Darkness and Company

by Sigitas Parulskis

  He must have fallen asleep, because the knocking frightened him. He jumped up in bed, confused as to where he was, who he was and what this awful darkness that pressed on his eyes could mean. He listened.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked quietly.

  At first he heard a low moan, and then Judita’s quiet voice. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘Judita? Where are you? What are you doing? Why are you leaving?’

  He turned on the lamp. Judita was kneeling naked on the ground; next to her lay Baltramiejus’s coffin, which had fallen off its stand. She turned to Vincentas smiling guiltily, but her eyes were full of tears, and blood trickled slowly from her split upper lip.

  ‘I was just getting up to go …’ she said quietly and swore again, ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘It’s dark,’ said Vincentas.

  ‘Very dark,’ agreed Judita. Then she added, ‘I’ll stay with you. Until things become clearer.’

  After the final salvo in honour of Baltramiejus had died away, after the gravediggers had taken the ropes and, lifting the coffin, begun slowly to lower it into the grave decorated with young birch branches, in the bright July sunlight Vincentas saw that in one spot the lid of the coffin was not shiny, as though it had not been varnished. He wanted to get closer, to be sure, because he knew very well that he had varnished the coffin lid carefully, not once but twice, so he could not have left a blemish of that nature, especially on the lid. And only later, listening to the shovels rhythmically chomping on the sand, and the soft tapping of the earth being poured on to the coffin did he understand: it was Judita. She had gone to pee in the dark, bumped into and knocked over the coffin and split her lip. Then, kneeling next to it, had dripped some blood on to the lid, and Vincentas had not checked it before driving it to Baltramiejus’s house. He had barely slept, was thinking about Judita, about how she would be living with him from now on, that he’d have to take care of many things, that he had wanted, had dreamed about this for two years, but when the possibility arose, when the possibility became an inevitability, he was not so sure that he wanted his life to go in this particular direction.

  LESSONS IN ASCETICISM

  Vincentas knew that he had not completed the job; he had not succeeded in photographing the people being shot. Jokūbas the Elder warned him that if he saw a camera lens aimed at him he would shoot without warning. And the people being driven into the pit and shot, that had been too unexpected for him. He had taken a few photographs of the bodies after they had become still, lying in the pit, chewed up by bullets, fallen one on top of the other. An unmoving body is a photographer’s best partner. A child running through a meadow – bloody, tattered underclothes. A spotted angel in an awakening meadow. An angel soon to be caught by a bullet. There were also a few frames of the old sickly Jews in the back of the lorry. Those photographs had made a great impression on him. The faces of these old, sickly, hopeless people looked as if they were not of this time, not of this place. Strange, but these images were somehow more forceful than when he had seen them in the flesh. He knew why. Those people are no more; he knows where they are buried; he was the last person to photograph them alive. All of it made his head spin. What’s more, looking at those photographs, he felt some kind of strange, shameful pleasure.

  ‘These aren’t at all the kinds of photographs that I was hoping for.’ The SS officer threw them on to the table and walked over to the window.

  Vincentas sat in silence. The German is unsatisfied. On the other hand, if he were satisfied Vincentas would also be sitting in silence.

  ‘Maybe I expected too much,’ added the German, turning towards Vincentas and smiling.

  ‘I’m not used to working … in a slaughterhouse,’ said Vincentas. ‘It’s … it’s very unfamiliar. It was the first time for me. And the second time they wouldn’t let me photograph.’

  ‘I know. The slaughterer Haman. Best to stay away from him. The angel of death with the four horsemen of the apocalypse. You probably saw that he was followed by four sergeants. Next time everything will be fine. I’ll arrange it.’

  Vincentas said nothing.

  ‘You must make an effort. Any one of our war correspondents can take photographs like these. But you are capable of more than that.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand. I probably just don’t understand.’

  ‘I want your perspective. I want your relationship. I want you to photograph not the fact but the whole – for you not simply to state but create. What is that pile of corpses there for? I want drama, I want a story; tell a story, use your imagination.’

  Vincentas saw the absurdity of the situation: on one side stands a group of armed, drunken men – drunk from alcohol, from the smell of blood and death – and on the other the unarmed, half-naked victims. And he is there between them with his camera. An unwanted witness. A vulture, a hawk, a hyena.

  ‘They could shoot me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My own.’

  The German laughed. ‘Believe me, that’s not the worst scenario. I need faces. I need facial expressions. I need a face that is suddenly invaded by death. You must understand one basic thing: until now man was in charge of his own life.’

  Vincentas thought that he had misheard. ‘Was in charge of whom?’

  ‘Of death. Of his own death. He gets sick, feels death approaching, talks about the signs that have appeared to him, calls for his servants one by one, his loved ones, takes leave, apologizes, blesses, because he has seen it before many times. But now we have the opportunity to see a person’s death being taken away from him. He does not have the conditions for being in charge of it because we are in charge of his death. Is that not a moving thought?’

  ‘I don’t know. I am most moved by the thought of photographing the faces of those who are in the pit, who are often made to lie face down.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the German, waving his hands. ‘I agree that it is not easy. But that is what distinguishes art from a document – it finds an unexpected solution. It is capable of looking at the same thing, at the same fragment of reality, in a completely unexpected way, differently, from another angle.’

  Vincentas had a few photographs that he had not shown. He stuck his hand under his coat, pulled out a small pile and placed it on the table. ‘Here.’

  ‘What are these?’ asked the German, curious.

  ‘I thought that maybe …’

  The German approached the table and took the photographs.

  There were a few shots of the Jews siting in the back of the lorry. Old, infirm people.

  ‘Expressive faces. Not bad. There you go … Why did you not give me these before?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s just a few shots that I took before all of it … before … I didn’t think that …’

  The Artist looked at Vincentas again, once again smiled briefly. ‘Here is what I will say. Now that you are a soldier you must understand that it is only possible to tolerate the necessity of killing, the risk of dying and the constant presence of death by adopting a stoic attitude. You must learn to observe and tolerate everything with indifference. A strong immune system protects us from fear and compassion, and to some degree from ethical and moral questions, questions of conscience. What is conscience? It is not innate but rather a matter of collective agreement. A tiger does not have a conscience, he only has the instinct for self-defence, the need to satisfy hunger, the need to continue his line. There is no conscience instinct. There is no point in questioning what is happening around you and what you are participating in. It is essential to learn, through extensive practice, to drive away horrific images, to maintain a distance from loved ones, so that you do not become exhausted and can continue to be capable of acting rationally.’

  ‘I’m not a soldier …’ Vincentas started to say, but he could not finish.

  Without a word the German pulled out a revolver, walked up to him and placed the muzzle against his head. Vincentas closed his eyes. It was not the first time during this war that som
eone had wanted to kill him, but the horror was still just as great. Paralysing, cold, it locked the muscles and flowed down his back first in breath-taking tremors, then horrible drips of sweat.

  He came back to his senses only after multiple clicks. The weapon was not loaded; the SS officer had fired a whole cartridge of air into his head.

  ‘This is how we, as soldiers in this war, must train ourselves,’ he said. ‘I want to see horror in their eyes, the horror of death.’

  Any more and Vincentas would have soiled himself. What beasts these Germans were.

  Then the SS officer picked up a photograph of the child running through a meadow in his bloody underclothes.

  ‘Now there’s something here,’ he said. ‘Very nice light.’ He walked around the room. ‘It’s important to look at death more simply, as a part of life, as its extension. As sleep. In the fourteenth century, when Europe was stricken by the Black Death, people eventually decided not to be afraid of death because they became tired of fear. So they began to celebrate life, to make love, to enjoy themselves. It was a time of complete degradation, when the only thing of value was to experience as many pleasures as possible before leaving this world. War is much like the plague.’ The German clicked his tongue. ‘For that matter the Jews and the Muslims were often accused of causing the plague, so if we take the view that they are guilty of causing this war, not much has changed since the fourteenth century.’

  ‘Are they guilty?’ asked Vincentas.

  ‘Now it doesn’t matter at all,’ replied the German. ‘Sometimes retribution supersedes guilt.’

  Vincentas was silent. He wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, to get as far as he could from these strange reasonings, from the freshly shaved chin, the mouth that spoke so much of death.

  ‘We spoke recently about the meaning of severed heads in art.’

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated automatically. It was always like this: the SS officer would speak and he would simply agree with a short ‘yes’ or nod of the head. As long as it did not annoy the German he could continue to behave this way.

  ‘The shock effect,’ said the officer, more to himself than to Vincentas. ‘Beheading is one of the best ways to shock the viewer, to attract his attention – in other words to stimulate the passion of surprise in his spirit. When that happens the viewer explores the work further. To shock, to attract interest, attention … that is exactly what the Führer wants to do. To chop the head off Jewish communism in order to attract the world’s attention, to shock, to force people to reflect deeply, to see the light.’

  He remained silent. He remembered how, before the war, Judita had told him about a conversation she had heard somewhere – when there was also talk of the Soviet giant with clay feet, about the giant whose head had been chopped off. How many heads does that giant have that they have to keep being chopped off?

  ‘The subject of beheading has been explored by those artists who liked to shock in all of their art. For example, the seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio – he liked to shock in all sorts of ways – probably painted the greatest number of beheading scenes. That would be a corroboration of my thesis: if an artist who likes to shock often chooses beheadings as a subject, it means that it is a good way of effecting shock.’

  ‘Yes, it is a good method,’ he said in order not to remain silent. The Artist was not paying any attention to him. He was developing a theory. Maybe he was writing an article or a book. Vincentas was useful to him because he listened to him. He never asked his opinion. Perhaps that was part of his scheme. But what scheme?

  ‘One of the most elementary ideologies – because it is a biblical subject – is the ideology of martyrdom, the theme of martyrdom. Another theme is male-female relations. The theme of the powers that lie within woman. In some paintings they look aroused. They hold a man’s severed head and look intoxicated by this sight. The motifs of Eros and Death are intertwined in these narratives. Freud’s theory also supports this – Eros and Death are very close. The French even call an orgasm la petite mort, the little death. The blending of Eros and Death can absolutely be discerned in these subjects. The nineteenth-century British graphic artist Beardsley, in his illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, shows a young woman almost kissing John the Baptist’s severed head.’

  He imagined Judita holding a man’s severed head. She appeared before him like a photograph, like a frozen thought. Realistic, more real than in life. A photograph waiting for him, which he just needs to take.

  ‘Works like that can operate through the subconscious. They sow the seed of the connection between Death and Eros, Eros and torture.’

  Judita stood with her back to him, but he knew clearly that she held a man’s severed head in her hands.

  ‘I have spoken quite extensively with soldiers – they say that the experience of pleasure, erotic arousal, at the moment of killing, is not foreign to them.’

  The more that Judita turned towards him, the greater the anxiety that flowed into his chest.

  ‘As for artistic devices – artists, especially in the Baroque period, employed a great deal of contrast: between old and young, between old and young faces, the contrast between withered and fulsome bodies. In this case – a man’s head and a woman’s head. The woman’s head is beautiful, pure, radiant, and John’s – old, bloody, horrible. A living head – a dead head. Breasts and a dead head. Woman – the embodiment of fertility, conception, the elements, nature, unconscious instinct, and in her hands a man’s head, the symbol of reason, intellect, a symbol of power, a dead symbol, a symbol of defeat.’

  Judita finally turned to face him, and she held a man’s severed head in her hands, and when he could finally discern the bloody face with its half-open eyes a chill went through him – it was his.

  The German led Vincentas to the door.

  ‘I have a different kind of task for you. You will receive a package. You will have to bring it to me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘You’ll find out.’

  THE GOOD SAMARITAN

  They drove off in the morning, but everything was different from the times before. There were no Germans, there were no officers, and Jokūbas the Elder was in charge of the five-man party. Vincentas took his camera but soon began to wonder if he would need it.

  They sat in the back of the truck. The weather was awful, the sky caked in heavy, murky, rag-coloured clouds.

  Vincentas asked Matas, ‘Where are we going?’

  Matas shrugged. ‘We got a report about some traitors.’

  At first there had been a lot of denunciations. Sometimes a man would inform on his neighbour, claiming that he was hiding Jews. Sometimes the report was confirmed, sometimes it was just revenge out of envy or the settling of old scores.

  They drove for less than half an hour. The truck turned into the empty yard of a farm. A sleepy old dog emerged from its kennel, barked lazily a few times, then went back in. The family was sitting at their table, apparently after a late breakfast.

  The farmer, a tall man in boots and a dark shirt, invited them to sit down, put a bottle on the table.

  ‘The harvest is ready to go, but the sky is stopping us,’ he said and waved his hand. ‘Help yourselves.’

  They all had a drink. Vincentas thanked them but declined. Jokūbas the Elder, sitting on a bench by the window, leaned against the wall. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve sat like this. With a family, at a table. My back and shoulders still ache from yesterday’s work in the fields, and now again we have to go and root around in the bloody earth.’