And the noose is waiting to snag the neck on which it rests.
But what happens in someone’s last moments when they are hung? Perhaps he dances a few steps in the air or sticks out his tongue at the onlookers. If the person in question is lucky enough, and the drop from the gallows is sufficiently fast enough, he might only have to live until his neck breaks at the exact moment the noose snags him, and so meet his end without delay.
But just as the fingernails continue to grow after the body has died, the inevitable conclusion of the hanged man’s time on earth is this: he “goes to the toilet” even though there isn’t a toilet nearby.
And that is something no one wants to be remembered for, neither the poet nor the audience.
And that is why the Icelandic poet flees his fate. He leaves it to others to compose their own Head’s Ransoms.
After all, you can’t hang a headless man.
He slips out of the lecture hall and loiters a while under the heavy rain on the sidewalk outside. And before killing his sodden cigarette and vanishing, he looks at the rain through his fingers and finds that it runs down the back of his hands and into his jacket sleeves.
And the waxy texture of the poet’s overcoat, which is meant to repel the rain, offers about as much protection as a dust jacket offers against criticism.”
PART FIVE. MINSK
PILIES STREET
The train leaves at 3:15 in the afternoon.
The mirror behind the bar shows Sturla standing on his own amidst the bottles of liquor, whisky, vodka, and cognac, and in front of him on the bar are two half-full beer glasses and two large shots of untouched cherry brandy.
How alone can a person be? Sturla asks himself, and smiles at how wearily he looks back out from the mirror.
How alone is Liliya, powdering her nose in the bathroom?
He picks up the black faux-leather case which she left on the bar stool and peeps into it. Before he takes two rather thick books out of it he glances quickly towards the bathroom door, then reads Jokûbas’s name on the front of the second book, which is unusually thick for a poetry collection. The other book is his own assertions, which he gave Liliya after he’d collected his suitcase from the old woman at the boarding house earlier that morning. He flicks through to the title page of Jokûbas’s book and sees that the author has written an inscription to her in his language, and below some long handwritten text he has splashed his name — very carelessly written — and scrawled three big x’s after it.
Sturla sticks the books back in the bag and gets out one of the movies he gave Liliya: The Apartment. He looks at the still from the movie on the case: Shirley MacLaine holds out a playing card — the Queen of Spades — for Jack Lemmon; they are sitting on a sofa, seemingly outside a window with gray Venetian blinds, Shirley has a string of white pearls around her neck and is wearing a flowing white dress, and Jack is in a white shirt with a black, loosely knotted tie, an indication that something big happened before Shirley held out the Queen of Spades.
Sturla turns the case over to look at another picture of the actors, a black-and-white head-shot. Shirley is in a white blouse beneath a light-gray suit, and Jack is in a black jacket and a white shirt with a tightly-knotted black tie. Some writing to the left of the picture describes how the movie won five Oscars, including Best Picture. And it adds: “C.C. ‘Bud’ Baxter (Jack Lemmon) knows the way to success in business. . it’s through the door of his apartment!”
Sturla looks up from the case towards the bathroom door of the restaurant, and he begins to wonder what the door to Liliya’s mother’s apartment in Minsk looks like. He imagines a pale yellow door made out of some kind of wooden material that’s long overdue for a coat of paint, if not for replacing. There is a peephole and below the hole a faded card in a rusted iron frame displays the typed names of Liliya and her mother Galina. Sturla turns the knob and forces the door. It opens into the living room. Before he takes a step onto the linoleum floor he breathes in the heavy air, saturated with meat fat or potato-and-cabbage stock — he cannot decide which. He closes the door after himself, takes off his overcoat and hangs it on the hook beside an oval spot which is lighter than the color of the wall, a stain from beneath the mirror which hung there for many years.
Then he turns to the living room. Galina is sitting there on a green sofa looking towards the television, at something moving there. She nods to him, and while Sturla watches, the newsreader reels off something that causes a smile to cross Galina’s face. She stands up — with considerable difficulty — and gets The Apartment DVD case which is lying on the DVD player inside the television cabinet. She points towards Sturla and makes a motion with her index finger which is meant to suggest movement, something budging forward. Sturla smiles at her and gets a smile in return. He asks where Liliya is, in English first and then by mentioning her name in a questioning tone. She is in the bathroom. He takes the case from Galina’s hand; then he remembers that the disc is in the machine from the evening before. He switches it on and indicates to Galina that she should sit down on the sofa. And he contemplates the five little bears that Liliya’s mother arranged on the television after she learned that Sturla was the father of five children. Then he goes into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator.
While the lion sighs under the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer logo, Sturla takes a half-liter of vodka from the freezer and picks up a wooden cutting board, on which there is some cheese and some slices of paprika. When he comes back into the room with the cutting board in one hand and two water glasses and the vodka bottle in the other, the names of the actors in the movie are on the screen.
He remembers the name Johnny Seven from the previous evening, but he sees that he hasn’t correctly remembered the name of the composer: it was Adolph Deutsch, not Alfred Deutsch. Next comes the name of the director and producer: Billy Wilder.
Sturla begins thinking about his father. And then the images on the screen change: instead of the grayish row of houses which served as the background for the names of the people in the movie, an aerial view of New York appears and you hear the voice of Jack Lemmon: “November first, 1959: the population of New York City is 8,420,782.”
Jack’s character says he works for the insurance company Consolidated Life. And then we get to see him in person; he is at his job, at a little desk in a hall that stretches on like the open spaces in Iceland. He tells us he sits at desk number 861 and is called C.C. Baxter, nicknamed Bud. We see the clock on the wall shows 4:41 and when it has counted off another nineteen minutes, a loud bell rings and the employees of Consolidated Life get up from their chairs and leave the room, following an intricate system which has evolved in order to avoid blocking up the narrow walkways between the work desks as they leave. The only person who doesn’t go anywhere is C.C. Baxter, and he explains why: he has loaned his apartment to his boss — for a date with a mistress — and because he needs to kill time while his boss is in the apartment with the woman, Bud works overtime.
He indicates that this is something he does quite often. We accompany him on his way home; he goes past a row of houses on the street where he lives. It’s nearly the end of the period of time for which he agreed to stay away from his boss and the woman.
Bud says he lives a short walk from Central Park. The weather is bad, and he’s wearing a hat and a light-colored duster that he buttons up to his neck. The way he braces his shoulders, walking along all hunched up, indicates that he is cold, that he is looking forward to getting home. But when he is nearly at the front steps, he sees that the light is still on in the window, and the music which he can hear from there conveys only one message: Bud can’t go home yet.