TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Danutė Kalinauskaitė

he waited until the postal worker left – the money was in a rectangular purse, something like an envelope, placed inside an aluminum kettle which was itself secreted on a rafter. She reached it (he could clearly see this through a gap in the leaves) by climbing up a bit, with trembling hands, struggling… She only heard them when they came down from the rafter with a crash. “The wretches! One was brown, the other green,” she managed to say in the kitchen, her hair in a braid like a radish tail, her eye twitching from a tic, to two militia officers who had just come in. The neighbors were already gathering down below – events like this, after all, break the daily routine, even the most neighborly of neighbors, as is well known, likes the smell of our blood. The ensuing discussion that usually flares up and spreads to broader themes: “Politicians are all swindlers and crooks,” “A state of liars,” “Thieves,” “Pedophiles!” – everyone has something to say and flays the hides of those up high, among the clouds, next to God, where you can’t reach them, choose them, or spit on them, though you want to… Hunched over, the two ran along fences through gardens, sunflowers and sunchokes, until they stopped to catch their breath in the winter-cress jungle of a garden, or maybe it was Sosnowsky’s hogweed, which back then no one feared. The brown one, the elder, breathlessly pulled out the loot. But in the crocheted,

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