Writing an ordinary letter has turned into a pretentious pastime. It’s worse, of course, if you save them all — me, I tear them up. Saving letters is like saving someone’s hair. Scents waft from them — the things suggested by the particular way they chose to fold the paper, all the lurking analyses of their handwriting … Not to mention the things Mika Waltari wrote about: “Therefore I wrote my friend a rather foolish and impatient letter, and all my senses were agitated as I wrote this letter, so that I sent my eyes and ears and nose and the tips of my fingers and perhaps my mouth too with this letter, so that she was forced to hesitate, when she read such an impatient, irritating and disturbing letter.”
A close friend wrote me a letter once when he was very ill. He w nearly blind and could barely hold the pencil in hi nd. He gave it to another person to give to me if he should die. I was in America at the
e. I only found out about the letter when he was already dead. But I had the chance to see him befor died and have a talk about important things. I never d read the letter; I called the man to whom it had been entrusted and asked that he b it with t opening it.
And then, when you had finished school and were writing letters to me while I was working in a country village, they always had a double crease in them. When I was first married, I ironed my husband’s slacks that way (and then he wouldn’t let me iron anything ever again).
If my computer hadn’t broken down, this letter would be printed on one of those sprocket-feed pages, with those edges like that ear of yours and its three piercings. But it’s okay it turned out this way. You must have gotten the list of our classmates in an e-mail by now. They were supposed to send it to everyone. I have two class reunions coming up this year: one for just us friends, and one for the whole class. It was a list of all our telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. (Sorry, sorry … the cat just walked by, right under my nose, and spilled some of my coffee here onto the table and onto the page … I’m too lazy to rewrite the above; when it dries out, no doubt some of the words here won’t be entirely readable …)
You know, I saw Linas’s name on the list, and the kolkhoz appeared before my eyes. He’s eating watermelon in an abandoned chapel, spitting out the cockroach-like seeds. Bats are flitting around in the nearly dark sky. We’re going out to steal apples tonight. I was so envious of you then, the way you and that German Studies student were making out in a clay ditch. (Did you read that the Japanese have practically proved that life could have begun in clay?) I liked to imagine your teeth worn down from acid, because I was in a panic that no one would ever love me because of my teeth — and, in general, because of my other … complexities. One time, Linas, half-naked, clambered up on a crane at the kolkhoz construction site, lay down, wrapped his feet around the shaft, pushed himself off, and, looking at the red sun upside down, sang Marina, Marina, Marina … Who knows why, but I knew at that moment that he would be going away to the university, as he’d already served his time in the army. You two hardly knew one another. But you were the one he told that philology students are good for getting your exercise lying down. Wasn’t it you? Well, let him rest in peace. But wait, why is he on the class list? Maybe they’ll invite his widow? It wasn’t long ago. Virga said that he couldn’t feed himself after the stroke — they did it for him. (And not intravenously, but with purée through a tube down his nose.) Well, anyway, we’ll either take a group excursion to the cemetery or honor him with a minute of silence. And while everyone’s keeping quiet, in my thoughts I’ll hum Marina, Marina … as I always do on such occasions. Actually, did you know that Linas’s mother was completely blind? When he was a teenager, he’d cut up blankets and sew dolls out of them. He would patch their body parts together out of different textures, so his mother would get a clearer picture by touch.
You remember Aist
? That time Virga found her American underwear on a shelf at the Science Academy library? How passionate we were — well, some of us — in those days. Much later Aist graduated from the Police Academy. Divorced now. Like you. Like me. She works at the public prosecutor’s. Can’t smell a thing. Thanks to chronic sinusitis, and the medicine she takes for it, she has anosmia. She even claims to be relieved about it, these days, because sometimes there are nights when two suicides need to be cut down and carted away, and she has to be in the room while the police photograph the bodies and write it up. She’s taken up drinking, too. But not because she’s squeamish. She hates it when you have to arrest one parent, who’s done away with the other, in sight of their children. It usually happens at night. The kids see a puddle of blood, and so think the police are to blame for everything. The men who dragged one of their parents off to who knows where. They probably call someone to spend the night with the kids. A grandmother, or a neighbor. And one child opens his eyes in the dark. Like in John Irving’s A Widow for One Year: “Tom woke up, but Tim did not.”
When Virga called me and asked for my e-mail address, so she could send the list of everyone who’s coming, and I said I didn’t have one, she nearly cried. She said, how will we keep in touch now, I divide people into two groups, those who have e-mail and those who don’t. I said, I divide people into two groups too, those who divide people that way and those who don’t. She sent everything by ordinary mail.
Now when I come home late at night from somewhere or other, I hear every sound echo by my house, as though it were in a tunnel. A couple of acacia leaves stick to my shoes and climb up the wooden steps. Then drop off and stay behind. Decide not to come in. I believe it was Nyka-Nili
nas who wrote that in the autumn, time merges with space. In the fall, I imagine time like fruit in a jar. The year written on the lid under transparent tape. Time looks out at us, its little flattened pear face pressed up against the glass. If it weren’t for those goddamned poets, our relationships with all these ephemeral phenomena, with the fall, and particularly with love, would be so much simpler. We’d be KO’d less often. But why have I bothered writing to you about the autumn? The seasons never affected you. And never changed you.
Now that everything’s over with, I’ll admit to something. After my divorce, I fell in love with this guy. I thought it was impossible. (I’m a hundred and fifty years old, and, like that café in Panev