Unexpectedly, she laughed. “You drive me crazy,” she said.
“Do you ever miss me?” I asked, my eyes still closed. The connection was good, just as good as if we were both in the States. I could hear her breathe.
“Of course,” she said. I pictured the tendons in her neck, the soft, almost shiny skin over her collarbone.
“I miss you so much sometimes,” I said.
“No,” she said, “you miss being eighteen.”
“Maybe.”
“Truth. Go. This call will cost a fortune.”
And we hung up. I stood on the street, a little stunned. Katya and I did not normally have such intimate moments. I had not heard that tone in her voice for almost eighteen years. To keep from thinking about it, I went ahead and called my mother to let her know we were safe. When I came back in, Vera was waiting patiently by the cash register. She had chosen a purple sundress and a pair of gray slacks, some little leather loafers and a couple of shirts.
“Loafers?” I asked.
“Shut up,” she said. “They’re the right thing.”
And she was right. They were the right thing. She put the slacks and the loafers on with her white T-shirt and she looked suddenly Lithuanian. And older. And prettier. I knew nothing of clothes or what it takes to fit in with teenage girls, but even I could tell this was an upgrade. Vera was ecstatic.
“Papa, thank you,” she said, as we hurried, late to our history tour.
“You are very, very welcome,” I said, embarrassed by how grateful I was for her gratitude.
—
I don’t know what I had been expecting of the history tour, exactly: lectures from various speakers, trips to museums, old women in spectacles and droopy sweaters. Instead, our program consisted almost entirely of one single human specimen. There were lectures and readings of course, and there were museums, and there was Johnny Depp, who turned out to be an American Fulbright Scholar at the University of Vilnius and who was our day-to-day liaison, and there was his girlfriend Rūta, who also appeared to be employed by the program in some fashion, and who was the person to see if you didn’t like your room or wanted reservations for dinner, but the heart of the history program was Darius.
We were to take walking tours with him every day. He spoke at length without notes, reeling off dates and titles, facts and figures in an inhuman way, almost as though he were possessed by a daimon like Socrates, a spirit that resided within his skull, giving him a priori access to all human knowledge. Judith was correct: The city of Vilnius was Darius’s life’s work and watching him talk was like watching a prodigy at the piano. The city itself would be our classroom, and most of the things we would study were not housed in museums but were simply places, ordinary ones, with pedestrians hurrying past.
But the things Darius said were rarely straightforward and his observations veered away from the purely historical and toward the hermeneutical. He was very concerned with the etymology of the word Vilnius, for instance. Vilnius itself was named after the River Vilnia, of course, though the exact location of the town had been chosen for spiritual reasons. It was built on a sacred pagan site where people came to communicate with the dead. The word Vilnia was etymologically related in Lithuanian to the words for “the departed,” “ripple,” and “devil.”
Darius’s English was lavishly fluent but was accented and slightly nasal, and he had an odd habit of punctuating his thoughts with the exclamation “Well!”
“So already, we see that, again, Vilnius is at a crossroads. Well! It is the portal between Eastern and Western Europe, but it is also the portal between the land of the living and the dead, the place where reality is thinnest and contact with the outside is possible.”
The outside? I looked over at Vera as we walked, following this strange blond historical daimon through the cobbled streets, but her attention was rapt. She was actually frowning, she was listening to Darius so intently.
“Even though,” Darius went on, “Vilnius seems to the West to be Eastern Europe, and seems to the East to be the start of Western Europe, it is actually at the exact geographical center of Europe, which makes any exploration of Vilnius an exploration of Europe, and yet Vilnius figures in Europe’s story of herself not at all. Well! This is an interesting problem, I thought. To be so central that one is completely marginal!”
We had to pause for a moment at a red light, and the group clustered tight around Darius as he went on. “Even stranger, Vilnius appears on early maps under a variety of names. To the Germans, Vilnius was called Die Wilde, because it was surrounded by wilderness and swamps. But the irony of a city called the Wilderness is not slight. Well! The Poles called her Wilno, the Lithuanians called her Vilnius, the French and Russians called her Vilna. It is also, of course, Vilna in Yiddish. Sometimes Vilnius appears multiple times on the same map, as though she is a pair of entangled particles that can exist in two places at once. In some ways, it is difficult to think of Vilnius as a single city at all. Czesław Miłosz famously wrote a poem about Vilnius called ‘City Without a Name.’ So how shall we think of this city then?”
I nudged Vera on the shoulder. This idea of Vilnius as being some kind of concatenation of multiple half-imaginary cities, a city that refused to be known by a single name, reminded me of the fight we had gotten into on the plane.
“Hey,” I said, tugging Vera’s sleeve. The light had turned green and our group was slowly shuffling across the intersection. “Vilnius doesn’t have a single self either.”
Vera squinted at me, like she had no idea what I was talking about.
“On the plane you were talking about there being no self. That the ‘I’ is an illusion.” It wasn’t that I wanted to dredge up the fight again, but I also didn’t want that whole conversation to be erased. If it never happened, then it could never be repaired. I didn’t want her to think I thought she was crazy, even if I did think she was mentally ill. Maybe it was an impossible line to walk, but I didn’t see any other path available to me.
“I didn’t think you were listening,” she said.
“I was,” I said, nodding. “I always am.”
“Hmm,” she said, and just kept walking, trying to listen to Darius, trying to catch his words over the traffic, but I could have sworn she walked several inches closer to me than she had been, and at least twice she turned to give me a look when something Darius said was interesting.
And I felt like I had won the goddamn lottery.
Chapter 3
Date: 7/9/2014 9:47 PM
From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com
To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com
Subject: Suck my imperfect pearl
Dear Fang,
So there is a thing called baroque architecture, and the word baroque means “imperfect pearl,” which I think should be made into a sexual euphemism for clitoris. Screw “the little man in the boat.” My clitoris is not some dude doing forced labor. (I don’t know why I think all rowing is forced labor. I think I am thinking of Roman slave ships or something.) Anyway, my clitoris is an “imperfect pearl” and shall be called such henceforth. Really, the possibilities are endless. Guys that like eating pussy could be called “really into the baroque.” You could say, “I’m off to go stroke the baroque!” Do you see the potential?!
Anyway, I really like this idea of the baroque because basically people started to think that not everything should look like an austere Greek temple and maybe buildings could get a little crazy and weird, so they started doing all this ornamentation and asymmetrical stuff, and they painted the buildings hot pink and bright yellow and purple and wild colors, and everyone was just amazed because this was beautiful too. Things didn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful. They could be weird and fucked up and insane and still be beautiful, and can you really believe that dudes were only just figuring that out? And they were figuring it out by BUILDING CHURCHES. I mean, the world is really a very weird place, Fang. Anyway, Vilnius has a ton of baroque cathedrals because I guess they didn’t get the memo when the rest of Europe got tired of baroque and they just kept on making more and more baroque buildings that got weirder and weirder and now there are no buildings like these anywhere else in the world.