Chapter 4
Episode 4as ne stoveti lifte suvestine
Kur juodas pragaras litargas grybas
The day after Kristina’s kitchen fell silent, I took the long way home. The elevator in our building had been broken for months, a fact my mother Onute accepted with a shrug and a muttered curse about the landlord’s soul. But the staircase was not empty that afternoon. Halfway up the fourth-floor landing, I found Steve sitting on the bottom step, his tool belt undone in his lap, his hands black with grease from some phantom repair. He looked up at me with the tired patience of a man who had spent his life fixing things that could not be held.
“Juodas pragaras,” he said, and I didn’t know if he meant the elevator shaft or the day itself. He never swore unless the weight of something invisible pressed on his chest. I sat beside him, and we listened to the building breathe—the creak of pipes, the distant hum of a refrigerator, the faint sound of a radio playing somewhere in the basement. That was the year he started calling the forest behind the old factory “Litargas,” a word that meant nothing to me then, a private name for a place where mushrooms grew like bruised knuckles from the earth. He would go there after his shifts, returning with a basket of dark-capped fungi that my mother fried in butter, and I would watch the smoke curl from the pan like a story she refused to tell.
That night, after Steve fell asleep on the couch with the newspaper over his face, I walked the empty corridor to the broken elevator. The doors were wedged open, revealing the dark shaft beyond. I did not step inside. Instead, I stood at the threshold and let the cool air rise from the deep, carrying the smell of rust and damp concrete. Somewhere below, in the black hell of the maintenance pit, a single drip marked time. I thought of litargas—the word, the place, the mushroom that fed us through winters no one acknowledged. And I understood, for the first time, that my father’s silence was not emptiness. It was a cellar where he stored the things that could not survive in daylight.