Sturla repeats his question about the owner of the female voice, and he stumblingly asks if Jón was with a student for a private lesson at this early hour of the morning.
“And what would I be teaching, my dear son?”
“But what about the movie?” Sturla asks in response, but he goes straight back to the previous topic of discussion, which seems to be the reason for the phone conversation: the rumor about the poetry book.
“Why is some guy on the street complaining about a newly published poetry book? It’s absolutely absurd.”
“I don’t know anything else about it,” answers Jón, and Sturla can tell he is thinking about something else. “I don’t know the world of poetry,” continues Jón, but he interrupts himself and asks Sturla to wait; she has returned, the girl, and he needs to let her in.
Sturla shakes his head at his father and nods his head to the waitress, who has brought him breakfast. He places the telephone on the table for a moment while he puts sugar in the coffee, and when he returns it to his ear his father is asking if he is there; he will have to call him back, “he just needs to see to his student.”
The bread turns out not to be toasted, though Sturla asked for toast. It’s actually ice-cold, as if it has just come out of cold storage, and he calls over the woman who greeted him when he first came in, asking her to fetch him some toasted bread. Until she comes back, Sturla plays with the cell phone and thinks about what his father told him; he looks towards the window and forgets he is abroad on a sunny day: he has arrived back in Iceland, there’s a gray cloud over the country, and the images which occupy his mind are of the past, Snorrabraut, Mánagata, Meðalholt, the Grammar School in Reykjavík — from there he heads into an imaginary editorial office (Sturla has never been to an editor’s office).
“But this is toasted bread,” says the waitress when she comes back to the table.
“Are you completely sure?” asks Sturla, then he decides he won’t complain any further about the bread — other, that is, than asking why it is ice-cold, literally frozen, if it is toast.
The woman has no other answer to the question than to shrug her shoulders, and Sturla thanks her with a smile; that will be all.
He promises himself not to let what his father told him destroy the bright day that is waiting for him outside the cafeteria window. He eats the other slice of bread, orders himself an espresso (which he has to pay extra for) and smokes a cigarette before standing up. Outside the window he notices that, despite the shining sun, the people who are traipsing along the sidewalk are fully-clad in winter clothes, either coats or windbreakers, and on the way out of the cafeteria Sturla puts on his overcoat; he sniffs at the shoulders to see if any odor has settled into it from the strip-club.
When he comes into the hotel lobby, intending to nonchalantly greet Henryk, a short man with a moustache and a thick, tightly-cropped goatee — a man who is actually quite tall compared to Henryk — is standing in reception, and he suddenly throws up his hands when he sets eyes on Sturla.
“Hello, hello!” he cries in English. “You’re the Icelander, isn’t that so?”
Sturla says that is correct, and in response the man beams and stretches out his hand towards the Icelander.
They say hello. Sturla is happy to shake this cheerful man’s hand. Even though he doesn’t need comforting, the man’s demeanor is calming to Sturla; for the first time since he arrived in the city he realizes he doesn’t have to be on his own.
“Welcome to Vilnius,” says the man and strokes his goatee. “I recognized you from your picture.” And he asks Sturla if he hasn’t been well taken care of, if Jonas and Renata hadn’t come to fetch him, if he wasn’t satisfied with the hotel-room, and just as Sturla is running out of positive responses to the man’s questions, he finally asks one which calls for a negative:
“They managed to show you the Writers’ Union, didn’t they, Jonas and Renata?”
“No.”
“No?” The man strokes his moustache with his index finger and thumb, and then places that hand on Sturla’s shoulder. “I asked them to take you there before you came to the hotel.”
Though Sturla appreciates the man’s friendly manner, he finds his physical closeness a little uncomfortable; he runs his hand through his hair, and this movement is enough for the Lithuanian — if he was in fact Lithuanian — to remove his hand from Sturla’s shoulder.
“I’m pretty sure that it’s still in the same place,” he says with a smile, and proceeds to describe how the Writers’ Union is on the next street; he points out the window to a stately house at the bottom of a street which meets Gedimino Prospektas almost directly across from the hotel. Yet it seems like he hadn’t forgiven Jonas and Renata for failing to take Sturla there on the way to the hoteclass="underline" he starts talking about how important it is when you come to a new place — as he assumes Lithuania is for Sturla — that the first building a person enters be someplace worth visiting because it is this building which will stay in your memory: not the airport (the airport is more or less the same wherever you land) but the first building in the body of the town (or, as he puts it in English: the city organism). For example, the first door he went through in the mega-city of London, when he went there for the first time, a few years ago, was the door to an old bookstore across from the underground station he first came out, after his journey from Heathrow airport, and this old bookstore was still in his mind when he thought of that metropolis, London; everything else in the city had been forgotten and buried, even St. Paul’s Church was nothing but a basement cellar compared to that entrance to the glorious world on the ground floor of Charing Cross. It is just like when a child first enters the world. His first experience is what he sees when he goes out the narrow door of his mother, and after that, everything up to old age, all his thoughts — whether the child is a man or woman — are about the environment which was first in front of his crying eyes: the navel and everything above and below it.
“No, I’m going a bit too far now,” he adds, and he literally bursts out laughing.
“But are you sure a newborn child can see with its eyes right away?” asks Sturla, feeling at once that the question sounds rather pedantic.
The bearded guy seems not to hear the question. Laughing, he again says that he has taken the metaphor about the crying child too far, but his expression suggests that he thinks Sturla is a bit of a killjoy; the guy apologizes by saying: “But we’re allowed to say whatever comes to mind, we poets, isn’t that so? Whatever rubbish it is.”
Sturla nods along with his new companion; he hadn’t realized he was yet another poet. Some people are no longer strangers as soon as they look you in the eye: this bearded chatterbox is one of them, and Sturla considers it a possibility that they’ll get better acquainted at the poetry festival.
“But it’s not every city where the Writers’ Union can be seen from the hotel that hosts a foreign poet,” he says, and Sturla admires the way he arranges his words in flawless English. “And it’s there, later today, at three o’clock, where we’re holding a reading, a few native poets, including me. . Of course, I’ve forgotten to introduce myself in all my endless prattling-on. . I am called Jokûbas Daugirdas and I’m one of too many poets in this city. .” and while he tells Sturla about the program, and continues talking about the reason the Writers’ Union of Lithuania got the use of such a splendid old house — a story which he perhaps goes through in unnecessary detail — Sturla contemplates, in light of what Jokûbas maintained about the permanence of a person’s first acquaintance with a new environment, whether or not the Ambassador Hotel will live on in his thoughts, and he’s quite convinced that it will. At least, he realizes he’s already forgotten the appearance of the airport terminal, and he decides to reconcile himself to the idea that, rather than the entrance to the Writers’ Union of Lithuania, the reception of the Ambassador Hotel on Gedimino Prospektas will remain in his memory as a souvenir of his trip to Lithuania: Elena’s face, the pamphlets in the stand on the way past reception — and an image of the dwarfish Henryk, who he can see just beyond Jokûbas’s shoulder at this moment, a friendly guy who it is impossible to imagine betokens bad luck for anyone.