Episode 2

In the morning a nurse came with a tray. Her name was Irena, or perhaps Irina — I never learned which, and it seemed rude to ask, as if the question itself would betray how little I trusted names anymore. She set down the tray with the metallic click of institutional compassion and said, "You were talking in your sleep."

"Was I? In what language?"

"I couldn't tell." She smiled. "It sounded like all of them at once."

That was the story of my life, I thought. All of them at once. The Soviet years, the Lithuanian years, the years after — every era stacked inside me like plates in a cupboard, and every plate chipped in the same place. I remembered a man they called Grybas, not because he was anything like a mushroom but because he had the shape of one — soft, pale, growing in the dark. He was a durnius, a fool, one of the many fools who had run things then. He stood behind his desk in Vilnius and explained to me, with genuine conviction, that the USSR could not possibly permit me to speak — not to speak directly, not to speak through a screen, not to speak in any virtual corridor that might exist beyond their reach.

"There is no virtual," he said.

"There is no other way," I said.

The beeping in the room quickened for a moment. I pressed the oxygen mask to my face and breathed.

Jesus, I thought. Christ. There is no simpler road, no other road, than through you. And yet here I am, still cutting.

The cuts were the worst part. Not the documents themselves — those were just paper, and paper forgives nothing but endures almost everything — but the cutting of my own life into pieces. I had done it deliberately. A life in slices, arranged for survival. This piece for the television, this piece for the police, this piece for the woman I used to be before the world demanded she disappear. I had spent so many years cutting that I forgot what the whole had looked like. Maybe I had never known. Maybe there was no whole, only the cuts, only the careful placement of fragment against fragment, a mosaic made of evidence.

The television in the corner of the room was on, muted. I watched the closed captions crawl across the screen. Something about Middleton. The BBC saying he was no longer a dictator but a prisoner. It seemed impossible — that a man who had once held everything could now hold nothing but a cell. But I knew better than most: the difference between dictator and prisoner is only a matter of timing. Both are trapped. Both are watched. Both are alone in rooms like this one.

I thought about the police. All my life I had known them — not as individuals, not as men in uniforms, but as a presence, a breath on the back of the neck. You learn to feel it. You learn to walk as if you are not being followed, to shop as if you have nothing to hide, to sleep as if the door could not be opened with a key you never had. They were always there, a step behind, patient as weather. In the old days I used to imagine what would happen when they finally caught me. They would kill me, of course — that was the shape of it, the simple shape, the shape they liked best. But they never did. They came, they questioned, they took my documents, they cut my life into pieces for me — and then they let me go.

Why? Because I had a mother.

Only a mother knows you that well. Only a mother can look at you and see the child you were, the one you tried to bury under all those fragments. She knew I was not what they said I was. She knew I was not a bandit, not a conspirator, not whatever name they had written in their files. She knew me the way you know a wound — by having watched it heal, by having dressed it, by having whispered over it in the dark. When they came to the house, she stood in the door and would not move. "She is not here," she said, and somehow they believed her. They always believed her. She was that kind of woman — the kind whose lies sounded like truth because she had decided they were true.

They could cut everything from me, I thought. They could cut my papers, my name, my voice. But they could not cut her from me. And because she was in me, whole and unsliced, I could never be entirely reduced.

In the afternoon a doctor came. He was young, with the clean hands of a man who had never filed a document in his life. He asked me how I felt. I said I felt like a pile of paper that someone had left in the rain. He laughed — a short, professional laugh — and wrote something on his clipboard.

"Any pain?" he asked.

"Only when I remember."

He nodded, as if that were a normal answer, as if every patient in this ward carried the same weight of memory. Perhaps they did. Perhaps that was why the beeping never stopped — the monitors were not keeping time for our hearts but for our pasts, beeping out the seconds we had lost, the hours we would never get back.

"Rest," he said. "Let the pieces settle."

But pieces never settle. That is the problem with pieces. They shift. They rearrange themselves in the night. They form new patterns, new accusations, new names. I have spent my life learning to read the patterns, and I am tired of reading. I want to look at a blank page and see nothing. I want to hear a silence that does not contain footsteps.

The evening came. The light in the room turned orange, then grey, then blue. The television was off now, and the beeping was the only voice. I held the oxygen mask to my face and breathed the way my mother taught me — deep, slow, as if the air itself were something holy.

There is no other Lithuania, I thought. There never was. They tried to make it into something else — a province, a memory, a bad joke in a Moscow office — but it remained Lithuania, stubborn and unrepeatable, like a thumbprint, like a heartbeat. And I remained her daughter. Cut into pieces, yes. Stitched back together by my own hand, yes. But whole enough. Whole enough to know that no police force, no document, no prison cell, no dictatorship and no democracy can take the shape of a person and file it away.

I closed my eyes. The oxygen hissed. The monitors beeped.

And behind me, for the first time in years, I felt nothing.

No breath on the neck. No footsteps. No shadow.

Just the white room, and the pieces, and the long quiet work of staying alive.