It gets dark. The Old Town, perhaps because of all its lights, gets dark more slowly than out beyond the railroad tracks. Out there lives a jeweler who once made me a silver ring with an alexandrite stone. The sky this night was exactly that color — purple with pink edges. And the evening was like the one after my divorce when I smashed the wedding crockery painted with forget-me-nots. I went out that night dressed in a jogging suit, with a cardboard box under my arm, and battered six cups and a coffee pot on the railroad ties. Back then, the big trees next to the railroad tracks hadn’t been cut down yet. When I took out the garbage, bats would fly over my head like rocks from a slingshot.
In the dusk, the thought came to me that a person isn’t aged by years but by perceptions. I should start my novel with an episode in paradise. The narrator will be dead, but it should seem to the readers that the woman is only relaxing in a small resort town. A long walk on a short pier is on the agenda, as the cynical English would say. Because I’m a pessimist. I’m always gathering up the worst impressions from my past and out of them cobbling together a future just as grim. Nabokov said about novels: “It’s queer, I seem to remember my future works, although I don’t even know what they will be about. I’ll recall them completely and write them down.” Nowadays, when you bring a manuscript to your publisher you can suggest a design for the cover at the same time. And I’ll give the book an ordinary sort of title: In Those Days, When I was Alive. Here’s a shot at it:
“While resting, my thoughts often returned to the past. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the wind would suddenly come up and carry slight swirls of sand along the streets. They reminded me of the silhouette of the genie escaped from his bottle in a book of old fairy tales I read as a child. On the far bank, little bells never stopped ringing, seemingly unconnected to the wind. I would imagine that they were hanging in clusters from the necks of camels, although more likely they decorated some goat or cow. By the way, I also noticed the smell of manure. I somehow never thought that even here, so close to God, domestic animals would be grazing freely and houses would be built according to some kind of social hierarchy as well. Sand, berries, and clouds resembling stuffed toys. It was impossible to reconcile the notion of camels — wandering in from a photo in some Turkish tourist brochure (‘Marmaris … We all deserve paradise at least once in our lives’) — with the blackberries ripening next to that stone cottage. An impossible combination, like the lions and birch trees in Wiiralt’s etchings. Standing a while by the river, one would inevitably see household goods floating by — a striped mattress, for example, and bits of wood from rotten doorjambs. It was difficult to believe that a modern black bus (if of uncertain manufacture) brought me to those mountains. When we were leaving, the director warned us to under no circumstances offer the driver money. Even though it was unlikely that the elderly people who’d spent the night on the bus had any. Aside from one or another anniversary coin, perhaps. As soon as I got on the bus, we were gliding down the mountain road without a sound, and I remembered an advertisement for a luxury car. Above there was a gold BMW; below, in letters as red as blood: ‘In a car like this, the only thing that clatters is your wife’s teeth.’”
So far, in this text, what I like most is the ambiguity about that “director,” which makes the reader wonder, is this a movie, a tour, or a funeral …? Next to the horrible intersection by the Aušros Gate, I stopped to wait for the green light. Across from me was a billboard with a picture of a couple of kids drawn with mushroom caps on their heads: “They sprout out of nowhere. Drivers, beware!” I stepped back from the road a bit. Because my aunt had just recently told me about two incidents that had stuck in her mind all her life: One of them was the death of a child, the other the deaths of two women. Happily, my healthy instinct for self-preservation had already managed to erase all the details of the child’s death from my memory, but regarding the two women, it all happened in the sixth decade of the last century. They were walking just here, in the spot where I stand now. My aunt was behind them on her way to the Pedagogical Institute. She was studying German and Spanish, at the time. In Spanish, the word “to live” in the second person plural is vivís. But, in Spanish, v is pronounced like b, so the word comes out sounding like the word for “penis” in Lithuanian. Well, my aunt and one of her friends just couldn’t keep from laughing when their elegant lecturer, wearing a snood on her hair, and so very much in love with the doomed heroes of the Spanish Civil War, would say bybys as she conjugated the verb, and on that day they were even expelled from the lecture hall for it. So, the two women walking in front of my aunt wanted to cross to the other side of the street, but at that moment a truck suddenly turned from one side of the Aušros Gate toward the railroad station. It was carrying thick plates of glass. During the sharp turn, some of the plates of glass that were strapped to its side peeled off and cut the women on the sidewalk to pieces. After that, the word vivís had a completely different meaning for my aunt. She said that it became as familiar to her as her raincoat. And even a bit Lithuanian. And my uncle, hearing this story, commented, “Well, didn’t you know that God is on the other side of the Gate of Dawn?”
On the other side of the Aušros Gate, a good deal lower down, there was once a cafeteria where my mother did an internship while she was studying at the Technical School of Commerce. It’s not there anymore, but you can walk by the spot. In the cafeteria it smelled of ordinary vegetables — boiled potatoes, beets, carrots — and aluminum pots clattered there all day long. One hot spring, the old cook, Mirikas, who’d been assigned to the girls, taught them how to make real lemonade. You need only six lemons in all. Plus sugar and water. You peel the skins off of three lemon halves and cook a syrup out of them with sugar. Then you mix this with the juice squeezed out of the remaining lemons and dilute it a bit more with boiled water. You must drink it with ice. (Preferably crushed.) The glass may be decorated with lemon slices. (Real orangeade, as far as I know, is boiled out of bitter oranges as well as lemon. And is diluted with rose water, which we never had, and still don’t.) I suppose it’s only really in the novels of Southern authors from the US that one can buy lemonade like that from little wagons on the side of the road — Eudora Welty’s fiction, for example (and maybe Faulkner’s). But Mirikas taught the girls many other food-preparation tricks as well. Unbelievably simple, many of them. For example, if you want your soup to be thick, you shouldn’t slice the potatoes, but boil them whole and then break them into pieces with a knife or fork. For the rest of her life, Mama would only sprinkle in her spices at a certain moment, a few minutes before the cooking was finished, and she never covered the pot afterward.