TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

The Grand Piano Room

He’s lost it.’ Immediately somebody hit me in the face, painfully. The light went out. ‘Come,’ I heard my wife whisper. ‘I told you to go to sleep. So now you got it. People have work tomorrow.’ ‘Lucy,’ I said, moving away from the snoring Konkin and leaning over towards my wife. ‘Do you at least understand what is going on?’ ‘What?’ ‘It’s hell, not life.’ Tears were running from my eyes and blood from my nose. ‘It is as it is,’ my wife said. ‘What are you unhappy about?’ ‘Lucy, we can’t live like this. In the same room, all together.’ ‘And where can we go? Would you prefer to be on the street, in the cold?’ ‘But... Why? Can’t they build their own . . .’ ‘From what? On what money? Go to sleep, you trouble- causer.’ She said that tenderly and I realised she thought me a fool who didn’t understand what he wanted. ‘And our children?’ ‘What? They’re sleeping on the upper beds, with their children. Tomorrow you’ll have to mend Verochka’s bag, you’ll have to get up earlier.’

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