Episode 2atrofo taigi yra bomzas betting o Bružas suvokia terapija plaučiai per BBC arge šniokščia pervargimas skrepliai valdo o dvi žemės raganos betting savo senatvė sako ji jau nudibdigs bus mums jos auskarais bent į trusikus isidesim pasibaigė ir tos ką trobos ubages. Bet bomzai nėra nei namų pastatė betting be dantų nuvykę shudu apsisukęs ėjo depiliacijos juokėsi klaunu ir aiškino slauges4 kartus kuri turi eiti per dieną skambindami atseit pagalba turi ... Būti.. kur

The bomzas arrived in June, or perhaps he had always been there and I had simply learned to see him. He was a man whose age you could not determine because time had treated him like a piece of furniture left out in the rain. He built a shelter from scrap wood and tarpaulin behind the abandoned cooperative store, and the whole village watched him do it with the same detached curiosity they might have given a dog learning to open a gate. No one helped. No one stopped him. He hammered and sawed and cursed at the nails that bent in the stubborn wood, and when he was finished, he stood back and admired his work as if he had constructed a cathedral.

Bružas, the village's self-appointed intellectual, watched from across the street, leaning on his cane with the air of a man who had opinions about everything and authority over nothing. He was the one who explained to anyone who would listen that the bomzas was actually a professor from Vilnius who had lost everything in the collapse, that his lungs were ruined from years of teaching in unheated classrooms, that he coughed up phlegm the color of old tea and recited poetry between fits. Whether any of this was true, I never knew. Bružas had a way of inventing biographies for the people he observed, as if he were a novelist trapped in a body that could no longer hold a pen.

The two old women, whom I had privately begun to call the earth witches, spent their afternoons on a bench near the bus stop, their heads bent together like two mushrooms sharing a secret. They were sisters, or perhaps just old friends who had grown to resemble each other the way couples sometimes do. They wore identical black scarves and identical expressions of disapproval, and they spoke about the bomzas as if he were not a man but a natural disaster that had been visited upon them personally.

"He will die before the first frost," said the one on the left, whose name I later learned was Ona.

"Good riddance," said the other, whose name was Valerija. "And when he goes, we'll take his earrings and put them in our panties."

This was the kind of thing they said. They talked about death, about their own dying bodies, about the indignities of old age, with a frankness that made me feel both horrified and strangely comforted. They were not afraid of endings. They were planning for them the way other people planned for holidays.

"He's not going to die," Ona said, waving a hand at the bomzas, who was at that moment attempting to eat a piece of bread with no teeth, gumming it with the determination of a man who had forgotten what shame felt like. "He's too stubborn. He'll outlive us all, and then who will take care of us? We'll be the ones living in that shack."

"Speak for yourself," Valerija said. "I've already told my daughter she can have my good coat. The rest can burn."

The bomzas, oblivious to the attention, finished his bread and began walking toward the village center. He moved with a strange, shuffling gait, as if his body were a vehicle he no longer fully controlled. He had heard something about a free clinic, a visiting nurse who came once a week to the community hall, and he was determined to find her. He had been told he needed to have his lungs checked, that the coughing was getting worse, that the phlegm was now streaked with something that looked like rust.

But the clinic was closed. The nurse, a tired woman named Aldona who had seen too many summers like this one, had left early because her own mother was sick. The bomzas stood outside the locked door for a long time, his hand resting on the handle as if he could will it open. Then he turned around and walked back the way he had come, past the bench where the earth witches sat, past Bružas with his cane and his theories, past the young woman who had once dreamed of a magazine cover and now dreamed of nothing at all.

He stopped at the edge of the village, where the road turned to gravel and then to dirt, and he looked out at the fields that had not been planted that year. They stretched before him like a question no one had bothered to answer. He coughed, a deep, rattling sound that seemed to come from somewhere far below his chest, and he spat into the weeds.

The earth witches had been watching him the whole time. When he finally turned and shuffled back toward his shack, Ona elbowed Valerija and nodded in his direction.

"You see?" she said. "No teeth, no home, no sense. And they say we're the ones who need help."

Valerija laughed, a dry, crackling sound like paper burning. "Help," she repeated, as if tasting the word. "You know what they call help these days? A phone call. Four times a day, they call you to ask if you're still alive. 'Hello, are you breathing? Good, goodbye.' That's what they call care."

I had heard about this too. The new system, such as it was, involved volunteers calling the elderly to check on them, as if a voice through a telephone line could replace a hand on a forehead, a pot of soup left on a doorstep, a body in the next room. The calls came at regular intervals, four times a day, and the old people learned to answer with the same script: "I'm fine. No, I don't need anything. Thank you for calling." It was a performance, a ritual of mutual pretense, and everyone knew it.

"They think we're fools," Valerija said. "They think we don't know that a phone call is just a way to feel good about doing nothing."

Ona nodded. "My sister in Kaunas, she died last winter. They called her that morning. She said she was fine. By evening, she was gone. The phone was still ringing when they found her."

There was a silence then, the kind that settles over a conversation when death has been invited in and no one knows how to ask it to leave. The bomzas had reached his shack and was sitting on an overturned crate, his head in his hands. From a distance, he looked like a statue of grief, a monument to everything the village had lost and could not name.

Bružas, who had been listening to the old women with the careful attention of a man collecting material for a story he would never tell, cleared his throat.

"He went to the clinic, you know," he said. "Four times this week. Four times, and every time it was closed. They told him to call. They gave him a number to call, and he called, and a machine answered, and the machine told him to call back during business hours. But the business hours were the same hours the clinic was closed."

"Machines," Valerija spat. "Machines and telephones and forms in triplicate. That's all they know how to give us now."

I thought about the woman on the magazine cover, her perfect smile, her perfect life, her perfect world where problems were solved in a single photograph. I thought about how far that world was from this one, where a man with no teeth and no home could stand outside a locked door and not know what to do with his hands. I thought about how the longing I had felt when I first saw that cover had not been a longing for that woman's life, exactly, but for the idea that such a life was possible, that somewhere, somehow, there was a place where things made sense.

But here, in Klisto, things did not make sense. The bomzas built a home out of scraps, and the village watched him do it. The earth witches planned their deaths with the same practicality they had once used to plan their gardens. Bružas invented stories to explain the inexplicable, and the nurse went home to care for her mother, and the phone rang four times a day, and everyone said they were fine.

The bomzas stood up from his crate and walked to the edge of his tarpaulin shelter. He looked at the sky, which was the color of old pewter, and he opened his mouth as if to say something. But what came out was not words. It was a cough, deep and wet and violent, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of all the years he had spent breathing the wrong air, eating the wrong food, sleeping in the wrong places. He bent over, his hands on his knees, and spat into the dust.

The earth witches watched. Bružas watched. I watched. No one moved to help him, because there was nothing any of us could do. The clinic was closed. The phone was ringing somewhere. The machines were recording messages that no one would ever listen to.

When the coughing fit passed, the bomzas straightened up and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at us, all of us, the old women and the old man and the young woman who had once dreamed of a different life, and he smiled. It was a toothless smile, a wreck of a smile, but it was real.

"Don't worry," he said, his voice rough as gravel. "I'm fine. I don't need anything. Thank you for asking."

And then he turned and went back into his shack, and the tarpaulin flap fell closed behind him, and we were left standing in the gray afternoon light, each of us alone with the weight of what we had not done.

That night, I sat in my room with the magazine open on my lap. The woman on the cover was still smiling, her teeth perfect, her skin luminous, her world intact. But I could not see her anymore. All I could see was the bomzas, standing outside a locked door with his hand on the handle, waiting for a help that would never come. All I could hear was the phone ringing, four times a day, and the old women answering with the same script: "I'm fine. No, I don't need anything. Thank you for calling."

I closed the magazine and set it aside. The summer stretched before me, long and hot and full of nothing. But somewhere, in the space between the longing and the reality, between the magazine cover and the tarpaulin shack, I felt something stir. It was not hope, exactly. It was something smaller and more fragile, a recognition that the world was full of people who had been forgotten, and that forgetting them was a choice I was making every day.

I did not know yet what I would do with that recognition. I did not know if it would lead anywhere or change anything. But I knew, with a certainty that surprised me, that I would not forget the bomzas. I would not forget the earth witches or Bružas or the nurse who went home to care for her mother. I would carry them with me, these people who had been left behind, and I would try to find a way to tell their stories.

The phone rang somewhere in the house, four times, and then stopped. Someone had answered. Someone had said they were fine.

I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling, and I waited for the next thing to happen.