“I think we may count ourselves lucky, Sturla dear, that we don’t live with people who don’t understand us. You are in Latvia and I am at my place on Nýlendugata; there are no other people to confuse us here, no other people hanging off us and wanting us to live the way we don’t want to live.”
“I am in Lithuania, mom.”
“I know that, dearest. And I am at Nýlendugata.”
“But how did Jenný know Tobbi had written in the guest book, since she’d already gone back to Reykjavík?” Sturla asks, admiring the way Þorbjörn Gestur had left this parting message, ranting across the white pages in the guestbook so that the next guests at the house wouldn’t need to bother.
“How did she know that?” Fanný acts like she hasn’t understood her son’s question. “She, of course, had to go and fetch the man. She had to drive six hours back and fetch Tobbi, who was planning to stay with those poor people at the house.”
Sturla suddenly realizes that he is the one paying for the telephone call, not Fanný, even though she called him. As he tries to get her to understand that they can’t talk together much longer, she starts to describe Tobbi’s written rant — how odd it was to write something in the guestbook which hadn’t happened yet, and especially to do that in the name of complete strangers. Sturla realizes that Þorbjörn Gestur has used the same method he did in his article about the poetry festival in Druskininkai; if Sturla had understood his mother correctly, Jenný’s common-law husband had described how those total strangers had spent the days they were about to stay in that very house he was refusing to leave — even though he was required to. In other words, Sturla and Þorbjörn, such different personalities, had both written about times that hadn’t yet arrived.
When Sturla imagines how his mother looks at this moment, and pictures her surroundings at Nýlendugata, he remembers the plastic folder and the picture she’d shown him the day before, and he is as amazed as before that she can’t remember the document folder she’d given to his cousin Jónas — the folder which revealed, when it came into Sturla’s possession a long time later, that it had been storing Jónas’s writings, writings which Sturla has brought into his present, where they have become a judgment against him.
At the end of the conversation with his mother, Sturla doesn’t feel up to calling his father; he realizes he needs to go out. He decides not to wait any longer for the coffee which he was promised but to get some coffee (or something else) at a bar or restaurant — to do what his mother suggested. He drains the whisky glass, puts on his overcoat, and turns off the television. On the way downstairs he remembers again that he wanted to tell his father the name of the street he is staying on; he thought it would please the socialist Jón Magnússon.
On the sideboard in reception is a tray with cold beer bottles and some glasses placed upside down. With a smile which is meant to make it clear that he is joking, Sturla asks the girl whether the bottles are meant for him — he’d let himself think she might be bringing him beer instead of coffee — but the girl replies apologetically that the beer is for a sick hotel guest who isn’t able to come down from his hotel room; she could bring some beer to Sturla’s room, but the cafeteria is also open. Sturla apologizes in turn, saying that he was just joking, but that she can still help him with another matter: could she tell him what the word prospektas meant in Lithuanian? The girl seems, however, not to recognize the word, or else she misunderstands the question; she shrugs her shoulders and tells Sturla to ask Elena, who was on shift just before.
Sturla repeats the question in vain.
“You must ask Elena,” reiterates the girl in English.
“But where is Elena?” asks Sturla, also in English, thinking how peculiar it sounds to ask after people by first name when he’s not been in the country more than two hours. “She was going to bring coffee up to my room.”
“She is gone,” replies the girl, letting him know he will have to wait until the morning. “Will you be staying after tomorrow?” she asks.
“Yes, I will be here,” answers Sturla, and straight away the photograph from the back of the record sleeve of Will You be Staying After Sunday by The Peppermint Rainbow pops up in his mind: three rather ungainly young men in white shoes, light blue pants, and dark shirts with light blue neckties, and two black-haired, sun-bronzed women in white leather boots and light blue, short summer dresses, the same color as their companions’ pants. This makes him think again about his five children — Egill, Gunnar, Grettir, Hildigunnur, and Hallgerður — and when he repeats to the girl at reception, once she has repeated her question, that he will be here the next morning, he smiles to himself, thinking that not only will he find out tomorrow morning what the word prospektas means in Lithuanian, but he might also get a cup of coffee up in his room; better late than never. And he delights in the thought that Elena herself will bring him that cup.
He goes past the cafeteria; the Nordic man has disappeared. Presumably he is sleeping after his tea-drinking. Sturla opens the door to the street, and this reminds him of an Icelandic poem which often comes, unbidden, into his thought when he opens an outside door — a poem about the world which “opens out onto the street.”
THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS
When Sturla wakes up the next day he is still thinking about what happened the evening before at a club downtown called the Old Town Erotic Center. The course of events had accompanied him into a deep sleep, and he knows he will always remember, as long as his mind is able to store things, everything from last night, the things he has made up and those he actually experienced. Sturla had enjoyed sleeping on the white hotel linen; he hadn’t been so tired in a long time, and now when he wakes from his excellent rest he is glad he didn’t have a cup of coffee the evening before, as he had planned; instead, he’d drunk a single beer, then two glasses of red wine at the club, and also the sparkling wine which was included in the cover charge. And when he gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom he is able to think up a title for the memorable events (which he had decided right away to note down in his notebook, with the intention of possibly using them in a short-story later):
“Beneath the Gaze of Salomé.”
Soon after he left the hotel the evening before — once he’d spent a few moments breathing in the invigorating atmosphere which larger cities than one’s own usually offer — he had gotten himself a beer at a small, likable pub nearby. He had taken a copy of his book assertions with him, and, as he often enjoyed doing on a trip abroad, he had sat down with his own book and a beer, and selected some poems to read. As peculiar as it sounds, seeing the poems in print in different settings from those where they’d sprung up gave him a certain distance from his own work. In the case of this new book, which had come to him in an entirely different way than his earlier books, this “foreign” reading affected the poems even more powerfully for him. Between choosing the poems and reading them he looked around inside the pub at the few people who were there, and when he’d just finished the first beer and was about to order himself another he overheard four young Swedes at the next table talking about going to some bar in the old part of town, some really exciting place they had been told about, and he’d decided to follow them, to let them lead him to the old quarter of town.