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It’s hard to create distance, it’s as if you’re looking at yourself dead or you’re dead and looking at yourself. You have to abandon that peel, which means being a Lithuanian, tradition, family, culture, and the like, and look at it from the outside, it’s very difficult, almost impossible, you’ll start to lie, because the truth about yourself is unbearable, or you’ll start to hate yourself, because you will always be lying.
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Survive.
The most important thing is to survive.
It’s the morning now, and I need to get up. To push on. To work. To do things.
Another day to be endured.
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Every art project is created on the basis of illusions you have at a particular stage of your life. They keep hold of your attention over what you do, over the things you live through. Perhaps, if there were no illusions, we would die much sooner.
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Drama actors learn how to throw things in their first course, but no one teaches opera soloists things like that. And that’s why they don’t know how to. How to throw things, how to fall down, how to show their emotions, how to show what they want. They just stand there like singing scenery and think about their melismas.
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While the scandal was unfolding in the Lithuanian press, like the stages of a nuclear explosion filmed in slow motion – first, a shocking flash, then an impact, then a rapidly expanding mushroom, finally turning into a cloud of radioactive sediment – another line of transmission, another genealogy of public memory, was forming in Tomas’s head.
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Everything was so peaceful and ordinary, but something didn’t fit in this idyllic picture, in this paradisiacal dream. And then Liepa understood what it was: their eyes, the eyes of everyone seated at the table, were dead, those weren’t even eyes but black holes in their faces through which one could see the darkness of another world.
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In spite of the changing partners, Inga's life was constant and monotonous. Two days working in a jewellery shop in the Old Town, two days off. She tried to drink less on weekdays. Sex and alcohol disconnected her from herself: everything that didn't matter was wiped away. The only thing she liked more was the sea. She would sunbathe on a secluded beach in the summer, and walk in the wind in the winter.
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I had never taken any interest in those distant generations. Why would I have? What did I care about people buried one on top of another in layers in far-away villages, buried in sand and clay? Overgrown with ferns. Their graves fallen in, sucked in by the earth. Burned. Vanished in Brazil and the Americas. On clouds of down in paradise or in the cauldrons of hell. For eternity.
A person cut adrift from my roots, living only for today, yes, but now... Am I now going to drink from a pool of water I'd spat into? Am I going to try and retrieve all the names that have disappeared into oblivion until I've retrieved them all? All the voices? All the bones?
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Paulė believed that small dwarves lived in the forest and that they had dug deep caves under the ground. They slept with their arms around badgers because badgers are clean animals – they worked as servants for the dwarves. Paulė imagined herself living in the forest and crawling into a burrow to be with the dwarves – it would be cosy and warm there. Without being aware of it she dozed off and when she woke up, they were travelling along the village road.
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They, with their curses, their shoving, their self-righteous hatred, had taken away her voice—her voice that loved to sing, to gossip, to chatter with Lucia and with her sisters. The voice that shared her dreams with Mama in the morning, in the kitchen, over a cup of black tea, before anyone else in the house was awake, even before Papa left for the pharmacy. The voice that egged her into squabbling with her brother Ilya. The voice that teased Papa during their long talks about philosophy, about Pushkin, Lermontov, Don Quixote. The voice that talked too much, and made Mama bade her stop, be quiet, be still, to give her a moment’s peace so that she may think. Her poet’s voice.
That voice was gone.
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You see, all the cats (there were seven of them at the time) lived according to a strict, ascetic, individual time table, so strict that one might think that they lived only for the purpose of putting it into effect, that that time table was divine guidance with the cats being the devoted and trustworthy executors of its will. It would not be overstating the case to say that behind them their actions – meaningless at first glance, their everyday languorous movements, their royal-like ways of stretching and snoozing, there lay a noble mission to uphold our world order, which we humans, of course, carelessly, irresponsibly, relentlessly disrupt like foaming waves do endless sand dunes.
