TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Jaroslavas Melnikas

Perhaps he would have felt then (for the first time?) that there was someone behind the door, filling his space. Fortunately, such a situation would have been rare; it couldn’t have happened more than once because my father hardly played the violin, while I only spent a couple of hours a week on the grand piano. All of this worry was just conjecture and hypothesising, thank God. Whenever I felt any kind of need, I always knew where I could go. I would play music in the grand piano room. Everything you might have needed was there and not a thing more. There was a music stand in the corner, a shelf of sheet music, and a bust of Beethoven on the grand piano. On the walls were portraits of composers. And another thing was the acoustics (the walls had been specially treated). There was a vase of flowers on the windowsill. I like emptiness. You would never find a hairbrush next to Beethoven, or a fork or some glue. The hairbrush was in a cabinet in the bathroom, the fork was in the dining room. The tube of glue was in the drawer of my desk, next to some pins, paper clips and other stationery items. In the same way, my painting was focused on my studio: the canvasses, the paint, the thinners, the gypsum models and the picture frames – everything that created my special world. This space had nothing to do with music, or with forks or hairbrushes and paper clips. And so what if I only went down to the studio (which was

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