Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

“I’ll let you know,” Sturla replies in English, and he smiles impishly at Liliya who is holding her glass at head height and seems like she can hardly wait for Sturla to conclude his business on the phone. He thanks Jónatan for the praise and the offer: he feels good that he appreciated the article and he will consider the offer; it’s just that he isn’t sure he is heading home in the short term.

“No? Jón told me you were coming back tomorrow,” says Jónatan, and Sturla replies that he isn’t sure he’ll be able to make the airplane tomorrow morning: “I’ve gotten used to waking up late.”

Liliya congratulates Sturla on the offer which he briefly explains to her. Then they open the brandy bottle from the supermarket and toast in little plastic shot glasses which Liliya gets out of her suitcase, and Liliya says she’s just listened to Icelandic spoken for the first time. Would he be willing to show her some written Icelandic? She hasn’t ever seen it written down.

“Have you lipstick?” Sturla asks her; and in his euphoria he recalls an English translation of a line of poetry by Alfred de Musset: “Julie, have you Spanish wine?” And when Liliya looks confused and tells him she has a pen, he repeats his question: “Liliya, have you lipstick from Belarus?”

Liliya shakes her head, smiling; she doesn’t have any lipstick from her home country, but she rummages around in her suitcase and pulls out some lipstick in a gold-colored holder from a pretty cosmetics case. When she opens it and holds it out as though she is going to put it on him, he grabs the stick from her and asks her to wait while he goes into the bathroom briefly. Then he takes his half-full glass of white wine with him, and after a short while he calls Liliya into the bathroom.

When she comes in, Sturla is standing in the bathtub and smiling, his glass in his hand; with a winning grin, he points out some dark violet letters on the white wall above the bathtub:

MÓÐIR BARNANNA MINNA HEFUR

MYRT BARNIÐ Í FÖÐUR ÞEIRRA

Liliya grabs the lipstick back from Sturla and looks astonished at how little is left. She seems about to say something about it, but stops herself and asks what the sentence means in English.

“The mother—” Sturla thinks for a moment. Then he points to the first word, móðir , says that it means “mother,” and translates the rest of the sentence as “If I may, then I will happily visit your mother.”

“If you may ?” Liliya turns to Sturla, clearly amazed by his request. She starts to say something but stops and asks why the last word she heard in the English version of the sentence was the first word in the Icelandic version.

“The mother always comes first in Icelandic,” replies Sturla without hesitation. Then he smiles and waits for Liliya’s reaction.

“Of course,” she says, looking at him tenderly.

“Of course what?” asks Sturla.

“You can visit my mother.”

He strokes his chin and tries to look contemplative. “What is her name?”

“Galina. She is called Galina.”

Their eyes meet. Liliya takes a sip of her white wine and Sturla sips his.

“Do you think she’s at home?” he asks.

“She never leaves the apartment.”

Liliya suddenly turns away and goes out of the bathroom. Sturla watches her; he feels like she has become sad all of a sudden, and he places his glass down on the edge of the sink and goes after her, leaving the writing on the wall: “The mother of my children has / murdered the child in their father.” He watches her set her glass down on the table beneath the mirror and lift the bottle of white wine as though she is going to pour some for herself. She looks at herself for a moment, and before Sturla knows what is happening she has come up to him: she places both hands around his head and clumsily presses her mouth onto his — any more clumsily and she might have injured him. He responds by putting his hands on her waist, and the next moment they collapse onto the single bed. Liliya tears his shirt out of his trousers, slips her hand inside, and pulls him to her.

*

Two hours later they sit facing each other in a restaurant in the old downtown with menus in front of them, waiting for their drinks to appear. Liliya, who has untied her hair and let it hang free about her head, is telling Sturla about a Dutch woman in her fifties, a participant in the festival, who had told her in confidence how she died at six years old, while on a walking tour with her father, but had come back to life again three years ago, when she went into an electric appliance store in her hometown of Maastricht. In exchange for that story Sturla tells her about the latest obsession of his youngest son Grettir: European lieder singers; he is nineteen years old and is listening to Gérard Souzay and Hans Hotter. But Liliya’s only reaction to this information is to say that she owns an old record by Gérard Souzay: her former husband had been in such a hurry to leave that he’d left behind his record collection, a very large classical music collection which Sturla will definitely have fun flicking through, as long as he likes classical music.

“It’s chiefly folk music in here,” says Sturla, and he smiles as he points to his head.

Two more hours have passed by the time they return to the hotel room. This time it takes even longer to get the room door open, even though Liliya has given Sturla the key rather than trying to open the door herself.

The air in the room is stale; they hadn’t thought to air the room out when they left, and it smells like cigarette smoke and wine. While Sturla opens the window out onto the street Liliya begins to run a hot bath. Sturla calls the old woman at the boarding house to let her know he will be back the next day to get his suitcase; he will pay for a third night, of course, she doesn’t need to worry about that. And a few minutes later, when he has finally managed get his meaning across to the woman — Liliya is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, her sides beginning to ache from laughter — he ends the telephone call and the world outside the door fades away as Sturla and Liliya’s swimming eyes meet across the floor.

“When the poet is just five minutes from his time at the lectern he recalls the rain that he looked at through his fingers earlier that day. He thinks about Vitezslav Nezval’s words about his hometown, Prague, which he looked at through fingers of rain, and it occurs to the poet that understanding Nezval’s images will mean turning them on their head.

A poet who travels from his country to another place in order to give a reading of his poems has important work at hand.

No less important than the poet Egill Skallagrímsson, who saved himself from being decapitated by the axe of king Eiríkur Bloodaxe when he composed his poem “Head’s Ransom,” twenty stanzas praising the king.

But today there are no Norwegian kings in the hall. Still, when the poet stands at the pulpit the audience facing him will have just as much power as Eiríkur Bloodaxe. And this audience has probably never before heard poems from the poet’s country.

So he waits nervously. He is present in the hall to hear some new things and to discover some things he didn’t know before.

This particular audience is perhaps Estonian. And in all likelihood many of them have come to recite poems they themselves have composed.

But there are many people in the hall who have either come to recite their poems or to listen, or maybe even to do both. They’ve come from Denmark. Or Russia. From England. And Argentina. They’ve come from neighboring Poland. And over the Atlantic Ocean from the United States of North America. And Italy. One of the audience members is from Afghanistan, another from Iran. A third from Norway, a fourth from Sweden. Two came from Latvia. Only one from Germany. And from Holland likewise. One audience member in the hall is Belarusian. And another, the same gender as the Belarusian — a woman — comes from Finland. One traveled from Switzerland, another came from the Ukraine, but most of those present haven’t had to travel further than from within Lithuania to get to the lecture hall in Druskininkai.