TE15 Lithuanian Honey Cake

Danutė Kalinauskaitė

means. He was more like the beggar invited to share a meal with you who, while eating and drinking, doing you a favor, starts throwing his bones by your feet, or even better, over your shoulder, entertaining the guests, even hitting the host in the nose. You politely offer him silver cutlery, and he pulls out a jack-knife right in front of your face… The judge starts to feel annoyed over this showdown. It ’s as if he were forced to look at himself with binoculars turned backwards, seeing himself from a distant perspective, from the beginning of the road. Yet he has long since been on the middle of his road. He had even begun to feel the worm of un-fulfillment gnawing at him. A black-headed worm – every day something was annoyingly lacking. Something indeterminate. The vitamins of life, or something. Colors. Scents. Salt. Pepper. When he really looked hard at himself in the mirror, thinking he were gazing at his very own essence, at the heart of his personhood, he only managed to see a man suffering from chronic constipation. Sometimes he would take a drink – not just anything, but Baron Gaston Legrand Bas Armagnac, or Diplomatico Ambassador – and one time he ending up taking it not on one leg, but on all four, rolling with his robe down the stairs of the courthouse like a sheaf of rye. Thankfully, his fall was only seen by the Gediminas Tower and the Vytis on a horse, so he wasn’t so worried about it. The reason? Routine, the drab gray of it all, years

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