“In the conservatory?” Sturla repeats.
Henryk nods his head and points in the direction of the cafeteria.
“You mean the. . konditori?”
“It’s the transparent door over there,” responds Henryk, smiling good-naturedly to this hotel guest who has just woken up.
Sturla chooses a table in the center of the breakfast room; no sooner has he sat down than the cell phone rings in his shirt pocket. It takes him a moment to answer because he has completely forgotten what button to press.
“Hi, Sturla.” It is his father, Jón.
“Hi, Dad.”
“You’ve reached your destination?”
Jón’s voice has a serious tone, and Sturla thinks he detects either anxiety or disapproval. The first thing which pops into his mind is that his failure to return the videotape to his father before leaving the country might have cast a long shadow over Jón’s workday. In Jón’s mind, the thought that the man who was planning to pick up the Iranian movie from the library collection was going to be disappointed would be troubling enough to render the day as good as useless. Although strangers, rather than those close to him, tend to benefit from what little scrupulousness Jón has, Sturla reckons it unlikely that this is what’s burdening his father; something else has bothered him.
“I’ve arrived in Lithuania, yes,” replies Sturla, and he says he’d planned to call the evening before, but he’d been so exhausted after his journey through Copenhagen that he went to sleep shortly after going up to his hotel room in Vilnius. As soon as he utters those words, he regrets it; he wants to share with his father everything he’d seen at the strip-club the evening before.
“You say you are in Vilnius?” asks Jón, and there is still some unease in his voice.
“Yes. Listen to this, I wanted to tell you yesterday the name of the street where the hotel is located.” Asking his father to wait a moment, he stands up and flings himself quickly out onto the sidewalk to see the street sign which he’d noticed yesterday hanging over the hotel door. A feeling of contentment washes over him at being situated here in the hotel on a sunny day, with a delicious breakfast on the way; happily, he has the whole day and all evening to spend at his leisure in this friendly city, for the festival program doesn’t begin until the next day.
“Gedimino Prospektas,” Sturla reads from the sign into the cell phone. “The street is called nothing other than Gedimino Prospektas. I don’t yet know what “prospektas” means in this context, but I’m probably going to get a private lesson today from a young woman who works here at the hotel.” Sturla thinks he probably sounds too eager, the way a young boy sounds when he knows something really exciting is about to happen, and when he tries to respond to his father’s lack of interest in his partial description of the street name by telling him about his vain attempts to order coffee at the hotel cafeteria the evening before — how his attempts convinced him that the service mentality of the fine people who lived here was the same as it had been during the era of Soviet rule — Jón interrupts him mid-word by announcing that Jónatan Jóhannsson called him last night and described something he, Sturla, would probably want to hear.
“I don’t know what it means,” says Jón, “but there is some guy here in Reykjavík who has some thoughts about your new book. And he intends, according to what Jónatan heard from a journalist at the daily paper Vísir, to share them with the public.”
“What do you mean, thoughts?” asks Sturla, who is back at the table and looking around for a waitress. “Share what with the public?”
“Like I said: I have no idea what it means these days for someone to have observations about a newly published book of poetry. Unless of course you are writing poetry about this man; I don’t know anything about that. Or “asserting” something which he feels is plainly false,” says Jón, undoubtedly feeling proud about having referred to the title of the book.
“And. . Jónatan didn’t explain it more fully?”
One of the girls who had denied Sturla coffee the evening before comes up to his table and hands him a white piece of paper listing his options for breakfast.
“He didn’t know anything other than that this man — he didn’t know at the time who he was — was unhappy about something in the book, and had spoken with a journalist at the paper, someone other than the person who’d told Jónatan about this, about sharing something that had troubled him with the paper’s readers.”
Sturla looks at the menu without taking in what is written there, and continues to do so until his father says that he had simply wanted to let him know about all this.
“Can you find out who it is?” asks Sturla, and when Jón agrees to, Sturla asks whether Jónatan hadn’t mentioned anything else; whether he hadn’t spoken about an article he’d read.
“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact,” replies Jón, and Sturla can tell that what he is about to hear now would be no more pleasant than the story he’d just been told over the phone. “He was quite amazed by the whole thing.”
“By the whole thing?”
“He said he’d read the article you gave him for the magazine.”
“And what? Was he a little amazed by it?” Sturla looks up at the girl who is still hovering in front of him and indicates with his finger that he wants coffee, orange juice, and toast.
“He said he didn’t understand a word in it,” continues Jón. “He spoke about how you were tearing strips off some festival which you had been at but hadn’t yet been held. What festival were you writing about? I didn’t understand what he meant.”
“And what else?” Sturla nods his head when the girl points questioningly at the word marmelade on the menu. “Why was he telling you about it?”
“Weren’t you asking me whether he’d mentioned it? Given the things he told me about this story of yours, it actually sounded to me like the piece deserved some praise: how you were speaking ill of the Nordic countries and poetry and. .” The tone of Jón’s voice becomes a little cheerier, and for a moment Sturla feels proud that an article of his has given him space to criticize things he knows his father doesn’t think much of. But immediately after he feels on the other hand anxious that Jónatan might not want to publish the article. “He seemed pleased,” continues Jón, “that you were taking some American poets down a peg or two and finished up your article with a dig at African-Americans, or black Americans, as I think he put it, Jónatan.”
Through the phone Sturla then hears a young, rather shrill female voice calling to his father, and Jón calls back — though not right into the phone — that he is coming, he is talking to overseas on the phone. Then Sturla hears the female voice shout that she is going, and he allows himself to ask his father who the “young voice” belongs to. The question makes his father happy, while Sturla doesn’t really find it so promising to hear and know that his sixty-seven-year-old father has a young girl visiting him. He didn’t like to ask who she was or how they had met — he suspects he knows, and his mental image of that liaison doesn’t make him happy. And when he imagines the absurdity of his father and the girl watching a movie together in the living room at Skólavörðustígur the evening before, some movie which could appeal to people of completely different natures and of such different ages, he is pretty sure that the girl is the reason his father has forgotten to mention the Iranian movie.
“She’s gone,” says Jón, after the sound of the door slamming travels all the way from Reykjavík to Vilnius.
“But what was the movie?” asks Sturla, kicking himself for having asked.
“What movie?”