Shortly afterward, they fired me as well. It’s funny … If I had to say why, I’d say: because I couldn’t live without Stilius, the fashion magazine. I’ve read it from volume one, issue one. It makes everything look so sexy and new, and everything — children, glasses of champagne, puppies, flowers, toothbrushes in people’s hands — look so happy. It particularly pleases me that many of the people featured in its pages are involved with charities — spreading kindness (and money) throughout the world. They arrange meetings with one another at the opera and dine leisurely on stone terraces overgrown with climbing plants; before sleeping together, they massage each other with oil, and then make love as lightly and softly as organza. As long as I was turning the pages of that magazine, I really did believe that time could stop. That I could greet spring, carefree and beautiful. That I could greet it, period. In one of its earliest issues, I found the following advice (other magazines of that era — all of them behind the times — wouldn’t even mention the horror of cellulite): “If you notice that the skin in the area around your thighs and seat is sagging, don’t be frightened. Do an experiment — it costs nothing. With the dull end of a pencil, poke yourself in the bottom; if an dimple remains, you should be concerned.” Next to this article was a photo of a dimpled orange peel, the name of a cream, and a picture of a woman who resembled Andie MacDowell. As I was looking at all of that, my editor, with one knee on her desk, was opening up a window. We were sitting with our graphic designer in an Old Town attic space, in front of a fan that wasn’t doing a thing to make the heat more bearable. Completely spontaneously, and clearly without giving it any thought, I reached out and poked the dull end of a pencil in my editor’s behind, and, before she came to her senses, lifted up her silk skirt — to find that there was a depressed dimple clearly visible on her sweaty bottom. But they couldn’t fire me just for that … they had to think up something better. Thus, according to them, I left intact — and with malice aforethought — a rather unfortunate typo in an interview with the wife of a well-known politician (“ruling party” having become “ruling farty”).
After the sixth ring, my friend picked up the phone in her kitchen.
“Today I’m not feeling very well. But fine, let’s talk.”
I heard her running water from the tap, dropping a metal implement, pouring something that gurgled as it went. Clearly she was holding the telephone pressed to her ear with her shoulder.
“Can I ask you something?” I began. “I know you’ve already been thinking it over, so please don’t take this the wrong way … but, where do you want to be buried?”
Her voice immediately took on an economist’s coldness: “Listen to me. Don’t let yourself confuse the remodeling of your apartment with a disaster. Don’t look at old photographs before you go to sleep. Or new movies. Don’t lounge around in bed with your cat the way you would with a person. Better go and drink some brandy. On top of whatever you’re already drinking.”
I immediately took this the wrong way: “When I get upset, I drink white wine or nothing.”
My friend said, “Sure, and the day I catch you drinking ‘or nothing,’ I’ll make sure to get it on camera. Look: I’ve got a will. I wrote it after my operation, while I was waiting for the next spot to appear, on my lungs or liver. I want to be cremated.”
“In Riga? Do you know how much that costs? Besides, don’t think that’ll get you out of anything — they’ll still put you through all the paces first: embalming, a coffin, a wake, your face twisted into an expression you’d never have made while alive …”
“So, no funeral. Wrap me in foil and throw me in the oven..”
I know that many people might consider her an insufferable cynic, but — she isn’t. She uses Russian puns and artificial crudity to save herself from her own exceptional sensitivity. She apparently thought I needed to suffer a bit, just now. I’ll wait a bit, I thought, and maybe she’d start talking normally soon. What I needed most at this stage of my life was gentleness. And protection. In fact, I was familiar with my state of mind from a few years earlier — what I felt like was a cracked egg. I tried to change the subject:
“Yesterday, a neighbor came by and told me he’d celebrated New Year’s in the country with his wife and grandchild. He’s got a wooden cottage near Ignalina, I’ve told you about it. He fired up his stove, he said, chased away the cottage’s eternal chill, cooked chicken and fish, drank some wine, then tried to call one son, and tried to call another, but the line was dead. Then he went to bed and rats started running around the place. He said, ‘I looked up, and there, in the moonlight, like in a horror movie, there was one hanging from the child’s bed …’ They were everywhere, he said — on the toys, on the books, the curtains, and on the food. At first he and his wife managed to scare them all off, but by the time dawn came around the squeaking had driven them so crazy that my neighbor got out his late father’s shotgun … Can you believe it?”
“So … he shot one. What would you have done?” From her intonation I felt she was going to hang up on me any minute, but I couldn’t stop:
“I wouldn’t have done anything. The rats would have eaten me alive … and, speaking of which, I really need to tell you what you’ll need to do when I die.”
“If you only knew,” she sighed, “how sick I am of this subject. Why has this become so important to you, lately, when you don’t have any real reason to …?”
“I read, recently, that a person sits on their death like they’re sitting on a barrel of gunpowder, but goes ahead lighting matches anyway, flinging sins about like they’re cigarette butts.”
“So call your writer friends and let them listen to you go senile. What’s death to a writer, anyway? A blow. What’s a woman to them? A hole. When writers die, I’ll tell you what should be done to them … why even bother dressing them up for the open casket? No, just glue their mouths shut, that’s all the dignity they need. Listen: why don’t you write down for me what you want me to do after you die. Okay? Whatever you want, I’ll do. I’ll even sign a contract. For a small fee …” And with that, she finally hung up. Until our next call (or, rather, hers).
That’s easy to say, “write it down.” But what could I possibly add to what I’ve already written? It seems I’ve already gone over it all. About growing old and withering away. Laziness, panic, and desperation. The forehead wrinkle you get from worrying too much over the deaths of loved ones, or from looking into the sun for too long without sunglasses. Old-age spots on the arms that the uninformed still manage to confuse for freckles. I’ve written about the inevitable solitude, that circle drawn around me by some unseen hand, that border only three creatures can cross without frightening me — the cat, my daughter, and Nobody. (Or, in order: my daughter, the cat, then Nobody.) About the impossibility of turning back time, and my total inability to adjust to essential changes — for example, the division of the common hall outside my apartment. All I could still do would be to produce an epilogue for my friend. In the nineteenth century, people were still relying pretty heavily on epilogues. Oftentimes you can’t even figure out from the epilogue what had happened earlier — the writer, acting like a historian, reports on what had finally transpired, and to whom, in concise sentences full of information and drained of sentiment.