At around eleven o’clock at night, all the sounds in our courtyard die down. That’s when the inanimate objects come to life. On the windowsill, the convolvulus plant’s life gets more convoluted still; in the dark, I think it even dares to take a few steps out of its planter. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, a crushed plastic bottle regains its form with a snap. A shepherd in the bucolic landscape on a soup plate continues to drive his three lambs down a mountain path. They make a few millimeters’ worth of progress … not that anyone will notice, come daytime. And then, the coats hanging by the front door, with their woolen mouths, discuss their impressions of the previous day in two different languages. My coat is Polish, my daughter’s is Italian. Their voices have a human note to them, because the coats came from the Humana second-hand store. At this time of night I start feeling sad. Because of all the time I’d spent believing I could make time go backward. Embarrassed, I cover myself up to the eyes with a blanket and imagine writing a letter to my daughter from an expensive clinic, as I’d seen people do on reality shows about plastic surgery. “My darling daughter … if I don’t make it through my operation, please know that I understood the risks, and that this is what I truly wanted. I’m tired of my real face. And, admit it, like all teenagers, you wish you had a younger-looking mother. And you’re right. Lately, even the cat yawns as he watches me undress in the bathroom. Remember when you dressed me in your “Miss Sixty” sweatshirt to go to a New Year’s party at Judita’s, and what came of that? I didn’t say anything to you then, but … if it weren’t for that piece of clothing, perhaps the guest botanist would be my … our friend. He might have saved our mandarin tree, with its drying twigs, improvising a makeshift IV out of a bottle of mineral water … Remember the day of the military parade at Sereikiški
Park, when you had me try riding a skateboard, and I smashed a stranger’s glasses with my wildly flapping elbow? (That was when we found out how much the glasses of an Independence Act signatory cost.)
“Of course, I’m only forty-six. It could be worse. And I still remember turning eighteen — well, a long, long time ago. I’m not sure I could even conceive of being forty-six, back then. We celebrated: Mama got oranges from somewhere, scooped them out and put apple mousse in the rinds. I sprinkled cinnamon on their whiteness — perhaps Nabokov would say like sand on snow — and with my finger sketched out my daydreams (in code) on the fogged-up kitchen windows. I thought, ‘Eighteen already …’ So, don’t blame yourself for wanting me to be look younger; I want to be more attractive myself, or as they say now, ‘sexier.’ Unfortunately, they won’t let you visit me here in the hospital. But believe me when I say I’ll look unbelievable. Striking! And on television, too — for the first time in my life. Not that anyone will be able to recognize me. (I mean, in a good way.) Do me a favor — bring your skateboard over and leave it with the nurse (her name’s Asta) — I’ll ride home on it myself. The green traffic light at the intersection will go on shining for me, forever and ever. Amen. Your loving Mama.”
These thoughts about the beauty that time has stolen from me haven’t come to mind accidentally. Everyone should be able to control their thoughts. You see, before falling asleep, thinking about the numerous and horrible yet unavoidable things that happen to the elderly, in order to avoid needing sleeping pills, I intentionally concentrate on other changes, rather than these unpleasant ones. I mean those changes — not the minor irritations I’ve been going on about — that are really what I might call “essential.”
… We bought the apartment where I’ve lived with my daughter for the past thirteen years from an old Polish lady called Malvina. The apartment’s radiators had burst, but my husband and I only noticed this after we’d moved in, because, before selling her property, Malvina had carefully glued pieces of cast iron over all the holes. The apartment looked completely neglected, yes, but we liked the price and the location. After all, in the Old Town, everything’s at hand. Sometimes the waitress in the café below would serve me a meat pie right through their open window, and I would hand my money to her the same way. And it was only a fifteen-minute walk to the university. My husband taught morphology there, in those days, and in his rather limited free time — just before dawn — wrote a dictionary of profanities. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to use a single word from that manuscript in this text. Not because the book was never published, and certainly not because of modesty, but because the terms he collected there are far too poetic and mild for the present day.
Malvina’s son had worked at one of the first manufacturing cooperatives in independent Lithuania, which went bankrupt, and for several years afterward, washing the floor, I’d find signs of his defeat at the hands of the new economy in the cracks between the floorboards — plastic beads and buttons. And there were lines penciled in on one of the doorjambs. The child whose height those marks tracked probably has his own kids now.
One of my apartment’s most interesting (or should I say extravagant) features is that it has two exits. One door opens into the inner courtyard. It was that door my husband left through when we separated. It was only after a couple of years that it occurred to me that quite a few of the people who left my apartment by that door, passing by the drying laundry in the yard, vanished without a trace. Sometimes I even suspected (though, obviously, I kept this theory to myself) that they had turned into blankets and coverlets hanging on the laundry line shared with the neighbors. A few weeks after a disappearance, strange notices, handwritten in ink, would show up in the passageway from the courtyard to the street: “We buy human hair — not less than ten centimeters long.” Or: “We can remove your kidney stones without pain, using an amazing new method.”
The other door in my kitchen leads via a shared hallway out to the opposite side of the building, toward the façade, past the broad stairway that takes us first to our mailboxes and then outside, into a busy street of gray smog. Not that we use the mailbox all that often, anymore; everyone uses e-mail, now.
On the opposite side of this hallway is another apartment. Exactly the same as ours. For most of our time here, Nobody lived there, creaking his calcified joints all night long, every night, starting promptly at eleven P.M. He only quieted down — temporarily defeated — when the owner let a student, a relative, spend the night in those two rooms that mirrored ours. In fact, I often thought it would be nice, if you could take off the roof, to see how we all slept, mirror images of one another, on different sides of the corridor, our feet nearly touching, like the figures on a pack of cards. Although, actually, the two figures on a single card are always the same sex, and their eyes are always open. The dilapidated hallway, soaked in old smells, whose four-meter-high walls present peeling nipples of wallpaper hanging like the petals of some tropical flower, is what divides the apartment into its two mirrored lives. During the Soviet years, the entire four-room space was a single courtroom. That’s what our pharmacist neighbor told us, anyway. A Stalin painted in oils used to hang in our bedroom; later it was Lenin, and now it’s Lenin again, right above my bed — just not the same portrait, of course. This one is three-dimensional, from a plaster mold. It dates back to an evening with friends that turned into a night and then a morning; while we were eating a healthy breakfast of four-grain porridge sprinkled with brandy, my friend the historian got out a drill and hung this bas-relief above my bed — he said he was doing justice to history. He hates change — as do I. Neither of us, for example, ever bought cell phones, and all our other friends, if they need to reach us in an emergency, just head out to wander the city, hoping to zero in on us by intuition.