He hasn’t been walking for more than a few minutes when a black Volkswagen with a cab sign drives at a slow crawl down the street, clearly hoping to be hailed. Sturla waves and asks the driver, a gray-haired man in a sports jacket who materializes from behind the dark window, whether he would drive him to the bus station, and make a detour via a supermarket.
The modern feel of the supermarket the driver brings him to after a few minutes drive surprises Sturla. As he carefully regards the selection of goods he thinks about Símon, Hulda’s partner in Egilsstaðir, and while he joins two teenage boys standing in front of the beer section in the liquor department he resolves to tell his son Gunnar, when the two next meet or speak on the phone, about his experience going through this huge supermarket in a tiny town in Lithuania, a town which, in proportion to the capital city, could be compared to Egilsstaðir. He selects a small bottle of cherry brandy and a cold white wine bottle he finds stacked with the beer cans and vodka coolers in the cold storage. He then grabs some crackers and potato chips and he smiles to himself at how cheap things are.
Although the taxi driver drives at about thirty kilometers an hour, as though he wants to keep hold of his passenger as long as possible, the bus station is only two or three minutes from the supermarket, and fortunately the next bus to Vilnius is scheduled to leave in half an hour. Assuming there will be a delay like the one in Vilnius, Sturla expects he won’t have to stay in Druskininkai for more than forty-five minutes longer.
He is looking forward to the journey: two hours where he will be left alone to himself, free from the atmosphere of misapprehension that arises when poetry is made into a team sport. He comforts himself by imagining that Liliya Boguinskaia will take up his cause and give Gintaras and his cheerleaders the finger by sneaking out of the gloomy dining hall, a place which reminds Sturla of the fish processing room at the trawling company in Neskaupstaður where he worked as a teenager. And his thoughts are already leaping ahead to the journey to Vilnius; he warms at the idea of a drive back in late-afternoon twilight, with Baudelaire’s “symbol forests” rushing by as the bus hurries back; the “dim temple” whose living colonnades breathe into his ears the mystic speech where all things watch him with familiar eyes: the stain on the carpet, the hazelnut from the airport parking lot, the dwarf at the front desk, the darkness of the shadows of the mother.
He remembers a quotation he noted down in his black notebook shortly before leaving Iceland, a quotation he’d come across by chance, (not long after he received the invitation to go to Lithuania) in a book which contained the musings of poets on their duty to explain the meaning of their poems. And when he opens his notebook as he sits there on the hard wooden bench outside the bus station, waiting for the driver to go into the parking lot and open the doors of the bus, he feels as if these words by the English poet Donald Davie, published in 1959, are his own. If one excluded the title of Donald’s poem, you could easily convince yourself that it was pure coincidence that they’d been printed in a book in England before Sturla’s handwriting had fixed the lines in a black notebook:
This poem I call mine, “The Forests of Lithuania,” has revealed to me some new sides of this poet who bears my name. I am glad to see, for instance (what I had almost despaired of) that he is capable of breaking out of the circle of his private agonies and dilemmas, in order to acknowledge that there are other people in the world besides himself, very different but just as interesting.
Nýjar hliðar á ljóðskáldinu sem ber mitt eigið nafn; allt hitt fólkið sem ekki er síður áhugavert. New sides of the poet who bears my name; all the other people who are no less interesting.
What had gone through Liliya’s mind as she translated his poem, other than the poem itself? Are those same thoughts going through her head again now, as she sits in her room on Maironio Street and notes his absence in the mirror, or has she entirely forgotten him thanks to a conversation with the next interesting poet who she comes across on her way out of the dining hall, a conversation about yet another interesting poet who during his life has revealed some fresh and unexpected sides of himself, and proudly bears his name up until the moment that name passes away at the same time as he does.
When the driver comes walking towards the bus, Sturla can’t help but notice that the man is quite drunk. He all but staggers off the sidewalk and loses his footing right before reaching the bus — and he then blames the bus for this mistake by kicking the tire. On the other hand, Sturla can’t tell whether this corpulent, angry man smells of liquor or not: as Sturla carries his bags past him, the very smell he’s trying to detect is coming from his own mouth.
THE LESSON by Sturla Jón Jónsson
that I won’t live long
in others’ lives
that was what I learned at school
neither dying of old age
when young
nor reaching a childlike old age
When the teacher asked
how many Westman Islanders there were
before the eruption
and were
after that
and when he received
all the wrong answers
he had expected to receive
I began to suspect
as I looked out the window
of the classroom
at the viscous traffic trickling down Lækjargata
that I would soon
rush ahead
and when he asked
this teacher
how many were buried
when the devil pumped
his satanic slag
across the islands
I knew the substance
I was made from
was not meant to last
it wouldn’t survive
a lifetime
PART FOUR. THE AMBASSADOR HOTEL
ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY
“Ms. Sturla Jón.”
So begins Brynjólfur Madsen’s e-mail to Sturla Jón, a letter which is otherwise free of typos and grammatical mistakes. There is no other explanation for the mistake than that, while writing, he’d used the feminine honorific out of habit since, as Sturla has to admit, he’d been writing two names that are both grammatically feminine: Sturla and Jón. That must have been what happened.
He has installed himself in a little boarding house in the northern part of Vilnius, close to the edge of the city. The place is run by an old woman and occupies a soot-gray, two story stone house which, if you forget about the immediate context of the street, looks like something you’d find in the middle of a war zone. The room is minute but relatively neat; there is a narrow bed with faded but clean linen, an iron table and chair, and a bathroom in the corridor for Sturla and the other guests (there don’t seem to be any). Sturla spotted an advertisement for the boarding house at the bus station when he arrived in Vilnius the evening before, dog-tired and somewhat fuzzy-headed from drinking. He knew that above all he had to avoid returning to the Ambassador Hotel or sitting down at Literatu Svetainé: he needed to find himself some inexpensive lodgings and maintain his distance from Gedimino Prospektas. He’d taken a cab from the bus station and, though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock when he reached the boarding house, he’d nonetheless needed to wake up the old woman, who seemed at first sight to be the same woman he’d seen that morning on the street holding the jam jar, though that surely wasn’t the case.