The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  After some time, she hardly left my side. It was summer and each morning I went to the nearby lake to swim. Geisha went along. She sat on the shore and waited patiently until I finished swimming and got out of the water. We would both return home and together weed the gardens, walk and pick strawberries. She rubbed up against me, jumped on my neck, poked me with her nose, and in the evening when I sat at the computer, she tried to lie down on my lap. The cat constantly underfoot sapped my patience. Her walking between my feet led to ‘accidents’ on more than one occasion: dishes would run out of my hands, I would spill soup on myself, step on her tail or paw, but she still refused to stop.

  Geisha’s last, fateful day was in the beginning of August. I was weeding the strawberry patch. The cat didn’t only snuggle up to my legs and my gloved hands – she would always approach me from the front, look straight into my face and meow. She meowed like she was crying, with an undisguised fear; she meowed like never before, full of an unspeakable concern. Then I remembered my fateful day – when I laid next to screaming women for an entire day. They were also afraid. They also felt pain.

  The box lined with soft little blankets had been prepared long ago. Emergency medical care had also been prepared, in the form of my daughters and me. I tried to explain all this to Geisha, but she was not put at ease. She accompanied me to the house with the same ear-splitting meowing, most likely lamenting her situation in the name of all the works of God of the feminine gender. She begged for help. But how could I help her?

  We talked. She meowed, I told her about my experiences, the experiences of my girlfriends, I tried to joke around, said that it’s like that for all of them, that it will pass, that we are able to endure everything, that I won’t leave her – just so she wouldn’t worry and concentrate better on the unavoidable process. I worked as a cat psychologist until 2 am. She didn’t want to be alone for one minute in the little box, which to me appeared so comfortable, safe and sufficiently spacious. If I sat next to her and petted her, it was fine, but if I got the idea to snooze on the sofa and pulled my hand away, the cat screamed even louder and jumped on my lap. I had to endure until the end, with one hand on her back, and that’s how we awaited the first kitten.

  Then she fell silent and calmed down. Raising her head, she very clearly told me to go away: I’m not afraid anymore. I will continue on my own. Thank you, you can go to bed.

  In the morning, there were four little ones in her cosy embrace. I never saw a better mother than Geisha. She would have ripped to pieces any intruder who would have thought to harm her children, just like that Sphinx of Thebes. She even changed her eating habits because of them. She started eating meat, chewing it with a mouthful of her favourite grass in the yard; she tried soups, cheese, pancakes – everything we offered her. Like the wisest of dieticians, she chose only what a nursing mother needed so the children would grow up to be healthy and strong. And that’s how they grew up before going on to other owners, and when the next spring came, Geisha once again became an elegant flirt, eating only dry food, tinned cat food from the shop and frozen sprats.

  And that’s how it is every year, and that’s how this work of God amazes me with her wisdom and sacrificing motherhood, her passion and independence, with her fiery furry and audacious elegance, her tenderness and savage hunting instincts (even when she wasn’t hungry, she would bring home small birds and mice and put them near the door on the welcome mat). What awed me most was the fact that everything fitted together harmoniously – everything that is within us, from the most amazing to the most horrible, all basic instincts, all of the most beautiful shapes and the most secretive depths. Maybe that’s why cats arouse such anxiety in us? Maybe that’s why they make films about cat-people? Maybe that’s why there are so many of them in all sorts of artwork? What is it that cannot give us peace? How did it happen that what was once the defender of motherhood and home, a protector from demons and other bad spirits, became the embodiment of the devil’s works and witches’ spells during the Middle Ages? The fate of cats and of women accused of witchcraft was the same – they were burned in town squares, and not just in any old town but in 16th century Paris, where live cats were thrown into the bonfire in the Place du Châtelet. The cats will burn, thus the seed of the devil will as well? Why do we spit, even now, when we see a cat, especially a black one and all the more if it has the gall to cross our path?

  Witches perceived more than the average person. Perhaps cats discern things better? And those who see, know and understand more – for them it’s easier.

  So what is it in the eyes of cats that bothers us? Is it the flame of nasturtium, or something that has been interpreted in various ways over thousands of years, but which is still an unsolvable riddle?

  Translated by Jayde Will from Birute Jonuskaite, Kregzdelaiskis, Vilnius: Versus aureus (2007).

  Birute Jonuskaite (born 1959) is a prose writer, poet and essayist. She was born and raised in the village of Seivai, in the Punskas region of Poland and studied journalism at Vilnius University. After graduating from university she lived in Poland, Lithuania and Canada. She returned to settle in Lithuania where she now works at the Lithuanian Writers’ Union. She is the author of the novels The Great Island (Didzioji sala, 2 vol., 1997–1999) and The Tango of White Zippers (Baltu uztrauktuku tango, 2009), the short story collections The Bridge of Grass-snakes (Zalciu tiltas, 2002) and Zip Me Up (Uzsagstyk mane, 2011). Jonuskaite has also translated poetry, novels and essays from Polish into Lithuanian. She has been awarded several literary prizes and her work has been widely translated.

  Christmas with a Stranger

  Danute Kalinauskaite

  Kolya came all geared up: hair combed, the face of a fifty-year-old, the dyed ‘chestnut’ hair and eyebrows of a thirty-year-old with a bottle of Sobieski in his inside pocket. He cradled a three-litre jar of marinated bell peppers in his arms like a month-old child. This wasn’t emptiness wrapped up in a raincoat, you’d say at once, but a body full to the brim with the warmest of blood. And that body wore a fake leather jacket, a Turkish sweater covered with rhombuses, and, as was fitting when going to visit someone, bright red socks and the pointiest of shoes with a raised heel. What’s more he had a gold signet ring. And Kolya’s scent is not one of fear, or the dampness of shrouds and mouse fur, but of tobacco, garlic and Adidas.

  During the first hour we got to know one another’s ‘general contours’. According to my horoscope, I’m a Scorpio whereas he’s a Cancer. I hail from Kaunas; he’s from the outskirts of Moscow, but up until he was eight years old, before his father, an anti-ballistic missile defence officer, brought him to Lithuania in 1960, he grew up with his grandparents in Siberia. What does he remember from those times? The sound of trees uprooting when the winds picked up in Siberia and the birches would flex like bent grass. He remembers how grandpa and grandma, living in a log cabin, would chase each other naked through the snow in the winter and would both go to the forest to wrestle bears, with grandma piling in first. She smelled of manly sweat, knew all the herbs, smoked a pipe and would always shove the tobacco into the belly of the pipe with her little finger, the nail of which was long and yellow. He also remembers the trees cut down in mid-winter and the white flesh and red heart of the wood steaming in the snow. He recalls the tracks of wolves, weasels and black grouse as well as cedar nuts and boiling snow in the round aluminium teapot. Kolya is immune to everything – both in body and in soul – because privivki, the Russian vaccines from those times, still work perfectly. Suddenly – perhaps so that his words were made flesh – he rolls up the sleeve of his shirt right there in front of my face and exposes a muscular, hairy forearm with a tattoo of the name ‘Lyosha’ and a snake curled around an anchor. Look, he says…

  In turn, I also tell him this and that. It seems that he genuinely likes my story from yesterday, but that kind of ‘humour’, in his opinion, is common in divorced, lonely men. By the way, he is also divorced, more than once, and now he has decided to live with just a c
at for company – a fire-coloured cat named Bill (second name: Clinton). Once he brought it to work and while Kolya was plastering, Bill sat on the windowsill with narrowed eyes and, understandably, could not avoid accidently pressing Siamese hair fossils into the corner of the window – to a future sea and Devonian period. Generally though, Kolya was not some steppe wolf, God forbid; he has a girlfriend named Lelka, twenty years his junior, and she, as they all are, is full of womanly whims: clouds of perfumes, hot chocolate, natural silk and furs, reading only the ‘odes’ written on the left side of restaurant menus, but not the ones on the right. When he, paying for all of this, once decided to test her feelings and asked what three things – hinting at the fact that they should be people – she would take with her to a desert island, she replied without hesitation: Gone With the Wind, fishnet stockings and a manicure kit, because without work she would die. Kolya was not among those things. Still, one could understand the manicure kit – but you could sense the resentment in Kolya’s voice and along with it the seriousness of a justifiable exception: she’s a manicurist. She attended not only to the hands of the average Olya and Liolya, but also to the hands of two government ministers: the minister of agriculture and transport, and not long ago the minister of defence joined him.

  And right this minute it was her, his woman, who was phoning. Having gone out into the corridor, Kolya covered the receiver with his palm: ‘Lelka, I am with a client right now. I’m with a client. Well, you could say it’s an exceptional case… I’ll buy it. I’ll bring it home… Nadeysia i zhdi – hope and wait.’ Finishing the words of his song, he deftly and secretly tried on my ushanka that was hanging on the coat rack, and then, crouching down in front of the mirror and hunching his shoulders, he then began springing up and down on his raised heels and, squinting, threw a few jabs into the air – boxers have a special term for this: shadow boxing.

  So what, for Pete’s sake, is bothering me, a man of intellect, he asks me when he returns. He asks tactically. He can see when people are being dragged down by worries even though they try to crack jokes. For some reason, especially during the holidays, people like to jab forks into their throats, slip nooses around their necks, jump from bridges or out of windows, and their guardian angel, unfortunately – and it really is a pity – cannot manage every time to slide a fluffy pillow under the head of a good person in time. I don’t want to explain anything besides what I’ve already told Kolya, but slowly, and I don’t know why myself – I only invited him over for his presence after all – I begin to talk to him…

  I tell him how the other day I went to my mailbox and how I did not find the typical junk mail inviting me to buy Jysk flower boxes and sets of packing tape as well as ads promising a ‘cheap and quick divorce’ or to ‘reach spiritual harmony (call Irena at 223…)’. Instead, someone had accidentally thrown a piece of paper into the mailbox – a blank piece of paper. But it was the colour of skim milk. And suddenly, in a thin thread of association, came the realisation that this was the emptying of being, I told Kolya. It struck me: Finita la commedia… Feelings, the heart, how could I have thought that taste, smell, touch and even sight could end like an ink cartridge or a bank account. When my wife moved out it seemed to me that not only did she take her Singer, not only did she make off with the fine china dinner set and the ‘soft’ furniture, but she also stole my autumn, my winter. My Christmas. I was left with bare walls, morning and afternoon. She even took the non-essentials – the grey evening ashtray into which the day waned and for which she, I know, certainly wouldn’t have any use. And on top of all that, Kolya, my mother dies and I end up… an orphan. Afterwards, as if deliberately, the telephone and door bell start to forget you. Someone with manicure scissors, the kind Lelka uses to cut the nails of the government ministers, cuts your links to the world one by one. Air becomes increasingly rare until one day, under the bell jar – again, this isn’t my invention but a classic for suicides – there’s no oxygen left. You lie in bed in the early morning, the air around you feels heavy and though it may seem that there are many more amazing things to see, you see only one: the reflection of the pathologist-faced moon, shining above you as if viewed from the dark water of the bottom of a river. What else could be reflected there when your big toe has a morgue number attached?

  Kolya listened, frozen, with a poppy seed kuciukas1 in his mouth. He glanced furtively at my foot under the table. Afterwards he looked again, as if he wanted to be certain of what he saw, i.e. that he didn’t see a morgue number. Having contemplated this for a little while, and clearly feeling that he needed to, Goddamit, seize the initiative into his own hands, he asked, unhesitatingly: ‘Kostas, do you have both kidneys? You haven’t sold one to pay your debts, have you? You don’t have cirrhosis of the liver, do you? Your bile’s in order? Your hips, and especially your knees, they’re not screwed on? Your eyes aren’t made out of plastic, are they? I don’t even need to ask about your heart. I can see that you have one. So in other words, you have everything! You’re not lacking anything!’

  Visibly annoyed, he got up to walk around the room. Well, if that’s the way it’s going to be, then he’ll have to tell his own story, I say. A story for a story – a tooth for a tooth. So he begins: a few years ago his youngest brother met a schoolmate by chance in Russia. They hadn’t seen each other for exactly twenty years. They met, drank, embraced and kissed one another, bared their souls and, as the Russians say, naraspashku, which means they had a heart-to-heart and promised never to separate again; then they got into a fight and later the criminal investigators counted twenty-six stab wounds in his brother’s body inflicted by the schoolmate – just a few less than the amount of litas he had left over from his disability pension after you subtract the alimony payments. During the trial the schoolmate got quite lost in the numbers. The courtroom buzzed angrily like a hive of bees. ‘Mathematics had always been my weak point,’ he replied to the accusations, blushing, ‘but I want you to know that I was always strong in my native literature.’ Putting his hand to his heart, he stooped and asked for forgiveness from the court and from all the people sitting in the courtroom for the fact that up until now he had not learned ‘to count honestly’.

  His favourite sister… oh, Kostas… At the time she was unemployed and living in Ust-Kamensk when one day a display board honouring ‘outstanding workers’ fell on her and broke her back. The responsibility for the fact that that particular memorial plaque in the centre of town was hanging by a thread, as is always the case in Russia in these circumstances, was ‘carried’ by the wind that blew that day from the northwest… His other sister left work at the end of her shift during a blizzard and froze to death in the snow… He was also, by the way, an orphan. He had buried his mother a year ago as well. A gypsy fortune-teller once foretold that she would drown. His mother believed it. She had already nearly drowned a few times but always escaped her watery fate. The last time she got very ill, she was delighted when she was taken to the hospital: ‘In other words, Kolya,’ she said, ‘I won’t die yet. I won’t fall into the water, the sea is far away, and I also won’t drown in the river or a lake so this means it isn’t time for me yet.’

  ‘However when your time comes,’ and now Kolya’s voice, and especially his face, struck a fatalistic tone, ‘the water starts to appear from out of nowhere, from within yourself. Water started to come out of my mother’s chest and legs and the nurses sat her up at night so she could breathe out from the tops of her lungs, but they also filled and she drowned. Dropsy. She drowned in water, which, with that hour having come, if there is neither a river nor a lake around you, you have to get up and turn it on. When the nurse brought her personal things, I saw what had swum out of my mother: reading glasses and a pipe… twelve graves…’ Nicholas opened up his arms, measuring in the same way fishermen show the size of the pike they have caught, most often exaggerating a little. ‘And now they all need to be cared for. But would someone stick their head into a cement mixer because of this? Between the wheels
? Lay down on the tracks?’

  A call comes from a colleague at Totally Windows. ‘Gerard, I’m with a client.’ Kolya, now totally at home in this foreign home, no longer goes out into the corridor. He has removed his ‘skin’ and familiarly placed his pointy dress shoes near the door next to mine, and now with his shirt untucked he’s in a half-collapsing armchair: ‘No, it’s okay, I can talk… Well, call Mecikas, let Mecikas call Nazaras. Don’t release the ‘Nightingale’, and catch the ‘Mushroom Pickers’. Great, Gerard. All in order. Gotcha. I’ll give you a call.’

  And, whether you want to or not, you hear the minutiae of life entering into your empty life – the hushed telephone calls, the subdued clinking of dishes, the echo betraying your steps, even the silence – it comes in from the street, appears out of nowhere and soon takes over living your life for you. Kolya is stuffing himself, snacking on kuciukai with bell peppers, drinking Sobieski vodka while sticking the gnawed chicken bones underneath the table without looking into a polythene bag he placed earlier between his legs, for the benefit Bill Clinton… It’s with bitter longing – as though I’m chasing Kolya on the running track in a stadium when I know that I won’t catch him – that I remember how I had once filched a brandy glass from a bar before giving it to my wife. And I even promised to get the whole collection. I remember how I used to tuck her in during the early morning and how I warmed her ‘gangrened’ toes. I remember many details; they returned to me when Kolya appeared. You could argue that they mean nothing, but there was a whole world made from them – content, and not form, like now: the smells of wood, fresh sawdust, woodchips and sap under the bark lying in your memory like the strata of minerals in an iron ore mine. The core’s redness is similar to fire and blood; the steam from our kitchen mugs and the round teapot without which, I am still certain, no new world can be established and the old one cannot be resurrected from the dead; and much more. And it seems to me that Kolya is like a longhaul driver – those types would never wrap a rope in a newspaper, only sandwiches, and how tasty, for those sandwiches of theirs smell of the printing press and lead! – who has returned from my life, a place I have not visited for quite some time already. And he tells how everything is back there. Are the windows nailed shut, Kolya? Would anyone remember me if I returned – the wind, whatever its species, or the snow, whistling on the stove from the pain of a little spring cleaning? They say the memory of suffering is long…