Darkness and Company

by Sigitas Parulskis

  Vincentas nodded again.

  Tadas jiggled the lock on his weapon.

  It was a threat. Wordless but convincing. He had a weapon – and power – in his hands. Pale, red-haired, freckled Tadas with his oversized paws. With his bloodshot drunken eyes.

  ‘I don’t have any choice,’ said Vincentas.

  Tadas suddenly let out an unnaturally loud laugh and then a wide yawn.

  ‘We need some breakfast. I saw a hen-house. An omelette would hit the spot on a morning like this.’

  Vincentas didn’t want to eat. His head now hurt less, and he no longer felt nauseous, but he had no appetite.

  They both stood up.

  ‘Just don’t go too fast – I have a blister,’ said Tadas.

  ‘New shoes?’

  ‘New.’

  ‘Go barefoot.’

  ‘It’s all right. I’ll manage.’

  ‘Take your shoes off. Give your feet some air.’

  Tadas did not reply but kept his shoes on. Vincentas started moving slowly in the direction of the village. Somewhere on the outskirts a cock was crowing. Maybe that was the hen-house that Tadas had in mind. Vincentas turned back and stopped. Tadas was standing and looking at the dead boy lying in the meadow. Then he sat down on the ground and pulled off first one shoe and then the other. There was a large broken and oozing blister on his right foot.

  ‘What a pain,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘Put a bandage on it,’ Vincentas suggested.

  For a moment they stared at the injured foot.

  ‘You see? What did I say?’ Tadas continued in an uneasy voice. ‘Goddamned Jewish shoes!’

  Vincentas picked a couple of plantain leaves and handed them to Tadas for his blister and continued slowly towards the village.

  Tadas, limping and with his shoes back on, quickly caught up with him.

  They found Jokūbas the Elder sitting on a knoll, smoking. He looked at them ironically. ‘Communing with the dead, were you?’

  ‘Yes,’ chuckled Tadas. ‘The photographer was in a hurry to get to Jerusalem. He was looking in the pit for a suitable beard.’

  Jokūbas the Elder sneered. ‘So, Mr Photographer – you went to mourn your mates?’ He turned to Tadas. ‘Why didn’t you shoot the Bolshevik bastard?’

  Tadas looked at the ground, jangling his weapon. Vincentas looked at Tadas. So he didn’t just happen to be following Vincentas. It looked like Jokūbas the Elder had wanted Tadas to shoot him. He shot the boy instead. The child had saved his life.

  Jokūbas the Elder looked into the distance, in the direction of the crowded, dirty pit.

  ‘I used to come here often, on summer afternoons – the kind of day when large white clouds float by in the sky. From the top of the hill I could see their huge dark shadows crawling over the earth, the ploughed fields, the meadows, the hills and the valleys. Sometimes a bigger cloud would glide over, and its black shadow would cloak the entire field up to the very edge of the valley, and on the other side everything was shimmering in the sun so that it looked like something out of a fairy tale or another world. Now it will never be like that again – never. This obscenity has ruined it,’ said Jokūbas the Elder, gesturing towards the pit.

  ‘Are you from around here then?’ Tadas asked him.

  ‘What difference does it make where I’m from? We’re all going back to the same place. I’m starving,’ said Jokūbas the Elder. ‘Let’s go and get some breakfast.’

  Tadas inhaled deeply through his nostrils. ‘Some eggs.’

  ‘Yes,’ nodded Jokūbas the Elder.

  ‘You know, you slice some smoked ham, a pinkish band of fat along the skin, and fry it up.’

  ‘Now you’re talking!’

  ‘Then the eggs – three of them.’

  ‘Maybe even four.’

  ‘So that the yolk doesn’t break but doesn’t set either.’

  ‘Of course. So that when you start eating you can dip your bread in it.’

  ‘And some chopped dill on top.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And some fresh finely chopped spring onions.’

  ‘And white bread.’

  ‘And freshly pickled cucumbers.’

  ‘And some garlic, too.’

  ‘But not too much!’

  ‘Sliced paper-thin.’

  ‘A symphony.’

  And the two men ambled off towards the village.

  From the top of the hillock Vincentas turned back once more. A light wind tousles the tall, uncut grass of the meadow. At the edge of the forest a woodpecker taps, in short bursts, at an old pine tree. A child lies in the grass with one leg thrown out to the side, his head unnaturally twisted back. From higher up he might look like a large bird or an angel, with bloody wings, a chalky face and glassy eyes overflowing with emptiness. But apart from Vincentas there is no one looking – the morning is calm, the sky cloudless, and neither aeroplanes nor birds nor angels fly overhead.

  THE FATHER

  Vincentas entered the church, kneeled by the central altar and turned towards the men’s side. A few years ago this had all been flooded, as if the river had wanted to pray. Its waters rose and entered the sanctuary to rid itself of its sins. As if water could be sinful. The only holy river is the river of faith that flows through me. Vincentas felt a stab of guilt – in truth, his faith was rather weak. Fortunately the stab had not been deep – in fact, it had not even left a wound.

  The church didn’t give a damn about his feelings or his wounds – it was like Noah’s Ark holding a cross up to the sky, floating towards the highest light, sheltering all those who are tired and rejected, all those who need comfort and hope between its walls.

  The organ drones like the engine of an ocean liner slicing through the waters, the sounds rising and stretching like fluid willow branches, weaving into the discordant but passionate voices of the choir. As a child Vincentas had a stereoscope containing a multitude of small colourful pictures; through the magnifying glass they looked wonderful – cars, people, scenes from nature, even images of New York, Krakow, Warsaw and Paris, motorcycles, horses, aeroplanes. And one picture contained an enormous boat that made Vincentas think of a church floating across the waters.

  The organ and the choir were the best part of the service. The priest droning on with his back to the faithful, the homily, confession and Holy Communion – the familiar routine failed to move him.

  The first time he went to confession he asked Juozapas, ‘Why is the priest locked up in prison?’

  Speaking through a grate. Through a grate, into God’s ear. The priest sits in the prison of his body. Dispensing advice to the free. Teaching about life when he himself knows nothing of life. Of lives of sweat, moaning, intertwined limbs. Or perhaps that which is forbidden is best seen from outside? Vincentas always had a lot of questions while in church, and they would seem important and solemn, but back out in the sun, in the light, those questions somehow faded and getting answers to them became less important. Only God knows, as Juozapas used to say.

  God, shut up in a church and never getting out. All questions are important to Him. And He does not care about a single question. Because He knows everything.

  And it will never be known whether it is He who is closed off from the people or whether it is the people who are behind the grating and will never see His face. Like in Plato’s cave. Some see the light, others only shadows, only illusions. And all will become clear in the light of the Last Judgement.

  What struck Vincentas most was that great feeling of release when he would confess his childish, naïve sins to that indistinct being who sat shining behind the grate in the dusk, that ear connected straight to Heaven. He would leave the confessional trembling, trying his hardest not to forget the penance he had been assigned – three ‘Our Fathers’, five ‘Hail Marys’, five ‘I believe in one God, the Father Almightys …’

  Vincentas sat down close to the confessional and closed his eyes. His mother had asked him to hurry, but he was dawdl
ing. He could fail to ask the priest to come and Juozapas would pass away without having received the last rites. Without having waxed his skis, as the boorish workers who liked to drop by Juozapas’s workshop to share gossip and dirty jokes would have said.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven, my father, where are you, I never saw you, thy name come, thy kingdom be; as a child he used to say that his father had died in a car crash, his mother used to tell him that the car had skidded off the road on a bend. His father had died, and she had been pulled out by three fishermen, on earth as it is in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread … She had been pregnant and Vincentas was born that very day. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee … was my father handsome, he used to ask his mother, and she would tell him about a very good-looking man. Conflicting feelings, looking at Christ. A feeling of relation. Did his mother invent the story to raise him a good Christian, or was it her idea of a joke? Three fishermen. Three kings. Oh Christ, King of Heaven, they are both fatherless, they were both raised by stepfathers, they each have a hole in their psyche that can’t be filled, only He was King of the Jews, while Vincentas is the Jew-killers’ handyman, a pawn, a servant the masters will discard once his services are no longer needed. This thought weighed on him. More and more. As much as he tried to console himself, tried to convince himself that it was all transitory, that he owed the SS officer his life and couldn’t back out now … But why couldn’t he back out? He’s afraid for his own life … And for Judita’s … Now she is in his hands, she depends on him, on his will, on his love … And if he only wanted … but he doesn’t want to … Oh yes, he wants her, he wants her, but that desire … that desire can betray a person, for out of desire one person can betray another …

  People in the countryside are horrified at the slaughter of the Jews; they say that the Jews who are communists and committed crimes against Lithuania should die but let the rest work and in that way redeem their guilt … But what guilt? He who does not have a home is guilty …

  If the Son of God was King of the Jews that means He was a Jew himself. Or could it be that the Son of God has no nationality?

  A newborn does not care about nationality … All he wants is food. Then he starts to soil himself … to scream, to demand … Food, air, attention … A dead man does not care about nationality; he doesn’t demand anything any more. He gets as much as he earned while alive. As much as others decide he is worth … Six boards and a handful of sawdust.

  Death is purifying, it cleanses us of our earthly habits.

  For, after all, He cared not about His son but for the descendants of Abraham … that is why He had to be made like His brothers, so that He could atone for the sins of men … but for what? For Himself. What nonsense. I am the father and become my son, so that through the son’s lips I can pray for the forgiveness of the sins of the world, for people I do not know but whom I created and set free in the world … to ask myself for forgiveness … Why did I create them? So that they could worship me. Why do I kill them? So that they will fear me. If I kill them, then they will fear and worship me. I cannot kill them all at once; I can only kill one people at a time. First the Jews, then the Poles and then the Lithuanians … The Nazis will never recognize Lithuania’s independence; they see the Lithuanians as their servants … Why did I kill my only son? So that they could all see what can happen and therefore fear me. If I could kill my only son, and in such a violent way, it means that I can do whatever I want with people I don’t know – burn them, hack them up, cut, strangle, whatever, whatever I want, whatever I want …

  Vincentas once again thinks that what he wants is Judita.

  She is the only sinner who could also be a saint, he thought to himself as he looked at a painting of the Holy Virgin.

  A few days earlier he had kissed her crotch; he hadn’t shaved so she suffered at first, but then she carefully took his head in her hands and said, it’s prickling me, and it slipped out of him, just like Christ’s crown, imagine what it would feel like to have your scalp pierced by thorns … That angered her, and she didn’t want to carry on making love … When a man and a woman are in bed together there’s no need for a third, even if that third person is God …

  Where could he have disappeared to? Why did he abandon his only son? Did he never think about him, or was it the opposite – he watched and followed his every step … ? He thought every tall, handsome man was his father, even though he had never seen a photograph of him …

  His mother said that they only had one picture taken of them together, and it had disappeared … it was lost …

  She could have lied … She had sung in restaurants, would come home late. She would sleep in late, and he would sometimes smell the stale alcohol on her breath. Juozapas suffered it all with good grace. He felt inferior. She was a singer; he was a carpenter. At first Vincentas had thought that Juozapas was his father. When he learned it was not the case he was relieved. He didn’t want his father to be like that … Ugly, obsequious, a man who spends too much time in church … It was he who constantly dragged the young Vincentas to mass … At first his mother went very occasionally and unwillingly and then stopped going altogether. Every time she seemed to be suffering from some kind of unbearable pain.

  ‘I can’t take a man in a dress seriously,’ she would say.

  Vincentas stood up, went to the door, kneeled quickly, made a cursory sign of the cross, walked out of the church and towards the presbytery. The priest was not there, and the housekeeper invited him to sit down and placed a glass with a cold cranberry drink in front of him.

  When the priest entered the room Vincentas stood up and kissed the outstretched hand.

  The priest adopted a sorrowful expression.

  ‘Are you not Juozapas’s son? Such a devoted member of our community. But you, it seems, are a rare visitor to the house of God …’

  ‘The war,’ muttered Vincentas. ‘And I’m not his son, I’m his stepson.’

  ‘I see,’ the priest replied then sat down, took a packet of cigarettes out of a drawer, lit up and only then thought to offer one to Vincentas. He refused.

  ‘These days people need God even more than in peacetime.’

  ‘Perhaps people do need God, but does God need them?’

  ‘Well, well,’ said the priest, nodding his head. ‘God is not a movie theatre – you can’t go and see Him just when you feel like it. You have to approach Him slowly, patiently. If someone begins to see God as entertainment it means his heart is empty, that his soul is empty, moribund.’

  ‘It’s a good time to commit sins.’

  ‘An adult must answer for his actions and confess his sins, whatever they may be.’ The priest wiped his lips, a bit of foam had collected in the corner of his mouth as he spoke. ‘God’s mercy is unbounded.’

  ‘Then why was He so merciless towards His son?’

  ‘His son? You are referring to Christ the Redeemer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That only demonstrates his boundless mercy for us, for human beings. Love does not mean that we grew fond of God and He grew fond of us and sent us His son. God is love, therefore he who remains with God remains with love, and God remains in him.’

  ‘Yes, that is great mercy and love. But what if in loving God you harm someone close to you … someone who is closest to …’

  ‘God’s ways are mysterious. On the other hand …’ The priest sighed. ‘I have thought about that quite a lot myself … Jesus Christ is God in human form, correct? In other words, Our Lord is like a king, a ruler, who, unknown to all, disguises himself as a beggar and wanders the streets with all the other beggars, living their lives, experiencing their pain and hardships, the hunger, poverty, humiliation, loss … and then dies such a horrible death to prove that He drank the human cup to the dregs …’

  ‘So when Christ says, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” and “Take this cup away from me,” who is He appealing to? Himself?’

  ‘No, you see everything too rati
onally, too humanly. He’s only trying to show that human life and God’s existence are two separate things. Two completely different dimensions, if you will. It’s philosophy. Appealing to His Father and according to His Father’s will, Jesus Christ shows us the path that we must follow. We are mortal, and that is irreversible; we are vulnerable, and that is reality, but as Christians we receive a great gift – a path we can follow towards the light, the path of love and salvation.’

  ‘What would you say to a woman who sees her infant hacked in two with a spade, and then … then she meets a similar fate? What would You, Father, say to such a mother? That all is love, that the horror and hatred that she feels towards the executioner are also love?’