store, the cakes at Danut’s, a new brand of mineral water, the likelihood that a newly emerged pimple is syphilis … But the sporting have to have a reason to call. They don’t like pauses; to them, the telephone is an efficient tool they use to perfection. In general, the sporting are more reliable. Unambiguous. Conscientious. Punctual. Energetic. They’re not hypochondriacs; they’re even optimists. They like to eat well-done meat, not cheese blintzes with vanilla. Their tree is a pine or an oak, not a linden or a willow. Their conjunctions are and or also, not but or however. Their motto is “That’s the way it ought to be,” not, as Leonardas Gutauskas said, “It could be otherwise, but it will never be otherwise now.” Their time of year is, of course, spring, not fall.
Autumn itself has a lethal effect on the autumnal. Every year it seems to them that this fall will be their last. In the autumn, their senses become crystal clear: like dogs trained to sniff out narcotics, they can scent their morning coffee miles away — as well as coming frosts, wet wool, plaster, book dust, and a strange body’s sweat, perfume, and skin. The autumnal women start to think they have nothing to wear, while the men become hungry for everything. Those autumnals who read start identifying with their texts. For at least two months those people become an autonomous nation — with their own flag, anthem, defense systems, and loneliness. All of this continues until winter. Then some weatherman comes on during the news, and he reminds us that after the second week of September (September 11, to be precise), the world will no longer be the same as it was — announcing that in many European capitals it will be cooler, and in some it will even snow.
When the first snow falls, one of my friends always eats cherry jam with the pits still in it. The tradition is a leftover from the hippie days. I try to imagine what my other autumnal and sporting friends and family will do then … Another close friend, now on a distant continent, will, as always, find that he’s misplaced his jacket once winter comes along. Because he doesn’t like (or more accurately, hates) wandering through stores, he’ll buy the first one he comes across, with sleeves that are too short. And he’s also forever forgetting his gloves at home and so walks around with dry, cracked hands. (I most certainly do not envy whoever might take it upon themselves to help him pick out a jacket, someday.) Yet another acquaintance of mine will defend a dissertation in which governments are treated as though they were people — all their relationships, breakups, sympathies, antipathies, strategies … One of my girlfriends will call late on a cold November evening — nearly nighttime — and tell me how her elderly father has again overhauled his furnace, reconnected his ducts, and done everything else that could be done in a private house to reduce the cost of heating. Then she’ll add that she broke up with her lover over the phone, and instead of saying good-bye, she said, “Stick it up your ass,” because he’d cheated on her. Another acquaintance of mine, a man who somewhat resembles a young Marlon Brando, will go out to eat at a basement restaurant on his lunch break and, sighing, will express a belief whose veracity he will never once ascertain during his lifetime — that faithfulness only reduces the possibility of improvement. Another girlfriend of mine will smoke a cigarette while watching the falling snow and will completely fail to notice it, and when I say she smokes too much, she’ll retort, “You and your observations, it’s always like getting smacked in the nose with a dry dishrag.” And then, one of my coworkers, just after finding an antique Italian scarf at a used clothing store, will lament that she can only make love in their cramped living quarters when her father’s out walking the dog. And someone else, whose thoughts run as straight as railroad tracks and who’s given me several crushing compliments, will think he’s not in my thoughts at all, and will be terribly mistaken. Actually, all of them, no matter how different, are in my (autumnal) thoughts, if not necessarily getting equal time. And now I’ve remembered another essential difference — for all I know — between the autumnal and the sporting: sporting people always find ideas more interesting; for autumnals, it’s people. I’d like somehow to finally shake off these thoughts about them. Throw them out. Like letters onto paper, like coal into the snow. But all of the autumnals, having been accidentally distinguished by a yellow maple leaf star that’s fallen onto their backs, and without being driven by anyone, are already en route to a place from which it will never be possible — no, not even by taking sedatives; not even while stroking a sleeping child or watching the most fascinating film — to return.
Required Texts
I didn’t ask the most important question: what will happen if, over the course of a year, I don’t manage to write that coveted, extremely well-selling novel? How will I look into the eyes of the committee—in corpore and then every one of its members separately — that naively believed in me and gave me a creative stipend? Even a graphomaniac, if he’s sufficiently disciplined, knows it’s impossible to write a “good novel” for money alone, just as it’s impossible to get a “good woman” to sleep with you for money alone. You’re unlikely to squeeze virtuosity out of need and speed. And what’s going to happen if I do write that book after all, but it doesn’t sell? Six months later they’ll be selling it in thrift stores, together with copies of cookbooks brought over from Great Britain. The publisher will take a bath. Maybe I’ll have to return my advance? What if the publisher’s idea of a decent novel is irreconcilable with my own? Six months have already gone by. I don’t have even my first sentence in mind. The first and the last sentence should be like pistol shots: the warning shot and the shot to make sure of the kill. Not that you can tell all that much from a first sentence alone — for instance, you can’t necessarily distinguish a “great classic” from a contemporary novel from its first sentence alone. “For a long time I used to go to bed early …” How could you guess, right off, just from the words themselves, that that’s the beginning of Proust’s Swann’s Way? “He dreamed a dream, and in it he seemed lifeless.” That’s not all that different. Perhaps even more interesting. (If it was in first person, you might even think it was from the same book.) But it’s from Arvydas Juozatis’s Laikraštis. Well, I’ll probably have to flee the country in a panic. Head for the hills, as they say. I imagine myself applying for a visa to travel overseas, and in the box where it asks about any debts incurred, I’ll write: a particularly popular unwritten novel.
By the by, I should calmly and coolly tally up how I used six months’ worth of my stipend. It might be a lesson to me. Twice I took a taxi to the suburb of Buivydišks — one of my friends was suffering from a serious depression: eight three-liter jars of pickles she’d canned had exploded. And then, good grief, when I think now of all the stuff I bought … I bought hundred-dollar shoes because they made my feet look like a stranger’s … a pedigreed cat, out of unforgivable snobbery (once, British cats would cost only six hundred litai; now it’s a thousand two hundred) … my usual Ysatis de Givenchy eau de toilette (I’ve been using it since the day — to be precise, the night — I felt a woman). I like my perfumes to have “pedigree” too, because after two minutes on me all the others start reeking like a hip flask. And then, I bought a Zepter pot. (I keep old keys in it.) I gave three hundred litai to a friend; she’s renovating a farmhouse out in the country. I took her some wallpaper out there, once — the same kind they have at the Shakespeare Hotel.