The Ambassador. Bragi Ólafsson
whether this picture originally came from a poem he’d read or from a painting or a photograph, but it always conjures up the phrase “Art of Poetry,” capital A, capital P. The fish represent the idea the poet captures, the image which moves restlessly in real life until it can be fixed onto paper; from then on it is firmly held in place for the reader to resuscitate later. Sturla knows his analogy for the art of poetry isn’t new or especially fresh, but he still thinks it is beautiful; it illuminates the art for him, just like the flashing, brightly-colored slot-machines which shone in the darkened space of the games hall.
The place had a comforting feel, something that wasn’t a new discovery for Sturla. He’d been here before; the building had been built about twenty years ago to replace a wooden structure that years before had housed a second-hand bookstore, “The Book.” Sturla had been a regular customer of that store as a child and young man, and he owed the foundations of his own library to it, the pillar, as it were; it was the place where he began choosing books for himself. First, it was books like Prince Valiant by Hal Foster; after that, he’d picked up all kinds of translated thrillers, and moved on from those to educating himself in the classics—in books that have long been known as the classics. During high school, towards the end of The Book’s existence on Skólavörðustígur, Sturla had purchased books by Halldór Laxness, Þórbergur Þórðarson, and the Icelandic poets, like Jóhannes úr Kötlum and Steinn Steinarr. He’d devoured these books with such enthusiasm that in recent years he’d come to believe he’d gotten burned-out from throwing himself into their writing with such admiration; he ended up losing interest in the poets he once absolutely adored.
With the exception of the old poet he’d read with in Kópavogur, he continued to respect the old Icelandic poet pioneers. He often had reason to remind himself that those poets had enriched and deepened his view of the world; they had doubtlessly improved the quality of his lyrical palette, though that spectrum couldn’t compare to the complex electric rainbow of slot-machines that greet punters at Skólavörðustígur 6. He could, though, say that the used books of Þórbergur, Jóhannes, and the others he had bought at The Book were among the last purchases of Icelandic books he had made; from then on he almost exclusively bought books by foreign authors, in English and Danish.
On the right side of the entrance to Háspenna was a Gevalia-brand coffee machine. On the front of this was a very visible sign inviting customers to get themselves a free sample in a paper cup before heading into reception to get their bills changed to coins, or simply going on down two steps to the games hall. Although Sturla had only recently drunk a rather strong espresso in the clothing store, and as a rule didn’t drink more than one cup of coffee after midday, he still obeyed the Gevalia machine’s silent command: he put a paper cup in the tray under the coffee nozzle and pushed the cappuccino button. While he waited for the jet of coffee he watched the university employee behind the glass counter: a dark-haired, thin man who Sturla thought looked like he had as a young man. He had a thick book, the spine firmly creased, and was deeply absorbed in reading it, though he took time to nod his head to the middle-aged man who’d just come in.
There was no one in the games hall. Sturla preferred the place that way.
Sturla had four hundred kronur in spare change in his pocket. He disturbed the supervisor from his reading and gave him the small change, telling him he wanted hundred-kronur coins in exchange. He also changed a thousand-kronur note for some coins. Then he followed the path of lights down to the carpeted games hall and sat on a high stool in front of a machine in the far corner, where there was a view out the window along Bankastræti. Before slotting the first hundred kronur coin in the machine, he looked at the traffic on Skólavörðustígur: a car, a woman, two men, another woman, a few more cars, two young boys, a woman with a dog, a black Hummer which idled at the crosswalk in the street below. As soon as the first coin disappeared into the machine the Hummer began moving along Bankastræti, and by the time it became clear Sturla was a hundred kronur poorer, the gleaming black monster had vanished from sight. Seven hundred-kronur coins later, Sturla’s gamble paid off, and a few coins could be heard dropping into the winnings tray; Sturla had got five hundred kronur back.
While he kept feeding the slot machine with coins he recalled a conversation from fourteen years ago between his father and Hallmundur Margeir, his father’s brother, which had taken place one Sunday in front of the old brick house at Skólavörðustígur 4. The conversation was etched in his memory like an engraving in stone. Sturla had been at a children’s matinee in the old cinema with his father, Jón, and his late brother, Darri Örn. They had seen The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and as they were going along Skólavörðustígur towards their home at Mánagata (where the boys’ mother, Fanný, was busy preparing Sunday lunch) they met Hallmundur and his son, Jónas. The two were on their way to a five o’clock showing at the same cinema, a movie Sturla knew was only for children older than sixteen. Perhaps that fact—given that his cousin Jónas was only twelve at the time—had stuck in Sturla’s mind along with, almost word for word, the brothers’ fairly ordinary conversation, in part because they talked without their sons saying anything at all to each other. After Jón and Hallmundur exchanged a few words about the movies they had seen or were about to see, Hallmundur had started talking about the house at Bankastræti 7 (one of the houses Sturla had walked past half an hour ago, after he bought the overcoat). What had aroused his uncle’s interest in the house was the image he had of the owners, when, in 1932, the house had first been built and they’d looked around the empty rooms. Hallmundur found it quite magnificent to imagine Icelanders from the early thirties looking around the brand new, empty, two hundred square meter stone apartment house; he didn’t, though, think his image fit the time period, since Reykjavík’s inhabitants lived then, by and large, in hovels of various sorts, as he put it. The conversation had ended with Hallmundur saying that, of course, the bank always ends up possessing anything that has any value—value in material terms, that is. The bank directors of Samvinnubanki were even now sitting at desks on the upper story of this magnificent house, with its view over Bankastræti, moistening their fingers and counting through all the bank notes they receive from the cashiers on the ground floor.
Suddenly a flood of hundred-kronur coins crashed into the coin tray. Sturla had been too immersed in the past to notice three oranges line up in a row on the screen of the slot machine, and he’d not realized that he only had one hundred-kronur coin left in his hand. He looked around instinctively, mainly to determine whether the young student who was supervising the place had heard the rattle of the coins, but in order to see for sure he had to get up and take a few steps across the carpet. He looked with some embarrassment at the shower of coins in the tray, slipped off his chair, and tiptoed carefully out onto the middle of the floor. The service booth was empty; the young man had probably gone to the bathroom. Sturla hurried back to the slot machine, picked the plastic bag from the bookstore up off the floor, and began counting coins into it. There were seven thousand kronur. What’s more, he still had the one remaining hundred-kronur coin in his sweaty palm; he slipped the coin into the slot and pressed the button, setting the fruit wheels in motion. He peered into the carrier bag, as if to reassure himself that his winnings were still there, and at the same moment he looked up from the bag he heard a now familiar noise: another consignment of hundred-kronur coins falling into the coin tray, not as many as before, but, at a quick glance, another few thousand kronur or so.
The first thing that came to Sturla’s mind was an analogy with the student Rastignac, would-be suitor to the daughter of Old Goriot in Balzac’s novel, who had won twice in a row at a roulette casino in the Palais-Royal neighborhood: seven thousand francs followed by an additional thousand francs—enough to pay off Madame de Nucingen’s debt at the dressmaker and a large enough sum to buy her affection.
Would the money that had found its way to Sturla be enough for him to buy something equivalent to the affections of Goriot’s pretentious daughter?
Without taking time to count the money, Sturla swept the coins into the plastic bag, took the paper cup, now half full of coffee, down from the slot machine, and left the room. Although the young man was still missing from the booth, Sturla looked in the direction of the counter as he went past, and he gulped down the leftover cold coffee before he placed the cup back beside the Gevalia machine. He had been too occupied with the slot machine for the last few minutes to pay attention to whether