I remember this word in particular, and your sullen wild nerviness, which had an energy of its own; you clung to your cigarette like a climber to a rope, you kicked at a stone and let it roll into the verge. I remember the mist, the smoke and the steam from your breath all at once. I think this was when you took my arm, pressed the wet wool of your shawl against me and said, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ Or no, perhaps I said something first about how early morning is thinner, less real, how I felt I could pass through the mist, steam and smoke, through the wet wool, into a reality beyond. Maybe it was me who started it, but in any case you asked, ‘Have you ever seen through the gauze of this life?’ And I said, ‘Is there a gauze?’ and you said with a small smile, ‘You can’t tell me this is the sum of it.’
Whatever I might have been about to answer, I didn’t when I saw your face. I can hardly say what it was. Something in the very idea of dissolution seemed to calm you, in the same way you were calmed when you used to talk about your first memories—real or borrowed—of life in Lithuania, a life that was gauzy at best, shifting and lost. As if you found something of yourself in the loss of the world around you. You, you have wrestled with this religion and that, this love affair and that, from god to god and man to man, with prayers and needles, to try to see your way to something true; you have been like a heron thrashing a fish against the riverbank—you would say so yourself. But your face lit with the notion that it might all be unreal and might not matter after all.
So I did not answer, though I could have. Instead I let you speed up our pace to catch Nicolas and Teddy. As we climbed the lane the mist was thinning and the sun spun through the trees in spokes—wet, golden light, and while the hilltops were basking, the mist was still thick down in the valley. Grey, bottomless trees rose from it. Church spires floated in the distance.
‘In Hindu mythology,’ you said to none and all, ‘the sun isn’t the mother of dawn, but the lover. He chases her across the sky and the day starts with a burst of romance. The flowers bloom, the lotus blossoms . . .’
‘The wheat is lovestruck,’ Nicolas said.
‘The bees are drunk.’
‘The streams are laughing.’
‘The monks are hungry.’
‘The clouds are giddy.’
‘The temples are buckling.’
‘The crickets are strutting.’
‘Time is tripping.’
This was evidently a conversation the two of you had had before in some form. You spoke like lovers; you had returning topics and private games. As we walked further, off the lane and up through the fields where the grass was pulled upwards by the vibrating hum of electricity, the light made strange glowing arcs around us. As if it were rucked by the vibration. I had never before and have never since seen this effect of the light. If I looked at it, it seemed to disappear, but if I looked at the ground or at Teddy or you or Nicolas, I could see it, a hoop, glowing. I still have no idea what caused this, but in my memory I see Nicolas a few steps ahead, ringed by this light. He walked tall with the carelessness and ease of a younger man.
Today at work Gene spoke for the first time about his Lithuanian roots, though it was me who brought it up. Such a private man, and yet not cold, not at all. He does a lovely thing when he is thinking of an answer to a question—he levitates his eighty-five-year-old hand upwards to demonstrate, I suppose, the rising of the thought from heart to head. Up it goes, shaky and slow. And when it has risen he speaks, but only then.
‘The trees,’ he said, when I asked him what he remembered about the country. ‘The oak, hornbeam and what else? Lindens. Lindens.’
‘Where were you from?’
‘Ariogala.’
‘Where is that?’
‘Oh, central-ish. A small town central-ish, in the middle. But I haven’t lived there since I was a very small child, you know, so don’t trust what I tell you.’
I smiled; I was helping him on with his clothes at the time, pulling socks over his papery ankles. He has asked for a female assistant to do these things and we’ve no grounds to refuse; his notes from the hospital back up this request, which suggests to me male abuse or bullying of a kind as a child, maybe. In his torso, his chest, his arms, he is a big man and still quite powerful for his years, yet so small and crumpled in his underwear—he the child, I the adult. ‘I trust what you tell me implicitly,’ I said, but he wafted away my faith in him. There are times, I suppose, when your lack of authority in a situation is so complete that you must come to doubt your expertise in everything, even the whereabouts of the town you were born in.
‘As fate would have it, I’ve been looking into Lithuania recently,’ I told him. ‘I’m trying to find out about an old friend.’
I expected him to be interested but he wasn’t particularly. He just nodded.
‘Have you heard of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences?’
He shook his head.
‘My friend’s brother, Petras, had something to do with them, that’s all.’ One white leg into the trousers, the other leg, an awkward hoisting of them up around his waist while he leant on my shoulder. I added, ‘He was investigating something specific, about the effect of radiation on algae in lakes that are used to cool nuclear-power plants. You were not allowed to openly investigate these things then, in case you discovered something the state didn’t like. But I’m sorry, you’ll know all this.’
Naively, I thought that Gene would respond somehow, or find in Petras’ gallant fight a shared cause, but he just pulled himself up from leaning and buttoned his trousers. ‘I wonder if it’s still the way you remember it,’ I said, with one last attempt at engaging him. ‘The lindens and all.’
I have noticed how elderly people acquire an unpredictable, unreliable look, almost impish in some, as though they are slipping between gears. Gene looked at me in that giddy way and then he said, just as you did that day, ‘The Soviets cut most of those down.’ And he said it so readily that I wondered if this was the stock belief, the people’s mantra, perhaps a way of summarising a set of complex losses. But nations can define themselves by their landscapes, this is certainly true; a tree can signify liberty, a tree felled by a foreign hand can crash to the ground as loudly as any army can invade. Sure enough, as he made his silent way into his shirt, he looked out of the window at the trees there as though they had just asked him a question.
‘Gene isn’t a Lithuanian name,’ I said.
‘Nobody could pronounce Juozas. My mother loved Gene Kelly, she thought I looked like Gene Kelly. Well, it was just her opinion. And later in life she started calling me Gene sometimes—perhaps she was confused or just joking with me. So when I came here and needed a name, that was the one I adopted.’
‘When did you come to England?’
‘When I was five-and-a-third.’
‘To be precise.’ I stood to get his wallet, which he always likes to have on him once dressed. ‘But you remember home?’
‘This is home.’
He was working his arms into a cardigan by this point. He asked suddenly, ‘What’s your friend’s story?’
‘Her story? You see, I think she isn’t the kind of person to have a story, maybe that’s her problem.’
‘We were Hasidic Jews,’ he said, as if on a separate plane of thought. ‘Many Lithuanians were. Do you know what Hasidic means? It means loving kindness—and that is what our religion is about. We told stories and sang and prayed. In Ariogala we had a place called the Valley of Songs because there were so many music festivals there; you see, Lithuania is a place of prayer, song, myth and folklore, and stories. Stories.’
‘You remember all that from before you were five?’
‘Of course not—not all our memories are things we remember.’
Again he smiled, or maybe he’d always been smiling, and I made some comment or another about this being true; I think how many memories I have borrowed from my parents, even from you, and built them up as if they were my own. I ease
d his foot into a dark-red shoe, his favourite pair, that he insists on wearing to the exclusion of all others. He looked down at me so sober and placid.
I asked him, ‘So where would somebody without a story go in Lithuania?’
His kindness remained, but he watched me blankly.
‘I’m looking for my friend.’
Still he watched me blankly. Was this to say, Your question is foolish. Or was it only that his thoughts were already elsewhere?
Though unsentimental by nature, a memory comes to you. You are outside your hut when a breeze catches you and takes you back to a time when you were not much more than a baby, in the dunes at Nida with your mother, father and Petras. Petras is around eight or nine, a towering brother tall as the hills, fearfully loved. Your mother and father are burying him in the sand and it makes you screech with laughter. They laugh at you laughing; this is what Petras most often recounted about you when you were older—your baby laugh, which was a cackle of pure joy requiring a mouth open to its fullest and a complete suspension of breath. Even when he emulated it we laughed too, so infectious was it. You were game, as a child. Feral, Petras commented, and your parents countered, Delightful. The foulest temper and the sweetest, most coaxing love of life and adventure, and nothing in between except sleep, which was deep, determined and uninterruptible.
Petras is up to his jaw in sand, and the sand keeps falling away from his face because he is laughing at you laughing. Your parents scoop it back but it flows away. Then you feel a breeze—maybe it picks up, or maybe you’ve turned your head into it—and you become quiet at the feel of it over your skin. Grains of sand rush across the surface of the dunes like lunatics, like drunks. Of course you do not think of it in terms of drunks and lunatics at the time, but you think it as you remember. You close your eyes and open your mouth to feel the air touch places it can never usually reach, and the laughter around you stops. The air is on your gums and your handful of new, sore teeth and the insides of your cheek, filling up your mouth as if you have eaten one of those cottony clouds up there.
This breeze, which is warm and balmy, but edged with a northerliness that never allows you to forget where in the world you are, has returned fifty years later. It touches your right side as you bend over the vegetables in your plot behind the hut. Holidays, you think. Holidays! At Nida, in the long spit of dunes where the sand flows like water but is dry as bones. How can bones flow? How can water be dry? You stand up, flick your ash on the soil; good for the pea shoots, they like it. And so they ought; you’ve filtered smoke through your very own lungs to make that ash.
You have taken to watching a video of geese flying, and you go indoors, suddenly provoked by the memory, and switch the video on. You found the video player and the tiny, portable TV in a skip in the village, so you took them. Inside the video player was this short film of geese flying, just a film without commentary, and at first you had it in your mind that the film had no sound. You never checked to see if it was the sound on the TV that was defunct, because you would rather that the film were silent.
Except, after days of watching this film, you realised it wasn’t silent at all, it was rich with the honking and squawking of the geese. You muttered incredulous profanities at yourself for this oversight—it is abysmal, wholly unnerving how deaf, blind, dumb, hubristic and arrogant you can be for assuming that a lack of human noise means no noise. You won’t survive in this world with thinking like that, amazing really that you have survived this long. But I’m telling you, you should forgive yourself. Life is like this; the senses are instruments that go out of tune. You have been surrounded by non-human sound for so long in this forest of yours that only something different and out of the ordinary counts as sound now. The owl-call, the throaty crow, the snorting bison, these are no longer sounds in themselves, but part of the fabric of the air.
Anyway you watch these geese in formation. You have no idea why you find them so interesting but you could sit and peer into the screen all day if it weren’t for the fact that, quite unconsciously, you chain-smoke while you do it. Even someone with only a very scant regard for her own life would baulk at the saucerful of dog-ends these sessions yield. Besides, not enough money to smoke this much. So you watch the geese for an hour or so at night, usually, to get you off to sleep.
On this occasion, though, the memory of yourself and your family in the sand dunes has taken over, and the V of geese sheeting across a chalky sky is not providing much distraction. Neither do the Upanishads have anything to say that can take you out of yourself, because the memory resists and pulls you back. The Upanishads say abstract things about time and about childhood, but what you feel is not abstract and the memory crashes through their verses as a ton weight through mist. So you turn the book aside.
It is peculiar to think of yourself as a child. As an adult you are a one-woman nation state. You do not consider yourself a person with a history and allegiances and moral frailties, but as a set of religious, political, social, physical principles, a stockpile of abstractions that have to be met periodically by base needs like food and sex, and here in the clash of the rarefied and the base you find yourself. It is a gritty little thing, this self, and not worthy of much, but it defends its borders all the same. You never expect perfectibility, you expect to be troubled because, after all, everything complex is troubled.
But as a child, with the breeze on your eyelids and the back of your tongue? Could this simple pound of happy flesh really be you, and is there any road you can take between this self and that and, if you could, what would it achieve?
Your thoughts turn away from yourself and towards those curious dunes, and to Petras. Ironic that he went on to dig himself into the Lithuanian landscape for the rest of his life, throwing his cause against the diggers and drillers and axes and chainsaws, dear old Petras, hero Petras, dear Petras, the drillers, the axes. Your thoughts run together anxiously when you think of him. Who would have thought a love of botany could set you against the state? You look out of your one rectangular window at the woods, what used to be oak and is now quick-growing spruce, larch and pine.
You remember all the battles he fought against the power station at Ignalina, against the deforestation of the countryside, against the obliteration of indigenous flowers, trees, birds, and finally against the oil-drilling at Nida. The Russians might try to stamp out our language, take over our schools and businesses, but—you hear him say, white-lipped—they are not going to ruin our dunes.
And they did not, you say to the geese on the wing. They did not! You pour out the last few drops of steeped nettle tea from the pot and slice a piece of cheese from the rocklike remains of a block. You sit back from your thoughts. Funny how that memory came on the breeze and, now the breeze has gone, how the memory is gone too. What was it about the way the loose sand was speeding across the surface of the dunes, around the legs of your parents and over the mound that was Petras’ buried body? It made you calm and ecstatic; when you think of it now it fills you with electrical energy, and you wonder if your hair is standing on end.
This is tantamount to assault, you are now saying. The cheese on my table is not rocklike; I do not even eat cheese. First the imagining of my life, what I eat, how I sleep and what I sleep on, and now of my memories themselves. The air aroud my baby teeth, this preposterous fantasy about geese! Do you not think that you and your letter have gone a step too far?
Sometimes when I look at the drawings at the end of the life-class I see that the bad ones are those in which a student has stopped looking and started making things up; in those drawings I acquire a rigorous little face that isn’t mine and a pair of breasts that belong to somebody and anybody else, and there is a kind of cruelty in the pencil marks, a violence at the way I have been hijacked and misused.
I do not feel bad about inflicting this violence and cruelty on you. If you had not run away I would be able to see you, and would not have to make you up. When I think about it, there are so many sentences I could b
egin like that: If you had not run away, I would be able to . . .
* * *
It is true, you do not eat cheese. I forgot. You came downstairs one morning when you were living with us in Morda and said you had dreamt that a cow was standing before you. You had heard its bell clinking along the lane, then it drew up to the door like the milkman. You shall not drink of me, it said. Its breath crept warmly around its nostrils. So in the morning you made yourself the first of a thousand black teas and dry toast.
But you’ll still eat of it? Nicolas said later, over roast beef. You took a piece of meat in your hand and shrugged: Unless I receive further instruction, yes.
When I look back on our years of friendship it seems to me that you are a person who, with fair consistency, has had more interest in others’ happiness than your own, though you had volatile ways of showing it.
But what am I saying? Can I really mean this? Sometimes you peer at me through the dark as I write and the familiarity of your face forces my hand into words that are kinder than they are truthful. To rephrase: you did not go out of your way to make another person happy, but you did not go out of your way to make them unhappy, either. You never went out of your way. It isn’t even that you are a selfish person—in fact isn’t the opposite true, that you are fundamentally selfless? By which I mean somebody who lies low like a card in a pack, until the cards are dealt. Sometimes her appearance in the hand will be good news, sometimes bad, but she herself is neither. She is just offered up, and played or not.
Dear Thief: A Novel Page 12
