“You could climb out the window. You’d just need to jump down about a metre. I know.”
Jonė clasped her hands behind her back, kicking clumps of earth with the heels of her shoes.
“I’ll be there tonight. At exactly midnight.”
Jonė glanced at me. I’m sot sure, but I may have seen fear in her eyes. When the municipal pump house came into view, we parted in silence. I stayed on the marsh and watched until Jonė’s tanned legs disappeared over the bank. But for the next half-day, all I saw was their glistening muscles.
I was standing by the veranda well before midnight. Clouds cloaked the sky. The marsh fog escaped on to the empty field and crept down the street. I could feel its damp caress. Formless bodies wrapped around my own, and when I shook my head trying to get free of them, hundreds of fingers stole under my collar in a gentle frenzy, and my skin trembled and I froze, trapped by a feeling of foreboding. It wasn’t a normal trembling, as the night was warm, but an old and familiar feeling of anxious waiting loomed over me once again like a strict and concerned stepmother.
I wiped my face with my hand. Just like that time in Palanga, I wanted to cry out words, and not ones borrowed from books. This cry slithered through my consciousness like a snake. By a black sea, huge shards of rock lay on the sticky ground. Strange-shaped snails, parched crabs, rotting fish, and ferns hanging before my eyes like stiff fans.
I turned around. Jonė was waiting on the veranda. I hadn’t noticed her jump out of the window. I leapt on to the veranda, grabbed Jonė’s hand and pulled her on to the sidewalk. We almost ran to the train station that never saw any trains, to where the semaphore stood. I pressed myself against Jonė with the full strength of my muscles, and she yelped. I clamped myself to her lips, and at the same time my hands, harsh and tearing, threw her down on to the grass. I saw her nakedness: her hips, the dark triangle of her lower abdomen, and when I detached my lips for a second to draw some air into my lungs, I heard her sharp, deepthroated cry.
Jonė screamed, and once again I saw the black sea, and the messy piles of track links became gigantic shards of rock, and strange-shaped snails, crabs, fish and ferns were coming at us. Jonė screamed, and it was a scream that I had heard before, when I didn’t have arms or legs and had rolled like a ball through the blind darkness. Jonė screamed, and my pulsating blood wanted to burst from my swollen veins. I stifled Jonė’s cry with my hand. She fell silent, and I took her.
When it was all over I said, “You should get dressed.”
And, as she cleaned herself up, I stared at the semaphore. At the leaning semaphore with its smashed signal lights, its post etched with swear words and hearts. And I turned back hesitantly.
“You OK?” I asked.
“You ripped my dress,” replied Jonė, and she broke out in sobs.
“Let’s go home. Walk next to me. I won’t touch you,” I uttered, staring at the ground. We went back. Gradually she stopped crying, and all I could hear was her rhythmic sniffling. We stopped at the veranda.
“Don’t be mad at me,” I said quietly. “Could you wait?”
“For what?” asked Jonė. And I felt relieved.
“I really love you, Jonė. Try to understand, I got carried away, one day I’ll explain. Could you wait until I get settled, until I get a job? I’ll never do that again. I promise.”
And then, with my trembling hand I touched Jonė’s hand, and she didn’t pull hers away.
“I’ll marry you, Jonė. OK?”
“OK,” she said. And she kissed me on the cheek.
“You go to sleep now. We’ll meet tomorrow, at the lake. OK?”
“OK.”
And I went home. And didn’t see, or feel, or hear the enveloping night.
We made love, of course. For three years. In the pine forest at Aukštoji Panemunė, under the hazelnut trees by the Jėsa, in my room, in my friend’s room. And, when I started to cheat on Jonė, I continued to believe: one day I’ll marry her.
A small town. A greyish lake in a ravine. The draining marsh where storks still stepped, and lapwings shrieked, and where, sometimes, you could hear the moans of drowned spirits. The old, narrow, slippery sidewalk. The masked figures, pathetic in their powerlessness. The volunteer firemen’s brass band playing the “Pantera” tango at the tempo of a funeral march. The notary’s veranda. The semaphore. My youth – erupting in poems of hanging and first love.
The three men sit on a bench in the changing room, smoking. Joe, Stanley, Garšva.
“I’m going to Philadelphia next week,” says the baritone Joe.
“What for? A girl?” asks Stanley. He reeks slightly. He’s had some whisky. Stanley has gone grey, even though he is only twenty-seven years old. His hands shake, he has a red nose like his grandfather, a bankrupted šlėktelė from Masuria.{39 Šlėktelė: Lithuanian version of the Polish term for landed gentry (szlachta).} He’s straight and flat. He knows these words in Polish: dziękuję, ja kocham, idz srač, and, for some reason, zasvistali – pojechali.{40 Dziękuję, ja kocham, idz srač and zasvistali – pojechali: Thank you, I love you, go to hell, and that which shall be shall be (Polish).}
“No. The Philadelphia radio invited me. They’re paying for my trip, meals and hotel, and another twenty-five dollars in my pocket.”
“You’ll put it in the bank, right?” Stanley asks, to confirm.
Joe’s round face reddens. “Not in the liquor store’s cash register, of course.”
“Then what are you turning red for?”
Joe clenches his fist.
“What a load of crap,” says Stanley, pulling deeply on his cigarette.
“Joe wants to sing. It isn’t funny,” says Garšva.
“Anyone with a gaping mouth makes me laugh,” Stanley notes calmly.
“And what about you?” asks Joe.
“Me too. That’s when I stick a bottle down my throat.”
Stanley shakes the ash off his cigarette.
“My girlfriend has a really deep belly button,” he says suddenly.
Garšva stares at Joe.
“In two years you’ll sound like that too. Two years of working in the elevator would scramble anyone’s brain.”
“You won’t have to wait. Your brain got scrambled when you were in your mother’s womb.”
“Watch it, Stanley,” growls Joe.
“Nice note. B flat, I think,” remarks Stanley. Joe stares, surprised. Stanley starts to whistle.
“Where’s that from?” he asks.
“I dunno,” replies Joe childishly.
“From Allegro assai. Mozart. The Fortieth Symphony. G minor.”
Stanley gets up, passes gas loudly. “Which note was that?” he asks, and goes out into the corridor.
“Funny guy,” says Joe.
And the two men continue along the corridor. I have to fight with both my character and my mind, to fly the elevator and write my poems. It doesn’t matter that I’m worn out. Old man Darwin smiles, surrounded by Spartan masters. Who are my guardian angels? A few lunatics who wouldn’t find peace in paradise. A modest book of poems – that’s all I long for. I’m even starting to pray. Is that a sign of strength – or of weakness? I’m losing the energy to look for the answer in books. I’m losing the energy to look for the answer in myself. I am nature’s excrescence. Like the Bible says – rip out my eye, cut off my hand. But which eye, which hand? I have a hundred eyes and a hundred hands.
More “back” elevator, more lobby, more number nine. Yes, sir, no, miss, oh yes, the Masons, the Cardinal, the chinchillas. Hop, hop through the meadow, your tail up – isn’t that the greatest blessing? With your teeth, your nails, your entire body. And your blood, which is no longer repulsive. And your consciousness, which is no longer there.