Breathing Into Marble

by Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite

  In the bedroom, behind the wall, it was still there. It was cold, like the drop of a well. Not so long ago a head had rested there. And the sideboard smelled of a cold, drawn-out breath. As sharp as the whistle of the sickle over grass.

  No, her mother had never existed. Her father had given birth to Isabel.

  What had they done during the winter? It seemed as though there had been no winter; no wading through the snow in the dark to school, no fire burning in the hearth. Early one spring morning Isabel was woken by the snarl of the saw – her father was cutting down the apple trees. She ran out barefoot and screamed above the sound of the saw. Her father turned with a feverish gaze – a terrible, foreign glistering in his eye.

  That night he came to Isabel’s room for the first time.

  He lay down at the edge of her bed with his knees bent to his chest. Isabel woke to the sound of his sobbing; she wanted to turn to him, but her father held her from behind with his arms and legs, a hot arc, breathing into her neck until dawn.

  Bit by bit they started to live again.

  In the summer a hot wind blew. More and more often her father would return from the village having lost his hat or his shoes; he would slump down on the stone in the yard. Isabel would pour some sun-warmed water onto his bare feet and tell him to sit there until he was dry. In the meantime she would run up through the fir woods to the bridge or even to the village sometimes. Often he had exchanged his shoes for some moonshine. I’ve had enough, you’ll have to walk barefoot! How many times did Isabel, with helpless tears in her eyes, have to repeat those words? And soon after she would buy a cheap pair of sandals from the market in town.

  At night he would come to Isabel’s room and hold her in his hot, tight embrace. At first she thought she had to give in to him; that she had to find a way of leaving that shameful heat behind in the darkness and living as normal as possible in the day light. And yes, as if the night did not exist, in the morning her father would turn into ‘dad’ and would make his haphazard sandwiches with a whistle. But the night breeze would once again awaken in him that uncontrollable reflex.

  At dusk Isabel would be in a hurry to switch on the light.

  As she grew older she saved some money and bought a table lamp and put it next to her bed. The cable turned out to be too short and she had to move the bed closer to the wall socket. Isabel slept then in the golden circle of the lamp. Hesitantly her father would wish her good night from the doorway and soon she would hear the squeak of the sofa in the front room where he slept, and then, relieved, she would fall into a dreamless sleep.

  But one night the bulb blew and the lamp did not turn on.

  Soon after she felt her father’s coarse beard tickle the back of her neck.

  ‘Daddy…’ For the first time she plucked up the courage to speak. She turned around. Her father’s face burned from the light of his red beard.

  ‘Forgive me… Judita…’ he whispered. ‘Forgive… me…’

  He locked the back of Isabel’s head between his palms and turned her to the wall, and groaned into her hair. And slowly his hot grip tightened around her, as if he were wrestling with the darkness.

  When her father died, Isabel was at a dance at the local disco being kissed by one of the boys she knew. Later the boy walked her home, all the way along the road as dawn broke, stopping to rest at each bush, or rather so that he could attempt to thrust his hand up under Isabel’s Sunday blouse. Each time his hands grew bolder, conquering a larger area and in his hasty scrabbling Isabel’s skin began to pulse. She didn’t remember the boy’s name - just that feeling of the suddenly awakened sensitivity of her skin and how passionately he argued with her, almost begging to touch her. She refused, saying her father would not let her. She did not know then that she would find him in the workshop, in his deep armchair – already cold.

  The boy persisted as far as the woods, hoping Isabel would change her mind, but when she ran off, having kissed him on the cheek, the words he shouted after her were like sharp stones. Isabel didn’t understand the meaning of the words but his tone hurt her. That autumn the boy was called up to the Soviet army and he faded from her memory, having left in her a scar deeper than kisses.

  Light seeped out from the workshop’s tiny window. But stranger than this was the shadow the armchair cast on the wooden floor; she noticed it through the window and stopped as if she had been stung. She understood what had happened in her very cells, as if the air had whispered it to her. She had experienced already that silence which spread like dead earth around a body whose soul had departed and which warns you not to come close. Death had drawn its circle and all that lived within it immediately hardened into stone.

  Isabel stopped in the darkness, under the apple trees. Around her the night sighed like a river and whispered; the birds chirped and sang, all life looked for each other, multiplied and celebrated.

  But in the workshop sat her father in the light of the wall lamp – until dawn, when the nurse who came with the ambulance told her that his heart had stopped about five hours before.

  ISABEL DID not notice that the snow had melted. One morning, walking to Kurpiskiai, she saw that the road side was blue with violets and her heart squeezed, as if she had overslept and missed something that she would never see again.

  ‘Look, Ilyusha, violets!’ she called to the boy trotting behind her.

  He muttered something without lifting his eyes.

  Ilya would often sink into a peculiar silence, as if a dome had been lowered down over him; a careless word would be enough to cause it. Sometimes they would not be able to put their finger on what it had been. But then, do what they may – caress, talk, cheat, charm him with the latest plastic lions, or ships, or promises, or with the smell of cake fresh from the oven – nothing would move him. There was no melting his silence, not even into anger.

  One Saturday Ilya dropped his coffee cup – a pale patch spread across the table and then across his trousers. He gazed at the damp spot as though enchanted but frowned as if in pain, as if the steaming coffee had been his own blood that had spilled out, an odd, pale, hot blood and that oddness was transformed suddenly into a terrible secret. Ilya’s cheeks were bathed with hot beads. Isabel and Liudas froze as they watched the child, as if the tears were actual proof that he was alive and sentient. Isabel’s hand slid across the table, her movement as calm as she was able – and Ilya did not recoil from her. She rose from her seat and hugged the sobbing child. She whispered into his ear; not words, only meaningless sounds, humming, like the hum of tea boiling. They didn’t finish breakfast that day, they moved into the living room crying and groaning – Ilya with his face tucked into Isabel’s skirt, mumbling for a solid half hour, his face hid among the pattern of flowers. Later he slept, relaxed and without shuddering. Softly Isabel called out to Liudas and he helped her move the child, who was dizzy from crying, onto the sofa. Ilya settled in a tearful trance; the irises under his swollen eyelids shone like damp velvet. On Isabel’s cornflower skirt there was a black patch from his tears, shaped like a wounded dragon.

  In the evenings he and Isabel would stay in the kitchen on their own. She sensed that Ilya longed for these moments together. He didn’t like asking for anything, or speaking or exchanging words. He would sneak up behind Isabel when she was washing the dishes or reading a book and would stand there breathing down her neck. She would pretend she didn’t notice him. Ilya’s blood would pound and he would grow suddenly distant and then, embarrassed, he would run to the nursery with the sound of blood pulsing in his ears.

  In the spring they would ready themselves for Gailius’ epileptic seizures, sensitive to the signs. Luckily that year the signs were late, or perhaps Ilya overshadowed them. Isabel attempted to explain to Ilya what the signs of Gailius’ seizures were and told him that he should help his brother if anything happened when the adults were away. Ilya’s eyes flashed with anger and disgust.

  They never left Gailius on his own anyway, not even when he took the fam
iliar path across the field to the Kurpiskiai primary school. Every day Isabel would accompany him to school and home again along the path which she herself had walked some twenty years before.

  ‘Next year you’ll walk to school with your brother,’ Isabel would remind Ilya.

  The prospect didn’t seem to make him happy.

  Ilya liked quiet, shady corners. In the evenings when Gailius would settle down to do his homework, Ilya would crouch on the floor in the nursery, where the light from the table lamp did not reach. With his face shrouded by the dark shadows, Ilya would breathe more easily and he would stretch out in the twilight like a black shadow.

  Gailius had never met a person who took up so little space. ‘It’s like Ilya’s always trying to become smaller,’ he said to Isabel. He behaved as though he was not two but ten years older than his brother. He would not complain to his mother when things began disappearing from the drawers of his desk - pencils and his tragi-comical everyday reflections – what he called the pieces of paper with his scribblings on them. Gailius was a little sad about his reflections disappearing, though he always memorised them; they were always bubbling away up there in his head, multiplying daily, begging to be scribbled down onto a sheet of paper. He decided to keep the newly written reflections in the drawers of his father’s desk. Fortunately they didn’t disappear from there. Or, perhaps, as the spring matured, they matured too and were not blown away quite so easily.

  One morning as it grew warmer, Isabel nearly tripped over Ilya as she hurried into the veranda. He was sleeping on a straw mat, with a coiled blanket pulled from his bed. He looked so helpless; his neck was twisted and a transparent slick of saliva stretched like a cobweb from his parted lips. Damp hair stuck to his temples. Around him, lined up by his childish hand, his toys stood guarding him. Pressed against his chest were his new sport shoes, the ones Liudas had brought from town.

  From that day on the veranda was given to him. Liudas brought a folding armchair from the bedroom, removed the empty jars from the cupboard and put Ilya’s clothes in their place. From this, the glass eye of the house, the fruit trees in the garden looked like splashes of blood and amber seen through the red and yellow honeycomb shaped windowpanes. Ilya would glue himself to the sun-lit glass and disappear; he would not reply if he was called or gently shaken. It seemed that, after that long season in the twilight, the colours mesmerized him.

  ‘They take over him,’ Gailius declared.

  ‘Just be happy that he finds something that excites him,’ Isabel replied.

  ‘So what? Before you said Ilya was closed in his own little world, but now he’s just created a new, more colourful one. If he carries on like this, he’ll kill himself with all those colours one day.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Isabel snapped.

  But two month later Ilya was still a stranger to Gailius. Having taken possession of the veranda, Ilya began to use its door to get outside, reducing still further the possibility of him bumping into other members of the family. Isabel felt Ilya was silently grateful for having been offered a place in the free world, but that was all he needed – nothing more. He had no need of help, or attention, or of warmth as would be typical of a child his age. Liudas was content to leave him alone, while Isabel could not settle for this. This small, wild shaman filled her with despair. At first she had hoped the boys would become friends – Gailius was full of good intentions - but Ilya didn’t pay any attention to him. When his step-brother approached him he would freeze, as if he couldn’t believe it was he who was being addressed. All offers of playing together would fly over his head like a gust of wind – wordlessly Ilya would carry on with the game he was playing or go out to find some more solitary entertainment. The games he played were the kind to be played alone – most of all, of course, if the sun was shining Ilya enjoyed looking out through the stained glass windows in the veranda. He would also spend a lot of time wandering through the nearby woods. At first, fearful of letting him go on his own, Isabel forced Gailius to go with him. Gailius came back later – as pale as a sheet – Ilya had disappeared! He came home just before dinner and from the wicked glint in his eyes it was clear his disappearance had been intentional. Liudas informed him he was grounded. Isabel promised, though, not to interfere with his solitary ways any more.

  Liudas was the second most important person to Ilya after Isabel, but he watched him from afar, fearfully, as if Liudas was an unpredictable animal which you could only win the respect of with irreproachable behaviour. What behaviour was expected of him, Ilya had no idea. The large man would take charge in the evenings, his voice a reserved baritone that seemed to hide something; when he came home the house would tighten like a warm fist, while in the daytime it would relax as if without his control things began to loosen. Once, when Liudas was having a wash in the kitchen, Ilya noticed that between the man’s legs swung a bag of skin just like the one that dangled between his own legs – only unbelievably bigger. Perhaps that meant the large creature was in some ways the same as him and that it might be possible to win his acceptance.

  Twice a week, after his lessons at the Kurpiskiai secondary school, Liudas would get into his Opel and drive to the orphanage. He would get back after dark and though he was very talkative, his features seemed to weaken, to bleed involuntarily from his face, like ripples from a stone dropped in the water.

  Isabel did not remember when she started secretly examining Liudas’ hands as if looking for blood or dirt beneath his nails. He would drop his briefcase onto the brown leather armchair, leave soapy scuds in the bowl of warm water he washed in and sit at the table gluing models while Isabel cooked the dinner. Isabel didn’t ask anything, but Liudas talked enthusiastically about his new pupils at the orphanage, as if he felt it was his duty to share his impressions of the day. The detail, however, would slide away without illuminating the dark hole of the hours they had spent apart.

  When was it that Liudas first carried home that new fragrance? Isabel didn’t notice it right away. It suddenly occurred to her one evening that for quite some time the whole house had been infused with this new scent.

  She didn’t do anything to stop it. Silently she watched, resigned, how less and less of him returned home. She watched how he kicked the mud from his shoes as he came in, how he took off his coat and sat down opposite her and talked incessantly, melting slowly before her eyes like a crust of ice at the tail end of winter.

  ‘Mama, when I die, take me to the barn and lay me there,’ Gailius said one evening, out of the blue.

  He was doing his homework at the kitchen table.

  ‘You’ll never die,’ Isabel replied, without turning from the stove.

  ‘The barn isn’t any use to you anyway…’

  ‘For goodness sake!’

  ‘When I try to have a serious conversation, why do you treat me like an idiot?’

  ‘Because you talk like a fool.’

  ‘It’s stupid to face the cooker and pretend that your son will live for ever.’

  Isabel turned to face him.

  ‘I’m sorry, mama,’ Gailius whispered.

  ‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘And don’t pretend you can’t hear.’

  ‘I can hear everything, mama. I can even hear things that I don’t understand.’

  ‘Last night I couldn’t get to sleep for a long time and I felt that…’

  ‘Did you have a head ache?’

  ‘No, but it seemed that Ilya wasn’t sleeping, he was walking around the house…’

  Isabel was sitting at the kitchen window looking out into the yard where Liudas was cleaning the soles of his shoes on the grass.

  ‘I think that’s what was happening.’

  ‘What?’ she asked absentmindedly.

  ‘The veranda door kept squeaking. He walks around at night.’

  ‘He went to the toilet.’

  ‘No.’

  Liudas lit a cigarette and
stood gazing out at the road, frowning. He exhaled the smoke.

  Suddenly she desired him. He looked so distant with his hair ruffled by the wind. That hadn’t happened for a long time – that moistness between her thighs when she looked at her husband through the window.

  ‘Ilya‘s very strange,’ Gailius said tapping his spoon on the picture of the pear on the oilcloth covering the table.

  Liudas turned towards to house, as if having instinctively sensed Isabel’s scrutiny. His glance was terrible. Ignoring Isabel’s face at the window which was hot with desire, his gaze pierced the walls of the house like a cold ray of light and then spun back again to the road.

  ‘It seems to me, he’ll never be able to be my brother,’ Gailius continued. ‘And it’s not that I don’t want him to be. He looks at us like a… fox.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Isabel interrupted absentmindedly. Having stubbed out his cigarette in a can, Liudas came towards the house.

  ‘You don’t listen to me! All the time you’re thinking about something else, something a long way away. Or about something that doesn’t exist. It seems to me that you’re only interested in things that don’t exist.’