When Sturla walks up to the hotel the sun has come back out from the clouds, and he catches sight of himself in a little pond in the car park. He looks at himself on the reflective surface, among the fall leaves that look like they have been specially arranged on the surface of the water by hotel employees. And he is content with what he sees. He decides not to go into the hotel to take a look around, as he intended, and instead walks in the opposite direction; it won’t be long before he and Liliya meet up. He goes down to the river which gave its name to the city and enjoys wandering the streets, wearing the face he saw in the hotel pond.
When he approaches the bar half an hour later, a bar which has become quite a familiar sight, he sees Liliya from behind; she’s standing by the door and seems to be examining the menu. He stops at the table nearest the road and watches her. She is wearing the same tunic as when he last saw her, but different pants, and her hair is tied in a knot at the neck; she lifts one of her feet to scratch her calf, and then, as though she can feel someone watching her, she turns round and looks straight at Sturla.
“Welcome back,” he says, and she nods her head, smiling. She gives him three kisses on the cheeks; has she learned that from Darryl’s girlfriends?
“I feel like I’ve come to your home town!” she says and she looks him up and down as though she’d expected him to have changed during “his urban seclusion, following the rebellion in the countryside,” or so he imagines her describing it.
“I’m just a guy who’s not made for the countryside,” Sturla replies comically, and Liliya laughs. She hits him playfully on his forearm then takes hold of it, the way he remembers her doing when they first met in the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel.
“I brought you something from the festival,” she says, smiling, and he beckons towards a table, asking if they shouldn’t sit down.
The same waiter who served Sturla earlier comes over to the table, and they order beer and cherry brandy. Liliya fetches a thick white paperback from her suitcase, and hands it to him, remarking that if Sturla had stopped less briefly in Druskininkai he would have received a copy himself. It is the collected poetry of all the participants; which hadn’t arrived from the printer before Sturla left the festival, having (briefly) turned up in Druskininkai. She also gives him a little book of her own, a beautiful, signed edition which he responds to by kissing her and saying that he has his new book at the hotel — at the boarding house, he corrects himself — which he wants to give her.
“I also bought a little something I wanted to give you,” he adds, and he immediately gets the feeling that he has no business giving a person he hardly knows something he has bought specially. “Just so you can get over the poetry debates from the last few days,” he adds, apologetically.
“For me?” Liliya takes a sip of brandy and follows it with a sip of beer. “You shouldn’t have done that. .”
He hands her the plastic bag from the store.
“You shouldn’t have bought me something, Sturla.”
“Too late,” Sturla replies. “I saw this in the store when I was getting something for myself, and for some reason you came to mind.”
Liliya looks in the bag and her face breaks into an embarrassed smile. “I came to mind?” She takes the DVD cases out and examines them one by one — wearing an expression of genuine astonishment — while Sturla explains how he’d been planning to use a small amount of money he’d won in an arcade games hall shortly before he left Iceland in order to buy something that would always remind him of his trip — he jokes that he is an incorrigible gambler — but he hadn’t found anything he particularly wanted to buy. He had thought about buying a Russian Babushka from a street vendor but he’d changed his mind: it didn’t seemed right to buy something Russian in a country that was not Russia.
“And hates Russia,” adds Liliya, without taking her eyes off the DVD cases which contain the movies. “But you must watch these with me, then” she says, putting her arms around Sturla and giving him a long kiss on one cheek. “You’ll have to come back to Belarus and watch these with me and Mommy. She loves this sort of movie.”
Sturla smiles, but he feels uneasy; what if he reacted to her unexpectedly, responding positively to her frivolous suggestion?
“Anyway, you must come back to the hotel,” says Liliya, continuing to read the back of the cases. “I just need to pop into my room before we go to the restaurant.”
Had they talked about going to a restaurant? Sturla tries to remember.
Then she thanks him again and calls the waiter over to ask for another round.
“I probably managed to ruin my liver back there in the spa town,” she says, smiling, as she watches the waiter, and when Sturla asks whether he was by any chance missed at the reading she’d told him about, she answers by saying — and he feels she’s being candid — that the three people he’d left behind at the dinner table after lunch (Roger, Rolf, and her) had regretted his sudden departure. By yesterday evening Rolf had been on the verge of “beating the brains out of that hellish imperial cow, Ms. Lipp,” after Liliya told him about the overcoat situation, but Roger, as delicate and weak as he was, had managed to cool him down, “doubtlessly with some unexpected quotation from the English Lake Poets; they didn’t spend a moment of their time together talking about anything else.”