Giedra Radvilaviciute
I’ll begin with some information intended for pretty much everyone. Please turn off your mobile phones for about twenty minutes. It’s a mournful evening in the Interpol Kebab Restaurant in the Old Town. If any foreigners are looking for it, they’ll find it by the smell.
My dear Ladies and Gentlemen, on this busy Saturday we could certainly pay our last respects to the dearly departed in the usual way with a few well-rehearsed phrases that conform to the sad rules of the obituary and our tired traditions. We would face less gossip and insinuation if we simply said: ‘She will always remain in the hearts of those who knew her. From now on we will be united by the gentle sadness of remembering. May her journey be an easy one for her…’ Or something like that. But clichés and concrete truths have always irritated me, and her as well. And the saying, ‘It is better to speak well about the deceased than to say nothing at all’, we find absolutely infuriating. I feel I have the right to remember my best friend more or less as she was. Why? Because of all of us present here, and perhaps in all of Lithuania, I knew her best: all her biographical details, buried in that small village, all her unfulfilled plans for the future. Although I am painfully shy, and my friend was a live wire, we had some things in common. Some people even confused our faces, tastes and opinions when we would appear in public together at book signings, book fairs or literary events.
True, she aged, got fat, went grey and became melancholic quite a bit sooner than I did. She once said that it wasn’t the years, but her experience and understanding that were making her grow old. I, too, have noticed that it is always the most infantile, temperamental and optimistic people who remain charming and attractive the longest. If my friend ever lost her earrings, she never bothered to replace them. I, on the other hand, would go out and buy new and fancier ones the very next day, usually from Swarovski. If she ever found that her lipstick was down to the end, she’d be sad that it was almost all used up. Whenever I see the same end, I always think it is just the beginning. My friend would contemplate death – and obituaries – much more often than I would. To this day I have kept in shape and kept my shape. She had dentures for her top teeth put in five years ago whereas I only did this year. The last man she had was a very long time ago (I’m talking about a lover). My boyfriend is here tonight among those gathered to pay their last respects… Thank you, Arturas.
As I’ve already said, neither of us ever liked the way in which in final farewells, or in election campaigns for that matter, people are suddenly transformed into moral, beautiful (especially in the photographs enlarged hurriedly by undertakers), hospitable beings, almost without sin, who were neither licentious nor alcoholic, but if they did drink irresponsibly it was for a good reason. A year ago, in a small town cemetery, as I was standing by a graveside and listening to the eulogies, I became frightened by the thought that we were probably burying a still-breathing former elementary school teacher, who was ‘eternally young, eighty-four-year-old, energetic and hardworking, forever forging ahead with his creative plans’. Perhaps the saying ‘he lives forever in our hearts’ means precisely that (especially in its most horrifying sense). Perhaps we sugar-coat a medically unsanctioned act intentionally with this euphemism? I am certain that in the accursed rush that generally forms our lives, we do end up burying the occasional body without adequate inquiry into whether the person is really dead. Usually, it’s those elderly folk taking an afternoon nap, who seem to have intentionally showered and combed their hair and covered themselves up with a newspaper as people used to with a prayer book in the old days. Do you remember? I think it was Tsvetaeva who requested not to be rushed to burial, asked for someone to put a mirror to her lips and check a few times whether the silver surface wasn’t dampened by the fog of life too subtle to be seen with the naked eye. And Gogol turned in his grave – or was it Gogol who was checked and Tsvetaeva who turned? I don’t remember now. They’re all the same to me.
Our dearly departed, if she really is departed (please allow me, as her closest friend, to think of her as ‘missing in action’) was neither energetic, nor beautiful, nor good, nor especially hardworking. Besides that, she drank enthusiastically. Every day. Worst of all, it was without any justifiable reason. So don’t ask why. I look you all in the eye now and I see, nonetheless, that most of you would be happy to hear the answer to this none-too-difficult question. If she were to appear here in the flesh, she would respond as any alcoholic would in the sincere voice of Jerzy Pilch: ‘I drink because I have a weak character. 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 nervous and I want to calm my nerves. I drink because I am sad and I want to clear my soul. I drink because I am happily in love. I drink because I am hopelessly looking for love. I drink because I am almost too normal and a little bit of insanity wouldn’t hurt.’
It’s true that during her last few weeks, the departed drank only swimming-pool water and nettle tea – the latter by the litre. Her cousin, the cybernetic, suggested she use that harsh but nutritious weed to clean out her joints. Diuretics… Dear God, what for? Her job was exclusively intellectual. She did not exercise and she walked like a duck. She rode her bicycle like Molloy… She went to her mother’s house again and again. It’s true that sometimes, seated in front of the computer screen, she would stiffen up and her daughter would have to massage her for about half an hour to loosen her muscles enough so that she was able to stand. Once every two months that same cousin would come to her house dressed in his black mourning suit to repair her computer’s interface with her modem. He wore this suit because he was ready, every time, to bury the computer. Yet when he arrived he would be warm and gentle. He had genetically inherited his gentle demeanour from the May winds. May was the month he was born. It’s odd that he is not here with us today. On his way out he would leave, pasted on the monitor, a photograph of a nettle field along the Vilna River, and in the thoughts of the dearly departed he would leave a longing for a healthy consciousness. While having a smoke in the kitchen he would ask her to make some nettle tea, and once, having worked seven hours and perhaps becoming a bit frustrated, he said that my friend’s relationship with technology was the same as Goethe’s wife’s relationship with spiritual values: ‘She was respectfully conscious of the huge importance of art to humankind.’
It was probably because of the nettle tea that my friend started having trouble getting to the bathroom in time. This handicap was another thing that she and I had in common. Handicaps, not love, are what tie people most intimately. A friend once told me the story of when she figured out that she really loved her husband. Coming home after a difficult operation, she was being led up the stairs to the third floor by her neighbour; she was bundled up in a winter coat because they had brought her to the hospital in January but released her in February, and she felt confused, didn’t know who or where she was. On the second-floor landing she felt sick. She leaned against the wall, and instinctively put her sleeve to her mouth. That was when she saw that her husband was holding out his large construction worker’s palms with white plaster crusted into his wrinkles out under her lips – just in case she had to throw up on the stairs… Onetime last year when I was crossing Zirmunai Bridge I, too, did not make it to the bathroom in time. You know what I did? I stopped in the café by St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church and splashed my jeans until they were soaked so that they would be dark blue throughout, because I still had to stop by the Ministry of Culture. Fortunately, it was raining.
We really were identical, like two halves of a coffee bean. That’s why once, a long time ago, she entrusted me and no one else to burn the twenty-five letters that her husband had sent to her in addition to the seventeen that she had never sent out to various men. ‘Dust falls to the ground, smoke rises to the heavens.’ Of course I never destroyed them because I thought that it might be worth publishing one or two of the letters, because the most popular literature these days is the kind that falls between fact and fiction. The other reason I made this decision was that her husband, a man who had stood patiently by her for a long time, became famous. It’s telling that the other seventeen, to whom the letters were never mailed, met unremarkable fates. I took some interest in them: most of them were her contemporaries, pernicious leaders now midway through their fifties who, having achieved their prostatus quo, had married women ten or twenty years younger. My friend reacted to this phenomenon positively – she supported adoption, no matter at what age. The divorces in her life were also telling. She got on with (and did not get on with) her children’s father like a suddenly awakened nervousness in an ever-vigilant mind, like quicksilver and a thermometer, like vers libre and a quatrain poem.
Although we were born in the same town, we met and became friends only during our first year at university. I compare my student days to an intoxicating journey on a cruise ship – few passengers on that ship are still alive today. During my first years in Vilnius, images and events from my hometown would enter my consciousness, usually at night: the cracking wooden banister of my stairway, the overwhelming smell of malt along the riverside, the infestation of green worms. I would recall that disgustingly memorable summer when those worms hung from the stairwells and balconies, crawled on the sidewalks, benches, windowsills and along the spines of books, and crept among carpets of Asian dahlias as if in an odalisque by Ingres. I remember a lonely little goat nibbling grass in the field. From a distance she looked like a rock. Within five years the field had been developed with identical houses. Each of those houses became a home to people who dressed the same, ate the same food and who unlocked their French locks into the same rooms. A scratch on the underside of the hand from tuberculosis turned into a dangerous mark the colour of a sunset, but our lungs remained healthy. I remembered the theatre, to which it was impossible to get tickets. My friend liked to repeat the saying of the cruel but beloved director: the most valuable treasure is the one that’s impossible to lose. This would bring to mind the statues in the bank in the city centre: titans who held up the vaulted ceiling so that it would not crash down onto the roubles being counted and recounted below. Those roubles financed the rockets that the Russians launched into the cosmos. The cosmos was like the dome of the glass ceiling of the bank. I would recall the track at the school playing field – shiny, as if it were paved not with cement but with the sweat of teenagers running a hundred metres in ten seconds. Sometimes I will remember a particular event like when a silent, barely noticeable woman who worked in the sugar factory gave birth to a child during her lunch break and shoved it into the toilet. I can’t remember if they put her in jail or if she had herself committed by virtue of insanity. But for the next few weeks every time I went to the bathroom I would carefully examine the water in the toilet bowl below, imagining that a slippery baby, like a kulak, could swim anywhere through the labyrinths of plumbing, even up to our house.
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 friend’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 nervous 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.’
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].