An excerpt from the novel Those Never to Return

Translated by Romas Kinka

 

 

All children are the same. It’s just that I believe I’m the only one who’s different. Every child in the village had at least several brothers or sisters, sometimes ten or more, whereas I was an only child like the one and only finger left on a carpenter’s hand. After the three-year war our family was half starved. My great grandmother told mum she was so hungry she once boiled her father’s belt and ate it while washing it down with the tasty juice from the leather. She thought it was only great grandmother who had been so affected by starvation that she was only able to give birth to just one child. But my granny also had just one child, and I’m the only child in our family. Sometimes, for no reason, I could feel the salty taste of a belt in my mouth and then I remember I had inherited the fate of my kin.

I came into the world in those times when storks delivered babies. Sometimes mothers would also find their children in a cabbage patch or in a wicker basket floating in a river amongst the reeds. But I was the only child in the whole village to have been bought. On the morning when a stork should have flown me in a bundle to my mother, it had only a letter in its beak, the letter written in cursive script declaring that I was waiting at the Riga market. A gypsy woman with dark circles under her eyes was holding me to her breast and in order to retrieve me a payment of scissors, a knife or anything with a blade would have to be made to her. And with the squawking of seagulls and the noise of market traders shouting I was ransomed with a payment of a scythe blade. As if coming into this world in this unusual way was not enough, my parents decided to add spice to my life and called me Riga. My grandfather would always say: ‘So you wouldn’t forget where you came from.’

It wasn’t enough that I had a strange name, I also began to notice I could hear what other children could not, I’d find myself in places where other children were not supposed to be, and I’d see what I wasn’t meant to. That’s how I became a witness to a certain person’s injustice.

That person was an old man we were all used to. We’d see him loitering in the village streets, shouting by the church on Sundays, peeing behind the stalls on market days, cuckooing from a tree, pulling the tails of nutria, and lying around in the pastures. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was always muttering something and always tipsy. He always had an unfinished roll-up between his teeth, it didn’t matter if it was lit or not. I had never seen the old man smoking, the ciggy was simply stuck in his mouth like a nail hammered into his head.

He had no one else, he was always on his own. He would put questions to himself and answer them himself. He would make himself laugh and make himself cry, he would listen to his own stories, and when he thought he was speaking too quietly, he would ask himself to speak louder. When he realised he was speaking too slowly or not interestingly enough, he’d become furious, and when he went too fast, he’d get angry, thinking the conversation he was having was no longer intelligible.

That old man was, to put it mildly, strange. He would furiously wave his arms about and laugh madly, and sometimes cry sitting by a tree stump, his body swaying like a swing from which a small child had just come down off.

What frightened me most was, when he was possessed by an unnameable force, words would erupt from his mouth, words that grown-ups only utter when they want to curse someone to death. He’d begin to scream and shout so loudly the whole village echoed with his voice. The echo would reach people’s houses no matter how far away and catch up with you no matter how far you ran or were a burr clinging to the trousers of a gypsy who had ridden off beyond our forest. The screams would reach as far as the allotments and our church during mass. Not that long ago a soldier who had returned as a ghost from the other side said he’d heard the screaming even in hell itself.

Nobody wished any ill on that poor drunkard or attempted to lecture him. Everyone knew that in his young days he’d been a skilful widely respected gynaecologist, as well as a breeder of chickens, until fate decided to mock him. What tricks providence can play on decent people wasn’t given to us children to know. All I could do was wait until I was older and for my parents to sit me down and explain what two naked persons one on top of the other were doing, why god doesn’t get cold in winter sitting on a cloud or what had happened to that poor down-and-out in the past.

I didn’t know very much then. All I knew was that people called that madman poor old Gintaras. And they would shout at him whenever he did something untoward like pulling out a post from a fence, falling asleep in someone’s cart, or uprooting a cabbage from someone’s garden. Whenever anything like that happened in the village, everyone knew that poor old Gintaras was to blame. Apart from him, there couldn’t have been anyone else.

One summer evening when I had just turned seven an incident happened. Elena, a neighbour’s daughter, and I were playing by a marsh not far from home pretending to run a bakery with a shop and baking mud doughnuts. Close to us, were my grandfather and father sitting on tree stumps under a large snowball bush drinking moonshine and playing cards, with long pauses given to thinking about their next move. They were keeping one eye on us and the other on their glasses to make sure they weren’t empty of their tipple.

I was familiar with those evenings. They were always quiet, with the hens clucking away, the sun breaking through gaps in the grey clouds, as if god were keeping a shining eye on us through a gap in a curtain. Grandfather, with some drink in him, would always go off to sharpen his scythe as if under orders, while father, after a few glasses, would put one foot on the other, rest his elbow on his knee and smoking away slowly would wrinkle his unruly eyebrows and observe our innocent antics with his eyes half-closed.

But this evening was different. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. Grandfather had decided not to sharpen his scythe. A turkey making its gobbling sound had chased the chickens away. Grandfather and father, both tipsy, were arguing furiously about whethera tooth falling out in a dream meant death because father had dreamt that he’d spat out a whole handful of his teeth the night before. Grandfather asserted that guessing what dreams meant was for old women while father frothing at the mouth was explaining that all his dreams come true.

At that point poor old Gintaras, acting up as always, appeared in the meadow in front of our house. The old man stopped, knelt down by our cow and putting her thick teat in his mouth began sucking milk straight from the udder. My eyes popped out of my head – I’d never seen Gintaras touching an animal or a person, speaking to a cat or a child.

‘Dad, look at what Gintaras is doing!’ I ran up to dad and pulled on his trousers which were as dusty as a dry path.

‘You’re getting on my nerves!’ father barked and pushed me aside with his huge hand. I just about managed to stay on my feet. When I got back to Elena and, pointing in the direction of the meadow, I suggested she enjoy the scene. Forgetting about the doughnuts, we laughed at poor old Gintaras until the marsh mud dried on our hands and began to crack like an old riverbed.

The cow was always hard to milk but this time she didn’t resist. With her muzzle pointing straight up to the sky, she was mooing loudly as if blowing a trumpet to sound an alarm. We didn’t know if it was out of pleasure or distress. Gintaras, it seemed, after deciding he’d had his fill, jumped up briskly as though he had springs for legs and showed a measure of flexibility unusual for an old man. Both Elena and I thought he’d move off on his usual routes to disturb other people. But no. All fired up, he began jumping around the cow and with his fists clenched waved them about in front of the cow’s muzzle as if he were in a boxing ring.

The animal didn’t move, and with its head up, it began to moo even louder, wanting to announce to the world the danger it was in – while the deranged idiot was stamping on the grass and waving his fists about. The heart-rending mooing upset everyone: the dogs began barking, the cats who had been enjoying basking in the rays of the sun stirred and looked in the direction of the meadow. Unable to tolerate the commotion any longer, father got up. Now he would evaluate the spectacle I had wanted to make him aware of.

He wasn’t happy about what was happening. He grabbed an empty pail and with his muddy clothes flapping behind himtore off to the meadow. His grim face was flushed from anger. I understood it wasn’t the milk he was concerned about. Drawing close to Gintaras, without asking for any explanation and it seemed using all the energy he had built up throughout all his life, he used the pail to strike the old man in the face. There was a loud sound that echoed through the air. The old man fell to the ground the same moment. Father, not giving any thought to stopping, directed a second blow and a third blow to his head – as if driven by some secret grudge.

He was hitting Gintaras and shouting as if possessed. After the fourth blow I began screaming. After the fifth blow the cow stopped mooing. In the meanwhile, it had become overcast, and the sun broke through a gap in the clouds – it seemed as if god had again glanced down to see what was happening on earth. Father threw down the bloody pail as if were some old rag, returned to his place and like a victor said: ‘I told you that teeth falling out of the mouth meant death.’

‘Dad, what have you done?’ my quietly spoken question escaped from my chest. A voice had whispered in my ear that I’d better bite my tongue, but the second stronger voice made me ask the question.

‘What I should’ve done a long time ago. Go off and play your games.’

That night I couldn’t sleep a wink. I heard my mother weeping and asking father in a low voice: ‘Why did you do that? He didn’t do anything.’

I heard mother sniffling, I heard her weaving a wicker basket and changing the settings on the stove. The heavy quietcreaking of the door and father’s leaden footsteps echoed in the emptiness. But what I heard more clearly than anything was father’s silence.

When I got up, I smelled smoke and the aroma of potatoes in their skins cooking. The silence in the warm house was deafening. Outside the only sounds were the clucking of the chickens in the yard and coming from further away the creaking of the well chain. There were no other sounds in our homestead all week. My parents didn’t even move their lips, no one uttered a single word, no one even whistled. I also kept quiet. I just caught the odd sound – a spoon hitting the side of a bowl, a pot being covered with a lid, the sound of water being swallowed, and the scratching of pine martens under the roof. And then the village church bell rang. It peeled so loudly that dust and bits of dried wood began to fall from the ceiling and even the foundations seemed to move. My father, unable to contain himself, said in astonishment: ‘Look at that!’ The house shook and was filled with banging and rattling to the amazement of all. It became as noisy as before, as if my father had committed no sin.

As we waited for life to return to normal, we learned that Gintaras had lain stretched out in the meadow throughout the early part of evening. Fortunately, as it began to grow dark the moon began to shine brightly, illuminating his face, bloodied and pale like that of a corpse. Stasė, a neighbour, on her way to the river to drown some kittens, saw the poor man in the moonlight. She thought he’d already given up the ghost, but his warm cheeks told another story. The neighbour tied a scarf around his head and led him home as he walked swaying from side to side. She let him sniff and then drink some spirit from a little bottle. After some sleep, who knows how much, he didn’t utter a word of thanks or say goodbye. He rolled out of Stasė’s house and managed to take his body to his ghostly lair overgrown with thistles.

After this unfortunate incident Gintaras would only rarely leave his home. Everyone was gossiping and wondering if his senses had returned to him and if he was living out his old age in peace. Nobody worried too much about bringing him a bagel or a tin cup of milk. It was only mother, her conscience heavy, who would regularly go to check on the poor man, taking him some boiled eggs, potatoes and butter. On her return home, father would turn his head away, look at the window or the stove and mutter: ‘Well, is he still alive?’

Mum would always simply answer: ‘Yes, yes, he’s still alive, what else do you expect?’

No one expressed any anger about what had happened, no one confronted my father about it. Perhaps our village had grown tired of the things Gintaras had been getting up to. Mother thought our family would be put on skewers, barbecued and fed to the dogs for father’s behaviour. Condemnation never came from our fellow villagers, and a small but heavy stone rolled off my mother’s chest. Only Stasė, it would seem, shocked by the dried blood on the old man’s pale face and not understanding father’s angry attack, until the end of her days did not exchange greetings with him, and as for Elena, she never came out any more to play shopkeeper with me or make a mud doughnut.

Notwithstanding this incident, by and large father was not a bad person. It was just that sometimes he’d overdo his beer drinking. And if he had too much moonshine, all he could think of was getting into fights. He didn’t hit mum or me, but when drunk he could sniff out a fight like a dog a buried bone. Without uttering a word, he’d be rolling up his sleeves and putting up his fists to a friend. He once even threw a log at an old man’s head. The man didn’t mind too much: his head had been injured during the war – it looked like an apple with lumps all over it. The old man just turned around, not understanding what was going on, and asked in a gloomy tone of voice: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Father was later very sorry for what he’d done. When he’d had some beer, he liked to lecture me: ‘Whatever you do, don’t act like that with your father.’

That was what my father was like: when drunk – always losing control and determined to go on to the bitter end, finishing whatever amount of drink he had in front of him, and when sober – always repentant and promising himself never to get drunk again, wanting to be prepared for anything, to be brave and resolute. I didn’t know how to blame my father for what he’d done to Gintaras, but I blamed myself for being unable to judge him.

 

2.

 

Mum, never known for her good health, began spending even more time in bed that year. Now, with the onset of the menopause, she would lie on her bed stained with her black blood and moan quietly. Within several days the bedclothes would be soaked with dark clots of blood, looking like small chicken livers. If able to, she’d stagger to the window, leaving a dark wet trail behind her. On some days she’d shuffle around the house looking pale, unable to do much of anything. Gritting her teeth and walking unsteadily, she’d use all her energy to get to the end of the garden to smell the hollyhocks by the fence. Her large expressive eyes were the only positive feature left, eyes with which she could not only look but also see.

With mother ill, father’s mood became even darker. Everything brought him down: a stone lying by path wasn’t where it should be, there wasn’t enough salt in the porridge, the cockerel crowed at the wrong time, the smell of the manure wasn’t as pungent and sweet as it had been last year. He became more and more unlike himself. Wanting to make mother’s lot in life easier, he’d start undertaking all kinds of women’s work – I’d often catch him frying an egg and doing the laundry, I’d hear him spinning flax tow, I saw him changing mother’s bedclothes, I even came across him with a pansy behind his ear.

These changes in father’s behaviour didn’t escape the attention of his faithful drinking buddies. They even began calling him the mistress of the house, and there was the time when one of the jokers pinched his backside. But my father, the sombre and dignified village wolf, paid little attention to these jokes or perhaps he didn’t realise that his like-minded friends were making fun of him.

Everyone soon got tired of the silly nickname given him. The gossip about father’s love of women’s work was soon overshadowed by all the antics the inhabitants of the village were always getting up to – before, the blame for everything would fall on Gintaras. Now, with him no longer wandering the streets, it became clear it was the villagers themselves who had gotten up to all kinds of nonsense and ungodly acts. Not to mention that the lives of the villagers were full of loss, altercations and deprivation, oozing like sweat out of every pore.

You could say we were lucky because of me being an only child. Each of us in our family could cut a thick slice of bread and spread it with a finger’s thickness of lard. We didn’t have to deny ourselves too much of anything since we had only our own mouths to fill and not a dozen like in other families, I wanted to tell mum that I didn’t need so much soured cream or so much honey in my tea - I’d be very glad to share all the nice food we were having with a brother or sister. What I wanted to say was that she could ask the stork to come with another delivery or she could go and look for a bundle by the banks of the river and I would be happy to welcome a new baby into our home even if it meant I had to go and work as a shepherd. I had already gathered together all the words I wanted to say but then I saw the first worm of the year had crawled onto one of my toes and the declaration I wanted to make went out of my head. After that, for a long time I blamed myself that all kinds of troubles followed because of a fat grub and my childish forgetfulness. I prayed to heaven that Shaban would appear quicker, I’d go there and ask for a better memory. And sure enough a few days later a bright purple moon appeared in the sky.

Shaban was a dark-skinned nomad who gave children pieces of halva and fried chicken hearts. A whole host of other nomads would turn up once a year looking for a place to be their homeland. Six hundred years ago that dark-skinned being had promised a lame potter, who was pretending to be a prince, that if they got their motherland, they could hook the moon with a rope and using twenty-two carts make it possible to reach it easily on foot and any wish would be fulfilled there and then. The cunning potter promised to grant them their homeland immediately if Shaban were to give him the rope to which the moon was tied. The moment the potter got it he immediately tied Shaban to a thousand-year-old pine tree and struck him over the head with a stone. He then took the nomad over the river and announced that here, on the other side of the river, is where his homeland would be. And what was left us was Shaban’s moon.

The pine tree fell over, the moon receded and now, with the year slipping by it would come closer less frequently. It would find its way here when the wind blew in from the south for ten or so days and its strength on earth was hard to judge. You would think about your desires only when you saw the old men running around the fields trying to catch their caps which the wind had blown off. All of us kept a tight control on our desires. Our people were not stuck up and so their wishes were straightforward and almost all the same as if bagels lined up in a row: that their children would reach the age to go shepherding, that the sick wouldn’t need to be looked after for long, that the rain would rain when the dry earth became cracked.

Shaban’s moon was always full, neither white nor yellow but purple. It was so close you could easily walk to it without getting out of breath but if that was too much for you and you couldn’t do it or didn’t have the energy – then you could feast your eyes on it from afar. Even total wastrels who no longer wanted anything, the weak minded or the senile who no longer expected anything from life would still go outside to enjoy it. The meadows were full of them and there was someone sitting on every tree stump. Pople would tear out door frames to bring out the old and the sick in their beds and put them in the orchard.

The eyes of gawkers were drawn to the soggy greenish pools of water and the blue aquifers in the hollows between the rocks, to the oak-sized ferns swaying on the islands between the water, to the prancing humped-back yellow horses, and the dark-skinned people running around here and there. Music, foreign to us, coming from who knows where, was pleasing to the ear, its slow rhythm calming and lulling you to sleep. It brought all kinds of life, people would even take the chains off their dogs who didn’t attack anyone but like kittens would brush up against people.

The grown-ups and the elderly villagers were too embarrassed to travel to the moon so they would send their children instead, and the cunning children would ask for whatever they desired, for example, to have mashed potatoes the whole year round and then upon returning home for their parents or grandparents to be deceived into thinking their joints no longer ached. For this reason, not everyone believed in Shaban, and some would grumble that the shining beautiful thing in the sky was only a figment of the imagination, that no wishes were ever granted and only the most gullible idiots went or sent their children there.

That was the first time I saw Shaban. Father gave me two unwashed beetroots, explaining they would be a gift in exchange for a wish. He told me to look him in the eyes, his furrowed bushy eyebrows unable to hide the sadness in them, and kneeling said in a low voice: ‘You have to ask for mum not to die.’

I almost fell over: could mum really die? But I was so afraid of the answer I might get I didn’t want to ask anything. The only thing gnawing at me was that then I wouldn’t be able to ask for a good memory.

After picking up the gift with the wilting beet leaves, I turned in the direction of Shaban and moved off slowly. I was trembling with nervousness like a lamb being taken to slaughter, after all I had no idea where to go nor what I would find there nor how I would get back. But the moon covering half of the sky soon had me under its spell, curiosity and the desire to embrace all that beauty replaced anxiety and uncertainty.

Sights unfamiliar to a child’s eyes became more and more vivid. The Shaban people spoke in unfamiliar words and sometimes in sounds as if the tongue was hitting the palate. And they seemed completely different to us and to our neighbours. Who could know how long they must have been in the sun for the colour of their skins to become so yellow, red, brown, black or even dark dark blue. Most of them rode on donkeys or goats, while the smallest of them flew around on the backs of geese.

As I got really close, I could see a large market in progress. Everyone was bartering: some exchanging ham for cheese, sharp spices for field herbs, cooking apples for star-shaped pears. Everyone believed their own things were not as valuable as those of others, and so it seemed to them in trading what they had in exchange for something they hadn’t seen before and giving that thing in exchange for a wish then their wish would be granted more quickly. And what they had received in exchange they took to a purple house in which, as everyone here said, wishes were fulfilled.

I was left feeling uncomfortable upon seeing that most people were bringing the sort of gifts that father couldn’t have even dreamed up, not even in his tall tales. One of the people was clutching a fluffy, white-furred cat, another person had a nut the size of a horse in his arms, and a third had a tray of steaming meat on skewers on his shoulder. A tall woman held a flower in the shape of a curved sword, while two shabby tramps were pulling an elderly, blue-skinned man along in a wolf’s cage. Nobody had any gifts as poor as mine.

After wiping off a tear which had fallen onto one of the beets without my realising it, I wanted to look skywards and ask for mercy, but there was nowhere to look, I was already in the sky. Lifting my head, it wasn’t the clouds or the sun I saw but the eye-blinding shock of fate and, standing on tip toes, I plucked a ripe red pepper. Juicy, huge, with a curved end like a clown’s cap. I hid my miserable beets under the fern – they would be for our grazing mares. And then I stood calmly in the long line of people winding along the lake shore waiting their turn.

The line moved quickly, and I was soon stepping into the purple house. In the middle of the empty room a young woman was sitting on a stool. She was dressed in black, her smooth hair covered in egg white, with green glitter on her eye lids and long eye lashes. When she blinked it was as if a peacock was fluttering over her head. The young woman seemed so confident and as trustworthy as an older sister.

On a closer look I noticed that she wasn’t dressed as normal but wore trousers. Clothing like that where we came from was only for men and for this reason more than one supplicant looked at the trousered female with suspicion, as if she were the bride of the Evil One, having sworn an oath to hell and not heaven to grant wishes. Those supplicants had to overcome their feelings to be able to express their wishes. There were also the curious who would make their way to the moon just to see this beauty, the likes of which they would never get to see within a hundred kilometres radius.

‘Good day, ma’am. I’d like my mum not to die,’ I said to the miracle maker, staring at her peacock-like eyes. Another young woman, not as attractive, unkempt and tired looking, came into the room, quietly took the red pepper from me and threw it into a dark storeroom full of all kinds of treasure.

‘Mothers never die,’ smiled the green-eyed young woman, saying goodbye to me by nodding her head aloofly, and seeing me off with her sad eyes. She then turned to the window, glancing at the shimmering water. I would never ever see eyes sadder than hers.

‘Next!’ shouted her assistant.

I returned home as if in a dream. For some reason father didn’t ask me anything as if he had never given me the important order that he had. But from that day on I began to feel grown-up, equal in importance to my mother and father.

 

3

 

The only work mum could still find the energy to do was to visit Gintaras. When she felt weaker than usual, she’d take me with her. She’d say, ‘Here, you can carry the bread.’ And so I would carry it, seeing it was hard for her. Even though I’d laugh at how Gintaras behaved in in the streets or the fields, the trip to visit him never seemed funny to me. I always dreaded that day which was almost always on a Saturday evening.

His place reeked of tobacco and wee, as well as some kind of unidentifiable odour, as if the smell of a pile of wet mouldy rags had been mixed with that of a dead mouse and of water which had stood for a long time in a bucket. All around were dust-covered objects seemingly never used for their intended purpose. On the table was a glass jar with a fish head and the remnants of lard in it, a pair of pliers, and a couple of wooden spoons. Pickled cucumbers, covered with a suspicious-looking white substance, were floating in a bowl under the table. Here and there, I could see chicken droppings and feathers. On the ground there were dirty dishes, on which at one time there must have been food, dishes that had never seen water.

Gintaras looked as thin as the spoke of a wheel. I had never seen him putting anything into his mouth, I couldn’t imagine him chewing or sipping on anything. The same dirty plate was always lying next to him, getting mouldier with every visit. I once saw his calves were swollen, looking like blocks of wood and all blue. It seemed to me that if he were to have another sip of water, his legs would explode, spraying the walls, the floor, the stove, as well as my face and mum’s. I was afraid of Gintaras deciding to have a sip of something in front of us.

His toe nails looked like they were made of flint, the thought even came to me that peeled off they’d make a good hoe with which to remove the weeds in the beet patch. They were somewhat green, somewhat grey, somewhat yellow, like a well cover overgrown with moss. The toes had pink, red and purple veins like small worms crawling their way to them.

Gintaras favoured two positions: he’d lie among all the rags like a cocoon without even the least intention of turning into a butterfly, or he’d stand with both hands resting on the window sill to support himself on his swollen legs and would stare into the distance muttering something as if waiting for someone to return from outside. I’d stand by the door and watch mum running around the poor man and talking to him while her words and life passed him by like wind through an old barn. After returning home, I’d stare at the meadows and sometimes wonder for days on end what it was that the strange man was seeing there.

Mum began taking me along with her every week. At the beginning I just carried the loaf of bread, but now I had also to carry her bag, and more frequently to help keep mum upright as she walked, and, when necessary, help her sit down on a tree stump. On our return home, I’d always hear father ask: ‘Well, how’s he getting on, is he still alive?’

‘Yes, yes, he’s still alive, what did you expect?’ she’d say, wiping her hands on her apron, only not as spryly as before.

Mum’s hair had been black and had reached the ground but was now grey and had become as stiff as uncombed flax. Before, she’d laugh at every joke father made, opening her wide mouth and showing her large healthy teeth, but now she’d respond with a weak smile, cracks appearing in her dry pale lips. Father didn’t want to see her full lips cracking and stopped telling jokes.

With the passage of time, we no longer visited Gintaras as often: just a couple of times a month and sometimes just once a month. All that mum could manage was to knead the dough for a loaf of bread once a week, which had become the usual Sunday morning ritual. And now she was doing that seated. I presumed she worked standing when making a large loaf and sitting if it was a small one. I was sad that the loaf would only be a small one.

When mum got up to get a bowl, I saw a large red stain across her bottom. I broke out in a cold sweat, fear gripped me, and I couldn’t do anything but keep quiet. I was also ashamed thinking that mum was weeing blood, I didn’t want father to know as mum would also be ashamed. But she quickly brushed her hand over her bottom and looked at her palm. My body went numb, and I burst into tears.

‘What’s happened, mum, what’s happened to you?’

‘Nothing, my dear child, these things happen to women sometimes. Don’t be scared, it’s nothing terrible. Be a good girl and go get your father.

‘I don’t want to get dad.’

‘Just tell him to come, that’s all.’

‘Alright.’

I squeezed the tears out of my eye sockets with the palms of my hands, while mum, took a few faltering steps and collapsed on to her bed. She began shaking as if she had spent a long long time walking barefoot across hot sand, as if she had returned on foot from a faraway country, where she felt homesick and things were foreign to her. On the bed she smiled gently, but sadly, at me. As much as I didn’t want to, I had to get father, who was eating hot potatoes in their skins in the outside kitchen, studying them a little too closely.

‘Mum’s asking for you.’

‘What’s happened to her?’

‘She’s weed herself. You can see for yourself, go!’

Father stopped chewing, as if in a flash of insight he had come to an understanding of the ways in which god had managed to create the world, his face became as pale as the wall of the outside kitchen, he threw the hot potato into a bucket, as if the potato was to blame for everything, and set off in the direction of the house. I then realised that today we wouldn’t be getting either of the loaves of bread – not the large nor the small one. And if we were going to get a loaf at some time, the taste would be different, not like it had been yesterday nor like it was when I was a small little girl.

I didn’t go back into the house. I pulled the still warm potato out of the bucket and tried to suck on it, but it made me feel sick. I really didn’t want to go home. I only plucked up my courage to do that when mum asked me to braid her plait. From that day on, mum no longer ever got out of bed.

Father reluctantly ordered me to give our neighbour Stasė some money to buy food for Gintaras and take it to him, at least occasionally. We no longer had any time to think about other people’s problems, we all had to look after mum: grandfather picked raspberry leaves and chamomile, looked for yarrow along the ditches, making sure there would never be a shortage of bitter tea, the dark colour of which soon made her teeth turn yellow. Every day I combed her hair, of which there was less and less. I’d put the pale clumps of hair which I had combed out behind the elastic waist band of my skirt and when evening came, place them in the stream, thinking it might somehow help mum.

It was also my job to wash her. I’d fill up a small barrel with hot water, mixing in a little cold. If there were any marigolds in bloom, I’d always throw in a couple to make it look nicer, but mum would no longer always notice that. Father, placing her arm around his neck, would take her into the kitchen and sit her on a chair. I’d undress her, wash her hair, her armpits, her crotch and rub camphor oil on to her hard stomach. I’d then take the water, full of blood clots, to throw out behind the animal barn. The water kept getting blacker and blacker. I’d often see stray dogs come and lap up the liquid.

Mum no longer did anything: she no longer did any knitting, she no longer wove baskets and no longer prepared anything to eat. She’d lie on the bed like a piece of melting ice, waiting to turn into water. She didn’t even take a step outside to look when a ragbag collection of serfs passed through our village carrying a mountain princess, dressed in a ballooned black dress with a starched lace collar, on a stretcher. Never mind about going to see the circus, the arrival of which we’d wait for months on end, mum didn’t even stick out her nose out through the window as the performers passed by banging on their old drums.

If my mother’s fate had befallen me, I would have been tearing my hair out, I would not have been able put up with the boredom. To brighten her dreary daily existence, I’d make a point of coming up to her to ask something. Most often she’d answer she didn’t know or mutter: ‘That’s how it is.’ If I’d have asked her why a chicken has wings but doesn’t fly, she’d have answered that’s the way the world is. Eventually I stopped bothering her and it began to seem to me that what I was doing didn’t bring her any joy or distract her but just made her even more miserable. I ended up going into the yard to observe the chickens and turkeys for myself to try to figure out why they couldn’t fly off to some place where no one would explain anything to them and order them to shut themselves off in their cage when the sun went down.

My parents began to speak a lot amongst themselves, but only in whispers, while I liked to observe them through a hole made by woodboring beetles in the door. Father sat on a stool by the bed, his mood as dismal as a black October cloud. He’d clutch his old cap, covered in sawdust, his knuckles white and his lips moving slowly and quietly, as if in confession. I once heard father begging mum to at least try some miraculous herbs or go to a healer or say a prayer at least once for her health to get better. But mum would always stubbornly repeat that this was her fate, handed down to her through generations, that she was fated to live whatever years given her and no one could interfere with that. Earlier, but very rarely, when they didn’t want me to understand they’d speak in a foreign language, but now that became the everyday norm. Certain words reached me, and although hard for me to understand, they were repeated so often I was able to make them out: mortu ‘death’ and labore ‘work’.

‘When I leave, Riga, you’ll have to look after Gintaras,’ said mum barely managing to get the words out and stressing each one while I was carrying some apples. My arms went numb, and the apples fell, rolling around on the floor.

‘Where are you going to go? You can’t even walk…’

‘I’m going to leave another way, not on my feet.’

‘Don’t go anywhere,’ I screamed.

I picked up the apples and arranged them nicely on the table, holding my hand just over them, wanting to make sure they wouldn’t roll off. I ran up to the bed and put my head on mum’s stomach and secretly wiped away two hot tears. She stroked my hair for a long time, and I can say she was smiling even though I couldn’t see her face.

After our talk, grandfather appeared in the doorway as if by order, holding a bag of food. He took me by the hand and for three days led me round the marshes and meadows, explaining how to catch a swarm of bees, how to tell the difference between a bog whortleberry and a blueberry, showing me which herbs and berries were safe to eat and which you absolutely shouldn’t put into your mouth, in particular deadly nightshade, which as it happens we weren’t successful in finding. But he encouraged me not to be disappointed, teaching me that not to have found deadly nightshade was nothing – many worse things would happen in life than eating a deadly nightshade berry. I had to be strong and prepared for anything.

On returning from my long walk with grandfather, I found out that mum had left us. Father said she’d opened the window at night, loosened her hair, clambered carefully onto the window sill and wearing her white nightgown, the knitted lace dancing in the wind, rose slowly and flew off towards the moon. I couldn’t find an answer to my question as to why she had not waited until grandfather and I returned from our walk, we could at least have kissed one another and said our goodbyes. Wouldn’t she at least have wanted to wave goodbye?

For a long time, it seemed to me mum had flown away because I had stolen the red pepper during the Shaban moon, and that the offering meant for the green-eyed granter of wishes had not been conscientiously earned. I never revealed that to anyone. I tried to get my father to tell me if mum had told him anything she wanted me to know. But he hid his eyes and was silent as if he no longer wanted me to see his face or hear his voice. All that was left was for me to imagine what she might have said to me before flying off. Still for some time after mum’s departure I was searching under the floorboards, unpicking the pillows, tying to sleep in her bed and dream of what she wanted to tell me, pulling aside the wardrobe, trying to find something she had left specifically for me. It took many years filled with heartache for me to understand that what she had left me I would always carry with me.

 

 

 

Dumbrytė, Ieva. Negrįžtantys. Romanas [Those Never to Return. A novel]. Vilnius: Kitos knygos, 2024, p. 5-23.