“So I said to her, all right, if you’re my grandmother who died three years ago and you see us all the time, then tell me what my mother’s bringing home for me? From the supermarket.”
Being of sound mind, as they say, I simply kept quiet. I watched my face slowly disappear in the bathroom mirror as steam fogged it over. I knew I that should “let it go.” But what if …? Whoever or whatever the creature who called was, she had to realize she couldn’t tell my daughter I was bringing home chocolate wafers. Because then my daughter would have (as I did once) drunk magic water from the footprint of a lamb and turned into something she couldn’t put a name to for the rest of her life.
“Did she guess?” I asked, standing naked now in front of the mirror, which was blank as a wall.
“Mom, sometimes you’re as dumb as the cat. Of course not. She just asked me to recite a poem instead. I got mad. I told her to take a hike. We’ll upholster the furniture, Mama will bring me home some wafers, and you could be anyone — there’s no such thing as heaven … I heard this noise on the line, you know, a grating sound, like when they’re sandblasting a building. Then she said, I won’t call again. Your mother will surely come home soon. Say hello to her for me. And tell her … when she makes soup, don’t slice the potatoes. For the soup to be thick, she needs to break them into rough pieces.”
When I next emerged from under my bathwater, the kid was no longer there. Even though I still felt like I was going to vomit, I thought I might be able to get to sleep. In any case, I told myself, the next day, sobered up, I would feel considerably better. I would go to the market first thing in the morning to buy some fresh beef. Saturday. Perhaps the upholsterer would even finish covering the armchair. Every piece of furniture, they say in the ads, has an intimate purpose too. And there’s more caramel and peanuts in chocolate bars these days. When you order new glasses, you can get the frames for free. Things aren’t entirely bleak. And, yesterday the woman’s magazine Stilius came out. There was a quiz in last week’s issue that was supposed to tell you how passionate you are. One of the things confirming this, in my case, was my yes to the question, “Have you ever read a novel you liked in one sitting?” And something else I particularly appreciated reading is that Colombard grapes in France are still picked by hand. This, precisely, is how a noble drink is born, with its rich aromas of flowers, honey, tobacco, and chocolate … Cognac (like brandy) should be made in the same way it should be enjoyed — slowly and leisurely …
Slowly and leisurely, I pulled the plug out of the bathtub, because I realized I was about to fall asleep there and then. The water even roared as it gushed into the drain — Slavka changed the pipes recently, a year ago. I stood up, grabbed a towel … And suddenly, as usual unexpectedly, beyond the thick wall, on the left, a dog started barking. A large, energetic, and not yet old one.
Even though I was sick of it, as I dried off in front of the slowly recovering mirror I once again meticulously considered who might live to the left of me. I know the seamstress Liuda has a cat. Below, there’s a fried meat pie cafe. Above, the neighbors only have children. For four years now that barking dog has been a hairy mystery to me. The riddle faced by one of Cortàzar’s characters was the resigned weeping of a woman all night long in a hotel room. He was tormented by it, or rather from speculating as to what could cause it. The man nearly went insane from lack of sleep. But afterward some kind of story developed out of it.
My American Biography
In 1960, the year I was born in a provincial town, Soviet soldiers shot down the American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers, which had been investigating all our great USSR’s private parts, so to speak. In the newspaper Tiesa, someone drew black hawks wearing American military hats perched on top of the Statue of Liberty. They held bombs in their claws. Mama, like all the other women in town, thought that this event was going to be the beginning of war with America. The month of May was nearly over, the best time for the five-year plan’s required sowing of all our imported American corn, and everyone was weighing Khrushchev’s statements to de Gaulle, Macmillan, and Eisenhower. All of life’s little discomforts faded in the light of our expectations of catastrophe. No one paid the least attention to the mess at home; it even passed unnoticed that they’d brought me home from the birthing center with lice. Although the Soviet leaders claimed they would not sit down at the meeting table with aggressors, they apparently seated themselves there anyway, as they later exchanged Powers for some colleague of their own. Ordinary people don’t know how exchanges like that happen, but I imagine them like the scene in the 1969 Russian movie Dead Season.
Father was still very good, then, and used to let my mother out to go to the movies. She wasn’t particularly crazy about the movies themselves, but apparently she sometimes longed for distant countries and fancy clothes — in a word, a different atmosphere. Mama worked in the station restaurant’s kitchen. She never put on a hat on her way home, even in winter, so that by the time she got back the smell of sunflower oil — from the donuts cooked there every day — would be out of her hair. One Sunday, coming home from The Great Caruso, she tripped over a bit of uneven sidewalk on the main street, fell down, and broke her arm. In the hospital, it became clear that the arm would have to be operated on because it was an open fracture. When I hear “open fracture,” I imagine a St. Petersburg bridge raised at night. I wish medical terms were even less straightforward than they already are. Anyway, when the doctor found out that there was a three-month-old baby at home, he immediately examined Mama’s breasts, saying, “With so little milk, we’ll never catch up with America anyway.” (“We” who?) So Mama stayed in the hospital, and gave me to my grandparents, to raise in an even smaller town.
When I was already bigger than the poppies growing in the garden by the house and no longer sucking on a pacifier, I took note of the people going by in the yard, the so-called neighbors. Russian military officers, settled there by the Soviet government, lived on the top floor of our building. A court had ruled that Grandfather purchased the house unlawfully, because its previous owner had forged the title to the property. I have all the documents from the case to this day. Sometimes I like to run my finger over the yellowed blueprints to the building, to remember the corridors in that house, and to find the small room in which I used to imagine being menaced by a bearded dwarf; I remember that a salt barrel eaten by rust used to stand just there. In those years, several similar cases were heard in town, during which those participating in the lawsuit, some of them armed with revolvers, were living in the same house. My grandfather couldn’t talk about the lawsuit without trembling in anger, but nonetheless he’d sometimes go and drink a bottle of moonshine with those officers in our sitting room. They called my grandfather batya, Dad, entirely innocently, while he, as soon as evening fell, would come into our rooms and turn on the radio to listen to the news, which always began with the sentence, “This is the Voice of America, speaking to Lithuania from Europe.” I didn’t understand why Grandmother would immediately cover the windows, close the shutters, and tell me to talk in a whisper. The radio didn’t seem to be saying anything special. The pleasant voices of men and women kept on talking about the important meetings Kennedy had attended, and his worries over Ecuador. Kennedy would say over and again that America’s relationship with the Soviet Union was important not just to his country, but to the entire world. Without understanding anything, just watching the blinking green eye of the radio, I’d listen to the news, and later I used to imagine that the Statue of Liberty had eyes that flashed in just the same way.