atrakinimas—Emergency dream opening.” How nice it would be to call a service like that in the middle of a nightmare — I mean, while I’m still alive. Before I’m shot dead. Before I’m heaved off a ledge to splatter in some abyss. Before I’m suffocated by gas. Before I’ve choked on the water-soaked towel. In the evening I take the garbage out into the yard. “Life has become so trivial,” my elderly neighbor, a former high-ranking KGB agent, who has watched the same news reports, says sadly. I can’t disagree. Everything’s become triviaclass="underline" love, the mafia, tending the dying, lumps of sugar, prayer. Not that long ago the president of the most powerful country on earth used to end his annual speech with the phrase: “God bless America.” This year George W. Bush ended this way: “May God bless our coalition.”
If you have a lot of nightmares over the course of a few weeks, they collect in the brain like coral reefs. You get heart palpitations. At the Diagnostic Center, I had an ultrasound done of the organ thought to be so vital to love. But to start my treatment, I have to go to another office and pay 90 litai. I returned to the clinic, to the same doctor I’d seen two years before, and modestly, with great dignity, I spread my high-quality black-and-white ventricles and valves on the table in front of him. The doctor said, “Get undressed. Don’t be so tense. We’ll do another ultrasound.” “What?” I asked, “You don’t trust the Diagnostic Center?” “I trust them,” he asserted, “I trust them so much I was even married to the doctor who did your test, when I was young. Which is why we’ll do it over again.” Then he continued: “I completely agree with her conclusion. Your heart is still healthy. It’s the cardiogram that’s bad.” He pulled a book out of a drawer, opened it to a diagram of the heart that looked impressive even from a distance, and, pointing with a pencil, explained the circulation of blood through the veins (blue) and arteries (red). Wanting to distance myself at that moment, I tried to think of Kie
lowski. “Put simply, you don’t know how to enjoy life,” the doctor said. “You can’t change the world, but you can change your attitude toward it. Don’t hurry home from work. Stop in a perfume store and take in the scents. As many pleasant scents as you can. Listen to music more often. Lying on the floor, or even in the street, with earphones. Mozart might help you. But loud music, or Beethoven? — no. By the way, how are your relations with men?”
“Very good,” I said, thinking of men generally, as a sort of aggregate. (As half of humanity. Or like penguins in a snowstorm, huddled in a pile in distant Antarctica.)
“Excellent,” said the doctor. “And pay attention to the drunks in the street. They usually walk alone. They haven’t seen their kids in a couple of years. Their apartments are either mortgaged to the hilt or already sold. Their pants have been pissed in. Sometimes more than once. But see the happiness shining in their eyes! How sincerely they manage to enjoy each moment. Do you suppose you could try to follow their example?”
“I’ll try. I’ll give it my very best,” I said on my way out the door. Going to the foot of Pilies Street, I sniff through every shelf of the Kristiana perfumery like a dog (or like a bitch, if you prefer, political correctness aside). The saleslady starts following me. (Just in case.) How unjust, how rude, and what a mistake, I think, to judge a person by her worn coat. Exactly the same as judging how attractive a woman is from her perfume. As I approach the Aušros Gate, God, perfectly in tune with the doctor’s instructions, sends an alcoholic. I start watching. Two well-dressed men hurry by. The alcoholic stands in front of them, or, more accurately, blocks their path with her bullet-proof purple llama-wool sweater, smiles (something compels me to count her teeth), puts out her hand, and asks for a handout. One man starts digging deep in his pockets for change. The other — at first I can’t believe what I’m seeing — quickly unzips his jeans and puts his signifier of masculine power into her hand. The woman pulls back. Recovers. And out flows a long Russian-Polish monologue, which probably sends those men winging all the way to Rotušes Square. And that speech of hers is the one thing in that whole sorry scene worth our absolute respect, attention, and emulation.
Somehow — again, perhaps, God is not above lending a hand — I stumble home. Sweat runs down my back. The kid says, “Just let me finish this movie? The police will catch the guy in a minute …” I don’t even glance at the screen; and anyway, I’m afraid of the television set too. I lie down and try to guess when I’ll be woken up. After a half-hour I feel my girl, all warm, cuddle up to me. Toss and turn. Then she says quietly, “They caught him. Kicked him. And then they shot him. But Mom, I’m probably not going to fall asleep … I’m hurting all over … those damn bobbies …” Then I can’t restrain myself: “What the hell is this all about? You know you aren’t allowed to watch thrillers before going to bed. How many times have you been told? Other parents — well, other moms — don’t let their kids watch those movies at all! Never. But here it’s a free-for-all. Because I don’t have the time, and you’re completely irresponsible. And to make matters worse I started going to those German lessons even though I don’t have the time for them. Sorglos is how you say ‘irresponsible’ in German, I believe. What do you expect? An hour and a half of nothing but guns and chase scenes. In those movies the police and the criminals are exactly the same sort of character, it’s just that the ‘bobbies,’ as you call them, have the law on their side.” The child’s gone quiet. But she thinks it over. Then, clambering over me, she gets up, goes to the bathroom, and comes back with some cream. “Rub my back.” (Then I realize that “those damn bobbies” are actually “boobies,” which are hurting after her dance lessons.)
But there are calm evenings too, and calm awakenings. I like them very much. I generally do wake up a half-hour before I get out of bed. I call those thirty minutes my stolen time — stolen from the day, from my routine. You need it, not just to speak with the dead (as if they were alive), but also to gently, calmly, and respectfully remember some of the living (as if they were dead). In that half-hour — stretching to an hour or two, psychologically speaking — I rewind the movie of my life. Or, better, with the caustic developing agent of my just-awakened consciousness, I reprocess the film — go back over the important things. I remember the texts I read long ago, that helped form my personality. The men who “made” me a woman. And people who revised me like a text. Lying there, I hear the rain splattering on the window. Later, in the daytime, that sound will start reminding me of fast typing on a computer keyboard. But in that half-hour, lying under a warm blanket, I surrender to the rain gradually, with passion, in complete forgetfulness, giving it thirty minutes of true loyalty. To the point where I feel the rain on my skin. Just as I did in my youth. Even walking through an outright storm, I wouldn’t take an umbrella. I didn’t have between-seasons shoes, either. (I don’t care for intermediaries: neither between summer and winter, nor between oil companies and the state, nor between God and man.) Now I always take an umbrella in rainy weather, because if I get sick, there’s no one to look after me, and a nasty sense of self-pity, demoralizing in the highest degree, is always ready to sneak up on me. I have a whole range of extraordinarily mature methods for killing this sense. But sometimes I still don’t succeed. Then I stretch out my hand and talk to the forefinger of my right hand as though I were speaking to a tiny little person who understands me and sympathizes with me (really as if I were speaking to my own body and blood). I can’t claim authorship of this comforting if insane approach. The child in Kubrick’s The Shining talked to his finger the same way.