This is a Fairytale Life

 MARIA MANOTSKOVA

- Mom, the sky is a cup!

He was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes, squinting because of the unexpectedly generous Lithuanian sun.

The frogs were singing outside.

I’d never thought that it could be so warm and bright here. The country of the mossy Ciurlionis, whose pictures were used as illustrations for psychiatry textbooks.

- A cup? Honey, it’s eight in the morning!

- Mom, the sky’s round, as if a cup was laid on our trees.

- Go to sleep. I’m sleeping.

- All right, but don’t interrupt me. The sky’s like a cup…

- Yes, different from Moscow, you mean?

- Yes, it’s round!

- And now I’m asleep.

- I love you, - he said warmly, closing his eyes. - I love every-everybody! Papa, and Hera, and grandma, and grandpa, and Rimas, and his cow! And the snails! Everybody! I love even the evil people, even the president!

Now I was completely awake. My heart felt love towards him, as sometimes you feel your usually unnoticed leg or a hand, looking at it with wonder and moving your fingers. “So there you go, - you think, - that is my leg!”

I didn’t want to live, let alone getting up.

With a practiced inner gesture, I focused on a single thing: I need to eat, what would I like? If I manage now to think of something tempting enough, I will be able to get up. Cheese. Toasts. Coffee. Most importantly, I have to eat as soon as possible, so that I can take the pill, and then it will be easier almost instantly - both because of serotonin and… whatever. Most importantly, I have to start.

- You go to the bathroom, love.

- Mom, guess, what movie am I from now?

- Go to pee.

- I can tell in your ear.

- Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. And it is me who goes to pee.

- Mom, don’t go!

- Hera will stay with you. Hera, come! Good doggy!

After the breakfast, when every little domestic care had been seen to, and every little ritual had been observed, I started to feel oppressed. I had to decide whether to go to the beach, to cook lunch, or simply to show him a cartoon.

The beach and the lunch were devastating because of inevitability and appropriateness. A child should be fed and taken for a walk. The only thing left for me to rebel against, a shred of reality. The cartoon caused an opposite but not less powerful feeling of guilt. Let alone, that I would have liked to postpone this opportunity of a 20 minute alone time with a cigarette and a cup of tea till later in the afternoon.

I decided to go to the local shop - the center of the village life - to buy ice cream.

-       Laba diena! - saying hello in Lithuanian was one of my usual attempts to fit in.

The saleswoman smiled patronizingly: “Laba diena”. Out of the corner of my eye I saw another customer. Rubber slippers, boxers, a tank top. Holding a bottle of vodka. I pushed my son towards the fridges with ice cream, hoping to outwait till he went away. It was an ill luck, he didn’t seem to leave, talking to the saleswoman in incomprehensible Lithuanian. He laughed. She laughed. What can you laugh at for so long? I fixedly studied the unsophisticated assortment of a village store: bread, soap, preserves, gumboots. The frogs tootled mournfully: uhoo, uhoo! The man wouldn’t leave. Continuing to avoid his eyes, I finally moved to the counter, awaiting gloomily for the social counteraction to start. According to the locals, we’re crazy: who else would come from Moscow to such a back-country to buy a former kolkhoz office as a holiday home, so we’re constantly put on a display. Had they known my eldest son’s ideas about repopulating the country by Jews and rebirth of Yiddish language! The inevitable followed: the saleswoman told the man we’re from Moscow, and he started conversation with Jasha. Next moment he offered my lovely neat baby to hug goodbye. I didn’t have time to think of what to do or to open my mouth to mumble anything, when my son was already kissing him on both cheeks. The man left.

-       Do you know, who was that? - asked the saleswoman enthusiastically.

-       Ermm, - said I.

-       That was, how to say it in Russian, the very chief headman of the district! He goes to his mother’s country house, she has a house nearby. A good person, he is!

“Oopsy, that’s an embarrassment. I should know better than avoiding looking people in the eyes and acting on bias[KK1] ,” I was musing, waving the wasps away with my sticky hands. We’re sitting on a lopsided twined veranda. Jasha finished his ice cream, wiped his hands neatly on his pants, and set to play with his stamper markers, which left sickly cute animal images when pressed on paper. “Oh, my! Who would have given him this muck,” - I thought.

There were no sounds of people or cars. Only birds and the frogs from the nearby swamp, tootling their eerie song, as if someone was blowing in a bottle. After all, it’s amazing how a person can be at once unwilling to live her life and rejoice in the life around her. 

Now I’ve almost completely recovered myself, at least I’ve found the very rope to hold on to. Then, in Lithuania, it had just stopped to seem that there was no rope at all. A year valid antidepressant order, which I had received a couple of months before going to Lithuania, scared me and at the same time made me feel important. I’d been afraid of losing myself, letting the drugs meddle in my life. I’d been full of prejudices, but the icy suicidal nightmare had been even more frightening, and so the drugs won.

-       Mom, look! I made a pirate flag!

Jasha stamped hundreds of smiley doggies and kittens of different bright colors on a slightly wrinkled and stained with chocolate piece of paper. After looking harder, you could see an outline of a skull and bones.

-       Wow, I like it very much, especially the eye sockets, they are so expressive!

-       Oh yeah, this is horrible murderer’s bones!

-       Fine, let’s go help me with the lunch, you can cut the cabbage. And after we can go to the lake, and then watch “Totoro” together, deal?

-       Deal! A patch across the eye! A scar across the skull! This is a fairytale life, I tell you! - my son was singing this pirate song he loved so much. His singing was roaring and abrupt, but rather in tune.

And suddenly I realized that I can manage, that the day runs by itself, as a well-built wooden toy motor train on wooden railtrack. Sometimes it jumps on edges, sometimes stops or even falls down. This isn’t a high-speed train, it’s not even a commuter train. It’s just a wooden train on wooden tracks, which moves thanks to a small battery. But I (by myself!) can slow it. I can push it, and the most important is that the tracks are built by me. And I can cautiously rebuild them.

Masha Manotskova was born in Leningrad, USSR. For over than a decade she worked as a researcher and a journalist specializing in human rights, discrimination and right-wing violence in Russia. In 2016, she started to write fiction in Russian language, mostly short stories and plays, but with occasional pieces of poetry. Her stories were selected to be published in short story anthologies of the Creative Writing School (Moscow). One of her plays was included in the long lists of two prominent Russian drama competitions, “Lubimovka” and “Remarka”. She also works as a translator from English to Russian and translates her own proze into English. Her works can be found on https://www.facebook.com/ManotskovaM. The author fled Russia during the first days of the war because she did not want to risk her children becoming soldiers and from exhaustion of the role of Kassandra.