To the autumnal among us, the past fills up a great number of empty vessels: Sunday streets in large cities, apartments with no loved ones at home, that moment of darkness on the television screen when you change the channel, cool churches on stuffy summer evenings. The autumnal visit churches to talk to themselves. (The sporting go, if they go at all, only to talk to God, and most often they only use words they’ve picked up in some book.) The autumnal can enjoy a cup of coffee with the dead just as much as they do with the living. Sometimes they go out to eat with them during their lunch break. Sometimes, like necrophiliacs, they even go to sleep and wake up with the dead. But at funerals, autumnals just get in the way. Only the sporting can take part in funerals. This is because the autumnal don’t see the situation in the same way — they go on thinking the deceased is still alive for at least three days more. They start to remember all sorts of things from their last meeting with the person in question, and these details are, without fail, taken to have been indications that the deceased was already doomed. These people torment themselves that they weren’t kinder to the deceased. As if niceness would have been enough to help the victim escape her fate. (Fate, by the way, is always sporting.) The autumnal even like to think that a golden moth flying into a dying person’s room might have been that person’s soul escaping, and they don’t even sound silly to themselves. At the same moment, another nearby family member — a sporting type — instinctively smashes the moth between his palms. After the three nights of the wake, all the mourning autumnals have aged enough to join the “trembling hands club”; they’re fit now to join the deceased in the ground, since their blood has coagulated along with the corpse’s. No, the covering of the casket, the Mass, the gravediggers, the meal, all of it can only be arranged by the sporting. The autumnal don’t concern themselves with anything at alclass="underline" they smoke and drink, pray and cry, repeat the same things over and over, and faint dead away as often as possible.
To the sporting, art is deadly; to the autumnal, it’s business (and in the early morning, it’s any activity whatsoever). The sporting are brimming and boiling with energy; they can make money out of anything. For example, they could sell a matched set of perfumes for men and women, call it Twins, and sell it in double bottles shaped like the World Trade Center, handily closed with airplane-shaped stoppers. I read somewhere about a Dallas city tour in which you get driven up to the spot Kennedy died, in the same car, and get treated to the sound of the same gunfire. Without a doubt, the sporting thought up this little entertainment, but the autumnal like to ride in the car too, because they are always hunting for — are the true epicures of — powerful sensations. I’d hire only the autumnal as paparazzi (whereas, unfortunately, it’s the sporting who usually get the job).
The stores in the center of Vilnius that open one day and close forever the next always belong to the autumnal (the sporting are their landlords). Sometimes, going down through the Aušros Gate (the “Gate of Dawn”) on Saturday morning, I see a saleslady standing and smoking next to a display window full of Italian shoes that look like gondolas. Sad and autumnal, she doesn’t feel she belongs there. I get the urge to cut her out of that background, those display shoes, like a paper doll, and paste her into a different one — in front of some black currant bushes, perhaps, with a glass of milk in her hand, standing next to two happy and dirty children. It’s usually the autumnals who want to rewrite the scenario of their lives. Sooner or later (particularly in an autumn of pear yellow and wine red), they start to feel as though they aren’t living how, where, with whom, or for the reasons they should. It’s not that the sporting never feel this way, but they conquer such thoughts with logic, work, resolve — fishing or knowledge, basketball or beer. Single autumnal men are forever searching for the Love of Their Life. And when they find her, they get the opportunity to see how well she does without them — with the Love of Her Life (probably, though not necessarily, sporting). Autumnal women are true cinephiles. Normal everyday life begins to manifest a morbid sort of emptiness for them, so they take as close and personal an interest in movies as they do in their own medicine cabinets. Moving pictures colonize their brains, and then, of course, these women’s meager paychecks disappear into Paramount Pictures’ millions.
Autumnal people feel as though they themselves have stepped out of a film, that they’re somehow different from others. Not necessarily better, but certainly not the same as everyone else. And this torments them. Sometimes they even go to a psychiatrist, until they notice that the psychiatrist — who is carefully listening to them and at the same time unraveling the sleeve of her knitting — is as much of a patient as they are. In reality, of course, autumnal people are the same as everyone else. It’s just that in their desire to live more fully, to identify with something greater than themselves, they search through magazines looking to appropriate some celebrity’s unusual biography, without noticing that they are nonetheless living a life very similar to their own parents’.
Sometimes the autumnal and the sporting do form couples. I saw a couple like that, street people, picture-perfect bums, sitting on a bench at the Antakalnis bus stop. The woman was sporting; the man, autumnal. He was wearing a suit, with a worn leather briefcase pressed under his arm. His eyes were focused on the distance where the trolleybuses come from. The woman attempted, with all her might, to bring him back from there:
“Come on, we’ll buy a bottle of wine and sit around. Where do you think you’re going, anyway?”
“I have to be at work in the Ministry at eight.”
“You idiot, just because you found a briefcase in the garbage yesterday doesn’t mean you work at the Ministry …”
The sporting always pull down illusions, turning them deftly into reality, while autumnals do the opposite. Which sort of couple lasts longer — two of one type, or one of each — is an open question. There’s no rulebook. Husbands and wives, like homelands, are habits. When you separate, the most difficult thing is to get rid of the habit of communicating (particularly of communing) with your partner. Emigration is the same. And then, when people who have broken up with someone of the other type start living with new partners of the same type as themselves, after a year or two they find that half of the supposed incompatibilities they were fleeing were incompatibilities of gender, not type.
The autumnal and the sporting even use telephones differently. To autumnals, the telephone is the most intimate technology extant. You can call them in the middle of the night and start talking about whatever you like: war, the furs on sale at the Nijol