Still, even when money is involved, a woman like me would only ever agree to change her name through a unique convergence of coincidence and sentiment. And I, a forty-five-year-old woman, being of completely sound mind and of my own free will, as they say, have sent love packing. But, two weeks ago, purely by chance, I started getting letters from an aging American man. He got my address from a distant relative of mine. He was searching for an “intelligent woman who has a sense of humor” to be his pen pal. I liked his last name best — Faulkner. Oh, and his parrots. He sent me pictures of them, and himself, via e-mail. One of the birds knows how to say “Hannah wants a cracker.” And why not have a different last name, after all? Giedra Faulkner …
In the evenings, it’s quiet now at my and my daughter’s building. Sometimes it seems as if the quiet is flowing from me like oil. I hear my houseplant shooting its ripened seeds at the window from a swollen, three-sided pod. I close my eyes, freeze, “And suddenly, like in the ads, Eternity. But not the time. Not the place.” The cat and I take turns sipping tea with milk from an English porcelain saucer.
Later we bite our nails. It’s a habit I seem to have picked up recently. I blame reality shows. I watch them too often. I bite my nails because I’m afraid. Because it seems to me that the people on those shows, on their first days — I mean the people as they once were, when they arrived at a studio for the first time—“disappear without a trace,” and no one even notices. Whereas the cat bites his nails because he doesn’t like it when I cut them with special scissors — something I can only do after first pretending — despicably — that I’m only coming over because I want to pet him. Later I find his clippings in my slippers or the breadbox. And sometimes we share an armchair and listen to salsa. If his tail should drop off the edge of the chair, the cat quickly nudges it back with his paw; it offends him that not all of him can fit on the cushion at once. The salsa CD was left for me at a certain publisher’s by an unknown person who added an unaggressive little love letter. Signed it “Johnsiera.” When I asked what the man who brought the disc looked like, the women in the office shrugged their shoulders, as if he’d been November’s wind or snow. I like the frothy rhythm of salsa — it too is like November’s wind and snow … And I happen to think that “Johnsiera” is not a he but a she, a friend of mine who translates Polish poetry for that publisher — but I haven’t said anything to her yet. Let her believe she’s pulled the trick off.
When the trains go by at night, I hear my room’s doors and windows vibrating. Like an earthquake building to a crescendo. This summer, after the earthquake we had in Vilnius, a Danish tourist was given the following instructions: when you feel the first vibrations, stand in a doorway holding some kind of identification. The doorway provides some protection from objects (or plaster) falling from above, while the documents come in handy when it comes time to identify what’s left of you. When the ground starting shaking again a few hours later, he took up his post in the doorway of the 
ili pizzeria — both hands clutching whatever personal documents he’d brought along, and with a Vilnius bank card between his teeth.
In the bathtub, having a long soak, I sometimes hear a dog barking. A big, vicious, energetic one, and not old yet, either. I sink underwater to get away from the sound. How often I’ve tried, most meticulously, to deduce who lives to the left of me. I know the seamstress Liuda only has a female cat. When the cat went into heat (on the 14th of February — as though she’d planned it), the thing pooped on my doormat. Out of anger and desire (they’re frequently related), because she smelled my own cat, but he, no matter how she meows, refuses to answer. Like me, he doesn’t like flirting through doors. Downstairs on the left is a fried meat pie cafe, and the neighbors above me have only children. So there’s nothing beyond the thick bathroom wall, the way I figure it. Except for another building, which, when you’re looking at it from outside, seems like part of the same building. There could be a small closed courtyard, too. I imagine it overgrown with chickweed; perhaps there’s a pump in the center, painted with oils. But I’ve never come across anyone coming out of the other gateway with a dog. For four years now, that barking while I’m bathing has been a hairy mystery to me. One of Cortàzar’s characters had a similar problem. His was the sound of a woman’s resigned weeping all night long in a hotel room. He was tormented by it, or rather from speculating as to what could cause such inexhaustible weeping. The man nearly went insane from lack of sleep. But afterward, it seems, some kind of story developed out of it.
Changing your name, or changing your face, is easy compared with changing your lifestyle. But I’ve made up my mind. The same way I always have to force myself to go to the dentist after a long interval. One quiet evening, I approached my daughter as she was doing her homework. Before beginning this difficult — and time-consuming, as I anticipated initially — conversation, I twice tried to fix the creased carpet with my foot, pushing both her slippers tidily into their spot. My daughter was facing away from me, doing a geography assignment, reading about the glaciers that once slid over Europe and so altered the continent’s landscape forever.
“My child,” I said, “I have something important to tell you. I got a phone call from a very wise publisher, you know. He suggested I write a novel. For money. I’ve decided to take his advice and become a real writer. I’m going out … I have to think it all through. Perhaps we’ll have to change the way we live. Hitch our banal existence to eternity. Just like the dead.”
“I have a test tomorrow,” she replied. “If you go by the supermarket, bring back some wafers. Two packages. The chocolate ones, please.” Without even turning around.
I put a spare pair of panty hose, a bottle of valerian extract, some brandy, a small volume of Nabokov, and my daughter’s photograph into a canvas bag bearing the slogan “Don’t Leave Home Without It.” Then I put on my coat in the hallway. Opening the door to the frosty Old Town — put into perfect order by our new mayor, but still full of surprises — I find myself telling myself that I am absolutely doing the right thing. That my mother, who died three years ago and in whose coffin I put a sprig of jasmine while no one was looking, would forgive me.
My eighth-grader was surely too young to understand that if you want to become a real writer, you leave home for good. You begin to shape your life, like Jurgis Kuninas would say, “from the start.” Writers are damned. The truly talented and passionate ones abandon their children entirely. To wives and husbands. Sisters and brothers. Fate and the law. Writers follow the rhythm of their hearts; they live apart, humming with everyday life despite keeping their eyes on eternity. In order to protect his or her talent, in order to go on providing so much happiness to thousands of very likely unhappy people, a writer cannot have either a house, or a job, or money, or any sort of peace, spiritually speaking. He must be steeped in loneliness. Must torture himself. Drink a lot, and starve a lot … At this point, the rhythm of my heart, without my even remembering to consult it, testified that I was on the right path. Invention must be the writer’s daily and only bread. The plowed fields of inspiration, watered by our bloody sweat, where tender crocuses open … (Semantically speaking, perhaps “delicate” would have been a better adjective than “tender.”) Exotica. Complaints about God. Eternity. The dead. Image after image. And … how did he put it? Interspersed with recipes. The novelist must listen for whom the bell tolls, and climb the magic mountain. Wander from here to eternity, across the river and into the trees. Like Homo Faber, the invisible man, or the mighty angel. I turn around … On the second floor, light leaks through the linen curtains, out here into the heart of darkness. Bring home some wafers. Two packages … chocolate. Ahead: the city and the dogs. Or do I mean the time of the hero. Light in August, anyway. One hundred years of solitude. Immortality. Feeling the tears brimming up in my eyes, I’m gone with the wind … Yes, blown from here to eternity. Look homeward, angel. But it’s not for those who have left to return.