TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

The Grand Piano Room

that I was going off the rails. Probably for the first time in my life.

4 Meanwhile, my family behaved as if nothing had changed. They would drop in my office, not at all surprised that it was cramped and chaotic (the more I fought against the chaos, the more it enslaved me). As if it had always been like that. And I didn’t doubt that was what they thought. I was afraid to even mention the studio to them, to ask them whether it used to exist or not. It was clear, anyway, what they would have said. They thought it was normal, from what I could see, that one room should serve as a grand piano room, an office and a studio. It was this that shook me most. If they had been, say, as exasperated as I was by how cramped it was in there, and said something about the piano room, or about the studio... But, the closest they came to this was when they said things like, ‘It’s true, it is a bit cramped in here; we should replace the grand piano with an upright. That’s the solution.’ Replace my grand piano with an upright! I felt like I had begun to disappear, bit by bit. I sensed that something undefined was emerging in place of me; a ball of nerves. I was not clear what. And that was worst of it. How could I paint when in front of my eyes there stood a grand piano, as well as my writing desk? They were different, totally different

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