I wasn’t disappointed. I was rather happy about it, to be honest. Can’t say I’d been sitting around every morning waiting for people from this trendy magazine to call me and ask me to talk to them about my apartment. But it didn’t surprise me when they did. I have things to say, after all, things to teach and explain.

I have things to show too. Here’s a desk. What does it tell you about its owner? Clean surface and a laptop. In other words, not too much intrigue there, and at this realization I’m suddenly annoyed. They tend to take pictures of desks and present the readers with spicy details. A faience dolphin, a hand-made grandfather wallet, or even an emphatically liberal little thing – a Bart Simpson fridge magnet. 

I opened the drawer. Everything was just as perfectly tidy inside as on the outside. I took a brand-new mechanical calculator from a special box where I kept all kinds of small measuring instruments. Great stuff – you press the button, that’s one. You press it again, that’s two. Flight attendants and event organizers use this kind of calculator to count people. The future I intended for this device is to count something else. What if they ask me what kind of future? Well, I’ll reply, I need the calculator for… Later – I’ll think of something later. It resembled a football referee’s whistle lying there impudently on the plain desk. It looked like a symbol of an unknown ideology. Even worse, a lone calculator could transmit an unwanted message about me using tools of hard sciences – statistics, in this case – to compensate for the softness of my humanities-based research.

The device went back to the drawer. Not for long. Giving it a moment’s thought, I decided – yes, I do want to legitimize philology through mathematics, and no, it’s not something to hide. I also remembered a tellable story to go with it. I bought the calculator in a curiosity shop. I was a little surprised at the package it came in. A piece of polymerized cardboard announced that I was holding a Licznik podrywacza in my hands. Nice, I thought to myself. Don’t mess with the Poles. A calculator for a bomber. In a moment, I realized I had read it wrong, adding one extra letter – Licznik porywacza, a calculator for picking up girls. On the other side of the package, I found a description that informed me about the device’s brilliant potential to count girls I’ve picked up. At home, I discovered that the misread podrywacz translates to the less ominous kidnapper instead of terrorist. Should this come up in the journalist’s questions, I’ll explain how well the Polish retailers managed to rebrand – no, rename?... Reappropriate? Appropriate a new purpose for an old product. Yep, something like that.

The desk was still dismally bare. I cast a searching gaze over the room. A sofa, some chairs, a plant, another plant, a box with a greenhouse painted on it, a bag, an unpleasant still life of carnations hanging on the wall – a gift from a long time ago, a floor lamp, books. Books! I need to move some to the desk, sort of showing I’m working on some serious sources here.

A volume of “Russian-Persian. Persian-Russian” dictionary was the first one to move. I’d borrowed it back when I was a student from a local Eastern wise man and never returned it. The curves of Arabic alphabet on the cover looked very photogenic. I couldn’t find a second book fit for shaping the image. Makes sense – I ceased buying books in the early nineties when their prices went up, turning instead to libraries where they appeared as inflationary compensation. Then came the internet, and kindle, and now I don’t have anything to put on the desk. “You pathetic snob,” I told myself. I grabbed a backpack and went out into the street. I browsed in three different bookshops: I bought some fresh Lithuanian novels in Vaga on Gediminas Avenue. A dozen essay collections on history and sociology ended up in my backpack after a trip to Akademinė Knyga. In Humanitas, I chose the publications by the effect of their covers. 

Back home, I took the collection of world literature to the bedroom and filled the free space on the shelves with the new purchases and stepped back to admire them – way cooler than before.

The expedition to the bookshops was the turning point. The line was crossed. Losing control, I started working on a true snobbish explosive. Music was the easiest bit. I didn’t even consider a CD player, I dismissed vinyls – everyone plays them now anyway. Only cassette tapes will elevate my apartment to the suitable level of elitism. It took me two minutes of browsing to find the perfect offer – an impressive unused vintage Japanese cassette tape player Onkyo Ta-2017 for just 50 euros. Back in my cassette tape youth, it would have taken two months’ salary to pay for this thing. I found some cassette tapes near Kalvarijų market, offered by the street vendors. I got a whole box of taped music for five euros (on the fly, I also bought a faience dolphin). The taste of their original owner was universal – the tapes featured classic rock as well as Italian songs. Some of them were recorded over the older records, and after some contemplation I came up with an argument to support the cassette tape caprice:

“…next to a bookshelf we find a long-forgotten music device – a well-preserved cassette tape player. Why cassettes, I ask, and the master of the house smiles:

‘The way I see it, cassette tapes signify the everyday culture that reminds us of the palimpsest paradox where experiential layers cover the images as well as the sounds. My favorite part is the end of the tape, when the so-called original melody finishes and a few chords of the previous one pop up…’”

Before I forget, I need to get my décor in order too. A person as interesting as the future me would be physically repulsed by the carnation still-life, and so off to the bedroom it went. Under the bed, I found a trophy from the slightly illegal expeditions of my youth – a huge drawing showing the possessions of Vilnius dating back to 1903. I had been saying I’d give it to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, but they’ll survive without it. The map depicted a fragment of the old town – the university, the governor general’s palace, and a chunk of the ghetto. There was a particularly strange-looking construction in the middle of Simonas Daukantas square, or Mikhail Muravyov square, as it was known then. The bird’s eye view of the governor general’s monument, with two fences around it, looked like a menacing device.

I folded up the map and rushed out to have it framed. I managed to get a craftsman friend to drop everything and finish my map in a couple of hours. He was done even faster than that but placed the map in an ugly wooden frame instead of a metal casing that I’d ordered. Seeing my face, he said soothingly:

“No worries. Grab some aluminum powder, mix some lacquer in it, splash on a quick layer and you’ll have your metal right there.”

I widened my eyes:

“Do you really think I have piles of aluminium powder and lacquer lying around?”

Eventually the craftsman furnished me with some powder, lacquer and a wet brush. It took two layers for the frame to look like the heavy metal I wanted. All done? Not yet.

I carefully approached the plants in the corner. Is a cassette-listening collector of rare cartography supposed to indulge in greenery? Off to the bedroom with them, too? But the pots were heavy, and as I pushed them aside, they uncovered discreditable ring-shaped stains on the floor, and so I gave up and let the plants be. I smartened the scenography a little bit, placing the charming little box with a picture of a greenhouse and a note in Estonian that said MKDS innovation. SIERA VAAVEL. 200g on the desk and pushed a bag of Emolus potassium nitrate fertilizer towards the darker corner of the room.

The interview was a success. I said what I wanted to say, the journalist was amazed where I had expected her to be, the photographer took shots in the carefully staged places. I wasn’t surprised at the text. What stunned me was how speedy and professional the mysterious law enforcement unit was. They rang the doorbell just when I was reading the article about me for a third time.

The officers were polite. They gave me some water, then some coffee, but five hours of intense conversation (the term inquest didn’t come up once) were draining. The experts from the media monitoring service picked up on a detail – it was the mysterious device in front of the palace on the hand-drawn map. A closer investigation revealed something even more ominous – aluminum powder, lacquer, and potassium nitrate are the constituents of a classic home-made bomb. During the conversation, I discovered that the Estonian word siera means sulphur. The decision about the inquest was made after the analysis of the desk – the Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets in a single book was a catalyst for the whole thing and the mechanical calculator with its slight resemblance to a strange chronometer fueled it. The cassette player did its own share of damage – the psychological profiler interpreted it as a sign that the subject is living in a dangerous past. 

On parting, they said that a few small human things in the photographs would have sufficed – a magnet or a cute dolphin figurine, and everything would have gone differently. It was the photographer who asked me to remove the dolphin, as he’d just seen one in a previous interior.

“This will help your image,” he said.