Grandfather came to this town, the site of the contemporary literature forum, onto which all these writers from Baltic and Nordic countries had descended, in order to make peace. But other events intervened before the two brothers’ fateful meeting could take place. One of Grandfather’s brother’s granddaughters died, and then later—according to this particular existence-of-God-refuting sequence of events—so did his daughter. I can still recall the photograph of the dead granddaughter: a teenage girl lying in a casket in her own bedroom, it seems. She holds a book in her hands—a prayer book, too large. And, standing by the casket, there are the bereaved mother and a ficus plant. I was the same age as the deceased girl at the time. Perhaps it was precisely this that overwhelmed me. I was constantly reminded of that girl lying in her casket and the lifeless (wooden) braids lying on either side of her—when I brushed my teeth, when I squeezed the pimples on my forehead in front of the mirror, when I took out my jewelry from a little apple-shaped box, and when I cried after reading stories about true love. On Grandfather’s fiftieth birthday, someone from the town sent him a ham wrapped in newsprint. I remember it: a ham marbled like a Moscow subway station. But it hadn’t been sent by any of the relatives we knew.
I had exactly two hours. The trails in the park weren’t paved or covered with gravel or pebbles. I had nothing with me except a box of truffles for Emilija, under my arm. Maybe I was going to have to call her by her pet name—Emiliute—as Grandfather did when he opened the last letters he received from his brother, who had dictated them to her. The sun was already setting; slanting filaments from it still shone, however, and on the other side of each of these rays, one was instantly attacked by swarms of flying insects. Only a kind of yellow flower was in bloom. Small, perfectly round clouds of pollen-mist hung around their blossoms. I was afraid a sandstorm might suddenly erupt; those are common in that area. A woman who sews blouses from dried jasmine petals and hair in Vilnius asked me recently if I enjoyed being in nature. Not alone—definitely not alone. I told her that the sound of barking dogs echoing in the distance seems mystical to me, that each blade of grass takes on a separate existence, while the sky above seems to close in like a lavender suitcase with a false bottom in which dangerous, apocalyptic things are hidden. A small bug flew into my eye, irritating it. To the left stood the cemetery fence, and it felt strange knowing that a girl had been laid to rest there, at some precise spot, in a white casket, holding a prayer book—a thin droplet of my own flesh and blood.
The local museum on the right was bathed in red light. I approached a woman who was smoking in the doorway; she seemed to me like a little gray mouse who might have used her fur to dust the dreary exhibits in their display cages every morning, but who was too small to block your line of sight to them. When I got closer to her, “it…occurred to me that there was nothing one could say about a woman.” Her nails were lacquered a rich cherry color, and she wore a silver chain around one ankle. She lisped when saying ermukni, the name of the street I was looking for. This woke a German word from my memory: verführen—to seduce. I noticed a long time ago that people with lisps, or even people who are cross-eyed, can give rise to an odd erotic effect.
“Watch out for the pond on your left,” she said, gesturing in the direction of Šermukšnių Street. “We call it ‘The Queen’s Eye.’ It’s three meters deep, but from far away it just looks like a meadow that’s completely overgrown.”
As I left, it crossed my mind that the woman could probably only bear the museum in summer (and her eyes were three meters deep, too).
Emilija met me in her orchard, wearing an old nurse’s gown that was old but still white over her clothes. I didn’t recognize any of Grandfather’s features in her face. But I felt at home when she asked me to take off my shoes and prepared us some tea. She never got around to showing me around her single-story house; all I glimpsed were two cats perched on top of an old-fashioned stove. And out in the “orchard chock-full of plums,” there was a man naked from the waist up who was mixing cement. Emilija began telling me about herself in a way that made it seem as though we simply hadn’t seen each other in a while, when in actual fact I’d never seen her before in my life. Not even in photographs of relatives. Emilija worked at the municipal hospital, in the dialysis ward. People with kidneys that no longer functioned were driven there by relatives to get their blood cleaned. Husbands would accompany their wives two or three times at the most, she told me—usually very polite, but scared. Later, their wives would seem like bruised and horribly jaundiced pears to them. “It’s no one’s fault,” said Emilija, “it’s simply Mother Nature at work. I understood long ago that a man only loves a woman as long as he desires her. Women, meanwhile, will sometimes love their men even after they’ve died.” Wives would accompany their husbands to these treatments, sometimes lasting up to four hours, until the day they died—which was what happened if a kidney donor couldn’t be found in time, making the situation hopeless. Men and women cried in exactly the same way when their wrists and legs got so butchered by the treatments that you couldn’t find a place to jab in a needle. Emilija was an old hand, though: sooner or later, she would always manage to find the right spot. She took a skeptical view of peritoneal dialysis because of the frequent infections it gives rise to. Though, of course, when it was possible to perform the procedure at home…Until six months ago she’d still worked at the clinics in the city of Kaunas. At the time, Riardas—she motioned toward the man out the window who was mixing cement—had been working at a fish processing plant in Ireland to earn money.
“I’m getting married this autumn. I was tired of coming in from Kaunas on the weekends. It doesn’t really matter what you do. I had an affair with a doctor from another ward while Riardas was away. I slept with him, and he slept with other nurses in turn. Somehow, right up to the end, I could never bring myself to address him with the familiar tu—I would use the formal js. And even his kids would use js when speaking to him. We made love in his old Benz once. In the winter. I opened my eyes only to see a person next to me whose breath stunk of the rags people use to wipe windows. A snow-covered signboard that read ‘Catholic Summer Camp for Children’ stood nearby, beside a path in the woods. I should have felt young, with two functioning kidneys to boot—I should have felt alive. Past the signboard there was a pine forest blanketed with snow and marked by the spoor of rabbits and dogs, and now stained with coffee from our thermos too; further on there were the outskirts of the city, then Kaunas itself, people, noise; but to me it seemed as though there was nothing at all beyond that signboard…only fog and sky, understand? It suddenly became clear to me that I couldn’t go on saying js to that doctor. And that I wouldn’t need to anymore, since I’d stopped loving him. After Riardas came back and I was already working here, the doctor called me one last time, at night, from the casino in Kaunas. He was a little drunk. ‘Emilija, you always know what you want, right? I never figured you out completely, but I know that much. Quick, tell me what color to bet on, red or black—choose one or the other, and give me a lucky number too!’ Riardas was lying next to me. I whispered: ‘Red. Seven. And please, Doctor, you should call the other nurses in Kaunas too: it’s not worth risking so much on one person’s opinion.’ Meanwhile, my Riardas was talking in his sleep, telling me what an important job I had: at night the staff were all lost without me, lost among the bottles of our laboratory.”
“Emilija,” I said, “love lasts three years. Like jail. Then you go home.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“From the French writers,” I said.
“Don’t be offended, but I have no interest in literature, you know. Chemistry is more my speed. I read about the conference going on at the manor, but I won’t be attending. Maybe just the evening sessions, to take in some music. The hospital wears me out so much that I sometimes can’t even manage to get through a newspaper. And we need to make plum jam tonight. And we need to work on the honey. The honey helps get us through autumn. My sis
ter, though, would probably have studied literature—though that’s just a guess, of course, since she was only twelve when she died. During the worst parts of her illness, Mother carried home the entire municipal library for her in bags; later, she had to haul all those books back again. My parents found my sister dead with a book in her hands, in the morning, and we buried her with it, a 1972 edition of Pan. Our idiot neighbors told us that God-fearing folk would have pressed a prayer book into her hands, not a novel, but Mother didn’t give a damn. Women who bury their children bury God along with them. And it was probably a consolation for her to imagine that my sister would finish reading that book in Heaven. The effect my sister’s death had on me was to force me to live in the present. Though maybe that wasn’t because of her death—I was too young to understand it at the time—but because of all the patients I see. Riardas thinks of things in an entirely different way. For him, the past doesn’t exist—only the future. He came home from Ireland with some money; now he’s building an addition. He says there’ll also be a separate entrance for our kid. What he doesn’t know is that I had surgery when he was in Ireland and that I probably won’t be able to have any children.”
There wasn’t a single picture of my grandfather with his brother among the photographs Emilija showed me. It was almost as though their one-upmanship meant they could only get along in other people’s reminiscences. But her album did have a print of the same photograph I had torn up as a teen, out of fear—a teenage girl with wooden pleats, lying in a casket, holding Hamsun’s book, that ficus plant and the mother who had to bear her death standing next to her.
Later, we went out into the orchard, because Emilija got it into her head to pick some plums for me and to give me a one-liter jar of honey. Without bothering to introduce me to Riardas, she climbed up a ladder and placed an enamelware bowl on my head; I balanced it with one arm, thrusting the other out to my side, which made me look like one of those women on old Soviet-era wine-bottle labels. A sweaty cat rubbed its head against my calf. Plums thudded directly onto my skull. A tiny moth blew in from somewhere and fluttered about like a scrap of paper. The moth ended up on her breast and stayed there before flying off again. Once the moth had flown off… then I could imagine Emilija’s future. Riardas would build the addition to their home, but afterwards he wouldn’t be able to find work in town and would have to go back to Ireland, since all of his work contacts were still there. He would package frozen fish that came down a conveyor belt and, in a half-year, he would begin to feel that his heart was freezing over too. One evening, hungry after a night at the pub, he would meet another Lithuanian woman in a café one who had moved there for a year to make some money so she could arrange for a nice headstone for her son, who had been killed in a car crash. He would escort her to her apartment, telling her about the addition, about the shitty standard of living in Lithuania, and he would even tell her about Emilija. A day or two later, he would get a letter from Emilija, who had been emboldened by the distance separating them, in which she would admit that she can’t have children and is feeling guilty for not having told him sooner. He would remember the town; that is to say, the home awaiting him—the orchard “chock-full of plums,” the autumn honey, Emilija, the old white gowns draped on the floor in place of doormats, and…
“Enough?” Emilija asked, perched among the branches. She had removed her nurse’s gown and wrapped it around her head to guard against the bees. She bent down, looking at me sideways. I lowered the bowl and looked back up at her, which was when it hit me that she reminded me of someone: a white pallid face in half profile, plump moist lips, no hint of any past, a perfect state of anticipation (although she might have thought the opposite)—swirls of white drapery instead of hair—yes, through the branches of the tree above, Vermeer’s girl with a pearl earring was peering at me with her enormous eyes. Only, instead of an earring, a heavy plum surrounded by an opal haze hung next to her ear, trembling.
After this, we went to the cemetery. I carried the bag of plums and the liter of honey under my arm and struggled to show an interest in Emilija’s sister’s grave; though all I could think was that whenever I visit such places, it always seems to me that I’m seeing them for the first and last time. Several layers of our family lay buried in that soil, but I lost the thread right after Grandfather’s brother. A linden stood next to the grave. The sap coming off the linden had darkened the headstone, which was odd since it was already the end of August. It must have been that the stone had drunk that midsummer syrup for many years. We kissed when we said goodbye. And I felt as though my lips had stroked a warm, freshly painted canvas.
I returned to the manor by another path, taking less time than the journey out. I knew it had rained in the park in the interim: crushed strips of fallen yellow petals lined the edge of the path. Theoretically, it seemed to me, Grandfather and his brother could have walked here together. Though, who knows? Country folk didn’t have the luxury of walking for the sheer pleasure of it.
Catching sight of the wall of the manor house through the trees, I took a nearly overgrown trail leading in that direction. Long ago, it had probably been an avenue. At the end of it there was a dilapidated and faded traffic barrier that served no purpose. I crouched and passed underneath it because it was surrounded by stinging nettles, sticking up like the battlements of old castles. Striped traffic barriers, for me, have always called to mind those dotted lines labeled “cut here” that appear on bills received in the mail. At the top of such documents there’s usually some general information, and beneath the “cut here” line is the date, your telephone-company account number, and a breakdown of local and intercity calls, showing absolutely astonishing amounts of time. In a word, dreary abstractions that become present-tense irritants once they’ve made their appearance below the dotted line.
As I made my way across a field, I could see two journalists and a camera they had set up on the lawn from afar. “Thanks for being on time,” said a friend from the town of Anykiai sarcastically. I felt bad. I knew that she was never late for anything and that she had left her little girl, just a few months old, at home for two days—mother’s milk frozen in little cubes—so that she could take part, unencumbered, in the conference. Her husband thawed the milk in little portions and fed it to the child as needed. My friend was convinced that babies needed mother’s milk during the first six months of their lives, six months at the very least, and that this staves off all illnesses until the age of three. Another acquaintance—a poet—stood there drinking coffee from a plastic cup, a men’s sock protruding from the pocket of his blazer. I still owed him five litas and one quotation, but I didn’t even look at him. I don’t like poets because they’re all flighty people who usually come from large families, and they usually have several kids in several different cities with several different poetry-crazed women.
In a bit of a panic because I couldn’t come up with a more precise way to formulate my fifth criterion for effective texts, I forgot to greet the journalists. For some reason, I walked right across the lawn toward the camera, which was switched on, as though I were about to accept an award. (A ham wrapped in newsprint.) I only stopped when I couldn’t go any further, because my lips were pressed against the glass of the camera lens. I pressed against it the way snails press themselves against tree bark, and without further ado I launched directly into my final criterion for a text:
“Fifth. A good text is obliged to draw you back to it many times. Just like old parks—in which you can always lose your way—beckon you to go for a stroll in them. But notwithstanding the tangle of trails and the mystical sound of barking dogs echoing in the distance; and despite the pollen mist rising from the flowers, the overgrown ponds, the sky above us closing in like a lavender suitcase hiding dangerous things, and the stinging castle-nettles, you forge ahead, sensing that, at some precise place, something vital, like a denouement, is awaiting you. Like a blood relative of yours—one whom you’ve barely, or never, known…until this moment…”
After I had spoken these words, the man standing behind the camera stood stock-still. This wasn’t the sort of nonsense people were supposed to spout on television if they wanted to leave an impression. A singer—I had seen this with my own eyes—even went so far once as to say that his favorite time for making love to his girlfriend was at the crack of dawn, in a sitting position, while his favorite song was playing: …even though there are only three million of us on this Earth. Afterwards, in full view of the interviewer and his girlfriend, the singer removed his underpants, which had been hand-woven for him by a designer. The reporter standing next to me looked a little exasperated. She could see that I was no longer young, that I was no longer photogenic, that I was a little too skinny (from crawling under traffic barriers, perhaps), and that I was basically a bundle of nerves. She took my elbow in a motherly manner and guided me a few steps away from the camera, drawing me nearer to her, saying, “Perhaps we can move away from textual and theoretical considerations and come back to the subject of the conference itself. You probably have some personal impressions of it, since you’ve been coming here for years. Do you have any anecdotes you’d like to share with us from the prior years of the conference?” This provided instant relief. The words poured from my mouth, smoothly and without hesitation:
“These last few days, I have been sitting and thinking about the northern summer, with its endless day…two years ago, I remember, the time passed quickly—beyond all comparison more quickly than time now. A summer was gone before I knew. Two years ago it was, in 1855. I will write of it just to amuse myself—of something that happened to me, or something I dreamed.”
Best European Fiction 2010 Page 20