The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  I sat down on a bench at a playground near their home. Good God, what had I done wrong? What? I was living my life, not harming even a fly, when he crawled into my home and my life. And now he’s not here anymore. What did I do wrong? Why was I suffering so much?

  When I talked to myself like this it seemed to me that I was thoroughly in the right. But then I remembered the little girl, that little voice of hers: ‘Dad, daddy, get up, please.’ Oh, I can’t do this anymore. I am a scumbag. Luba’s right. Yes, a scumbag. Sure, maybe I had saved Luba and my children from being killed, but I was still a scumbag. And Luba was afraid to touch me. And yes, now I can walk with my head held up high. There aren’t many who have killed a man, who have ended a life. But I have.

  And now, overcome with horror, I understood that I could never wash away this stain. I’m a killer. I will die like that, like a killer, with sin weighing down on my soul. A sin? I stopped right there. What the hell – a sin? What did I do wrong? So I sat on that little bench near their home until they carried him out – that son, father and criminal. Just now I heard real shrieking: the mother started wailing and I almost went crazy from her pain. ‘Son, son!’ It was just impossible to listen. That poor woman, she could hardly move her legs. She had given birth to him, raised him. I sit and cry a river of tears. I didn’t understand, I don’t understand anything. And then a young man comes up to me. He seems intelligent. He says in a low tone: ‘Leave. You had just better leave.’ And then he looks me straight in the eyes. But, good God, what is this? Well he’s a brother or a relative and recognises my right to defend myself and all that. But he personally blames me, only me. You hear me, guy, you were in the right in your own bedroom but now go, get out of my sight and out of their sight. Don’t stand there, you killer.

  So what of all this, ultimately? I leave. Like a beaten dog. There’s shouting, crying, his kids are screaming – that son of his as well – out of grief. The mother is wailing. God, what had I done? I, I alone. With this hand right here.

  So I calmed down in a café. Now they are putting him in the ground. So, what is there left to do? Did I really understand what I was doing when I grabbed the revolver from the nightstand? He approached with a knife, for God’s sake. All right, maybe he wasn’t planning to kill me. He most likely just wanted to scare me so I’d lie in bed without resisting while he emptied out our drawers. Then… Now I understood Luba. Goddammit, so in other words, let’s just say he would have robbed us and disappeared, it would have been better than what’s happening now. So what, we would have taken a hit financially, but everything in our hearts and minds would have remained just like before. And what now?

  I went home, but Luba didn’t even say a word.

  ‘So, what’s wrong now? How can we live like this? Luba, do you hear me? Don’t be silent.’ And instead of answering she’s silent. ‘Don’t be silent, or I’m going to smack you!’ And then she looks at me. ‘So, why are you staring at me? Huh? I’m a murderer, right? You see a murderer?’

  And then she, incomprehensibly, says with a shaking voice: ‘Yes.’

  And she runs out of the kitchen and cries alone in the bedroom. So I start breaking the dishes and the furniture. I broke a stool and the table then fell right down onto the floor. And here I cut my hand, the blood’s running. What am I supposed to do? Luba began to wail even louder. It was good that the kids were at kindergarten. I was going to go crazy.

  ‘I’m going to kill you!’ I say. Suddenly I leap up and Luba, seeing me in the doorway, retreats to the corner, her eyes glazed with terror.

  ‘Don’t kill me,’ she screams.

  So, I think to myself, those are the facts. It’s not far to the mad house for me. My nerves are totally frayed. I turned around without saying a word, took out a half-litre bottle from the cupboard and drank from the bottle, right there.

  And that was what saved me. I knew that I was acting like the biggest lush in the world, but I put it to my lips and emptied it right to the bottom. And ten minutes later I collapsed to the floor. Of course, it would have been better to take some strong sleeping pills – a triple dose of Tazepam. But we didn’t keep anything like that in the house. Ultimately, I needed to relax for a long time because otherwise my nerves would have gone haywire and it wasn’t clear how it all would have ended. So I acted correctly in getting drunk.

  Luba was still somewhat hysterical all alone in the bedroom (she told me that she had pushed the chest of drawers in front of the door so I couldn’t get in, though she knew she was acting the fool – she scared herself deliberately). Afterwards, when everything quietened, she calmed down a little. The foolishness evaporated from her head. She put the chest of drawers back in its place and went into the kitchen to take a look. I was lying all twisted up on a pile of broken furniture. Of course she started to scream, thinking I had killed myself. Afterwards she found the empty bottle and she understood everything. While I was lying there I felt sick a few times. But having lost consciousness, I don’t remember anything.

  I slept something like thirty hours. I sobered up in the bedroom and even smiled. Somehow my soul felt good.

  The sun was in the window. Luba came in. ‘So, how are you feeling?’ And she came to hug me. Good God. Everything’s fine again. I remembered that something horrible had happened, but it was like I saw everything through some sort of filter. In other words, I gained a little perspective. My nerves calmed and my heightened senses subsided as did Luba’s. She would have a cuddle with me; it was entirely different now. It seems that she also got some sleep.

  A year later and I had forgotten everything. An unpleasant feeling remained, but there were no more recollections of how that man died, crying in our bedroom, and the other family came to terms with it and got used to living without their son and father. That lonely old mother and that girl with the swollen little nose continued to stand there before my eyes, but in time they disappeared as well – especially after the one time when I was walking by and saw that very same mother angrily arguing with a neighbour. I didn’t feel anything good and noble towards her then.

  Lately for some reason Luba and I have been fighting over petty things. We came into a little money, but it seems we aren’t happy. Our eldest, Vova, goes out partying and doesn’t come home to sleep. I’ve noticed that Luba looks at me like I’m not even here. ‘Take out the trash,’ she says while she is scraping at something in the kitchen. ‘The Yelizarov’s are flying to Paris this week.’ Now she apparently wants to go to Paris. ‘Luba,’ I say. ‘What?’ she says annoyed. ‘Nothing.’ And I take out the trash.

  Good God, what a life. What is going on with us? Are we bored with each other or what? The trash. Vova. Paris. Money, and what’s more, it seems that I killed a man. Yes, I did. I’ve got work tomorrow morning. Yawn, I’m getting sleepy. Neither feeling nor meaning. Still, back then, in those horrible days, I lived to the fullest. I cried out of grief with that old woman and I suffered.

  In the evening I said ‘Luba, do you still remember that incident?’

  ‘What incident?’

  ‘When I killed that person?’

  ‘And what were you supposed to do? Wait until he killed us?’

  And she taps her spoon so nervously against her plate, thinking to herself.

  ‘I’m a killer, after all.’

  ‘Stop it, you acted like a proper man.’

  It was nice to hear, of course, but then came the comment: ‘Fix the sink in the bathroom. How long can you put it off?’

  I went to his grave. A horrible longing overcame me. I thought it would get me feeling. I’d remember how he died right before my eyes. Maybe something would tremble in my soul. But I didn’t besides the crooked cross and the headstone with ‘Pavlov Gennady Konstantinovicius’, I didn’t see anything. I didn’t feel anything. The grass and the remains were under the ground.

  I ended your journey, friend. You could forgive me.

  Translated by Jayde Will from Jaroslavas Melnikas, Rojalio kambarys, Vilnius: Lit
huanian Writers’ Union Publishers (2004).

  Jaroslavas Melnikas (born 1959) was born in Ukraine, studied literature in Lviv and Moscow, and later settled in Lithuania. He has written books of prose, philosophy and criticism. His work is distinguished by his paradoxical way of thinking, his philosophical narrative tone and his humorous renderings of existential situations.

  Obituary

  Giedra Radvilaviciute

  I’ll begin with some information intended for pretty much everyone. Please turn off your mobile phones for about twenty minutes. It’s a mournful evening in the Interpol Kebab Restaurant in the Old Town. If any foreigners are looking for it, they’ll find it by the smell.

  My dear Ladies and Gentlemen, on this busy Saturday we could certainly pay our last respects to the dearly departed in the usual way with a few well-rehearsed phrases that conform to the sad rules of the obituary and our tired traditions. We would face less gossip and insinuation if we simply said: ‘She will always remain in the hearts of those who knew her. From now on we will be united by the gentle sadness of remembering. May her journey be an easy one for her…’ Or something like that. But clichés and concrete truths have always irritated me, and her as well. And the saying, ‘It is better to speak well about the deceased than to say nothing at all’, we find absolutely infuriating. I feel I have the right to remember my best friend more or less as she was. Why? Because of all of us present here, and perhaps in all of Lithuania, I knew her best: all her biographical details, buried in that small village, all her unfulfilled plans for the future. Although I am painfully shy, and my friend was a live wire, we had some things in common. Some people even confused our faces, tastes and opinions when we would appear in public together at book signings, book fairs or literary events.

  True, she aged, got fat, went grey and became melancholic quite a bit sooner than I did. She once said that it wasn’t the years, but her experience and understanding that were making her grow old. I, too, have noticed that it is always the most infantile, temperamental and optimistic people who remain charming and attractive the longest. If my friend ever lost her earrings, she never bothered to replace them. I, on the other hand, would go out and buy new and fancier ones the very next day, usually from Swarovski. If she ever found that her lipstick was down to the end, she’d be sad that it was almost all used up. Whenever I see the same end, I always think it is just the beginning. My friend would contemplate death – and obituaries – much more often than I would. To this day I have kept in shape and kept my shape. She had dentures for her top teeth put in five years ago whereas I only did this year. The last man she had was a very long time ago (I’m talking about a lover). My boyfriend is here tonight among those gathered to pay their last respects… Thank you, Arturas.

  As I’ve already said, neither of us ever liked the way in which in final farewells, or in election campaigns for that matter, people are suddenly transformed into moral, beautiful (especially in the photographs enlarged hurriedly by undertakers), hospitable beings, almost without sin, who were neither licentious nor alcoholic, but if they did drink irresponsibly it was for a good reason. A year ago, in a small town cemetery, as I was standing by a graveside and listening to the eulogies, I became frightened by the thought that we were probably burying a still-breathing former elementary school teacher, who was ‘eternally young, eighty-four-year-old, energetic and hardworking, forever forging ahead with his creative plans’. Perhaps the saying ‘he lives forever in our hearts’ means precisely that (especially in its most horrifying sense). Perhaps we sugar-coat a medically unsanctioned act intentionally with this euphemism? I am certain that in the accursed rush that generally forms our lives, we do end up burying the occasional body without adequate inquiry into whether the person is really dead. Usually, it’s those elderly folk taking an afternoon nap, who seem to have intentionally showered and combed their hair and covered themselves up with a newspaper as people used to with a prayer book in the old days. Do you remember? I think it was Tsvetaeva who requested not to be rushed to burial, asked for someone to put a mirror to her lips and check a few times whether the silver surface wasn’t dampened by the fog of life too subtle to be seen with the naked eye. And Gogol turned in his grave – or was it Gogol who was checked and Tsvetaeva who turned? I don’t remember now. They’re all the same to me.

  Our dearly departed, if she really is departed (please allow me, as her closest friend, to think of her as ‘missing in action’) was neither energetic, nor beautiful, nor good, nor especially hardworking. Besides that, she drank enthusiastically. Every day. Worst of all, it was without any justifiable reason. So don’t ask why. I look you all in the eye now and I see, nonetheless, that most of you would be happy to hear the answer to this none-too-difficult question. If she were to appear here in the flesh, she would respond as any alcoholic would in the sincere voice of Jerzy Pilch: ‘I drink because I have a weak character. I drink because something in my head is turned upside down. I drink because I am too anaemic and I want to be rejuvenated. I drink because I am nervous and I want to calm my nerves. I drink because I am sad and I want to clear my soul. I drink because I am happily in love. I drink because I am hopelessly looking for love. I drink because I am almost too normal and a little bit of insanity wouldn’t hurt.’

  It’s true that during her last few weeks, the departed drank only swimming-pool water and nettle tea – the latter by the litre. Her cousin, the cybernetic, suggested she use that harsh but nutritious weed to clean out her joints. Diuretics… Dear God, what for? Her job was exclusively intellectual. She did not exercise and she walked like a duck. She rode her bicycle like Molloy… She went to her mother’s house again and again. It’s true that sometimes, seated in front of the computer screen, she would stiffen up and her daughter would have to massage her for about half an hour to loosen her muscles enough so that she was able to stand. Once every two months that same cousin would come to her house dressed in his black mourning suit to repair her computer’s interface with her modem. He wore this suit because he was ready, every time, to bury the computer. Yet when he arrived he would be warm and gentle. He had genetically inherited his gentle demeanour from the May winds. May was the month he was born. It’s odd that he is not here with us today. On his way out he would leave, pasted on the monitor, a photograph of a nettle field along the Vilna River, and in the thoughts of the dearly departed he would leave a longing for a healthy consciousness. While having a smoke in the kitchen he would ask her to make some nettle tea, and once, having worked seven hours and perhaps becoming a bit frustrated, he said that my friend’s relationship with technology was the same as Goethe’s wife’s relationship with spiritual values: ‘She was respectfully conscious of the huge importance of art to humankind.’

  It was probably because of the nettle tea that my friend started having trouble getting to the bathroom in time. This handicap was another thing that she and I had in common. Handicaps, not love, are what tie people most intimately. A friend once told me the story of when she figured out that she really loved her husband. Coming home after a difficult operation, she was being led up the stairs to the third floor by her neighbour; she was bundled up in a winter coat because they had brought her to the hospital in January but released her in February, and she felt confused, didn’t know who or where she was. On the second-floor landing she felt sick. She leaned against the wall, and instinctively put her sleeve to her mouth. That was when she saw that her husband was holding out his large construction worker’s palms with white plaster crusted into his wrinkles out under her lips – just in case she had to throw up on the stairs… Onetime last year when I was crossing Zirmunai Bridge I, too, did not make it to the bathroom in time. You know what I did? I stopped in the café by St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church and splashed my jeans until they were soaked so that they would be dark blue throughout, because I still had to stop by the Ministry of Culture. Fortunately, it was raining.

  We really were identical, like two halves of a coffee bea
n. That’s why once, a long time ago, she entrusted me and no one else to burn the twenty-five letters that her husband had sent to her in addition to the seventeen that she had never sent out to various men. ‘Dust falls to the ground, smoke rises to the heavens.’ Of course I never destroyed them because I thought that it might be worth publishing one or two of the letters, because the most popular literature these days is the kind that falls between fact and fiction. The other reason I made this decision was that her husband, a man who had stood patiently by her for a long time, became famous. It’s telling that the other seventeen, to whom the letters were never mailed, met unremarkable fates. I took some interest in them: most of them were her contemporaries, pernicious leaders now midway through their fifties who, having achieved their prostatus quo, had married women ten or twenty years younger. My friend reacted to this phenomenon positively – she supported adoption, no matter at what age. The divorces in her life were also telling. She got on with (and did not get on with) her children’s father like a suddenly awakened nervousness in an ever-vigilant mind, like quicksilver and a thermometer, like vers libre and a quatrain poem.

  Although we were born in the same town, we met and became friends only during our first year at university. I compare my student days to an intoxicating journey on a cruise ship – few passengers on that ship are still alive today. During my first years in Vilnius, images and events from my hometown would enter my consciousness, usually at night: the cracking wooden banister of my stairway, the overwhelming smell of malt along the riverside, the infestation of green worms. I would recall that disgustingly memorable summer when those worms hung from the stairwells and balconies, crawled on the sidewalks, benches, windowsills and along the spines of books, and crept among carpets of Asian dahlias as if in an odalisque by Ingres. I remember a lonely little goat nibbling grass in the field. From a distance she looked like a rock. Within five years the field had been developed with identical houses. Each of those houses became a home to people who dressed the same, ate the same food and who unlocked their French locks into the same rooms. A scratch on the underside of the hand from tuberculosis turned into a dangerous mark the colour of a sunset, but our lungs remained healthy. I remembered the theatre, to which it was impossible to get tickets. My friend liked to repeat the saying of the cruel but beloved director: the most valuable treasure is the one that’s impossible to lose. This would bring to mind the statues in the bank in the city centre: titans who held up the vaulted ceiling so that it would not crash down onto the roubles being counted and recounted below. Those roubles financed the rockets that the Russians launched into the cosmos. The cosmos was like the dome of the glass ceiling of the bank. I would recall the track at the school playing field – shiny, as if it were paved not with cement but with the sweat of teenagers running a hundred metres in ten seconds. Sometimes I will remember a particular event like when a silent, barely noticeable woman who worked in the sugar factory gave birth to a child during her lunch break and shoved it into the toilet. I can’t remember if they put her in jail or if she had herself committed by virtue of insanity. But for the next few weeks every time I went to the bathroom I would carefully examine the water in the toilet bowl below, imagining that a slippery baby, like a kulak, could swim anywhere through the labyrinths of plumbing, even up to our house.