To the sound of a noticeable murmur through the hall, Salomé began dancing again, and she seemed — to Sturla’s great relief — to have forgotten what she’d been about to do the moment before the disturbance took place. Igor clapped Sturla firmly on the shoulder. “I’ve known other Icelanders,” he said; there had been young students in Moscow in the sixties, lively men whose hearts were in the right place, as Igor put it, and he concluded his positive summary of Icelanders by saying: “And they are not Scandinavians.”
“Stupid tourist,” barked out Yuri when he sat back down at his table, having watched the Swedes leave. Then he said something in his own language, something Sturla told himself must have hewn closely to his own, rather negative characterization of Nordic people in his article about the poetry festival.
It was difficult to tell whether or not the dancing of the Belarusian Salomé had really aroused the admiration of the men in the hall, but everyone’s attention was grabbed when she loosened the fifth veil, the one around her waist. According to the voice which had announced the dancer, and the story of Salomé which the dancer alluded to, there should have been seven veils around her body, but after she took off the fifth there was only one veil remaining, the color of an orange in shadow, and this veil concealed the last part of a woman’s body to ever be revealed; it was wrapped around her like a cloth diaper on an infant. Sturla saw that both his companions had noticed the discrepancy, and they exchanged curious glances. Had the girl miscounted, or was the discrepancy intended to make the audience speculate as they waited: Was there a seventh veil underneath?
For a moment, Sturla feared that the pale, naked dancer would decide to come up to him. At least he noticed her looking tenderly towards him for a while as she rubbed herself up against the pole on stage, but then the man in the striped suit came back onto the stage, holding an object about the size of a basketball in his outstretched hands; the object was concealed in a silk scarf. According to the script, this object was supposed to grab the Belarusian’s attention — or, as Igor put it, “Here comes Jokanaan,” and just then Salomé untied the knot on the sixth scarf, let it fall to the floor, and whipped the veil from the object the pinstripe-wearing guy held out. With that tug she pulled away all the mystery from everything on stage that mattered. In Salomé’s assistant’s hand there was a tray, and on the tray the head of a mannequin, wearing a slightly-askew wig, its neck blood-red. Salomé held the tray with both hands and led it, and the assistant, towards the audience, all the way up to the edge of the stage, only about a meter from the table where Sturla and the Russians sat.
Then she bent forward, her back to the hall, so that her most private parts were on display to anyone who didn’t look away, and when she kissed the decapitated head on the tray, a peculiar expression crossed the face of her assistant, the man in the jacket. It took Sturla a fraction of a second to realize that his facial expression was meant to indicate sexual bliss. Immediately a glimpse of a memory occurred to Sturla, an image from his youth: his mother drunk at Mánagata, at a party which had made an indelible impression in young Sturla’s mind because one of his father’s friends had dared him, at the age of ten or eleven, to drink a sip of Bols liqueur (the name Bols had stuck in his memory then and never left), and Fanný—who had planned to take Sturla to her sister Jenný’s in order to save him from the loud, hectic gathering of his father and his acquaintances, had never left; she had been behaving very inappropriately with his father’s close friend Örn Featherby and another of the guests, the accountant Magnús Hall. When Sturla, who was sitting in the lap of one of the opera ghosts (that was what he’d started calling his father’s friends), broke loose and tried to get out of the living room, he saw his mother pressing her half-naked breast up to Magnús Hall’s face, and thrusting her ass (which might well also have been naked, under her thin nightgown) in the direction of Örn Featherby, who smiled uncomfortably at the frightened child, this boy he had held in his hand while he was baptized and who now ran out of the very same room in which the baptism had taken place, pretending he didn’t hear his father, who was standing, glass in hand, at the kitchen-table, in conversation with another of his friends, calling in a drunken voice to “Sturla mine.”
“You can tell that she is from Belarus,” Igor whispered to Sturla, twitching his head in the direction of the dancer’s ass.
Yuri laughed at his companion’s comment and declared that now the time had come for a real bottle of champagne. But in spite of his “bubbly” suggestion he couldn’t hide the fact that he wasn’t comfortable at all; contrary to Sturla’s expectations, the uncouth Russian was trying to avoid looking at what the Belarusian woman seemed absolutely determined to display.
Sturla decided he’d had enough. He applauded along with the others when Salomé finally disappeared with her assistant behind the curtain at the back of the stage, then he apologized to his companions and said he needed to step out to the restroom briefly. His real mission was to get his overcoat, leave the Old Town Erotic Center, and relieve himself in some other place before beginning the task of recalling the route back to the hotel. While he put on the overcoat he looked around for the woman with small breasts who had accompanied him to the coat check earlier in the evening, but she was nowhere to be seen. So he headed out, thanking the guy who opened the door for him, a young man in a pinstripe jacket and pants, for a lovely evening. He was a little surprised to hear himself enthuse about how beautifully the place was decorated; the words slipped out of his mouth because he was so happy and relieved to be free of those same fixtures.
And now, the morning after, as Sturla comes out of the bathroom and lights a cigarette, he finds he is still relieved to be free of the place where he’d been the previous evening. And as he draws the curtain and looks out at the yard, where the two trash cans are still lying on their sides and there are more cars, he looks forward to seeing how the city of Vilnius will appear for the first time in the light; he still hasn’t seen anything other than its pale backside.
THE DAZZLING BRIGHTNESS
When Sturla comes down to reception, there is a dwarfish man standing behind the desk, wearing the same style uniform the girls had worn the previous evening. They say good morning, and Sturla recalls what Svanur Bergmundsson said when the two of them were on a trip to Italy some years ago: that he was frightened of little people, especially men. He experienced their presence as a bad omen, like a black cat crossing your path on the street. When Sturla is about to push open the glass door to the cafeteria, still thinking about Svanur’s crude words, he hesitates instinctively, feeling that he ought to say something to the man at the reception, something other than good morning. He turns back, apologizes politely to him, and asks the little guy if he can tell him what the word “prospektas” means in Lithuanian.
“I am sorry but I am not from here,” the man replies. It is difficult to pin down his accent, and Sturla reads the name Henryk on his employee badge. “You can maybe ask in the conservatory,” continues the man.
Sturla gets the feeling that maybe there’s something to Svanur’s fear of dwarfish people, as absurd as it sounds. He himself has just made up a superstition that seeing dwarfish foreigners outside their home country betokens something unpredictable, some kind of mishap, as he puts it, for passersby.