“You’re in room number 304,” the red-headed woman had told him, and she had then told him several things about the hotel, pointing out the stairs with her index finger and telling him, apologetically, that there was no elevator; he would need to climb two flights and then go to his left.
Sturla was therefore still out of breath when he stepped over the stain on the carpet of the hotel room, with his suitcase in tow and his briefcase in his hand. When he was past the stain and stood beside his bed, what drew his attention next — other than that the room was cramped — was the lamp on the bedside table between the narrow beds; it had an orange-colored plastic shade which seemed to have come from a pizza parlor he once ate at in Budapest exactly twenty years ago; he’d stayed there with Hulda for a weekend, after visiting an old, distant aunt of hers in Vienna. But when Sturla switches on the lamp, and dims the overhead light, there is a soft and pleasant glow in the room, which reminds him of a particular habit he’d adopted when traveling abroad: the first thing he would do on entering a hotel room — even before turning on the television — was pour himself a shot of whatever alcohol he’d bought in duty-free.
As if welcoming himself to the new place.
On this occasion, Sturla had bought himself a half-liter of twelve-year-old scotch whisky. He lifts his briefcase up onto the table below the mirror, opens it by arranging the numbers into the combination 666, and looks at himself in the mirror as he opens the briefcase. He decides to take a shower after he’s had a drink, then change his clothes and work out whether or not to order coffee up to the room to refresh himself, before he has another measure of whisky and goes into town to look around. He remembers seeing a door to a cafeteria or some kind of bar midway between the hotel entrance and the reception, and he allows himself to imagine that the young man who was sitting inside, next to a window that looks out onto the street, is one of the festival participants. “I’ve evidently arrived at some kind of Scandinavian family gathering,” Sturla says out loud to the mirror; he decides that the man he’d glimpsed looks like those Nordic poets who enthusiastically recite their works in a dramatic manner, with musical accompaniment; he must be a Norwegian or Swede, Sturla thinks, as he scrambles the numbers on the lock again. Then he takes the whisky bottle from the briefcase (wrapped in a black v-neck sweater he’d bought on his layover at Kastrup airport in Copenhagen), a paperback (which he’d also bought at the airport), a cigarette packet, and the in-flight magazine from the AirBaltic Fokker airplane.
While he fetches himself a water glass from the bathroom Sturla recalls the article he read in the in-flight magazine about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986, and he thinks about how close he is to that area at the moment. Chernobyl, which is in the Ukraine, is right by the border with Belarus, itself no more than a stone’s throw from Vilnius, and the radioactive material had done most damage in Belarus, both to the people and to the arable land.
Sturla pours some gold-colored scotch into the clear water glass and holds it up to the mirror before taking his first sip.
“Belarus,” he says aloud to himself. “Lukashenko. President Alexander Lukashenko.” And he tries to imagine how it feels to live in a country which is governed by a person who describes the language of his people, Belarusian, as unsuitable for dealing with important matters; who says that the only great languages of the world are Russian or English. It reminds him of a middle-aged man from Belarus who he got to know a little at the poetry festival in Belgium, a poet and literary critic who Sturla regrets not having mentioned in his newly-written article, which he realizes at this moment casts his hosts, past and present, in a negative light. Perhaps if he’d also added one or two more generous depictions, it might have brightened it up a bit, without sacrificing any of its sting. If anyone is ripe for a generous characterization, Sturla thinks, it is that Belarusian literary guy in Liège. He’d aroused Sturla’s admiration because of his rare talent for making harsh critiques sound like they contained some praise. Talking with Sturla and two other poets at the festival in Liège, he had torn apart the unsuccessful organization of the festival in a particularly humorous fashion, but at the same time praised it generously. It had been a splendid example of constructive demolition, of the warmth there could be in sarcasm, a quality Sturla wanted most of all to characterize his own thoughts and actions as an author. And yet Sturla had never come across a more strong and pungent odor of sweat than the one which had emanated from the pithy Belarusian, and he’d done his best to avoid ending up on the same table as him at mealtimes.
Sturla remembers how, while translating the poem by Liliya (the Belarusian poet who he suspects he will likely meet quite soon), his memory of the literary critic’s body odor had been quite literally disturbing. If there was something that put Sturla off-balance in close conversations with people, it was the odor of sweat or of halitosis, and if any life experience were likely to stick in his mind, it was being forced to breathe the pollution that comes from the human body.
“Cheers, Liliya Boguinskaia. I’ll go back to Belarus with you.”
And Sturla toasts the mirror on behalf of the Belarusian poet whose poem he translated and who translated his poem from an English translation as part of the project the festival organizers had instigated in the hope that the poets would get to know each other before they met at the festival. And just as Liliya Boguinskaia has no idea who this Sturla Jón Jónsson is, this guy who has translated her poem “Pilies Street” into Icelandic, Sturla doesn’t know anything about her: only her name and that she’d translated his poem “kennslustund,” via English, “the lesson,” into her own language.
“Cheers to the unknown translator,” Sturla says, smiling. He finishes the drink and grimaces at himself in the mirror. Then he goes to the window and draws back the curtains, and as he wonders if Liliya is already in Vilnius and what she looks like — whether she is planning to arrive in the country before the festival begins, since she lives in the vicinity — he faces the whitewashed wall of a house and a well-lit yard between the buildings where two trash cans are laying on their sides and some cars are parked. He notices that all five cars are German brands. It strikes him at once how little people notice in new, foreign surroundings; not just people generally, but himself in particular— someone who is supposed to be a poet, and therefore observant, his eyes open to everything before them; provided, of course that his conception of what a poet should be is correct: someone who is the conscience of language, someone who has the duty of setting into language things that others are not attentive to or aware of.
This thought strikes him because he realizes, with some regret, that on the way into the city from the airport he didn’t pay proper attention to what the city looks like and what impression it had on him. The only thing he remembers from the trip are two or three particularly ugly high-rises, a set of dwarf skyscrapers which he suspects were built after the country won its independence from the Soviet Union. A single glance had stamped these awful structures in his mind as the symbol of long-awaited liberty from totalitarian communist rule for the natives. Those people he particularly remembers noticing from the car on his way to the hotel had seemed handsome and even well-to-do (as his mother would put it) — a complete contrast to the mournful image which the brutal present-day architecture had imposed on the city for the sole purpose of challenging the poet’s eyes.