INTROITUS

A house.  Just like all the other houses surrounding it – a split level.  
On the verandah tomatoes ripen; they will be picked before the first frost.  
A maple grows beside the house. Its leaves have already turned.  
Just like all the other maples.
Dova lives here. The traitor's wife.
This is the nest of Balys Arminas.  Not his mother's arms.

Introitus is a coming together – white chalk marking the threshold.
Introitus is a touching of the wound with one's palm.
After that the ritual begins:  Meditation.
(She loves her husband! She loves him!)
She loves the traitor.
But will it matter whom we loved?  Maybe it's enough that we loved –
that we were even able to love.
Like mollusks trapped in an ice floe, we warmed ourselves by panting our lips thawed.
Trees, birds, beasts:  they were crueler than us.
The oceans tore at the continents with their teeth, thunder split 
        screaming glaciers, suicidal fish swam the marshes, roots of grass 
        strangled one another within the darkness of the earth.
But we were often overcome with gentleness – even for one another.
Maybe we were another (unknown, unknowable) father's crowned children?  
Maybe we did not inherit everything from the earth?
Our skin is hopelessly bare (and that gaze into the stars).
Our playthings are pathetic (space shuttles, pyramids, cathedrals).
The universe chuckles. But we calmed ourselves.  Orphans are always the objects of ridicule.  
It's common.

Everything was holier than we were: clouds, fauna, bees.
Beasts mated sadly, honestly, not desiring shameful proximity.
New moons spun in the expanses of foggy space and growing lonely rolled off into the distance.
Everyone was holier than we were.  They were born quietly, they died alone, 
lived keeping a respectful distance from one another.
But we were greedy and our love could not be sated.
When our souls met they would wrap around each other like ivy, sucking up everything.  
Oh soul, oh captured soul, be my ransom!  We'll make love, stranger-soul, until 
                                                                                                your soul fuses with mine.
And this is why we need to remember one another's crimes. 
It is like breeding a blossoming bud.
Like the stigmata.

* * * *

A house.  Just like all the other houses surrounding it – split-level.
Dova lives here.  A woman who has taken on the stigmata.
That is why her soul is about to be sliced open like a fish.
Like the moment when the fishermen rips out the pulsating liver together 
with its bloody stones.
Her soul will be cracked open like a nut.  And out of the shiny wooden shell 
the center will fall, long tortured by dark, hidden diseases.
At this time Dova is preparing dinner.  The kitchen is probably over there, 
where a light reflects against the ceiling.
The sound of piano music wafts out the window.  The Arminas twins, girls, 
are playing in the living room.  Four hands play "Solveig's Song".
Dova raises her girls nicely.
Still, her soul will lose its leaves and before the sun black welts will appear – 
hacked into the trunk.

Right now Dova is placing bread, meat, vegetables, and milk on the table.

It is time to eat.
(But where is the Arminas's son Liucijus?  Their first-born?)
Everything in Dova's kitchen is cozy and homey – the speckled pots, shiny creamers, 
the spice rack, the pepper mill.  A yellow sponge hangs from the spout of the teapot – 
it is used to catch droplets of tea – it is cut in the shape of a butterfly 
                                                   and has little wire whiskers.  A fun sponge!  
It is cozy in the kitchen.

The coffin stands in the bedroom.  At the foot of the bed.
Be damned Dova, traitor's wife.  Before your bed a coffin will stand, always. You
                                                alone will see it and you alone will know who is lying in it. 
(Who put the curse on her? When? Where?  Maybe no one did ...)
But the invisible coffin is there.
And Dova knows who is lying in the coffin – Leonas.  The man who once loved her.
The bedroom lamps are covered with apple-colored fringe – green eyelashes.
Light plays luxuriously on the lovers' bedding – the traitor's and his wife's.  
(Dova stretches a soft lamb's hide under her sside, so that the hide's curly texture
might give her body more pleasure.)

A triptych mirror, crocheted bedcovers, silk sheets, fragrant skin 
                                                          creams, crystal bottles of perfume.
And the coffin.
Always.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis


BIRD CHERRIES

My mother was slender – like the bird-cherry.
Heavy with me, her misfortune ripened.
Wide bowls filled with wild flowers –
The yellow painted shutters remained 
Closed – she was waiting for me.

I came during the very Consecration –
When all the roads are empty, the organ still.
Throughout the night my cradle filled
With jagged, fallen, harvest stars.
And my mother cried out bitterly.
For the first time.
Because I had broken away, 
Like a landslide and will rush
Down.  Without her.

Really –
She holds my hands and will not let them slip.
Autumn orchards burn red.
Wild drakes fly south – their wings
Smolder bronze.
It is then that I say good-bye.
The path through the rushes hunches in.
The sedges are like sharpened knives.
Toothless trunks gape at me.
My joints shake.
But I do not turn back.

Translated by Laima Sruoginis

Birutė Pukelevičiūtė is one of the most colorful, and diverse talents in the Lithuanian émigré community. Pukelevičiūtė is an actress, director, poet, playwright, novelist, author of children's stories and plays, and a translator (well known for her rhymed translation of the opera Carmina Burana from Latin into Lithuanian). She has published two collections of poetry, four novels, one collection of short stories, and a collection of plays with émigré presses. In 1944, after the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania, Pukelevičiūtė was forced to escape to the West. Her family was trapped in Danzig during the bombings and the Soviet invasion. She managed to escape to the West, but not before living in Soviet refugee camps in the Russian occupied zone of Germany. Much of the material of her work returns to the trauma of her shattered youth in war-torn Europe. The fragment translated here, Introitus, is from Pukelevičiūtė's post-modern dramatic monologue Mass for a Traitor's Wife. The play is a meditation on the fate of Balys Arminas, a partisan fighter in Lithuania during the post-war period, who betrays his best friend, a fellow partisan, to the Soviets, in order to be able to escape to the West with Dova, his friend's beloved. Fifty years later, living a comfortable life in the suburbs of Chicago, Balys Arminas is diagnosed with cancer.