Street and parodies their mincing gaits behind their backs. Because if I sit here in my kitchen any longer thinking about what best-selling fiction should be like, I’ll start picking at my ears, which haven’t been washed in six months. Like Shrek, I’ll make candles out of their wax and be steeped — put so accurately! — in the intimate light of my candles. If I start thinking about best-selling fiction again, I’ll go white-hot and disintegrate like a wire. After a few weeks, the neighbor and his Ada will break down the door. (Without any commitments …) He’ll kick at my ashes and say, well, she was a smoker, and she liked to burn those stinking candles of hers, probably belonged to some sort of cult, and look at the pigsty she lived in — it could be even worse!
Yes, if I continue wondering about what sort of literature sells well, I’ll feel like my grandfather on that sorry day he also sat in his kitchen, a supposed Soviet surplus scattered on American newspapers, and, to no good purpose, with his nails, searched carefully for a nut.
Awakenings
If, before dawn, I open my eyes upon waking, I see my dead mother’s photograph on the wall. That’s why I hung it across from my bed. The photograph was copied and enlarged by a woman artist I don’t even know (and who refused to accept money for it) from a small, completely candid shot. I don’t know the exact occasion of the photograph, but I believe it was somewhere, taken by a male friend of mother’s on her way to the sanitarium. I was very young at the time, but old enough to hate that man. Only now is it clear to me how much that hate must have hurt my mother at the time: she had gotten divorced three years earlier, found herself someone else, and immediately after fell ill with an incurable disease. (When I think about this, I remember that children frequently meet their ends in the same way as their parents.) In the photograph my mother is sitting lighting a cigarette on a whitewashed cement mileage marker at the side of the road. Wearing a black silk dress sewn (or more accurately, resewn) by my grandmother.
My eyes open, but without getting out of bed, I say:
“Mom … Let’s talk.”
“Well, be quick about it,” she answers a bit curtly. “Just until I’ve finished my cigarette.”
“This past fall I went to Kaunas. Your granddaughter, looking out the window of the bus, saw a cow and asked, Does that cow belong to anyone, or is it Nobody’s? I said, Cows always belong to someone, only people can be Nobody’s. Mom … Now, when I wake up in a pool of sweat, most often at daybreak, I start to feel quite clearly that I myself belong to Nobody. My eyes are Nobody’s. My arms are Nobody’s. My legs, skin, nails, lungs, breath, and hair — Nobody’s. It makes me feel terrible.”
“How did your daughter’s semester go?” she asks.
“Same as ever. I was at her school just yesterday. The teacher drew a diagram of their behavior and social skills on the blackboard. As four circles fitting within one another. In the central circle were the children whom everyone else wants to be friends with, sit next to, and go on dangerous expeditions with. They’re the best students, too. Your granddaughter isn’t there. She’s in the second circle, marked with a star. The star means that at least two girls in the class don’t like her.”
“Okay,” says mother, exhaling smoke.
“What’s okay?”
“That she isn’t in the center circle. I wouldn’t have been in it, either, if they’d drawn diagrams for us back then.”
I don’t say anything. Because I doubt I’d even have made it into the second circle. I would have been in the third or fourth. (Of hell.) But even now, as my mother smokes in the world beyond the glass, I don’t want to make myself out to be worse than she already thinks I am. Actually, in her eyes, I’ve only really done serious harm to my reputation maybe twice in my life. One of those occasions I don’t even want to remember, while the other was perfectly ordinary. I was about twenty-five at the time. I didn’t come home to bed. (I regret that night for many reasons, not just because of my mother.) I clearly remember how I was dressed, in a white sheer linen dress with a large butterfly drawn on one thigh (I like asymmetry in clothing and hair styles). When I came home in the morning, Mom was sitting in our small kitchen with the dog, drinking tea. Now I realize she had been there a good part of the night. (I also realize something else — I myself really have absolutely no interest in sitting in the kitchen all night waiting for my own daughter like that.) Without looking at me, my mother then spoke a single sentence: “I thought you weren’t like all the others.” That sentence (and particularly her not looking at me) was enough. To this day.
“Well, I’m going.” She stands up, leaving the roadside marker, leans over, and with her small hand brushes the silver cigarette ashes from her black dress. Already leaving, as if by the way, she adds, “Don’t get carried away. You aren’t Nobody’s. I’ll be thinking about you … for at least another few years.”
No chance of going back to sleep. I get up. I go into the kitchen and make a cocktail — fifteen drops of valerian and fifteen of hawthorn in a third of a glass of water. I can drink a bucket of this brew; it helps, but only psychologically. When there’s a half-hour left before the alarm clock goes off, I fall asleep. On top of that, before it has a chance to go off, the child sleeping next to me turns over on her side and smacks me in the face with the back of her hand. As awakenings go, this is actually one of the nicer ones.
It’s really unpleasant to wake from a nightmare. It’s been two years since the cardiologist told me the movies I was watching weren’t nearly violent enough to give me a heart attack. He suggested I really focus on the coverage of the Chechen War, if I wanted to do myself in properly. And particularly those shows in which journalists ask, very professionally, lingering over each detail as though it was a mouthful of delectable cake, how the criminal of the week went about killing this or that old lady and boiling her in a pot. (In pieces.) So when they showed what had happened after Chechens took the audience hostage at a musical theater show, I watched television until the middle of the night. The worst, of course, were those bullet-riddled women who were draped on the ground and over chairs in graceful modern-dance poses. In the middle of one report, a considerate friend called and asked if I was watching the news from Moscow. “That’s just exactly what I’m doing,” I said. He advised me, “At least don’t explain what’s going on there to the kid. She won’t understand, anyway. She still cries over teddy bears.” I still cry over teddy bears myself, so maybe that’s why I had a nightmare that night: I’m lying in a hospital. Into the room comes Putin in a white coat. (“… the son of a factory worker who learned his manners among bullies on the streets of Leningrad and in judo classes…” The Globe and Mail.) Next to the president stand several men with IV bags. They strayed into my dream from another newspaper article, about hospitalized prisoners being brought their medication not by nurses but by FSB (Federal Security) agents. The president in his white coat approaches me, one hand behind his back; he smiles with his eyes like ice, and says: “Popravlyaetes’, popravlyaetes’—get better.” But in my ears it echoes “Otpravlyaetes’, otpravlyaetes’—get out.” I wake up when the cold barrel of a pistol touches my temple. I’m lying with my head pressing up against the metal rail of my armchair.
I go to work early in the morning. In a daze. A car drives by. On the side is a sign “Avarinis spyn
atrakinimas—Emergency lock opening.” I read it as “Avarinis sapn