Sturla laughs and answers Liliya that yes, it was a very fine overcoat. He is filled for a moment with exultation over not being where he should be at this moment: he experiences his telephone connection to Liliya as a real presence, and has the strong sensation that the twenty-four hours they have together in the capital city before he flies home will not be their only time together, although nothing supports this idea. “So I will be sauntering the streets of Vilnius in a coat that belongs to an antiques and drugs dealer who has turned the whole of Minsk against him.”
“You say you’re in Vilnius now?”
“Where else?”
“I thought perhaps you were still in Druskininkai. That you were sitting in some health-spa and letting a middle-aged woman get you peppermint tea and East Indian plant cigarettes.”
“East Indian plant cigarettes?” Sturla laughs. “I am in fact drinking freshly-made tea, but the only cigarettes I smoke are my industrial chemical cigarettes. I took the bus back to Vilnius once Gintaras threatened that he and Jenny would look in my suitcase.”
“Are you at the Ambassador?”
“No, I’m at some tiny boarding house on the outskirts of the city. I am going by the name Stavros Monopolous.”
Liliya laughs warmly, and Sturla is as much amused by the comedy of his description as she is. Once he has described the persecution theory he’d come up with for Darryl and Jenny, and got her to laugh even more, he asks what she’d meant by saying that the Americans had once made entertaining movies. She says she is a great admirer of American movies from the end of their golden age until the sixties, and she names a few titles. When she lists Sabrina as one of her favorite movies, Sturla asks if she’s seen The Apartment; he’d noticed it on DVD in a record store in Vilnius. It turns out that the movie is one of the few well-known Billy Wilder movies she hasn’t seen, and then she answers Sturla’s question about whether she owns a DVD-player affirmatively: the two of them, mother and daughter, have “that contraption” in Minsk. Sturla immediately makes up his mind to buy The Apartment for her out of his slot-machine winnings, along with some other movies. He figures this gift won’t seem pushy or inappropriate — it is just something that came to mind because she’d started talking about movies.
“We were also talking about movies yesterday,” says Liliya, and she tells him that Jenny had sat down at their table after the reading and put on a haughty expression when they began discussing the light-weight and worthless Oscar-winning movies. Rolf had given an entire speech about “the crazy heifer (or, in English, ‘the mad cow from Kansas’)” as he called her once she’d gone to bed (long before the others), and he’d described how Jenny had personally declared war upon him as a poet with her perfectly tasteless last poem earlier that evening, a poem about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and American support for child murderers and needless destruction: she had earned gaping admiration from everyone with some showy bravado, having recited some endless nonsense about the life of an American poetess in Lithuania.
As he listens to Liliya talk about people interacting at the festival, Sturla realizes suddenly that he wishes he was there; he wants to take part in these lively conversations — arguments, even — with informed and entertaining people. They say goodbye, promising to meet the next evening, once Liliya has returned to the city and they can get together at the coffee house on Pilies Street, where Sturla intends to go himself after their phone conversation. Liliya says she wants to show him the bar she wrote about in her poem, and Sturla feels that it is apt, a kind of postscript to their phone call, to tell her about the clever license he took in breaking her word “language,” “tungumál” in Icelandic, across two lines. Tungu, the first part of the word, means “tongue” in English, and mál, the second part, can mean almost anything, from a court sentence to needing to pee.
“But it doesn’t mean anything rude, does it?” asks Liliya, and Sturla is a little surprised to hear that she’s clearly ambivalent about him adding to the poem an ambiguity which wasn’t originally there.
And then she tells him about the walk she went on the day before. Shortly after he disappeared from the dining hall she’d walked along the river that ran through town, and the fall had been so beautiful that she couldn’t trust herself to put it into words. He is ashamed that they can’t go there together later in the day, as there will be such beautiful afternoon sun.
Sturla is a fraction of a second away from asking Liliya if she has experienced The Season of Poetry, as the festival organizers had envisaged it, but he realizes in time that such oafish humor would only offend Liliya’s feelings, feelings he thought he’d sensed in her wish that they could enjoy beautiful things together.
And so they say goodbye to each other.
When Sturla has thanked the old woman for the use of her phone, and offered her payment, which she refuses, he feels bad for having deceived her about his name the previous evening, and he decides to correct matters.
“I have to apologize for not giving you the correct name yesterday. I am not Stavros Monopolous.”
But she doesn’t seem to understand what he is driving at. “Why not?” she asks, after Sturla has put no small amount of effort into explaining his meaning to her in English.
“My name is Sturla Jón. Sturla Jón Jónsson. I come from Iceland.”
And the woman shrugs her shoulders and pats Sturla’s upper arm in a friendly way. “You like coffee?” she asks.
“Yes, but the tea was very nice.”
And she waves him away good-naturedly with a few words in her own language as if to underline that she also knows something he doesn’t understand.
Sturla looks optimistic when he emerges onto the street in the overcoat, his scarf wrapped around his neck. He is feeling good; he decides that whatever happens over the next few hours shouldn’t be determined in advance — he won’t plan more than an hour ahead. The only thing he knows he is going to do is buy a few movies for Liliya; he will play the role of Rastignac, the student, to her Madame de Lucingen.
She said she lives with her mother, Sturla thinks as he begins walking along the street in the direction — as far as he can tell — of midtown. As he contemplates the fall in the city he remembers Miroslav Holub’s feelings about poetry and uses those words as a justification for being alone, walking through Vilnius when he ought to be working on behalf of poetry with the crowd in Druskininkai. If it is true that poetry can be found in all things, then it’s just as true of the hazelnut he now catches sight of and picks up from among the fallen leaves on the sidewalk as it is of the large, concrete lecture hall.
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to celebrate this nut, Sturla thinks as he looks at the beautifully created natural specimen in the palm of his hand; then he throws the hazelnut out onto the broad lawn beside the sidewalk and keeps on going.
He buys four DVDs in the record store. In addition to the film starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, he chooses Sunset Boulevard, which is by the same director; Night at the Opera, by the Marx brothers; and Made For Each Other starring James Stewart and Carole Lombard. He thinks long and hard about this last one, since Liliya might misunderstand his choice and think that the title is meant to reveal his actual feelings. He buys three new CDs for himself: one by Kate McGarrigle, the newest release from Maria Muldaur, and the compilation Sing it Again, Rod by Rod Stewart. By the time he’s concluded his transactions, only a thousand Icelandic kronur remains of his slot-machine winnings.