She walked away, stepping carefully with her bare, suntanned and strong legs. The cat was devouring fish innards in the grass. I decided to go for a swim and then for a ride in the sailboat that the village yacht club had let me use.
The wind had picked up and the boat leaned dangerously to the side when a squall rose in the middle of the lake; I nearly capsized when I tried to turn it around. I would have died of shame if the young men had run from the yacht club to help me and found me floundering beside the boat. Nevertheless, I made it safely to the shore, fastened the boat to a post at the pier and hurried back for dinner. I was ravenously hungry.
Benedict’s wife brought me a fatty fried perch and some freshly boiled potatoes. I tasted it and licked my lips.
‘Delicious.’
‘I can’t even look at fish.’
She stood and watched me eating for a while, then left the room humming a melody. Benedict’s wife – what a woman! Why had I not met her while she was single? I would’ve proposed instantly.
I don’t exactly remember when it happened, it must have been Saturday. The landlady went to the market, Benedict went to the village to buy some hooks and lead weights, and the boy and girl ran off to play with the yacht-club guard’s children.
It was drizzling outside. I was reading in my room. Benedict’s wife, that beautiful and lovely woman, knocked on the door and asked if I could put up a rope up in the barn so she could hang the laundry. If it weren’t for the unexpected rain she would have hung up the washing outside. But it didn’t look like the rain would stop any time soon.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Leonard.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to be of service.’
I put the book, an interesting work on the habits of bugs and beetles, to one side. I took the rope from her hands, found some nails and a hammer and went to the barn to look for a suitable place to drive in the nails. The acrid smell of freshly mown hay filled the barn. I stretched the rope from one wooden wall to the other.
She brought in a basket of laundry and began hanging it. I stood nearby, giddy from the smell of hay and her closeness. Suddenly, she burst out laughing, she laughed long and loudly, and then, as though bereft of strength, she collapsed onto the hay and stretched out her strong brown legs. Her dress slid upward. I saw her round, tanned knees and in that instant I saw nothing but them and a hot mist covered my eyes.
I turned around and practically ran out of the barn. Her laughter rang in my ears for a long time. Soaked through, I walked aimlessly in the rain. Finally, I went to the yacht club, sat on a bench and stared at the surface of the water, grey and stippled by the falling rain. A profound sadness overwhelmed me.
After that hot and rainy afternoon, she no longer spoke to me. She would greet me coldly, yet politely, on her way to her morning ablutions by the lake. Benedict and I would fish all day and now I fried the catch myself. Often we heard the rumble of a motor on the lake; a red motorboat would speed past us. A large, corpulent man in a green shirt sat at the wheel. That motorboat belonged to the chairman of the co-operative; he dashed about the lake like a madman, throwing out jigs and setting his bobbers baited with small live fish with which he always caught large pike.
I didn’t like him, I don’t know why. But Benedict found some common interests to talk about and even invited him for dinner. Benedict’s wife began to smile again – not at me but at the chairman of the co-operative, who spoke charmingly and was very deferential.
At that time the blueberries in the forest on the other side of the lake had ripened. Every day the women and children would return with full baskets.
‘We should pick some berries too,’ said Benedict’s wife.
She was washing her legs in the lake. Benedict and I had just returned from fishing and were winding up our fishing poles. The chairman of the co-operative was tinkering with the motor on his boat. He raised his head.
‘If you like, I can take you to the other side of the lake.’
The woman glowed with pleasure.
‘When?’
‘Right now. I’ll just fill the tank with gasoline,’ he said, scratching his broad hairy chest.
‘What are you waiting for?’ said Benedict. ‘Call the children and go.’
They cast off. The children were thrilled but the rumble of the motor soon engulfed their cheerful voices. The boat lunged forward and took off, spraying white foam in its wake. It soon disappeared from view. Benedict went off to clean his perch. He whistled as he walked up the hill.
If I had kept a diary I would be able to read in it now, more or less, the following intermittent entries:
Wednesday. Benedict’s wife returned in the evening with a basket full of blueberries; the children had gathered mushrooms. When she cooked them, the whole house was filled with their aroma.
Thursday. They went berry picking again. Today, Benedict seemed out of sorts for some reason. He didn’t joke with me and he didn’t catch much while fishing; he let go of two large perch.
Saturday. This afternoon I went sailing, wanting to practise turning about in a strong wind. At the north end of the lake, beyond the peninsula, I passed the chairman of the co-operative and Benedict’s wife sitting in the red motorboat. She pretended not to see me. In the evening, Benedict walked in the yard for a long time and smoked many cigarettes, although he had told me he quit smoking when he became ill with TB.
Sunday. The beautiful woman is blooming like a flower. She went berry picking again today. She and the chairman of the co-operative can be seen on the lake with increasing frequency. It’s as though Benedict doesn’t exist.
Tuesday. Benedict no longer goes out fishing. His face has become completely grey. He looked very ill and appeared to not have slept well.
Wednesday. In the early morning, Benedict rowed out onto the lake alone. He didn’t wake me. Before noon, someone noticed his empty boat drifting on the lake.
All efforts to find Benedict were unsuccessful. Members of the yacht club looked for him, as did the fishermen and the chairman of the co-operative in his fast motorboat. Benedict disappeared without a trace. Presumably, he fell out of his boat and drowned. No one’s to blame. He should have been more careful. After all, the lake is so deep! Maybe he didn’t know how to swim.
That’s what people said at the lakeside, consoling his weeping wife. She sobbed and sobbed, wringing her hands, and the wind carried her cries into the distance. I went down there to that spot on the shore where Benedict’s boat was floating and, looking into the bottom of the boat, I saw neither the rope nor the heavy stone he used as an anchor when fishing for those big perch.
Translated by Ada Valaitis from Romualdas Lankauskas, Pilka sviesa, Vilnius: Vaga (1968).
Romualdas Lankauskas (born 1932) is a prose writer, dramatist, translator and painter as well as one of the founders of Soviet-era abstract Lithuanian art. In the 1970s and 1980s he became known as the master of the laconic short story, writing against the cultural groove of the Soviet era. His works explored forbidden themes, putting him at odds with the wardens of Soviet ideology. Throughout his career he composed over thirty short story collections, novels and travel essays. He founded the Lithuanian PEN centre in 1989.
A Cry in the Full Moon
Juozas Aputis
He was not always alone in the day. Indeed, if he were running a fever he would sit alone in the shade on a rickety bench at noon; at that time his hunched back was nearly parallel to the ground and he would hold one hand outstretched to grasp a cane so that he would not fall flat on his face. He would sometimes free his hands by leaning his chin on the cane and then this small-town Quasimodo would resemble a wooden sculpture that was splitting and being eaten away by the elements.
He could remain motionless for a terrifyingly long time, and he even wore a hollow into the bench. He would gaze, with his blue, ever-dry eyes, out into the courtyard at the well that the inhabitants of the neighbouring homes often went to for water. Usually it was th
e women. Drinking them in with his sometimes blank, sometimes bitter eyes, the hunchback would follow every drop of water splashing over the well-curb. If a stream poured over the edge he did not of course jump off the bench but instead, irritated, would move his neck (from which his long, angular face grew in a peculiar way) back and forth, and his mouth would open. He was certainly not short of water; though he walked with difficulty, he could still reach the lake encircling the town. Besides, people often left water in the bucket chained to the well. As he watched the water flowing over the well-curb, one might suppose that the hunchback thought about something beautiful, something real, something that he had been lacking from the time he was in the crib and which all these people possessed, whistling in their carefree way, coming and going, coming and going.
The worst thing for him was when the young women – which the small town, with its many summer visitors as well as the natives, did not lack – would bend over to pull up a bucket full of water and their legs – beautiful or un-beautiful, still holding for the hunchback the foreshadowing of some sort of secret – would be shamelessly revealed. He would feel the cold crawl up from somewhere in the earth through the torn soles of his shoes, rising up through his wizened, bony legs, squeezing under his loosely clasped belt, and then would begin to creep higher, gently and pleasantly adhering to his large hump and rushing out though his eyes. There were also those women who leaned heavily over the well-curb on purpose – it is truly a womanly foolishness to take eternal joy in that which others do not possess and to feel a pleasant tickling near their hearts understanding that those others see her and perhaps even desire her a little bit. This type of hunchback-teaser bent over for a long time, dawdling over the bucket, and the man on the bench would hear how his cane would pierce through the compressed earth as he pressed down with his chin. Even worse was when that stout-legged heartbreaker, having poured the water into her bucket and without fail having released a cold stream of water over the well-curb as though it was nothing, would turn to the hunchback and greet him:
‘Good morning! You’re up early…’
And then she walked away, staggering a little from the weight of the bucket but still managing to move properly that part of her body that a hunchback does not have and which the woman knew would elicit desire. After the woman had already gone some distance the man would slowly lift his cap – having not managed it in time after being stunned by the beautiful and rarely heard voice – and would smile openly, revealing his yellowed teeth.
Then he would be left almost alone, the townspeople having dispersed – some to the fields, some to catch fish, some driving off on the dirt road to the larger town to look for more fashionable cloth for a jacket or a dress before returning with a full basket of lovely rye or wheat bread in tow. Quite a few non-locals wandered by and they would draw up exorbitant quantities of water, banging the bucket on the cement edges of the well-curb. After pouring the water into their own oily buckets, they would then carry them over and dump the water into the hissing radiators of their autos before rushing off in a cloud of dust. There were others who were of more interest to him. These people would climb out of shiny automobiles and walk the streets of the town with their hands in their pockets, looking at the newly built houses and the red-brick school. The hunchback, having on occasion heard a fragment of news on the radio at the town snack bar, understood this pageantry – this was actually the white-shirted visitors’ job. Sometimes he would pretend he was slinking away somewhere purposefully and would pause and carefully look at those very powerful people climbing back into their automobiles and careering further along the wide roads of the homeland.
Sundays were most pleasant for him, when the women from the countryside flocked to the market in front of the church. He was acquainted with all of the market women, and when he paid for his purchases he could consequently praise each and every one very convincingly because he really knew which woman pressed the best cheese and which one would never bring a huge block of butter dyed with carrot juice to sell. He would be the last to leave the market, feeling great pleasure and satisfaction, and would head to the town square, but rather than going straight along the street, he would go in a roundabout way, passing alongside the lake from whose centre a purple-hued island peak, overgrown with bent grass, protruded. Every summer during the haying season he would buy a rake; the rake-maker knew this and he would carve and polish one beautifully for the hunchback. There were about fifteen of those rakes piled up in the attic, if not more, but he bought a new one every year. It was more interesting to live like this.
In the summer he had yet another pleasant little undertaking. After escorting those wayfaring vehicles into the distance with his eyes and having allowed to enter before him the spryer, healthier and more hungry, he would calmly enter the town snack bar before resting his chin on the table edge. He would then rifle about through the crumbs in his pockets for a long time until he found a metal coin of some sort. Then he would make his way slowly towards the counter; the portly woman behind it, who had known him for a long time, would offer to serve him out of turn, but he would turn his head to look at those standing in queue, lower his voice and say: ‘No, no. I’ll stand, I have time. These people are in a hurry.’
And he would stand at the end of the queue, and when he reached the counter he would take a coffee and a small bun. On some days he did not have enough money and on others he did and was given change. He would sit on a chair in the very furthest corner of the snack bar and, using all his strength, he would try to lean back far enough that there would be sufficient space for a glass between his chin and the table. The snack bar was full of people he knew, and when they ran out of room they would sit at his table, eating and drinking, not really paying any notice to the hunchback. And he felt good; he loved all those people and for this reason he could not say no to a drink when it was offered. The first time someone offered him something to drink, he carefully studied the person who pushed the glass towards him; later, he no longer studied them, understanding that they offered out of goodness and love to him, a fellow inhabitant of the town without whom nothing would be quite the same and much would be lost. Having drunk a couple of glasses he would grin, opening his mouth even wider than when the woman by the well wished him a good morning, and his stiff body, which had never walked upright, would warm up and he would let loose with all sorts of things – things for which he would later be sorry and angry with himself to such an extent that they would sometimes even keep him from daring to enter the square for a few days. He would wedge his feet against the cross of the table legs and lean his chair back, shouting at those sitting with him at the table: ‘Look, I’m vertical too, I’m vertical too! Ha, ha!’
But there was rarely a time that, after saying those words, he did not proceed to crash down to the floor, chair and all. Though only the very drunk and those who were not regulars at the snack bar laughed, he would lose his wits and get caught up in the commotion. He would hop back up and sit on the chair again before kicking up his feet once more. When he finally managed to push himself up, the man would hang his head, the muscles of his wrinkled nape, overgrown with grey hair, straining from the horizontal state of his back as he twisted his head to the side, wanting to look at the ceiling. When he eventually achieved the desired position, he would swallow the saliva accumulating in his mouth from the strain on his muscles and would shout once again: ‘Didn’t I tell you! I’m vertical too…’
Then he would let his body collapse back down, rest his chin on the table, take his cane in his hand and leave. Perhaps it was for this reason that when he stepped outside he felt an unburdening before overwhelming regret set in. He would then go over to the fence, overgrown with peonies, where the patrons of the snack bar who had had too much to drink would make themselves at home. The hunchback would find work here. The men who had left the snack bar and crawled into the grass and peonies thought they were already home and so would remove their footwear by the fence before stretchi
ng out and sticking their bare feet through its gaps. The hunchback would collect their shoes and put them back on the their dirty feet, tying up their laces while chattering away, chiding the men, shaking them and telling them to go home. And then one day this beautiful sight was witnessed by some people passing through the broad fields, and the town council tore down the fence. The peonies were quickly trampled on, no refuge remained for the drunks and the hunchback no longer had anywhere to do his penance, and so he stopped mentioning verticality even though the villagers had become very used to it and continued to feed him drinks and ask him to remember the good old days.
Night-time belonged to him. When everything settled down and the people closed their doors or dispersed on the last buses, he would once again go out into the square, only now he did not sit on the bench but made his way slowly to the well, grasping the edge of the well-curb with his hand or else resting his chin against it as he stood rooted there. Here and there the lights in the windows went out as the day’s life began to die. On nights with a full moon you could see him, illuminated by the dim light, lonelier than in the day, looking over the edge of the well-curb in the direction of the hill fort and the large lake. The hunchback would listen, his ears perking up like some sort of animal, and it seemed that all those hidden, unknown things that surround us flowed into his hump. Gazing into the night with his shiny, moonlight eyes, the hunchback felt that there, in the town square by the well, he was useful not only to the well and the sleeping people, but to the trees, lakes and other things. He felt how his life-breath pulsated alongside and around the love-torn life surrounding him and returned once again into his hump. That night a miracle happened: the humpbacked man raised his free hand, the one that was not grasping the well-curb, and gestured towards the lake, and out there splashed a huge fish and he waved back at her while a bat flapped by the well, flying low. That night he turned his hand towards a lit window and a woman with bared breasts came into view; she then undressed entirely and gazed at herself for a long time in a large mirror.
The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature Page 10