In the yard Isabel ran round the car, laughing. A couple, who were passing the gate, looked at her bemused. Liudas recognised the old man with the grey-beard. He was wearing a dark green raincoat and a strip of hair, clean and neatly combed, ran like white putty beneath his knitted beret. Holding his arm was the woman in the black coat. Liudas recognised her.
‘Good evening!’ he shouted.
The woman shrugged and waved. They strode on with even, tiny steps, their heads turned in one direction, as if they were sewn to each other. A sour breeze blew through the gate way.
That night Liudas couldn’t hold back.
‘Isabel…do you really not remember anything strange? You didn’t see any stranger near the house?’
Isabel thought.
‘No. Gailius had run out of ink and he was determined to go to Kurpiskiai. He wouldn’t listen, he didn’t care that it was too late and that Pranciska had probably closed the shop… You know what he was like. I had felt…I always felt that our life was a long preparation for what happened…such a long farewell before that…’
‘That day – did anybody come to the house?’
‘No…I don’t remember.’
‘Beatrice said…’
‘It was not Ilya.’
‘How do you know, Isabel?’
Their eyes met.
‘We made a mistake taking that child on.’
‘I don’t regret anything,’ Isabel replied coldly.
They didn’t say any more about it.
On Monday evening Isabel suggested they go to the cinema.
‘I want to watch a love story, something funny,’ she said.
Liudas chose an American comedy.
They sat in the small, hot hall, sunk deeply in the soft, red chairs and watched the audience come in. Music played softly from the loudspeakers. Most of the people arrived in twos and joked, quietly looking for the seats marked on their tickets. Liudas noted that they all looked similar somehow.
‘Maybe they’re all in a similar mood,’ Isabel suggested.
She sat with her jacket unbuttoned. The curls that were re-growing at her temples were damp and beads of perspiration gathered above her lip. Liudas brushed them away with his thumb.
‘Take your coat off.’
Obediently, as if she had just woken up, Isabel took her jacket off and placed it on her knees.
Every single face interested her. She soaked up the expressions, the movements, the modulations of voice. Her face held the expression of an observer. She was hypnotized by the speed with which hands unwrapped a chocolate and by the way women adjusted their hair or pulled off scarves from their necks. It was like Isabel had been locked up for an eternity and was captivated, now, with faces and the cosy din of people relaxed after the working day.
The cinema was only half full when the film started. When the lights went down, Isabel let out a long sigh and then laughed at herself. They smiled at each other as if they were engaged in a secret game.
‘What a joy it is to sit in soft chairs and observe huge people, whose faces fill the screen, even if they aren’t very clever, or interesting and we’ve seen their story lots of times before,’ Isabel said after the film.
The rain had just stopped. They stood under a lamp post unsure what to do next, people flooding past them.
‘I want some ice cream,’ Isabel said and they went to look for a shop that might still be open.
‘I want to run!’ she shouted and began to run as fast as she could.
Her figure, as she receded into the distance, looked as frail as beads on a thin thread. Liudas felt a knot in his throat. He quickened his pace and waved; Isabel was waiting at the crossing. Her cheeks were burning. Her tousled hair gleamed like fire in the orange street light. Unexpectedly they took each other’s hands. Isabel’s damp, trusting palm responded to the slightest pressure of his.
‘Liudas, am I healthy now?’ she asked, suddenly very serious.
‘You’re getting better. You’re getting better very quickly,’ he said.
At home, Liudas watched, mesmerised, as Isabel made sandwiches under the dim light which shone from above the cooker. Her hair had grown down to the mole on the back of her neck; the mole that he had touched for the first time twelve years before when kissing Isabel under the horse chestnut opposite the student hostel. She had been shy and asked him to remove his hand from her neck and then joked that if you pressed the button under her hair, the door to her heart would open. That night Liudas had parted her curls and kissed the magic lock to her heart – not realising he had already been granted entrance.
Liudas went across to Isabel, who was bent over the cutting board and touched the mole with his lips.
He felt a warm wave of her long forgotten scent. Breathing heavily, he kissed her back under the cotton shirt, her fragrant buttocks, the islands of skin between her shirt and jeans, covered with light, golden hairs. When Isabel turned, confused, he pressed her to his chest so hard that she grew scared and began to squirm.
‘What are you doing?’ she whispered, her eyes wide open.
Liudas realised nothing would come of it.
Her body didn’t respond. It stood before him so painfully beautiful, but foreign. Isabel had changed the lock it seemed. The old key wouldn’t open her heart.
‘Will you ever forgive me that I left you both?’ Liudas whispered.
‘I forgave you a long time ago. It’s just that…something broke. I’m not your wife any more,’ Isabel said, looking into his eyes.
Liudas’ throat tightened.
That evening, as always, they stood for a while at the window silently looking down at the late cars whizzing across the bridge, and at how the distorted patterns of neon advertisements reflected in the black water of the river. Cold air blew through the gap in the open window; the breeze was painfully sad but pleasant at the same time.
‘I love you,’ Liudas said quietly, his eyes focused on the empty road.
‘I can feel it,’ she said.
In the middle of October Isabel asked him to drive her to Puskai.
Lots of silk in the hair and everywhere
(From a child’s note book)
THINGS LOST their brightness last summer. I stood near the well and saw mama in the distance, coming back from Kurpiskiai. She was a pale, watery dot jumping in the disc of light. And suddenly the light that danced upon the grass went out. At first I thought something had happened to mama, but she was still walking towards me and I could see she was smiling.
Something had happened to me.
I lowered my gaze – the grass seemed normal - the blades were flat and neither moved nor shone and it wasn’t painful to look at. The bucket by the well looked grey and clear and frozen, as if dead. One of its sides was dented slightly; I had always found this beautiful, but that day it was just a dent.
I never knew that things died.
Nobody told me.
And nobody ever told me that things breathe and shine and that all their tiny parts quiver. Until then it had all seemed so natural. I understood, too, that things hadn’t changed; it was I that had changed. Everything shone still, it was just that I could no longer see it.
That was so sad.
Now I could only recall that mama was woven from fibres of silk, from the core of which spread a quivering gentleness. I still quivered when she drew near across the yard and wiped her shoes on the grass. The quiver ran through me when she read the newspaper, bent over the table, occasionally underlining things. I felt it when she opened a can of oil paint and I inhaled the pungent scent.
I had to remember that my mother was made of silk.
Of silk that wasn’t ripped or worn.
It was like that worm I accidently cut in half when I was chopping an apple. I was so sad, so unbearably sad that, because of my carelessness, I had cut the chain of life, that I had cut such a complex and perfect circle of life. And I was sad that the world was the kind of place where one person kills another withou
t hesitation. How can you accept this? At that moment I found it horrible; I couldn’t accept it. I felt like I was the worm the giant’s hand had just cut in half. I felt pain and fear; I was afraid that I was dying. I shouted and squirmed, still able to feel my chopped off tail. It was such burning, screaming pain that it filled my whole body. And it was unbearable and unforgivable that I had caused that suffering - to the worm and to myself. It seemed to me that I would never be able to repair the harm I had done to it, to its children and to the higher being, thanks to which me and the worm had both appeared on the earth. Who could forgive me? Who could make me feel better? Mama was very concerned when I started to cry; she thought it was the start of a seizure, that it was that beast in me which stuck its face out without warning and scared everybody. I live with the beast, but I have never met it. When it sticks its face out, I retreat. I learned about it from mama and my father. The beast has eaten their lives.
I don’t see any difference between the worm and myself. Or perhaps just one – that such a small worm couldn’t fit a large beast inside it, which means the worm doesn’t cause other people pain - while I was born to bring pain. Because of me, mama can’t work; she hasn’t had enough sleep since I was born. They’ve never told me this directly, but sometimes they shout at each other with this hatred that I know is actually about me.
When I think about death I can’t picture it. I can only feel it as it approaches – it always comes a bit too early. Even if you’ve tried to get used to it from when you were young it would still be too early. We lack the imaginative leap that would allow us understand it, to really comprehend it. There’s always too much life in us. That’s why when death makes its first move, when it steps out of the darkness, we won’t be expecting it.
I know that my death is growing up with me, and that it is sharp and fast, like a stab. It won’t attack me from the back. It will call out with its secret, velvet voice and, when I turn, it will pierce me like a knife. But we will have looked into each other’s eyes. It isn’t sly - it’s just that death is much faster than we are.
And everything in me will relax when death’s shroud slithers and shimmers across my skin.
I won’t resist.
Because it knows what it is doing.
Home
ISABEL STOPPED in the yard by the well with her eyes half closed, the colours and the sound of murmuring enfolding her. The ochre October colours seeped through her eye lids, settling in layers, as if they were wrapping her heart in velvet. Overwhelmed, she stood still, breathing and listening. Everything was bright and heavy and saturated with the sad autumnal sun. The bronze fields and the path to Kurpiskiai were spread out before the woods – while in the other direction the burnt beams of the barn looked like a black scrawl. The familiar scent of the dark soil was almost palpable from the depth of the woods. The stream was barely audible, though in a few weeks its serpentine bend would become visible.
She could tell with her eyes closed that autumn had come.
An inexplicable wave of happiness rose abruptly in her chest, freeing itself from its cocoon and rolling out across the fields, throwing itself at the horizon.
She ran around the outside of the house wanting to hug it, to embrace each corner simultaneously. And each log. Out of breath, she sat on the steps of the veranda which were strewn with lilac leaves; those same steps on which Dionisas Vietusis had played his accordion for the last time more than thirty years before.
When she unlocked the door, the musty scent of the house greeted her like a faithful dog. Isabel took off her jacket, opened wide the windows and walked around the house, the breeze buffeting her, gazing with fresh eyes at the bright, familiar things. The sunlight fell almost imperceptibly across their surfaces.
Her son’s things greeted her with lightness and with joy. She could hold them in her hands, she could smell his clothes in the cupboard – the blinding pain had settled into a kind of sadness which it was possible to accept and live with; it had settled into a sadness which she was able to carry in the corners of her heart like a familiar substance. It seemed to Isabel that her child was floating somewhere close, joyfully stretching his hands out towards her from the other side. I am here, I am still here, the drawers of the writing table squeaked when she opened them. You can let me go now, whispered the drawings of dragons and soldiers that were pinned to the wall. I need to go, sighed the fluffed up pillows and the moon.
Fly, fly, I am letting you go. Isabel brushed her hair from her eyes and looked at herself in the mirror above the sideboard. A warm, palpitating shadow unfolded its wings and flew away. She bent closer in order to be sure – the mirror was not steamed up.
She wanted to cry with happiness, she wanted to become completely light, to become weightless, like the strands of light that dominated the house. For a long time she gazed into the eyes of the unfamiliar woman in the mirror.
A slow, quiet life began.
Isabel felt calm; like a person who, having lost everything, finds their heart empty and clear. Time was measured by the shadows which fell away from things, by the rattling of the bucket that cut through the silence, by the sound of the plates and forks being washed – always the same plates with a silver lining and the forks with a pointed handle. Water would heat up, as it always had, on the stove, the third floorboard from the door would squeak, as it always had, in the porch. That year she walked a lot, until the alders stood naked. She walked in the evenings to stand by the river. After dark she would read a book in the kitchen – any childhood book from the attic. Or she would idly move a pencil across an empty piece of paper – and, suddenly, look, a picture – which quivered, and streamed like blood in the veins. Did she eat? Did she sleep? Did she speak? She didn’t remember. That indifference of her soul seemed like a kind of fullness. It liberated her from objects and habits so that Isabel didn’t remember much from those days. She remembered only the silence, as clear as crystal, touched occasionally by a distant sound. Thoughts, if they came, did not hurt nor disturb her; they rustled more quietly than the wind in the grass and melted away immediately. Days would sail one from another like ripples in the water and everything that touched Isabel quickly poured out of her. When she was asked how she was doing, she could not find the words. She would smile. I’m fine, thanks.
This, probably, was happiness.
Soon people started knocking at the door. At first they knocked shyly, as if she were a stranger, but then more frequently and sincerely.
Pranciska’s dog had a litter. One day she brought a soft puppy, as white as a lamb, wrapped in a shawl and placed it carefully on the porch floor. Isabel was worried that she wouldn’t be capable of looking after it, or that she wouldn’t be able to get used to it, but the pup was serene and undemanding; it was happy with leftovers and didn’t beg for attention.
At first she avoided stroking it and at night she would leave it in the kitchen. But one day she came home from town filled with anxiety and the dog looked at her with such a sense of understanding that Isabel called it to her and talked to it. It smelt like a young, inexperienced hunter, who knew how to listen. It expressed its dog-feelings in a reserved way and had soft, such unbelievably soft fur.
That night he earned himself a name – Nut.
And he was allowed in the big room for the night, next to Isabel’s bed.
When she started writing cultural reviews for the daily newspaper, the pace of life picked up, with more noise and events. Isabel started to go into town more often – to the editor’s office, to openings of shows and plays. In the car Nut would settle down on the seat next to her and half close his round, brown eyes; sometimes when something sparked his wild nature, he would remind her of a boy she tried to avoid thinking about.
She bought a cheap, old, burgundy Mercedes from a typesetter colleague. At first she regretted it, but the car adjusted to her as Nut had, though it was given neither a name nor the right to spend its nights by her bed. Well, old man, well, she would gently tease and encour
age it and it would listen to her; and though it coughed and choked, it obeyed her. At dusk she would call Nut and they would speed aimlessly along the roads.
It was enough for them just to head in some direction; the fact that she couldn’t think of a purpose for the trip didn’t worry her.
The head of the Kurpiskiai primary school offered her a position teaching an art class. It seemed, to her, as if the offer was like a greetings card to which there was no obligation to reply. Isabel shrugged. She observed children from a distance now, like animals you were not allowed to stroke. From afar they looked like joyful, colourful dots – childhood poured not from the noise and the immature shapes but from itself, an ebullient radiance. That radiance unnerved Isabel. She would turn as far away as possible from their forms and voices.
On the first Saturday of November, though, she dreamed of a bright yellow spot on the floor of her father’s workshop. She woke up in tears, got up and unlocked the door to the workshop that had stood closed for many years.
A rainy, morning light fell through the window in the roof onto the dusty table. Her father’s tools were in boxes along the wall, untouched since the night she had found him in the chair, dead. For fifteen years she hadn’t dusted it once - as if doing so would have been as unacceptable as reading somebody else’s letter. That night, all dressed up and with lips swollen from kisses, she had called Pranciska and Juozas for help, and having covered her father with a clean sheet, they moved him still in the chair to the big room. Isabel had gone back to the workroom then, to switch off the light. She locked the door and hid the key in the bottom of the mahogany sideboard.
The workshop table, which was long and wide and took up most of the room, was covered with strips of wood and sketches. A yellowish newspaper lay on one of its corners, and on it – a pencil and an ashtray filled with stubs. On the windowsill she found a plastic comb full of golden hair. Time calmed these little things, Isabel thought, like stones on the riverbed to which you return; you might have changed, but they wait for you the same as they always were, only covered now with the thickening fog of memory. They testified to events eaten away from recollection and mixed with imagined details, faded in one place and brighter in another. Or possibly they didn’t exist at all.
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