Breathing Into Marble

by Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite

  From a distance Ilya’s tiny face was hard and dark, but when Isabel drew closer it stirred like wind-blown blossom.

  No, it wasn’t blossom yet – more like a tightly folded bud, the petals of his personality firmly knotted still inside, all his lines shy and inarticulate.

  Nobody could tell yet when he would bloom, what he would be like and into what he would mature.

  One afternoon eight weeks later, Ilya came in to the yard before the orphanage with an imitation leather bag slung over his shoulder. Liudas’ Opel Kadett awaited him, glistening in the sun. The children, glued to the windows, watched as Ilya climbed into the car. He settled in the passenger seat with his lips pressed firmly together, next to a woman with a narrow face and ash-blonde hair. Though he sensed the jealous stares, Ilya didn’t turn back, or wave to anybody as if he wished a similar happy ending to their lives in the orphanage. At that moment conflicting winds blew through his chest and if he had stopped biting his lips he would have burst into tears or laughter – he was not sure which.

  Beatrice kept Liudas behind for some time as he was due to take over the class of the teacher on maternity leave the following week. Isabel and the child were forced to wait for him to come out, as he would, splashing through the slushy snow, joking carelessly like he always did, to drive them out of the yard. Hungry faces pressed against the windows of the orphanage. The fence, though not visible, pressed in on them.

  Seeing the picture of a smiling piglet with a ball on Ilya’s bag, it occurred to Isabel that she had never seen such a wide smile on Ilya during the two months she had known him. As her thoughts rippled around the child, he shot her a short, eloquent glance and smiled.

  And then she could not hold herself back and reached out and stroked his tightly-clenched fist.

  Just one light touch, as undemanding as a breath of wind.

  The child cowered and stiffened as if ready to run.

  ‘Don’t be afraid; I won’t touch if it’s uncomfortable for you,’ Isabel said quietly.

  He listened and seemed to understand.

  He sat in the car quietly, concentrated, his eyes focused on the office door from where Liudas would emerge. Though his hands remained gripped in fists, they opened slightly, cupping, like the cold, empty glass of a homeless child, glittering in the winter sun, waiting to be filled to the brim.

  And so, as February drew to a close, they brought a child with the face of an angry puppy back through the hissing, wet snow toPuskai.

  THERE WERE so many dark haired women in the city. The black curls tickled the retinas of his eyes like malicious feathers. He flinched. Nobody noticed because the flinch was hidden deep inside him, deep in his subconscious.

  The winter was wild and changeable; the cold was bitter and it snowed. The dampness penetrated the bones like sulfuric acid.

  It had been two months already.

  Usually they would have agreed a date for their next meeting and he wouldn’t jump when a cloud of black curls appeared out of the crowd. Desire would ignite his loins. He would bring her that pent-up desire and give it to her and she would greedily soak up all that he had managed to gather during the hours they had been separated.

  Now, when he got out of the car, there was a gnawing in his gut. The feeling of emptiness in his heart was dull and painless, but there were more and more black haired women on the street. The sight of them awakened the old reflex – the emptiness in his heart swelled and then immediately contracted. A reflex spasm. He felt no pain.

  He had promised to drop in at the Department for Education and at the pharmacy. He would also go to a couple of bookshops, have lunch somewhere and on the way home do the shopping at the supermarket. They would be angry with him at home for having lunch in town.

  He had lunch in town.

  Again. Well….But…

  He slammed the car door shut, mechanically pressed the car lock button and crossed the street without looking. A figure with pearl-black hair and an ochre wool coat floated past in the crowd; at first the separate parts didn’t stick together as a whole in his head – the hair might not have belonged to the coat but if the crowd parted and allowed him to put them together, to join them to each other… He slowed down and dug his hands into his coat pockets and for some time the distance between him and the woman with the black curls didn’t get any shorter. And then, yes, a warm, dark brown, beaded scarf suddenly joined everything together – at a distance it looked like her shoulders were dripping with molten chocolate.

  She was walking rapidly without looking around, just like she always did when she had some goal in mind. When she was at home her footsteps were shorter, softer, enfolded with a graceful laziness. But when she was out, she always walked with a purpose, as if she disapproved of anyone who dawdled or lazed around on the benches under the trees.

  Though he didn’t feel anything seeing her, he followed her, as if lured on by the light of her curls. His empty heart thudded a little. Just that. He knew that he could stop following her and go back to the car. There he could think.

  He could stop at any time.

  The curly hair turned off the main road and he began to run so as not to lose her. There she was. There was her dark red Peugeot. And she was sat in it, like a golden seed in a pepper pod.

  As always, she had parked her car illegally.

  He approached the car on the passenger side and knocked on the window.

  She was sitting in the driver’s seat fiddling with her bag. Her hair was tousled. Under her feet, on the rubber mat, was a glove and on the empty seat next to her a hastily opened cigarette packet and large silver lighter – a present from her husband.

  Her eyelids wrinkled and the lashes fluttered as she slowly raised her troubled gaze.

  And then she was looking at him. For the first fraction of a second she stared at him blankly, as at a stranger, and then surprise flushed her face and her red cheeks pearled with confusion.

  He opened the door and slipped into the car like a lizard.

  They sat for some time, not moving, as if afraid to disturb the silence carelessly. She was the first to turn. When she whispered, her voice barely coloured the air.

  ‘Well, here we go…’

  He moved slightly but didn’t answer. He gazed emptily out of the windscreen in front of him.

  ‘You followed me?’ she said.

  ‘I was passing and noticed your car... You can’t park here, can’t you see?’

  When she looked at him, her gaze was tortured and terrible.

  ‘It would have happened anyway – sooner or later,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It would have happened…in the street.’

  He had thought she was referring to what happened between them.

  ‘I expected that I would bump into you,’ she said. ‘I was preparing for it. Now, when you knocked on the window, I was ready. Where are my cigarettes?’

  He shifted in the seat.

  ‘You’re sitting on my cigarettes,’ she said calmly, but he didn’t move.

  ‘Have you spoken to her?’ he asked.

  ‘She came to see me.’

  ‘I know. Was it you who decided to employ me?’

  She started the engine and smoothly, confidently, took the wheel and nosed the car onto the main street.

  ‘We needed someone to cover the teacher,’ she said calmly, insouciantly, and drove through a red light.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She said nothing , pretending that she was focused on the road.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  She didn’t reply.

  After some moments she said, ‘Pass me the cigarettes. They’re under you.’

  He didn’t pass them. He didn’t hear her; the request was irrelevant to him. The streets were half empty and they flew along more or less without stopping.

  ‘But why did it have to be me? It’s you who thought this up, on purpose,’ he said.

  And he understood from her silence and
from the way she bit her lip that it was true.

  ‘We agreed…Do you hear?’

  ‘I do.’ She cut him off.

  For some time they did not speak. Suburban cottages appeared by the road and trees hovered over them like enormous skeletons.

  ‘Where is your car?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘In the centre.’

  ‘You’re on your own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She turned off into the woods and after a couple of hundred metres stopped the car in a slushy clearing next to the river.

  ‘She wants to take one of our children,’ she said.

  ‘I know; she’s been talking about it for years.’

  It was silent. Only the crowns of the pine trees moved as if being tickled.

  ‘These months…these last two months?’

  ‘Yes. What about them?’ he said.

  ‘They were…difficult.’

  He took some cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. She watched as the smoke balled, rolling out of his mouth and nostrils.

  ‘You know what I think about that,’ he said very quietly, gazing through the windscreen.

  ‘I couldn’t care less what you think. I can see how you feel.’

  He cast a swift, sharp glance at her and then stared again at the slow flow of the river.

  ‘Give me a cigarette,’ she said, her voice hard. ‘Shift your bottom.’

  He pulled out the squashed LM packet and offered her one.

  ‘Lighter.’

  He extracted the lighter from the same place and their eyes fixed on it as if it were the common enemy.

  ‘Oh,’ she said contemptuously.

  She bent towards the light, the cigarette trembling between her lips. Suddenly, he opened the car door and with a sharp, angry movement, like the firing of a gun, he threw the lighter towards the pines.

  ‘Liudas,’ she whispered.

  Her vision dissolved. Tears flowed from her eyes, forcing themselves from between her eyelashes. Liudas shimmered. His face receded and disappeared – and only her gaze was left, swirling and dancing like mercury.

  ‘I’m not asking for anything… I just want things to be the way they used to be.’

  He took her face and held it between his palms.

  ‘Will you come to work for me?’ she asked, trembling.

  ‘I will, Beatrice. I will.’

  THE PUSKAI farm had once belonged to Isabel’s father, George Jamontas.

  He had bought it cheaply from Dionisas Vietusis, a lonely, old, retired teacher and amateur musician. Having paid in cash, her father took a photo of Dionisas in the garden, next to the veranda, which was still in good shape and sparkled in the sun, the colourful panes of glass shimmering like a kaleidoscope. Dionisas had his foot on the step, an accordion on his knee and a newly plucked sprig of lilac stuck in the lapel of his Sunday-best jacket. Suddenly, he remembered his suitcase, so her father had to unlock the boot of the Zaporozhets again, drag out the artificial leather case full of books and photographs and with documental accuracy take the picture once more – Dionisas, lilac, accordion, the porch windows shining like a massive honeycomb beaded with dripping honey and, next to the owner’s feet, the suitcase sprinkled with the blossom of the lilac. The mood of the photograph didn’t in any way look like a farewell – on the contrary, Dionisas looked like a happy settler, his case stamped with lilac, who had no intention of moving even an inch from the veranda steps.

  However, her father closed the camera, offered Dionisas his handand took him to the yellow Zaporozhets. An hour and a half later the old Puskai owner had signed the agreement which stated that he would stay at an old peoples’ home. That was his request - the condition of the sale of the farm. After that, for the next five years, on important holidays, her father would take him a bottle of vodka and would take a picture of him glass in hand, his vital, blazing eyes shrouded by thick, grey eyebrows, an artificial dahlia in his jacket lapel – and, as if by accident, the accordion would happen to be in the shot too.

  What Isabel remembered most were the melodies Dionisas played on the accordion and the artificial dahlia. She recalled too the densely rutted wrinkles on his face; a pure carelessness shone from them. Close up he looked as colourful as a lollipop and he smelt like one too. Isabel would wait impatiently for Dionisas to extract from his pocket the carelessness which allowed him to joke and sing, and hoped he would secretly slip it into her hand. It seemed to her that they were all waiting and competing to become heirs to Dionisas’ carelessness. But he, though, would sit on the tidily made bed in the care home and lift his glass and happily pose for her father, his smile twitching his wrinkles. He would play his accordion. He was not going to hand anything to anybody.

  Isabel could not imagine that Dionisas might die. People like him didn’t die. His carelessness would last him for a couple of hundred years.

  But early one spring morning the news reached them: Dionisas Vietusis passed away in bed in the old people’s home with his best suit on, having failed to leave his carelessness to any offspring.

  They had moved to Puskai from the city when Isabel was just beginning to learn to walk and to lispingly ask for the potty. It was there, by the brown tiled stove, that she started to form her syllables ‘po-rridge, ri-ver’. At first, when the house was not yet fully inhabitable, the three of them took shelter in the living room. Having hired some men from the village, her father replaced the roof, the floor, patched the walls, enlarged the windows, and built a brick outbuilding with a window in the roof – his workshop.

  In the mornings, having washed at the well, half naked, he would straighten up and his beard would flame in the sun.

  Her father said that the people from the village were suspicious and slow – they needed time to get used to new settlers, especially those from the city who didn’t rear animals and bought their eggs and milk from their neighbours. And they considered the new settlers’ garden to be pitiably small; too small to feed a family. When they gathered at the shop the locals would ponder how they made a living. Perhaps, they speculated, money poured from those wooden images the father was carving, like from a golden calf? Her father, having heard about these conversations, scratched his beard and the next time he went to the shop in Kurpiskiai, announced seriously, ‘I shook the image and here’s the money for cigarettes… Is that enough, Pranciska?’ Pranciska, the shop owner, not having quite the same sense of humour, was not sure whether to laugh or think him mad.

  When there were only the two of them left, Isabel began to think that it was her father who had given birth to her - that there had always been just the two of them. He had never known how to make sandwiches neatly because that was how he was - he could carve wooden sculptures neatly but he couldn’t cut cheese straight. That’s his nature, Isabel would explain to her friends, until one of them snapped, That’s because he hasn’t had enough practise, it used to be your mama who made the sandwiches.

  She was eleven.

  One morning she ran to the barn before it started to rain and the swallows were twittering loudly.

  Possibly she had gone to get her bike; her father might have asked her to get some cigarettes from the shop. Or some moonshine. They always had some at the shop; Pranciska would bring it up from the dark pantry, wrapped in newspaper.

  The sun was shining as she entered the barn. Later, whenever she recalled that day, everybody said it was cloudy in the morning and in the afternoon it rained. But through the gaps between the planks of the barn walls, needles of sunlight sowed a line across her mother’s skirt and her bare feet. Isabel’s forehead hit them as she walked in and she jumped. And then she lifted her eyes.

  The swallows twittered because they were alive and were full of the desire to live. From that moment on she understood that life should be full of noise – it was life’s privilege, its daily battle. Silent things were cold and dark and dangled from the roof beam like an empty sack. Silence was more terrible than noise. It corroded your sanity.


  Her father carried Isabel into the house. Later he told her she was screaming and screaming, but Isabel didn’t remember that - the screaming. She recalled only a painful buzzing in her temples and thousands and thousands of swallows; the air trembled with them.

  Also Isabel remembered the heaviness of the heat, as if she had been filled with hot sand. A dry heat pulsed in her eyes, her mouth and the tips of her fingers; only her forehead tingled from an icy touch. The touch she had brought back from the barn.

  Later, like the fingers of a corpse, the tops of the trees interlocked over the slow funeral procession. And the sky felt as if it were everywhere; the easiest thing was to lean her head back and to gaze up into it and allow the gloved hands to lead her. Both her palms squeaked against black leather. They wouldn’t let go of Isabel, not for a moment, as if wishing to protect her from the stone that had begun to mutter in her heart. They asked pointless questions, as if trying to drown out the noise of the stone. When the damp, yellow sand thudded like soaked semolina onto the coffin lid, the stone in her heart loosened and rose up and she rose with it.

  They carried her away. The low, tepid sky dampened her corneas - she tried not to blink. She dug her nose into the sheepskin collar of the person carrying her; the collar was slippery and pitted like the surface of the moon and she inhaled the man’s masculine scent all the way home.

  At the house, as a respite from the long black box, a long white table awaited them. Isabel was lowered into a deep, lace covered armchair in the corner of the front room; it stood farthest from all the other furniture and the laid table on which the dishes and cutlery glinted hard and malevolent like a surgeon’s instruments ready for an operation. The mourners did not rush back from the cemetery; those who had brought Isabel home stood talking quietly in the yard, outside the open door. She could smell tobacco and hear their soft coughing. With all of her strength she lifted herself from the armchair; it was a kind of rebellion, an act of will, or perhaps a mobilisation of life. It was possible that if she had sat there longer her soul, like a worm of faint smoke, would have left her without disturbing any of those standing in the yard, or indeed the fly buzzing around the lamp, or the shadow of the apple tree trembling on the floor. She was close, so close to letting go that she had to gather all of her remaining strength to pin down her soul within her – and to lean on the arms of the chair with her slim, stem-like wrists and stand…To stand up. She stepped across the wooden floor. The fact that she had feet and that she could touch the ground with them distracted her for a moment, but the memory of the legs came back. And then with a quiet, determined confidence in the fact that she was alive, she left the front room where she had been laid by the man with the sheepskin collar, as though she had been just another piece of furniture, or some cutlery. Or their mourning.