And that about covers the major points of the Lithuanian program, which I have here in front of me, except for the Sunday night, when they’ve planned some universal gathering of poets. And, following that, there’s an item in the program with the embarrassing name “Night of the One Poem.”
Monday, the last official day of the festival, naturally begins with breakfast. Some people won’t exactly be bright-eyed that morning.
Then there is some ridiculous performance planned for the tired, ready to depart participants, some nonsense called “The disagreement between fire, water, air, and earth.”
I’m going to make myself disappear while this torture takes place.
At the end of all this, there’s a festival publicity event to introduce a festival poetry collection which is being published on behalf of the festival.
The only good thing about both the presentation and the publication is that — mixed in with all the stillborn poems by Jespers, Bengts, and Kláuses — you can find my own poems in the collection, the poems of a poet who has turned his back on poetry.
Actually, the poems will be in the odd Lithuanian language, but nevertheless they will be there, and as far as I’m concerned it will be enough that people know the poems were originally written in the one Nordic language you can definitely describe as having a somewhat lyrical tone: the Icelandic language.
And then, as a way of concluding this tragicomic presentation, all kinds of reading groups take over the program. We poor devils will be arranged into groups according to some rigid system one of the festival committee members has been devoting months to, and I’m assuming that these groups will perform an autopsy on one of the poems.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up choosing a messy effort by one of the American housewife-poets, or by the Meierhof Phenomenon; it certainly won’t be a poem by that drunkard Bush or by me, who is from the back of beyond.
And finally, when we’ve all been over-stuffed with the art of words, the organizers will reveal to us who is the idiotic winner of the poetry contest they announced on the first day of the festival.
At this moment, I will be asking myself why in the world I accepted the invitation to this strange festival. Especially as I’m already thinking about, eagerly anticipating, the moment I get to take off in the airplane from Vilnius, free from all that crap, at least until the invite to the next festival arrives.
Nevertheless, I am going to go there in mid-October; not long now.
Indeed, I got my tickets in the mail this morning. Keflavík — Copenhagen — Vilnius and back. The tickets were sealed in a stupid envelope which was so tight a fit that I tore them on one corner when I tried to get them out.
It felt to me like I was playfully tearing banknotes in half. The feeling was painful and tender at the same time.
I imagined some crazy rich rapper in Los Angeles excitedly setting down his gun and beginning to tear dollar bills apart in front of a photographer who has come to visit him.
Why don’t they invite this sort of larger-than-life guy to Lithuania for the festival?
Someone people know. Someone who can compose on the spot and actually has something to say about the situation in the world. Or the situation in South Central.
I can imagine this rapper sitting at the breakfast in Druskininkai, his baseball cap on backwards and thick gold chains dangling into his oatmeal.
The organizer of the festival is standing outside the breakfast room, and he has taken up smoking again.”
PART TWO. VILNIUS
A STAIN ON THE CARPET
When he opens the door to room number 304 in the Ambassador Hotel in Vilnius, it’s not the television set which seems to hang from thin air high above the curtains, but a darkish stain on the light brown carpet in the entryway that Sturla first locks eyes on. The stain is the same size as the hazelnut Sturla had earlier slipped into his overcoat pocket while he was waiting to be picked up from the airport. It was a beautifully shaped and colored natural object, something that would serve as a kind of lucky charm while he was staying in that country.
Sturla had been told in an e-mail from the organizers of the festival that a person by the name of Jonas would meet him at the airport. “One of our most renowned poets” had been included in parenthesis in English after the man’s last name — a very strange name which Sturla had not tried especially hard to remember. At first, Sturla wasn’t sure what he ought to feel about the fact that his welcoming party had the same name as his long-dead cousin poet, but when he had shaken this Jonas’s hand, after the latter had eventually found him on the sidewalk in front of the airport terminal, he felt it was appropriate that a poet with this name would welcome him to his final week as a poet, or so he told himself.
“Nice to meet you, Jonas,” Sturla had said, and Jonas replied, “Nice to meet you soon, Mister Jonsson.”
Just as with Jonas’s last name, Sturla had difficulty remembering the name of the woman who was with him, a dark-haired, striking woman in her forties who kept her eyes hidden behind unusually large, coal-black sunglasses. Jonas the poet’s appearance didn’t give any indication that he was a writer. He wore a short, light gray leather jacket, jeans of some unknown origin, and his unkempt hair looked like it was full of plaster or dust. Sturla saw why when they got into the car: it was a twenty-year-old red Datsun which appeared to have long been used for some sort of construction jobs.
Other than his greeting when they met, Jonas seemed unwilling to trust himself on the slippery ice of English; the woman handled the introductions. She started by apologizing for Jonas, who spoke German but not English; Sturla would have to ask her if he wanted to know something, and then she immediately said something strange about Vilnius: “But what is there to know? It’s only a city.”
Sturla shrugged his shoulders; he wanted to ask something so that it didn’t seem like he was agreeing with this woman’s opinion of the city, but nothing came to mind. She asked Sturla a few polite questions about whether his flight had been okay and what the weather was like in Iceland, then turned her undivided attention to Jonas; they seemed to be in the middle of a discussion, and forgot him completely for the quarter of an hour it took to drive to the hotel. In the meantime, Sturla listened to the Lithuanian coming from their mouths — a language which maybe wasn’t as stiff-sounding as he had assumed in his article’s jokes about the festival (in a disrespectful fashion, he now realized) — and he wondered whether or not finding a hazelnut on the bare concrete at the entrance to the airport terminal was a little strange. Wasn’t such an unlikely occurrence on his arrival in the country a sign that something unexpected was going to happen, something that would never happen on, say, Skúlagata?
As soon as Jonas and the woman finished their conversation, Sturla was going to ask them whether they could guess what the little hazelnut had been doing in the concrete airport landscape. He imagined the question as a humorous little remark which would allow him to perhaps form a very tiny connection with these people: truth be told, he found it a little uncomfortable that they didn’t pay more attention to him, a newcomer to their country. But Jonas and the woman (Sturla thought she might also be a poet) didn’t stop talking for a single moment until the three of them arrived at the hotel reception, where a long and seemingly complicated discussion took place between the woman with sunglasses and the hotel employee, a young red-headed woman in a dark blue uniform who ended the conversation by turning to Sturla and saying, in English, “I will take care of you now.” This declaration appeared to lift a heavy load off Jonas and his lady friend; they smiled — something Sturla realized he hadn’t seen them do yet — and Jonas suddenly remembered to give Sturla an envelope with information about the festival. They said their goodbyes, and Sturla found he was relieved to be out of their care.