Youth
Elena was a teenager whose maturing womanhood made itself known every month by five days of bleeding. She knew when it would begin and when it would end, and that was one of the few constants in her life. Elena liked the word cycle: every month, as though with a stick in the sand or a piece of chalk on the pavement, it traced a temporary circle in which she felt safer than she did in her own room, the room that her humiliated, strangely flustered parents could enter at any moment to ask to borrow the very money they had given her for small expenses. Her mother continued selling cosmetics and looking after her friends’ children, while her father took on extra repair jobs around the neighbourhood. They were constantly looking for other ways to make money, but never learned how to save.
Indian summer arrived, and one of her father’s colleagues took the family to an isolated farmstead outside the city, surrounded by vast stretches of apple orchards. First, they were introduced to the owner of the orchard. She was large and tall, and so wrinkled and scarred that she resembled a canvas sack stuffed with dried apples, liable at any moment to split open and fall apart. It was not only the woman herself that was scarred, but her voice too, rough as sandpaper. As she walked through the enormous farmhouse, opening and closing heavy wooden doors that creaked and rattled, and recounting disjointed stories about the people who had lived there, the pumice stone of her scarred voice seemed to scour away at the walls beneath their several layers of paint, walls hung with portraits of the dead in oval frames – it seemed that the old woman, who had lived here for many years, might have erased some of the building’s spaces or rooms, or perhaps even other people who had once lived there.
Elena couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s fingers – they were disproportionately slender for her hands, not only because of the many gleaming rings set with tiny stones that resembled the roe of shimmering fish, but also because of her ivory-coloured skin, which instantly mesmerised Elena in the same way as an old film her father had rented on video, which she would often replay in her mind when she couldn’t sleep.
Elena went to the farmstead several times with her parents and Nikita, and later they would drop her off there on her own. She picked apples, sorted them into different boxes and stuck labels on them with the names of the varieties, but in reality she was making plans to escape – plans that would allow her to break away from home and, once she had earned enough money, leave for the capital. Elena knew the way to the bus stop, had calculated how long it would take her to reach it on foot, and agreed to work there at weekends – helping the old owner look after the house and orchard and prepare apples to be taken to the juice press. At that point, she would probably have accepted any offer that allowed her to escape her gossip-ridden town. She had lost all hope: remembering that filthy crows nested in the strip of trees separating the music school from the park, she decided to test one of her mother’s absurd superstitions: if a bird marked you, you would become rich. And so, on one of those countless occasions when she couldn’t stop thinking of ways to get rich, Elena stood in the triangle of crows until she had been shat on from head to toe. Of course, it didn’t help – on the contrary, her mother complained about the unexpected load of washing and the detergent it had used up.
Even so, she lasted only a few weekends in that house. When the two of them were alone, the old woman would sit down at a large dressing table with its many lockable drawers, pull-out mirrors of different magnifications, metal chests and wooden boxes carved with scenes of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and perform her evening toilette. As she slipped off her rings one by one and placed them in different boxes, Elena could see up close the lions and panthers emerging from the surfaces of the wooden carvings, the walnut trees and towering palms, climbing roses and birds, their feathers coated in layers of varnish and gold. There were pomegranates, bright water lilies, fountains sprayed in vivid colours and vines inlaid with tiny stones that could be mistaken for snakes – in the carving on one of the boxes, flora and fauna merged into a single whole, at once spilling luxuriantly from the amphora depicted there and entwining themselves around it like a magnificent lichen.
Once she had put away her countless pieces of jewellery in their designated drawers and boxes, the woman would let down her hair. Her long grey hair settled over her shoulders like a dirty cloud saturated with smoke, which Elena then had to carefully break apart with a comb. The closer she came to the woman, the stronger the pungent smell of medicine, liquorice and decay became. The smell had permeated every corner of the house – the heavy, suffocating bedding stuffed with chicken feathers, the hollows of the silver spoons, every cupboard in the kitchen and the wardrobe in the bedroom, from which the old woman would take out dresses and ask Elena to iron them for the following day.
But her evening toilette didn’t end with her hair combed and the next day’s dress prepared. The culmination was her gaping mouth, from which Elena, using a special pair of tweezers, had to remove one by one all thirty-two worn teeth screwed into her jaws, wipe them clean with a cloth soaked in alcohol, and place them in the designated box – where she discovered several more spare sets of teeth. The stench from the woman’s open mouth was so strong that Elena held her breath every time. But the woman would stare at Elena’s tightly pressed lips and ask her to smile so that she could inspect her teeth and remember that she herself had once had teeth like those – back in the days she recalled with the deepest nostalgia and would gladly have turned into objects, trophies to be arranged behind glass in elegant display cabinets beneath a label that read youth.
For lunch, Elena would make stews and soups according to the woman’s recipes – vegetables that had been frozen no one knew how many years ago, tipped into a pot of boiling water, would soon disintegrate and come to resemble the contents of the woman’s diaper. Several times a day, Elena would hear her draw oxygen in through her nose and hold her breath, as though oxygen were something edible, something that had to be digested; for a few seconds later, having passed the gulp of fresh air through her failing digestive system, with its paper-thin liver and shrivelled stomach, she would expel it through her anus. The loud sound echoing through the rooms would signal to Elena that she could start running the bath and prepare the diaper, while the usual smell of liquorice, medicine and decay was joined by the stench of decomposed vegetables and ammonia.
The pungent nausea of those days was soothed by the orchard – the complete opposite of the house, its old owner, the empty cavities in her stinking mouth and the diaper soaked with faeces, dissolved salts and layers of intestinal gas. As Elena picked the gleaming apples, their thick, almost lemon-yellow skins revealing patches of crystallised sugar beneath, she would think that the hundred-year-old apple trees had seen everything a thousand times over. They had absorbed the storms that had swept through here and torn the roofs from the buildings of the settlement; countless times their trunks had bent, knelt and lain prostrate before the shapeless yet all-powerful bodies of the elements, only to straighten again. Once the cycle had traced another circle in the earth with an invisible finger, the apple trees would shed their leaves again, let them rot, and then ripen fragrant apples whose freshness could be matched neither by the fruit of the great pear trees in the yard, nor by creamy bananas, nor by tinned pineapple.
The White Transparents, light and almost papery, as though fashioned from gusts of wind and summer rain. The Canada Reinettes, massive as rubies. The Raspberry apples, acquiring a marble sheen in the full glare of the sun, their skins suffused with spreading crimson. The autumn apples, conical and ribbed, with thick, waxy skins streaked with pink that seeped towards the flesh like watercolour soaking into heavy paper. Countless thousands of apples, hundreds of different varieties, theories of their origins and instructions for their care, which she could read on the signs hanging nearby – and one Elena. For the first time, away from home, closer to another world. All she had to do was press herself against an apple tree and close her eyes – on those long October afternoons filled with a vibrating electric rustle, the orchard itself became an elemental force, more thrilling than any erotic scene she had ever seen in a film or imagined in her mind. And so she was never alone here – the orchard was a place where she could become an inseparable part of everything.
When she returned to the house in the evening, the woman would greet her with an even more pungent stench. After changing her diaper, Elena would prepare dinner, and during the meal she would begin to feel tired – she would go to lie down before it was even dark, and the woman, her face strangely illuminated, would cover the teenager with heavy bedding. Elena knew that she watched her sleep, but she couldn’t resist – a cool drowsiness scented with apple flesh would approach like an inevitability she had no strength to fight. Her sleep was deep, her dreams damp and sticky, bursting with apple juice. She dreamed of herself grown together with the trees; she could feel the branches bending from within into incomprehensible shapes and forms, reaching into cavities that had opened in the trunk, dripping with slick, gluey resin, and filling them with the sugar of the fruit. Elena wanted it never to end. The dreams were a sweet ecstasy induced by some obscure mixture of medicines the old woman had given her, to which she became instantly addicted and had no desire to give up.
Elena would wake drenched in sweat, while the woman sat in a round armchair with wooden armrests, smiling as though she knew what the teenager had experienced. At those moments Elena would feel a tenderness towards the old mistress of the house – as though she had unlocked one of the rooms erased by the pumice stone of her scarred voice. But one time she woke to find the woman’s fingers in her mouth. Elena’s body was still asleep, petrified like a lump of resin or a giant piece of amber, while the old woman pinned her against the mattress, preventing her from closing her mouth. Her ring-covered hand, with its strong fingers, resembled the tentacles of a squid pulled from the water, clotted with roe, probing her mouth for open mollusc shells containing pearls. Elena screamed and hurled curses into her face, but the woman couldn’t understand them. Elena’s lips, tongue and entire throat were paralysed.
Her body woke in the night. Blood returned to her lips, her jaw regained its usual shape, and her tongue could move again. By then, the woman was asleep in her own room. Holding her breath, Elena sat up and quietly climbed out of bed. In the bathroom, she was afraid to turn on the light, not because she might wake the woman. She was afraid to see what she had done. The lights built into the mirror didn’t come on immediately, so Elena had time to feel the throbbing pain. From her jaw it spread to her ears, from her ears to her forehead, and from her forehead it travelled down the vertebrae of her spine, into her pelvic bones and legs. As the light grew brighter, she saw her face. It resembled a Raspberry apple, suffused with spreading crimson, except that the red came not from its waxy skin but from dried blood from her gums. She opened her mouth. Two molars were missing. The same number as the rings set with glittering gemstones that Elena found slipped onto her fingers.
But no one believed her. Not her mother, before whose eyes the mistress of the house had once again transformed into an innocent old lady. Maybe those teeth would have fallen out anyway; you eat all sorts of rubbish. Nor her father, who brought her home on Sunday along with twenty tonnes of apples Nikita had picked. Together they unloaded them from the lorry beside the remaining furniture from the closed-down second-hand shop. Nikita intended to sell the apples, and her father said: You’re lazy, so you make up all sorts of excuses just to get out of working. If he weren’t ill, your brother would have stayed.
Elena kept the rings in her backpack and showed them to no one. Eventually, she dared to climb up into her uncle’s attic. If the carpet – the only possession from the days when Ksaveras had been a designer that he had not traded for ink – had not been nailed to the floor, it would have torn itself free and flown away – just like Elena when she found out where she could get the most money for the rings.
And one night, when the house had fallen so deeply asleep that it seemed to be snoring, she put on her father’s steel-toed work boots and went down into the former shop. In the half-light gleamed the apples Nikita had picked, still brimming with freshness and carrying the scent of the hot August winds – apples he intended to take to the press and sell the juice at the market – and she couldn’t resist. She stamped on them for as long as she had the strength. She stamped on them imagining the whole world, in which she longed to be alone but no longer could: the world had already poisoned her. She stamped and kicked at them all – the light, papery White Transparents, the Canada Reinettes gleaming like rubies, the Raspberry apples coated in melted pink wax, the conical, ribbed autumn apples – one after another the apples vanished, dissolved, burst beneath her feet. Elena was part of everything, an inseparable whole that she wanted to crush, though she didn’t yet know that this was impossible.
More than anything, what she really wanted to stamp out was her blossoming womanhood – the surges of desire she felt so distinctly as apple juice ran down her thighs, the sticky dreams filled with heat and the wetness gathering between her legs as she imagined touching the firm trunks of trees. She wanted to pluck off her rounding breasts and buttocks, every swelling curve – to gouge them out with woodcarving chisels and leave them to rot. She already knew what old age was and how it stank; she had seen what it meant to wither and conceal a failing body beneath glittering gemstones. She already understood that she could condemn herself for ever to watching younger women and to the searing daily confirmation that everything ends with youth, with that blossoming, poisonous lily-of-the-valley flower whose scent, if inhaled for too long, begins to smell like urine.
That night Elena knew so much that she promised herself she would never become a woman and would avoid everything associated with it. But she was lying to herself, just as experienced juice makers lie when they swear to their customers: no sugar, no preservatives. She didn’t yet know the most important thing – that her body, swollen with the desire that frightened her, would soon become a chisel she would use to carve herself into other people’s skin, trying to turn passion into a porcelain figurine and place it alongside glass perfume bottles, naïve love letters kissed with easily extended lipsticks, and gleaming eyeliner pencils in the columbarium of youth.
After all, her youth was only just beginning.
Translated with the support of the Lithuanian Culture Institute.
