” after Liliya told him about the overcoat situation, but Roger, as delicate and weak as he was, had managed to cool him down, “doubtlessly with some unexpected quotation from the English Lake Poets; they didn’t spend a moment of their time together talking about anything else.”

The more important things Sturla and Liliya learn about each other over the next hour, on the other hand, as they sit in the warm afternoon sun outside the bar, are that she has a grown son who lives in Switzerland and she earns a living as a translator from English and German; he (who omits to mention his work as a super) is the divorced father of five children who at the moment — as far as he knows — are all in Iceland; one of them lives in London these days.

Afterwards, they walk together towards the Ambassador Hotel, stopping in the supermarket to buy themselves a cold bottle of white wine and a small bottle of cherry brandy, which Liliya confesses she has become “horribly dependent on” during her brief stay in Lithuania. She suggests that Sturla should put a paper bag on his head before they enter the hotel, but when he says he will (although he will have to use a plastic bag, as paper bags aren’t easy to find these days) Liliya shoves him out of the store, laughing out loud, and promising to take responsibility for him; she will defend him if any “of the ambassadors from poetry-land starts asking what became of him and why he vanished so suddenly from Druskininkai.”

It turns out that there is no one at the front desk when they enter the hotel. Liliya hurries Sturla up the stairs holding the bag from the supermarket — he isn’t prepared for how determined she is — and she tells him to wait outside room number 411; she needs to get the key. It isn’t until Sturla reaches the door of the room that he realizes Liliya is staying in the same room as he had; he’s probably drunk too much to remember numbers properly. He hears a toilet flush in the next room, and as he stands with his ear to the door from which the sound came, looking along the corridor towards the stairs, Liliya suddenly appears on the landing with her suitcase, rattling the key in the same hand she uses to point at Sturla as she calls out:

“Are you eavesdropping?” Then she laughs and tiptoes along the corridor as though she thinks it is the middle of the night and she doesn’t want to wake up any of the hotel guests.

Liliya has a hard time opening the door to the room, and she eventually has to ask Sturla to help her. And at the very moment they enter the room, Sturla’s phone rings. He apologizes formally in English (“If you will excuse me,” and so on); Liliya nods in reply and tells him she will open the bottle “while he attends to his business affairs.”

It was Jónatan Jóhansson calling. He gets right down to the matter at hand, which is Sturla’s article, “The Rain Seen Through a Man’s Fingers,” and the editor’s unexpected enthusiasm over “this progress from the last article,” as he describes it. He absolutely wants to publish it; does Sturla think he needs to see a proof? The magazine is about to go to the printer. That being dealt with, Jónatan delivers another message while Sturla lights a cigarette and takes a water glass full of white wine from Liliya’s hand: perhaps Sturla could write an article for him — maybe even a book — about his half-brother N. Pietur, the visual-artist and musician, an acquaintance and former colleague of Sturla’s father. This project might mean Sturla will have to follow Níels on a trip abroad; Níels has recently booked a two-month stay in Kjarvalsstofa in Paris, which Jónatan explains is a kind of studio apartment for visual artists that the city of Reykjavík owns in an art center called Cité Internationale Des Arts (he takes every opportunity to show off his limited French, Sturla thinks). Would he be interested in the project at all?