Bragi Ólafsson: The Ambassador

For it is in Druskininkai, a spa town in the southern part of Lithuania, that people from many countries have gathered together to let each other hear their poems.

And at the moment there are only four minutes left until the delegate from Iceland takes the lectern. In three and a half minutes he must get up from his chair in the front row of seats by the stage, giving himself half a minute to go to the pulpit and compose himself behind it.

The feeling the poet carries inside him is nothing less than pride at having been invited. Someone has paid for all of the three thousand kilometers that led to the pulpit and has taken care of his hotel bill; he has been fed and even been encouraged to drink alcoholic drinks.

At the same time, the poet is quaking inside, out of fear that he won’t be able to stand up to the expectations that go hand in hand with the invitation. In his last moments he wonders again whether the poems he is planning to recite have been carefully chosen, whether he’s decided on the order with good reason.

And the poet scolds himself for choosing reason as his guiding light.

The poet has other guides than reason.

But suddenly a new sensation is aroused in the Icelander’s heart when the preceding poet, from the United States of North America, more specifically from Kansas City, introduces her last poem and offers a kind of preface: this poem was composed on the occasion of some unforgivable actions by her powerful and great nation on foreign soil.

A murmur goes around the packed hall as the first words of the poem conjure the image of a prosperous nation in fancy dress, a nation which doesn’t bother to look around itself before she squats down and “goes to the toilet” in her neighbor’s yard. And the murmuring, which the Icelandic poet knows signifies enthusiasm, accompanies the reading of this female poet from Kansas through the final minutes which she has at her disposal, and for two or three minutes more, because the meaning hidden behind the poem’s words is now plainly boiling over.

And when the American poet sends a metal dragon rattling from her lips over the sun-baked cradle of civilization, and drops bombs on apartment blocks full of life, she reaps genuine admiration and congratulatory applause, which follows her all the way back through the hall of spectators and continues while the poet from Iceland, crippled by his own inferiority complex, slides out of his seat and walks on unsteady feet up to the execution platform, holding his white sheets.

And given the implicit debate which has undeniably been thrust onto the agenda in the hall, the poet from Iceland has nothing to add, nothing except an impenetrable description of the architecture of his own lodgings in Reykjavík; joy at seeing a mountain from a peaceful valley; the shadows which stretch over quiet streets and sidewalks; and the occasional images which touch no one and nothing but the paper they are written on.

And the poet’s mouth has gone dry. The silence that faces him in the room is much the same as the silence that obscures the destruction of Christian and Jewish invading armies.

And as the poet gets close to the end of the poem which has a theme addressing the slipshod material the self is made from, how that material doesn’t last a lifetime, he feels the noose of international opinion in the hall tightening around his neck. And the poet still has four or five more poems to read, poems which make no mention of the atrocity of young and healthy men killing children and old people, so long as it’s done in God’s name, and he knows that the poetic silence which his poems are trying to describe is nowhere near as profound as the silence which they will receive.

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

But what happens in someone’s last moments when they are hung? Perhaps he dances a few steps in the air or sticks out his tongue at the onlookers. If the person in question is lucky enough, and the drop from the gallows is sufficiently fast enough, he might only have to live until his neck breaks at the exact moment the noose snags him, and so meet his end without delay.

But just as the fingernails continue to grow after the body has died, the inevitable conclusion of the hanged man’s time on earth is this: he “goes to the toilet” even though there isn’t a toilet nearby.

And that is something no one wants to be remembered for, neither the poet nor the audience.

And that is why the Icelandic poet flees his fate. He leaves it to others to compose their own Head’s Ransoms.

After all, you can’t hang a headless man.

He slips out of the lecture hall and loiters a while under the heavy rain on the sidewalk outside. And before killing his sodden cigarette and vanishing, he looks at the rain through his fingers and finds that it runs down the back of his hands and into his jacket sleeves.

And the waxy texture of the poet’s overcoat, which is meant to repel the rain, offers about as much protection as a dust jacket offers against criticism.”

The train leaves at 3:15 in the afternoon.

The mirror behind the bar shows Sturla standing on his own amidst the bottles of liquor, whisky, vodka, and cognac, and in front of him on the bar are two half-full beer glasses and two large shots of untouched cherry brandy.

How alone can a person be? Sturla asks himself, and smiles at how wearily he looks back out from the mirror.

How alone is Liliya, powdering her nose in the bathroom?

He picks up the black faux-leather case which she left on the bar stool and peeps into it. Before he takes two rather thick books out of it he glances quickly towards the bathroom door, then reads Jokûbas’s name on the front of the second book, which is unusually thick for a poetry collection. The other book is his own assertions , which he gave Liliya after he’d collected his suitcase from the old woman at the boarding house earlier that morning. He flicks through to the title page of Jokûbas’s book and sees that the author has written an inscription to her in his language, and below some long handwritten text he has splashed his name — very carelessly written — and scrawled three big x’s after it.

Sturla sticks the books back in the bag and gets out one of the movies he gave Liliya: The Apartment . He looks at the still from the movie on the case: Shirley MacLaine holds out a playing card — the Queen of Spades — for Jack Lemmon; they are sitting on a sofa, seemingly outside a window with gray Venetian blinds, Shirley has a string of white pearls around her neck and is wearing a flowing white dress, and Jack is in a white shirt with a black, loosely knotted tie, an indication that something big happened before Shirley held out the Queen of Spades.

Sturla turns the case over to look at another picture of the actors, a black-and-white head-shot. Shirley is in a white blouse beneath a light-gray suit, and Jack is in a black jacket and a white shirt with a tightly-knotted black tie. Some writing to the left of the picture describes how the movie won five Oscars, including Best Picture. And it adds: “C.C. ‘Bud’ Baxter (Jack Lemmon) knows the way to success in business. . it’s through the door of his apartment!”

Sturla looks up from the case towards the bathroom door of the restaurant, and he begins to wonder what the door to Liliya’s mother’s apartment in Minsk looks like. He imagines a pale yellow door made out of some kind of wooden material that’s long overdue for a coat of paint, if not for replacing. There is a peephole and below the hole a faded card in a rusted iron frame displays the typed names of Liliya and her mother Galina. Sturla turns the knob and forces the door. It opens into the living room. Before he takes a step onto the linoleum floor he breathes in the heavy air, saturated with meat fat or potato-and-cabbage stock — he cannot decide which. He closes the door after himself, takes off his overcoat and hangs it on the hook beside an oval spot which is lighter than the color of the wall, a stain from beneath the mirror which hung there for many years.