It’s been a long time since I’ve had a cold. Now I have other problems. In the spring I’m getting married. For the second time. I didn’t think second times ever happened to women like me. But these portentous sorts of thing are always happening to me. He’s an ordinary guy. (An electrician.) He exudes peace and understanding. I need the peace most of all. (Because I’ve got enough craziness and ill temper for both of us.) Besides (and this is particularly important), this guy isn’t afraid of me. Not at all. Because he has figured me out. When the computer breaks down and won’t immediately — this instant — fix itself, and I start swearing and get angry, not at all with myself for being an idiot, not even with the viruses that have ruined my work, but with this fellow here who has nothing to do with it, he seems to take some quiet pleasure in it all. And continues to want me. Right there, in the kitchen. Even like that — furious, sweaty, unshaven, and disgusting. At the same time, he’s very romantic. And, for the time being, he’s forgiving and has a protective streak. It’s this latter talent of his (very rarely met with) that really won me over. Even now I find I resent it a little. He’s constantly, considerately asking me this or that: How come you don’t have fur-lined winter shoes? Or: What makes you think that soup you made didn’t taste good? Or: Why did you say it’s your fault that your daughter got an D in history?
I’m happy that when we recently met for the first time (in person) in a restaurant, he didn’t speak the words I was so anxiously expecting. Like these, for example: You know, nothing will come of this, because of what am I — an ordinary electrician, while you’re a published author … you write for a newspaper! He didn’t say it, but wanting to head things off at the pass, I pulled out a quote, probably Tsvetaeva: “What is fame? Just a word.” And he saw that I was sincere. I don’t even get annoyed by his ignorance of literature. Last week I told him some more about Tsvetaeva. I don’t know what time of day she hung herself, but to me it would be most believable if it were early morning (after first waking up). He said to me, “How odd … you see, I’ve always thought that Tsvetaeva slash Akhmatova was the same long-suffering Russian poet.”
For now he just drives me home after we see one another. (From Šven
ioneliai.) But I’m starting to panic at the thought of the day he’ll move in here. I’m particularly afraid of our first nights together. (I’m thinking of all my awakenings.) I know a couple of ways to turn over in bed without waking up the person next to you, but in the long run, that gets tiring. (Even the bed gets tired of it.) All in all, if I wake up, he’ll wake up at some point too. He’ll turn on the light (after a couple of years, when, unavoidably, some of the spark will have gone out of things, this will be as welcome as a terrorist attack.) He’ll probably take me by the hand. Without opening his eyes, he’ll kiss my hair. And with his lips touching my ear, in a whisper, as considerate as ever, he’ll ask, “Why did you wake up?”
Even now, in anticipation of this, the question fills me with horror, because … well, how will I ever manage to give him a short answer?
Hello,
Today is one of those Sundays as interminable as a piece of chewing gum. There you have a simile taken from everyday existence. Goda and the neighbor’s boy forced me to go see the Karlsson-on-the-Roof movie. In the dark I gave the children some gum, and then I started to worry. I asked the little one, “Do you swallow it sometimes?” He admitted it: “I swallow, but not on purpose. Freken Bok says that all sorts of things happen, even in the best families. If I were to eat a couple of pieces at a time, I’d come down with appendicitis.” The boy’s father is an actor. They live above me. Apparently the words of strangers slosh around in a child’s head as easily as they do in mine.
But yesterday was a long day too. If I was a cynic, I would have started my letter like this: The morning dawned, clear and sunny, on castration day. (But I’ll save the worst for later. Like it or not, that’s why I’m writing.) And I’m still terribly upset. As though it wasn’t enough that in the course of a single week the washing machine bit the dust, my cordless phone gave out, and the furnace stopped venting properly … But unrepairable things happened too. Actually, the phone only needed a new battery. You know where I found it? Right near your favorite stomping ground, the Akropolis shopping mall. The salesman said batteries like that hadn’t been made in a long time, what’s the charger’s voltage? I was reluctant to admit I didn’t know; after all, I’d had the phone for years. (Whenever I’m in an electronics store, they address me politely at first, like they would anyone else. Then — with suspicion. By the end, they’re treating me like a patient on her last legs.) The salesman said, go on home, our telephone number is on the receipt, call us before you plug the phone back in and read off what’s printed on the charger, because if it can’t handle the voltage, this battery will burn up your phone. Warily, I asked if I should read everything printed on the charger, or else … should I be more selective? He just waved his hand. I went home, and there, in place of one, I found two of those things … those chargers … hanging there. I got down on my hands and knees to follow the cord up from the outlet, in order to figure out which charger was the one I’d been using … and my purple rayon skirt tore. And not on the seam, either. I mean the one I bought at the general store in Obeliai that time. I was planning to go to my class reunion in it — I don’t know which one, maybe the hundred fiftieth. They’ve already reserved a cafe for it — one that’s already been bombed twice, as is appropriate for the city of Panev
žys.
The telephone is working now. But why that other charger is hanging there remains an “open question” (to utilize one of the political clichés of our age). My neighbor is a dead man, when he gets back. He could have fixed everything in two seconds, but he’s off mushroom hunting in Labanoras with his wife and the Tyzenschnauzer. I’ve read, by the way, that those dogs aren’t all that safe. And you can’t tie them up because they go out of their minds. One bit through a child’s hand, apparently. As soon as he gets home, I’ll tell him. But first let him help me buy a new computer. He said he’d install three things for me, the first day — Windows XP, Word, and Woolite. Perhaps I should hurry up and thank him for the offer? Because when I say nothing, he seems to get grumpy. Then his son (a flighty musician type), without lifting his fierce little troublemaker’s face from behind his newspaper, says: “No, no, you’ve gotta get her Linux and Clorox, then she’ll react.” But it’s not funny …
Relations with that family are going downhill all around. Too bad. They were among the few people with whom I wasn’t afraid to be myself. Not long ago we were coming home from visiting some mutual friends and my neighbor said, “You need to straighten out your disposition.” He was driving. Sober. His profile was flawless, as on a coin. Like it was cut from tin plate. You could slice bread with a nose like that. I said, one’s disposition isn’t like a dresser drawer, waiting to be tidied up: one’s disposition is a matter of control. You see, on our visit, I’d raised my voice rather unattractively (when I talk quietly, no one listens). The discussion got interesting — it was about ugliness in literature. I don’t care for it … Neither ugliness, nor literature. It’s much better to write letters like this. Literature is simply another artificial thing among all the other artificialities surrounding and congealing around us. And it’s getting more artificial all the time. Lewis Lapham’s table in his introduction to Marshall McLuhan’s book Understanding Media, in which he describes the differences between citizens and nomads, can be applied equally well to traditional and contemporary texts. Dream has replaced art. And pleasure, happiness. Celebrity, successes. Passion as truth, truth as passion. Pornography, drama. Polymorphism, heterosexuality. And journalism, literature. All that awful postmodernism ruined everything. Standards were scattered to the four winds. Contexts got confused. When we say “empire,” we mean the perfume; when we say “morning miracle,” we mean — like Victor Erofeyev, in his essay of the same name — waking up with an erection. But I want an empire to have emperors, damn it, and walls impervious to cannon, and I want a morning miracle to be a cat licking its paws in a slanting ray of sunshine. But, you know, I suppose I’m changing with the times as well; I’ve started confusing criteria left and right. For example, I’ve started judging some poets’ works by how well they take care of their children (particularly those born out of wedlock), rather than by the subtleties of their texts. And, horror of horrors, when I read their poems, they seem so terrible.