When we quietly returned to Petrarka a half-hour later, he was sitting on the windowsill, completely drunk, cleaning out his fingernails with a foot file — I have no idea where he got it. Vitia called him a taxi. Petrarka went down the stairs, continuing his cleaning. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he would have finished his manicure by sticking the file into the taxi driver’s heart. He seemed horrifyingly inert.
Vitia and I gradually finished the vodka, but now we’d set up camp on my side of the hall. Vitia, like all real or imaginary men, really did inhale the sandwiches I made … but real men usually only eat that way after a day of exhausting work, out of hunger. Well, Vitia was eating after difficult work too — just not work with his hands. Work that was difficult because it was nerve-wracking. At nine o’clock in the evening I saw him out to Aušros Gate Street. Not through the courtyard door …
Returning, I stopped at the café for some kharcho soup, because one thing that always sobers me up fast is getting a little tomato paste flowing in my veins in place of blood, and so I began then to go over every recent choice, legal or otherwise, in my head. Nearby, several men were eating meat pies. A random scattering, sitting singly or two together at a table. Like wax figures with orange vests. Judging from their clothes, they were the workers putting in a new road next to our building, along the railroad. In preparing their location, they had to excavate a section of the hill running parallel to the tracks, where I used take the cat in summertime, kick up clouds of dust on the footpaths, read, and sunbathe naked. The first thing they found when they started digging was that there were a lot of people buried there, about a meter down. One of my neighbors from the next street over even sent me, via computer, a picture he’d taken — half-excavated skeletons tangled up with tree roots, as if they were lovers. On my left, in the café, next to the window looking out onto the busy street, sat one man, alone, who didn’t in the least resemble the workers. He looked conceited. He reminded me somehow of Victor Pelevin. Black glasses and boots laced up to the knees. He couldn’t be in Lithuania, though — the author, I mean; I don’t watch television anymore, but I’m sure I would have read about a visit like that in at least three newspapers. Aside from that, however, it wasn’t too difficult to believe that he’d come snooping around a dive like this in search of homemade soup and homespun characters … When the waitress approached this man, he took off his glasses and said, in Russian, “When I was a child, I used to eat a Lithuanian dish called v
darai. Do you have it?” I immediately remembered a short sentence from one of Pelevin’s stories in A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia: “Happiness in general is nothing but reminiscence.” This story describes the ontology of childhood: a child’s impressions of growing up in a prison. The walls, a game he plays in the corridor, and the light falling through a high window are the only events of the story. I finished my soup, went home, and then I called my friend in Pavilnys.
I have reasons for not wanting to mention my friend’s name, first or last. (Last even less than first.) It will suffice to say that after Mother died, I took her Singer over to my friend’s house along with a pile of half-necessary, mostly Soviet books that wouldn’t fit in my apartment. Our friendship was cemented by three years of working at the same journal, and is, nowadays, a relationship of absolute trust. Yet, our goals, our opinions of men, stockings, hobbies, perfumes — none of it matches. She used to say: of all the wines in the world, brandy is the best, and she used to call that Russian company out to gobble up Lithuania’s one oil refinery “Fuckoil.” She was a fan of Coco Chanel, but she would intentionally mispronounce it as “Sinel,” the word for the rough homespun coats worn in Siberia. Instead of saying “make love” she’d say “lie down next to.” My husband couldn’t stand to be around her because he hates rude women who smoke, not to mention corny jokes. I, on the contrary, have an affinity for corny women and rude jokes. I would frequently walk through the Old Town with her in the rain. Unless there had been some catastrophe, or one of us needed some important advice from the other, we never really called. Although, actually, sometimes she’d call me for no reason at all, but then only very late at night. I would pick up, and, after taking a smoker’s pause, my friend would ask without preamble if I knew what paella was, or what the English word was for a business where you could hock an antique white-gold ring with an emerald setting — who knows what it was all about, maybe she did crossword puzzles when she couldn’t sleep. I liked the way she always mixed up her prepositions, telling me how one of her rich Pavilnys neighbors “dressed out and went up.” Sometimes, when I called her, she would hang up on me almost immediately, first explaining that she didn’t see any sense in life today, and I knew it was useless to pry — it would just make her mad. Once, when we’d only recently met, I invited her to go to the movies. She refused: “I haven’t been to the movies in twenty years and I won’t break the tradition. The last good movie I didn’t see was Fellini’s And the Ship Sails On.”
At the time, I wrote for the journal we both worked at, while my friend was an accountant. They threw her out, supposedly because they’d discovered she never finished her college degree, but actually because of her endless sick days. First they cut off one of her breasts, then the other. Now she doesn’t do anything, she just waits. For a spot to appear on her lungs. And it was around the time her husband left her for a colleague who could provide solace from all his family’s misfortunes. Perhaps there’s no need to condemn him — when their wives become ill, husbands take forever to recover. I won’t call his lover names, either — she sincerely wanted to help. People say excessive empathy is a mark of exceptional delicacy. When I visited my friend in the hospital, she would scribble letters on toilet paper, put them in envelopes, seal them, and give them to me to drop in a mailbox. They bore the name and address of a man I didn’t know, as well as the words “Open when necessary.” When they discharged her from the hospital, we waited for a taxi together in Santarišks for about an hour. My friend sat on a bench and looked at a bush blooming with exceptionally bright, yellow spring flowers. At that time of year, those bushes are usually the only impudently bright plant on the otherwise completely green background of spring. She asked me: “How do you measure your life?” I answered, in my daughter’s age and height. “I measure mine in seconds,” she said. I said, don’t be upset, people go on living without their legs, arms, or memories. And a good number walk around without hearts, and never even know it. My friend smiled: “It doesn’t make me feel better just because I know that someone else has it worse.” After thinking it over, I realized why she never went to the movies. You couldn’t sit through them if you really counted your way through life second by second, as my friend claimed she did. No, you’d stare up at the screen, dividing hours into minutes, minutes into seconds, seconds into half- or quarter-seconds, never getting caught up with the plot or the characters’ problems. It would be a joyless endeavor.