CHRISTENING
He’s sitting in the kitchen, day is breaking, Judita is asleep. He suddenly has a strange feeling of déjà vu: all of this has happened before. As if he is looking at a photograph taken by someone else. He knows that it’s just his mind playing tricks on him, but at the same time he’s rather enjoying the deception – as though someone is responsible for it all, for what is happening to him, to everyone.
Judita is asleep; he’s sitting in the kitchen looking out of the window. The sky is gradually brightening. The summer nights are short. He can’t sleep. Here and there an occasional shot echoes. Something is happening that would have been unimaginable even a few days ago. That night, just a few days into the war, he suddenly understands, and it takes his breath away. Something is happening that will alter all of their destinies. Perhaps not everyone’s, but most people’s. Everything will be different. It is not clear whether for good or bad, but people living in this city, in this country, perhaps all over the world, will never again return to their homes the same as they left them. And how many will never return. Such thoughts are dizzying, overwhelming – they at once terrify and challenge and intrigue. A dark excitement, as terrifying as a dream from which one cannot awake. He sits and looks out of the window.
That night, when they began to make love, when he entered her, he thought he heard a noise, a cracking sound that threw him off his stride. As though a joint had cracked, but it wasn’t exactly a sound … He might have felt it more than heard it.
‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Judita.
‘What?’ she asked.
Of course she had not heard anything, because it had only been in his head.
For the first time, he stopped just as they had begun their lovemaking. An unpleasant feeling. Something that had never happened to him before. Twenty-six is too young to have problems of that nature. To start and not finish is at the very least unpleasant. That is a universal principle of harmony. Like with a composition – if it is left unfinished one feels a lack, a deficit, a frustration. To make love and not be satisfied – it’s not right. He reached over to the chair next to the bed, grabbed a packet of cigarettes and lit up.
Judita ran her long fingers over his ribs.
‘We haven’t finished yet, and you’re already smoking.’
‘Yes,’ he mumbled, ‘I just …’ And he fell silent.
‘I’m scared, too,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said. ‘As long as you’re with me nothing bad will happen to you.’
‘Don’t be afraid …’ she repeated, staring at the ceiling.
‘Yes, don’t be afraid,’ he said once more. ‘It’s something else. I must be tired. I overdid things today. We’ll sort it right away.’
She leaned her head on her hand and looked at him.
He liked looking at her.
He liked it when she looked at him.
‘It’s really nothing. I’m just tired. Honestly.’
‘Silly boy,’ she said. He feels pleasure when she calls him ‘silly boy’ – it feels like someone is caressing him. Judita says that he did not get enough attention from his mother. That is why he is like this – still immature, agitated, egotistical.
For a few moments he lay there smoking, slowly blowing smoke towards the ceiling.
‘Aleksandras disappeared,’ said Judita, breaking the silence.
‘Disappeared? Seriously?’
‘He said he was going to dig a trench.’
‘What do you mean, dig a trench?’
‘Stop repeating everything I say.’
‘I’ll stop.’ He turned towards her. Aleksandras and war sounded ridiculous together.
‘His neighbour served in the First World War and convinced him that you have to dig a trench so that you’ll have somewhere to hide if you need it.’
‘Has he done it?’
‘I don’t know. I saw a hole, but only a child could hide in it. Aleksandras was also planning to stop by the telegraph agency … And I haven’t seen him since.’
He did not know what to say. His heart rejoiced. His heart quivered and rejoiced. He didn’t listen to his heart, because his heart was crazy. He was afraid that Judita would not like that joy. He was afraid that Judita would not like how he was getting excited from all this fear and joy.
‘I think he’s gone east.’
Judita raised her head. ‘He couldn’t have.’
‘Why not?’
‘He would have told me. We spoke about it.’
‘Could there have been other reasons?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You think that he knew?’
‘I don’t know.’
Vincentas was telling the truth. He didn’t know if Aleksandras suspected anything about him and Judita. About him and Judita. About the two of them. How sweet it sounded.
She didn’t say anything, then sighed heavily. ‘Maybe it’s for the best. For everyone.’
‘Someone I know … we worked as guards together … he said he saw Aleksandras at the station, that he got on a train.’
It didn’t sound convincing. He had never worked as a guard, although he had known one guy who served as a paramilitary naval guard. Judita sensed the lie.
‘Why were you talking to your friend about Aleksandras? Tell me. What do you know?’
He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know anything. Just what everyone knew, that there was chaos in the streets, that the Reds and the Jews were running.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t manage to come up with a convincing lie.’
She gave him a light punch in the ribs.
‘I don’t think he would do anything like that,’ Judita eventually said. Then she laughed quietly. ‘I kept hesitating about leaving him, felt sorry for him, thought he wouldn’t survive on his own … And what if he did actually go east? What if he knew about us? Oh, shit, he knew about us!’ She leaned on her elbows and looked at him carefully. ‘I feel like such a slut,’ Judita moaned theatrically and hugged a pillow.
‘You are the most wonderful slut I’ve ever known,’ he said and kissed her.
Judita again punched him in the ribs, harder this time. ‘And just how many sluts have you known?’
‘I’ve often been told I’m the son of a whore.’
Judita moaned once more. ‘This war will tear off all our masks,’ she said, still lying back and hugging the pillow.
When she arrived that night he’d meant to tell her what had happened the day before. He didn’t want to frighten her, but he knew that it wasn’t right to hide the truth. Now he was no longer so sure.
His hands continued to shake and his heart pounded madly. It was the first time he had felt such overwhelming tension. It was somehow like making love but different. Like its opposite – its dark, brutal side.
They lay in silence for a while, Aleksandras’s name still hanging in the air.
Then she pressed against him, her bare skin slightly goosebumped from the cool evening air.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked in a whisper. ‘Have you seen what they are doing with the Jews?’
‘I’ve seen,’ he said.
‘They spit on them, beat them, curse and kill them. What has happened to this peaceful, hard-working nation? Maybe they have never been so peaceful, so devout?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think about the nation, only about you. I will protect you.’
He embraced her and once again felt the blood rush to his groin. Such a good feeling. In that moment he believed he could do anything. That he was all-powerful. That he could create. Embark on grand works, change lives, divert rivers. Build socialism and then tear it down. He pulled away from her slightly and ran his palm over her breasts, abdomen, the curve of her hips.
‘What?’ she asked, a bit self-conscious.
‘Why didn’t you have children?’
‘Aleksandras didn’t want to. At least until now. So he wouldn’t lose h
is freedom.’
‘Children don’t limit freedom – they broaden it.’
She smiled slightly.
He fell silent, again caressed her shoulder, then her hip, thigh, drew his palm over the barely perceptible bumps on the skin of her thigh.
‘It’s a strange machine, the body. Such a strong but powerless machine. It reminds me of a camera – it lets in and preserves different forms of light.’
‘It preserves what?’
‘Light.’
‘What does it look like in there, inside?’
‘I don’t know – maybe like thoughts, memories, dreams. It’s all light.’
He caught her eye.
‘You’re looking for light in me?’
‘I can’t get that cracking noise out of my head.’
‘What cracking noise?’ asked Judita.
‘As though it wasn’t real, just in my head.’
She sighed heavily, closed her eyes and crossed her hands over her chest, as though she were trying to emulate a bas-relief on a tomb.
‘Right now you’re my only reality,’ she said almost inaudibly.
Her spectacular body. He could see it from a distance, he never mistook her for another woman when he waited for her at the Žaliakalnis funicular. She would come down from the top, from the hill, and he would say, you are an angel descended from Heaven, and she would smile and laugh, showing her white, even teeth and would laugh and say, ‘Why?’ Once she asked, ‘What kind of an angel could I be? An angel comes down from Heaven only for two reasons – either he has been expelled for his sins or he comes down to this vale of tears to rip a soul from some poor body. What kind of an angel am I?’ And he embraced her and they walked on together, his nose nestled in her thick, fragrant hair, and he whispered, you are every kind of angel, I like both types, no, that’s not right, she objected, you have to choose. It isn’t that easy to choose between a fallen angel and a murdering angel, he said, and Judita triumphantly raised her hand in the air, you see, she said, you don’t know, you can’t choose, I can’t, he replied, because I don’t want to be that stupid God who banished such a beautiful angel out of jealousy or that poor wretch whose soul is about to be ripped out by such an awfully pretty angel.
Fine, she said, you’ve wriggled out of it. This time I’ll leave your soul alone, let it continue to ripen.
He drew closer to her. Judita continued to lie there, her eyes closed, lips slightly apart; if he had not felt the warmth of her body she might have been dead.
He had not had his camera with him. Before everything that happened he had carried it like an item of clothing, like a part of his body. It was better that he did not have it – if he had tried to take a photograph he would have been shot. Killed along with the rest of them. He found this scene: they lie there with their bloody mouths agape, half naked, some completely naked in pools of blood and that sound … that cracking sound. That splintering. He had never before heard the sound of human bones cracking. Of a skull splitting.
Vincentas had been walking home along Vytautas Prospect. It had not been that long ago, but he couldn’t remember if it had been sunny or cloudy that day.
He had looked at his watch; it had been around ten in the morning. Or had it been evening? No, morning. By the cemetery he was stopped by an armed soldier.
‘Don’t go there,’ he said. ‘Better not go there.’
He looked over towards the cemetery and saw people digging pits. There is a lot of death in the city, so a lot of pits are needed.
He had gone out to fetch the doctor, but no one had come to the door. Juozapas, his stepfather, was bedridden. Some retreating Russians had stopped by his carpentry workshop and demanded a length of rope. Juozapas had insisted that they pay. The Russian officer had scribbled something on a piece of paper, but Juozapas had shaken his head and demanded money, shove your paper up your backside, shouted Juozapas, I wouldn’t even give you a coffin for free, what do I need your paper for, you’re never coming back, for the love of God let’s hope you never come back. A few unpainted coffins stood in the corner of Juozapas’s shop, the Russian officer understood that Juozapas was offering them a coffin and was about to shoot Juozapas, but his pistol jammed, or maybe he had run out of bullets, because some of the Russians had run from the city not only without bullets but some without guns. So the Soviet soldiers beat Juozapas up, kicked him unconscious, ransacked the shop full of completed work, shat in a freshly built coffin and took off.
Vincentas’s mother had reproached Juozapas, ‘Bloody hell, Juozapas, be happy that you’re still alive – they could have shot you on the spot. They’re savages, those Asiatics!’
‘You can’t blame everything on the war. So, what, if it’s wartime there’s no decency or anything?’ muttered Juozapas in a thin voice as he lay there. Vincentas’s mother had waved her hand and then opened the living-room sideboard, pulled out a half-empty bottle, poured herself a shot, taken a deep breath and thrown back the vodka. She drank like a common worker – no food, quickly, no ritual, not wasting any time with niceties on such an insignificant act.
His mother sent him to fetch a doctor they knew, Bluzonas. Juozapas had recently built him a medicine cabinet, and the doctor had yet to pay for it.
Vincentas was not allowed in. The maid said that no one was at home. She was frightened or maybe just half asleep. Her eyes swollen. As he walked from their building he saw a curtain twitch on the second floor. Bluzonas’s beard was unmistakable. It was him. They simply had not wanted to let him in. Out of fear, or just to be safe. There was a lot of fear in the city, many people peeking out from behind curtains. Shots popping here and there. The Germans were already in the city; they had started to hunt down any Bolsheviks who had not managed to get away in time.
He returned to the door and knocked again. There was no answer. Not even the maid appeared this time.
Even though the soldier – actually he was not a soldier but a partisan; he was wearing an old army jacket but civilian trousers and shoes – even though the partisan soldier had advised him not to go there, Vincentas did not take any notice. He did not want to argue with an armed man, so he circled around and once more entered Vytautas Prospect. A group of people had gathered by the garage, around the fence, and were looking into the yard. He couldn’t see anything through the crowd, so he went over to Miško Street and entered the yard of the former Polish high school, which bordered the garage yard. Here, too, spectators were hanging off the fence.
‘Is there a game of football going on there?’ he asked a man with a crumpled hat. The man grinned oddly and shrugged his shoulders. Looks like it, he replied. A crumpled hat and rotted front teeth: it’s easiest to remember ugly images. Why is that? Maybe because he was not raised properly.
He had not found the doctor, so there was no need to rush. Juozapas would manage somehow, and, if not, there was nothing he could do about it. Death was now a frequent visitor; no one would be surprised. Maybe it’s easier to die when everyone’s dying. When so many are dying. Or maybe the opposite is true: it’s no big deal to die in a crowd of corpses.
He pushed through the crowd, the excited, whispering, waving people.
People were being brought to the garage yard in twos and threes, evidently from the cemetery; some young men without jackets were beating them with rubber truncheons and crowbars.
‘They’re being led from the graveyard to be sent to their graves,’ said a voice behind him.
The crumpled hat’s voice, Vincentas thought.
The paving of the garage yard was strewn with mutilated bodies and swimming in blood. Those being brought in were dragged by the hair, shoved, their heads smashed with crowbars, sprayed with a hose. The same hose that was used to wash cars. The hose writhed like a long, shiny snake.
A huge, shaggy-haired, bearded old man in a camel-hair coat held the hose in both hands and shouted, ‘You scum. So you think you can escape what’s coming to you?’
The crowd gradually pushed Vincentas f
orward. Perhaps the sky went black or he closed his eyes, but suddenly he realized he was right next to the old man, who had now thrown down the hose and was standing with one hand tucked into the wide leather belt girding his waist, the other clutching a long iron rod.
The old man handed him the rod, smiled, slapped his back and then his cheek. As if they knew one another. He looked like a shepherd. It was June, the middle of summer, the old man was dressed so warmly, sweat poured down his cheeks, his hands were sticky, as if he had been eating pears, his fingers sticky from pear juice, and Vincentas felt it when the man clapped his cheek. Like priests do or men who like children. Or maybe shepherds or gardeners.
Darkness and Company Page 3