TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Jaroslavas Melnikas

I had that I wasn’t going mad; nobody could explain how I could have painted them if I had spent my entire life here, sharing a room with my parents, my wife and children. God himself had given me this sign so that I didn’t fall into despair. He had saved the evidence, so that I wouldn’t believe in the life I was living at that moment. ‘Dad, why are you whimpering here?’ I suddenly heard my daughter’s voice. ‘It’s bad enough as it is. You need to do something about your nerves, I noticed a long time ago.’ ‘Jurij Vladimirovich,’ the man with a beard interrupted, ‘I know a psycho-neurologist personally. I do, I swear.’ Without a word I went back out into the corridor. In the living room my wife and my father, who seemed half asleep, were waiting for me. So the Konkins lived in our bedroom. I stopped midway down the corridor: that meant I had nowhere to go. (8) The worst thing was that I had become the very essence of irritability. From morning till night, I suffered constantly from this irritation. The sobering thought that everything that was happening to me was not true, not serious, lasted but for a moment; it would disappear suddenly, giving way to prickliness and anger. For longer stretches of time, I did not feel like myself;

40