January 16th, 2021
That piece of paper that had caught V.’s attention at the bus stop, that piece of paper hanging from that grimy advertising board, now firmly gripped between her fingers, was already yellowed, wrinkled like the cheek of an eighty-year-old, repeatedly getting soaked by the rain and then drying. A simple scrap of rough, thin paper, a palm-sized rectangle with the lower section cut in strips.
There is a telephone number on the strips; a few of the pieces are already torn off, of course carelessly, haphazardly. The advertisement itself is just a few words.
“Models needed. Desperately. I paint,” the smeared old letters announced. Letters like old women.
And that strange note underneath: “I live above a canteen. They give leftovers.”
May 29th, 2022
I write V., because it’s easier that way. A stroke down, a stroke up, and a period. V. It doesn’t hurt.
Veronika, Ve-ro-ni-ka is already something entirely different. Veronika is a plant, a spring flower with bright blue blossoms; they are so delicate that they never last till morning in a vase. They still make it through the evening, they make it through the night, they make it till the first crows of the rooster; no, most likely they are still outstretched where they were until the very last second before a human-like figure glides into the room, but after gliding in, noticing, and stopping – it’s always just bare green stems that crowd the vase, while the table is blue from the plentiful wrinkled blossoms. It’s always like that. It’s impossible to witness, to film, to record how it occurs. I think if someone managed to, that person would be struck by lightning before noon, run over by a car, or have a brick fall on their head from a balcony. That’s simply how it is and how it should be; the unexplainable falling off of the veronica petals is a fundamental law of this planet. The unconscious pull of the eyes to still happen upon the blueness of its blossoms, for the fingers to reach out and pick them, make small bouquets, take them home, put them in glass vases and allow the night to come is a fundamental law of this planet. To await the morning, go to the kitchen barefoot, steal a glance towards the vase in the sterile silence and take in the irreversible tragedy of beauty. To be silent, not utter a word, to breathe. To make scrambled eggs for breakfast, wipe the blossoms off the table, go for a walk, return with a new bouquet of veronica, and once again put them in that same glass vase – all of that is a fundamental law of this planet.
But I am not a fundamental law either of this or any other planet. I am not fundamental. I am not a law. Which is why I write V. – it’s easier that way. I write she, because it’s easier that way. She burned the scrambled eggs today, her hair is tangled and is asking for shampoo, it’s her pajamas that are caked with a tomato sauce stain around the navel, which she doesn’t scratch off because she likes the color, because it’s like blood.
I write K. I won’t explain anymore why. It’s simply K., and not Konstantinas. It’s strange just how much a letter can change things. K. is K., V. is V. In this world there are no contexts, no blue blossoms, there is no one preparing to die, there’s no Čiurlionises, nothing. Just letters and numbers – it’s quicker, easier, cleaner that way, so why not. They could even not be people – with names like these they could be washing machines, SUVs, or anti-aircraft missiles. K. could be an AK-47, discarded on the side of the road in Mariupol. V. could be a five, a Roman numeral V of a church which had a road leading to it, carved in stone, broken off from the other numerals that had marked the date of its construction during the bombing; a lonely stone, immortalizing the present date and tossed indiscriminately beside the AK-47. And that’s how they would meet. That’s how their stories would merge, and that would suffice. It could also be the other way around – in this world there is no one that is hurting or that can be hurt. It’s just an endless game in which they chase one another. In this world, V. is certain, matter is unable to keep up with form anymore, and the act of entelechy occurs where it can – under a bush, by a fountain, in an archway – it isn’t important, it’s a lot like drunk or drug-fueled sex, which is why things as well as people do not fulfill their function, don’t represent what they want to represent, last for a short time, and expire so quicky. It could be that the matter that overtook them was not really meant for them and took on their shape by accident. It could be that their names, Veronika and Konstantinas, are a total coincidence, having nothing to do with the laws of this planet.
That’s why I write V. A stroke up, a stroke down. That’s it.
November 5th, 2011
“Your left eye…your left eye is a little…” V.’s voice is barely audible in the kitchen air paralyzed by the morning dampness. She has goosebumps under her nightshirt.
You can see the sky out the window – rain clouds are gathering. They have been gathering the entire week and slinking off to the side, ultimately not letting a single drop trickle down, heavy, exhausted, barely holding in their bloated dark gray stomachs. But they don’t burst, they can’t, they come up short in weeping over their home, they come up short – that’s that. In this home, in V.’s childhood’s home, there is no crying. In this home the laundry is never put out to dry on the balcony, so it won’t become white flags being blown about on which someone could notice a blood-red color that hadn’t been vanquished by the detergent. In this home there are no mirrors. Not one. In this home one speaks quietly in the morning. She and her mother sit like this on their stools in front of each other every morning, their legs stuck under themselves, wrapped in their nightshirts, having yet to groom themselves, having yet to crack open the shell of the coming day, and replacing the mirrors for one another with words. It’s chilly, but neither of them gets up to get their clothes until their ritual is finished. Barely a matter of a few centimeters separates their faces. V. is eleven years old, and she doesn’t know how to describe a wound so the person listening won’t feel pain.
“The left eye a little… I think it’s a little bigger, Mom,” she tries once again.
“Bigger?” Mother touches her eye with her finger. The finger is slender and very white. That finger on her face is like a foreign body – a lonely swan in a dark, muddy, dying lake.
“Yes, a little…”
“Bigger than yesterday?”
“No, I don’t know. Probably not. Bigger than the other.”
“Ah.”
The swan reaches for the corner of the eye, and shudders after grazing the swollen, blackened mucous. Afterwards it slides along the eyebrow and sits on a scab that little bits of hair have gotten stuck to. V. sees how it’s shaking. It trembles, as if it had flown thousands of kilometers and has finally returned home. It finally found its nest, where it will grow old.
“And how’s the color?” her mother asks.
“Like grapes.”
“Blue ones?”
“No, those reddish ones. Like reddish grapes. Those ones we ate last night after dinner, Mom.”
“Ah, that’s right. Good. There aren’t any left?”
“What?”
“The grapes, dear.”
“No.”
“I’ll bring some home.”
“You don’t have to, Mom…”
“It’s fine, I’ll buy some. You like them. And how are the lips?”
V. forces herself to look at the lips.
“They’re cracked.”
“Where?”
“Up top.”
“Show me”
She takes V.’s hand, takes her fingers into her own and presses them against her lips. V. feels a hot liquid burning her frozen fingers. The lips under her fingertips pulsate furiously, even her heart doesn’t pulsate like that – V. could swear that her heart beats slower. She moves her index finger from the corner of her mother’s lips to the little furrow under her nose, marking the hot, throbbing river of blood to its source so her mother will know how long it is. She had already long ago learned to suppress the nausea in her windpipe, not allowing it to rise further and erupt either through sound or gesture. She’s a good daughter, a daughter-mirror. The ritual doesn’t take long. Soon she will need to get ready to go to school, whereas Mother will need to heat up breakfast.
“Thanks, Veronika.” Her mother lets go of her hand, and her bloody palm lies once again on her skirt.
“Now it’s my turn, Mom,” V. reminds her.
“Yes, your turn.” Mother’s eyes, the left one narrow under a swollen eyelid, perch on V.’s face for a long time.
“There’s an eyelash under your right eye.”
V. rubs under her eyes.
“Now it’s fine. Then… The pimple on your nose has almost healed. The neck rash is still red, but it’s nothing to worry about, it will probably be gone by tomorrow. Your lips are as they always are. Your ears… The left one is a little dry on top, but maybe… No, further up. Yes, here. There you go, it came off. It’s fine now.”
“Thanks.”
“…”
“…”
“My daughter, you are so beautiful.”
V. picks at her nails. She tries to discreetly clean the blood from under her nails; the coagulating blood becomes even stickier, and the more she tries, the dirtier she feels.
Mother keeps smiling, and her lip cracks once again.
So, January 16th, 2021
So, she is standing at the bus stop, clutching the piece of paper, which she has just torn off the wall of the stop, and stares at it, barely blinking. The seconds, minutes, heartbeats tick, and she is standing and staring. Her fingers are almost imperceptibly trembling from the cold, with the piece of paper trembling along with them.
An out-of-the-way part of town, the line’s second-to-last stop, a dry frost; it’s not yet late, but it’s also not early, that time of the day when shoes, tires, and dust flood the streets from offices all at once, there’s an insane amount of shoes, tires, and dust on the streets, everyone is moving, rushing to overtake one another. They disappear from sight and then appear again, the trajectories of motion intersect, repeat, break off, and bend, weaving between one another and merging into a uniform kaleidoscope of moving lines that draft an uninterrupted sketch too immense to be taken in. That kind of time, where until night, until the in between, which separates one day from the next – there is still an entire evening, but there’s a strange sense of lateness, hurry, an incurable neurotic exhaustion hanging in the air. A sixth sense of an impending daily miniature catastrophe, a nagging feeling of a train wreck that has become normal and routine.
Everything’s in motion, he pauses at the crosswalks or corners are just barely discernable ruptures of emptiness crossing a dotted line, which don’t slow down the glimmer. The figures of passersby, cars, buses, dogs, pigeons, old women, children, cyclists, and plastic bags rippling in the wind – at such an hour, everything that’s alive is in motion. V. standing at the bus stop is the only motionless vertical thing in this frenetic kaleidoscope.
In her hands is a piece of paper, and they are trembling a little bit. A few of the telephone numbers have been torn off, and the rest quiver as they await what their fate will be. Art models are needed. Apparently, there’s someone that paints. And that note about the canteen. A fisherman’s trick, there’s no question.
If only more fishermen knew how easy it is to lure their prey by offering it its own meat – we most likely would only know about fish from legends and museum pamphlets. Like woolly mammoths or dodos.
V. scoffs and sticks the scrap of paper in her coat pocket. She had yet to have the thought enter her mind that someone could paint her. That someone would dare to allow themselves to look for her body, be her Eskimo, take on the role that she has always assigned to herself.
In the end, it’s making her simply incredibly curious.
January 17th, 2021
Of course, she is afraid. And who wouldn’t be?
With fear, for fear, out of fear, in fear, acted-upon fear. V. is the most scared animal in the world. That’s how it is, that’s who she is. Sometimes she really regrets that she can’t allow herself to have a pit bull, mastiff, or other large dog that doesn’t understand a joke. That she never learned karate or how to box. Or at least fencing. Now she keeps a little pepper spray bottle in the right pocket of all her jackets and coats, she has maybe fifteen of them so she doesn’t have to take them out and put them back in her pockets as the weather and her clothing change. While walking alone on the street, she constantly brushes her fingers up against those little bottles. This has already become a habit, an unconscious action to calm herself, just like a baby sucking its thumb. It’s not clear if she’d know how to use the weapon if trouble arose, but by gripping it she still feels calmer, returning from class in the dark or running to the shop for milk, paint, or tinned beans. Every figure that emerges on an empty street raises alarm, but it eases when that figure turns out to be of the female gender. Whereas she is afraid of all men.
The worst thing is that much like her forefathers, who would tickle their imagination with horror stories on winter evenings in their timber homestead, V. scares herself senseless imagining how she would live if she had that organ dangling between her legs. Sooner or later, the bridge between mind and body would collapse, she (he) would be unable to control her (his) might, but she (he) didn’t need to control herself (himself), as that might belong to her (him) anyway and would be totally available at her (his) disposal. While a disgusting sweetness seeps into the grooves of her brain, she sometimes imagines how the gates suddenly open up to the body’s potency towards any moving creature that is nearby. She (he) rushes to schoolgirls in short skirts in overcrowded buses, whistles at the single moms walking by, follows some long-legged woman in a different part of the city, follows her and corners her. She belittles, rapes, destroys her. She revels in her might and laughs, laughs, and laughs; sometimes V. awakens drenched in cold sweat, and her cheek muscles ache from laughter. In her dreams, she sows her seed left and right, she sows and whistles. She awakens with cheeks aching from laughter, then she climbs out of bed and drags herself to the toilet to change her tampon.
Of course, she’s afraid, and who wouldn’t be? What are the chances that the guy who is looking for an art model isn’t an alpha male? That’s why before going out, V. doesn’t only feel around in her coat pocket so she’s sure that the little bottle of pepper spray really is there, but she also sticks a small razor blade wrapped in a tissue behind her heel. If the need arose, she could disfigure his face, hands, or eyes.
V. finds the studio (if you could call that half-empty room with a high ceiling, old, deep windows with outlets, and bare white walls a studio) according to smell. The smell of fat, fried potatoes, coffee, oil paint, and sweaty anxiety – all of that is blended into a uniform, indivisible olfactory conglomerate. In fact, there is a cheap canteen located on the ground floor offering lunch specials, but when V. appears in front of its window, it’s already slowly getting dark; inside, in the darkest recesses, there sits a lone red-faced straggler hugging his glass and nodding off, while the fat barmaid with a perm and yellowed flowery apronwipes the last compote glasses, sniffling loudly and sighing, hoping that this will compel him to take the hint and scram. V. watches that scene through the display window with heartfelt interest, feeling like she is in a natural history museum, as if she is looking at a diorama with extinct animals. It’s precise, impeccably constructed, the poses of the subjects are true-to-life, but the scene isn’t real, because you are fully aware of your own existence, of Homo sapiens as such, which appeared at least a few thousand years later, you are the eye of the here-and-now, presented with a spectacle that you will never see in your everyday life.
After tearing herself away from the display window, V. turns towards the inner courtyard. She finds a door there and beyond it, stairs to the first floor. While walking up, the building is silent as if it is holding its breath, not wanting to scare off the newcomer. It is old, hulking, dirty, having lost its elegance long ago and most likely thought that itself, while she is wearing white gloves and a thin blue silk skirt. Though normally she doesn’t use makeup, this time she has powdered her face and even highlighted the small mole on her right cheek. Why? She couldn’t explain it.
Most likely it was because of the razor that was pressed tight against her ankle with a clandestine, serpent-like coolness, so that that it would have a reason to be there.
Having reached the first floor, V. comes up against the only door. She knocks. No one comes to open it. She knocks again, again nothing, then she pushes down on the handle – the door is unlocked – and she goes inside.
There are only three pieces of furniture in the room – a couch the color of red brick, an easel, and a simple white stool. Nothing else. The easel is huge, and the paper shell attached to it almost covers one of the windows. The walls are white and bare as can be – no clocks, paintings, or shelves with trinkets. No plaster heads, pencil cases crammed with God knows what, or dirty palettes. Not one used coffee cup, not one pizza box or beer can – nothing like V., of course, had hoped to see. Nothing. Even the white dust is right where it needs to be.
It’s not the studio of a painter, but rather the operating room of a surgeon, the igloo of an Eskimo, ready for the field dressing of an animal they have hunted their entire life, V. thinks. It’s a surreal de Chirichoesque universe of waiting, of budding necessity, of desire that swells quietly and irrevocably. This light is stifling. The dust sticks in your throat. This emptiness is severe. Severe and tender. Genius armless children that see the future are born in such light, in such silence. In such light Buddhists die smiling. Something very important is not yet born, something vitally necessary could come to fruition in any of this room’s contours, in any of its forms or lines, which is why the shadows don’t move, which is why the building has silently held its breath. But that something is stalling, the walls and the space’s four corners expand, but it still doesn’t show up. V. feels that just after coming in. She is waiting, but no one comes to meet her, doesn’t offer her a seat, doesn’t ask for her to take her coat off. The gleam of the streetlights slides unbearably slowly across the ceiling, and the frozen toes in her shoes thaw, whereas the sheen of silence doesn’t recede. There’s nothing else that can be done, just surrender to the order of such a universe, sit on the red couch – red like lips, gigantic, absurdly grandiose, almost like the church-shattering lips of Man Ray, relentlessly wishing to utter a last syllable – and turn into yet another piece of furniture, the last detail completing the map of waiting.
It is after some time that V. notices a little whisp of smoke from behind the easel, coiling towards the ceiling. He is sitting with his legs raised on the windowsill and is intentionally acting as if he is not there. V. can’t hold back and smiles. She wipes a crumb off her skirt, and it falls on the ground, but it seems so large and vulgar in that whiteness that V. picks it up and sticks it to her thigh once again. She closes her eyes. She opens them. The cigarette isn’t on the other side of the easel anymore, the fingers grasping it are already visible. Insect fingers, boney, unbelievably white, sensual fingers. That’s his left hand.
The right hand is drawing on the paper. V. hears the lines slashed by the charcoal. She hears how they appear, how they come to an end, how they cross one another. The cigarette smolders, the ashes hold to the butt, hold and don’t fall, they can’t fall on the whiteness of the floor and desecrate it after all. But the lines – the lines that she doesn’t see – multiply at breakneck speed. his hand draws and draws and doesn’t stop; the poor paper, the drawings are like an itch, like a plague that leaves no reprieve, there are so many that they begin to wrestle with one another, to fight for survival like animals, seized by an unavoidable, natural cruelty. They hurry, they chase one another but can’t catch up – too late, too late, too late. V. can’t look at the ashes on the end of the cigarette anymore. She won’t survive if they fall – it will be her fault. She finds a crumb on her skirt with her eyes and stares at it, while the squeaking of the charcoal is amplified, and she doesn’t know what to do. How to run away. This sound should be calming. This process should be simple, eye-hand-paper, the plan is not complicated, after all, this way of existence is written in one’s blood, preserved in the song of our prehistoric ancestors, in the milk of a doe, in the damp wall of a cave. This process should be quite simple and familiar, and it would be like that, if not for one detail. V. can’t stand it anymore. She really wants to go to the bathroom, but what is really bothering her is asking, asking frankly. What the hell is she sitting there for? For what ends did this person search for an art model if he has yet to, even with the briefest of glances, look at her? V. can swear that he hasn’t looked. He hasn’t even looked up.
Perhaps he’s blind, she suddenly thinks. But those lines – they can’t be blind.
She finally drums up the courage. If she doesn’t ask now, she’ll pee right here.
“Why are you hiding?”
The flow of lines stops for a moment, and the cigarette quivers, but the ash doesn’t fall. Only a small see-through flake peels off.
“I’m not hiding,” says a voice in which V. hears a smile. “You’re the one that’s hiding.”
“Me? I’m here.”
“I know.”
“Did I really speak with you on the phone, and did I really understand correctly that you are looking for an art model?”
“Of course.”
“Are…are you sketching me?”
The cigarette is still hiding behind the easel, and soon a new tumulus of smoke swirls up.
“Yes.”
“Am I doing something wrong?”
He laughs.
“No, of course not. Wrong? I don’t think that’s possible. Why did you think that?”
“You haven’t looked at me once. I have been sitting in front of you for a whole hour, and now you’re saying that I’m hiding.”
“I know.”
“Isn’t that why you were looking for an art model, so you could depict them as precisely as possible?”
“Yes. Precisely that.”
“So?”
“What?”
“I perhaps don’t quite fully understand you.”
“That can’t be.”
“Sorry?”
“I think you understand. That’s all.”
“Why do you think that I should understand?”
“You already pointed it out yourself. I haven’t looked at you once, and you’ve been sitting here for a whole hour – an hour and six minutes actually. I think you understand.”
V. doesn’t know if she is smiling or baring her teeth out of loathing. That feeling burns like fire. Blood rushes through her veins. A blood river, an irreversible river. She is late, her brain lags woefully behind – but not even that hurts, because she doesn’t escape anywhere from herself, she is as late as the lines embodying her on the paper made by insect-like fingers. When she finally understands that he, K., is behaving in the most serious way, isn’t lying and isn’t mocking her, that his only desire, the only crazy, fanatical desire is to see her – all she can do is sink deeper into the red couch. Of course, he is ever attempting to see how she looks in her entirety, and no one has yet desired this so strongly before. Of course, he is ever attempting to create her portrait, and he needs an art model – which is precisely why he doesn’t look at her, precisely why he is waiting, until she herself looks from the paper at him, which is why he allows the lines to breed and mutate; how painful this kind of waiting must be, a lonely path that no one has yet trodden. If he takes the task of creating her portrait only so as to fully fathom her, how inhumanely much of his own existence he is able to endure. How he is unafraid to admit that upon seeing, he only ever sees himself – so why should one pretend? That’s how it’s always been and how it always will be, and that is like a verdict, which one cannot change. Unless you learn to dance and laugh while rattling the chains.
When V. finally understands this, it’s not too late. The strokes die one at a time, gradually, peacefully and undramatically like wild animals. In this room there is no – and cannot be – tragedy. In this room no one becomes disappointed in themselves or in others, they don’t look for the guilty ones, they don’t expect forgiveness, they don’t desire victims. Shapes appear and disappear. Some of them, for example, K.’s fingers, grasping the charcoal pencil, and V.’s waist, leaning on the back of the sofa, remain long enough that at one point they appear in the very same unit of space, and this coincidence is beautiful, because it’s totally meaningless. Time passes. The cigarette burns as the charcoal squeaks.
V. sits until she feels that her bladder can’t hold it in any longer. Then she gets up and leaves without saying anything. While going through the door, she hears how K. asks her to take a steaming plastic bag in the stairwell, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in, in lieu of payment. In it lies a box of four gigantic, greasy potato pancakes from the canteen downstairs.
Sokolovaitė, Ieva. Pozuotoja (Poser). Vilnius: Baziliskas, 2024, p. 7–29.
