“Do you want to see my shells?” Lina asked Magdalena. Lina was a class ahead of Magdalena at school; they had never spoken to each other before. Though their mothers said hello when they passed each other on the stairs, Lina was usually out playing with the older kids or, when she wasn’t, Magdalena was too shy to do more than smile from behind her mother’s packages and scuff her shoe against a step.
Lina had her own room, unlike Magdalena, who slept on the foldout couch. Her father was a truck driver and she had shells from all over the world, pink and yellow and white and one giant one, the prize, that curled into itself like a bony ear. “Listen,” Lina said. “You can hear the ocean.”
“Magdute?” her mother called from the kitchen. “Run downstairs and get us some coffee cups.”
“Okay,” Magdalena said. But she didn’t have to take the stairs. Lina showed her the magic combination: left foot cross right foot, big step to the side and down, change hands and down again, and Magdalena landed with a little thump next to the garlic her mother was growing on their balcony.
After Lina’s father left, Lina and Ruta had to move out of the apartment upstairs. Ruta wanted to give Magdalena and her mother the illegal washing machine, but Magdalena’s mother insisted on paying for it, which surprised Magdalena because her mother worked in the laundry at the hospital and she could wash their clothes for free.
They carried the washing machine in a procession down the stairs, the four of them, Ruta and Magdalena’s mother each straining under one end while Lina directed them from the front and Magdalena followed along behind to keep the cords and hoses from dragging on the ground.
“Like a bride,” Lina said.
“Like a bride without her own feet,” Magdalena’s mother said, out of breath from the weight. They lowered the washing machine down to rest for a moment. Lina’s mother started laughing, then Magdalena’s mother laughed too, both of them like crazy schoolgirls with a washing machine between them teetering on the steps, and their daughters, looking at them bewildered, then starting to laugh too, not knowing why. That was the beginning of a new kind of laughter, which ever since Magdalena thought of as belonging to moments involving men and disaster, and at the same time an absence of loneliness. When they finally stopped and got the washing machine the rest of the way downstairs, it took the four of them pushing to get it through the doorway of Magdalena and her mother’s apartment. They put it in the middle of the living room—there was no other place—and Ruta said she knew somebody who could help them hook up the hoses. Before Ruta and Lina left to stay with Lina’s grandmother they had a party, with a cake and dandelion wine, and they used the illegal washing machine as a table. With a crown of flowers and a bit of lace for a tablecloth, it did look like a bride.
Magdalena had gone the wrong way. The shape she’d thought belonged to the yellow church now looked more like the primary school, which meant that the park was in the opposite direction. Now she was sure to be late to meet Ivan. She turned to go back, but there ahead of her was something she didn’t recognize, a jumble of shapes and something sticking up out of them into the air. A construction site. What had been there before? She squinted, and the more she squinted, the less certain she was that she was heading toward the school after all. Time was passing. Ivan would be waiting. She had to find out where she was. Magdalena felt around for her glasses at the bottom of her bag. She cleaned the lenses on her sleeve and unfolded the frames. There was hardly anybody on the street.
She put her glasses on and the world took on sharp edges. It was a church, but across from it was a shopping center Magdalena didn’t remember ever having seen before. She turned around looking for the name of the street, and there was a man standing in the doorway of a shop, eating a sandwich and dusting the crumbs off his shirt. He smiled and Magdalena put her hands up to cover her face, but not before she saw the word, stamped out as if by a typewriter across his forehead. Murderer. Magdalena ran.
She was crazy to run like that, even from a man with such a word set in block type across his face. If it were true, it was sure to happen anyway, and if it were not and Magdalena was crazy, crazy like lots of people are crazy, then she was going to get herself locked up one day, acting like that. But Magdalena didn’t stop. She and Lina had taught themselves to run in high heels, using only the tips of their toes. As she ran she remembered the men in the Russian neighborhoods who used to call out to them, shouting “Dyevochki! Dyevochki!” trying to grab them as they went by, after Lina had made them stay out too late and they had to walk home—then run home—past the men with hands too heavy to catch them.
Those were the best times, when they were fifteen or sixteen, after they missed the last bus on a winter night without their coats—blind tired, drunk on drinks that must have been bought for them and hypnotized by the snow falling into the streetlights, running home with snow melting on their eyelashes and their bare arms, twisting away from the hands, shrieking and laughing.
Up ahead of her Magdalena saw the park, so sharp and clear through her glasses that she imagined she could even see through the trees to where Ivan would be sitting by the fountain, crumbling a leaf between his fingers.
“Hey,” Ivan said when he saw her coming up the path. “Look, I can’t stay long.”
Magdalena coughed so he wouldn’t know she was breathing hard. Lina’s trick was to look a man straight in the eyes while writing his name with her tongue on the roof of her mouth. She’d read it in a magazine somewhere. Magdalena tried it, just lightly tracing the letters with the tip of her tongue across her palate. It was supposed to look seductive. Magdalena didn’t know what effect it had, but it helped keep her mind off the text that looped around one of Ivan’s eyes, making him look, Magdalena always thought, a little like a Dalmatian. She was afraid she might start understanding the Russian letters if she saw them too many times.
“I shouldn’t even be here,” Ivan said. “I told Phil I was doing the inventory.” Magdalena noticed she was writing Lina’s name instead of Ivan’s on the roof of her mouth. She also noticed that Ivan’s lips seemed suddenly too big for his teeth.
Ivan offered her a cigarette and tried to tuck his lips in at the edges. He bit the top one, then the bottom one, then he put a cigarette between them to take up the slack.
“Shit, I’ve got to get back. Listen, I didn’t want to tell you in front of everyone—” Magdalena had an enormous itch from writing with her tongue on the top of her mouth. “So look, you’re not on next week’s schedule,” Ivan said. “It’s not my call. They want to try that new girl. And it’s not just you, Kaylee’s going too.” Ivan blinked. It was like he had two faces. His eyes were somewhere else, while his mouth hopped from word to word like they were hot.
Magdalena dotted the i in Lina’s name on the roof of her mouth.
“Okay,” she said.
“Yeah?” Ivan said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. He nudged her toe with his foot. “Nu?”
“Nu, blyat,” Magdalena said, like the Russian men used to shout after them, spitting the word through her teeth.
“Right then,” Ivan said. His lips fit more snugly now around his mouth. “Like I say, it’s not my call.”
After Lina and her mother left to live with Lina’s grandmother, Magdalena and her mother used the illegal washing machine as a table, but they never did get someone to hook up the hoses, and after a while Magdalena’s mother sold it to one of the doctors at the hospital where she worked.
With the washing machine gone the evolution of the stain on their ceiling was frozen forever and Magdalena and her mother’s fortunes were fixed. Sometimes her mother would still look up at the kitchen ceiling after she’d come home from a night out with her boyfriend, but she stopped telling Magdalena what she saw there. It was easy to see that the news was not good.
“It’s a wolf,” Magdalena said.
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said, which was a lie. No matter what angl
e you looked at it from, the stain was unmistakably a wolf with a long mean snout, and the snout was tinted pink with the blood of Ruta Valentukienė’s red curtains.
Not long after Magdalena’s mother got rid of the washing machine, Lina’s mother got sick and had to go away, and because her grandmother was so old, Lina came to stay with Magdalena and her mother. A cold wind blew all winter long. Magdalena’s mother baked cakes to warm the apartment and then left the oven open while the three of them huddled under the wolf and warmed their hands over the pan. It snowed and the wind blew straight from Sweden. Freedom wind, the newspapers called it, and that was the year the Russians left, they became Lithuanians again and people sang in the streets. There were flowers everywhere and Magdalena’s mother came home from the store with a banana. She cut it into three parts and they ate it with a knife and fork. Magdalena’s mother picked out all the tiny seeds and Lina tried to eat the rind—that was how little they knew about bananas. Magdalena and Lina shared the fold-out couch and they made angels in the snow on the way to school.
It was the year that Magdalena learned to read.
“What’s ap-ree-tsots?” Magdalena asked Lina one day. They were walking to school.
“I don’t know,” Lina said. “Stop looking at me like that.”
“Why don’t you know what it means?” Magdalena said.
“What what means?”
“Ap-ree-tsots,” Magdalena said, pronouncing the sound of each letter carefully.
“Why should I know what it means?” Lina said.
“I don’t know,” Magdalena said. “Why is it on your face if you don’t know what it means?”
“It isn’t on my face.”
“Yes it is,” Magdalena said. “Right there.” She spelled it. The letters came down from Lina’s hairline and ended over her eye.
“A-P- what?” Lina said.
It was a strange-looking word, and when Magdalena put the sounds together what came out didn’t make any sense. “Ap-ree-tsots.”
“I don’t think there is a word like that,” Lina said, and when they passed a shop window Lina looked in at her reflection. “There’s nothing there,” she said.
Magdalena’s mother’s skin also said things that Magdalena didn’t understand. She could read the name of her father on her mother’s forehead, and the name of her baby brother who died, which was written in the cradle of her mother’s arm, but there were also some longer words she’d never heard before. When she asked her mother what they meant her mother told her she was imagining things. “Let me write my name too,” Magdalena said one day, holding a pen from her school bag.
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said again, looking mad when Magdalena said she would only write it very small, next to where Juozas, her brother’s name, was written on her mother’s arm. And then Magdalena understood. The words were something not to be talked about, like the fact that the fortune-telling stain had gotten permanently stuck in the shape of a wolf. After that, Magdalena tried very hard not to let her mother see that she was looking at the words, just like she looked hard at the tablecloth at mealtimes to help her mother forget about the stain on the ceiling, and bit by bit Magdalena learned to read the words in her head without making a sound.
Ivan walked away. Magdalena stood by the fountain and finished her cigarette. She dropped it into the fountain, and—why not?—she made a wish. She wondered what she would do that night, instead of going to work. She kicked the fountain hard enough to hurt her toes, then she started walking. She walked until she was back in front of the yellow church, which Neil had said was beautiful. Magdalena hadn’t gone into a church for a long time, but she went in now.
They were supposed to have been best friends for life. They would marry millionaire brothers and connect their houses by an underground tunnel. They would name their daughters after each other and drink coffee together in the afternoons.
It was Lina who decided they should go to London. Magdalena was nineteen and Lina was twenty, and they were looking out over Vilnius from up by the old castle, drinking a bottle of wine and chewing on bits of the cork that had crumbled down into it because as usual they hadn’t had anything but their house keys for opening the bottle. They were sharing a set of keys again because Lina’s mother had just gone back into the hospital. Magdalena thought about telling Lina that Ruta’s skin didn’t say she would die there, but she didn’t want to get into what it did say, and after all, who knew whether what it said was true. So in the end Magdalena said nothing, and it was Lina who looked out over the city and told Magdalena she was going to London. London, the English spelling, was written high across Lina’s forehead, and though Magdalena’s own skin had nothing to say about it, there was no question that she would go with her.
Actually, Magdalena’s skin had nothing to say about anything. Her entire body, from the bottoms of her feet to the bit of her nose she could just barely see if she closed one eye and squinted, was empty of words. Most of the time her own blankness was a relief, though sometimes, when she let herself think about it too much, Magdalena wondered why she alone had been left unmarked, as though the ability to read what it said on the people around her meant she’d have no stories of her own.
Aziz was Lina’s first real conquest in London. She met him at the bar where she worked and he took her out on a private boat along the Thames. One night Lina took too much of some pale pink powder Aziz had brought back from Morocco and woke up all alone in a cream-colored limousine with a big dent in its fender and a bump on her head. She was sorry she hadn’t told Magdalena where she was going, she said, sitting on the kitchen counter the next morning, opening and closing the silverware drawer with her toes while Magdalena rushed around getting ready for work. She’d be more careful next time, she said, but Magdalena knew it was a lie: Lina had drunk champagne in a long white car, she had heard each bubble rise and break against a crystal glass and she had breathed the air that was trapped inside them. She had watched the city lights flow like a river around her, and she was not going to start being careful now.
Magdalena didn’t expect the same things that Lina did, and when they went out together she wasn’t surprised to find that the nights in London ended the same way they had in Vilnius: Lina would be gone, Magdalena would find herself kissing some stranger, or sitting in a pub with him and his friends while they bought her drinks. The wall behind their heads would come rushing into focus; she’d see a spider on the wall lift and set each leg with such deliberation that she’d feel she was in a sort of trance watching the spider walk across the wall, while the person in between her and the spider was saying things to her and she was laughing.
In London the men were insurance analysts or bankers rather than the aimless students and guitar players she and Lina had known back home, and sometimes they would ask Magdalena to talk to them in Lithuanian.
“Okay,” she would say, keeping her eyes on the spider. “So listen and I will tell you what the two sisters did on the day that God walked by.”
The men would laugh like it was going to be something dirty, and Magdalena would tell them in Lithuanian about the first sister, who was too busy spinning wool and stayed indoors, while the other sister left her baking and ran out to greet the stranger without even wiping the dough off her hands. God turned the first sister into a spider and made her sit forever in dark places making thread, while the second sister became a honeybee whose arms are always covered in sweet dough, who rests in a warm hive through the winter and is loved by everyone.
Usually the insurance men would stop her before she got to the end of the story. “Just teach us the bad words,” they’d say. Back home people mostly cursed in English or sometimes Russian, so just for fun she’d teach the men the Lithuanian expressions for “bread-and-butter” or “take me to the hospital, I’m about to give birth,” writing the words down on a napkin and making them repeat after her, take me to the hospital, I’m about to give birth. The insurance men would all imagine they were b
eing very obscene, while the spider on the wall paused, then slid down an invisible string to dangle over somebody’s drink.
But the English words across their faces that had looked so unpronounceable at first, hemmed in as they were on either side by consonant sounds, gradually took on meaning, and Magdalena began taking out her contact lenses before she and Lina went out. She’d keep her glasses in her purse, and when she went to the toilet she’d put them on, just to reassure herself that her feet still had edges, that there was a clear place where her body ended and the rest of the world began.
She had stopped wearing her contact lenses altogether when Lina met Tobias Kronen, and so it wasn’t until Lina started seeing him regularly that Magdalena really noticed him. He said he was a professional photographer—which Lina laughed at. Men were always telling her they were photographers. But this was true: He showed Lina his card from National Geographic and Lina made Magdalena go with her to look for his pictures in the magazines at the library. They were there, iridescent tree snakes and grass huts and street children in Bangkok. He was in London on an extended assignment, and he had a wife and twin babies back in Stockholm, but he liked Lina a lot, he said, and if she wanted to she could go with him to photograph some Neolithic tombs.
So Lina went with Tobias Kronen to a place where a big flat rock buzzed under your hand if the moon was right, and on the drive back Tobias showed her how to use his camera, which was not digital but the old-fashioned kind covered with dials and buttons, the kind real photographers use, Lina told Magdalena, suddenly the expert, as if she weren’t always using her phone to take pixilated snapshots of the two of them, the phone held at arm’s length so that part of Magdalena was usually missing.
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