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,