Now she was a hag. The skin sagged. The forehead, cheeks and breasts drooped like wet underclothes. The thickened, callused lips. The sluggish body swayed heavily on swollen legs. The fair hair hung in witchlike tufts. Her neglected teeth – skull-like black holes.
And despite it all she tidied rooms, mended clothes, tried to kiss me at bedtime. Her speech deteriorated. She moved and worked like a convict who knows he will die in prison. Her imagination returned during her fits. These happened unexpectedly, so that each time my father and I thought it was the first time. At first they coincided with her periods, and some provincial doctor promised us that the fits would end when these ceased. Perhaps it was this promise, or perhaps residual sentiment, that held my father back from making a decision.
A fit. At first, a moment of lucidity. A lost gentleness reappeared in my mother’s eyes. As though she felt a general relief. Like an old woman remembering her youth. We watched as she tried to say something amiable and searched for the necessary words. My father and I were frightened by this effort. We waited. It was coming, it would happen, now nothing could stop it.
“Fish. Beautiful fish. Silver,” my mother would say, her fingers moving. An aged, heavy ballerina demonstrating that she had once been graceful. Her gaze pierced my father. With piercing insistence, so that he was forced to answer. My father tried to be casual.
“What kinds of fish, Mother?”
“Silver ones. Swimming. Remember?” My mother would give a restrained, mysterious snicker.
“I always said that she doesn’t know how to make strawberry jam. The berries always fall apart. Not enough sugar. Am I right?”
“Absolutely, Mother,” said my father colourlessly.
“Ha, ha. I’m right, I am, I am, ha, ha. Archangelsk isn’t right either. It has to be Angelsk. There is only snow and lace there. Archangels’ wings are like this.”
My mother would stand and hold up her embroidery. She had been working on it for about two years. A dirty piece of cloth, small red crosses that failed to make a pattern. It was supposed to become a small tablecloth for a night table.
“That’s right. That’s what archangel wings are like,” my father would hopelessly agree.
“You think so? You think so? Yes, yes?”
My mother stood, waiting for an answer. The answer would solve the mystery of the universe. She looked at my father as though he had risen from the dead and could see the afterlife.
“I’m sure of it,” my father would reply. Suddenly my mother would calm down. And sit down. And would start speaking quite normally.
“Don’t think that I don’t know. I know everything. You play for the German-language teacher. You play, and she thinks that she is the first one you have ever played for. But you used to play for me. She’s stupid, that German teacher of yours.”
My mother would cackle, satisfied that she had won. The cruel prosecutor has hurled the strongest argument and the accused will be condemned, as the jury members are already thinking.
My father would jump up. He would automatically move towards the hanging violin, but then would turn away and go towards the door.
“You wait, wait, wait, wait! If you’re leaving and I’m no longer yours, then take your clothes – they aren’t mine, they aren’t mine!”
Now I would press my fingers against my face. I couldn’t watch this. And I couldn’t run away either. My feet were nailed to the floor. I pressed my fingers against my face and heard the words.
“You stick your body into her body, stick it, stick it! Here, take them, take them!”
“Shut up, shut up!” my father shrieked.
I listened to the duet in red darkness. This is how people being seared with hot irons must sing. Lord, why was I so weak? Why couldn’t I scream louder than they? Why couldn’t I writhe on the floor? I was crushed by the horror of it. I could only release my fingers and watch.
My mother’s dress and underclothes were scattered on the ground. I could see the little flowers on the dress, the pink camisole, the tangled stockings. The storm had blown over, ripped off the tattered clothes and thrown a short, black coat on to my mother. The coat had a little hook at the collar. She had worn it as a young woman. My mother held it closed with her hands. My ashen-faced father stood at the door. It was quiet. The curtain opened slowly on the last act.
This was the final scream. Of the last person on a dying Earth. And yet I could clearly see my mother’s quivering double chin. The old prima donna was hitting the high note. My father’s face would fill with blood. He would rush to the desk, pull out a nickel-plated revolver and trace the muzzle along his temple. As though using a razor.
“I’ll shoot myself, I’ll shoot myself!” And my mother screamed. Tossing aside the revolver, my father would leap towards my mother, throw her on to the sofa and beat her with his fists. The coat would fall open and I would see my mother’s naked, flabby body. And now she was no longer screaming but howling, like an animal being harmed. And then I would run outside to get help.
After that, everything happened in a blur. Neighbours trying to offer comfort; women dressing my mother; my father collapsed on the sofa; voices saying what a poor little boy I was.
But the violin still hung on the wall. And the apples and pears still lay on the dining table. And the linden trees grew by our house. They were fragrant in July. My friends played cops and robbers. Charlie Chaplin entertained the townspeople in the cinema and the priest sang in a strained baritone in the church. And I was looking at girls differently, reading, dreaming. I wanted to live. Like most people.
My father finally took action. I was the only one my mother trusted, so I was the one who executed the betrayal. I convinced her that we were going to Palanga for a summer holiday. She enjoyed the trip. Asked me a lot of questions. Went on and on about what a good son I was, how I should eat more because I was so thin. She asked me about school, books and friends. The two of us in the car, the driver had been warned, she was quiet, we were two lonely friends. She enjoyed the highway, the trees, the cottages, the woman with her buckets. She seemed perfectly normal. Towards evening we drove through some gates and stopped in front of a red-brick building marked Psychiatric Hospital.
The driver, orderlies and I were barely able to drag my mother out of the car. She didn’t scream. She stared. Like the soul of someone recently deceased would stare upon discovering that all there was in the afterlife was hell.
And this expression of my mother’s would haunt me whenever my teachers explained that the universe was created according to the principles of Good, Beauty and Harmony, and that man is guilty for his own misfortunes.
“I didn’t call her on my day off,” Stanley recounts.
“Yeah. I went to her house. The door was locked. I decided to wait in the street. And I waited for two or three hours. She came home arm in arm with that clerk. I knocked him out in a couple of minutes. And then slept with her. I caught the clerk with her again, in her room. He was dressed and managed to escape. And we slept together again. Wait! I’ll remember in a second. Psiakrew. Did I pronounce it correctly?”{77}
“Yes.”