The clock shows 10:15. The bus, which has been idling since Sturla sat down, was supposed to leave at 10:00. For a moment, Sturla feels that the vanished communist past is looking at him from this old woman’s eyes. Suddenly a couple of lines of poetry begin to form in his head, but he immediately reminds himself that the publication of assertions marks the end of his poetry writing, period, and that a fitting punishment for such behavior should, at the least, be losing one’s head. With that decision, familiar pictures play through his thoughts: an image of a decapitated head, rolling on cobblestones; a wrinkled old woman with a bottle of sunflower oil in her hand; and a neurotic poet who has bid farewell to poetry.
He waves at the woman with the jam jar, who continues looking at him without taking note of the greeting. And just then the driver sets the bus in gear, and it crawls away from the station.
Sturla suddenly regrets returning the white shirt to the black suitcase — it would have gone well with the dark jacket he is wearing, though it wouldn’t work with the overcoat. As he realizes how stupid returning the shirt was, having come into possession of it, he recalls the rule, “first thought equals best thought,” which is as true for other activities as it is for writing and poetry. The owner of the suitcase wouldn’t be surprised that a single shirt had gone missing, nor could he make a fuss about it. The situation with the American’s overcoat is entirely different, thinks Sturla. But even if it turns out today that “the artistically-savvy enthusiast” is somehow connected with the festival — which right now is only two hours distance away — there is nothing to connect Sturla to the disappearance of the overcoat, in much the same way as a tree that falls in a forest doesn’t make a sound when no one is near enough to hear it fall.
When Sturla came down to the front desk on the way to breakfast, the dwarf Henryk had told him that someone had called from the poetry festival the previous evening to ask after him. Sturla had wondered then if the call had something to do with the overcoat — perhaps someone from the festival had heard how the American had clutched thin air when he went to fetch his overcoat from the coat hooks, and had made some ridiculous leap, assuming a link between the lost overcoat and the fact that the Icelander hadn’t met up with the bus — but now Sturla is convinced that Gintaras (the main organizer, the one who’d called) had only wanted to let him know he was missed. Henryk had been especially friendly to Sturla when he booked himself out of the hotel (again) after breakfast. Henryk told him that he also knew someone named Gintaras — he didn’t know the guy well, but well enough to know that he reminded him of his cousin in Poland, a man who reminded him of the man in that famous August Sander photograph, the one of the fancily dressed young farmers on their way to a dance, the man with a cigarette between his lips.
Sturla was a little surprised that Henryk should reference that particular artwork — and as part of such a tenuous link — but he knew the picture Henryk had mentioned; he’d seen it in one of his father’s books at Skólavörðustígur. And while it gave him no small amount of pleasure to have a factually-based conversation about the picture by the German Sander with the dwarfish hotel employee, he imagined his neighbor Áslákur was one of the three farmers in the picture: instead of a walking stick, he held the broom from the laundry room; he wasn’t on the way to a dance but rather going to tidy up his life — hence, the broom.
Countless things go through Sturla’s mind during the two hour journey. But what Hulda said about his mother, or rather what his mother said to Hulda, causes him the most speculation. He considers his mother’s words from various different perspectives. He wonders if Brynjólfur Madsen, who appeared to have known Jónas best of all, might hold the key to the mystery, and he imagines the reason Brynjólfur had asked for Sturla’s e-mail address was because he intended to shut “the courtroom door” and write to him. Sturla thought over the events of the last few days, and “the poet’s situation,” which, thanks to his own words, had led to this moment in his life, led him to borrow the broom from Áslákur and brush his confused ruminations under the carpet so that he could instead think about Liliya, the person who most lit up his world.
He imagines her inside with the other temporary guests in Druskininkai, but he feels sure that underneath her friendly manner, as she sits having coffee (or cherry brandy and beer) and talking with Roger and the other poets, whatever their names are, she worries about the congenial poet from Iceland (for that’s the picture of himself he sees reflected in Liliya’s eyes): Where is Sturla Jón? Has she said or done something to offend him and cause him to vanish? He knows that their short acquaintance isn’t really reason enough for her to imagine him in this way. Wouldn’t it be more likely that when the poets’ names were read from a register on arrival — to make sure none of the poets had gotten separated from the group — Liliya wouldn’t even have remembered his name if she hadn’t translated his poem?
But what would a person like Liliya think of the American, the one who’d hung his overcoat on a hook in Literatu Svetainé? Sturla suspects (based on an interpretation of his clothes and appearance) that this man is a parasite on the body of art. He’s one of those people who over time had come to accept that they will not be artists themselves, and so they get themselves into a position, through tricks and swindles, to skim the cream off the work of those who struggle with their bare hands to make their names, as the saying goes. But in using a metaphor from the world of home cooking, Sturla has included himself in that group which he looks down upon. And he wonders if Liliya — who no doubt grew up in an atmosphere of shortage, of antipathy towards ideas of individual liberty — looks up to and respects people who come from a culture of excess where there is unfettered competition in all fields, not least poetry, which Sturla isn’t ashamed to call high art. And with a sneer in his own direction, he thinks about his article on the poetry festival; there you have some progressive art, at least in the sense that it takes its material from the future, a future awaiting the author when he steps out of the rather slow-moving bus in an hour or so.
The sun suddenly bursts from the shadows and lights up the landscape, and just as suddenly Sturla remembers the place he’s come from; how different it is from where he lives.
Or lived.
He regrets not having brought a bottle or two of beer with him. He remembers the ice-cold beer he drank at Literatu Svetainé, and in his imagination he looks towards the table where the American and his female friends had sat. Was it possible they’d noticed him sitting at the bar near their table? Is he the type of man who sticks in strangers’ minds? When he tries to picture how an American, like the one he has just described for himself, sees the Lithuanian countryside, he is suddenly afraid of going in the front door of the poetry festival at Druskininkai, in case the first person who meets his eyes there is the owner of the overcoat which rests at the bottom of his suitcase. He tries to convince himself that it doesn’t matter if the American is in the village; he can’t prevent Sturla from the task at hand, from attending to his diplomatic duties, as someone in diplomatic service should: the duties one is entrusted with undertaking after he has delivered his diplomatic credentials as the ambassador of one nation who has come to work in another country, credentials which in this case mean Sturla himself, credentials which he has already delivered by arriving in the country. He has undertaken to greet the other foreign ambassadors, the poets of the other nations, who have all assembled in the spa town of Druskininkai, and who are at this very moment (Sturla imagines) speculating as to why the Icelandic delegate hasn’t arrived. They don’t know that he is halfway there, having just passed a sign for the town of Dzukijos.