Breathing Into Marble Read online

  Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė was born in Vilnius, Lithuania in 1972. She studied Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University and became a journalist and an editor of a children’s magazine. In 1993 she won the Lithuanian Writer’s Union First Book competition. She is also a playwright and her plays have won awards in Lithuania and Germany.

  Breathing into Marble won the EU Prize for Literature in 2009.

  Laura Sintija Cerniauskaite

  Breathing into Marble

  Translated from Lithuanian by Marija Marcinkute

  Noir

  First published in Lithuanian as Kvėpavimas į marmurą

  Text copyright © Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė

  English translation copyright © Marija Marcinkute

  The moral rights of the author and translators have been asserted.

  Published by Noir Press.

  www.noirpress.co.uk

  [email protected]

  Cover design by Le Dinh Han

  Cover photo by Roberto Tumini, sourced from www.unsplash.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  978-0-9955600-0-0

  The Fox’s Den

  He was walking.

  The road shone between the fields like the blade of a knife thrust into the west. Shadows rolled over his head and shoulders and the occasional car left steamy tracks through his brain. When he stepped off the road, the grass, which glistened like oil, moistened his shoes. He lived here – like this - between the asphalt and the sky, as if nothing had happened until that moment. The ghosts of the past had been left on the other side of his memory, a niggling, fading noise.

  It was as if he had just sprung from someone’s imagination; as if he had been shot out above this road through the woods, beneath the weak eye of the sun. The sun’s light was undemanding and he floated in it, as complete and light as a speck of dust.

  It was as if his purpose was unfolding as he walked.

  He moved forward resolutely, unaware, perhaps, of where he was going or why, but deep inside – whatever it was that had been growing in him for years – knew and led him on.

  He only had to obey. He had been forgiven everything already.

  The sun-baked stones pulsed in the grass. That smell...the smell of hot skin. In the evenings when he would press his nose into her neck he would sense the hot, anxious pulse of her blood.

  ‘What is it?’ she would murmur, her eyes not lifting from her book.

  She rarely touched him and he rarely touched her, sensing, somehow, that he was not allowed.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she would mutter, in the late evening, her voice colourless. ‘What does he want?’ She was almost asleep.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t want anything, then go to bed. Your brother’s asleep already.’

  He is not my brother.

  He is not my brother because I have no brother. I am unique, born of the air.

  A white Porsche slid past quietly as a bowling ball – he remembered having once watched a game on TV. He had also seen a Porsche on TV which you could win if you bought something and filled in a coupon. The Porsche on TV had been red, like the hot water tap in the showers at the orphanage. Long legged girls were wrapped around it like cellophane. They caressed it as if it were alive and as if they had already fallen in love with its winner. It struck him at that moment that love, which everybody was always talking about, was simply about being the way everybody wanted you to be. But nobody could explain exactly how you were supposed to do this. The models who were wrapped like ribbons around the red Porsche had long, slim legs – he had never seen legs like that anywhere else; the girls and women in the orphanage were fatter, with soft bottoms that he was afraid to look at for too long, their legs were solid and their feet were planted firmly on the ground, kicking up a racket as they walked down the corridors. Perhaps the TV models, like an exotic species of hens, had been bred especially to stroke Porsches – or so he had thought as his palm grazed his feverish trouser zip.

  The white Porsche slowed to a stop. He sensed immediately it was for him. He pretended not to notice. As he walked past, the front door opened.

  ‘Where are you going? Get in, I’ll give you a lift.’

  He was afraid – it could be her; the light suit, the hair bleached gold by the sun at the temples and the smell – that smell, and the foot wrapped in shiny lycra – like her the woman drove without her shoes on – he took in all the detail, just in case. He blushed so violently that for a moment he felt faint. It couldn’t be her, even after so many years, and definitely not in a Porsche. And that smell, though it was similar, and the timbre of her voice, and the shiny knuckles like tiny crowns above the wheel – it was all just a clever forgery.

  He got in the front, beside the woman.

  The car moved off. It drove down the road as smoothly as a knife cutting through butter. The woman asked him a question and he knew he had to lie; about everything – nothing he said should contain a speck of truth. Don’t tell them the truth. He didn’t know her and didn’t want to. At first - when he was younger – it had seemed like the truth was important to them. Actually they didn’t really care; they only wanted to know what was most convenient for them. He didn’t care what the woman wanted to know – probably just the same as everybody else - some dull, insignificant details, as alike as the alders that grew along the roadside. He was irritated that the woman made him use his brain and waste his breath. He listened to her deep, lazy voice and took his time to answer, noticing how the diagonal rays of the evening sun sifted through the soft, ash-grey hair that rested against her cheekbone. As if sensing this arbitrariness of the light, she took out a pin, let go of the steering wheel and, with a couple of deft moments, skilfully fastened her hair at the back. A velvet shadow appeared in the hollow of her naked cheekbone; a seductive, secret shade - like that on thighs once the lace garter had been removed – he had seen that movement when he was watching TV with the boys. He froze, swallowed thick saliva and squeezed the small knife in his trouser pocket.

  ‘Where do you want me to drop you off?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Here? Just here?’

  The tone of her voice, her scent and the arrogant arsenal of feminine movements made him mad.

  He held the knife to her throat.

  ‘Stop the car!’

  Immediately the woman obeyed. She realised he wasn’t joking. Without having even seen the knife she immediately understood what lurked at her throat and what it meant.

  He just wanted her to understand what he was capable of. Nothing more. He just wanted to see that knowledge in her eyes.

  The woman didn’t look at him. She stared in front of her at the road which was drowning in shadows. A couple of cars drove by. Simultaneously they both glanced up and then once again he heard the sound of her breathing. No, he saw it throb from beneath the half unbuttoned jacket, from under her linen shirt.

  He wanted the woman to touch him, but he didn’t know how to say it. How do they say it? What do they do when they want to be touched? Just say it.

  Her thin, pale hand on his clothes which sta
nk of cheap washing powder… No.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  She shouldn’t have asked.

  Because he knew what he wanted to do; it’s just that he would never, never have the courage to do it. Instead, he could do something worse. Something she would remember for the rest of her life.

  He pressed the knife and a string of blood ran down her neck.

  The woman gasped. She began to shake, her eyes closing tightly, her face wrinkling. A moment before it had looked so calm and confident – now it resembled crinkled lace ripped from the thigh.

  He swallowed.

  ‘Kneel down!’ he demanded.

  He didn’t want to have to say that – he was ashamed to say it. She should have read his mind and obeyed him without forcing him to humiliate himself. But she couldn’t read his mind and he was going to punish her for that. The woman collapsed in a heap on the rubber mat, her breasts pressed against the steering wheel like two small stoats ready to escape, their little faces struggling through the linen shirt, climbing, looking for an exit.

  ‘What do you want?’ she whispered.

  He didn’t know. He just liked holding her under the blade of the knife, liked her whisper, her softness; he could make her do anything, but he couldn’t think of what. He was afraid to touch her with his fingers, just the knife, the very point of it. But he could not feel the warmth of her skin. He leaned towards the woman’s neck and inhaled, inhaled the fetid scent of the fox’s den there - it was he who had done it, he who had cut open her flesh, he who had unlocked the smell. The secret pleasure of the conqueror spilled through him, filling him up to his temples…

  He let out a long whine, stuck his nose into the cut on her neck and at the same time the tension ejaculated with such force that he nearly passed out.

  The woman opened her eyes and gazed out at the road. There was a warm, wet feeling in his trousers; he felt slimy and vulnerable, like a newly conceived embryo. He was so ashamed he felt he could strangle her and stab the road and the woods.

  ‘Whore…’ he whispered. ‘Whore, whore!’ he shouted. ‘How do I get out?’

  The door would not open. Still gazing in front of her, the woman moved reluctantly. There was a dull sound – he shot out and ran under the cover of the low alders, into the dusk of the woods.

  He came to his senses only when he reached the fox’s den. The one where four years before, holding his breath, he had watched the fox. When he had returned to her he had cried and couldn’t explain what had happened. The shadows grew longer, the coolness that spread from the cliff breathed on his back, and the wings of the swallows lacerated his chest. His blood pulsed suddenly so heavily and thickly…

  Unblinking, the fox’s hole gazed straight back at him, like an enlarged iris.

  It smelt of stale clothes, like in his dreams, nauseous and familiar. Around him the sand pulsed warm, damp and orange. There was no wind. The trees and swallows were silent. His blood stopped throbbing. Only the sand pulsed like feverish brain cells and he dug into it not knowing what he was doing, feeling so small, as if on the way his body had scattered among the cranberries, as if he had slipped off his skin like worn out clothes and left them and soared away. He hurried so as not to be caught or disturbed as he made his offering. The sand was a breathing spirit that was always happy with him; soaking up, anaesthetizing, covering over the paths of his feverish thoughts.

  He lay with his knees pressed to his chest, his head stuck in the damp, dark cave, sand grinding between his teeth. When he pulled his head out, he felt the breeze settle like a cool cloth on his face. He had cut his left arm in a few places with the knife – the sand glittered in the small, drying wounds. The same thing had happened at the orphanage. They had even brought a woman in once. She asked him questions, fixing him with a sharp gaze. She kept on asking, not getting angry when he refused to answer. They wanted him to tell them the name of the boy who had sold him the knife. He just sneered.

  He found the path easily despite the thickening shadows in the grove of firs. His breath echoed from the arch of the branches returning to him in ghostly shapes. Walking made him hot. It was spitting with rain and warm droplets fell like needles on his nose. He flinched when he saw the light was already on in the kitchen window. His stomach rolled. The other windows were black; they must all be in the kitchen.

  Keeping close to the edge of the woods, he circled around towards the small, dilapidated barn. His breathing was so loud that he was frightened when the light went out in the kitchen – had they heard him? But the light jumped to another window – the large room where they used to watch TV and mark books.

  They didn’t have any cattle. The small barn was used as a store room where the neighbours kept hay – but there was nobody there now. He listened – occasionally rain drops pattered against the roof tiles. There was very little hay; what was there was probably from the previous year, though the dry stems crackled in the twilight, as if they were alive.

  Smelling his way to the hay stacks, he dropped down.

  He was the only large, dark object there; around him everything else crackled, stabbed and tickled and having been subdued, withdrew.

  And perhaps he too wanted to learn how to step away and leave, and for that to be the end of it.

  He must have been crying.

  Crying for a long, long time in the fragrant, inviting darkness of the barn. The tears immediately soaked away into the hay as if they had never been.

  He felt tired and shrunken, like a wrung-out cloth and the last convulsions of his lament trembled through his fingers into the hay.

  Then the patter of the rain stopped; it seemed to have cleared up outside and the evening sun seeped through the gaps in the wooden walls. He wasn’t sleeping, just hiding in a ball of darkness that was darker than the twilit barn. Slowly, it drained from him like poisoned blood and it was horrible and sweet. He felt its protective radiance, felt how it spread like a pool of urine. He wasn’t sleeping, in fact he didn’t close his eyes, he was as alert as ever because the darkness required alertness. Then why was it that he didn’t hear the footsteps? Grass always rustles when someone walks over it, even someone as quiet and light as him.

  That boy.

  He appeared silently and unexpectedly. The fact that the boy noticed him first, stood and stared at him while he was doing God knows what, made him furious. That boy had always been like that – he always noticed things first, as if, because of some unknown merit, he had the God-given permission to stare like that. He hadn’t changed at all, with those bony features that had been sharpened by his illness, looking like a stalk of pale grass. But now they were both the same height.

  Surprise drew the two boys into a single, suspicious, trembling unit, but almost immediately a sharp, metallic sound squeezed between them – he must have dropped his bike in astonishment. He had probably come for his bike, moved it away from the wall and then noticed him and was struck by surprise.

  They shuddered as if halved by the harsh noise and brought back to their own selves.

  ‘Ilyusha!’ the boy whispered.

  He jumped instinctively. Rage throbbed in his temples. It was as if everything had been preordained and it wasn’t even his idea.

  It hadn’t been his intention.

  It was that power that had always been in him.

  In the instant before he jumped from the floor, he felt for the knife in his pocket.

  He wasn’t aware of the movement; he hadn’t rehearsed it, but it was as if he had dreamt about it for a long time, in dream after dream, and now it struck like lightning within him. He didn’t need to do anything, just step back and allow the force to flow through him, the force which knew better than him and then

  that

  again

  and again

  and again

  and could it be……………………………………………………………

  blood splashed the spokes of the bike which glistened in the s
un and a black hole steamed in the white shirt,

  grass is only pale on the outside, but when you cut it,

  such an unexpected colour spills out

  its greed and brightness could drive you mad,

  how to silence it, how to survive it, if he could have known how it would be

  was that him, and what had he done

  what had he done

  but then

  could it have been ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

  steps crunched across the grass, approaching and suddenly untamed, ash-grey hair, crackling like hay, spilled through the sunlit doorway, spilled from fluttering, flowery silk

  and then the fluttering collapsed, and everything stopped

  those eyes

  crystal irises, pistils and stamens flying in smiling circles … they flooded, flooded, steaming

  which saw -

  and screamed

  scrrrrrrrrrrrrr

  scrrrrrrrrrrrrr

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  and so, and so, let me out

  it was so tight, it was so bright you could choke, she was so close

  she just

  just

  having ripped her eyes away from that vivid opening

  only then did she recognize him

  ‘Ilya?’ she whispered. ‘Is it you, Ilya? Ilya? Is it you?’

  Her.

  Isabel.

  Traps