The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  On our block lived a lady who dressed all in black. She kept a bowl of milk for the cats who came begging on her doorstep. However, the entire neighbourhood knew that every night when she climbed into bed she would step onto a rug made of kitten fur. We would imagine that she had skinned them in the bath in the same way most normal people peeled huge quantities of wild mushrooms in the autumn. On dark evenings, when November turns unnoticeably into December and fallen leaves turn into roughly frozen earth, we would take off at full speed with our sledges right past the black hag. We’d shove her shoulder, gasping out of fear: ‘Murderer! Murderer!’ and she wouldn’t even turn around. Half-blind, she’d focus her milky eyes on the emptiness and wade through the soft snow as if it were short-haired fur. Recounting this now, I feel guilty. What if that rug at the foot of her bed was nothing but an unproven legend? And she herself – what if she were an unhappy, lonely woman, incapable of making friends with her neighbours, whose parents and relatives had all died, for example, in Siberia?

  There was one Veronica1* – the name is associated with unhappy love stories, not only in literature, but also in real life – who was abandoned by her lover and jumped off a three-storey rooftop, breaking her back and legs. Later she married another man and gave birth to identical twins who resembled her former lover, even though seven years had passed since they’d broken up. Back then I didn’t know that with men, the ones with whom you feel a deep – one should say clinical, because it is almost poisonous – attraction of both the body and soul, the relationship can develop in one of two ways: either an all-encompassing but short-lived love with a dependence that is almost identical to hatred, or a long-lived flight from one another that only results in getting increasingly mired in thoughts of each other, like trying to move through sweet syrup, and ultimately all of this turns into nothing.

  There was the town cinema with the films like Mackenna’s Gold, Phantom, and The Spinster. Those days seem so long ago, like an Annie Girardot heroine’s shyness on a rocky shore. In the morning at the beach, the girl would change out of her underwear into a swimsuit under a special long skirt, the gathered waist of which would pull up to her neck. A reporter once asked the actress how she imagined misfortune. Annie answered: ‘As a beautiful, young woman dressed in black, crying on a park bench on a sunny day.’ I wonder now, how my friend imagined happiness. We can no longer ask her… But she probably would have answered very simply: ‘recounting your own life experiences and those of others’; ‘swimming in a lake until it freezes over’; ‘listening to my daughter’s impressions about school’; or ‘watching how the cat sticks out his backside as he stretches in the morning’.

  Some people thought her recently-acquired affection for that household pet was funny; there are those who would argue that this behaviour testified to a slight indication of dementia. First of all, that cat was not a household, but a greenhouse, creature. It had gooseberry-green eyes, while its tail squeezed between its hind legs like a dog’s and its fur electrified into sparks during thunderstorms. My friend became quite offended when, one day in a café, a woman sitting at another table saw the animal in her bag and asked: ‘Excuse me, is that a dog or a cat?’ My friend responded to the question with a question: ‘Excuse me, are you a man or a woman?’ Nonetheless, to call that creature an animal is hard for me as well. My friend would visit her mother’s grave together with the cat. (This seemed pointless to me – the cat did not know her mother.) Together they’d go shopping at the second-hand clothing stores. The cat would grab onto some drapes or warm children’s clothing with its claws, and my friend would buy these for him immediately. At the outdoor market he would effortlessly help my friend choose the best minced meat. My friend believed that he didn’t disappear in order to join the all-too-promiscuous alley cats, but that he walked through the mirror. Like Alice.

  My friend had brought the mirror from her deceased mother’s newly-sold house in her hometown, and wanted to hang it in the bathroom. That was the only place in the apartment where you could have seen yourself at full height. I saw it leaning against the kitchen wall; I fitted into it with my head chopped off. My friend said that she could see history in the mirror. The simple past fitted in that one-dimensional space like a ship built out of matchsticks by an inmate residing inside a narrow-necked bottle, even though from the outside this might appear impossible. During certain hours at dusk, the mirror would decide to reflect not an image of the hall, with its untidy shoes, sack of potatoes, the half-open bathroom door, and jackets and coats hung on hooks, but rather a slice of memory: also a hall, but in another city, fifteen, twenty, or even thirty years ago. In the old apartment, the mirror was hung facing the entrance, reflecting a variety of people entering and departing – now into my friend’s kitchen. Usually her mother would appear. She would step through the door into the mirror. She was young, dishevelled, indecently licking an ice cream that she had purchased on the street, or dressed in a flannel robe, and on crutches. It was a month ago that I sensed in that kitchen the strange aroma of turpentine and eucalyptus. My friend thought that it must have been the smell of her mother’s arthritis ointment.

  Other relatives were also reflected in the mirror. Sometimes her uncle would appear with a stool and a bowl; setting the bowl on top of the stool, he would use a rusty grater to grate farmers’ soap into the bowl. He used the soap to wash her newborn daughter’s nappies. He would play the saxophone or a game of chess on a special table; sometimes, with tears in his eyes, he would declare checkmate on himself. Although a lost game would not mean the end of her uncle’s life, he would immediately remind us that he wanted to be cremated: ‘Don’t pour my ashes into an urn. I can’t stand them. Sprinkle me into a paper bag, blow up the bag, and burst it on Sunday at the outdoor market, as children do.’

  My friend’s two-year-old daughter would also appear in the mirror. Smiling at the kitchen furniture, the barefoot girl would come so close that it looked as if she were about to step out into the other side; but having come close in her imagination, if she wasn’t sick, she would pick her nose and wipe the snot on the mirror. Then, swearing, my friend would clean the mirror from this side with a little rag. Grandmother would re-wind two balls of wool into one, a fatter thread would be made out of two. She’d wind it on paper spools made of the wrinkled-up letters of her dead husband to another woman. The neighbour, who had once had a large two-acre allotment, would appear. She would bring us carrots, cabbage, beetroot and dill. I began to doubt my friend’s sanity when she would take those vegetables (from the mirror).

  On her kitchen floor there was always parsley, mint, dill and scraps of thread, but I think that these were brought home from the Hale marketplace stuck to her shoes. The neighbour who brought vegetables had a dog. She would take him to the garden as well. The retriever didn’t bite, but he barked at every cyclist passing by, every piece of newspaper floating on the wind and every starling pecking the ripe cherries. Some breeds of dog are big, but timid and unthreatening. My friend’s cat attacked the neighbour’s dog in the mirror and chased him away, thus violating the permissible boundary of healthy fantasy. The mirror broke into five pieces, which slowly, almost as if they were weightless, dispersed and settled in the kitchen’s darkness, like metal garden puddles reflecting the herring-coloured sky.

  My friend said that after this event, her memory suddenly became weak. I noticed this without her needing to mention anything. Before, she could remember perfectly the Arabic surnames of all the terrorists who so meritoriously contributed to the history of their countries, but now she confused them. She said that the Ministry of Education had finally chosen an adviser who was well acquainted with the literature of the period between the world wars and the last century, namely Alfonsas Nyka-Viliunas2*. Invited to speak about literature at the university, she lamented that the female students, compared to those of our own Mackenna’s Gold days, were hardened in their ways, they detested post-modernism and were not open to discussion. They were surprised at my f
riend’s attempt to analyse Zemaite’s The Daughter-in-Law in a very contemporary and thorough way, as thoroughly as the length of a seminar allows.

  ‘What do you think Katre’s final words “please forgive me” mean?’ she once asked the class. Without a doubt, they could not identify with the final, submissive gesture of a rural character oppressed by the family patriarch and unable to come to terms with this. Probably Old Vingis had got Katre pregnant and when she begs forgiveness from Jonas and Mrs Vingis, instead of being accepted along with her good fortune to be with child (the source of which should not matter to a woman), she is scorned as worthless. During her last weeks, my friend became entirely disillusioned with literature. She would hum the song ‘I am so alone, so hellishly alone…’ claiming that the forgotten, slightly snobbish twentieth-century Russian writer had a perfect sense of language and solved ingenious linguistic puzzles: ‘Ya nikak ne ponimal, kak sovetski veter ochiutilsia v veterinare. Shto delayet slovo tomat v avtomate. I kak prevratit zubr v arbuza.’3* He had intentionally avoided novelistic narrative, playing a sophisticated game of cat and mouse to taunt readers who understand plot to be simply a sequence of intriguing events.

  When – it’s no longer relevant how – my friend’s cat disappeared, I worried that the kids in her yard, deprived of their daily pleasure of patting its head with the strangely folded ears as it peeked out of her bag, might decide to play some nasty prank on my friend. They might decide to kick a ball through her only remaining cracked window. They might cover the window with the newspaper Lietuvos Rytas from the outside at night. They might fill a paper sack with shit and leave it on her doormat. In winter they might race past her on sledges up the hill. Towards the Gates of Dawn… They might grab her by the shoulders, shouting ‘murderer, murderer!’ and what could she do? Wade through the soft snow as if through that short-haired fur with her dry eyes fixed on the railroad tracks? What’s most painful about this is that the disappearance of her pet undoubtedly contributed to the fact that my friend never finished her second book or the essay she was writing. It’s true that I can’t prove that she was in fact undertaking these particular creative pursuits, but every living person leaves something unfinished when they depart. Sometimes those things are great, sometimes banal and sometimes even obscene. My mother’s work colleague’s sixty-year-old husband, for example, died with his mistress. To be more precise, he died on her. The frightened young woman, before dialling the emergency service, rolled her boyfriend over onto his back, dressed him in his suit, and, completely illogically, put on his shoes. If that wasn’t enough, she pressed a book into his hands in order to further neutralise the situation. Stories about this nonetheless tragic event would not have spread as quickly as a good joke if it weren’t for the book’s title: it was the then popular novel by Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.

  And the aforementioned unfinished essay that my friend was writing was supposed to be called ‘The Last Time’. You know, my friend used to say to me, there are volumes and volumes written about the mysteries of the first time. We could both recite by heart the McCullough that we’d read in our childhood: ‘Bowing, she gently pressed her lips to his wound, her hands slid down his chest towards his shoulders, slowly, intoxicatingly caressing them. Surprised, frightened, trying with all his strength to free himself, he pushed her head away, but somehow she ended up in his embrace once again – like a snake that had ensnared his will and was holding tight. Pain, the church, even God were all forgotten.’ We must admit that from a literary angle, the last time has been unjustly neglected.

  After all, there are thousands of women who have experienced, contemplated the act even-handedly, without emotions, from… let’s say a three-year distance. I can formulate for you precisely, she said, how the last time differs from the first. It’s unique, because it is unrepeatable, in the literal meaning of this word. The first, you know, will be repeated, unless of course at the end, as in the famous case in our town, you die. But the last time can only be repeated in memory, dreams and essays. In principle, it’s all one and the same – formulas without structure, as the contemporary literary critic Jurate Sprindyte-Baranova7* would say. I know that when she wrote, my friend would recklessly base her work on her own – and sometimes my – experience. Her experience of the last time was with a guy named Vitka – a painter and not the estate agent representing her, as one text has stated. She preferred self-conscious, strong, but painfully sensitive, sexual, even bashful, cement-spattered labourers who ate canned fish imported from Asia with a spoon and cursed expressively. Vitka was so self-conscious that he scraped and planed the corridor walls until he’d removed half of the wall. ‘I’ll finish tomorrow. My word is solid,’ he said to my friend, stepping back two metres from the wall, constantly evaluating his work; but he did not finish for another two weeks. They became intimate in that unheated corridor to the melody of the long, drawn-out meow of the jealous cat.

  Her second book, The Beauty of Death Strikes, also remains unfinished. This was supposed to be a book of prêt à porter funeral wear featuring colour photographs of the highest quality and short descriptions, the text was going to be white on a black background. Clothing created for the final journey was supposed to be affordable for any relatives of the deceased, but the projected coffee-table book was not intended for the average book buyer, because it was to be priced at a hundred and fifty litas, otherwise the cost of the photographs and the models’ fees would never have been covered. I saw some of the completed photographs. The models lay inside coffins, dressed in specially created suits. A businessman who had committed suicide. A motorcyclist who’d been killed on the road. An émigré who met his end in Ireland – a man rendered an abstract statistic. A politician. An ordinary guy – a beekeeper. A beautiful woman. A homeless person. A poet. A florist. A child. Each got their own page with a short caption underneath the photograph. Only the New Lithuanians and sexual minorities received two-page spreads.

  ‘Death,’ my friend claimed, ‘must be public – like sex, chastity, indigestion and shoe inserts that guarantee quality of life. It’s no accident that funeral photographs adorn the front pages of all the best newspapers. I saw a shocking television show about a fire, which had destroyed a home in a village. The cameraman was filming the burnt corpse of a baby. People long for images of death and burials. Flipping through such pages, they crave cheese and beer. Their children frolic and shoot at one another. I wouldn’t want to fall behind the times with my naïve work and turn into a pitiful anachronism. Why is it that for birthdays, weddings or divorces, even when we go to the theatre, we dress up, never begrudging the price of stylish accessories; yet we allow ourselves to get buried in galoshes and dresses that don’t even zip at the back and in a colour that we wouldn’t be caught dead in?’

  I remember a photo of a dead prostitute in my friend’s book. The model lay in a white coffin littered with pink feathers dressed in only a corset and azure stockings attached to garters. The corners of the coffin were stylishly decorated with pleats made from the same material as the stockings. The model’s head rested on a stuffed poodle. Her perfect legs and breasts were frivolously covered with several issues of Stilius (Style) magazine. In her hand the woman was holding a pink… mobile phone. I expect that the book would have been successful. I also expect that someone will make good use of this barely exploited idea, if not this year then in a few years. Shrouds don’t burn.

  And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, you can turn your mobile phones back on. I am coming to the end. And during this part of my speech, nobody has the power to stop me. I am hurrying like everybody else. I see how several women are crossing their legs, afraid, like I am, that they will not make it to where they absolutely must go. Besides, I want to buy some grapefruit and wine today. If anyone were to ask why I drink, I would answer like Jerzy Pilch: ‘I drink because my character is weak. 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 nerv
ous and I want to calm my nerves. I drink because I am sad and I want to clear my soul.’ To conclude, if I really consider myself honest, not wanting to make you too sad, I have to explain who inspired this talk. One of my many close friends – among whom I consider all of you, especially those who came here by accident – is always asking: ‘Why aren’t you writing anything anymore?’ I answer very directly: ‘Because the narrator in me has died. Or perhaps it would be more convenient to say that she has gone missing in action.’