There isn’t a living soul at that farmhouse in the early spring. The more I see of places like that, the more I like them. It would be nice to head out there for a day or two, with my cat and an imaginary lover … without any commitments. (That’s what my drunken neighbor says to his wife when he comes home at two in the morning: “Dammit, Ada, just let me back in! No strings attached! Without any commitments!”) We could watch the Panorama news hour, relaxed, luxuriating in the republic’s most important facts and figures … Maybe they’d have some psychic on. Then, when my imaginary man falls asleep with my cat, I’ll sneak out for a walk in the woods, so I don’t disturb them, wearing his gloves, feeling my “hand melt inside the glove like snow.” Some women’s poems are just as good as a short story. (A novel, no. Most often women aren’t “attracted” to this genre; they don’t have the time, or the rage, or the money for alcohol, and once again, I’m terrified about my novel.)
The last time we drove out to the country together, my friend’s father’s shoe wound up filled with acorns and maple seed “helicopters” by some gremlin, or perhaps a marten. Walking in the silence, we found little footprints in the snow, sneaking up from the mystery of the woods, leading to the shoe. Maybe I should start the first sentence of my book with those footprints? Or maybe — with the mystery? Or maybe with how my friend was eighteen years old when her mother died? She remembers that her mother liked sunsets in Palanga, watermelons, silk blouses, mother-of-pearl clips, small children’s clothes hanging to dry in the sun, and being happy.
Perhaps a real writer can’t just start writing whenever she likes, but it’s true that you could start with anything. From a little gray thread pressed into the three-dimensionality of a white piece of paper. Or a little hair (an eyelash?). I’m not sure. First I need to live through a little bit of life, and only afterward turn it into credible fiction. Sometimes it works out. Most often not. It’s comforting to know that there are others writing in a similar fashion. A talented man once complained he couldn’t begin writing a short story about his first teacher because he couldn’t remember how the buttons were sewn onto her worn-out postwar coat: in a cross, or in parallel lines?
I do seem to know, at least theoretically, what a novel needs to selclass="underline" sex. Someone is lying on my, that is, my heroine’s, chest — or she’s on someone else’s? If not sex, then at least something slightly indecent, or even some kind of wild gypsy-type erotica. “The qualities required for the birth of the erotic act — logic and firmness of mind above all, imagination, humor, and daring, to say nothing of the power of conviction, organizational ability, good taste, esthetic intuition, and a sense of grandeur …” (Emmanuelle, p. 138; I yield at once to such unquestionable authorities …). All of these qualities would, perhaps — one way or the other — suffice; but, as I’ve already said so succinctly, I need to live through a bit of life before trying to turn it into credible fiction. And the last guy I saw naked was the plaster statue of an Indian standing in the Maxima supermarket on Mindaugas Street.
A book should take a couple of good swings at God, of course. And let’s not forget the aesthetics of disgust. There should certainly be mention of someone’s bodily secretions. Dripping from the ear, the backs of the knees, the underarms, the genitals. And death, of course, must be present … but in a bravura mode, cheerfully. As in American films. An old professor with a fatal illness decides to go back to his home state for the weekend, accompanied by a college student. There he runs into a woman he once loved (older, but still attractive, dressed in nearly the same muslin dress), guzzles beer in a local bar, then — visited by miraculous powers — sleeps with the woman, and, with the sun rising over the hills of South Dakota, dies in the coil-spring bed of his childhood, watched with a smile by his student. To the student, who was a wreck before the trip, it becomes clear that life is worth living.
Maybe some episode from just after the war would come in handy. At the moment, given the wars on the Internet and in signed letters in the newspapers, the topic is, it appears, timely again. You have to “weave” some exotica into your text. Fairy tales from distant countries, pop culture references. The reader has to wade into the text knowing he will find something recognizable. The same goes for those people whose acquaintance the reader wants to make (but only in the text). The characters too ought to seem familiar. So the reader can be a bit frightened, surprised, shocked, tickled — but never drowned. And, most importantly, don’t make them sad. No, there must always be laughter. Avoid the temptation to dwell on metaphysics, transcendence, or time. Those things will still be there whether you think about them or not. (Unknown and unchanged.)
Chronologically speaking, starting my novel with its first sentence won’t work. I think in a dotted line; I have no willpower. Two years ago I did start trying to put together a plan for my life, but then the alarm clock went off. I’ll have to start my book from several places at once, while cooking up dumplings at breakfast.
Grandfather had a lover during the war. (Before and after the war, too, but not the same one.) This woman sometimes went to church wearing a rather “loud” silk scarf, with red and blue roses on a yellow background. She must have really stood out in the churchyard. Grandmother knew the scarf was a gift from my grandfather. One time, the neighbor ran up, all out of breath, and said, “Go pick up Juozas. He’s been shot — in the barn. You know which one.”
I’m guessing Grandfather had been on top. On that beloved woman’s breasts. Because he’d been shot in the lungs and hip and shoulder, while she was still okay. They carried him, barely alive, to the dispensary; blood bubbled out of his chest wounds in a little stream, so no one even thought of worrying about his hip. (I saw that bullet for the first time some forty years later — he and I both did — still stuck in the bone. They’d taken an X-ray of Grandfather at the polyclinic in my hometown, just because of an ordinary case of sciatica, and found the bullet by accident.) They nursed him for a long time. My mother, while my grandmother was doing the work that is never done, balanced Grandfather’s leg on her neck with her back turned to him, because for some reason his shoulder hurt him less that way, and told him stories about her friends from school to pass the afternoons. (One of these friends now lives in Germany, another in Poland, and yet another just sold her apartment in Vilnius. She’s decided to renovate her parents’ neglected farmstead in the country, to go there, as she said at my mother’s funeral, to shuffle through the fall leaves in her boots and then die.) Nevertheless, Grandfather got up after a few months, and the very first day he could, went out. To that same lover. Later, unfortunately, they took that woman to Germany to work and … never brought her home. The “loud” scarf with red and blue roses — by what means, I could not say — ended up in a cabinet at home. Grandmother never wore it. She kept it for no reason, the way I sometimes keep a forgotten program from a once-memorable play in a drawer.
After the war, Grandmother had one more child. A boy. He was six months old when he died. When I asked what from, she said, “In those days … who really knows, my child, what he died from. Viliukas cried all the time, and the cottage was smoky.” Then she’d start staring out the window. (For some reason I imagine the cigarette smoke like worn sock-rags printed with faded roses flying through the air.) The dead boy wouldn’t have come to mind, or perhaps I wouldn’t even have been told about him, had we not been forced to exhume and rebury him. Grandfather, nearly in his dotage, decided one day, with no provocation, to move his parents and the boy’s remains to another plot, surrounded by a new fence. Two men gathered up the three sets of bones in a cloth and buried them in another spot in Užpaliai Cemetery. I was still in the first grade. The impression made on me by the cemetery remains clear. Ingeborg Bachmann (let her be yet another exotic inclusion) wrote something about “unappeasable crows and the fear of death.” All that was left of that boy, I well remember, was his skull. Like a cabbage leaf, or my open palm.