The restaurant where Liliya and he had talked about meeting the following day is the same one Sturla had briefly sat down at before deciding to follow Jokûbas’s advice; it is about midway between the town hall and the little traffic circle which opens into Pilies Street and several other streets. Sturla is quite warm from walking, so he decides to sit down at a sidewalk table and get some coffee and some whisky, that long-awaited combination he’d never managed to get on his first evening in the hotel. They are digging up the section of the street nearest the town hall, and as Sturla waits at the table for his drinks he watches the workmen, who are in blue, labor with drills and shovels, and he allows himself to believe that he could happily do a job like that for a while: rising early in the morning, spending time in the carefree company of sturdy men during the day, and heading home tired in the evening, perhaps with every part of his body feeling like he’d achieved something, something which you could literally call a foundation.
Sturla is lost in thought when he suddenly notices the bass player in the black hat enter the traffic circle from a little side street. He starts; he feels a stab in his gut as though he’s seen something terrible. Perhaps Sturla wouldn’t have recognized the guy if he’d been wearing the overcoat, but when he saunters onto the sidewalk he is wearing the same clothes as when Sturla first saw him: a well-worn jacket, black jeans, and cowboy boots, and he is holding an instrument case. Although one could say fall has arrived today, the bass player has certainly not let the season dictate the way he dresses; he clearly couldn’t expect a warm day if he was planning to spend it outside playing his instrument.
It occurs to Sturla to go straight up to this man who has made him far more angry than everyone else over the past days put together, and let him know that he can’t expect to get away with robbing people of their winter clothes. He is about to leap from his chair when he pauses because he realizes that he, and not the bass player, is wearing the same kind of overcoat he suspects the stranger of having stolen. And he makes up his mind to let the bass player go about his business in peace because he should, in fact, be satisfied with the way things are turning out. He watches the man in black walk along Pilies Street: after going a few meters along the street he stops suddenly beneath a giant shop sign which sticks out from the wall of one of the stores; he looks up at the sign, turns around just as suddenly as he’d stopped, and goes back up the street. Then he pauses at the corner of the street where Sturla first saw him, puts his case on the ground, and takes out his instrument.
When the waiter has brought Sturla his coffee and whisky, and after Sturla has tasted each of them and lit himself a cigarette, he can hear the man in black playing his bass on the street corner. Listening along, Sturla has the following conversation in his head:
Sturla: You know who I am, don’t you?
Bass Player: Yes. You’re the guy in the overcoat.
Sturla: What did you do with it?
Bass Player: With what?
Sturla: The overcoat.
Bass Player: What overcoat?
Sturla: The one you stole from me.
Bass Player: The one you’re wearing?
Sturla: No. The one I left on the coat hook.
Bass Player: I don’t remember being near any coat hook. But I do remember that you’re headed to Druskininkai.
Sturla: I went to Druskininkai.
Bass Player: And came back already?
Sturla: Gone and returned. But what did you do with the overcoat?
Bass Player: What did you do in Druskininkai?
Sturla: I asked first.
Bass Player: I answered with a question.
Sturla: I discovered that one has to hide the truth from those who want to build their lives on lies. So as not to prevent them from achieving their goals. And that leads me to ask: What did you do with the overcoat? Do you have any idea that it cost me the equivalent of three months wages for a Lithuanian workman?
Bass Player: I gave it to a Lithuanian workman who has been out of work for three months. I don’t have anything to complain about myself. What’s more, I’m allowed to bed down at night in the warm kitchen run by the Daugirdas brothers. Oh, that’s let the cat out of the bag. Yes, I know Gintaras really well, through Jokûbas. He once let me play some numbers in his poetry festival. I even know that you’ve just come from there.
Sturla: Who told you that?
Bass Player: You told me when we last met that you were heading to Druskininkai. And I simply put two and two together: someone headed to Druskininkai in October, wearing a quality overcoat like the one you wore — I see you’ve got a brand new one — well, that sort of person, someone who has grown very pale from staying indoors with European poetry, he must be taking part in The Season of Poetry.
Sturla: This new overcoat is not. .
Bass Player: (interrupting him): I’ll never forget how nervous I was at the festival immediately before I got up on stage, following a reading by some famous American poet. It was like I was standing huddled in a group with the lambs in the slaughter house, with the feeling that the slaughterer couldn’t tell the difference between bass players and lambs, that he suffered from the same weakness as de Selby, who, in Flann O’Brien’s story, makes no distinction between men and women.
As soon as the bass player winds up his latest tune, Sturla imagines himself getting up on stage in the recital hall in Druskininkai, and he begins to contemplate using the little time he has left in Vilnius to write another article for Jónatan Jóhannsson’s magazine. This one will also be about his experience at the same poetry festival he’d written about in the earlier article, except now the festival won’t be part of the author’s future but his present; and, twenty-four hours later (when he has finished writing the piece), his past. This idea gives Sturla an excuse to order another round of drinks, and before he knows it he is beginning to really enjoy sitting in the cool and listening to the musician in black play from a comfortable distance, alongside the rumbling sounds of the jack-hammers working further down the street, and he amuses himself with the thought that perhaps he would have ended up in the same situation as the bass player if he had chosen music instead of poetry.
Poetry has at least brought him here.
As Sturla is drinking his third shot of whisky, which this time he washes down with beer rather than coffee, the bass player decides to move on, and he saunters along Pilies Street, somewhat hunched over, while the rock song You Wear It Well chimes in Sturla’s head, not because the man had played it but because it is connected to the song Mandolin Wind, which he had played outside the restaurant three days earlier.
It is close to two in the afternoon when Sturla pays the bill and gets up from the table. As he did the day before, he walks back to the guest house from downtown, and as he walks he tries to shape this new article in his head, an article which he feels fairly sure will satisfy Jónatan’s expectations of what an article about a literature festival ought to look like. Instead of shooting darts at something he has yet to experience — which he had done in the article by quoting from his earlier experiences in analogous situations — he decides to be very tough on himself in this version: to use his words to show himself none of the mercy he’d shown himself by running away like he did.
A SINGLE BED
And the noose is waiting to snag the neck on which it rests.
When Sturla awakes on his second morning at the old woman’s boarding house the sun in shining through the windows. He feels much better than the previous morning, yet despite his good mood the first thing he hears in his head on this, his next-to-last day in Lithuania, is the above sentence. It is from the article he wrote the evening before, a piece which he feels quite satisfied with; he makes up his mind to go to the same coffee shop where he received Brynjólfur’s e-mail and send the piece to Jónatan, letting him know it is a replacement for the earlier article.