žis. The boy survived, and was carried back to shore on the back of a swan, later becoming an honorary citizen of that town; he now works at the Ministry of Transport. Uncle and I still exchange gifts from time to time. My last gift to him was a Catalan woman singing “Bésame Mucho.” I went up to her after a concert at an old manor house. I told her about Uncle’s unfinished studies in Spanish, and she, without even waiting for the end of my story, made a gift of that song to him by singing it right there into my cell phone. Now when he calls, they sing together. On my end there’s blindingly white Catalan teeth lighting up the telephone, while, at the other end of the country, there’s my uncle: sagging pajamas, wool socks, and a room without light. Why would it need light? Light had no function there. Music now means the same to my uncle as light does to others. But when I was three years old, Uncle could still see. (“Don’t worry,” he says, “I can still remember how tea turns lighter in the cup when you put some lemon in it.”) He used to like to photograph women, particularly those who never seemed to change with age; chess pieces on a board, if they were in stalemate; and pale sprouts breaking through the sidewalk. Shouting “Hola!” he used to pick me up and toss me into the air, using only one hand, all the way to the ceiling, which at the time I thought of as a convenient wooden sky that my parents had decided to rent. Of all the small children tossed into the air with only one hand, there’s only one I’d like to meet again: my daughter, as a small child. An egotistic wish, as she was someone who loved me unconditionally. In the kitchen, in Panevžys, she would open the cabinet door and play with the dried beans. Watching her from the side, I liked to dissemble the girl into her component parts. The hair was from her grandmother (the other one); the smile was from that portrait of my mother as a little girl; the bones and logic were from her father; the voice from me; the ability to think spatially from God. They call God the Great Designer, because he created everything. My daughter decided to follow in His footsteps as a designer. Now she’s grown up; when I look at her from the side I no longer take her apart. And I suspect that she has someone who loves her unconditionally. On her birthday, this fellow texts her, telling her where in Vilnius he’s buried this year’s presents. With a silver flour scoop, my daughter digs a little box out of the ground containing toys made just for her by the young man in question: a lantern with cats and mice hugging, umbrellas designed to shield your head from fear, and nonexistent birds of paradise engraved on its glass. And a carousel that actually turns; in place of chairs it had halved walnut shells bearing sugared almonds. Sometimes he includes a note as well.
On the subject of unconditional lovers, I should also mention a particular man from my own biography. I was attracted to him in the same way a patient can get attracted to a psychiatrist — and vice versa … I think that, while he was with me, the world seemed brighter to him, more open, a series of discrete, colorful images, as though seen from the cars of a train traveling at great speed. We had no future as a couple: we both lived in other worlds, whereas a happy couple should live in this one. I always enjoyed something he used to say: “There are only two occasions on which I could actually say I’m happy, in this life — when I’m drunk, or when I come up with a new idea.” Once, he went to a conference in Prague. After the conference, along with his colleagues, he drank several pints of Budweiser, and I should mention that he had the silly habit of sleeping in the nude whenever possible. Unlike me, he didn’t associate a naked body with the soul; it’s just a material, he used to say, like clay, asbestos, or silk. Anyway, during the night, in his monk’s cell of a hotel room, this friend of mine got out of bed, took two steps, turned left to enter the bathroom, opened the door, went inside, and then, leaving the bathroom a moment later, he took another turn to the left, after which he slammed the door behind him. He opened his eyes in a long corridor: dim lights protruded from frosted glass lotuses, and a red runner stretched to nowhere, like something unspooling out of his dreams. There weren’t a lot of options. The first: knock on the door next to his, in which a conference participant from Poland — not always friendly to our people, but truly Christian — was sleeping. The second: wrap himself up in the carpet and present himself like Cleopatra to the Anthonys at the front desk. He bent down and felt it — no, the carpet was too stiff and too long. And yet, the woman working the registration desk that night gave him his key without even a second look — reaching out and dropping it into his outstretched palm (my friend had used a brochure about Prague’s old town as a fig leaf).
Shortly after we broke up, I returned from an overnight trip to Poland. I was carrying a heavy bag down a railway platform. I don’t know why I still haven’t bought a wheeled suitcase. And here’s another personal fault of mine, to add to the list: whenever I get upset — or, should I say, agitated — whatever I’m wearing at the time becomes etched permanently into my memory, remaining perfectly clear even after decades. So, I was hauling my bag through the station and suddenly felt it getting lighter behind me, and rising into the air … I turned around, and there, on the platform, sleepy-eyed, was the man for whom the world looked, when he was with me, like bright flashes of countryside seen from a speeding train. “You’re meeting someone here?” I asked him. “I am,” he said, looking into my eyes. And I looked into his, but all I saw were my beige stockings, twisted not once but twice; my face bedraggled from two border crossings; the beret covering my greasy hair; and the bandage on the heel of my right foot. And if my bag were to continue the story, the events on the platform might play out like so: “The man carried me to a car and threw me into its empty trunk. But my owner lifted me out again. ‘Don’t be silly,’ the man said. ‘It’s Christmas, look at how many people are waiting at the trolleybus stop, let me take you to Panevžys.’ The man got into the driver’s seat, flicking the toy spider dangling from his rearview mirror, while the woman walked off, heading for the bus station. Waiting in line for a ticket, she put me down on the muddy floor and then fell right on top of me; I expected my ribs — made up of books, boxes, cans, and shoes — to tear through the skin at my sides. I remembered then that fifteen hours before, at the departures tracks, a different man had seen my owner off. They kissed on the platform. I suppose she must have thought that a different man unexpectedly meeting her on her return was some sort of sin?” I thought about how I would behave now. I would probably have gone to hell with him, that man for whom the naked body, unrelated to the soul, was just another material, like so many others — clay, asbestos, silk. But, then, who really knows where we board the train to hell. Where its tracks begin, where they end, or what’s waiting there?