Masha went to bed in Samuel’s room next door without washing her feet or switching on the light. She couldn’t sleep, the lines of poetry wouldn’t compose themselves. Regretting that Nike had left and there was no one to share her new experiences with, Masha lit the table lamp and took from her pile of books the most dog-eared one: it was consoling Dickens.
Soon she heard a quiet knock at the window. She moved the dark blind aside—the little window was blocked by Butonov. “Are you going to open the door or the window?”
“You won’t get through the window,” Masha replied.
“My head will, and the rest can follow,” Butonov answered in a voice which sounded grumpy.
Masha pulled back the bolt. “Wait, I’ll move the table away.” Butonov climbed in. He looked in a bad mood and said not a word, and she only gasped weakly when he pressed her to himself with both arms.
To the touch she really was like Rosa. The heavens were again rent for Masha, and the gate into them proved to be not at all in the place where she had diligently and consciously sought it, leafing through Pascal, Berdyaev, and the cinnamon-scented wisdom of the East.
Now Masha slipped easily, without the least effort, through to the place where time was absent and there was only an unearthly space, a high alpine space radiating a brilliant light, with movement free of the necessity of following the laws of physics, with flight and sailing and total forgetfulness of all that was beyond the bounds of the sole reality of the outer and inner surfaces of a body which had dissolved with happiness.
She was slowly sliding down from the last summit, a fold of skin on his arm firmly squeezed between her lips, when she heard the artlessly plebeian enquiry “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette, have you?”
“I have,” she replied, her delicate foot coming down to earth on the boarded floor.
She felt around with her foot—the cigarette packet was somewhere on the floor. She found it, reached down, lit up the cigarette herself, and passed it to him.
“Actually, I don’t usually smoke,” he told her confidentially.
“I didn’t think you would come. You didn’t even look at me,” she replied, lighting a second cigarette.
“You pissed me off. Why did you have to come bouncing in on me like that? I really hate it,” he explained straightforwardly. “I’m tired. I’ll go.”
He got up, pulled on his clothes, and she moved back the blind. It was getting light.
“Are you going to let me out the door, or do I have to climb through the window?” he asked.
“Through the window,” she laughed. “It’s closer for you.”
Vitalis’s amusements were wholly infantile: He threw everything that came into his hands down on the ground, so Aldona always had enameled rather than glass cups and plates for him. He enjoyed breaking toys, and would laugh in a reedy little voice while tearing up books. Sometimes he would have fits of aggressiveness, and then he would wave his little clenched fists and scream with rage.
By being born, the boy had brought a lot of dissension into the lives of those around him. Gvidas was still profoundly at odds with his mother Aushra, who had in any case been against his early marriage to Aldona, who was much older and who, on top of that, had a child from her first marriage. At his mother’s insistence Gvidas delayed getting married for a long time; but he married immediately when Aldona came out of the maternity hospital with her incurably sick child, something that was established within minutes of his birth. Aushra hadn’t even seen her grandson.
Aldona’s elder son, Donatas, put up with the dubious advantages a healthy child has over a sick one for two years, but gradually progressed from secret jealousy to open hostility toward his brother, to whom he invariably referred as “the damned crab,” and went to live with his father. Shortly afterward, unable to settle in his father’s new family, he moved to his paternal grandmother’s in Kaunas.
Poor Aldona had this to put up with too. Once a week, on Sundays, with bags she had packed with food and toys, she would set off for Kaunas on the first train of the day, returning on the last one. Her former mother-in-law, who had many sorrows of her own, as a Lithuanian smallholder, an exile, and a widow, accepted the food without thanks. Hiding the happy or greedy gleam in his eyes, handsome, broad-shouldered Donatas would take the expensive toys out of her hands and show her his neat notebooks, full of boring “Good’s” combined with an equal quantity of “Average’s.” She helped him with his mathematics and Lithuanian, and then he saw her as far as the gate. Grandmother wouldn’t let him go farther than that.
With a heavy heart Aldona left Vilnius in the morning, leaving the little one with Gvidas, and with a heavy heart she left Kaunas in the evening; but the bitterest thing was the feeling that she was a means to an end: everybody needed her care, her help, her efforts, but nobody needed herself or her love. For the younger one she was still a womb providing nourishment and warmth; the older one seemed only to put up with her for the sake of her presents.
Gvidas, who had married her after a major reversal in love here, in the Crimea, had a smooth, steady relationship with her, devoid of emotional attachment.
“It’s just too Lithuanian,” she had said to him in a rare moment of irritation.
“But how else, Aldona? It’s the only way we can get through this. It’s only possible by being Lithuanian,” he confirmed, and she, a Lithuanian born and bred and with a strain of Teutonic blood, was suddenly seared by an unusual feeling: “If only I were a Georgian, or an Armenian, or even a Jewess.”
But she did not receive the gift either of the joyous relief of wailing, or of the wringing of hands, or of liberating prayer— only of endurance, rocklike peasant endurance. Indeed, she was an agronomist. Before the birth of Vitalis she had managed a hothouse enterprise. In the first year of her child’s life, deprived of her usual green solace, she suffered cruelly, painstakingly learning to be the mother of a chronic invalid, not letting her twisted babe out of her arms. When she did lower him into his cot, he emitted a faint rasping, wholly nonhuman sound.
The second year, in early spring, she made cardboard flowerpots, sowed seeds, and created a vegetable garden beside the window. She sank her fingers into the soil, and all the bad static electricity generated by her superhuman endurance and tension flowed away into the crumbly sandy-brown border planted with the arrows of spring onions and the rosettelike tops of radishes. The more acidic vegetables grew particularly well in her borders.
By then they had already moved to a half-built house in a suburb of Vilnius. Gvidas put up a high fence even before building began: neighbors’ eyes focused on their little cripple were unendurable.
Gvidas put all his passion into the building. The house was a fine one, and life became a little easier in it. It was in this house that Vitalis got to his feet. It would be too much to say that he learned to walk: rather, he began to rise out of his sitting position and to get around.
Changes for the better were also to be seen in the boy after he had been living at the seaside, and Gvidas and Aldona did not cancel their annual pilgrimage to the Crimea after the building work was completed, although it was difficult for them to leave their house for the sake of something as frivolous as a holiday.
Dozens of small children had passed through Medea’s hands, including Dimitry, the late grandfather of the little freak. Her arms knew the inconsistent feel of the weight of a child’s body, from the eight-pound newborn baby, when the bundle of the little sleeping bag, the blanket, and diapers seems greater than what they contain, to the sturdy one-year-old who has not yet learned to walk and who stretches your arms in the course of the day like a sack weighing several stones. Then the little fatty grows up, learns to walk and run, and three years later, having added a few insignificant kilograms, now rushes to throw himself at your neck and again seems as light as a feather.