‘Yes,’ nodded the farmer. ‘That’s for sure. Farming is hard.’
‘We’re looking for Jews. We heard that it’s swarming with Jews around here.’
The homesteader laughed loudly, perhaps more loudly than was appropriate. ‘I have neither seen nor heard anything. We see our neighbours rarely. I don’t know, no one has said anything about Jews hiding around here. Our forest isn’t big, there’s nowhere to hide there. Sounds like rumours. You know how many rumours there are these days.’
‘Yes, there are a lot of rumours floating around.’ Jokūbas the Elder poured himself some bootleg vodka, threw it back, smacked his lips in satisfaction, reached for some bread and slowly took a bite.
‘They say that there’s shooting. That they are driven into pits and then pelted with machine-gun fire …’ the farmer added. He scratched his head, shrugged his shoulders. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to put them to work? Or just shoot the communists? Let them work, let them be useful, now … They say that Lithuanians are shooting and the Germans are filming.’
Jokūbas the Elder smiled. ‘Who knows what the truth is? Even Jesus Christ, when asked by Pontius Pilate what the truth was, didn’t have anything to say. And we have our own photographers, too, don’t we, Mr Photographer?’ Jokūbas the Elder fell silent, gave the farmer a harsh look. ‘So you’re saying there are now Jews around here? Either above or below ground?’
The farmer said nothing and dropped his head. Then he stood up suddenly. Jokūbas the Elder automatically raised the barrel of his weapon slightly. The farmer dropped his trousers and laughed, saying, ‘Look – am I a Jew?’
There was a dead silence. For a few seconds nobody even stirred.
‘I’ll be damned,’ whispered Matas finally.
‘Mr Photographer, do you have your camera? This really is something.’
Vincentas raised his camera and then lowered it.
Pilypas stared stupidly. ‘I’d like to have a record of it!’
The man’s organ was impressive. The men stared at it, stunned, while the woman lowered her eyes modestly.
Feeling his worth, the farmer pulled his trousers back up slowly then buckled his belt.
‘I’ll be damned. It should be measured. Have you ever seen anything like it? That’s a gift from God; that kind of gift shouldn’t be hidden. The newspapers and magazines should be writing about it, I’m telling you,’ said Jokūbas the Elder, although he was looking around the kitchen. His eyes finally stopped at the wood stove. ‘That’s a big stove,’ he said.
‘It’s like a serpent!’ said Matas, still stunned.
‘Did our God not speak about that kind of reptile? Was it not that same serpent that was more cunning than all the other wild animals that the Lord had created? Was it not thanks to that reptile that our forefathers Eve and Adam realized that they were naked?’
Jokūbas the Elder stood up and walked to the stove.
‘Do you remember, sir, the story about the viper warmed under a coat?’
The disheartened farmer said nothing, just looked straight ahead of him with unseeing eyes. He placed his hands on the table as though he were afraid that the table would suddenly begin to lift up and start flying around, together with the irritating flies that sting so painfully before the rain. His fingers shook almost imperceptibly.
Matas and Pilypas approached the stove. Tomas stood up and moved to the door. Vincentas stayed seated at the far end of the table, glancing now at the armed men, now at the family.
Jokūbas the Elder, Matas and Pilypas began to tap on the stove slowly with their rifle butts.
There were four of them: a man, a woman and two children, a boy and a girl. Jokūbas the Elder led the men, the farmer and the Jew, outside; the women remained inside the farm cottage. Having led them to a cesspit that had been dug some distance away from the outbuilding, Jokūbas the Elder stood the Jew by the edge of the pit and ordered him to perform some squats, and while doing them to shout, ‘I am a Jew, a betrayer of Christ!’
The man did a number of squats, ran out of breath, fell silent, then Matas approached the pit and grabbed him by the hair.
‘Repeat, you parasite, “I am a Jew, a betrayer of Christ!”’
The man just barely moved his parched lips and said nothing. When he squatted again Matas kicked him in the shoulder and the man fell into the cesspit. He lay unmoving in the wet waste, waiting for the shot. There was no shot. Jokūbas the Elder ordered him to climb out. The man crawled out of the pit with difficulty and sighed with relief: not just yet, he’ll live a bit longer. Then a shot echoed, a hole appeared in the man’s forehead and he fell back into the pit.
‘Take some pictures, maestro!’ shouted Jokūbas the Elder. ‘You think that we just brought you here for the entertainment?’
Vincentas stood staring at the dead man lying in the pit. He stared and realized that he felt nothing at all, not even disgust. Nothing at all. He raised his camera and clicked. Without aiming, without focusing. Shooting blanks is what that’s called.
‘Well then. Now it’s the turn of the Good Samaritan. Just as it is said, “Do not go among the pagans or enter any town of the Samaritans” and “There is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, nothing hidden that will not become known”.’
There was a space about a metre wide between the wall and the woodstove. That was where the hiding place had been built. Boards had been nailed from the top of the stove to the wall. A small trapdoor had been installed in the boards, through which the Jewish family could get in and out of the hiding place. The boards had been plastered with clay so that they would not stand out from the wall of the stove. A bag of onions hung above the little door to make it all look normal. If an informer had not revealed the location of the hiding place it would have been difficult to find.
‘Do you know how it is said?’ spoke Jokūbas the Elder to the ashen-faced, dumbstruck man standing by the cesspit. ‘For this people’s heart has become hardened; they heard poorly with their ears and they closed their eyes, so that they might not always see with their eyes, hear with their ears, nor understand with their heart and so they could not turn to me and I could not heal them.’
‘I didn’t realize that you were a doctor,’ the farmer finally said.
Matas laughed, but Jokūbas the Elder said nothing, only looked angrily at Matas.
‘They are like those corn-cockles, those weeds that the Evil One sowed in our soil, in our Lithuania.’
‘I grew up with them.’
‘Yes, I know, attachment is a complicated matter, complicated and painful when it is necessary to give up bad habits.’
‘They are human beings, not habits.’
‘I’ll say it again: they are not people but weeds. Did human beings deport our brothers and sisters to Siberia? Could a human being horrifically torture innocent women and cut off their breasts, or cut off men’s sex organs and stuff them into their mouths? Can Jewish communism appeal to human beings? I’ll be damned – but no! Harvest time has come, and now it’s time to separate those corn-cockles from the wheat, to root out and burn them. Well then, let’s take another look at that gorgeous thing. Hold him, pull down his trousers.’
Matas and Pilypas grabbed the farmer by his arms, Tomas pulled down his trousers.
‘If you love Jews so much you should look like them,’ said Jokūbas the Elder. ‘Take him to the chopping block.’
By the wood shed stood a chopping block with an axe stuck in it. Jokūbas the Elder pulled out the axe, checked the blade with his thumb, nodded.
‘It’s a good tool; you’re a conscientious person. It’s just that you’re conscientious about the wrong things.’
The farmer shook as though he had gone mad. Matas and Pilypas could barely control him.
‘All men want theirs to be longer, but the Jews shorten theirs,’ said Jokūbas the Elder almost to himself, and Matas giggled again. ‘Put him on the block.’
The farmer was now howling like an animal about to be sla
ughtered. Jokūbas the Elder swung, and then Vincentas closed his eyes. He waited for the blow, for the whack, for the cry – but nothing happened. He opened his eyes slowly. Jokūbas the Elder held the axe in front of him and looked at him mockingly.
‘What, Mr Photographer, are your legs too weak for these kinds of pictures? Photograph, you son of a bitch. Do your job just like we’re doing ours, otherwise … you’ll up in his place.’
Again Vincentas pressed the button. Click, went the camera’s mechanism. Whack, echoed the blow of the axe on the block. The farmer collapsed. Matas and Pilypas were wiping the blood off their hands and faces, their clothes also splattered with red.
Then the Jewish woman and her two children also fell into the pit. Jokūbas the Elder ordered that they be buried, then warned the farmer’s ashen-faced wife and wailing children, ‘That’s what happens to Good Samaritans. Now you know, and you will tell others about it.’
A bottle of spirits went around as they drove back. Vincentas drank with the rest of them.
NEWS OF ALEKSANDRAS
Judita sometimes went into the city. She had carefully bleached her already fair hair with peroxide, and now – a perfect blonde – would go out walking. Vincentas did not like it, but he couldn’t stop her. She found some contacts who, through other contacts, got her a fake passport and food card, important documents that proved her right to exist. Then she found work in a private translation bureau where a friend of hers from before the war was employed.
‘But what if someone recognizes you?’ Just the thought of it made the tips of Vincentas’s fingers go numb. He and his mother would be shot, or at least thrown in jail.
‘I can’t lie around in a basement day after day,’ she would say.
‘Go and see my mother,’ Vincentas would reply, knowing that it was a half-hearted suggestion.
Judita would shake her head quietly. She avoided his mother as far as was possible, but she would sometimes go to visit her but would then agree that the woman could only be taken in small doses. When she’d been drinking she would grab whoever was to hand and would not let them go until her reluctant companion finally managed to escape, sick of her endless stories about better days and the time when she sang and danced and was a desirable woman on Laisvės alėja.
Judita would bring work home. Each time it would be a meaningful journey for her – from ‘the underworld to the kingdom of light’, as she would say – but would return sullen and withdrawn.
‘They have made slaves of us,’ she said. ‘I keep seeing brigades, all wearing Stars of David, creeping along side-streets – they do everything, all of the unbearably hard jobs. Prisoners of war and Jews have been turned into cheap labour that can be worked to death without adhering to any codes of humanity. The other day I saw some men hauling a wagon filled with logs, the kind of wagon that should be pulled by two strong horses, and just a few of them were dragging that wagon up a hill – and to make it worse, a guard was hitting them with his rifle butt. And today I saw my gynaecologist, a professor. He didn’t recognize me. The poor man was walking in the gutter while his guard walked along the pavement.’ She looked at Vincentas with eyes full of hurt. ‘The guard wasn’t a German, he was a Lithuanian partisan.’
Vincentas had nothing to say. He had seen that kind of thing more than once.
Their relationship deteriorated. Perhaps not deteriorated, it just became lukewarm. After the last operation, even though Vincentas had washed and scrubbed his skin with soap until it hurt, he still felt like he smelled of lime. And they made love less and less frequently. He had more and more difficulty struggling over the dead, the shot, the desecrated bodies, to reach his lover’s, his only beloved’s body. More and more often he made love drunk or having sniffed some powder. And he was still sometimes overcome by the fear that he would once more hear that cracking sound that had so frightened him at the beginning of the war and which he had subsequently heard more than once by the huge open pits filled with dead bodies.
After the Jews had been driven into the ghetto, Maksas Handkė’s photographic studio, where Vincentas worked, had passed into the hands of someone who served the nationalists. He did not fire Vincentas, but he was clearly not thrilled to have him there. There was not a great deal of work, but Vincentas was spending more and more time at the studio.
When he returned home one evening Judita was more distressed than usual. She sat the table with her eyes fixed on a book. When he approached to kiss her she evaded his caresses, and he noticed that she smelled of alcohol.
‘Your mother treated me,’ she said, by way of explanation, then lit a cigarette with trembling fingers.
‘Did something happen?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Something. A very big something,’ said Judita, nodding.
His chest tightened. Suddenly he realized that he might lose her love. He did not know how or why, but it was a possibility. Anything was possible in this war. Before the war they had met secretly for almost two years. Their meetings were rare, but he always savoured each one for a long time afterwards. They were celebrations of emotion and passion that made living worthwhile, for which he would have given his life. Now, when he could see her every day, he was permanently worried that the whole thing could suddenly vanish, end, dissolve.
‘Could it be … ?’ he began but didn’t finish. He did not know in which direction he should guess. Could she have found out that he was serving the Nazis? The whole time he had made excuses to himself that he was serving his homeland, but how long can such self-deception last? There is no homeland. And the Nazis consider themselves superior. Any number of shops, restaurants and cafés were now reserved only for Germans. The lowest German nobody considers himself above every Lithuanian. The soldiers in his brigade aren’t issued with uniforms; they walk around in their own clothes. The warehouses are packed with Lithuanian army uniforms, but the Germans won’t distribute them. They don’t want the Lithuanians to look like real soldiers.
‘Aleksandras has turned up,’ she said finally.
‘How? You’ve seen him? Where?’
‘I sometimes go to a school where some of the Jewish women from the ghetto work. I take them some food.’
‘We don’t have enough food for ourselves.’
‘No, we aren’t short of food at all. You should hear what they tell me. They are half starved.’
‘Fine, do as you see fit.’ Vincentas’s voice sounded unpleasant, almost hostile. He didn’t care about the food. He was jealous. Judita was bringing not only food to those Jewish women she was also taking them a part of herself. Handing herself out to strangers instead of giving her whole being to him, Vincentas. He realized it was egotistical and maybe even absurdly childish, but he couldn’t help himself.
Judita said nothing, just gave Vincentas a piercing look. It had to happen sooner or later. All those walks she was taking could not end well.
‘In an inner courtyard next to the school a brigade of people with stars pinned on them was cutting firewood and washing soldiers’ uniforms. I gave them a packet of cigarettes, and they were as excited as children. And one of them recognized me. I did not recognize him. It was Izaokas Lipceris. He had shrunk to half the size he used to be … He used to play with Aleksandras. He said that my husband was alive, in the ghetto. And he asked why I was not with him. I didn’t know how to answer him. Why am I not with him? Why? I don’t know. Maybe I should be with those who are already under the ground. In the pit, in the Seventh Fort!’
‘It isn’t your fault.’
‘I should go back … I should go back to Aleksandras. I’m his wife. We were never divorced.’
‘No, you can’t, not under any circumstances. You have documents, you can get divorced and live here. With me. And become my wife!’
Judita shook her head. ‘I have to go back. I feel like a whore.’
Vincentas did not know what to say. How to stop her.
TOTENKOPF
They arrived at the site of the operation a few hours e
arly, so the men were allowed to go for a walk. Vincentas, too, went into the village. He took a few photographs of the church, then walked through the market square, and a few blocks further on he came upon the synagogue. He once again raised his camera and pressed the shutter-button. The Germans had given him a Leica II with a built-in rangefinder, an excellent camera. He didn’t like photographing buildings, but lately he had ceased to be interested in capturing people. Their faces, their bodies – he was beginning to be afraid of looking people in the eye; he wanted to avoid their mockery, their contempt, their disgust. Walking around town, he would see the passers-by on the street and imagine them all dead – lying half naked in rows on top of one another in the pits. Anyone could find themselves there one day. All it would take would be one insane order and everything would change.
Darkness and Company Page 16