Tube? Why would she want to swallow a tube? Her confused brain took her back to the absurd bets of the schoolyard. Here’s a litas if you eat this slug. Here’s a litas that says you’re too chicken to swallow the earthworm alive. Then a grain of logic asserted itself. She must be in a hospital. She was in a hospital, and they wanted her to swallow a plastic tube. But why?
She couldn’t swallow, as it turned out. Couldn’t help. Couldn’t stop herself from struggling, which brought a new pain, sharp enough to pierce the fog of her confusion. Her arm. Oh God, her arm.
It is very hard to scream with a plastic tube in your throat, she discovered.
“
MIKAS
.”
“What is she saying?”
“Where is Mikas?”
She opened her eyes. They felt thickened and strange, but she forced them to open all the same. The light was blinding, and white as milk. She could only just make out two women, darker shapes amidst the whiteness. Nurses, or aides, she couldn’t make out the details. They were making the bed next to hers.
“Where is Mikas?” she said, as clearly as she was able.
“You must be quiet, Mrs. Ramoškienė.”
An accident, she thought, I’ve been in an accident. A car, or perhaps the trolley bus. That’s why I can’t remember anything. Then came the fear. What had happened to Mikas? Was he hurt?
Was he dead?
“Where is my son?” she screamed. “What have you done with him?”
“Please calm yourself, ma’am. Mrs. Ramoškienė, will you
please
lie down!”
One of them tried to restrain her, but she was too afraid to let herself be restrained. She got up. One arm was heavier than the other, and a bitter green wave of nausea washed over her. Acid burned her much-abused esophagus, and the pain took her legs from her, took away all control, so that she ended up on the floor next to the bed, clutching at the sheets, still struggling to get up.
“Mikas. Let me see Mikas!”
“He’s not here, Mrs. Ramoškienė. He is probably with your mother, or with some other relative. Or a neighbor. He is perfectly fine, I tell you. Now will you please lie down and stop screaming so. There are other patients here, some of them seriously ill, and you really mustn’t disturb them like this.”
The nurse helped her back into the bed. At first she felt simple relief. Mikas was all right! But then she understood that something wasn’t quite right, after all. Sigita tried to see the woman’s face more clearly. There was something there, in the tone of her voice, in the set of her jaw, that was not compassion, but its opposite. Contempt.
She knows, thought Sigita in confusion. She knows what I did. But how? How could some unfamiliar nurse in a random ward in Vilnius know so much about her? It was so many years ago, after all.
“I have to go home,” she said thickly, through the nausea. Mikas couldn’t be with her mother, of course. Possibly with Mrs. Mažekienė next door, but she was getting on now and could become peevish and abrupt if the babysitting went on too long. “Mikas needs me.”
The other nurse gave her a look from across the neighboring bed, smoothing the pillowcase with sharp, precise movements.
“You might have thought of that before,” she said.
“Before … before what?” stammered Sigita. Was the accident her fault?
“Before you tried to drink your brains out. Since you ask.”
Drink?
“But I don’t drink,” said Sigita. “Or … hardly ever.”
“Oh, really. I suppose it was just a mistake, then, that we sent you to have your stomach pumped? Your blood-alcohol level was two point eight.”
“But I … I really don’t.”
That couldn’t be right. Couldn’t be
her
.
“Rest a little,” said the first nurse, pulling the blanket across her legs. “Perhaps you will be discharged later, when the doctor comes by again.”
“What’s wrong with me? What happened?”
“I believe you fell down some stairs. Concussion and a fracture of your lower left arm. And you were lucky it wasn’t worse!”
Some stairs? She remembered nothing like that. Nothing since the coffee and the playground and Mikas in the sandbox with his truck.
G
ETTING AWAY FROM
the center was actually a relief, thought Nina, as she drove up the ramp to Magasin’s parking garage and eased her small Fiat into the none-too-generous space between a concrete pillar and somebody’s wide-arsed Mercedes. Sometimes she got so sick and tired of feeling powerless. What kind of country was this, when young girls like Natasha were compelled to sell themselves to men like the Bastard for the sake of a resident’s permit?
She took the elevator to the top floor of the building. As soon as she stepped out of the narrow steel box, the odor of food overwhelmed her—roasted pork, hot grease from the deep-fryer, and the pervasive aroma of coffee. She scanned the cafeteria and finally caught sight of Karin’s blond head. She was seated at a table by the window, in a sleeveless white dress that struck Nina as an off-duty version of her nurse’s uniform. Instead of one of the chic little handbags she normally sported, one hand rested possessively on the black briefcase on the chair next to her, while the other nervously rotated her coffee cup, back and forth, back and forth.
“Hi,” said Nina. “What is it, then?”
Karin looked up. Her eyes were bright and tense with an emotion Nina couldn’t quite identify.
“You have to fetch something for me,” she said, slapping a small round plastic circle onto the table. A token with a number on it, Nina observed, like the ones used for public lockers.
Nina was starting to feel annoyed.
“Don’t be so damned cryptic. What exactly is it I’m supposed to fetch?”
Karin hesitated.
“A suitcase,” she finally said. “From a locker at the Central Station. Don’t open it until you are out of the place. Don’t let anyone see you when you do open it. And hurry!”
“Bloody hell, Karin, you make it sound as if it’s stuffed full of cocaine, or something!”
Karin shook her head.
“No. It’s not like that. It’s… .” She stopped short, and Nina could see the barely suppressed panic in her. “This wasn’t the deal,” she said feverishly. “I can’t do this. I don’t know how. But you do.”
Karin got to her feet as if she meant to leave. Nina felt like grabbing her and forcing her to stay, much like she had with Natasha. But she didn’t. She looked down at the token on the table between them. 37-43, read the white numbers against the black plastic.
“You’re always so keen on saving people, aren’t you?” said Karin with a bitter twist to her mouth. “Well, here’s your chance. But you have to hurry.”
“Where are you going?”
“I’m going home to quit my job,” said Karin tightly. “And then I’m going away for a while.”
She zigzagged her way to the exit, skirting the other tables. She clutched the briefcase under her arm rather than carry it by the handle. It looked wrong, somehow.
Nina watched her go. Then she looked at the small shiny token. A suitcase. A locker.
You’re always so keen on saving people, aren’t you?
“What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Karin?” she muttered to herself. She had a strong feeling that the wisest thing to do would be to leave number 37-43 there on the sticky cafeteria table and just walk away.
“Oh hell,” she hissed, and picked up the token.
M
RS
. M
AŽEKIENĖ
? I
T’S
Sigita.”
There was a moment’s silence before Mrs. Mažekienė answered.
“Sigita. Thank the Lord. How are you?”
“Much better now. But they won’t let me out of here until tomorrow. Is Mikas with you?”
“Oh no, dear. He is with his father.”
“With
Darius
?”
“Yes, of course. He picked him up even before your accident. Don’t you remember, dearie?”
“No. They say I’m concussed. There is so much I don’t remember.”
But … Darius was in Germany, working. Or was he? He didn’t always tell her when he came home. Officially, they were still only separated, but the only thing they had in common now was Mikas. Might Darius take Mikas back to Germany with him? Or to his mother’s house in Tauragė? He didn’t have a place of his own in Vilnius, and she very much doubted that the party-crowd friends he occasionally stayed with would welcome a three-yearold boy.
Her head hurt furiously. She couldn’t think things through with any clarity, and she didn’t feel very reassured by the knowledge that Darius had Mikas, but at least she knew where her son was. Or with whom, at any rate.
“It looked so awful, dearie. I thought you were dead! And to think you had been lying on those stairs all night! Now, you just have a good rest at that fine hospital, and let them look after you until you’re better.”
“Yes. Thank you, Mrs. Mažekienė.”
Sigita snapped her mobile shut. Getting hold of it at all had been a challenge, and smuggling it into the loo with her even more difficult. The use of mobile phones was prohibited inside the hospital, except for a certain area in the lobby, which might as well have been the moon as far as she was concerned—she still couldn’t walk without hanging onto the walls.
Awkwardly, she opened the phone again and pressed Darius’s number with the thumb of her right hand. She was unable to hold the phone in her plaster-cased left, or at least not in such a way that she was able to operate it.
His voice was happy and warm and full of his presence even on a stupid voicemail message.
“You have called Darius Ramoška, but, but, but … I’m not here right now. Try again later!”
That was actually completely appropriate, she thought. The story of his life, or at any rate, the story of their relationship. I’m not here right now, try again later.
THEY HAD STARTED
going out together the summer she was due to finish elementary school, and he was about to begin his second year of secondary school in Tauragė’s Education Center. The summer had been unusually hot that year. In the schoolyard, only the most energetic of the little kids felt like playing on the heat-softened tarmac. The older students sat with their backs against the gray cement wall, with rolled up sleeves and jeans, chatting lazily in what they felt was a very grown-up manner.
“Are you going away for the holiday, Sigita?”
It was Milda asking. And she knew very well that the answer was no.
“Maybe,” said Sigita. “We haven’t really made plans yet.”
“We’re going to Palanga,” said Daiva. “To a hotel!”
“Really?” drawled Milda. “How cool. We’re just going to Miami.”
All around her, there was a sudden awestruck silence. Envy and respect were almost as visible in the air as the heat shimmer over the asphalt. Miami. Outer space seemed more accessible to most of them. A holiday meant Daiva’s fortnight at a Palanga resort hotel, or perhaps a trip to the Black Sea, if they got really lucky. No one in their grade had ever been further away than that.
“Are you sure?” said Daiva.
“Of course I’m sure. The tickets are already booked.”
No one asked where the money came from. They all knew— Milda’s father and uncle brought used cars home from Germany, fixed them up, and sold them to the Russians. That this was good business had been obvious first from the children’s clothes, and Milda’s new bike, then from the BMWs they drove, and finally from the big new house they built just outside town. But all the same—Miami.
“I’d rather go to New York,” Sigita heard herself say. And immediately wished she could have swallowed every last syllable.
Milda threw back her head and laughed.
“Right, then, you just tell your father that you want to go to New York,” she said. “He’ll buy the ticket right away … just as soon as he sells those shirts.”
Sigita felt the heat rise in her cheeks. Those damned shirts. She would never hear the last of it. They would haunt her to the end of her days, she felt sure.
They were everywhere in the flat. Thousands of them. They came from a closed-down factory in Poland, and her father had bought them for “practically nothing,” as he put it. Practically nothing had still been enough that they had to sell the car. And even though her father kept talking about “top-shelf merchandise” and “classic design,” he had managed to sell fewer than a dozen. For nearly two years they had been hanging there from broomsticks and wires screwed into the ceiling, crackling, plastic-shrouded, and “fresh from the factory,” above the couch, above the beds, even in the loo. She never brought friends home anymore; it was simply too embarrassing. But not nearly as embarrassing as being forced to take “samples” with her to class in the hopes that some of her friends’ parents would feel a sudden urge to buy one.
Her father had been severely out of his depth since the Russians went home. Back then, in the Soviet era, he had been a controller at the canning factory. It did not pay much better than working on the line, but back then it hadn’t been the money that mattered, it had been the connections. No one could just buy what they wanted, it had to be arranged. As often as not, her father had been the man who could arrange it.
Now the factory had closed down. It sat behind its barbed-wire fence, a gray and black hulk with empty window frames, weeds breaking through the concrete paving. The old connections were worthless, or worse than worthless. The people who did well these days were the ones who knew how to trade, fix, and organize—in the black economy as well as in the white.
Sigita got up. The sun hit her like a hammer, and once she was on her feet, she really had no idea where to go.
“Leaving so soon?” said Milda. “Oh, I suppose you are in a hurry to go home and book that New York hotel?”
It was at that moment that he came to her rescue.
“Sigita? Don’t forget we’re going to Kaliningrad on Saturday, right?”
Darius. Tanned and fair-haired, with that relaxed and well-trained confidence none of the other boys had. His shirt was left casually open to reveal a crisp white T-shirt underneath, and neither garment had come from Poland.
“No,” she said. “It’ll be fun. Have you heard that Milda is going to Miami for the holidays?”