An excerpt from the novel The Bones of the Beloved

Translated by Jayde Will

 

 

Big Mater. Ona’s Birth. September

I was born on a Thursday evening in the fall, in the basement sauna of a four-story apartment block like all of Pašilai’s children. In the stairwell near the mailboxes, Vanda killed a black chicken with a ladle to mark the occasion and boiled a pot of broth right on top of the bread oven. Father, who had come home after his shift, the neighbors, having returned from work, everybody knew, everyone was in motion, as they didn’t get to beat themselves with birch branches and rinse themselves off as usual or leave any soap or hot water that night for the fairies. There were more important things to attend to.

Big Mater brushes my hair and tells stories, she repeats them, always from the beginning. I listen, I imagine my mother white as a cheesecloth, I ask what her skin was like, how she smelled, and Big Mater strokes my head, smiles, look at you, she says, it all stayed in you. And my father would say that. Mocked by the other grown-ups, he carries me on his shoulders everywhere he goes morning, noon, and night, and drives the trolleybus with me sitting next to him in his driver’s seat. He says he will never let me go, he says he dreams about mom, and they are so happy, they dance around, sing together around their little sweet bun – me. You are a miracle, my father says.

She places one plait on top of another, pulls, and braids. I’m listening, I don’t make a peep. More, tell me more, please. Then she starts up again, how mom went pale and fainted, while Vanda, just a little girl still, cried and felt sorry for the chicken, Big Mater egged her on, arguing that it was the only way to show respect to Laima, the goddess of childbirth, only that way. Perhaps she killed the chicken at the wrong time, perhaps not quite as she was taught, perhaps not with a ladle, perhaps she became frightened and mixed everything up, she didn’t save mom, I ask, did she really do everything right? Big Mater says that now it’s not important anymore. Vanda made that soup for the first time, once she learned it, she knew it, she prepared it for all the mothers, everyone who gave birth after my mom. Each time on that very same bread oven, on the ground floor, just as you come inside. We sit there in winter, when the women bake bread, and the neighbors come up and down the stairs, someone in only a t-shirt and towel would always end up there, having failed to hear there’s a special evening, and that they couldn’t use the sauna. They stepped on the hops and grasses spread across three stories, from the door of our apartment down to the sauna. I still think that if I hadn’t been born on Thursday, if it had been on a different day, during work, when everyone was gone, they wouldn’t have stepped there, displeasing Laima, and maybe mom would still be alive.

Big Mater gets up, she moves with difficulty to the stove, herself resembling a bread loaf, you have no idea where her soft, swollen breasts end, and where her stomach begins under the light fabric of her clothing. It’s only in the sauna you can see how many layers of skin and flesh overlap, how many folds there are. It’s difficult to even imagine that within their depths is a skeleton, bones, perhaps even tiny ones, who knows, though they must be made of iron to support such a body. Other women flatter it and praise it while rinsing her off. Breasts forever full of milk without end, the little ones, having gotten a whiff of the milk, run up to her in the sauna to suck on them.

Big Mater once again pulls my hair, the braid has to be tight, you’re such a happy child, she says, don’t think anymore, carry the memory of your mother and just be.

 

The Saint. Ona is 9. July.

I am sitting in the stairwell, I quietly watch to see what the people who moved in are like, whether they have animals, maybe even children. The boy, right after catching sight of me, grins, dimples clinging to his cheeks, I’m Lukas, he says. Lukas and his mom, that’s it. He’s handsome, sun-tanned, skinny legs, like a grasshopper.

In the evening we meet in the basement sauna. I’m embarrassed, Lukas should go with the men, but his mother is alone, so she takes him with her. Later they let him go alone, once he gets to know people, settles in, but now she’s pulling him by the arm, soaping him up, telling him not to stare, to look at the floor.

I am sitting on the ground hugging my knees, my legs pressed together so nothing shows, I catch Lukas’s glance. As if he’d look at the floor while breasts wiggle and behinds jiggle around him. He soaps himself up in the corner, throwing occasional glances over his shoulder. His mother pulls him by the ear, shouts, and pushes him out wrapped in a towel. Pour some water from the well in the yard, she tells him. Afterwards, both will climb up to the first floor, into their new home, their things not yet unpacked, there’s so many packages left in the stairwell. I look through the little basement window into the yard standing on my tiptoes. The boy shoots out from between the cars and over to the well, climbs into the water trough and, having thrown off his towel, pours ice-cold water over himself. I bet the other neighbors in other stairwells are scolding him from their windows, balconies, everyone is interested in the newcomers. Lukas doesn’t care, the towel remains in his hand, and, naked as the day he was born, he passes right under my nose pressed against the little window. He greets some neighbors who are bringing a cow home near the entrance and disappears into the vestibule.

 

Father. Ona’s childhood.

My nest is inside father’s trolleybus. As far back as I can remember, I was always there. The names of the bus stops mark summer vacation, horrible downpours after class, the Christmas Eve rush, the side mirrors completely caked in snow. The straw mobile mother made sways from the ceiling of the driver’s cabin, with father’s fur vest smelling of wild animal laid out in my lair. He didn’t start driving until after I was born, he worked as a ticket conductor. Having been left alone with me, still a little baby, he consulted Big Mater, or maybe she ordered him to keep his child close to him. So he got the idea to become a driver. I got the roost where the ticket conductor or the next driver waiting for his shift normally sits. Other drivers treated my father’s behavior with derision, that snotkin will push buttons she shouldn’t, she’ll steal your concentration, but Big Mater’s word was final, and, even without it, my father would have carried me on his shoulders to the ends of the Earth. For him, raising a daughter from behind the wheel was all joy and laughter. I sat quietly and grew up, Big Mater had promised that, said it would be like that. And why not, I count the stops, the images changing under my nose, it’s never boring there. My memory is full of alleyways, meadows lined with overhead cables, factories, the occasional district of high-rise apartment blocks, cheerless four-story apartments in sparsely populated areas.

We both know all the passengers by heart. We laughed, talked, said hi to one another. Everybody loves father’s Nr. 7 and me – a dumpling with big eyes next to the driver. I always get candy or fatty cuts of cured pork to suck on, drool over, someone always thrusting bags of carrots and potatoes at me and my father, cheese, freshly pressed, the women say, very tasty, and if it’s goat cheese, it’s not just food, it’s real medicine for your growing daughter, just give it to her. The bundles of clothes they’ve grown out of are endless – I am growing, and they grow as well, regardless of whether we asked for them or not, they always appear at some stop.

Father arranged his shifts around my afternoon nap and, later, around my school schedule, he even changed his route, it was important that his cable lines follow me. Everybody liked him since he was the only one who allowed, if necessary, passengers to take their animals a few stops, though this was strictly forbidden. The shepherds were only permitted to let their animals graze in the meadows that surrounded their homes, just as the old men and women who kept a goat grazed them beside their balconies and playgrounds and no farther. But all sorts of things can happen. You get caught by the rain just as you’re herding them home or, having set off, you may lack the strength to bring them home, it happens, the little shepherds lose track of time horsing around, so father stops and whistles for them to get on quickly so no one sees them, calms down the passengers who get angry or bleat louder than the animals.

Once, a cow traveled with us, it was already late in the evening when no one else was on board to see it. Then I climbed out of my nest and caressed the cow’s wet nose. Its shepherd girl milked a cup of milk that smelled of udder, it was warm. I don’t really like it like that, but then, laid out on the back seat, I gulped it down and fell asleep right away, stretched out all along the back.

 

The Saint. Ona is 12

Only Lukas lives in my stairwell – it’s a building full of old people, younger people built the eleven-storey high-rise with an elevator next door, everyone who had small children left. My father wouldn’t budge, and that was how Lukas’s mom, after space in the building freed up, took over a two-room apartment.

We constantly rile up the animals that are brought back in the evening to the new eleven-storey building, we stop under their balconies and egg them on. There are some that never get used to it, looking around all scared, they run back into their rooms, even in the summer when, after grazing, they still return to our water trough to drink. Though, in time, more docile calves are born in the new building.

I love Lukas, it’s impossible not to love him, and he loves me, but we don’t talk about it, we both dream about our future spouses, we talk about what they might be like, what they will be like, at the moment we are only lending ourselves to one another. Sometimes he says, Ona, don’t get mad, he smiles, and the creases on his cheeks, those dimples of his, that little devil, and it seems I could love him until the day I die.

Lukas is special, that’s obvious, but also because of his crepes, Lukas’s savory crepes. His mother makes the crepes, but says her son heals through them, only she doesn’t reveal how or why. There are those who think his mother is a witch, others say she puts spells on them, or perhaps Lukas does, but who cares why, what’s important is that they stop fevers, headaches, get rid of parasites from your stomach, they save, when no one knows where else to turn, all you have to do is eat. There is always a line of people stopping by, asking, every evening after work, while Lukas’s mom busy in the kitchen, mixing the batter, frying and frying. I never saw Lukas mix batter or cast spells, but his mother says that the healing is from her son. She says it, but I don’t ask Lukas about it.

 

The Little Shepherds. Ona is 14. October.

It’s a long break, I am standing at the trolleybus stop, waiting for father, who has already completed his route today for the umpteenth time. I forgot my sandwiches when I got off his trolleybus this morning. I check the schedule, he’s not far away at all, he should be driving past the school any minute, while the name of the stop is announced, I will jump in and grab them.

It’s pouring rain, the elementary school kids in the schoolyard are running aimlessly in circles, running and shouting, as much as their throats will allow, the boys from older classes catch them and tease them, just because, out of having nothing to do. Behind the fence, stands the empty house of the Little Shepherds, a building with separate entrances, divided not by class, but by family, gangs of pretend brothers and sisters. Where these children have come from, I don’t know exactly, there are some that remember their parents, while others were abandoned almost as soon as they were born, my father says that the hospital nurses take them here, at the beginning, to one side of the house for the little ones, and then, after they grow a bit – into separate batches, so they are easier to take care of. Each of them has their own Herdsman, a woman of the house, and a nanny, they form a particular kind of family. When they have a Herdsman and woman of the house, but not parents, it’s probably not a lot of fun, but in general the Little Shepherds are truly lucky kids. They only study a few months out of the year, in winter, and the rest of the time they put cows out to pasture alongside sheep from the neighboring high-rise apartment blocks in the surrounding meadows. During winter, they come to our classes, and that education of theirs is hilarious, the teachers are overjoyed if they cobble together a sentence, or write legibly, or occasionally remember to use an ogonek. If they hit their mark, then the teachers stand up and applaud them, these eighth-graders!

Now there isn’t anyone in the yard, there’s still a couple weeks left to herd, so they’re wading through the rain somewhere out in the meadows, but we’ll mix together soon. In the beginning, it’s hard to get along with those who just appeared, the teachers announce right off the bat that they’ll punish us for fighting and so on. Finally, we get used to one another, maybe even become friends, but then spring comes and that’s it, they’re off, they bolt for the pastures and that’s the last you’ll see of them. And I wouldn’t mind if, instead of math equations, I warmed my legs in cow pies.

 

The Saint. Ona is 14. April

We bust a gut in Lukas’s room, his mother has gone to the neighbors. We’ve just drunk old man Martynas’s sour beer, he sometimes pours it into a 1.5 liter plastic bottle, gives it to us to take with us, just he orders us not to tell anyone. It’s almost as if the beer doesn’t affect Lukas at all, but for me it’s quick, though in the end, we both get dizzy, perhaps out of sheer foolishness plus everything we’re doing is a deadly secret.

We suck it up greedily, passing it back and forth, hurrying to finish. I say, I want to take a pee, he says, I do too. Let’s go together, who’s first? Is the toilet at your place for men or women, we laugh, the bathroom is for everyone, it’s fine for both, we can both go, whoever needs to go more. We can’t stand it anymore, there’s so much bitter liquid in our stomachs, we both go, Lukas smiles, and I agree in a fit of mania. I say, only, let’s not put the lights on, alright, let’s not, he says, you can go first, and I will be next to you, it’s fine with me. Alright, I am sitting in the dark, I pee, I hear him peeing too, just I can’t figure out into what, the sound is hollow, as if he’s peeing into a plastic bottle or something. I call out to him in the dark that I’m done, I already finished, he replies that he’s done too, we both snort, how brave we are, what nonsense that was, it gives me butterflies in my stomach just thinking about it, he was naked and I was without pants, near to one another, but we didn’t see anything, only sensed it, and that makes my cheeks flushed and hot.

Groping around, I find the sink, turn the water on, the lights go on, Lukas turns them on. He comes over, washes his hands, satisfied, dimples on his cheeks. I see a plastic canister in the corner, almost full. How much piss was in there and why, if the pot was right next to it?

He catches a glimpse, shrugs his shoulders, giggles, Ona, I’ll tell you, but don’t you ever tell anyone else, swear on my mother’s grave, may it crumble down to the last grain if you tell. I dry my hands, promise, who cares, just as long as he tells me. These are my savory crepes, he says, that his mother adds it to them, he waves his hand towards the canister of piss, this is my miracle here, just don’t laugh, I’m telling you, it works, you can’t argue with it, when I was really small, my mother once tried to drink my pee after reading it somewhere, she healed herself. Before that, she couldn’t get out of bed, then she started giving it to other people, at first just to people she knew, until she decided that she shouldn’t be so stingy, it’s a gift from the gods, after all, we need to share it, I got bigger, what do I know, there was already a stench, so to hide it, she started making crepes, savory ones, and that was that, everyone is happy.

I look at him with my eyes wide open, and a taste accumulates on the roof of my mouth that I don’t like at all. My father has treated himself this way more than once and been healed, I can’t really knock it, I swear on his mother’s grave, and, plus, it’s Lukas, I will keep silent till the day I die. Ona, he says, don’t make that face, it works, I nod and laugh dryly, and we leave the bathroom.

 

Father. Ona is 15. March

I’m sitting with my father on the balcony, we’re smoking. Today after school I brought two cigarettes home, I exchanged them with the little shepherds for a bottle of lemonade my father gave me, whereas he had had the bottle thrust upon him by Old Liuba at the Obeliai stop, sugar, she said, a growing organism needs it, give it to your daughter, it will give the girl strength, women need all sorts of things, so he didn’t protest and took it. I don’t think I’m lacking sugar, but the little shepherds practically started shaking upon seeing the colorful label, so we traded and I took the cigarettes home.

My father has said before that if I ever want to try smoking, then it would be better with him, at home. It’s not such a big deal, it’s not like I’ve never tried it before, I’ve had a couple puffs with Lukas, but father gave me the lemonade, and there’s precisely two cigarettes, and my evening is free, Lukas left to go somewhere with his mother, so I offered, let’s try it, like you said.

My father shows me how to suck it into my lungs, I swallow the smoke, I don’t cough, it’s fine, he looks at me concerned, he says, just don’t start, he says, it’s hard to quit, I’ve tried to quit so many times, I’ve tortured myself so much. The clotheslines dig into our sides, my father is leaning with his back on the lid of the coffin, I think it’s pretty funny now looking at him smoking next to his grave, I don’t pay attention to it while hanging up the clothes to dry, but today I notice it and think about it.

As long as I can remember, it’s been here, blocking the balcony’s emergency exit, waiting patiently. During winter, we occasionally fill it to the brim with apples, so they don’t freeze. I say, Dad, why do we keep that coffin on the balcony, I know it was made right after mom died, he’s mentioned that. Were you afraid to die then, I ask, he smiles, a cross-breeze pulled open one door and slammed the other shut, he says, you came, mama left, I was thinking and thinking, how this sweet little pearl barley will have to bury me if something happens, everyone would have to go to a lot of trouble, better to get it ready myself, so now we have one. I flick the ashes, and they land on a slipper. The worst is forgetting that it will end, he says, you live like a fool, and then you kick the bucket, that’s horrible. So I don’t forget, I keep it here, all nice, on the balcony, I should squeeze myself inside and see if I still fit across the waist. We both laugh, and father puts out his cigarette butt on the coffin lid.

 

The Saint. Ona is 15. June

Lukas and I are lying on the carpet, sprawled out, it’s the afternoon, around four, nap time, when laziness sets in, you don’t even want to talk. He turns to me and says, bring some water, I’ll show you something, I am settled in so comfortably, I am so lazy, but he says, go to the bathroom, pour me some water, and I’ll show you something, alright?

Lukas’s mother is making such a clatter in the kitchen with the plates, there will be stuffed cabbage rolls for dinner, but I will go home for dinner. I pull myself away from Lukas, I take an empty cup and walk to the bathroom in only my socks. I fill it up and return to the room. Give it here, he says, I give it to him, and he returns it to my hands, having not even really touched it, try it now, he nudges me. I wrinkle my nose, I smell it carefully, I know for certain that it’s going to be another trick, I just hope it isn’t piss, I take a gulp, damn, I say, he is laughing, well, he says, he gets up, he’s so nimble, satisfied. What do you mean, I ask, that’s what I mean, he replies, yesterday it was an accident, but today, as much as I’ve tried, it all worked out fine, he is talking and looking right into my eyes, he waits for me to praise him, to squeal, you’re so wonderful. I ask, so, since when have you had running wine in your bathroom, well, he replies, since never, go to the bathroom and check. What do you mean, I ask, I just tried it, no, it’s me, he tells me, I transformed it, can you believe it, his dimples fasten his cheeks to his skull.

Stepping back, I take another gulp, I take a really big gulp, I feel a dizziness numbing my brain, there’s no doubt about it, it really is wine. Just don’t tell my mother, he laughs, gosh, I think, his mother would be elated, maybe this also heals, it would be more pleasant for patients than that miraculous piss of his, but if he’s asking me not to, I won’t say anything. We take turns taking sips, my head grows heavy, this is neither here nor there, but Lukas doesn’t feel a thing.

Then both of us go into the bathroom, we giggle as we lock the door. I scoop up a big handful of water, he takes my hands and it happens again, wine in my hands, it drips through my fingers, I bend over the sink and slurp it up until my mouth is full, I’m going to get wasted like this in your bathroom, Lukas, you’re such a shit, you miracle maker, I snort. I tell him to let go of my hands, I splash my face with water, I drink greedily from the tap, don’t make more wine, I still have to go home, we sit on the floor, his mom isn’t banging plates around anymore, we hear her coming.

 

 

Zylė, Kotryna. Mylimi kaulai [The Bones of the Beloved]. Vilnius: Aukso žuvys, 2024, p. 15-25.