The more important things Sturla and Liliya learn about each other over the next hour, on the other hand, as they sit in the warm afternoon sun outside the bar, are that she has a grown son who lives in Switzerland and she earns a living as a translator from English and German; he (who omits to mention his work as a super) is the divorced father of five children who at the moment — as far as he knows — are all in Iceland; one of them lives in London these days.
Afterwards, they walk together towards the Ambassador Hotel, stopping in the supermarket to buy themselves a cold bottle of white wine and a small bottle of cherry brandy, which Liliya confesses she has become “horribly dependent on” during her brief stay in Lithuania. She suggests that Sturla should put a paper bag on his head before they enter the hotel, but when he says he will (although he will have to use a plastic bag, as paper bags aren’t easy to find these days) Liliya shoves him out of the store, laughing out loud, and promising to take responsibility for him; she will defend him if any “of the ambassadors from poetry-land starts asking what became of him and why he vanished so suddenly from Druskininkai.”
It turns out that there is no one at the front desk when they enter the hotel. Liliya hurries Sturla up the stairs holding the bag from the supermarket — he isn’t prepared for how determined she is — and she tells him to wait outside room number 411; she needs to get the key. It isn’t until Sturla reaches the door of the room that he realizes Liliya is staying in the same room as he had; he’s probably drunk too much to remember numbers properly. He hears a toilet flush in the next room, and as he stands with his ear to the door from which the sound came, looking along the corridor towards the stairs, Liliya suddenly appears on the landing with her suitcase, rattling the key in the same hand she uses to point at Sturla as she calls out:
“Are you eavesdropping?” Then she laughs and tiptoes along the corridor as though she thinks it is the middle of the night and she doesn’t want to wake up any of the hotel guests.
Liliya has a hard time opening the door to the room, and she eventually has to ask Sturla to help her. And at the very moment they enter the room, Sturla’s phone rings. He apologizes formally in English (“If you will excuse me,” and so on); Liliya nods in reply and tells him she will open the bottle “while he attends to his business affairs.”
It was Jónatan Jóhansson calling. He gets right down to the matter at hand, which is Sturla’s article, “The Rain Seen Through a Man’s Fingers,” and the editor’s unexpected enthusiasm over “this progress from the last article,” as he describes it. He absolutely wants to publish it; does Sturla think he needs to see a proof? The magazine is about to go to the printer. That being dealt with, Jónatan delivers another message while Sturla lights a cigarette and takes a water glass full of white wine from Liliya’s hand: perhaps Sturla could write an article for him — maybe even a book — about his half-brother N. Pietur, the visual-artist and musician, an acquaintance and former colleague of Sturla’s father. This project might mean Sturla will have to follow Níels on a trip abroad; Níels has recently booked a two-month stay in Kjarvalsstofa in Paris, which Jónatan explains is a kind of studio apartment for visual artists that the city of Reykjavík owns in an art center called Cité Internationale Des Arts (he takes every opportunity to show off his limited French, Sturla thinks). Would he be interested in the project at all?
“I’ll let you know,” Sturla replies in English, and he smiles impishly at Liliya who is holding her glass at head height and seems like she can hardly wait for Sturla to conclude his business on the phone. He thanks Jónatan for the praise and the offer: he feels good that he appreciated the article and he will consider the offer; it’s just that he isn’t sure he is heading home in the short term.
“No? Jón told me you were coming back tomorrow,” says Jónatan, and Sturla replies that he isn’t sure he’ll be able to make the airplane tomorrow morning: “I’ve gotten used to waking up late.”
Liliya congratulates Sturla on the offer which he briefly explains to her. Then they open the brandy bottle from the supermarket and toast in little plastic shot glasses which Liliya gets out of her suitcase, and Liliya says she’s just listened to Icelandic spoken for the first time. Would he be willing to show her some written Icelandic? She hasn’t ever seen it written down.
“Have you lipstick?” Sturla asks her; and in his euphoria he recalls an English translation of a line of poetry by Alfred de Musset: “Julie, have you Spanish wine?” And when Liliya looks confused and tells him she has a pen, he repeats his question: “Liliya, have you lipstick from Belarus?”
Liliya shakes her head, smiling; she doesn’t have any lipstick from her home country, but she rummages around in her suitcase and pulls out some lipstick in a gold-colored holder from a pretty cosmetics case. When she opens it and holds it out as though she is going to put it on him, he grabs the stick from her and asks her to wait while he goes into the bathroom briefly. Then he takes his half-full glass of white wine with him, and after a short while he calls Liliya into the bathroom.
When she comes in, Sturla is standing in the bathtub and smiling, his glass in his hand; with a winning grin, he points out some dark violet letters on the white wall above the bathtub:
MÓÐIR BARNANNA MINNA HEFUR
MYRT BARNIÐ Í FÖÐUR ÞEIRRA
Liliya grabs the lipstick back from Sturla and looks astonished at how little is left. She seems about to say something about it, but stops herself and asks what the sentence means in English.
“The mother—” Sturla thinks for a moment. Then he points to the first word, móðir, says that it means “mother,” and translates the rest of the sentence as “If I may, then I will happily visit your mother.”
“If you may?” Liliya turns to Sturla, clearly amazed by his request. She starts to say something but stops and asks why the last word she heard in the English version of the sentence was the first word in the Icelandic version.
“The mother always comes first in Icelandic,” replies Sturla without hesitation. Then he smiles and waits for Liliya’s reaction.
“Of course,” she says, looking at him tenderly.
“Of course what?” asks Sturla.
“You can visit my mother.”
He strokes his chin and tries to look contemplative. “What is her name?”
“Galina. She is called Galina.”
Their eyes meet. Liliya takes a sip of her white wine and Sturla sips his.
“Do you think she’s at home?” he asks.
“She never leaves the apartment.”
Liliya suddenly turns away and goes out of the bathroom. Sturla watches her; he feels like she has become sad all of a sudden, and he places his glass down on the edge of the sink and goes after her, leaving the writing on the walclass="underline" “The mother of my children has / murdered the child in their father.” He watches her set her glass down on the table beneath the mirror and lift the bottle of white wine as though she is going to pour some for herself. She looks at herself for a moment, and before Sturla knows what is happening she has come up to him: she places both hands around his head and clumsily presses her mouth onto his — any more clumsily and she might have injured him. He responds by putting his hands on her waist, and the next moment they collapse onto the single bed. Liliya tears his shirt out of his trousers, slips her hand inside, and pulls him to her.
*
Two hours later they sit facing each other in a restaurant in the old downtown with menus in front of them, waiting for their drinks to appear. Liliya, who has untied her hair and let it hang free about her head, is telling Sturla about a Dutch woman in her fifties, a participant in the festival, who had told her in confidence how she died at six years old, while on a walking tour with her father, but had come back to life again three years ago, when she went into an electric appliance store in her hometown of Maastricht. In exchange for that story Sturla tells her about the latest obsession of his youngest son Grettir: European lieder singers; he is nineteen years old and is listening to Gérard Souzay and Hans Hotter. But Liliya’s only reaction to this information is to say that she owns an old record by Gérard Souzay: her former husband had been in such a hurry to leave that he’d left behind his record collection, a very large classical music collection which Sturla will definitely have fun flicking through, as long as he likes classical music.