Читать книгу The Ambassador - Bragi Ólafsson - Страница 10

It is made from particularly durable material, 100% cotton yet feels waxy to the touch. And the seams will last a lifetime. The exterior is like a laminated dust jacket—“something you’ll appreciate, being a poet”—which makes the item totally waterproof, the perfect design for the weather in this country, or, to put it more accurately, any country where you can’t take the weather for granted. Even when a day begins without a cloud in the sky, you can’t guarantee that dust and dirt are the only things that’ll have fallen on you by the time night comes. The color, too, is a key attraction: it doesn’t garishly call attention to itself yet is likely to invite quiet admiration, even perhaps—“though of course one shouldn’t think such thoughts”—envy. The fact that it was made in Italy is insurance against the price one would have to pay for it, a price that’d clean out your pockets, as the saying goes.

And, on the subject of pockets, one of the nifty little inside pockets is made-to-measure for a cell phone. Or for a cigarette packet, if perhaps the owner doesn’t use a cell phone and is instead one of those few stubborn people out of every hundred who smokes, who don’t care about smoking’s effect on their health. The other inside pocket is also worth mentioning: small, designed perhaps for a wallet, it contains a small, dark blue, velvet bag (that’s one of the things that makes this item unique, a bag made from velvet) and in this charming little bag, which you draw closed with a yellow silk cord, are two spare buttons, for the unlikely event that the owner managed to lose the originals and had to replace them. But there’s little danger of that happening, since the stitching is, as was mentioned earlier, guaranteed to last a lifetime.

With these words—or something along these lines—the salesperson in the coat department of the men’s clothing store on Bankastræti describes the English-style Aquascutum overcoat to Sturla Jón. Sturla had decided to buy this coat a long time ago; he’d even re-ordered it after it sold out. The sales attendant has no idea Sturla Jón had made the order—Sturla hadn’t spoken to this employee, who seems to be new, before. So it takes Sturla pleasantly by surprise that the sales attendant recognizes him, though perhaps Sturla should have expected that a person whose job involves paying close attention to clothes might also pay close attention to the people wearing those clothes. On the other hand, it’s possible another employee had pointed out, when Sturla entered the store, that this was Sturla Jón the poet, maybe adding: you know, the one who published that book, free from freedom.

Sturla had first set eyes on the overcoat in the store back in February. At that time it had been too bitterly cold and stormy for him to justify buying an unlined overcoat, even if he could have afforded it. And when he remembered to take another look at the overcoat later, in June, when there was a marked difference in his financial outlook, the three or four coats that were there before had disappeared from their hangers; they’d all been sold.

“There was a guy in here the other day who must have tried on every single suit in the shop,” the sales attendant is saying. Sturla isn’t sure how to react to this information. “Perhaps you know him,” continues the man. “I think he’s a painter, or some sort of artist.”

“Did he buy anything?” Sturla asks.

“I’m an artist myself, as it happens,” the sales attendant adds, doing his best to sound nonchalant. Sturla repeats the question.

“He couldn’t find anything that suited his style,” answers the sales attendant, smiling. “We don’t have anything in stock that comes with dried mustard on the lapels.”

Sturla is surprised to hear a young man like the one standing in front of him use a word like lapels.

“The jacket he was wearing had a crusty old stain on it,” the sales attendant offers by way of further explanation. When he describes how the customer’s mustache was like Adolf Hitler’s and adds that it had been difficult at first to tell whether the yellow of the customer’s shirt was the original color or a color the shirt had acquired over time, Sturla is fairly certain that the customer was N. Pietur, the visual artist and composer, an old friend of his father. He begins to wonder whether it is appropriate for a sales attendant in a store of this caliber to gossip about other customers. When the attendant adds that, naturally, it isn’t just anyone who buys “such expensive and elegant clothes,” referring to the range of clothes in the store, Sturla is convinced that if anyone should be allowed to sound-off to a complete stranger about the delicate relationship between employee and customer, in which one person offers another merchandise and that other person has to accept or reject those items, then it should be the customer, not the salesman. Sturla reckons it isn’t a great idea for this young employee to be talking to a potential customer about interactions he’d had with a different customer, even if—or precisely because—the former customer hadn’t bought anything, despite having asked the salesman to go to a lot of trouble.

His thoughtlessness notwithstanding, the salesman was right to suggest not everyone could afford the clothing this store sells, especially the item Sturla has his eye on. You’d have to say this Italian-made, English-style overcoat is expensive or, more accurately, over-expensive. But many years ago Sturla Jón, who made it a rule not to spend much money on clothes, had seen a coat like this, somewhere between a mackintosh and a trench coat, and it had occurred to him that, just this once, he should break his usual clothes-shopping habits. So he’d set himself the goal of acquiring the overcoat, almost regardless of the price: the goal of allowing himself, this one time, to buy something expensive, something he knew would afford him more pleasure to wear than the other clothes he owned, clothes which cost no more than they had to.

And as Sturla declares that he is going to take the overcoat, he realizes he is wearing a broad smile on his face—the smile of a man at peace, he thinks, but then he worries it might come across to others as though he is uncontrollably proud of himself, like a child or teenager who is about to fulfill his wildest ambition. “I’ll take this one,” he says decisively, trying to wipe the smile from his face. The salesman nods gravely, as if an important decision has been reached by all, and says, “Good choice.”

At first, Sturla thinks he heard him say “Gotcha!” and he stares at the salesman in astonishment as he folds up the item, which, thanks to the stiffness of the cotton, rustles the way weighty, good quality paper does.

“Was there something else you wanted?” asks the salesman, seeing the look on Sturla’s face.

“No, that’s all,” replies Sturla.

“Gotcha,” the salesman says, and they go over to the checkout which, as is customary, is located in the middle of the shop floor, around a square column. Next to the till is a gleaming coffee machine—from the same country as the overcoat—and an artistic display of bright white coffee cups.

“Have an espresso while we’re ringing this up,” the employee offers, shaking out the creases from the overcoat.

Sturla sets one of the white cups under the nozzle he knows the coffee is supposed to flow from, and he gropes blindly about the machine until the salesman rescues him by pushing a little button, which is the same color as the machine itself and has a picture of a coffee cup on it. While the coffee is brewing, Sturla looks in his wallet and counts out thirteen 5,000-kronur bills.

“It’s not often you see this much cash,” the man says, and Sturla asks whether there is a discount for paying cash.

“Not for cash, but there’s a five percent discount with plastic.” The salesman takes the notes from Sturla’s hand and puts the coat on the counter next to the coffee cups. He licks his thumb a few times while counting the notes, and has to start counting again when he gets distracted by Sturla, who is taking off his windbreaker and unfolding the coat in order to slip it on. The salesman puts the notes in the till and, smiling a little, watches his latest customer’s awkward attempts to struggle into his purchase. He hands Sturla a bag with the store’s logo on it so Sturla can put his windbreaker inside, a bag so beautiful Sturla fears he will have to pay extra for it. The bag is a rich brown color, made from thick, waxy paper, a texture not unlike his new coat; it has orange cord handles.

While Sturla is stuffing the windbreaker into the bag, another employee calls the salesman over; a young married couple needs assistance. The couple had caught Sturla’s eye when they entered the store: they are a well-known couple from the world of theater, and he had recently heard his father’s friend Örn Featherby speak rather scornfully about them in connection with a play one of them, possibly the woman, or perhaps it was the husband, had sold to one of the two major theater companies in town. While Sturla drinks his espresso, he watches the couple and the salesman; they all seem to know one another, and they launch into a conversation that immediately breaks out in laughter. From the husband’s gestures, Sturla judges that the topic of discussion is some project the young couple is involved in. Glancing around, Sturla sneaks his hand into a white bowl full of light brown, cylindrical sugar packets, and grabs several. Looking down at them in his palm, he counts them and sneaks them into one of the side-pockets of the overcoat.

By the time he leaves the store, it has begun to rain. It’s cold rain, one step shy of sleet. Sturla buttons his overcoat and thinks about how the salesman commented on a prospective buyer’s likely uses for this item of clothing. This customer, Sturla Jón, is not a cell phone user but a smoker. As if to prove to passers-by that that is exactly the sort of person he is, someone who wouldn’t want to be disturbed by a phone ringing while he is out in the open air, someone who instead expresses his independence with the guilty pleasures of smoking, he pauses on the sidewalk of Bankastræti, right outside the store, fishes a packet of Royales from his inside jacket pocket, taps out a cigarette, and, after lighting it, slides the packet into the made-to-measure inside pocket, but not without difficulty; the packet only just fits.

He goes down Bankastræti in the direction of the Útvegsbanki building on Lækjartorg, a bank which no longer exists. Sturla had actually worked there for nearly two years before going abroad to study; he’d been in the department that handled foreign exchange. A young woman from New Zealand had worked beside him in the bank, and her name now appeared right in front of him, on a vertical, red sign standing on the south-west corner of the old stone house at Bankastræti 3: Stella.

Sturla comes to a sudden halt directly under the sign. He looks around to see if anyone has paid any attention to him or is at all surprised that he stopped so suddenly, and he takes another few steps forward before turning to contemplate the Stella sign as he inhales the stimulating cigarette smoke. He’d stopped because a question occurred to him: Had the sign been there when he was a young man, or is it a new addition? And, along similar lines—and this flabbergasts him—how on earth can he not know for sure? One voice in his head tells him that the shop has been around at least as long as he has, that it is one of the oldest shops in town; another voice insists that the apparent age of this sign is nothing but a figment of his imagination, the subconscious mind’s way of implying that the other, New Zealand Stella—whose slender, feminine fingers had, a quarter-century before, sent amounts of money overseas on the next telex machine to his—had felt for Sturla exactly the way he had longed for her to feel at the time. It was entirely possible that, despairing at some point over whether the woman from New Zealand had any feelings for him, Sturla had looked out of the window of the Foreign Exchange and, gripped by a poetic flight of fancy—which he of all people might succumb to, since he is, after all, a poet—his eye had alighted on a sign on Bankastræti bearing her name, like a message from above, like the sun rising in the east.

Sturla turns back to look at the old Útvegsbanki building and confirms with a smile that the windows of his long-abandoned workplace hadn’t faced Lækjartorg; they had instead looked out onto Austurstræti. There was no way he would have been able to look along Bankastræti, at least not at the odd-numbered houses. He continues on his way, but stops again almost immediately to look at two rust-red, life-sized statues of people that rise up from the sidewalk, standing face to face. Only the torsos of the sculptures have been designed to resemble the human body; the lower halves consist solely of a perfect cube, which might represent nothing more than a cube but which might also symbolize the artist’s intention for the work. Whether there is a particular significance to these statues or not, they give Sturla the impression of suffering and fear. One of the statues is looking down, bowed by a weight the passing pedestrian can only guess at; the other has thrown its head back and is wearing a pathetic expression, as if inviting the viewer to cut its throat. Sturla looks between the statues, along Bernhöftstorfan in the direction of Skólastræti, and contemplates the corrugated iron roof of Reykjavík’s Grammar School in the distance. Four lines from his newly finished book of poems, assertions, come to mind:

the house on the hill

which we face towards

the mother, the window

the darkness of the shadows

Sturla—the purported author of the poem—isn’t sure whether these lines actually describe the very educational institution he is now looking at or whether they describe another kind of institution: the mother who sees everything, a dark figure in the kitchen on the other side of the window’s glass, standing and watching her progeny play on the sidewalk.

Is there a connection, indeed, between the first two lines and lines three and four, between the house and the mother? Does the house symbolize the father? In my Father’s house are many rooms: Sturla’s father’s flat, at the top of Skólavörðustígur, opposite the church on the hill, is a one-bedroom which, besides the living room and bedroom, has a hall, kitchen, and bathroom (which Sturla is planning to use when he drops in on his father after running a quick errand on Austurstræti). In this case, the son, Sturla, has even more rooms than the father, since Sturla’s apartment on Skúlagata is technically a two-bedroom.

Suddenly the rain gets heavier. Sturla stubs out his cigarette, puts up the collar on his coat, and presses on in the direction of Lækjargata. As he goes past the Prime Minister’s office a sharp gust of wind blows from the north. The weather, in all its bitterness, emphasizes the warm practicality of Sturla’s new overcoat, an overcoat that is only lined with thin, red-patterned cotton yet offers considerable protection from both wind and water, and which—as the name of the coat implies, no less significantly—would protect one’s shoulders from the dust which falls from above, the way a dust jacket protects a book.