TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Jaroslavas Melnikas

and the snooker room. They lived in that one possible reality, while I knew there was another. I soon realised that in the living room there was not only the television and my desk, but also a sofa bed on which my parents slept at night. Their bedroom had somehow disappeared. They had put so much e ort into supporting me that they had never had one of their own. This I could never believe. I clearly remembered my father and mother going to their own bedroom. My father had had his own office! Something had tampered with reality, something had moved, broken down. What in fact saved me, was a certain mistrust with which I gazed at the reality around me. I felt, I understood and I saw that there was a different life. And I was very well informed about it. If I wasn’t breathing it, how then would I have such specific knowledge about it, such clear feelings? My surroundings, as far as I could make out, seemed to be changing faster and faster: because of this I was almost certain that it was not an ‘eternal wheel’, but rather a oneway process with its own logic, which was rushing towards its destination. Only I did not know where that destination was. Once, when I discovered we didn’t have a separate dining room any more (we had meals in the kitchen, by the cooker), and later, when I realised there was no nursery (for some time, unknown to me, our children had been sleeping in our bedroom!), I grew calmer somehow. It was so absurd,

30