Giedra Radvilaviciute - Those Whom I Would Like to Meet Again

In her letter — written on a computer and then printed out — the author told me that the story I had selected for the journal and the story she had recorded on the tape were from the same collection. The book had apparently won some American-Lithuanian literature prize, once upon a time. I’d like to get that book back so I can read the rest of it. It probably won’t be easy to find. Even among the few readers left, people aren’t much interested in local color now. Those who still read books only collect rare ones, brought from afar. Everyone wants to learn something new.

I can’t help but notice that the things which have gathered in my purse now are the same as the ones I remember in my mother’s purse thirty years ago. Except that she carried her pills in a little pocket, while I carry mine in a special box for tablets. Now the handkerchiefs in my purse are paper; back then, mother had percale.

In the kitchen, the salt has begun hardening into a rock more often than before. I don’t know why. Perhaps I used to wash it out more often than I do now. On the other hand, if you leave jam sitting around, it doesn’t get moldy as fast as it did when I was a kid. Maybe because of the preservatives? And my daughter won’t go to the movies with me anymore, but she’s started daubing on my lipstick and wearing my boots. When she was younger, and she wasn’t feeling well, I used to ask her if maybe she’d eaten a whole bag of potato chips again … but nowadays, a very different question flashes through my mind — is she pregnant?

Over the course of two years’ worth of evening naps, the cat, lying on the mouse pad next to our computer, learned one simple thing: that it was fun to bat the mouse with his paw. At first, I suppose, he’d moved it accidentally, but later these interventions became premeditated and precise. Sometimes he would even set challenges for himself, for example trying to smack the mouse with his eyes closed — which is no mean feat. As was written in a story about a different cat, “He needed to bend his foot in a particular way, because otherwise all you would hear was a clank instead of a clink. The cat kept trying …” Which is how my supposedly anonymous comments about the play that won the National Prize this year wound up posted with my real name and personal e-mail address appended at the news site delphi.lt … Since my post was made up of Russian (and a few laconic American) swearwords, I was so ashamed I couldn’t sleep for nearly a week. As punishment, the cat spent three days shut up in the cabinet under the sink. With a box of litter, a bowl of water, and a dish of cat food — but no remorse. In fact, he played the victim: he ate his litter, pooped on his food, and made histrionic choking sounds.

I’ve pretty much stopped watching television. Not that I ever watched very much. Every weekend all they would show were American movies advertised as about “the will to win, the instinct to survive, and the power of love, no matter the cost.” By then, this same country — the most powerful in the world — had already been waging a war on terrorism for several years, yet they were forever organizing roundtables in order to define that very phenomenon. And then, just before Christmas, my neighbor came over to see me, rising disheveled out of the dark stairwell bearing a lit candle, apologizing that she wouldn’t be able to buy me a present this year, but offering the consolation that there was a man on TV who sounded very confident, interrupting the regularly scheduled programming no less, announcing that terrorism, the plague of the twenty-first century, would meet its final defeat this coming Monday night at the hands of Bruce Willis. That same evening I stuffed my television inside my grandmother’s lilac embroidered pillowcase and set it in the kitchen. I sit on it when I’m peeling potatoes for my daughter. Or skinning fish for the cat.

Now I go to the movies more often. Usually on Fridays. I pick a late show, and go on foot. I like it when all that’s left of your contact with the city is the wind on your face and the sound of the shoes of passersby. When all that’s left of the choices the city offers you is solitude; all that’s left of its light is the luminescence reflected off of the snow; and all that’s left of its noise is the distant rumble of automobiles. Incidental phrases heard on the street arrange themselves effortlessly into coherent stories without endings. The theater smells like popcorn, perfume, and the plastic carpeting. Once upon a time, it smelled of sunflower seeds, wet umbrellas, and wine. Occasionally, you hear lines in the movies that some people feel accurately represent contemporary relationships, like: “Men love women as much as the women let them.” Not long ago I read in a magazine that as many as twenty-eight percent of modern couples prefer to make love on the dining-room table; twelve percent at work, in the boss’s office (when he’s not there); three percent at work, in the boss’s office (when he is there); thirty-five percent in the bathtub, amid floating candles; and sixty-four percent in the bedroom. Adding up all these percents, however, I got 142. Perhaps the magazine had taken into account the likely predilections of all the offspring that might be produced by these encounters? By the way, Italian researchers at Pavia University recently invented a tomographic test that can determine whether a person is really in love or just faking it — they arrived at this procedure when it was discovered that feelings of “legitimate” love increase the number of NGF molecules in a subject. Of course, this makes little difference, in the long run; even when love is “true,” it only lasts about a year, they say, and when it comes time for couples to separate, their feelings don’t even enter into the conversation — they leave it all up to their therapists. Speaking of marriage, I read that a woman in Israel married a dolphin. She wore a silk dress to the ceremony, and a pink diadem. When the dolphin swam up to the side of the pool, she kissed him, said, “I love you,” and then dived into the water with her clothes on.

Despite the progress of modern science these days in analyzing inscrutable things like love, psychics are still able to make decent livings — searching for missing people (or their remains), predicting the future, and generally encouraging people to see day-to-day life as a many-tiered warren of sinister signs and symbols. For example, a psychic recently directed the police to a certain canal, and, sure enough, they pulled a girl’s body — a suicide (or murder victim?) — out of the water: two years after she (the girl) had disappeared. The girl’s purse looked like a black jellyfish, but was more recognizable than its owner. It’s no less peculiar to me that writers too can manage to make a living from writing, these days, though their worldviews are considerably less intricate and interesting than those proposed by the psychics. That’s why the reviews you see for so many books (for example, There’s a Curve — Don’t Drive Off ) can just as well apply to so many others (for example, A Woman Like That is a Treasure ).

Another sign of the changing times is that in the morning, people on the trolleybus chat on their cell phones with several passengers following along with their conversations involuntarily, including the driver: “Hello, Valera. No, I can’t hear you either. I’m on my way now. I’m-on-my-way, jomajo , I said. Though after last night I don’t really want to go anywhere. Jele jele dusha v tele . Unlock it. Carry the cement upstairs. Take everything upstairs, every last bit of that shit. Lock the place up. Don’t let anyone out. I mean, don’t let anyone drink. What …? Unlock it. What …? I’ve got the key?”