On Fridays, Grandfather would bathe. After his sauna, he would cut the hairs sticking out of his nose, then cut the calluses off of his heels with a pocketknife, and throw them into a drawer. Then he would put on the clean pair of underwear thrown over the chair ahead of time, and sit down to eat some milk soup. When he caught the spot of melting butter with his spoon, he would sigh out his content in one word: “Amerika …” Looking at that spot of butter, I began to understand that in America things were the way they ought to be in this world — clean, bountiful, and just. Not like they were in our house, where heel calluses rattled around our drawers and men with revolvers lived over our heads.
“Where is America?’ I asked my grandfather once, wanting to understand his sigh of bliss.
“There.” Spooning soup with his right hand, he pointed at the floor with his left forefinger, apparently having the other side of the earth in mind. Perhaps because his finger had been cut once and had healed with a squared-off tip, the location of America remained a mystery to me. Right up until he died. Grandfather almost seemed to enjoy having taken this secret with him into his coffin — where he lay dressed in a blindingly white shirt sent to him from America by a cousin who had emigrated.
When, eventually, I was sent to school, and we were studying the continent of North America, which I thought resembled a rooster hung up by its feet, I remembered Grandfather’s forefinger pointing at the floor. That finger, breaking the crust of the earth, penetrating its many layers to emerge on the Atlantic shore with its nail full of Miami sand …
It was around then, I’m told, that father began leaving us. I say “began leaving” because only cynics leave their families all at once. Father was a true romantic: he wrote poems, collected herbariums, and even had tuberculosis. If he had decided to stick to poetry, perhaps everything would have turned out all right, but no, he had to take up writing prose. I’m convinced that people only throw themselves into writing prose when all other avenues have been closed to them — it’s an act of desperation. And Father’s one and only story was about his solitude, which was apparently expressible only through art. His main character, a lonely dreamer, observed ordinary life from a distance: “From his study window he can see the street. It is not far away, since the lawn is not deep. It is a small lawn, containing a half dozen lowgrowing maples. The house, the brown, unpainted and unobtrusive bungalow is small too and by bushing crepe myrtle and syringa and althea almost hidden save for that gap through which from the study window he watches the street.” It’s that althea which always makes me feel most sorry for my father. He, the herbarium collector, could so easily have swapped that swamp plant for something better. And an editor was already planning to print my father’s story in the town newspaper, but he too noticed the althea, and, since he happened to be reading Faulkner’s Light in August at the time, he recognized the sentences …
Right after that, father disappeared. For a month he was supposedly at a famous sanatorium — on account of his lungs — but then he returned to the house after all, just to get his books. Rushing (apparently he was afraid of running into Mama, coming home from work), he piled both Faulkner, whom he knew by heart, and all my fairy-tale books into his suitcase. I didn’t so much enjoy reading those fairy-tale books as I liked looking through the little colored pictures. If no one was at home, I would even scare myself looking at them. The witch with orange hair and the dragon with three heads on its disgusting neck would seem to come to life. They would sneak away from their pages in the book and stand behind me, staring.
The next summer I went with my older cousin to an amusement park; we wanted to ride the Ferris wheel. When we got to the very highest point, where it always seems as though you’re hanging in the air without support, instead of taking in the entire small town below us at a glance, I looked down and saw my father there, walking down a path with his second wife. And at that same moment, my car broke off the wheel, and slowly, softly, as though it were the down coverlet my grandmother had made for my mother rather than a piece of metal, it glided down right on top of the walking couple … For some time afterward, still feeling the desire of that fantasy, I would often dream that I was falling, but Mama would stroke my head and say that it wasn’t anything to be afraid of. All children dream of falling; it means they’re growing.
At school I differed from the other kids at the top of the class because I lacked both jeans and a father. I’ve already told you about Father; I was jeanless for several reasons. First, my mother didn’t have the money to buy them; second, I don’t like to see tight-fitting behinds, unless they’re on a bicycle or a motorcycle. Not all of my classmates bought their jeans at the market; frequently, relatives from America would send them. They wore down those jeans down to the paleness of an enameled pot, after which they’d cut them into pieces and sell the strips to other kids as patches. Now Gvidas, he didn’t have a father either, but he did wear jeans. He walked around with his thumbs stuck in those tight pockets and looked at everyone as if he had a purebred horse right behind him, neighing expensively. Moreover, he didn’t believe in God. Not because our textbooks said that God didn’t exist, but because no one had proved to him that there was a higher power. And by the time Armstrong and Aldrin stepped out onto the moon, Gvidas was absolutely sick of the topic of God. I remember very well how grandmother, grating potatoes in the kitchen, would always pray and pray — that Grandfather wouldn’t drink; that my mother’s arm, which still hurt after its fracture, would heal; that our undependable father wouldn’t leave us for good … And though God didn’t fulfill a single one of her requests, and though even with my head pointed right at heaven I still couldn’t smell the sweat from His feet, I continued to believe in Providence, not Gvidas. Once, losing his patience, he told me about the Ganges — which I’d already heard about from my older cousin. Religion convinced people to wade out into that holy river of India, hoping it would heal their wounds, and then they ended up dying from even worse infections. How can you argue with facts like that? I sat on the school bench with tears in my eyes and said nothing. Gvidas opened the classroom window, jumped out onto the field, picked two handfuls of dandelions, and then came back to present them to me like a prince showing kindness to his vanquished foes. The teacher put a remark about disruptive behavior in red ink on his report card, even though he’d wiped his footprints off the windowsill long before class started. We never argued about God again, and started celebrating our birthdays together. Shortly thereafter, Gvidas’s mother’s second husband, a very nice man — an officer, in fact — adopted Gvidas. On one birthday, Gvidas gave me a burnt-wood engraving he had made himself, showing a tiny cottage, a well, and a sparrow on a fence, probably chirping; and his stepfather took us out to see real military planes. Up until then I hadn’t even known there was an airport in our little town. The planes there were little too, painted in a non-threatening, potato-like color, but we were assured they could be deadly in the right circumstances. According to Gvidas’s stepfather, all our enemies lived in America, probably in the same house as that Mr. Powers. On our way home, both of Gvidas’s shoes filled up with snow (but not mine, because I was walking in his footsteps), and he soon came down with pneumonia. By the time he came back to class, I wasn’t there to greet him, because I’d been transferred to a school closer to home, but for a long time I couldn’t fall asleep nights because I would imagine Gvidas’s suffering in his own bed — a sparrow chirping in each of his lungs. When he graduated from university, Gvidas got married, and then got divorced a few months later. Then he quickly married again, a Lithuanian born in America, and moved to Philadelphia. A classmate from my old school told me all of this. I saw Gvidas live only once, “twenty years after,” as Dumas would say … On our lunch break from work at the journal, a girlfriend and I went out to a nearby restaurant. Gvidas was sitting there in a corner of the room. I don’t doubt it was his wife sitting next to him: wearing earrings with diamonds and a short fur jacket that didn’t at all suit a place where drunken artists with cold gray eyes slouched over three-cornered tables, propping themselves up with their elbows. The woman’s face seemed cold, arrhythmic, out of sync with the world around it; I wished the gleam of her earrings could have been in her eyes instead … Gvidas dawdled over the menu and picked out dishes quite theatrically — one thumb stuck still stuck in his jeans pocket, the same as when he was a kid. I was still pregnant that day, enormous. Of course, it would have been interesting to hear first-hand what Grandfather hadn’t managed to tell me about America. And if Gvidas’s wife hadn’t been sitting next to him, I would have gone over and started asking questions, about America, about all sorts of things. Whether dandelions grew where he lived; if he remembered how badly wool socks chafe the feet when both your shoes are full of snow; if he still burned pictures of sparrows on fences into wood … Clearly it wasn’t the salad I was eating that was nauseating me, but rather this sudden flood of memories and feelings (I only have the one burnt-wood engraving, and I’ve kept it to this day). But I didn’t go over to him. I needed to avoid stress, after all. Yes, I was working in a comparatively quiet office — all I needed to do was some light editing of our articles, and occasionally I had to select some suitable piece of prose to fill a gap — but, still, even in those days, everyone was expecting a catastrophe at any moment.