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 cat 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…
A call. Well, of course, it’s Lelka. Women… And again he’s in the corridor talking with his palm covering his mouth: ‘Lelka, you, my child, are already testing my patience because right now I really don’t care about that nail you are polishing for her, got me? I am with a client now. The same one. We’re not drinking because this is a special case. Dangerous? He’s most dangerous to himself. Or maybe to you, stupid, if you keep asking… If you’ve already finished one of her hands, then take the other, am I, Goddamit, supposed to tell you when and whose nails to cut?!’
Kolya has been talking in a raised voice. He returns furious. He is becoming a real man who has set things straight. Those women… But I see that he’s even looking at me all cockeyed, raw – like that Siamese cat. Because when somebody steps on Kolya Afanasyevich’s calluses and he gets worked up, he really gets worked up – like a week ago with that house with the pool outside the city where he, Mecikas, Nazaras and some others were putting in additional hours – not working for Totally Windows – fixing plumbing, digging trenches, putting in windows, plastering and painting. Having finished work and taken a shower – Nazaras even shaved, having carelessly singed his moustache while welding pipes, reducing him almost to tears because for him his moustache was everything and because ‘a real man should be able to have an eagle perch on his moustache’ – they joined the owner to ‘break the ice’ with a little Smirnoff. The owner had already laid out a spread next to the pool; he put out some tinned sprats, onions and a little herring, everything served in a refined way.
He even took care to provide toothpicks, but the hostess, taking her husband to the side, said: ‘Did they already finish work? Felix, make sure I don’t ever see their mugs around here again…’ Kolya squinted like his fiery cat, though his eyebrows and fur were a ripe chestnut colour: ‘Ah, you see, our intellectual friends, our little brothers,’ I hear all of his tension in his voice, ‘if it weren’t for us, the Dimas, Mecikases, Slavikases and Kolyas, you wouldn’t have any windows, any walls, any shitholes, and even, it seems, any of your goddamn heads…’
…Sometimes it is only the very faintest of feelings that can communicate with you. For example, when, for whatever reason, the only thing that remains of you is a frame, the outlines in a colouring book titled Colour Yourself, because all the colours have gone elsewhere (perhaps, like everything these days, to where they are better paid) and the desire and strength to colour deserts you once again, there comes a gift of fate. Even if the sky drops red socks into the space between the lines, of course, it’s not enough – Nicholas Belochvostikov must be inside those socks. Having buried our small misunderstandings, Kolya and I spoke, naraspashku, and it seemed that there were no topics that could not be broached: fear as one of the basic states of man; the soul and how much it weighs; the prostate, which Kolya explains is a man’s secondary heart and without a doubt the more important one and one for which pumpkin oil is its best friend as the years pass…
There was an un-Christmas-like minor key to Kolya’s voice: he had entered into his middle years, but had been almost nowhere, so what was the point of living, dammit, if he was going to die without having seen the bedouins of Africa or the aborigines of Australia. He had heard that a businessman in Russia had gotten rich just before he was shot and very nearly didn’t manage to see the world; but, having sensed something like this might happen, luckily he wrote the following in his will: ‘I want to travel, even after my death.’ He did so in a glass coffin, so the world would be clearly visible from both sides. His nearest and dearest, cursing him but carrying out his posthumous wishes, took him across Europe: he was transported to the Alps, lugged up the snaking roads through the fjords of Norway… Nicholas was deep in thought. He had on occasion seriously thought about such a possibility in the event that things didn’t work out while he was alive. Of course, he wouldn’t burden Lelka with such an obligation. She was not the kind of person who would lug him, dead, through fjords. It wasn’t clear if she would lug him around much longer alive. Besides, he was beginning to suspect her of infidelity. It was possible that it was even with Gerardito. But she wouldn’t lay her head down for Mecikas too…
‘So have you travelled a lot?’ he asks and the greenness of his eyes moistens. At the very bottom of the greenness there is an emerald that could have crystallised, you hazard a timid guess, either from a mixture of faith, hope and love for a dear one, or equally as likely could well have crystallised from stupidity.
‘Almost around the whole world. Kolya, tell me, do you really think that when you’re travelling you’re escaping? You can’t escape yourself anywhere, not in Norway or by dyeing your eyebrows…’
‘The whole world…’ Kolya answers with an echo from the fjords.
We fall silent for a moment. Each of us with our own burden, each with our own Sisyphean task. And suddenly panic overtakes me, thinking that this silence might linger too long. Just a little longer and Kolya will leave because he is already bored with me. Because having fired off all of my merry gunpowder – the hats and black leather gloves, little saws and chisels – I have nothing else of interest for a person that would make his blood course through his veins. And when Kolya leaves… When he reaches that critical distance away from my home…
I read somewhere that Russians, when talking about the phenomenon of the ‘modern Russian’ (which no one, not even they themselves, are able to explain), sometimes call themselves wet matches – hard to light and quick to go out. But Kolya… all of my senses, which were on standby, are now signalling – no, they’re not signalling, bells are going off, my heart is beating – that this is the one who you’d manage to light a cigarette with. And you’d light it up on the first try, even in a northerly wind. It doesn’t matter that, when trying to talk you out of sticking your head into a cement mixer, he doesn’t offer up the arguments for ‘the positive side’. What for? You yourself are an argument. Besides, the real argument is about wearing socks that are the colour of a presidium’s tablecloth. In the end – and this is most important – it is the argument that will survive a catastrophic tsunami hanging on to a python and, look, he’ll reach back and pull someone along and drag them by the hair, and why not, Goddamit, if they were just lying around uselessly on the way. Just listen to him, go with him…
‘But we don’t even need to knock on any more doors,’ Kolya says, calm again and lit up by an inner serenity (or maybe it’s the emerald?). ‘If we can’t go out into the world, that world, Kostas, will move in with us, right into our room or even into our palm, just take it and use it…’
And sure enough, when the television screen scatters its snowflakes across the room, after a long pause the world once again comes into your home. What happened in it while you were sticking your head in a noose?
On Channel 1 there’s a report about Christmas around the globe. Dire news from Naples – the church nativity tableaux were stolen. It appears, you see, that the white dust of Jerusalem’s roads kicked up in clouds of dust while cows, sheep and donkeys were herded off in groups. St. Josephs, Virgin Marys, shepherds and wise men were taken away – whole episodes of the memory of God – all drastically purged. But the most worrying, at least for Kolya and I, is the sky emptied by the thieves who carted off its wind-shaped arches, took down and extinguished the moon, the sun and the stars, and left all of us under the wide-open holes of the cosmos, each and every one of us the most orphaned of orphans… Still, and this is the real Christmas miracle: baby Jesus was not touched in any of those nativity tableaux…
‘Thinking logically,’ Kolya wrinkles his brow severely: ‘Can Jesus be stolen? Casper, Balthazar, Melchior, even St. Joseph, sure, but even then, clearly, only if you’re in a really tough spot, but Jesus?! In the end what can you do with him, stolen? Sell him? Keep him hidden in a shed and use him for your own purposes? Continuously make demands and more demands? Export him as contraband along with Saint George cigarettes? No, no,’ he shakes his head with his eyes closed, and suddenly he hits the top of his head on the wall, ‘we all know that cursed state of mind when the burden of logic sits on you with all its force, and you can’t run or scream…’
On Channel 2 there are orphanages and old people’s homes. There is the tear of an inebriated old man in close-up in one of the latter. He found himself there, in the ‘Grey-Haired Club’, after he signed over his flat to a nurse who used to massage his back but also ‘tenderly grabbed my buttocks’… We see a family with twelve children – ‘the backbone on which today’s Lithuania relies, despite the governmental controls, despite the stolen millions’ – sitting at the Christmas table on which all the plates – including the soup bowls, the appetiser trays, the platters usually filled with herring – are full of apples. Apples, everywhere there are only the apples that they grew and which, from the time they are small until the time they are grown, they chew with great perseverance. Maybe for that reason they have such strong backbones. But their teeth – when the camera zooms in, Kolya manages to get a look – they’re made of steel…
On Channel 3 the wife of the Belarusian sausage king is singing. We both assess the vocal material sceptically, and even decide that she, most likely, doesn’t have a voice at all but only impressive silicon. Nicholas doesn’t like it when silicon squeaks between his hands. It squeaks, beg your pardon, like cheap potato starch. ‘You’ve tried it?’ I ask him. Many times! He’s too lazy to talk about it. He’s allergic to it – as soon as he touches silicon he immediately develops a rash. And boy do they explode in the crematorium when they’re put inside. He’s heard it himself…
But on Channel 4 it’s all serious – tragic numbers, how many people went gaga this year and chose the unfortunate fate of wandering among the trees and the bushes until their appointed time on the earth passes. ‘Lithuania is once again among the leaders,’ a psychologist walks around the studio with a piece of unpolished green amber hanging on her chest and stops next to a window frame, which to her clearly symbolises the link between this world and the next. ‘In Europe, we are like a zoo… We have crossed all boundaries… the consequences of the Soviet era… Unfortunately, from all this the press and journalists only titillate us with sensationalism…’ After her factual analysis, a lyrical interlude ensues: the narrator’s voice, imbued with a worried metaphysical tone, is accompanied by images: clouds, pine needles and pine cones, a shoe rinsed out by snow and rain nestles in a bed of moss, the remains of a shirt, the end of a rope swinging romantically in the wind, and a line runs by underneath: ‘Christmas sale with manufacturer’s prices…’ Nicholas turns his head toward the television: ‘All the same, it’s good that you’re here, and not dead among those pine branches. Right, Kostas?’
And in that moment you feel how, little by little, this and that is weaving together in your home – mostly from the absurd and the grotesque, somewhat less from mercy, and even less from sympathy. Who? And then the slow sensation – is it you? Or is it someone else for you? A moment later, is there SOMEONE at all? Regardless of what it is, that textile is abrasive, ‘stinging’, because Kolya is working on it, weaving it, and before weaving it, he readied the threads in his own unique way, and when trying to wrap and warm yourself in it, you might be bloodied if at that time you’ve shed your skin and thrown it on the back of the chair, or someone else has flayed it off. However, God sees – late on Christmas Eve we really are something or other…
Translated by Jayde Will from Danute Kalinauskaite, Niekada nezinai, Vilnius: Baltos lankos (2008).
Danute Kalinauskaite (born 1959) studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University. Her first short-story collection, published in 1987, made her overnight success and marked her as one of the most important authors of her generation. However she shunned the limelight and it was only in 2008 that she published her second short-story collection, You Never Know (Niekada nezinai, 2008), which won the Lithuanian Writers’ Union Prize.
1 A sweet, crouton-shaped biscuit traditionally eaten during the Christmas season.
Published in co-operation with The International Cultural Programme Centre programme: “Books from Lithuania” and Arts Council England, London.