Читать книгу The Ambassador - Bragi Ólafsson - Страница 15

The clock shows seven minutes on the way towards 12:00 when the telephone on Sturla’s nightstand rings. He was up until about 4:30 in the morning; he sat at the kitchen table, practically without getting up, from 10:00 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning, drafting a narrative of the poetry festival. And then, between 2:00 and 4:00, he sat in the room with the printed text in front of him on the table, only moving to get a beer from the kitchen. He later listened to some John Martyn songs while he drank his last beer and collected his thoughts, before falling asleep on the living room sofa and waking around 9:00 to go to the bathroom and from there to the bedroom. He is not particularly well rested, therefore, when his father wakes him by calling.

“You never came by with the tape,” are the first words Sturla Jón hears said on this bright October day. And immediately he runs through the mental to-do list he had prepared for his next-to-last day before going to Lithuania. He’d meant to get into the list earlier in the morning: he plans to buy a cell phone (Jón had told him that before starting to use such a phone one would need to charge the battery for a full twenty-four hours); he plans to talk to Jónatan Jóhannsson, Jójó, about the article for the magazine; and he plans to visit his mother at Nýlendugata—he knows she will be devastated if he doesn’t go to say goodbye before he leaves.

“It got stuck in the machine,” Sturla answers, watching his alarm clock change to 11:08.

“What do you mean, stuck in the machine?”

Sturla Jón gets out of bed and starts dressing himself while describing to his father how the tape of the Iranian movie had held his attention for half-an-hour without him actually getting to see any of the movie. He’d put the cassette in the VCR (the way a person puts a cassette in the VCR) and after the tape had played for a few seconds it stopped, and didn’t just stop: the tape had been wrenched out from the black plastic case into the bowels of the machine, and so there was no way to get the tape out of the machine without cutting it or taking the machine itself apart. Neither option had seemed promising.

“There’s a man here waiting for the tape,” Jón says, and he reminds Sturla of something he already knows well, even though he is poorly rested and has a headache: he had planned to return the tape to his father at Skólavörðustígur before he went to work.

“Didn’t the library only just open?” And Sturla asks himself a question he hadn’t really thought much about before: shouldn’t his father have retired and be collecting his pension, now that he is in his sixty-eighth year?

“Yes, it opened ten minutes ago,” answers Jón.

“Isn’t the time in Hafnarfjörður the same as in Reykjavík?”

“You ought to have someone untangle the movie from the machine for you, if you can’t do it yourself,” says his father, scoldingly. “He’s waiting here for it, that man.”

“What type of person waits for the library in Hafnarfjörður to open in the morning to get himself an Iranian movie?” Sturla asks his father, realizing straightaway that this remark has only managed to slip out because last night’s alcohol is still in his bloodstream, and that there’s a chance drunkenness might have played a role in the powerful inspiration which had gripped him when writing his article.

“There are people, even in Hafnarfjörður, who are interested in movies which aren’t American or British,” replies Jón. The man who was waiting for the movie had ordered it from the library yesterday; he should have known it was a total mistake to lend Sturla a movie that someone was going to borrow the next day.

Sturla says he will take the machine to get repaired this afternoon; Jón will have to give the man a different movie instead.

“Did you just wake up?” asks Jón.

Sturla glances at the clock and tells himself it is absurd for the sixty-seven-year-old father to scold his fifty-one-year-old son for not waking up early enough. Without it having occurred to him before, Sturla begins thinking about another father and son relationship, and he answers his father’s question by saying that he wrote his Judgment last night—his own Urteil—which took him exactly the same amount of time it took Kafka to write his, from 10:00 in the evening until 2:00 in the morning. He is going to let Jójó have the text for his magazine before he leaves for Lithuania. It is in a way a “departure” from the things he has written before: it isn’t only a judgment against himself but it’s also a well-reasoned, constructive article about the current state of poetry.

Without making a dig at his son’s accomplishment—without even making a sarcastic remark about the editor Jónatan Jóhannsson, as Sturla expected him to—Jón tells him to have the movie ready by tomorrow. Then he says goodbye, hangs up, and immediately calls back to remind his son to buy a phone, as he advised him the day before. “I can show you how it works when you bring me the movie in the morning,” he adds.

Sturla sighs deeply and shakes his head. When he goes out of the bedroom into the living room, buck-naked, he notices the living-room table is covered in white sheets, books, and empty beer bottles which he’d arranged at one end of the table. “Two hours away from the city.” He strokes his stomach and then his hand travels down to scratch his crotch. He picks up a sheet of paper from the table and reads aloud: “Two hours away from the city. By Sturla Jón Jónsson.” Then he goes back into the bedroom and puts on dark blue, rather baggy chinos, a wine-red shirt, a brown cardigan, and white socks. He goes to the tall living room window and looks out at Akrafjall mountain, Esjan, and the gas station on Skúlagata, and he repeats to himself, quietly, the title of the article, Two hours away from the city.

He gets himself coffee and cookies. Next he clears the beer bottles from the living-room table, disconnects the VCR and places it in a plastic bag. He stands for a minute in front of the coat hooks, debating whether to go out in his new overcoat or his blue duffel coat, and after looking at the weather out of the kitchen window he opts for the latter, wrapping a striped scarf once around his neck before he leaves.

When Sturla comes back home from town roughly two hours later, having taken the machine in for repair on the east side of town and having bought himself a cell phone on Laugavegur—that least expensive one he could find—he finds in his mailbox, along with the daily newspaper which gets delivered free of charge, an envelope from an institute called the International Biographical Center in Cambridge, England.

“That could make a good scene in a novel about me,” he thinks as he looks at the envelope while waiting for the elevator. When he reminds himself that he still hasn’t written a novel—hasn’t even made up his mind yet what sort of novel he will write—he argues back to himself that the scene he has just experienced would be perfect as a key moment in the story he feels sure he will write, eventually: the protagonist one day receives a letter from overseas which unexpectedly casts a new light on his life; in the reader’s mind, this establishment would offer a complete contrast to the character. “I, the superintendent of an apartment building, the person the residents of other apartments rely on when something goes wrong in the building, am waiting for the elevator while holding a letter which I have received from the International Biographical Center, alþjóðlegri ævisagnamiðstöð.” He translates the sender’s name on the envelope into his own language and, as he is wondering whether it is only by mistake that a letter from such an institute could be sent to Mr. Sturla Jon Jonsson, Skúlagata 40, 101 Reykjavik, Iceland, one of his neighbors appears, a man of a similar age who—going by what Sturla has read on his mailbox—is married with four children.

“Hey,” says the man.

Sturla returns the greeting and notices that his neighbor is holding the handle of a broom—a broom Sturla bought on behalf of all the residents a few weeks ago to keep in the basement laundry room; he’d received complaints from one apartment in the building that they didn’t have anything for sweeping away snow in winter.

“Listen, tell me something,” the man says, “how is it that . . .”

As Sturla waits for him to continue he ponders whether the man is planning to take the broom up to his apartment permanently or whether he will return it afterwards. But nothing more comes of the man’s question; the elevator door opens and the man—who Sturla remembers is called Þorlákur—points at the plastic bag in Sturla’s hand, asking whether he has bought a phone.

“Yes,” replies Sturla, and he asks himself whether the residents of the building think it is perfectly normal to ask their super what he is up to. Wasn’t it a little bold of the man, who doesn’t know him at all, other than in passing, to inquire about the contents of the bag he is carrying into his house? Does the man know, for example, that Sturla is a poet? Had it come up at one of the tenants’ meetings Sturla is required to attend? No. He is not listed that way either in the phone book or on his mailbox. Even though the attendant in the clothing store the day before—the man on the street—had known his line of work (that is, his other job, not as a super) Sturla reckons it unlikely that many of his neighbors know he is involved in writing poetry. He likes that idea: living alone in a huge apartment block in Reykjavík and sending out a body of literary work which, perhaps, none of the people from the building had any idea could be bought in the bookstores.

What’s more, he isn’t just a poet who has published some books: he has been selected on the merit of those books—and probably because of his character, too—to be sent to another country as the appointed representative of the people. This fact is foremost in Sturla’s mind when his neighbor asks:

“A cell phone, if I’m not mistaken?”

“Yes, that’s right,” Sturla answers.

“I don’t know where we’d be without those phones,” the man continues, asking Sturla with his eyes whether or not he pressed the right button.

Probably in the same place, Sturla thinks to himself: here in a lift on the first floor, about to ascend to the upper floors. But instead he says, without pause: “I only got this phone just now, because I’m going overseas.”

“And where are you traveling to?” his neighbor asks.

“To Lithuania.”

“Lithuania?”

“It’ll be cheaper to use a cell phone abroad than to use the phone in the hotel room,” Sturla adds. He realizes immediately that he’s just given his neighbor, who’s practically a stranger, the mental image of him lying in a hotel room, far away from home.

“A hotel in Lithuania?”

But before Sturla can decide whether he ought to confirm the picture which has clearly popped up in the man’s head, there is a new question:

“Isn’t Lithuania some place near Russia?”

“It’s by the Baltic Sea.”

“Yes, it’s by the Baltic Sea,” says the man.

“It’s between Poland and Belarus.”

“Belarus?”

“It’s like a part of Russia,” Sturla hears himself explain. “Or of the Soviet Union, to be precise. It was part of the Soviet Union.”

“Lithuania? Didn’t the Icelandic people sign a petition on behalf of Lithuania not that long ago?”

“I couldn’t say,” answers Sturla.

“Three hundred thousand signatures. I think that our Foreign Minister went over there and delivered it to the president of Lithuania. Or the prime minister.”

“What was the reason for the signatures?” asks Sturla. “Did you sign?”

“No, not me.”

“I didn’t know anything about it,” says Sturla. “It’s rather unlikely that there were enough Icelanders for three hundred thousand signatures, if both ours were missing, right?”

“That’s true. Unless I’ve got it backwards, and Lithuania signed something for Iceland.”

Although Sturla is quite content to keep talking about topics on which he, Sturla, is clearly better informed, he decides to steer the conversation away from geography and the collecting of signatures for petitions and towards something his interlocutor will surely know more about: “You could say I’m going on a business trip of sorts,” he says, looking around nonchalantly, as if the business he is going to conduct isn’t at all remarkable.

At that moment the elevator door opens, but the information Sturla has just announced makes his neighbor press the button that holds the door open and turn to Sturla; he looks like someone who has just been told something he long suspected.

“You’re going on a business trip to Lithuania, you say?”

“Yes, kind of,” replies Sturla Jón, realizing that the explanation “business trip to Lithuania” suggests he is involved in a drug deal or prostitution, or maybe both. He feels he’d better correct the misunderstanding, but he doesn’t want to directly state that misunderstanding—in case there isn’t one. But his neighbor jumps in first, accompanying his words with a smile that is clearly meant to be ambiguous:

“Then it’s what’s called in English ‘business and pleasure?’” And with that he releases the button and waves his open hand as he leaves.

Sturla doesn’t feel that this is the way he wants to end the conversation, but when he hurriedly adds that the business in Lithuania concerns his job, his everyday affairs, his comment is cut off by his neighbor bidding him goodbye with the words: “Well, enjoy the trip.” And it immediately strikes Sturla that Þorlákur (if that is his name) has the impression that he is headed to a conference of supers, or something of that nature. He decides to make it quite clear, before he leaves the man on this floor, that he, a poet, is not going to be part of a congregation of supers, whatever that peculiar assembly is like.

“I am going to a book festival,” he blurts out, and he imagines that he looks like a dog who has heard his owner calling.

Sturla’s words have a magnetic effect on the man: his free hand, the hand which isn’t holding the broom, thrusts out to block the open elevator door from closing, and he asks, surprised:

“What did you say? A book festival?”

“A poetry festival, to be precise. An international poetry festival.”

“Listen, don’t go anywhere,” says the man; he stays in the elevator and once again presses the door hold button so the elevator won’t move. “I just remembered I’m supposed to get the laundry from the dryer for my wife. Is it okay if we head back down?”

Sturla has no idea where he stands anymore, and because he doesn’t know how he ought to reply he simply says, “Yes, okay,” and so the elevator goes back down, when it ought to instead be going two floors up, to Sturla’s floor.

“So you write poetry,” his neighbor wants to know.

“That’s what I’ve been up to, yes.”

“And have you published anything?”

“My new book was published a few days ago.”

“Your first book?”

“I’ve published a few books,” Sturla answers, looking searchingly at the man.

“I clearly don’t keep up very well,” he says, apologetically, and asks Sturla what the book is called, saying that it isn’t out of the question that he might have heard about it. “No, I don’t recognize the title,” he says when he has thought about assertions for a few moments.

The elevator comes to a halt.

How long did the tormented pianist Ryder, the character in Ishiguro’s novel, spend in the elevator during his first elevator journey on his mysterious concert tour? Sturla recalls how irritated his colleague and friend, the poet Svanur Bergmundsson, was with Ryder: how he, Svanur, had practically pulled his beard out (he was, indeed, bearded) because of his bewilderment at the way the author had allowed a character to have a conversation with another character for what seemed like half- or even three-quarters of an hour, even though the actual time they spent conversing, according to the narrative, could only have been a minute or two at most. Could it be that poets—with Svanur Bergmundsson at the head of their ranks—wouldn’t put up with novelists playing around with and twisting the concept of time; is poetry alone allowed to challenge the reader’s perception of logic? Does this particular method mean that the novelist’s work falls to pieces, that it doesn’t hold water in the eyes of a perceptive reader, one who feels that he deserves—as compensation for the effort and generosity which reading a long book requires—not to be sent out into the wilderness and abandoned there, alone, insecure, and lost?

At that moment—as Sturla thinks about the information he has given his neighbor about his published books—he has the quite amazing realization that the whole flock of books he’s published under his name (if you can call seven a “whole flock”) are in circulation: in libraries, on the shelves of literary-minded people, in bookstores (at least his two most recent books). But has he contributed something to that form, a form he has by now spent roughly a quarter-century devoting the bulk of his spare time and energy to—or is it a formlessness (which one could also say about time and energy)? How widely held, for example, is his father’s opinion that if he really wants to continue with poetry—composing, as he’d called it—then he should ball the poetry up into one continuous text and hide it there, because this impatient world no longer has the appetite or attention span for irregular linebreaks and for words that come in outfits which remind one of frayed rags (prose, on the other hand, wears a carefully-cut, broad-shouldered suit)—in other words, for a dense, weighty book wrapped in a beautifully designed jacket which will protect the poet’s work from dust, from the passage of time, and from use.

One moment Sturla feels there is depth and purpose to his writing but the next—and this is something which has been happening more and more often—he, the poet, starts to think that he can’t see anything in the production of poetry but emptiness and the surface emotions that still lifes offer: more or less beautiful textures, at best, things better suited to being the subject of a watercolor on the wall of a room. In those gloomy moments when the latter feeling grips him—like the moments when he allows himself to delve into the work of his favorite authors for writing inspiration—he looks at and thinks about certain poems which he has loved more than others, poems that one could say left him exposed as a poet and—paradoxical as it sounds—made him greater and lesser at the same time. One of those poets who “opened and shut” Sturla’s creativity in that way was the same poet his father Jón referred to the day before, when he criticized Sturla for verging on old-fashioned forms of poetry by rhyming—or half-rhyming. And yet that reactionary innovation in Sturla’s poetry didn’t originate with him, though these days he isn’t able to look into the eyes of the person from whom it came. The image Sturla’s father had mentioned originally had used perfect rhyme, accompanied by alliteration: “the mother in the window / the murk of the shadow.” To better fit the words to his own style, and also because rhyme was a somewhat fussy custom that irritated him, Sturla altered the lines so they read, “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” He’d downplayed the subtle symmetry of the lines in favor of the necessary friction that makes the art of poetry something more than just form.

But how long is it possible to fill out the same form? Is the form of poetry infinite? These and other questions bob about in Sturla’s mind as he stands in the stationary elevator. His neighbor, on the other hand, has another question as he holds the elevator doors open:

“What do people do at a book festival?” And he apologizes at once for not having introduced himself; he is called Áslákur, nicknamed Láki—though of course they’d met at a tenants’ meeting. He knows Sturla’s name well, and he too has a cousin with that revered name, a friend who is, in fact, actually called Sturla Snorrason. He also apologizes again for having asked if he, Sturla Jón, would travel down to the laundry room. He just needs to get the laundry and then they can go back up in the elevator. It will only take a moment.

Sturla has nothing against the unexpected digression that is this elevator journey. He is interested in finding out what this so-called Láki wants with the broom—a question he ultimately doesn’t get an answer to because Láki sets it down in the laundry room while he takes things out of the dryer and forgets to take it with him when he gets back in the elevator.

During this stop on their trip to the laundry room, the neighbors have the following conversation:

“So, what do people do at these book festivals?”

Sturla realizes that to some extent he needs to answer this question carefully; it is as though something important rests on it. “What do people do?” He gives himself some time to reflect. “People meet and chat together. And they give readings. That is generally the purpose of such a festival: people read to other people.”

“So that . . .” Láki pushes open the door into the laundry room. “It’s a kind of holiday for authors? After they’ve finished writing their books?”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Sturla answers, but as he is setting out to convince this man about the significant energy and organization that goes into the travel of the majority of authors, he is asked another question:

“So you’ve been to this sort of festival before?” Láki puts the broom against the wall, opens the dryer, and looks over at Sturla, who is standing with his back to him and staring out the window.

“I’ve probably been to two or three,” answers Sturla, turning around. And while he recalls the two he’s previously been invited to, in Belgium and the Faroe Islands, he realizes his neighbor isn’t listening while he takes the laundry out of the dryer. And thinking this, he wonders whether he ought perhaps to revise the way he’d described his first trips to poetry festivals in the article he wrote last night, the article that imagines The Season of Poetry, which is the name of the festival in Lithuania. Although it should be very clear to the reader of the article that Sturla is joking in his, as it were, advance review of the festival, he isn’t sure everyone would understand the disparaging remarks he’d made about past festivals, which he’d included mainly to underscore the frustrated tone of the article’s narrator, the character Sturla invented as the voice of the piece. Sturla begins to realize that people like this married man, Áslákur, a father of four children, weren’t likely to comprehend that behind the personality who appears in the text lives another character: the omniscient author who can allow himself to turn everything upside down.

“I’ve recently begun writing a little story myself,” says Áslákur, after a few seconds have passed without Sturla saying anything. “But I’m not sure it counts as literature,” he ploughs on, stuffing the laundry into a red plastic tub.

“Why do you say that?”

“It’s an altogether different thing to be a real artist who carefully puts together well-rhymed and well-alliterated poems,” replies Áslákur and closes the dryer.

At around the same time the day before the salesperson in the clothing store on Bankastræti had contrived to tell him he painted. And though Sturla had found a need to let this stranger, his neighbor, know he was going to a book festival (not to a gathering of supers), generally speaking Sturla didn’t have any reason to let people know out of the blue that he writes poetry. When it seems that Áslákur doesn’t have any more questions about the poetry festival, Sturla starts to suspect Áslákur asked him down to the laundry room because he doesn’t like being there alone. As it turns out, he doesn’t seem to have the interest in Sturla he had so genuinely shown. Sturla offers to help with the laundry baskets but Áslákur declines; his expression changes as though to suggest that he has forgotten why he invited Sturla to the laundry room in the first place. When they get back to the elevator Sturla studies the envelope from Cambridge—partly to see whether the mail will arouse Láki’s interest in the poet—but once they are in the elevator and Áslákur doesn’t say anything, Sturla suspects he’s occupied with the little story he mentioned he is writing. Perhaps he is lamenting his missed opportunity to be a published author, like his fellow traveler in the elevator.

When they part ways, with Áslákur saying goodbye to Sturla somewhat curtly as he launches himself out of the elevator, Sturla is beginning to wonder why this fifty year-old man is home alone in the middle of a weekday. He supposes that his wife and children are at work and school, but what does this curious—and seemingly moody—man do in his apartment when it gets to be two o’clock in the afternoon? Does he start looking for something that he knows doesn’t exist, something which he can’t be sure about, something concrete and intangible at the same time—and is he sorely disappointed when he doesn’t find anything other than what existed in front of his eyes every single day?

The first thing Sturla does, on the other hand, when he enters his place is open the envelope from the Biographical Center. In the upper right corner of the letter is a red logo, a simply sketched image of the earth, and below the logo are the initials of the sender: IBC. A little further down was a drawing of a church building in Cambridge.

Sturla begins to read the English text:

Dear Mr. Jonsson

2,000 outstanding intellectuals of the 21st century

The Oxford English Dictionary defines intellectualism as the “doctrine that knowledge is wholly or mainly derived from pure reason” and it follows by saying that an intellectual is a “person possessing a good understanding, enlightened person.”

Surely, therefore, this definition is the reason for your selection to be included in this prestigious publication which is due for release in early 2007. I invite you to take your place within its pages. Only two thousand intellectuals can be featured from across the world and I therefore urge you to complete the enclosed questionnaire as soon as possible.

He takes a break from reading and lets himself scan the rest of the text with his eyes. Is he being mocked, or has he ended up on a list of world intellectuals because of some kind of misunderstanding? Could it really be the case that the recipient has to act fast to avoid being excluded from the two thousand people there is room for in the volume? Who’d had the idea of sending him—Sturla Jón Jónsson—this letter? The name of a Nicholas S. Law is written below the body of the letter, his signature looking rather like the lines of a cartoon EKG; what on earth could this man have been thinking as he put down his pen after signing the letter? The postscript asks the recipient to recommend someone he knows who deserves to be in the book by writing their name in a special box on the reverse side of the letter. Here is the answer to why Sturla received the letter: some spiteful individual from the crowd of Icelandic writers had also got a similar letter—at the recommendation of another spiteful author—and he had added Sturla’s name to the list of suggested recipients. The person had thought they should add, “of course, the inferior poet Sturla Jón Jónsson—who has never had any thoughts that have had any influence on other people—he ought to be very much at home on your list of the two thousand most vital thinkers on earth.”

Sturla would without doubt have done the same thing, if he’d been able to step outside himself and look from a distance at the mediocre poet Sturla Jón. In fact, his first thought is to return the letter with the words to the effect that he isn’t worthy of or able to accept this honor which has been offered to him, but he can instead recommend the bearded Icelandic poet Svanur Bergmundsson, the same person who had, in conversation with his fellow poet, friend, and countryman Sturla Jón, described how the Japanese-English author Ishiguro (or Japenglish, as Sturla can’t resist adding for his own benefit) had shown complete disregard for his loyal readers by allowing three-quarters of an hour to pass inside just two minutes during one of his novels.

But perhaps a similar letter has already dropped into Svanur’s mailbox.

Suddenly Sturla is depressed at the thought of how little these colleagues, he and Svanur—and also their fellow Icelandic poets of a similar stature—have contributed to world literature; their contribution even to Icelandic literature is pretty modest. And on the heels of this thought he begins thinking of his neighbor Áslákur, and an even greater gloom descends over him; in all the apartment buildings in the country—in all the high rises in the world—life goes on in exactly the same way as inside the residences of Skúlagata 40 in Reykjavík; how pathetic it is, how miserable. Weren’t fathers of numerous children all over the world fetching brooms from laundry rooms of apartments, only to return them to the same place later? Is there anywhere in the world where you can’t find insignificant men struggling to write some insignificant texts which are of no use to anyone but themselves—in other words, useless products that actually prevent the people who write them from being human beings of any value.

Or are they?

Doesn’t the piece Sturla wrote yesterday have any message? Could it be that the actual message of his damning, sarcastic critique of poetry festivals is self-deception, which springs from his discomfort and dissatisfaction over his own impotence and uselessness? That’s all very plausible, but he isn’t able to shake the feeling that this decision to make the leap from poetry to prose—a personal change of form—has aroused something entirely new inside him, something which really means something, for him or to others. He decides to fix himself a drink, and on his way into the kitchen (where the drinks are), he puts the newest Richard Thompson album, Front Parlour Ballads, on the CD player.