The priest shakes his head. ‘You should not talk like that.’
Vincentas understood – there was talk that a good third of all priests had been recruited by the NKVD and then re-recruited by the Gestapo.
‘You are right, I shouldn’t. It’s just that sometimes questions arise for which I can find no answers.’
‘Hatred is the reverse side of love,’ said the priest. ‘You know the expression about turning the other cheek? That’s what it means – by turning the other cheek you turn away from hatred and towards love. It does not take much. One only has to want to do so. One only needs to turn the other cheek.’
‘That seems too simple.’
‘Yes, everything that makes us human is simple. And that’s what is hardest. Because man tires of simple things, he gets bored. And then he complicates life so that everything becomes as intricate, as complex as possible. Ultimately those simple things become inaccessible, can no longer be experienced.’
Outside it seemed to darken, perhaps a cloud passed in front of the sun, and the priest began to speak more loudly. ‘The war against Bolshevism is meaningful not only as a battle for the survival of nations or human freedom this war is also a crusade, a crusade for man’s spiritual beliefs and his freedom of conscience. If someone is destined to captivity then he goes into captivity, and if another is destined to die by the sword he will die by the sword; it is an awful battle, but then it is said, “Put in your sickle and reap, for the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe, and the angel left Heaven’s slaughterhouse, and swung his sickle, and harvested all the grapes on earth, as the fruit was now ripe, and he poured all the grapes into the great press of God’s wrath, and out of the press coursed blood … a great deal of blood.”’
The priest fell silent, raised the glass with the cranberry juice to his lips, and the liquid in the glass became dark and thick, and it looked as though the priest were drinking darkness, that his lips were dyed the colour of blood.
‘From Heaven’s slaughterhouse?’ Vincentas asked quietly.
The priest blinked several times. ‘You are overtired, my child. The temples of Heaven, it is said, the temples.’
Vincentas nodded.
They both sat in silence. The priest sighed. ‘I do understand what you are talking about. It should not be this way. Even if it is retribution, an eye for an eye and so on, it should not be this way. We can only pray.’
‘For what?’
‘For the victims and the executioners. For their souls.’
Vincentas nodded once more. ‘I understand.’ Then he remembered why he had come there. ‘As it happens, Father, Juozapas is very weak. If you could …’
The priest raised his hands, palms upwards. ‘Why did you not say so right away?’
‘I don’t know. After all, it is said that the dead should bury the dead, while we need to worry about the living.’
‘Wait a moment, I’ll get ready.’ Then, as he left, he turned back and said, ‘The quote is inaccurate.’
Vincentas did not reply. He realized that now he would have to walk home with the priest, and he did not want that at all. He did not want ever again to see that thoughtful, well-groomed, plump face with its saccharine smile more suited to Heaven’s slaughterhouse than to a temple.
While the priest heard Juozapas’s confession and gave him the last rites, Vincentas and his mother sat in the kitchen. His mother had grown old – she rarely went out any more. One evening she had put on her best clothes, a hat, black shoes and gloves, and had gone out for a walk on Laisvės alėja. She returned angry and disappointed.
‘Laisvės alėja is full of Germans. Who do they think they are, the arrogant bastards! I wanted to go into a restaurant – and they called me an old whore. Can you imagine? The food shops designated for the Germans have everything: white buns, butter, vodka, vegetables. I met a neighbour. Do you remember Mrs Julija from the second floor?’
‘The one who didn’t know how to ride a bicycle?’
‘Really?’ asked his mother, surprised. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Her husband bought her a bicycle, but she never learned to ride it.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Her husband died during the June Uprising trying to protect the bridge from the Reds. She said she had stopped by the department store, and it’s full of wonderful goods: toys, balls, wooden goods, handbags. It appears all of them were made by Jewish craftsmen.’
‘The Jews are a skilful people.’
‘The poor Jews,’ said his mother.
They sat in the kitchen in silence.
‘Juozapas was a skilful person. And he loved you like a father.’
‘He’s still alive,’ Vincentas reminded her.
‘Yes, yes, alive.’ His mother stood up with difficulty and approached the kitchen cupboard that Juozapas had made. He had built all of the furniture. He had even built his own coffin. Vincentas watched his mother open the cupboard door as though she were opening the lid of a coffin, then reach her hand in to pull out a half-empty bottle of some coloured liquid.
‘Cranberry vodka. Would you like a drop?’ she asked Vincentas.
‘Yes.’
In the rectory he had drunk water with cranberries, and now it was vodka. What next? Hell’s tar with cranberries?
His mother poured them both shots. She was drinking more and more. He had no idea how she had got hold of any vodka, but the bottle in the cupboard was never empty.
‘Where did you get it?’ asked Vincentas.
‘Old connections,’ winked his mother.
‘How old are you, Mum?’ Vincentas asked suddenly.
His mother looked at him carefully. ‘Surely it isn’t as bad as that?’
She pulled out her compact and inspected her face, drawing a finger over the fine wrinkles radiating from her mouth.
‘There it is, not much more to hope for, not much at all.’ Sighing heavily, he sat back down.
‘Did my father look at all like Juozapas?’
‘For God’s sake, child, don’t you understand how annoying that is? And being annoying is one of the most awful human traits.’
‘For a long time you told me a story about my father. I think I should know who he was, what he looked like. Shouldn’t I?’
‘I envy the birds,’ said his mother. ‘Parenthood lasts only a few months for them.’
‘Why won’t you talk about it? Did he mistreat you in some way? Did he hurt you?’
‘Well,’ she said, raising her glass, ‘I suppose you’re old enough now. You’re making your own living … By the way, what is it that you do? Judita said that you sometimes get called out by soldiers.’
‘Yes, I guess I am. I do some photography.’
‘Ah yes, photography. You should be grateful to Juozapas for that.’
‘I am grateful.’
‘Judita is a nice woman. But you know, you do know how it is … I heard that people get sentenced to death for hiding Jews. The whole family could be shot.’
‘I know.’
His mother sighed. Then she took Vincentas’s hand. ‘You see, it’s all terribly boring. I didn’t want to tell you, but … I don’t know who your father is. I can’t remember. There were a few men around that time … There were many men, and there’s no way I can say which one it was. I didn’t even know all of their names.’ She looked at him carefully from under slightly lowered lids. ‘See, you don’t like hearing that your mother’s a slut. Nobody likes that kind of thing – I wouldn’t like it myself. But nothing is that simple. I loved life, didn’t sell myself, I just liked … I liked it, and I just don’t understand why it’s forbidden and sinful to enjoy the pleasures that life has to offer … Understand one thing, son, youth doesn’t last long, and then those pleasures simply become inaccessible. Today I was kicked out of a restaurant and called an old whore. If I were young no one would call me that – the German officers would invite me to join their table and would offer me food and drink. That’s the difference. Whi
le you’re young you don’t realize the gifts you have and when you’re old you realize what you’ve lost, but that doesn’t help much.’
Vincentas said nothing. In the next room lay the dying Juozapas, his stepfather, and next to him sat a representative of the Heavenly Father, while his real father was unknown, someone or other, but who? A random stranger, a criminal, an artist, a baker, a swindler, a gambler? Whoever.
Juozapas died that very night.
CHILDHOOD
Juozapas had built his own coffin. Vincentas hired a truck, he and the driver lifted the coffin into the back and then, together with his mother and Judita, they drove to Juozapas’s home town. That had been the dying man’s last wish. It was not a long drive. Juozapas’s sister had made arrangements with the local priest. During mass Judita wandered around the cemetery. She joined Vincentas and his mother when they accompanied the coffin to the freshly dug pit.
There were many birch trees in the cemetery. Vincentas had been five when they had buried his mother’s sister Gema. Or maybe eight?
‘How old was I when Aunt Gema was buried?’ he asked his mother.
She gave him a dirty look and whispered angrily, ‘Ten’, then turned her head back towards the priest. For you are dust and to dust you shall return, said the priest to Juozapas, who lay there in the coffin he had built himself, on sawdust he had made himself, preparing to become dust once again.
You couldn’t disagree with him. With either of them. They had done everything correctly, Juozapas, the priest. Death had taken on a different role. Before, it had been an actress, the most important person on the stage of life. Like his mother, when she was still singing and dancing. Now death had grown old, had lost her leading role and become an extra, was only given roles in crowd scenes. So many people died every day that death had become banal, decorative, background material, a minor character.
They held the wake at the home of Juozapas’s sister, Julijona, who kept glancing and glancing at Judita until she couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘Isn’t she a Jewess?’
They said quick goodbyes and drove back to the city, making the excuse that the driver could not wait any longer, that they had already paid him fifty marks extra to wait.
Sitting in the cab next to Judita and his mother, Vincentas again recalled Aunt Gema’s funeral. Wandering around her enormous garden, he had found a pile of ampoules and medicine bottles under a tree. He stuffed his pockets with them, even though he had no idea what he was going to do with them. He smashed a few against the shed wall. The bottles exploded, the liquid running down the wall; it had been summer, so the stain quickly dried. Disappearing, just like a person who yesterday had been speaking and eating but today was no longer speaking or eating and tomorrow will not be there at all; the photographs will yellow, and in time those who might have looked at the photographs will be gone, too.
Back home, Vincentas lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling.
‘But you didn’t love your stepfather, did you?’ asked Judita, sitting next to the mirror. His mother had invited them to dinner. She was suddenly feeling lonely.
‘I’m not talking about love,’ he replied.
‘It just seems like you’re grieving.’
‘It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what it seems like. I gathered some pieces of birch bark, the kind that curl up, arranged them by the wall of the wood shed and walked along it proudly, imagining that I was some sorcerer or healer with a great collection of ancient texts and medicines that could raise the dead. I can’t remember where I found some matches, but in the end, disappointed by the failure of my spells and healing, I stuffed all the ampoules into the birch-bark curls and set them alight. The bark crackled merrily and the ampoules and the little medicine bottles exploded even more merrily, frightening the funeral party.’
‘What a little monster.’
‘My mother said that I was already ten.’
‘Boys mature later.’
‘A crowd of black-clothed men and women ran over and explained that I shouldn’t behave that way, that there was a deceased woman in the house. “What difference does it make?” I asked. “I won’t wake her up.”’
‘And you didn’t wake her up.’
‘I remember now that Juozapas was the only one who laughed. They were all angry, and he alone laughed and then said that I was right, only the trumpets of the Last Judgement would wake the dead.’
Judita turned around and looked at him briefly. Then she got up from her chair by the mirror, approached the table, took a cigarette out of a pack and lit it carefully.
‘I think your mother can wait a bit.’
‘Her room was always full of all kinds of thread. Because she only worked at night, in the daytime – after she had had enough sleep – she liked to sit there and sew, embroider. She told me about how she had learned that craft from her mother’s sister Serafina. Aunt Serafina was a nun, and in the convent she and the other nuns sewed and embroidered church vestments – mantles, chasubles, stoles. She taught my mother to work with many kinds of fabrics and threads. An embroidery stand and frame stood in the corner of my mother’s room by the window – two wooden rollers on which the fabric could be stretched by turning cranks at the ends of the rollers. After the First World War, when the country was getting on its feet, my mother had supplemented her meagre cabaret-dancer’s and singer’s salary by sewing – often refashioning old clothes.’
He had liked to sit in her room and smell the rustling fabric, to watch her lay a piece of carbon paper over the stretched fabric and then draw an entire garden, a garden with shimmering stars, and then how those drawings would gradually turn into colourful blossoms and fountains.
Vincentas also liked those nights when she didn’t have anyone to leave him with and would take him to work. The pianist Dinas, a round-faced, chubby man – if asked how old he was he would snap back that it was rude to ask dames that sort of thing – taught Vincentas all sorts of card tricks. Once he asked him and his mother to hold the ends of a willow switch with her ring threaded on it, then threw a handkerchief over it, shouted ‘Abracadabra!’ and pulled away the handkerchief, and there was the ring in his hand, even though Vincentas held the willow switch so tight that the tips of his fingers went white.
His mother was always surrounded by cheerful, carefree people who all loved Vincentas, would grab him in their arms and hug and caress him, especially the intoxicatingly scented young women.
His mother would disappear into the back room with different men, saying that she had to ‘discuss the conditions of the deal’, and then he would be taken care of by one of her girlfriends or the homosexual Dinas.
Life really was like a holiday, even if they were often short of food and didn’t always have firewood. Everything changed when his mother lost her job. It wasn’t clear why. She would say that it was because she had lost her love of singing, but more likely she was simply discarded to make way for younger and prettier women.
Then Juozapas appeared on the scene. His mother married him without even consulting Vincentas, and he never forgave her for that. Juozapas was a dried-up, balding, short-haired man with a thin moustache under his nose. Vincentas thought that he had flippers like bat wings under his armpits. His mother scolded him for such fantasies, but he had the right to dislike the man. His life changed dramatically: before he had been surrounded by a cheerful, colourful company of dancers and singers, but now he had to obey the orders of a man with an axe in his hands. Juozapas was a carpenter, but in his heart he was a Prussian officer, always issuing commands, ordering him and his mother about. He cut Vincentas’s hair in a brush cut and made him make his bed like a soldier – quickly and strictly, creasing the corner of the blanket on a stool using a hammer. Vincentas would be punished if he spoke at the table or was late for breakfast, lunch or supper. Once he was ordered to leave the table because he had grabbed a piece of bread without asking – even worse, before Juozapas had finished saying grace. Prayer was more important to Juo
zapas than bread. Vincentas had to study the truths of the catechism, would be woken in the middle of the night and forced to recite all the prayers, and sometimes, even at the table, Juozapas would turn to Vincentas with piercing eyes and ask him to name the mandatory holidays, and he would have to answer – all Sundays, Easter, Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, the birth of Christ, the revelation of Christ, Christ’s ascension into Heaven – and he wouldn’t be allowed to eat until he had named them all.
At first his mother had tried to defend her son. Then she tried to sing again – Juozapas did not oppose it – but bit by bit she succumbed to the alcohol and eventually gave Vincentas up to Juozapas’s control. Strangely, the man seemed more interested in his stepson than he was in his new wife.
Vincentas would think about his father the engineer, would build tall buildings with him in his mind, inaccessible castles on steep river banks; they would travel together to Paris, Krakow and America, sailing across oceans or taking an aeroplane.
Darkness and Company Page 11