Darkness and Company

by Sigitas Parulskis

  ‘Well then. A photograph is also a kind of story. And I’m not talking about photographs documenting specific narratives: celebrations, parades, people playing football or some other sport. Even a woman’s naked body can tell us a lot. For instance, looking at the woman you have photographed I can tell that she feels a lot of trust for the individual on the other side of the camera. And perhaps even more. Her eyes are full of passionate longing. She is baring herself not before the lens or an invisible audience that will (or more likely will not) see her image, she is baring all before a man to whom she is attracted. And she knows that he is attracted to her as well, she can see this, feel it, and I can see it in the photograph, in her eyes, in her pose. So the two of you must be lovers.’

  Vincentas could feel his cheeks burning. He could remember clearly that after that he and Judita had made love. He had photographed her and then … passionately, greedily, on the floor. His cheeks burned, but he felt a chill pass through him.

  ‘A woman in love – that in itself is a story. Like any body is. When instinct wells up from our depths, when it becomes visible, we become more open to an attentive gaze. On the other hand, bodies that are already dead – which have no more passion, no spark, which have extinguished all of their feelings and desires – such bodies are usually indecipherable, hard to read.’

  ‘I never thought about that,’ admitted Vincentas.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the officer, waving his hand. Another matter is that these beheading stories offer many possibilities for art and painting to display their capabilities. Other topics don’t offer such possibilities, possibilities for showing the body. If an artist is painting a beheading he has to imagine how to represent the body. He would not be able to represent the body in the same way if he were painting, for example, a corn harvest, cherry-picking or people eating.’

  ‘Do you mean that the intention is to instil fear?’

  ‘Why?’ replied the SS officer.

  ‘Well, is that the effect the artist is aiming for? Is that the message?’

  The German sat in silence. It seemed he had said everything he wanted to say, and his guest had become utterly uninteresting and unnecessary. Once again Vincentas felt a chill. What could it all mean? Perhaps some obscenity lay behind it all. Why had the SS officer invited him here? To give him a lecture on art, on severed heads? On the Poor Man’s Bible? It was hard to imagine that a German would be so concerned with an unknown photographer’s educational lacunae.

  ‘I can imagine that this seems a bit unusual,’ he finally said. ‘I hope that I did not make a mistake in selecting you. One way or another it’s a question of an exchange of services.’ Then he fell silent again.

  ‘Will I have to do anything?’ Vincentas asked and immediately regretted it. It could have sounded like an offer. On the other hand, he felt he owed the German his life. Had it not been for the SS officer his own people would have shot him as a communist spy. His own.

  ‘Yes,’ the officer replied immediately. ‘You will be given everything you need. A camera, film, you will not have to do any dirty work. Unless you want to, of course … You will have to photograph.’

  ‘Photograph?’

  ‘You will work for me exclusively. You will receive a permit, so do not worry about that. You will have to hand in any film you shoot right away without delay. Do you have requests, questions?’

  Vincentas thought for a moment and remembered Tadas, how he had shoved the rifle muzzle into the man’s mouth. He said quietly, ‘I don’t want to be part of the battalion.’

  ‘You can continue living as you do, but you will have to travel to all of the assignment locations with the battalion. A special group has been formed for operations in the provinces; Obersturmführer Joachim Haman will be in charge. You will sometimes have to go out with them.’

  ‘But …’ he tried to protest, but the German simply waved his hand.

  ‘It is not negotiable.’

  He stood up, unbuttoned the collar of his uniform, undid his belt with its holster, then turned and said in an irritated voice, ‘Go! My people will find you when we need you.’

  Vincentas turned towards the door without saying anything, agitated, terrified.

  ‘Sleeping with a Jewess these days – not very smart, although perhaps quite romantic,’ he heard as he opened the door. He closed it as fast as he could from the other side.

  THE CROSS

  Vincentas sat in the kitchen, sipping tea and reading an excerpt of a document the SS officer had given him:

  The photographing of executions for official purposes is permitted only upon orders from a strategic unit or special unit commander, an SS military company commander or a war correspondents’ group commander. If under exceptional circumstances it is necessary to carry out such photography and it is not possible to gain permission in advance from a strategic unit or special unit commander, SS military company commander or war correspondents’ group commander, they must be informed about it immediately.

  The operative unit or special unit commander, SS military company commander or war correspondents’ group commander is responsible for ensuring that plates, film and photographs do not remain at the disposal of any of the staff of the operative offices …

  The document was signed by someone named Heydrich. Why had the SS officer given Vincentas this document? He had told him to familiarize himself with it. That must be the procedure. Vincentas understood perfectly well that he would have no freedom in his actions.

  ‘What are you reading?’ asked his mother, coming into the kitchen.

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Vincentas, folding the paper and sticking it in his pocket.

  The word ‘executions’. He did not know what to expect, but this word alone horrified him. Maybe he should have tried harder to resist, to refuse? To run? But where could he escape to with an alcoholic mother and a bedridden stepfather? And what about Judita? What would happen to her? The reports of what was happening to the Jews were increasing in number and horror. At the same time news of the ghastly crimes being committed by the retreating Bolsheviks was coming in from the provinces. Even as they ran from Lithuania they had managed to brutally torture maybe hundreds of innocent people. Would the Germans surpass them?

  Juozapas could barely speak any more. He complained that his mouth was dry, that his tongue was tangled, that it was getting harder to breathe. Doctors and medicine were unavailable. And that smell, that constant smell of piss and rotting flesh. It’s hard to get used to that, although one can get used to anything, even the smell of death. When a person is healthy he doesn’t think about such things, those smells don’t irritate him, people don’t even notice them, and if the nostrils pick up a whiff of death coming from somewhere, everyone turns their noses away, pretends that it’s just a minor fact of life, an unnecessary fragment of existence. That’s not mine, it has nothing to do with me. What’s important is the present.

  When there is a very ill person at home such smells and such thoughts are an inevitable consequence. His mother nursed Juozapas patiently, but she sometimes left the bedroom wrinkling her nose. She had an antidote to those wretched smells and scenes of illness, however. A bottle of alcohol of one kind or another always stood in the kitchen cupboard. In better times it was even a bottle of the Lithuanian honey liqueur, krupnikas, but these days she was very fond of vodka.

  Before the war Juozapas had cooked up glue from animal waste. The smell had been disgusting. When Vincentas had asked where Juozapas had found the bones, the latter had smiled, stroked him with his heavy, calloused hand and said, these are infidels’ bones, then would look around him, squinting furtively, and whisper, as though he was telling the biggest secret, I did away with a few Jews, that’s where the bones are from. Seeing the child’s expression he would throw back his head and laugh.

  He laughed rarely. Perhaps because he was constantly working at something – carving, hammering, planing. A tired man does not have the energy to laugh. Either that or h
e had simply been of a dour disposition.

  If life is made up only of memories and a person remembers only what he needs to, what’s the point of life? Juozapas liked to say this, and would then offer the answer himself: life is a mystery, just like faith. Vincentas had always wanted to ask what he meant when he talked about memories but never did. Juozapas had always been a bit of a stranger to him, someone without a past, and Vincentas was not interested in that past.

  When Juozapas laughed he emitted a high-pitched sound; sometimes it seemed that he was not laughing but squealing, like a rat caught in a trap.

  And he looked like an animal. A long, pointed nose, thin lips, ears stuck against his skull, his neck always thick with greying down, a balding crown, shiny and uneven like the bottom of a tin pot; his mother used to take milk in a pot that looked like that and leave it for the stray cats who gathered in the neighbouring stairwell.

  His stepfather had always smelled of wood, even when he was cooking glue from animal bones and gristle. It was the smell of dead wood, but at the same time it was a festive, exalted smell.

  Juozapas had once received a commission from a farmer who wanted a cross for his land, to greet those arriving and send off those departing. When the cross was almost completed – there was only the figure of the crucified Christ left to be attached – Vincentas had lain down on the cross, spread out his arms and closed his eyes. He had tried to imagine how the Redeemer felt when the Roman soldiers crucified Him on the Hill of Golgotha. They stand by the cross, sharing out his clothes, while He, suffering a hellish agony, hangs on the cross. Vincentas was disappointed: he experienced nothing remotely mystical, only the uncomfortable hardness of the wood.

  Then everything happened very fast. The cross lay on two beams, about a metre above the floor. Juozapas came into the workshop and pressed down on Vincentas’s chest with one knee, then quickly tied first one and then his other arm to the cross. Vincentas was not the strongest of teenagers, and he was unable to resist. Then Juozapas did the same with his legs. He tightened the rope so that Vincentas would not slide down, raised up the cross, leaned it against the wall and left the room.

  Juozapas did not reappear for an eternity, and no one apart from him ever went to the workshop; Vincentas’s wrists ached horribly, the ropes cutting into his skin, tears running down his face. A few times Vincentas tried to call his mother, even though he knew she would not hear him. The longer he hung there the more frightening were the thoughts that entered his head: maybe Juozapas had lost his mind and had left Vincentas there to die? At first he was overwhelmed by an intense hatred for Juozapas, then he began to curse all the arseholes who think of planting enormous crosses by their homes and, finally, almost unconscious from the pain, Vincentas became completely indifferent. The only thing that he knew for sure was that his real father would never have behaved that way. The father he had never known and had longed for his whole conscious life.

  ‘Do you understand now that a cross is not something to play with?’ Juozapas asked as he untied the ropes.

  Vincentas never forgot that lesson, and now, as Juozapas lay suffering, smelling of decay and faeces, helpless and repulsive, he sometimes thought that it was something of a punishment for the nasty old man. Even if Vincentas had not delivered the mortal beating himself, he now felt somehow avenged. He sat in the kitchen looking at his mother, who had just drunk another one of her doses – a small shot glass she referred to as a ‘bunny’s palm’ – and now sat calmly at the table flipping through a newspaper. He looked at her and thought about how illness is the heaviest cross anyone ever has to bear, that a serious, incurable illness is a cross from which one is taken down only after death, and then one’s clothes are divvied up, one’s body hidden away for all time until the Resurrection, until the Final Judgement.

  ‘Poor Juozapas,’ said Vincentas, turning his eyes towards the window. His mother sighed but said nothing.

  JUDITA AND ALEKSANDRAS

  Judita and Aleksandras lived in the suburb of Šančiai, in a wooden house that could be reached only by passing through a large, poorly maintained garden of overgrown grasses and shrubs. Judita and Aleksandras lived in one side of the house, the owners in the other.

  Vincentas had met Aleksandras the previous evening, and now he was going to visit the couple at home.

  Vincentas liked to go for walks along the river, especially in the evening when the fog begins to swirl over the water and the trees to wade into it like desperate suicides. That was when he would get the best photographs. With atmosphere, as his teacher Gasparas used to say. An atmosphere that was probably created simply by that suicide motif.

  ‘Trees trying to commit suicide – isn’t that great?’ said Aleksandras gleefully when he heard Vincentas’s explanation of what he was doing there when there was not another soul around.

  Aleksandras had been riding a bicycle that evening. He had stopped near Vincentas because his chain had fallen off. It fell off and got stuck between the back wheel and the frame; the wheel suddenly stopped turning, the bicycle toppled over and Aleksandras crashed to the ground, rolled a few metres down a slope and lay there unmoving.

  Vincentas ran over and helped him up.

  ‘Did you hurt yourself?’

  ‘No, but thank you.’

  Aleksandras spoke Russian. He gestured towards the camera. ‘Did you manage to get a picture? It would be a great shot – a helpless intellectual falling to his end … or something like that.’

  Aleksandras was short, small-boned and a bit overweight, with tousled black hair and widened eyes.

  ‘No, I didn’t have time. Forgive me,’ Vincentas, for some reason, answered apologetically.

  ‘Don’t be silly. But if you could help me find my glasses – I’m like a mole without them.’

  The two of them began to crawl around the slope searching for the glasses. Aleksandras was crawling not only for show – his eyesight was genuinely poor.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Vincentas again after the latter found the glasses. ‘And what do you photograph?’

  ‘Suicidal trees,’ said Vincentas, pointing at the trees that were gradually becoming enveloped in the evening mist, even though it was clear that it was by now too dark to take a photograph.

  ‘Trees trying to commit suicide – isn’t that great?’ For some reason Aleksandras rejoiced when he heard that explanation. He paused, then asked, ‘And what do you think about opera?’

  ‘Do you sing in operas?’ Vincentas asked cautiously.

  ‘No, I create them.’

  ‘I’m not too fond of opera. Those fat women pretending to be desirable lovers and princesses get on my nerves. It’s just silly.’

  ‘Fantastic. Everyone thinks that, but no one says it out loud. And least not in decent company. Thank you!’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Aleksandras picked up his bicycle and smacked the seat angrily.

  ‘Bloody chain. It keeps falling off. What do I do now? Throw it in the river and walk – that’s what I should do!’

  Vincentas turned the bicycle over, gave the chain a couple of pulls, rotated the pedals both ways, pulled once more and then the chain slackened. He hooked the chain on to a tooth, turned it, caught his finger between the chain and the sprocket and some blood oozed out.

  Aleksandras went pale, turned away and held out a handkerchief, still not looking.

  ‘Tie it up,’ he said, still turned away. Then, still not looking at Vincentas, he quickly told him his address and insisted that he visit them the following evening. He said he had an opera ticket and wanted to thank the man who photographs suicidal trees and fixes strangers’ bicycles. And he rode off still not having even glanced at Vincentas’s injury, which, although wrapped in the handkerchief, was still bleeding.

  Vincentas passed through the vestibule and knocked on the door, then knocked again. Not getting a response, he stepped inside. The room was empty. A table, chairs, piano; modest but tasteful, tidy, clean. Except for a pile
of papers on the piano.

  ‘Hello,’ he called, then, louder, ‘Good day!’

  He heard a sound in the room. He entered the room and almost froze in astonishment. A woman was sitting at the table. He gasped a few times and had no idea what to do. The woman was naked to the waist. She looked relaxed, one hand resting on the table, the other holding a large plum. She had just taken a bite of the fruit; the juice was running down her cheek, and a single drop hung from her nipple. Maybe that drop, maybe that drop was what so threw him because he could not pull his eyes away from it; he stared and stared and stared, unable to say or do anything.

  ‘It’s beautiful, no?’ she asked in a strong, low voice that was at once pleasant and soft.

  ‘Hello,’ he said automatically and turned his eyes to a cupboard with a large butterfly on the door. His throat dried up completely for a moment. He felt his blood flowing both up and down – to his cheeks and to his groin.