She brightens before my eyes, and almost instantly, the way they do in cartoons, writes up an entire page, on top of violet carbon paper, gives me one copy, and, taking her leave, informs me, “Every client is allowed three weeks to change their mind. You can cancel your claim until December 15.”
I know what you’re thinking. I made the dream up. It’s too rational and logical. But did you know that Jean Baudrillard says that even dreams are manufactured now? I guess I’ve swallowed even that. All you have to do is guess who palmed it off on me, and why. Baudrillard also wrote that wherever we are, we live in a simulated universe that sometimes resembles the original, and that illusion has become impossible, because reality itself is impossible.
Listen, let’s break with tradition this year. Come visit — not between the holidays, before New Year’s, like you always do, but as soon as you can. You could come during the German Days festival in Vilnius. They’re showing The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich. I could get you a ticket. The movie’s supposedly about love, but what it’s really about is how a man shouldn’t change, not even for the woman he loves, because it will destroy him. Anyway, you do have the key to my apartment, after all.
But, look, when you come in, don’t be surprised if you don’t find anyone in the kitchen. The only thing that will greet you is a picture of Eminem on the refrigerator with his middle finger sticking out. Please go on to the middle room without delay and don’t freak out — Potter has grown a lot. He started growing even before the visit to the veterinarian. I knew that cats usually start getting fat after a time, but generally only after they’re fixed. As for me, I’m shrinking. Everyone gets smaller with age. Don’t be afraid of snapping the mandarin tree’s branches when you elbow your way into the living room. I brought the seed home with me from Chicago. Now it’s grown so much I can’t get it out of the room; last year the top even broke through the ceiling. My actor neighbor laughed when he told me about it. His son woke up in the morning (this is the boy I went to see Karlsson with) and stepped out of bed straight into the tip of the mandarin tree. He leaped back under the covers and said to his mother, “Let’s not be afraid of anything. Like Freken Bok says, all sorts of things happen, even in the best of families.” Anyway, shoulder your way through those branches, and if you break one or two, don’t worry. The cat will be lying there, probably in the middle of the room, on the floor. Like a tiger under a tree. After everything I’ve told you, you’ll probably understand that calling him “kitty, kitty” somehow doesn’t seem appropriate. (Maybe you’d better not even pet him. Just go around.) I’ll be sitting there too, leaning against his side, like the kid’s Bratz doll (from the fall collection) is leaning against him now. I’ll be reading a big book. I’ll barely be able to hold it in my hands. And I’ll give you one very important thought from that book, because I might forget to quote it later: “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.” Then carefully pick me up and put me in Potter’s carrier. Zip me up tight. (The more time passes, the more I’m afraid of the cold.) On the way out, take a thimble from my Italian jewelry box.
I’d like to go drink coffee with you in Pilies Street. If, when you pass the Aušros Gate, you turn back and stand there in thought a while, a piece of the wall’s gold decoration might well fall at your feet. Take it: sometimes it brings luck. I’ll want coffee with cream, by the way. In what used to be the Vaiva Café. We used to run over there for milk sausages in the breaks between classes. One time Linas, drunk, broke the corner of a lettuce-green cup. The waitress started yelling that she was tired of hooligans like him, and he threw himself over the bar, got right up into her face, and sang, Marina … Well, when you order coffee there, it’ll all come back to you at once. (Because in the fall, time merges with space.) I’ll drink my coffee in the carrier. Out of the thimble.
If, perchance, you can’t come, then tomorrow I’ll send you three things that have started irritating me in their obtuse opposition to reality. (You could take them to the cottage in Obeliai, or leave them at home, as you wish.) Don’t get insulted. First, I’ll send you a jar that’s still a third full of honey. My mother gave it to me three years ago, when I was returning from Panev
žys to Vilnius. It’s been two years already since she died. But the honey never seems to end. Of course, I don’t use it much, really, just in the evenings for tea. But, anyhow … Next, you’ll get an artificial silk scarf. There’s a reproduction of a Renoir painting on it, a mother and daughter; I’ve forgotten what the painting’s called. Don’t bother tying it. Even a seaman’s knot. It unties itself. I’ve lost it on hedges, the trolleybus, the streets.
If you do wear it, pin it on with something. Though the faces on it are so bright that you’ll notice right away if it’s fallen off your neck; you’ll turn around and see them at once. And then, the last thing I’ll send is a little wooden hand-cranked coffee mill with a little drawer. I bought it in an antique store in Chicago, on 47th Street. I returned to Lithuania five years ago. I’ve ground coffee in it many times. But the coffee always smells of some indeterminate spices, ground in that mill in some house in that city. I wonder if the population of Chicago has reached six million yet?
Good-bye! Kisses! (When I have e-mail again, I’ll write a few sentences about how I’m getting along.) I always feel like you’re close by. Like a watermelon seed in the stomach. Like cryptorchidism in the mouth. Jesus, I mean the other way around — like a watermelon seed in the mouth, like cryptorchidism in the stomach.
yr. g.
P.S. I mentioned the neighbor’s dog. He’s not a Tyzenschnauzer. I made a mistake. The breed is called a Riesenschnauzer. (Although, to me, when I love someone, neither their breed nor their looks are important.)
A Long Walk on a Short Pier
Some three months after the appearance of my first book, a well-known publisher I knew only by sight called me late in the evening. I don’t like late calls. They have long been associated with family illnesses and my mother’s friends checking to see if I’m doing anything illegal, for example, if I’m drinking wine in the kitchen with Nabokov again. “I’m disturbing you on account of the novel you’re writing,” the publisher said. “We’d like to read it.” I assured him I wasn’t writing anything. But it immediately became clear that he was going to patiently persevere. I told him he’d caught me during a reading phase. I write from experience — I can only write down as much as I live. I can no more write faster than live faster. Others construct reality — for money, with ease, and all the time. I don’t even know how to make decent soup all the time, never mind fiction.
Besides, I had just then started on redecorating my apartment. Bought myself some putty. Some fabric. I’d been expecting an upholsterer for a couple of days already. He was supposed to cover a Klaipda armchair, the Lithuanian equivalent of a La-Z-Boy, with Japanese hieroglyphics. When the publisher called, I was sitting on the floor, on top of the material I’d purchased, browsing through Stilius magazine. I was turning the pages and wondering how high-class women with nails like that manage to wipe their asses without hurting themselves. After a short pause, the publisher said, “But you wrote that you’re writing. And in that one essay, you very insightfully — although, frankly, I think you needn’t have been so sarcastic about it — listed everything that a best-selling novel needs: exotica, complaints about God, sex of a somewhat unusual …” “Sure,” I interrupted him, “and in another essay, I wrote that a girlfriend took me downtown in a cat carrier to have a cup of coffee, and that her father finds women most useful for pulling ticks out of his back.” Whenever I get interrupted, I lose all desire to converse further, but this man, in the nearly indifferent voice of an experienced gambler, pressed on: “Well, yes, it’s difficult to tell fiction from reality. Just because you have a gentle narrator doesn’t mean its author isn’t merciless in real life. But look, one way or the other, I’m sure that you’ll write a novel sooner or later, as there are perfectly viable longer narratives — buried, but still alive and kicking — running through parts of your various essays. I’ll call, if I may, about every four months. Think about it carefully. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but what is a writer these days without a novel under her belt? A nobody. In other words — nothing but a columnist. If you aren’t on the cover of a novel, you’re nowhere. Strange as it may seem, the best-seller lists are still dominated by novels, you know. Sometimes I wonder why, myself. You know, a person comes home, sinks into an armchair, and wants to be launched into outer space for a while … that’s what stories are for, they take you out of yourself. The reader wants to leave life behind, become indeterminate, neither here nor there. To disconnect himself. To become a detective, or a murderer. Do a little traveling. Find true love, feel lots of exciting emotions. In short, to make a clean getaway from one’s own boring skin. When I was little I used to read The Three Musketeers that way, but I still had to do my homework, so as soon as I read a paragraph of chemistry or physics I’d reward myself with Dumas for a half-hour. Now I see my daughter reading There’s a Boy in the Girls’ Bathroom the same way. Short stories don’t cut it — they don’t last long enough to really get into them. There’s none of the allure of the long journey. You know, it’s like floating in a rowboat, just drifting, pleasantly, with the shore far away, but not dangerously so. Of course, a novel still has to end before it begins to feel like a burden, an obligation. Five-hundred-page books use up their credit very quickly. Unless the narrative is propped up by some kind of quest, or investigation. Henning Mankell, Unni Lindell, John Irving, Haruki Murakami, Dan Brown … I say the mystery novel is the basic form to which we should all aspire. Not literally, of course. When I say ‘investigation,’ I don’t necessarily mean a whodunit. Why not a quest for one’s sexual identity, for example? In one of your essays you wrote that you felt as though you’d lost your gender. A great beginning for a novel … or end for a life. No, no, I’m kidding. But you’re mistaken when you say, as you did in the title of one of your essays, that the plot should be shot dead. The celebrated essay genre is basically a parasite, right from the start, thriving at the expense of real literature. All that topicality, the irrepressible exhibitionism of our essayists, well, the river of time drowns them soon enough. Writers think they’re talking about solitude, for example, when they’re actually just fondling their wilting genitalia. Yes, yes, it’s as difficult to squeeze existentialism out of that particular spot as it is to squeeze sweat from a stone. Sex … Well, you probably remember what that art historian said: Sex is like eating plums. And eroticism is like smelling flowers. But where’s love in all that? When human feelings have been impoverished to the point where they’re nothing more than mechanical movements, they can only be of interest to soldiers. And I mean the old-timers, not the new recruits. I think sex without love really is like eating plums. That is, with a big pit in the way. But, look, with writing, the most important thing is not to be afraid to start. Do you know what Bernard Shaw said to a lady who asked him how he wrote? He said, from left to right. Perhaps the problem is that you’re intimidated by the so-called seriousness of the novel genre? The weight of it all? Plots, central conflicts, character development, endings reflecting important social realities … What silliness. This isn’t the era of Anna Karenina. Just make up your mind; your train will surely arrive. Essentially any text, you know, even a novel, is just a bunch of free-floating thoughts written down. Although it would be ideal if they were interspersed with recipes, if that’s not too much to ask. Not that that hasn’t already been done. But, you know, on the way to the Baltic, Esquivel’s water for chocolate and Allende’s aphrodisiacs all turned into mushrooms — mushrooms, mushrooms, and more mushrooms. In Lithuania women even make their salads according to Laima Muktupavela’s memoir The Mushroom Covenant. So there’s still room to sprout, I say. A novel can be about anything. Getting started is what’s most important. Oh, and the ability to end the thing in good time. Like I said, before reading becomes an obligation. Are you still there? Hello? Am I interrupting something? What are you thinking? Whatever it is, I’m certain it could turn into the first sentence of your novel … Just so long as it isn’t one of those five-page sentences …”