Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

… Underground, my godmother’s wine glass set with those hunting scenes will tinkle very faintly. I’ll see the bird cherry blossoms falling on Vitia’s thin leather jacket, clinging together, blown then into a white mass on the riverbank, resembling a scarf woven on a board rimmed with nails. For an instant, I’ll even imagine that Vitia came into the world, into my mirror apartment, out of Rudokien’s belly. And then, deep in the ground, perhaps perched on the root of a tree, the carpenter who told me never to repeat his story will be working on his prosthetic leg. (Tuk, tuk …) He’ll have propped the other leg, the remaining one, against who knows what. Maybe he’ll stick it into some ground water. And Vitia will glance at the river again. Me too. But, as ever … we’ll see completely different things. He’ll notice the brown seaweed, still not recovered from the winter, waving in the current. But me — I’ll see the sheepskins my grandfather tanned after the war bobbing there in the water, spreading out to the sides. The river, to me, is like a vein through which my childhood flowed. After stubbing out his cigarette on his heel, Vitia will check the soil density by kicking at it with his shoe. Then he’ll get into the van and drive straight to an ATM. “In a jacket sprinkled with bird cherry blossoms, and smelling of a corpse,” he’ll approach the machine and take out two hundred litai for gas and miscellaneous. And will have no idea that — through the slot of the cash machine, supposedly from Vilnius Bank, but in reality straight from an old, demolished cottage — the money is being handed to him by my sleepy grandfather, wakened too early.

On the trip back, like on the way there, all four will ride in silence. Near Ukmerg, Vitia will take pity on Petrarka. Because he’ll remember past hangovers of his own. Instead of driving straight down the freeway to Vilnius, he’ll turn off by Ukmerg. In the café they’ll drink Švyturys stout, likewise silently. In the silence, somewhere not far away, two shots will ring out. And this will be enough to surprise Petrarka, for once, and so he’ll finally open his mouth: “It used to be that these stupid hicks would sit around shooting crows because they had nothing better to do, but now they’ve gone nuts because of the bird flu …” And it won’t occur to any of them that it might have been shotgun fire, and that it might have been intended for a rat. Probably by some man whose instinct to defend, to guard his children and his woman, as well as his innate marksmanship, had been handed down through the centuries. After climbing back into the van, Petrarka will take the wheel and start to speed … Well, what of it? He’s been driving with Vitia from the day he got his driver’s license, but he’s never gotten a ticket when they were stopped yet. He speeds just to speed, not because he’s eager to get anywhere. Everyone will have been told a long time ago that they’ll be paid back in Vilnius. But it’s precisely now, during the drive, that Petrarka will find the time to be bored to death by the previous day’s work. His thoughts will scatter; it will become impossible for him to concentrate. Besides, the scraped knuckles on his right hand will hurt … What had been the connection between Vitia and that lady next door? he’ll wonder. It’s all pretty unclear. Probably just money, or the craziness of some distant kinship, given the way families stick together in clans in Lithuania, because she was old and not pretty. Petrarka himself wouldn’t have gotten involved in all this, certainly not for so little money, if it hadn’t been for that eternal debt of his. Which you couldn’t even call a debt. He had reminded Vitia of it a thousand times when they were drinking. Once, Vitia had even suggested that he shut the hell up. Fifteen years ago, you see, next to the Tyzenhauz Palace, four men had knocked Petrarka to the ground. They kicked him till they had broken two ribs and a collarbone, and his liver started pouring out the corner of his mouth. Anyway, that’s how it felt. When he woke up in the hospital, that’s just what he told the doctor: “My liver is leaking out.” The nurse on duty started laughing, because they had indeed needed to put a bandage over the ripped skin at the corner of his mouth. But the thing was, if Vitia hadn’t shown up at the gate at the right moment … well, no one would have. Sure, Petrarka’s scattered, hungover thoughts, jumping around like a cloud of midges in the sun, could — if you really wanted to — be brought together into a coherent form. (Every line of thought must be controlled.) In essence, though without knowing it, Petrarka is thinking precisely the same thing that Victor Pelevin once wrote. Even though he hasn’t so much as seen a single copy of the famous writer’s books, not even from afar. I mean the thought that might even look appropriate painted on the recently plastered blind wall that you’ll find up beyond my extra door: “Happiness is reminiscence.”

Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again: An Introduction

Salinger wrote a story called “Seymour: An Introduction.” Seymour Glass, the narrator’s brother — who didn’t actually exist, but then existence isn’t always a requirement for brothers — committed suicide in another story while vacationing with his wife in an ocean-side hotel room smelling of veal and nail polish. When Seymour prepares to go swimming with a small girl staying in the same hotel, no one — neither the other beachgoers, nor anyone reading the story for the first time — suspect that he will shoot himself at the end of the story. That’s the way a story’s ending should be — unpredictable. Perhaps it seems to the reader that she will indeed read a story about a perfect day for catching bananafish: “He unrolled the towel he had used over his eyes, spread it out on the sand, and then laid the folded robe on top of it. He bent over, picked up the float, and secured it under his right arm. Then, with his left hand, he took Sybil’s hand. The two started to walk down to the ocean.” I really do think that great literature has died. Which is why ending a story with death has fallen out of fashion. Almost all contemporary art is intended to help us forget death, after all.

All of those whom I would like to meet again (excepting Seymour) really do exist. I like to remember them when I have a moment to myself — now, for example. I bought food for supper, because here, in the summerhouse, there’s a kitchen. I went swimming twice — strange, it’s the beginning of August, and the water in the sea is sixty-four degrees. Tomorrow it’s supposed to be horribly windy. The smell of seaweed will penetrate the pinewoods. The waves will break in crests, and like in the famous Lithuanian artist’s painting, splash the initials MK (Mikalojus Konstantinas iurlionis) on the water. I’ll walk barefoot on damp sand that’s like minnow spawn thrown out on the beach. And now I’m waiting for a friend to arrive. In the evening we’ll watch a bad movie starring a good actor — Mickey Rourke, having emerged from the quagmire of alcohol and drugs, plays a wrestler. In his youth, he worked out his anger boxing, incidentally, in the same state where Seymour killed himself. Everything in the world, or almost everything, is connected.

When you’re waiting for the arrival of a very close friend or loved one, you usually do have some idea where she is and what she’s doing. I could call her, of course, but why bother, when I can see her so clearly? At a log-built donut shop and convenience store, next to the freeway, not even having reached Kryžkalnis yet. The grass at the side of the road is beginning to brown. There are colored inserts from the Sunday paper and plastic bottles scattered around. Ideally, the car radio isn’t turned on; worst-case scenario, it’s “Pretty woman, walking down the street,” or “I can’t get no satisfaction, I can’t get no …” My friend looks at a bottle of brandy for a long time, but she resists and buys kvass, a donut, and some real wax candles poured by local craftspeople — one in the shape of an angel, the other of a phallus. She’ll be here in approximately an hour and a half. After parking her car in the lot, across the little lawn, directly across from the window at which I’m sitting, she’ll walk straight through the grass rather than up the sidewalk and around, saving herself approximately two meters, a Parliament cigarette clenched in her teeth all the while: “You couldn’t come out and help?” she’ll say. “Didn’t you see my hands were full? Oh, Tadas called from his ‘sports camp.’ The toilet’s in another building, so he and his roommate pee into a mineral water bottle. I brought him the icing from a donut, towels, gym shoes, and clean bedding, because nothing dries there. You won’t mind if he spends the night here? With his friend? Yesterday someone stole a hundred litai from them, and their gym shoes too.” And she’ll kick the pink crocuses by the door, but by the time she’s finished scattering around the clothes, towels, and mattresses she brought along for the weekend, by the time she’s adorned the dresser with that framed black-and-white photo of a soldier she takes everywhere (I think of it as a portable Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), as well as her prescription glasses (-10.00 / -6.00), by the time she’s poured herself some brandy from the bottle I’ve left on the table, by the time she’s announced that people her age just aren’t cut out for driving three hundred kilometers a day (yesterday she was all the way at the other end of Lithuania, at a funeral), by the time she thinks to have another smoke, her story about the funeral she just attended will have begun to break apart and die away, until it finally sputters out. In the dusk of the room I’ll soon see only my friend’s bare knees, the red point of her cigarette, and her six gesticulating arms. Dusk is my favorite time of day: sounds become muffled, less shrill; the cellophane of the air turns to flannel; ponds begin to reflect the netherworld; things turn into other versions of themselves; and characters from novels pour into the streets … I don’t know where they come from, but they float about as quietly as sentences. “Now, that’s how he’ll take two hectares of land away from me,” my friend will say, pointing at the refrigerator with her middle finger. “As far as I’m concerned, if he couldn’t help carry the coffin yesterday, he shouldn’t get the land — for that reason alone! The coffin was hardly heavy. When he got sick, my uncle turned from an oak to stewed rhubarb.”