The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  Although I am extremely shy and she was a real live wire, we had some things in common. Some people, usually at public events like bookfairs or book signings, when we would appear together – more precisely, we would meld into one – would confuse our faces, tastes, and opinions. It’s true, we were born in the same town. The same day, the same hour, during the same snowstorm. However, we became friends at university – we met during our first year. Because that was exactly when I started to write. Until then, if I still remember correctly, I was staring out the window at a little goat, which from a distance looked like a rock.

  In a few years the field at the edge of town was developed with identical houses. Each one of those houses soon became home to people who dressed the same, liked the same food, and who opened their French locks into the very same rooms. Nobody would even have suspected that one sunny June morning one of the many Veronicas – and all love stories about women named Veronica are sad, both in literature and in real life – abandoned by her lover, would have the courage to jump from a three-storey house. She would jump and soar all the while holding, as I recall it, pressed against her armpit, not crutches, but two little boys. Her twin sons, like two drops of water, resembled her past lover even though thirty-five years had passed since their break up… The woman in black, whose relatives all died of starvation in Siberia, is buried in the cemetery on the outskirts of town. I found her abandoned grave by accident in late autumn when I was attending someone else’s funeral – a former elementary school teacher. November was turning into December and the leaves were frozen. The aster blossoms on the square patch of black soil had turned brown and the ordinary stone monument, built by the unknown good Samaritan, resembled the arched back of a cat. It was located in the shameful section of the cemetery devoted to suicides; the monument leaned to one side, nearly touching the cemetery fence, and was crafted out of field stones stuck together with veins of cement… The sugar factory worker, she flushed her baby down the toilet and spent seven years in jail. She never married. She moved to Vilnius. I always buy grapefruit at her kiosk, which is called ‘Marlen’, but I don’t know why. It’s not even on my way home; it’s right next to the former railroad-workers’ hospital. The woman, who I still easily recognise, puts on green fuzzy fingerless gloves at the beginning of winter so that her fingers are bare and able to move unhindered. I watch as, somewhat agitated but always polite, she weighs my heavy golden-coloured fruit; she places the grapefruit carefully into the open plastic bag, as if afraid of harming the babies’ heads.

  Sometimes I tire of reworking other people’s fates. Your relationship with a text is similar to your relationship with a man you love with whom you connect deeply, body and soul. (One should really say clinically, because it verges on poisonous.) Thinking about sentences, punctuation and words, you connect with them as with a blind and impossible to remedy, yet brief, love affair. The dependence is quite similar to hatred. Later, you distance yourself from the text, sinking into it in your thoughts as if into sweet syrup, until in the end it turns into nothing. Recently I have been occupied with something else. A very secret thing. Just like a particular, somewhat snobbish, twentieth-century Russian writer, I decipher linguistic puzzles. He would intentionally distance himself from his narrative with sophisticated games of cat and mouse in order to taunt his more stupid readers, who understood plot as a sequence of events. I imagine him comfortably seated in a mismatched chair, wearing a silk robe and a nightcap made of butterfly netting. Between his porcelain teeth, which he had put in during the years that he spent in America, there would be an ever-smouldering cigar.

  I think while standing in line at the post office or grocery store, while riding the trolleybus, while drinking nettle tea diluted with white wine, while staring into the dark of the night, while stroking my cat. My head hurts as I try to imagine the solution to the riddle. What does the Estonian kroner have in common with my grandmother Ona, who lived under President Smetona? (She would spin yarn from two skeins into one, on paper spools made out of old letters written to another woman.) How does a false tooth, fastened onto a rotten root barely holding on to one’s jawbone, became a crown? How does a news agency like ELTA become TALENT5*? Why do style magazines always appear stolen to me? And finally, and most importantly, who is this asshole, and on what grounds did he dare to call any penis Dick?

  First published in Giedra Radvilaviciute, Nekrologas, Siaures Atenai, 2006–11–18, no 821.

  Translated by Jura Avizienis from Giedra Radvilaviciute, Sianakt as miegosiu prie sienos, Vilnius: Baltos lankos, 2010.

  Giedra Radvilaviciute (born 1960) studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University and lived for some time in Chicago. Though she published her first prose works in the 1990s, she only came to the fore as an essayist in 1999. Since then she has published several impressive collections in which she blurs the lines between short story and essay. She is one of the most well-known women prose writers in Lithuania.

  * * *

  1* Veronica was the protagonist of the famous work Paskenduole (The Drowned Woman) by Antanas Vienuolis.

  2* Here the author/speaker combines two similar sounding names: Alfonas Nyka-Niliunas is a well known émigré poet; Giedrius Viliunas is a contemporary literary scholar.

  3* The wordplay referenced in these sentences (which are Nabokov’s) is based on the presence of root words in other, unrelated words in Russian. ‘In no way could I understand how the Soviet wind (Rus. veter) found itself in the word ‘a veterinary surgeon’ (Rus. veterinar). What the word tomato is doing in an automated machine (Rus. avtomat). And how does a bison (Rus. zubr) turn into a melon (Rus. arbuz).’

  4* The speaker/author combines two similar sounding names: Jurate Sprindyte is a well known literary scholar; Jurate Baranova is a philosopher and essayist.

  5* This wordplay between the word talent and the name of the news agency is likely a criticism of the increasing focus on entertainment and celebrity in the news industry [Ed. note].

  Colour and Form

  Birute Jonuskaite

  There is a fire of nasturtium that lies in the eyes of cats. I agree with Lesmian: the redness of the nasturtium is truly fiery – inspirational, dangerous and fiery – while its leaves are a luxuriantly healthy green. That is until the small, repulsive larvae appear in great numbers.

  All the flowers from mum’s garden, found in the space surrounding the house that comprises the mosaic of my childhood, were interesting to me in their own way, with certain memories clinging to them, encoded in my brain according to colours and smells, connecting me with the name days of people close to me, with holidays, or with particular family events.

  Peonies stand for the end of the school year. With their enormous white and pink heads, they represent huge bouquets for everybody, even for the teachers one liked the least – after all, there were a couple months of freedom ahead.

  Dahlias stand for the beginning of the school year. The rigid blossoms, seemingly crammed with petals, went only to the class teacher. During all of those eight years, there was not one female teacher who was also a tutor. There were only male tutors in the following order: a bent-over, deaf bachelor; a crazy half-wit alcoholic bachelor still searching for a wife; and a well-kept bachelor who flirted with everyone, but who loved boys. You wouldn’t have brought those happy dahlias to any one of them yourself, but mum would order you to, and she would pick them herself. It was no skin off her back as the whole area near the fence was full of them. In Lithuanian one says that the woodpecker is colourful, but dahlias even more so.

  Lilacs stand for the violet name day of my mother. Isn’t it for this reason that she died so young? After all, violet is the colour of sorrow and anxiety. The Crucified Christ is covered with violet tulles before Easter while the priests wear violet garments…

  Lilies stand for the white, sweetly fragrant anniversary of my cousin’s death – an aberration of fate: he was run over by a train on the eve of his eighteenth birthda
y, in July, right as they were blooming.

  Rue stands for first communion, and a crown that never seems to stay on my head. So what if the back of my head is still not particularly sinful; my hair is thin and short, and even with a number of hairpins I can’t manage to keep that somewhat heavy green halo on it. It slides to one side, then the other, while the hairpins stick out like the thorns of a briar patch.

  Before chrysanthemums had come into fashion, the violet, dark blue little suns that I now know to be called blue felicia were used on All Saints Day and All Souls Day, and it was as if all the constellations had fallen from the sky onto the graves. Pansies also stand for graves, graves and more graves. From spring to autumn, in all possible colours and on all possible occasions, we come to weed them and water them on feast days. It’s an occasion to ask about grandparents, none of whom I ever saw.

  Sage was one of my mum’s favourites: the little red soldiers of Napoleon, and that’s all.

  Snapdragons, which we knew simply as dragons, stand for the awfully funny lips of rabbits in all warm colours. ‘Make one, make one, don’t you know how to make a crown out of dragons?’ the children would say, annoying one another. It was an enormous source of shame if you didn’t know how to weave them together.

  Cowslips make me think of the sunny shores of the lake. Smelling of wild strawberries, they are always close to hand; you only needed to snoop around a little among the tall grass to find them. During a sweet hour or so of oblivion, you would stretch out among the bent grass and tear the yellowish bells off the cowslips one after another, and suck and suck with your eyes closed, disappearing beyond the borders of dad’s fields, beyond the border of the blue lake, even beyond the nearby forest. You are suspended somewhere in the most pleasant point of the universe, light and formless, able to become anything you want, floating between strange galaxies, feeling no danger at all, no fears whatsoever, neither the flow of time, nor a feeling of belonging to a planet, community, or family of some sort. You don’t even care about the ants climbing up your legs – even those brown ones that painfully pee on you. Cowslips are the harmless narcotics of childhood summers, leaving only an unforgettable love for sunny colours.

  Marsh marigolds belong to the same category. A cold wave of air would rise from the earth. All puddles would turn to stone at night, and in the morning it would be impossible to break them, even with the hardest of shoe heels. And in the evening the ducks quacked loudly in the swamp belonging to the neighbour Jankauskas; the lapwings (pewits) just having flown home, greeting everyone. I would put rubber boots on and head straight for the huge puddles and ditches from which each year they surfaced from the water. You would find yellowish little clouds and would immediately wonder how to reach them, how to pick at least a little bouquet without falling in all the way up to your knees with your boots on. You would either manage to do it, or you didn’t. You would march home victoriously with dry feet, or in shoes smelling of swamp, because you had a fistful of flowers, full of dampness, the very first flowers to conquer the departing winter despite their fragility and tendency to wilt quickly. You needed them as proof that it has already started, that you are bringing it home and that the entire house will wake up and will overflow with spring.

  ***

  If it was only the fire of nasturtium that burned in the eyes of a cat, it would be a cat that walked alone and returned in the night only when the consequences of war become unbearable: torn ears, swollen eyes, wounds festering over its whole body. Who knows if it is due to such an ability to make use of freedom that the Egyptians embalmed cats after they died, burying them in enormous necropolises and mourning them just as they did people. Who knows whether that is why killing a cat was sacrilege to them, and a degenerate who did just that was sentenced to death.

  Why was a Sphinx built in Giza in 10,500 B.C.? Perhaps they knew something we don’t know today? Perhaps they understood something essential? That’s what I ask my cat, Geisha, in whose eyes I most often see a calming tenderness. And just so I would fully believe in her, the cat begins to purr.

  Before Geisha, there had been various cats in our house. Generally, they aroused contradictory feelings in me: love and anxiety. Warm, soft and pleasant strokes, blissful purring on long winter nights somewhere near your feet, your side, or even on your lap. But it’s enough to look into the eyes of these animals and feel how everything inside them is totally the opposite: a proud independence, worthy of respect, their form and their elegance when they move. So where does this insurmountable feeling of danger come from? The feeling that the cat will sneak up and attack, that it will become a huge black panther? That in the night it will crawl into your bed, or the bed of your child, and suck the life out of you or him? In contrast to a dog, you can never trust a cat – who knows what century that belief, alive and well, comes from. Dogs rip, bite and tear the faces, shins and arms of their owners, maul their small children, but the harm cats do to people is never reported. So why does their gaze scare us? Maybe a legend somewhere in my subconscious that gives me no peace is responsible, a legend about a Sphinx that lived on a rock near the road to the city of Thebes that would offer a riddle to travellers, and those who could not solve it were torn apart? Do we still fear that we will be unable to solve the riddle? Did this question torment the painter Gustave Moreau, who depicted The Triumphant Sphinx with the elegant face of a proud woman adorned with a crown?

  Geisha was nothing like a big-eyed, big-eared, wrinkled cat-sphinx. She didn’t have any documents showing her lineage, but according to my small daughter, she had ‘a pedigree’. Perhaps it was her genes which determined that when growing up in a flat – a rather small, enclosed space – she was affectionate and tidy. Even when she was young, she didn’t crawl up the curtains, didn’t push the flower pots off the windowsill, didn’t pee on the carpet, on the bed or in someone’s shoes. Rather, she would lap up water from the sink or tub, and not her own dish. She particularly liked to take part when the children had a bath. They splashed around in the tub, giggling with delight at all the foam, and she’d sit on the edge and, it seemed, could not look away. Or she’d walk on the edges of the tub, back and forth, back and forth. Her curiosity would even get the better of her, and she would slip and fall into the water.

  She slept in the funniest of poses: with her legs stretched out, two to the front and two to the back, just like a piglet. One paw would cover her eyes and she would twist all around like a little number eight. All four legs were raised and curled up into a little ball in such a way that at first glance, you couldn’t distinguish her head from her tail. She walked extremely gracefully – in a way only Russian blue bloods can – and her smooth fur allowed her to express herself in the most refined, cat-like shapes. She was a flirt – a quiet, elegant flirt. She would reveal her voice only in very exceptional circumstances: when she was left alone for a long period of time, she would give a few meows in greeting to those who had returned. Otherwise she would meow when she was very hungry – for instance, when she didn’t get frozen sprats for three days or so. ‘What, am I going to live with just dry food?’ she complained angrily, having gone to her little dish for the umpteenth time to find nothing. But these complaints stopped when we moved from the flat to live in a house. She discovered mice and little birds. That was a new dessert.

  She was of course confused at first by the increased amount of space. Going outside for the first time in her life, she still didn’t understand what freedom meant. The appearance of any other animal – be it a dog, a cat or even a crow – frightened her. She hurtled toward the tree like an arrow and got to the top in an instant. You had to coax her patiently for a long time to come down. She didn’t stick her nose outside for a few days after such adventures. But one day, just as I opened the door, she shot out to the yard like a bullet.

  She didn’t come back for three days. We had almost gotten past our stage of mourning when she reappeared acting as if nothing had happened, but looking at her gait, you could see it was mu
ch freer and somehow full of satisfaction and self-confidence, I understood that Geisha’s way of thinking had totally changed. She had become the master of her house and her territory. She went past the other cats like the new Lithuanian elite went past people living in a landfill. All she was missing was an Armani purse on her shoulder and Swarovski crystal in her hair. And perhaps she had them – who knows what style-cats like. She was like an elegant, pretty girl who had just married well – to a good, rich, older man, of course. She even stopped being afraid of our bitch dog. Our wolf-dog bitch was of a meeker type and tended to get along with all living creatures, thus the appearance of the cat most likely amused rather than annoyed her. She would run up, smell the cat and then run off. But if that smelling lasted a little bit longer, Geisha would smack her on the nose in such a way that the poor thing cowered in pain. When the cat, having jumped on the windowsill, sat in its favourite sphinx pose, it raised its head high and educated the bitch with the glare of a queen: no familiarity whatsoever, miss! Don’t stick your nose where you don’t need to! You’ll get the white bow-tie on my neck dirty!

  However, spring, like the marriages of trophy wives with old men, has a happy beginning and… a much more serious end. She walked around the yard for a whole month like Musetta from La Bohème wearing a sexy costume and high heels made by the famous Lithuanian designer Juozas Statkevicius. Geisha started becoming lazier and slower, snoozing on the chair and hiding under the tablecloth for days on end. She would go outside only to perform the necessary duties. It seemed that she started to become disinterested in the world beyond the borders of the house. The round, flirty eyes full of devilishness lost their nasturtium fire; anxiety churned in them more and more often. Every touch, and now she needed them more and for longer, was cause for long, monotonous mantras.