Chapter 5
Episode 5
The corridor is longer than I remember. They have repainted it, yes, but the same green that peels in the same places, like the skin of a fruit left too long in a Soviet summer. The fluorescent lights hum a low B-flat, and I count the tiles again: forty-seven from the bench to the fire door, exactly as it was in 1979, when my grandmother’s leg was taken.
The skeptic’s voice is still in my ear. Atheism is a disease, I had said. He laughed. You believe in ghosts, not God. I told him: Neither needs belief. They simply are. He walked away chewing gum that smelled of Soviet mint.
I close my eyes. The corridor becomes a river. On the river, a boat with no flag. In the boat, a man tapping — dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot — against the hull. Morzė, I whisper, and the word tastes like metal and old bread. The boat passes under a bridge where someone has carved: Čia nieko nėra. Here there is nothing.
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