The Boy in the Suitcase - Lene Kaaberbol [44]
But it wasn’t Dobrovolskij.
SIGITA WALKED TO the nearest trolley stop on legs that felt disconnected. The trolley stop did not represent a conscious decision, more a conditioned reflex. She had lived in this neighborhood herself, once, in two attic rooms in one of the wooden houses where the well was anything but decorative. For three years she had climbed the narrow stairs every day with a couple of ten-liter plastic water containers in her hands, one for Mrs. Jovaišienė , who owned the house, and one for herself. If she needed to bathe, she had to use the public facilities some blocks away, so usually she took sponge baths and relied heavily on a wonder-product called Nuvola, which came in an aerosol can; one sprayed it into one’s hair, waited for a few minutes, and then brushed vigorously, after which everything would be as clean as if one had just showered. Or that was the theory. Once a week she borrowed Mrs. Jovaišienė’s little hand-cranked washing machine, but most of the time she just washed her clothes in the sink, like they had done back home in Tauragė.
Mrs. Jovaišienė was probably dead by now. She had been over ninety. Sigita deliberately avoided Vykinto gatvė, where the house was, although that would have been the shorter route. She didn’t want to see it. Didn’t want to be reminded of that time. Mikas was all that mattered now, she told herself.
Back home in Pašilaičiai, the flat was unchanged. White. New. Empty. She closed the blinds to the afternoon sun and lay down on the bed with all her clothes on. A few seconds later, she was asleep.
THE YEAR SIGITA became pregnant, winter had come early to Tauragė. The first snows fell at the end of October. Her father had just taken over the position of caretaker in their building, after Bronislavas Tomkus had moved out. In practice, this meant that Sigita had to help her mother shovel the walks before she could go off to school and her mother could leave for her job at the post office. Her father had “the thing with his back,” of course. He did insist on directing his troops, though, entertaining them with a series of humorous remarks to keep up morale.
“It’s the secret weapon of the Russians, that is,” he said, pointing to the packed snow. “Direct from Siberia. But they won’t get us down while we have good, strong women like you!”
He jokingly praised Sigita and her mother as brave defenders of the Independence to everyone passing on the half-cleared sidewalk. It was all rather unbearable.
At least the cold weather meant that Sigita could wear heavy sweaters without arousing comment. She had begun to cut all phys-ed classes, but she knew it was only a matter of time before Miss Bendikaitė would contact the headmaster, who in his turn would contact her parents.
Sexual education was not in any way part of the curriculum at Tauragė Primary and Secondary School, but Sigita did realize what it meant when she had missed her period in August, and again in September. She just wasn’t exactly sure what to do about it. Theoretically, she could have bought a pregnancy test at the pharmacy in City Square, but Mrs. Raguckienė, who sat at the register, had gone to school with her mother. And in any case, what good would a test do? She already knew what was wrong.
She hadn’t told Darius. By the end of August, he had been sent to the States to stay with his uncle and attend an American high school for a year. Sigita rather thought that this unprecedented generosity owed much to the fact that his mother didn’t consider Sigita a suitable girlfriend for her golden boy. Sigita had written him a letter, but without mentioning her condition. Her own mother sorted all mail outbound from Tauragė, and the airmail paper was so terribly, transparently thin.
She missed him. She missed him so much it made her breasts and her abdomen ache. She counted this longing as one more item on the list of sins she had omitted to tell Father Paulius about, but she had no plans to confess. Eventually