Breathing Into Marble

by Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite

  The night flooded in through the window, as soft and slick as a raven’s feather. It smelled of damp soil and excited the senses. Here, at this window, Isabel had stood ten years before, trembling and as juicy as an overripe cherry.

  It had been in the afternoon, her father already dead, when she brought Liudas into her empty house for the first time. Isabel was standing by the window and could feel the air quivering in the heat and heard how the uncut grass rustled in the sun. From deep within a silent nectar oozed from Isabel. Liudas leant against her back, lifted her dress and parted her buttocks and there, even more secretly, the silk ripped. Down her thighs rippled waves of excitement. The honey stirred, rippled and oozed. Her honeycombs bubbled and yielded as she allowed him to take her.

  Pranciska had been driving her goats along the edge of the woods. She waved at them lazily as she hurried the animals along with a stick; Isabel and Liudas waved back, restraining for a moment the trembling of their loins.

  And then – then there was only the wind in the grass in the yard and a faster breathing, the silent trail of the plane in the sky which soon would fall behind the shawl of the apple tree, there was only the wood of the windowsill which pulsed and the alder trees which were ruffled by the breath of the hot wind. And they were both quiet for a second, before the explosion which was rising already from within their cells------and then a sudden dive--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  And a fainting throb spread through the tissue--------------------------------------

  A dive---------

  And a mouth open like a shell as it spits out the pearl—

  A dive-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  And the heavenly cork shot out and rose with a whistle, their howling bones vibrating to the frequency of the light and then the waning into one another---------------------------------------and then --------------------------------------------------the deathly ball rolled forward with a tremendous speed along the corridors of bliss-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Isabel stepped back from the window. The bed creaked in Gailius’ room and she remembered that she had decided to sleep with him that night. She felt then, suddenly, her desire rising, dark and thick, as it is when it is brought on by despair. Liudas lay silently; quieter than someone who is sleeping. She approached him, willing him to feel her desire; the darkness glowed like hot coal. Liudas did not make the slightest movement to give himself away.

  ‘Liudas…’ Isabel bent over him, flaming, touched him with her smouldering hair and nipples which were as hard as shards of coal. Liudas moved and mumbled, ‘Let’s sleep.’

  Isabel leant back. The darkness cooled immediately and tightened about her throat like an icy noose.

  ‘Isabel?’ Liudas lifted his head. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘If you are planning to leave… go now,’ Isabel whispered from the doorway.

  She plunged out into the tepid summer night – later she would recall that feeling often – that was probably how a man plunges into a woman’s womb. She shattered like a glass broken, in a moment and to her very depths, and, feeling barely heavier than the air itself, felt herself scatter across the yard.

  At dawn she found herself in the fields, naked, with her nightgown bundled up at her chest. When dawn broke it was warm, not painful; it was like a careful hand pulling a dressing that was stuck to a wound. The light returned Isabel to her body; she shuddered suddenly from cold and from the weariness in her loins. She pulled on her night gown and took herself home, shivering.

  A grey light seeped into the bedroom. Liudas was breathing evenly, lying on his back; sleep made his features look even colder. She was in no state to go back to her child; she barely remembered she had one. She remembered nothing about the things around her, except for the armchair and the early sun light falling through the kitchen window onto the floor. She wrapped a cover around herself and settled in the kitchen, on the same armchair she had been lowered into during her mother’s funeral by the relative in the coat with a sheep skin collar. After her father’s death she had moved the chair to the kitchen and put a bag of sawdust under its missing leg.

  Isabel placed her cheek against the back of the chair and gazed at the sliver of sunlight moving barely perceptibly across the floor boards. She travelled with it, as if riding a pony trimmed with ribbons under the lime trees in Vilnius, across the park which shook from the blare of trumpets. The pony knew where it was going to take her, she trusted it. She trusted it implicitly. Her thighs were warm from the pony and a little sore – it was no joke straddling it. The crowns of the lime trees rustled like sweet wrappers and Isabel’s eyes were glued to them. Early autumn sunlight shone through the leaves, as if through a green tapestry.

  In the morning Liudas left for town and didn’t return.

  Three

  THE DOOR to the barn stood wide open, a stone stopping it from closing.

  Light from a murky sunset fell through the open door onto the floor. Deeper into the barn the skeleton of a bicycle sparkled in the sunlight. And then she saw, and in that fraction of a second before her eyes had adjusted to the dusky light, understood what she saw.

  She leapt forward,

  and then there was nothing of her left, just her son lying like a shadow, flat on the earth.

  She had seen him like that many times before - like that – looking as if his blood were mouldy and shining through his skin – green inclusions in the blood vessels at his temples. So many times before she had seen his face heavy and pure as if it were made of antique marble. Perhaps that was why she wasn’t surprised, having had all those times to rehearse for this moment. And there, below the face, lower, in her child’s stomach, flamed the bloody jaws of hell illuminated by the evening light falling through the door. It was impossible to resist the blood; it called out from the body’s deepest mines – it screamed directly to her own blood. Her blood howled, as if it were her not the child that was wounded, it rose up to spurt out of her, struggling to find an exit.

  ‘Ilya!’

  His eyes – the steel irises and the black pinprick of his pupils - were not the same as before; their darkness was diluted. They cried and pleaded for something Isabel couldn’t give. He held his fist at his thigh, strangely, as if his arm had just sprouted out of his body and he had no idea what to do with it.

  Something glistened and quivered in his fist. A knife.

  He stood immobile, the knife’s bloody tip pointed like an arrow at her son’s wound.

  Isabel hesitated and drew in a deep breath; the sound seemed to nail Ilya to the wall. The knife dropped to the floor. He squirmed and slid along the wall, his back shaving the planks. She knew what he intended to do immediately - as clearly as if she had put the idea into his head herself.

  She blocked his way, grabbed him by his throat. She lifted him up and pressed him against the wall.

  She looked not into his eyes, but at the yellow chin that had grown larger over the last four years. He pressed his palms against her face. With the click of a lock springing open, she felt then, with the pure force of parturition, that she could strangle him, but just as she lost all restraint the call of the sacrifice on the floor broke over her. She pushed Ilya away; she tossed him towards the door through which the evening sunlight fell. He, a light, tight knot of fear, slithered away into the grass towards the wood’s edge.

  The crunch of his disappearing steps echoed in her temples,

  as she turned back.

  Her child was so big on that barn floor. Too big to be scooped up. Only his head was small, with its face growing heavier, like a thimble stuffed with gypsum - much smaller than the steaming nest in his gut. For several long moments she still hoped to sort it all out, to draw him to her like some knitting and hold him
until everything in him grew together again, till everything healed and began working.

  She pressed the child’s face between her palms as if trying to staunch the steaming life that was flowing out of him. She slapped his cheeks in attempt to shake out a sigh or a sound, but he did not respond to her touch. His features grew strange. They folded up, like blossom shrinking back into its bud, and it seemed to her that she was watching her child from the window of a train that was moving away. She looked and could not do anything more.

  Still she tried to hold him. She tried to lift him, or thought about carrying him, but the jaws in his stomach bubbled threateningly and she could do nothing but give in to hopelessness. That was all.

  There was a mobile phone somewhere in the house.

  She walked out into the light with a peculiar slowness. As she forced herself along the path through the grass towards the house, the light pressed around her like glass armour. They never knew where the mobile phone was. She ran from room to room, lost herself at the sideboard, pulled herself back together at the bookshelf with a calendar and finally pulled out, from under a pile of newspapers, the old Nokia. She pressed the keys. Spoke.

  Her voice sounded as though it came from somewhere beside her, to the left, as if through a loudspeaker.

  Twice they asked her to repeat what had happened. She grew confused. She couldn’t find the words, because they were just not there. The woman at the other end of the line was casual and seemed, at first, annoyed. Only once she had checked the details did she relent suddenly, seeming finally to have understood what had happened. It had been a long time since Isabel had last had to call an ambulance, or perhaps the woman was new; she didn’t know the way to Puskai and thought the driver might not know either and Isabel patiently explained, a couple of times, where the ambulance should turn in. ‘Have you called the police?’ the woman asked. The police. Call the police. The woman wasn’t in a hurry. She wrote down her notes as the line began to break up; her pauses were like wounds through which the child’s life poured away. Perhaps each moment was still crucial. The woman didn’t seem to understand this, she said: I have to write it down, don’t interfere with my work.

  Isabel cut off the connection and, stumbling slightly, turned to the window. Somebody moved in the dark doorway of the barn and the bright reflection of the grass was so sharp it made her sick. A blue checked shirt scooted along the wall of the barn towards to woods.

  He had gone back for his knife.

  And then her focus returned. She leapt out into the yard; her feet were like spears pressing out the fatty sap from the soil. The woods started behind the barn; the blue checked shirt jumped still among the tree trunks. The woods belonged to Isabel, she was faster there; the trees gave way to her and the moss pushed her forward. She did not need to go round the shrubs or bushes. Her face sharpened, transformed into the beak of an eagle. Soon she would catch the runner.

  The ferns stuck to Ilya’s feet; he grew tired and slowed down. Isabel grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him to her and pushed him down to the ground. Their weight pressed down the ferns which stank of the child’s fear and desperation. As she was about to dig her nails into the child, a glance flashed between them.

  The glance invited closeness and silence. And this they found.

  Everything stood still.

  They gazed at one another. In Ilya’s pupils she saw the contours of her own face reflected and she was frightened by the sudden thought that she was gripping herself. Her rage evaporated and she slouched down strangely.

  Ilya’s yellowish eyes were like bursting buds; tears rimmed the whites, one slight movement and a wet trickle ran down his temple. She did not recognise his face. Not the features, but what shone through them; the wrinkles and twitches, like a foetus ripped from the womb. His face had never been so open and helpless, making her want to shade it from the light, to sew it up, bandage it. As if she was looking not at cheek bones and eyes but at the exposed brain. And it hurt to look at it. Let me go, let me go, missus, I won’t do it again.

  She let him go.

  For a couple of seconds the child lay still, not believing it was over.

  It was not him that she was looking at. Rather, she saw herself; how she would have to rise up out of the ferns and make her way back there, to sort things out on her own. She stepped away from Ilya and he jumped up, suddenly, like an animal released from a trap and, without a word, disappeared into the ferns. She did not look; she heard the sound of him running. In her ears, along with the sound of the boy’s feet, a silent stain spread, drowning out everything.

  She stopped in the middle of the yard, halfway between the barn and the farmhouse, her heart sensing the door’s gaping mouth. That was as far as she could manage. From the darkness of the barn something was spreading that was stronger than her and it held her there, preventing her from moving.

  The darkness flooded around her, but it had no weight or pressure. It gathered Isabel and held her, gently rocking her until the ambulance, white as a ghost, appeared from the woods.

  Offerings

  A SKYSCRAPER glittered in the dusk on the other side of the river; cars were strung like a festive garland as they crept across the bridge. It wasn’t a holiday, just an ordinary working day. Downstairs, people were moving about, looking forward to a warm dinner and an evening in bed watching a film. He sat smoking in the darkness, exhaling through the gap in the window. In the skyscraper across the river there was a darkened window; half an hour or so ago the light was on – today, again, he had been the last to leave the office of the ‘Liudvikas’ travel agency. When, in the lift, he remembered he had forgotten to switch off the lights, he had to go back again.

  ‘Have you noticed how the days are getting shorter?’ his new secretary had said towards the end of the day. It was true. In the summer the computers were the only thing consuming the electricity; they would walk out of the office into the sun lit streets not having had to switch any light on during the day. Now he had to get used to electric lighting again – it saddened him and filled him with the kind of heaviness grass feels anticipating autumn.

  He bought some donuts and mineral water at the ground floor café, then, lighting a cigarette, he crossed the bridge; he almost bought another copy of the newspaper which his secretary had left on his desk that morning.

  At the bus stop a gipsy was hanging around, as she had been the previous day. When he crossed the road he knew she would say something. He pushed his hands into his pockets, quickened his pace and ducked past her with his eyes down. Back in his flat he lit another cigarette. He paced the dusk darkened room, greedily inhaling the tobacco. He could not get the gipsy’s quiet, sharp words out of his head. He hadn’t caught the meaning, but he felt as if she had seductively flashed her breasts at him.

  When he got home he didn’t feel like switching the light on. He hadn’t got round to buying curtains. ‘Don’t you have anything to hide?’ his secretory mocked him gently. When she stayed behind doing overtime, the secretary could see from across the river how he came home, switched on the light and smoked, aimlessly pacing his room.

  ‘There’s nothing to hide,’ he answered. ‘I’m as empty as my living room.’

  The living room, it was true, was quite empty. Its walls were painted white. On one of the walls there was a Venetian mask covered in glitter, which had been left by a woman as a gift. This solitary decoration would often depress him but he never got round to taking it down, though there was nothing particular he wished to remember about the women who had given it. Disconnected as it was from any memories of his past, it did, in a strange way, fit there – matching perhaps not the walls but rather the emptiness. It was a mirror to his invisible grimace.

  He put the kettle on and took a bite out of the greasy donut. It wasn’t fresh. He threw it on the table and lit another cigarette. The light from the street lamp fell through the archway into the other room, where he kept his clothes and books. He had never slept or worked there, exce
pt for a few times when guests had stayed the night.

  Behind the other wall his son’s room throbbed with emptiness. When it had been decided that his son would attend the secondary school in town, he had bought venetian blinds for the room straight away. The glass door to the room was black in the dusk, like an enormous block of chocolate. When his son was away, he kept the door closed.

  He was left with only a spacious, half-empty room where there was a cooker; a cupboard; a writing desk on which he had his meals and did his writing and a fake-leather, light, brown sofa in the centre of the room. This was where he slept, read or battled for hours with the blocks of ice in his head – during the night they would rise up to the surface and scrape painfully against his temples. Buried deep within the ice was a question that niggled at him, which shouted and begged him – something needed to thaw. But he refused to listen. With an enormous act of will he would push the blocks of ice back to the outskirts of his conscience. To fortify himself he would pour a whiskey.

  That was how he passed the hours.

  He made some strong tea. As he reached up for the packet of tea some medicine fell out – he always had it, just in case. He picked the medicine up from the floor and placed it back behind the tea and coffee. And then he lit another cigarette.

  The phone was silent. He knew he could call first but he was afraid she would be next to him and that would make the child nervous; they had agreed that the boy would ring. He had bought him a mobile phone; it was a used one, so it didn’t matter if someone took it from him. His son looked like the kind of boy you would itch to take something away from.

  He went over to the window and blew smoke through the gap. From somewhere below drifted the sound of an operetta; a piece by Puccini. Suddenly he regretted that he hadn’t bought a music centre for his son. The boy had lingered over one, but couldn’t pluck up courage to ask for it. He knew his son needed music to replace the sound of the trees which were sparse here in the city; the trees grew meekly, subdued by the noise of the city. The wind couldn’t get them to talk. He liked his son’s taste in music, but music, like electric lights, filled him with a longing he didn’t want to think about. He only ever switched the radio on for the news. When he employed a girl he would warn her that he didn’t like music in the office.