“Don’t tell me he’s been scolding you for arriving late?” Liliya says when Sturla sits down beside her and begins prodding at his food with his fork. “Isn’t he going to leave you alone to enjoy your lunch?” But she seems to suddenly notice that her lunch companion is upset; she puts her hand on his shoulder and asks whether something is bothering him — he looks like something bad has happened.
“No, everything’s the way it should be,” Sturla replies, using the English words “perfectly fine.”
“I can clearly see that he said something to you,” Liliya insists, and Sturla is momentarily unsure what to make of her concern.
“Do you know this Jenny Lipp?” he asks as he watches Gintaras return to the hall and apologize to a middle-aged man at a table in the middle of the hall who tries to speak to him.
“No, only from the interview I told you about the other day. That she flew from Kansas to Kaunas. And that I listened to her reading; I rather liked it.”
“She’s not the one who lives in Kaunas,” Sturla contradicts her as he puts on his jacket.
“No? I read that in the interview with her.”
“That is Daniella.” Sturla puts his scarf on, and Liliya looks at him, amazed.
“Who told you that?” she asks. “Are you going?”
“The man I was talking to. Gintaras.”
“Then I suspect he knows less about things than I do.”
“I think this man generally knows less than the next man,” says Sturla, and asks Liliya to forgive him; he needs to go to his room and make a call.
Liliya asks whether he isn’t going to finish his food first, and as much as Sturla knows she means well, he finds her concern suddenly irritating; he shakes his head and says he will meet her later. When he gets up from the table and pushes the chair back under, neither Rolf nor Roger seems to notice — they are completely occupied with each other. On the other hand, it seems clear that Sturla’s impromptu decision has worried Liliya, as if she realizes that he isn’t going to turn back — or perhaps she simply feels that it is boring to be left behind with Roger and Rolf, who have evidently found a common interest: the English Romantic poets.
After about ten minutes have passed Liliya decides to go over to Gintaras, to where he sits talking to Jenny Lipp and Kelly Fransesca, and ask whether something in his conversation with Sturla Jón had insulted him. She seems considerably worried that Sturla had immediately rushed from his table, so to speak, without giving a credible reason. To Liliya’s surprise, Jenny looks at her with obvious disdain, as though she’s heard something disreputable about her. When Gintaras gets up from his seat to have a few words with Liliya a little apart from the others, Jenny follows him and whispers something in his ear, which leads to him asking Liliya to excuse him and leaving the hall.
A few seconds later she sees him heading across the lawn towards the building where Sturla is staying.
At this moment Sturla is sitting in his room with a beer glass and a shot of cherry brandy, which he’d bought at the bar after leaving the lunch hall. He’d found a place for the overcoat in a separate compartment in his suitcase, a compartment for clothes that shouldn’t get creased, and he is talking on the phone to his father Jón, who called while Sturla was standing at the bar in the Ranevskaya-like house and ordering drinks from the pink-haired server. Jón informs Sturla that, according to his publisher, Gústaf, Brynjólfur has decided to do everything in his power to “call off ” the unfair media discussion of Sturla’s “manuscript theft,” as the journalist termed it. He has sent Sturla an e-mail, and Sturla should try to access the Internet as soon as possible. Sturla’s concern about his reputation at home, however, clearly isn’t all that great, because when the knocking on his room door starts he is in the middle of asking his father whether he managed to retrieve the VCR from the repair shop, and whether the vanished Iranian movie caused major chaos at the library.
“Is someone knocking?” asks Jón, and Sturla tells him that there is never any peace; he’d never in his wildest dreams imagined how busy he would be at this “jamboree.”
“Is everything OK?”
“OK with me?” asks Sturla, doing his best to sound astonished at his father’s question while he opens the door and looks at Gintaras, who is standing outside. “I’ll call you later, father. I’m just about to take part in a discussion about the influence of overcoats on modernist poetry in Lithuania.” And he looks impassively into Gintaras’s eyes while he hangs up the phone and replaces it in the breast pocket of his jacket.
“I only wanted to let you know about this,” says Gintaras, “that the book that was published on the occasion of the festival has been set out in front of the library in Dainava.”
“Thank you.”
“There’s a reading this evening; you know about it, don’t you?”
“I have a program, so yes.”
“Then everything should be clear.” It is obvious that the organizer has not knocked on the door with this information alone, and it takes him a great deal of effort to pass on his actual message:
“She has let him know you are here,” he says, leaning on the doorframe.
“She who? Let who know what?”
“Jenny.”
“Let who know what?”
“Jenny is calling Darryl.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Sturla, realizing that they’ve reached the same place as they had gotten to in their conversation outside the lunch hall.
“I am talking about the overcoat which they are sure you took.”
“Which they are sure? So you are talking about her, this American poet who evidently doesn’t want to come face to face with me, the criminal mastermind, since she always sends you on her behalf, and he, this man who has. .”
“Pardon me,” interrupts Gintaras, and Sturla suspects he can’t remember his name, “but I am not suggesting that you have stolen anything; this is a question about whether you may have taken something by mistake.”
“But she is obviously suggesting something,” answers Sturla, and adds calmly that he doesn’t care one bit for coming in good faith to a poetry festival in a distant country, and being called a thief instead of being welcomed.
“She told me that the waiter was sure that it was you who. .”
“Who what?”
“She is certain that she saw you at the place and that you are also the person the waiter described.”
With those words Sturla has had enough; he goes into his room, opens his suitcase, and tears all his clothes out of it, scattering them across the floor, and he asks Gintaras, who stands motionless in the doorway, whether he sees an overcoat. Then he opens the closet by the bathroom door, grabs the coat hangers, and places them on the bed.
“Is the overcoat you’re talking about here?” he asks, pointing to the empty wooden hangers.
Gintaras looks down and glances briefly, with a moralizing expression, at the beer glass and the shot on the table. The only solution to the impasse is for Sturla to talk to Jenny. He should come with him to the office in the next building, and he will then go and get Jenny from the dining room.
“I don’t intend to talk to this woman,” answers Sturla.
“Why not?” asks Gintaras.
“Because, like I said, I haven’t come here to some poetry festival to be accused of being a thief. I came here to read my poems.”
Gintaras shuffles his feet in the hallway outside the room and mumbles into his chest that Sturla has to make up his own mind; he doesn’t want to force him to meet other people. Without answering, Sturla shuts the door on him and then places his ear against it. He hears Gintaras going briskly down the hallway and waits until he hears a door shut. Then he gulps down the remnants of the beer and brandy, crams the clothes back into the suitcase, and puts the key in the lock before he leaves the room. He checks that no one is around as he goes out of the building and along the sidewalk, from where he looks back up at the wall; he is, despite everything that has happened at the place since he came to town, full of admiration for the building’s appearance, and a little disappointed that he won’t get to enjoy a night’s sleep here. He feels sure that all the other festival guests will still be in the dining hall, and he wonders for a moment whether he should head to the bar in the building and ask the pink-haired woman to call him a cab. But he decides not to take the risk that someone connected with the festival will see him — he half-expects that Gintaras will suddenly appear with his paranoid protégé—and he sets off along the sidewalk with his suitcase, heading away from where the poets are staying.