THE DARKNESS OF THE SHADOWS
The taxi which Sturla takes from the bus stop is the same type of car he’d taken from the airport with the poet Jonas and the woman in sunglasses: a red Datsun, though a little newer and more spick-and-span than the one in Vilnius. It smells of musk oil, which Sturla is sure the driver, a woman in her late twenties, will also smell of when she gets out of the car. When Sturla gives her the address of the festival residence, 16 Maironio Street, she asks whether he is headed to The Season of Poetry, and when he replies that yes, he is on the way to “the poetry festival”—he can’t bring himself to use the official title — the woman tells him she is a poet herself: she is an artist (watercolors) but composes poetry a lot when she’s not painting, chiefly nature poems.
The clothing store employee on Bankastræti; Áslakur in the elevator; the pot-bellied Russian in the Old Town Erotic Center; and now a taxi driver in Druskininkai. Sturla looks at the woman’s attractive profile and reminds himself once again that a poet ought to be observant, ought to have his eyes wide open when he’s in new surroundings. From the time he stepped off the bus, Sturla hasn’t once thought about how the appearance of Druskininkai compares to other urban areas in the world. But he also argues with himself that maybe he hasn’t seen anything worth noticing; the only thing that he remembers is the place’s name. And he begins to wonder what sort of nature the driver’s poems deal with: he doesn’t know about the picturesque river which runs through the town and won’t associate the name with natural beauty until Liliya tells him, in a phone call twenty-four hours later, about the matchless fall beauty of the riverbank — about how she feels bad that they can’t go there together in the afternoon sun. Sturla will interpret this as a revealing confession, something he’s longed to hear but hadn’t dared expect he actually would.
“And you aren’t taking part in the festival yourself?” Sturla asks.
He doesn’t mind hearing a resident of the town telling him that The Season of Poetry is for established writers (“professionals,” as she puts it in English, which Sturla thinks is a strange way to describe poets), but he doesn’t know if it’s appropriate to compare himself to the woman when she adds that employed folk like herself aren’t usually invited to such festivals. She works as a janitor in the apartment block where she lives and is only driving the car for her father while he is sick; working as a janitor gives her plenty of time to paint and write. But when she asks Sturla where he is from and tells him she won’t charge him for the ride since he is from Iceland, which was the first country to recognize Lithuania’s independence, Sturla feels it is only fair to let her know that he also works as a janitor in the apartment block where he lives, adding that no one in the building knew he was a poet.
“No? Then you’re probably less well-known than I am,” the woman replies, smiling in the direction of the passenger seat. “They post my poems next to the mailslots in the building,” she continues, and Sturla remembers he saw some low-rise apartments shortly before getting off the bus at the bus shelter.
Although he repeatedly insists that she take his money, the woman flatly refuses to charge him a fare. She says it is impossible for her to charge the first Icelander she’s ever met just for driving him a few meters in her father’s car. When she says, as if compensating Sturla for not getting his way, that she’s called Loreta, he asks for her address so that he can send her his book, and a translation, when he gets back to Iceland; he doesn’t have any copies on him.
The sun gleams brightly as Sturla takes Loreta’s hand and thanks her. He wants to suggest that they sit down together at the table in front of the residence, the one with the patio umbrella bearing the logo of one of the domestic beer companies, and drink the first beers of the day together before he hands himself over to Gintaras and the rest of the people at the festival. But the way she lets go of his hand suggests that she is in a hurry; perhaps she isn’t especially eager, Sturla thinks, to associate with a guy in his fifties who is, like her, a super, and probably therefore a part-time poet, and who, against her own wishes, managed to make her give him her home address.
Although he’s never seen a Chekhov play staged, Sturla can well imagine that he’s standing before the shuttered set of The Cherry Orchard: he’s just about to go for a walk through Madame Ranevskaya’s rural estate and to take a teacup (not a beer glass) from the hand of Firs the butler. The three-story wooden house is a pale pink color, with white window frames. A handsome gable rises from the middle, with a window that has a small balcony extending from its left side; both wings of the residence have ornately decorated verandas, which emphasizes the poetry of the image.
Inside, however, the residence looks like a ski lodge. On the left side is a raised, dark-paneled room, but the main room’s walls are covered with black-and-white photographs; looking at them, Sturla suspects that his face will be added to the wall at the conclusion of the festival. Off of the breakfast room on the right, there is a wine bar that looks promising: the lone person at the bar (other than the female bartender) is holding a huge glass of beer, something Sturla really wants right now. He figures that the festival participants are assembled somewhere else for one of the events in the program — an event he is probably too late to attend — and shortly the group will meet here in the breakfast room for nourishment and to gather their strength for the next activity. He rolls his suitcase over the broad floorboards towards the bar (which is cozy, even if it does look like a ski lodge) and he nods his head to the pink-haired bartender and the man with the beer glass — a stout, swarthy man Sturla guesses is from Southern Europe.
He orders a shot of cold vodka with his beer.
“I’ll have one of those as well,” he hears the stout man ask in English, and Sturla thinks he can immediately detect a Spanish accent.
The man lifts his beer glass towards Sturla and asks if he’s one of the poets. He introduces himself as Rolf once Sturla answers and explains he’s the poet from Iceland. Rolf is Argentinean and hasn’t come to Lithuania to listen to some lecture about European poetry through a headset. Everyone else is in the next building attending some debate which is taking place in Lithuanian and being simultaneously translated into English and piped into individual headphones. “It doesn’t have anything to do with poetry,” he says, shaking his head, as he takes one of the two vodka shots the woman with pink hair has slid along the bar to them.
Sturla likes him. They clink vodka glasses as the pink-haired woman smiles at them. Sturla begs the man’s forgiveness, but he doesn’t remember reading about an Argentinean participant in the festival description.
“No, until I got here there wasn’t one,” the man replies, explaining: Rolf isn’t, of course, an especially Latin name (as he puts it) and nor is his last name, Tuzenbach; on his father’s side, he was from Germany, and he actually lives in Sweden, in Gothenburg, where he knows a few Icelanders fairly well. The reason why he isn’t on the list of participants was because a Greenlander who had been invited had been unable to attend, and he’d been invited instead; he’d needed to decide with just a week’s notice and “threw his lot in, not having anything better to do.”
When Sturla says he remembers the Greenlander’s name from the festival’s information packet, Rolf is mid-swallow, and he struggles to avoid laughing through his beer; he’d been told the news yesterday, by a guy who was somehow connected to the festival, that the Greenlander had been imprisoned for a serious armed assault in Copenhagen. Therefore they’d called up the Argentinean poet instead, looking for any poet who wasn’t from Denmark, Norway, or Sweden but who nevertheless lived in Scandinavia — providing he had a clean criminal record.