Then Sturla remembers hearing the main door open without anyone coming in. He repeats his question to the waiter: Is he absolutely sure he had hung up the overcoat? Then he presses the phone to his ear, with a despairing expression, and tells his father that he will have to call back.
“What is the matter?” asks the waiter in English.
Sturla replaces the phone in his shirt pocket and heads out of the kitchen towards the entrance. Even though there is still nothing on the coat hooks, Sturla angrily rattles some of the hangers, and as a few of them fell to the floor with a clattering sound, causing the waiters to come bustling out of the kitchen wondering what’s happened, Sturla rushes out the door and is out onto the sidewalk by the time the waiters reach the coat hooks. He throws up his hands when he realizes that the bass player in the hat has vanished, but he doesn’t stop to ask about him; he runs down the crowded street. He pushes past people without apologizing and as soon as he has run about twenty meters in one direction he suddenly stops, and then starts running in another direction, with the same urgency as before. It takes him a few minutes to realize that his sprints are useless; there is no point searching for a man who has long since vanished into his own familiar neighborhood, gone without a trace.
When he finally comes back through the door, exhausted and wearing a hangdog expression, the waiters are standing by the bar, and they come towards Sturla with anxious expressions. They try to tell him that they have difficulty understanding how the overcoat vanished: never before in the restaurant’s history has an item of clothing disappeared from the coat hooks, and definitely not when the place was empty. Sturla looks at them, completely dumbfounded by their explanation, and suddenly he decides it is best to point out to them that there had been a man with a guitar outside the place, dressed in black—“all black,” as he puts it in English. In all likelihood, he was the only person in the world who’d known he was in that restaurant — other than them, that is, and his father, who he’d been talking to on the phone.
When he adds that it seems likely that the man ducked into the place and grabbed the overcoat — he had heard someone come in when no one actually came in — the older waiter answers that it was very unlikely that some colored person came inside just to steal something from the coat hooks; there are very few coloreds here in Vilnius. Sturla doesn’t bother to correct the misunderstanding. Instead, he asks the younger waiter why he’d taken his overcoat away to hang it on the coat hooks, why he hadn’t let him keep it with him, as he’d wanted. But the waiter doesn’t seem to understand the comment: he replies that, here, we don’t take responsibility for clothes which are left on the coat hooks; nobody does, not even the more expensive restaurants in the city.
“We are very sorry,” says the older waiter, who Sturla is now certain has to be Jokûbas’s brother, that wretched man who’d guided Sturla to this restaurant. For a moment it occurs to him that perhaps they work together as accomplices to lure people to the business, and that they share their ill-gotten gains from the restaurant and coat hooks, but Sturla pushes these thoughts out of his mind with little further consideration. The waiter takes down Sturla’s telephone number, the name of his hotel, and his room number. He will let him know, if it suits him, when, or if, the overcoat turns up. Maybe someone — someone who is barely from this world, Sturla thinks — took the overcoat by mistake; it’s possible that someone believed they’d forgotten a similar coat the evening before, popped in to get it, and didn’t scrutinize it closely enough to see that it was the wrong item.
Sturla can feel his rage bubbling up inside. He strikes his fist on the table, and the waiter — for no other reason, it seems, than to make some kind of response — asks if it was a good overcoat. Sturla is just about to inform the man exactly how much he paid for the overcoat, but he suddenly realizes how absurd it had been to leave such an expensive coat alone by the open entrance to a building where anyone could freely come and go — how stupid it had been, above everything else, to let thirteen 5,000-kronur notes slip through his fingers, all for some winter coat which no one — least of all the disappearing busker — could guess the monetary value of just by looking at it. And he decides there and then to do nothing more than storm out. The plain fact is that the overcoat has vanished and isn’t going to re-appear.
Sturla’s suspicions about the brotherly connection between the waiter and Jokûbas are confirmed when the former brings Sturla a drink, “to offset your misfortune,” as he puts it, and then says that, naturally, it is unthinkable that Sturla should pay for the meal; that is the least they can do to repair the damage. But Sturla can’t bear to stay in the place a moment longer; he feels like he has suffered enough in there and shouldn’t continue tempting fate. He declines the drink and leaves without saying goodbye.
The midday sun is hot and strong when Sturla walks unsteadily back down Pilies Street, tired and with a heavy head; if truth be told, he is too exhausted to fully realize what has happened in the last few minutes. Jokûbas Daugirdas’s description of his brother’s restaurant—“You won’t be sorry”—echoes in Sturla’s head, and though nothing in the world is more likely at this moment to put him in a resentful mood, he suddenly remembers the lyrics to the song Mandolin Wind; this song which no doubt Jónas Hallmundsson would have despised, and he would definitely have died laughing if he’d known one of the records Sturla had liked most when he was around twenty — though without ever making a great show of it — had been a Rod Stewart record, Every Picture Tells a Story.
PART THREE. DRUSKININKAI
A PACKED READING
Liliya Boginskaia is standing in the lobby when Sturla enters the Ambassador Hotel. He can’t, of course, recognize this straight away since he doesn’t know what the Belarusian poet looks like, but Liliya — as she later told Sturla — immediately guesses correctly that the person coming in was the Icelandic poet, the author of “the lesson,” which she’d translated from English after the author himself had translated it into English. She watches Sturla and listens carefully as he explains things to the employee at reception, no longer the dwarf Henryk but instead a middle-aged woman, a rather sulky woman who reacts badly to Sturla’s announcement that he’s managed to lose the key to his room. She mutters something to herself, stabs a reprimanding index finger into the air in Sturla’s direction, and shakes her head before getting him a new key from a little cubbyhole. Liliya watches, wearing an amused expression, as this irritable character makes Sturla fill out a receipt for the reception key, and she stops him politely as he turns away from the desk and heads towards the stairs.
“Are you Sturla Jón?” she asks, and Sturla is astonished to hear a foreigner say his name the way this poet does: almost flawlessly.
“I am,” answers Sturla, and he knows right away that this is Liliya. She is more beautiful than he’d imagined — though how could he have known? he asks himself.
They shake hands.
“I’m glad to make your acquaintance,” she says in a rather formal English, and as Sturla feels the warmth of her handshake, she confirms her name: she is Liliya, the one who translated his poem, “the lesson”—she’d really enjoyed doing so. It had also been a nice surprise — and yet, of course, she hadn’t expected anything else — that the first Icelandic poem she read had been so wonderful.