“And it’s not every Writers’ Union which is also the home of the best bar in the city,” continues Jokûbas. While he adds more than a few words about the arrangement — which Sturla finds strange — by which the Writers’ Union of Lithuania is licensed to serve food and drink, Sturla tries to imagine what sort of poetry this man writes. He is a man who clearly has a tendency to lose himself in needless details: Sturla pictures him writing long lines and putting lots of them under a single title; he imagines that even his suggestion that Sturla have his morning beer at the Writers’ Union bar (it’s open at this hour of the morning) has already found its way into one of his poems. Sturla, however, says that he wants to begin the day by nosing around town: he still hasn’t had the chance to see downtown Vilnius in daylight, having only been able to see the shadowy side of the city so far. Last night, he’d inadvertently stumbled into a “manly” entertainment spot, as he tries to put it in English, but this confession doesn’t seem to pique Jokûbas’s curiosity; he begins telling Sturla about a few places in the city which he might enjoy exploring, and he recommends especially fervently an eatery on Pilies Street, a street Sturla realizes he knows about, since he remembers it as the title of Liliya Boguinskaia’s poem that he translated, the Belarusian poet who in turn had translated Sturla’s “kennslustund.”
Before they say goodbye, Sturla asks Jokûbas if he knows whether Liliya from Belarus, Liliya Boguinskaia, has arrived in the city.
“Do you know her?” asks Jokûbas, and when Sturla explains to him that they were asked to translate each other’s poems as part of a scheme to get unfamiliar poets acquainted with each other before the festival, Jokûbas tells him he expects she will be at that very eatery around midday today. He met her last night and she had, like Sturla (though this clearly hadn’t been the case) asked for a good restaurant in the city. She’d been here many years ago, during Soviet rule, and had actually written some poems about the city; when he directed her to the restaurant on Pilies Street she said she was going to go there today: she remembered the street after having written a poem about it.
“That’s probably the poem I translated,” says Sturla, and Jokûbas replies:
“My brother runs the restaurant. Tell the waiter that I told you about the place; you won’t be sorry.”
While Sturla takes the last sip of his coffee, he watches Jokûbas, in green corduroy jacket and baggy blue jeans, going along the avenue, down the street towards the Writers’ Union. Sturla’s overcoat rustles comfortably when he raises the collar before heading out onto the sidewalk and into the cool October sun. For a moment he pushes away his thoughts about the phone call he’s just had with Jón and is pleased with himself for having bought the overcoat before heading to Lithuania: if any item of clothing was right for this climate, it was this Aquascutum overcoat. There’s no question about it, he thinks, and then admonishes himself good-naturedly for letting himself — a poet who should be skeptical about everything — be so sure about his choice as to declare that there is “no question” about it.
In contrast to the dazzling brightness of the sun which could be seen shining on the faces of Vilnius’s residents, there is, on the other hand, no question that the conversation with Jón has cast a heavy shadow from Iceland; it doesn’t fall across these citizens, of course, only their guest, Sturla, who goes along the sidewalk on the sunny side of the avenue, Gedimino Prospektas, towards the cathedral square — that is, if he can trust the city map he is looking at.
THE TABLE IN THE FAR CORNER
According to written sources, the city of Vilnius dates back to 1323. An ancient folk tale tells how the Lithuanian count Gediminas (the forefather of the Jagello family that ruled Lithuania and later Poland for two and a half centuries) loved to hunt in the extensive, dense forest on the tract of land where Vilnius now stands. He lived in a nearby castle in the town of Trakai. At the end of one particularly successful hunting trip in the forest, Gediminas and his retinue set up camp at the banks of the rivers Neris and Vilna, and stayed there drinking late into the night. During the night, Gediminas dreamed a strange dream: that high in the mountains above the river Vilna there stood a gigantic iron wolf which howled with the sound of a hundred wolves. And when Gediminas awoke he sent for the heathen priest Lizdeika, the one who guarded the holy fire, and asked him to interpret the images he had seen in his sleep. The priest read in the dream a message from the gods, requiring Gediminas to erect a fortified castle up on the slopes where the iron wolf had howled. This building should be just as magnificent as the animal had been, and an industrious city would arise around it. This city would be very beautiful, and her glory would be lasting in the surrounding districts, like a wolf with the sound of a hundred wolves. Count Gediminas took Lizdeika’s interpretation of the dream seriously and sent invitations to craftsmen and merchants in small towns across Germany to construct buildings in exchange for various privileges, including, among others, complete religious freedom. And so the city of Vilnius was born, the same city that now sounds under Sturla’s hard soles as he goes towards the cathedral square wearing his overcoat.
He’d read this story in a booklet in the hotel reception, and as he goes on his way down Gedimino Prospektas he is suddenly so immersed in drawing analogies between the wolf on the slopes and what his father told him about the rumors regarding assertions that he doesn’t notice the magnificent façade of the National Theater across the street: four very prominent and unmistakable copper figures stretching themselves out over the street and literally shouting for attention with their dramatic facial expressions and hand gestures. Sturla had seen pictures of these silent delegates for the art of theater in some booklet or newspaper, and he would have recognized them if he’d had his eyes open during his walk. But at the moment nothing in his surroundings can attract his attention; the word “wolf, wolf” resounds in his head, and he realizes his father has provided him with a warning, just like the wolf on the hill. He hasn’t really thought about what the wolf symbolizes, but Sturla feels that everyday events and objects around him frequently turn out to have been insightful prophecies, and so he makes up his mind that the image of the wolf must be some form of omen — like the dwarf in reception, perhaps — and, moreover, he connects it to the “house on the hill” line in the poem which he fears is one of the sources of the man’s thoughts, that man who spoke with the journalist, according to Jónatan.
Could it be that the house on the hill — which had actually found its way into Sturla’s poem thirty years ago — was also the castle of this Count Gediminas, long before Sturla had any idea such a castle existed? Earlier in the week, on the way down Bankastræti, he had considered the idea — and, in fact, it seemed to actually be the case, given when the poem was originally written — that the high-roofed house in the poem was the Grammar School in Reykjavík; of course, it could be, as his father Jón had suggested, that the house on the hill was the overcast residence of Norman Bates and his mother, but at this moment Sturla is most taken with the new possibility that the poem was composed about something its writer hadn’t yet experienced, just as Sturla has recently written about his experience at the poetry festival before the festival even took place. But it could also be argued that his insignificant lyrical creation dealt with all these, or — and this was perhaps more likely — had nothing to do with any of them. And Sturla thinks this is true of all poems, as far as the much debated but ill-explained definition of the riddle called poetry is concerned: they are about everything and nothing at the same time. The whole world — everything that has happened in the kingdom of nature until now — is contained in every text which, given his aforementioned definition, counts as poetry in Sturla’s eyes. As he is approaching the cathedral square he recalls Miroslav Holub’s poem, which suggests that poetry is found in everything, a fact that is also the chief argument against poetry, but he immediately begins to doubt the Czech poet’s assertion when he observes the white, neo-classical edifice which dominates the square, on the left side of a handsome tower: the cathedral of the city of Vilnius.