Max Fry’s "Cards on the Table," a summary

This 2016 collection dissolves the rigid boundaries between physical reality and the hidden underbelly of everyday urban commutes. The characters overcome death through creativity, sincere memory, and lucid dreaming. Melancholic figures find themselves stuck on the threshold between physical existence and absolute nothingness. They seek salvation in art or random miracles. The book accurately captures the fragility of human consciousness, teetering on the brink of destruction.

This work is a retrospective compilation. The stories are borrowed from various authorial cycles. These include "Tales of Old Vilnius," "Winds, Angels, and People," "The Big Cart," "About Love and Death," "The First Line," and "The Book of Sentences." The anthology forms a single text, summing up the writer’s early narrative experiments.

Violation of physical laws

In the title story, "Cards on the Table," a nameless hero saves Vilnius from disintegration. The man sits on the hot tiled roof of a three-story building on Etmonų Street, having just drunk bitter beer with his friend Stefan. He chooses a meaningful existence, willingly sacrificing himself to save the city from the approaching white solar horror. The hero is reborn through the music of the clarinet.

"What Color Are Your Dances" describes choreographer Frida’s studio, located on the first floor of an old gray building on Raugiklos Street. Ballroom dancing lessons cost only ten litas. The studio’s students, who have experienced severe personal tragedies, restore their shattered psyches by visualizing vibrant colors as they move. Former musician Felix, grieving the death of his friend Lis, dances a cool emerald, feeling part of a colored fog and regaining the ability to breathe.

The monologue "We Lived in Tents and Washed Ourselves with Beads" reads like a poetic penitence. The hero stands before a red-ochre door on the third floor. He apologizes to his beloved for her cold hands and half a bottle of dark rum. The drenched traveler promises to reimagine their shared history, molding new, strong bodies from soft felt and glittering shards of mirror.

Illusions of Memory

The young man from the story "The Krakow Demon" makes a living as a living statue in the central Market Square. A homemade long robe of silver fabric, sewn by his wife, Jana, accidentally transforms the former Warsaw University of Technology student into the town’s local miracle worker. Spanish tourists drop hundred-euro notes into his jar, healing their serious ailments with the simple touch of a silver glove.

The lyrics to "From Scraps, from Rags" transport us to a snowy evening in Helsinki. Terminally ill, Yuri drinks strong glögi and receives a strange, homemade rag doll with an embroidered third eye from the Finnish giantess Tuuli. Meeting his own Death — a creepy figure in a blue jacket — on tram number six, he gives the doll as a Christmas present and receives a lucky reprieve.

In the short story "Sweet Plum," a trip to Odessa in an ancient car the color of spilled mercury is accompanied by a strange jumble of other people’s memories. The narrator escapes the disintegration of his personality by smoking plum-scented tobacco. The ritual of smoking helps him stay in the present moment.

The plot of "Cutlet" revolves around a long-standing childhood trauma. A twelve-year-old boy, submitting to the unyielding will of his cook mother, abandons a fluffy kitten with a red ear in a wet, cold park. More than twenty years later, a grown man returns to his hometown to find an old boxwood bush, symbolically complete the task, and tuck the animal under his jacket.

Messengers of the Invisible

The artist Irma from the story "Karlson, Who" forms a strange friendship with the marginal genius Kelly, who smokes thin cigarettes. Nighttime walks on slippery, wet rooftops save the heroine from the despair of communal life. After Kelly’s death from an overdose, Irma moves to Vilnius and meets her friend’s doppelganger at a delicatessen on Stikliu Street.

The story "Say Nothing" tells the story of Tanya, who is forced to guard fish in St. Petersburg. On New Year’s Eve, her old friend Bobka comes to visit, hangs hundreds of sparkling garlands from the ceiling, brings a Christmas tree, and buys tangerines. Later, the stunned girl learns from her friend Alexey that Bobka died back in November.

The protagonist of "Geshechka" accidentally discovers the compact camera of deceased photographer Mark Glints. Photos of snow-covered rooftops with unfolded mirrors capture an altered optical reality. A cameraman photographs the city in a blizzard, on all fours. Soon, Fabian Faich, the materialized angel of death, clutches his heart with icy fingers.

In the fairy tale "Hide and Seek," a little girl hides from her friend Olka in a ruined cellar in an abandoned lot. Crawling on all fours through a dark, damp tunnel, she emerges on the banks of the underground River Styx. The frightened child gives the angry ferryman Charon a three-kopeck coin.

Cities and Wanderers

Venice emerges as a fully-fledged, living subject in the novella "Everyone Would Like It." Local resident Tony whispers to a visiting friend that the ancient city materializes tourists’ secret fantasies. The perfect morning of the carefree, long-legged Stella in Campo di San Silvestro turns out to be merely a vivid projection of the thoughts of Valya, a tired math teacher from Gomel, smoking in the entryway.

The protagonist of the story "When the Saints Go Marching In" hears American jazz on the Pont Saint-Louis in Paris. An elderly musician with a trombone looks like a dead ringer for his father, who was shot and killed in the Balkans seventeen years earlier. Noticing that old people don’t cast shadows from streetlights at ten o’clock in the evening, the man realizes the absence of physical death.

"A Conversation in German" brings together five residents of the capital in a basement esoteric shop. The writer Fabian Feich, wearing pink shorts, teaches them his native language, gathering material for a future book. It soon becomes clear that Feich is a conduit for souls, carefully taking the life of a centenarian, Greta Franzevna, to ensure her transition to another state of matter.

Loss and oblivion

In the text "River Amelies, Reckless," a man who has lost his wife Lyuska and child steps off a train onto the platform. His destructive delusions of forty-second degree veracity, in the form of a station cafe, threaten the delicate fabric of the universe. Patrolmen of the Border Code give the hero cold water from the River Lethe to drink, granting him a saving oblivion.

An ancient myth is ironically reimagined in "Helen’s Cat." The Spartan queen bitterly laments to her furry companion the death of her beloved Paris during the six-year siege of Troy. The pragmatic cat considers human passions to be a fleeting folly, preferring to enjoy the peace and catch mice.

The narrator of the novella "All the Gold of the Roads" uses a numerical generator to choose a French island for his summer vacation. Stuck in the empty Ponte Leccia station with temperatures hovering above 37 degrees Celsius, he descends into melancholy. A youthful trip to Karolino-Bugaz by the Black Sea comes to mind, where the heavenly dome suddenly transformed into the glittering mirrors of the mythical Lane.

Overcoming the Limit

The Riga episode, "The Most Handsome Consul in the World," describes the friends’ grief over their friend Marik, who drowned in India. Observing the mysterious androgynous female consul in a white coat, the characters unexpectedly discover inscriptions from their childhood games on the stone walls, written in the fictional language of Yokki. These messages help them find solace and come to terms with their friend’s death.

The work "From a Goat’s Point of View" offers a zoological perspective on the well-known problem of crossing a body of water. The goat, finding itself in the silent boat of Charon, loses its animal fear, accepting the dark, otherworldly shore as a natural extension of its vegetative route.

In the road story "Strange’s Inzynite," Tom’s friends and the narrator are driving to Gdansk at night. Their car plunges into an abnormally dense fog at a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. Loudly singing Frank Sinatra songs, the characters tear themselves out of the enveloping emptiness and back onto the paved road.

"Head and Lyre Floated on the Hebru" features an instrumental concert of early music at Trakai Castle. Live flutist Rodrigo plays a complex score alongside the spirit of Roger’s dead friend. Acoustic vibrations blur the insurmountable boundaries between physical states of being, leaving only pure musical harmony.

The collection concludes with the miniature "Hawa Shimali, Hawa Janubi." The various world winds are personified. In the dead of night, powerful elements gather at the edge of the desert, taking the form of playful children. A divine voice calls them home for supper.