Water flows from a miraculous spring next to that cemetery. And it wasn’t just the people from Užpaliai who believed it was miraculous, but people from far away as well. The water bubbled like blood from the lungs of a giant shot through the chest lying under the earth. After the reburial we washed our hands in it. Strange … the boy was my uncle, whom, had things been different, I might call on the phone today. Sometimes when thinking about one or another death, I remember what a particularly devout professor of mine once said: “You’ll rarely meet a person as evil as God.”
Grandfather’s old age was relatively peaceful, if you don’t count his high blood pressure. He hated pigeons, grafted all the neighbor’s trees, wrote complaints to the newspaper (about the pigeons too), and used to take the prettiest apples from the collective orchard to the prettiest salesgirls in the local stores. I loved him more than my father. (If I were being honest, I’d have to say I loved him even more than I did the Count of Monte Cristo.) He loved me too. He didn’t tell me so; I knew it thanks to certain signs, because men like that are ashamed to verbalize their feelings. And when Grandfather was already quite old, I had a dog. The dog would take revenge on us for this or that by pissing on a corner of the refrigerator until it finally rusted out. Once he pooped on the bed — squatted there surrounded by glaciers of white pillows. Unlocking the door to our apartment, Grandfather found several hard, ochre-colored tablets that looked like quicklime. And he thought they were peanuts. In the Soviet days, there was a shortage of peanuts (and other nuts too). Grandfather put the leash on my dog, poured the tablets in his jacket pocket, and later, at home, sat down at the table and put on his reading glasses. Careful of the tablecloth, he spread a newspaper on it, and poured out his prize. He started picking at them with his nail. After a few jabs, he started muttering that these shells were very strange, the way they crumbled, and what on earth was going on?
Grandmother was the first to realize that shit is not a shell, whatever it might contain. When she started laughing, she laughed first hanging halfway out the window, then in the kitchen, then leaning on her sewing machine. And after Grandfather, without saying a word, washed his hands clean, and for some reason gave my dog — who was panting energetically — a reticent sort of look, and then went and lay down. Grandmother shut herself up in the bathroom and, burying her face in a towel, continued laughing. Obviously, it was her own tongue that set Grandfather’s adventure loose among the neighbors. He didn’t say a word for almost two weeks. He’d fry himself some smelts and go lie in bed quietly, calmly reading Vilnis and Laisv
, the Communist newspapers his cousin had sent from America. But when he dared to step outside and had to walk down the road in order to bring apples back from the orchard, and the neighbors sitting on the bench followed him with their eyes, he felt as if the story was tripping along behind him, taking little peanut-sized steps. Once, when I told some people the story of Grandfather’s adventure, while everyone else was laughing, one person said, “Be quiet, she’s talking about what kind of family she grew up in.”
I find it pleasant now, if sometimes unbelievable, that all my living relatives fit in my one bed. Everyone else eats, smokes, sits, and smiles around me from photograph frames. When I look at them in the slanting rays of the sun, I feel calm. Those slanting rays of sun always seemed to me like they ought to rank as one of the wonders of the world. Next to the Colossus of Rhodes or the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Wherever they might occur — in the woods, at home, or in an old wooden shed.
“My child,” I said to my daughter one night in bed, “don’t get angry, but I have some sad, glad, and at the same time somewhat awkward things to say to you. I love you very much. But we’re going to have to start sleeping separately. I’m not just your mother. I’m a woman, too. Sometimes, in the dark, or if you just look at my shadow, I’m quite pretty. I checked myself over naked yesterday in the bathtub with two mirrors. I say all this because I’ve recently found myself a friend. We’d already met, but we ran into one another again at the Vilnius Book Fair recently, and this time, for some reason, it stuck. I feel as though I can’t live without him — today, anyway. I’ll give it to you straight, as I would to a friend: I want him now, here, lying on my chest, just like you.”
I see the eyes of this girl, who’s accustomed to all my talk, turn glassy:
“What’s the guy’s name?”
“His name,” I say, “is Bohumil. His last name is Hrabal. And if I don’t read him now, I’ll shoot myself. He won’t be faithful to me for long. He’ll melt into other women’s and men’s prose in various citations … And if they manage to use these citations in the proper places, he’ll endow their texts with miraculous powers. Those texts will become enduring works in their own right, and best sellers. And those two things are practically irreconcilable. I’ve been wondering myself for the last six months how to reconcile them. And they’re paying me good money for my thoughts. So, maybe you could go to your own bed now?”
“You should live so long,” the child says, and fumbles to pull the lamp’s plug out of the outlet.
It’s beginning to be obvious that either my novel won’t get written, or else I’ll write one that doesn’t sell. For the second weekend in a row now I sit in the kitchen or lie on the sofa, and instead of reading Kundera, McEwan, Allende, and Irving, instead of learning to think in a high or low style from Immanuel Kant of Königsberg or Emmanuelle of Bangkok, from Kabelka or Kubelka, I read bits of Hrabal. That book shoves me down into my bed on weekends like one of those hydraulic presses for compacting recycled paper. I read five or six pages of his last novella, and can’t manage any more — I simply get worn out. I run sweating behind his sentences like a rat in Prague’s sewers. That’s when I set Hrabal down on my chest. I close my eyes and feel him with my entire body, as his hero once felt the naked gypsy woman lying on him. And like he did then, I don’t want anything anymore, just to “go on living like that forever … as if we had been born together and never parted.” For six months now I’ve been pondering how and what I should write in order for it to be liked, and look, Hrabal put it all into a single sentence: “If I knew how to write, I’d write a book about the greatest of man’s joys and sorrows.” Most of all I’m charmed by the subjunctive mood in this sentence. It shouldn’t be there, of course, but he’s not being coy. The subjunctive mood here represents the necessary, conscientious, and commonplace doubt of a person who knows very well how to do a thing or two.
For what it’s worth, now I’m going to peel the bandages off my toes and put on a pair of seamed stockings. (In honor of Hrabal.) I’ll pull them on slowly, gradually unwinding them, starting from the tips of my toes, so there won’t be a run in their insect-wing thinness. Then I’ll jump into black suede shoes and go out onto the street. Even though it’s raining. Soaked through. And the streets are crooked. But in the spring, who knows, something could always happen. I could meet someone. I could meet spring itself. Or the beggar Volodia, who sometimes follows elegant women down Bazilijon