Darkness and Company

by Sigitas Parulskis

  Simonas, who was called Petras, fell silent. ‘The sergeant was just injured, but Tadas was killed. He got some shrapnel through the eye.’

  Simonas Petras pulled a silver chain with a small jewel from his pocket.

  ‘So this is what’s left of Tadas. He had this little chain around his neck. Not a cross, but this little piece of crap.’ Simonas Petras held up the chain, let it swing in the air and then put it back in his pocket.

  Vincentas remembered Juozapas. ‘At the end someone hammers down the points of the nails,’ he said.

  ‘What nails?’ asked Simonas Petras.

  ‘Even the ones that no one can see.’

  Simonas Petras did not like Vincentas’s words. He made a face, took a step towards Vincentas and, barely taking a swing, whacked him around the ear. Vincentas’s mouth dropped in surprise. Simonas Petras stood there with clenched fists and looked at him angrily.

  ‘And what are you going to do to me?’ Vincentas finally asked. ‘What?’ He pressed his hand against his hurt ear – it was bleeding.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘Nothing.’

  ESCAPE

  He wanted to die. Sitting there injured by the lake he felt weak, helpless and useless, he wanted to end it all because he saw no point in going on. But then, from somewhere very deep, from the darkest corner of his unconscious, came the realization that the only reason for which it was worth living and suffering was his son. He didn’t care any more what future generations might think of him; he didn’t know those generations and never will. The most painful thing was that he would probably never know his son either.

  Although Judita had written in her farewell letter that he must not look for her, he had tried. The more so because one day he had found a small piece of paper wedged between the door and the door jamb of Juozapas’s workshop. There were only two words on it: ‘A son’. Why had she done that? To torment Vincentas, to hurt him? Or maybe she still loved him and wanted Vincentas to know that their short, unlucky love had borne a wonderful fruit – a son.

  And a strange desire awoke and grew and spread inside him – the desire to explain to his son who his father was, who he was. To justify himself. To apologize. This simple, even banal thought, this desire saved his life. He began to resist death, and death withdrew a little. Sometimes he felt its presence, sometimes he even imagined it standing in a corner, but in its hand it held not a traditional scythe but a seven-tined harpoon. When he felt better he thought about his life; he couldn’t blame the way he had behaved on the times he had lived through. To him it was as colourless as developing fluid.

  His mother did not want to flee. Who in Germany would want an old whore? she asked Vincentas ironically when he suggested that they leave the country together. On the last night they sat together in silence, drank some alcohol mixed with cranberry juice, and he asked his mother to take care of Judita if she should ever turn up – when the Reds come, when the Reds come back.

  He had managed to get a permit from the now-defunct general commissariat and had bought a ticket as far as Vienna with no trouble. At the border his permit did not raise any suspicions with the border guard either, then Tilžė, Königsberg, where he had a long wait for the train to Berlin – the military were allowed through first – then Elbing, Berlin … He decided to get off in Berlin. He had seen it only in photographs, had read things in books and newspapers, and the city enchanted him immediately – Friedrichstrasse, Hallesches Tor, Museuminseln, Alexanderplatz, he muttered the names under his breath, and it all seemed like a childhood dream or memory, although he knew that he had never been here, and he spent a whole day riding the metro in every direction, enjoying the rhythm of metropolis, which is best felt underground. Sometimes he felt as though he were a photograph, as though he were an image captured and fixed on film, a negative that rises from the catacombs up to the light, revealing the light contained in him. No matter how many times he came up to the surface, there was still no more light in his eyes, but here were Berliners taking the metro, people who looked as though the war had never happened – all well turned out, shoes polished to a shine, and then for a while he did small carpentry jobs, and worked as a mechanic at a factory in Spandau, and when the Russians got closer to the city he and other refugees retreated further south.

  Wandering among the ruins that Germany was gradually becoming, he felt his personal circumstances mirrored what he saw around him – his life, too, was in ruins, and when he tried to imagine what he might say to his grown son all sorts of complications arose.

  He imagined a measured conversation between two grown men … Love is real madness, he would tell him, a disease, an obsession, like being poisoned. And when you recover you can’t understand how you could have behaved that way, thought – or rather not thought – that way. Love is like war. In both love and war you can act as though you’ve lost your mind. You have to be mad to be able to kill your fellow creature. Of course, war causes death, love brings life.

  And yet, when I think about Judita, about your mother, he says to the son he imagines, a feeling of bliss comes over me. Of intoxication. I think about her; I think about her, and I don’t want to stop, I don’t want the bliss to end. It’s a strange feeling – as if when I lived with her, back then, when we were together, it’s as though I wasn’t living but just waiting. And now, when she’s no longer here, when I may never see her again, I have started to live. With her. I remember her much better, feel her more deeply, know her in the finest detail, very differently from when we were together. I still love her, I still lose my mind when I look at photographs of her.

  Thankfully he had managed to save some photographs of Judita. Not all of them, but a few. He pored over them constantly, every day; it was like praying, a ritual for him. And every time he looked at those photographs it was as if he understood just how beautiful she was for the first time, how amazing her body was and now that a few years had passed he couldn’t quite remember if he had always understood that, if he had always told her that she was beautiful, that she was the most wonderful woman on earth. There she is, leaning her full head of blonde hair on her arm, her other arm resting on her curved hip, she isn’t looking into the camera but just above – there was a small window there, light fell through it, just like here. Only Judita is not here.

  Among the photographs of her he found a scrap of newspaper. The negatives, which he had not looked at since the war, were wrapped in it. It was old.

  Lithuanian brothers and sisters!

  The fateful hour of the final reckoning with the Jews has arrived. Lithuania must be liberated not only from Asiatic Bolshevik oppression but from Jewry’s long-standing yoke.

  Where are you now, my liberated brothers and sisters, you miserable refugees, now that you have been freed from your homeland?

  He keeps losing his train of thought. It breaks like a strip of film. Some frames are exposed, in others there are white spots, he doesn’t even know if they were good shots or if he had just been shooting randomly. Sometimes the image yields only after several tries. It is as if he were not looking through his own eyes but through someone else’s, or – even more strangely – through a rangefinder, through a lens. He looks at that image through the lens and senses that it is there but just can’t find its contours, can’t grasp its essence. Then suddenly it reveals itself, all by itself. Then other times it happens on the first attempt. Exactly as it should be. Like the image was waiting to be found, to be extracted from reality. Then he walks through that same place, in his thoughts, and there is nothing left; it has disappeared, melted away. Everything seems to be the same, but all the objects and shapes are nailed down where they belong, like they are decorations. But when the revelation occurs everything looks as though it has just been created – it hovers in the air, rises barely a few millimetres above the ground, like a soul trying to liberate itself from the confines of its corporeal prison.

  More and more the world seemed like a giant darkroom to him, with people’s lives pegged
to a string to dry – or, more accurately, reflections of their lives, shed skins, copies that no longer had anything to do with the original.

  I would like to talk to you, he would say to his imaginary son, nothing more, just exchange a few idle words. Do some of those silly little things that fathers do with sons. Go fishing, take some photographs, talk about girls, first kisses and the final colours of a sunset. Ride bicycles towards the horizon. Ride and never stop.

  But still he was tormented by another unpleasant thought – what if it was all a big joke? A note about a son? Judita’s big joke? But a joke would be too light a punishment. Another thought crept along after that, a much darker, crueller one: what if the son did exist, but the father was not Vincentas but the Artist, that poet of severed heads? This was unbearable, but it was with this thought that the conversations with his imaginary son usually ended.

  PAINTINGS

  Vincentas’s doctor – although in his thoughts he called him ‘the butcher’ – was not in any way a dilettante. He talked about having treated wounded German soldiers during the war, he claimed to have seen everything. He had been ready to give his life defending his country, but in 1944, as the front approached, he realized he was not made for heroism. He described to Vincentas a scene he had witnessed that definitively convinced him that he was not cut out to be a soldier. A young Lithuanian captain put a couple of sandwiches in his pocket, a loaded pistol and two turnips, kissed his wife goodbye and calmly walked off down the road – as if he were not going to war but was simply on his way to work. I understood then, said the doctor, that I wouldn’t be able to show the same courage, and I decided to flee.

  One way or another, whether it was the doctor’s qualifications and experience or Vincentas’s survival instinct that saved him, he slowly began to recover. He regained a ravenous appetite and the desire to know what was happening outside the walls, what was happening in the camp. Strange things were going on in the refugees’ world: they were all dancing, singing, publishing newspapers and books, staging plays and talking about how they had escaped from their homeland and how they would return to it. Some were enraptured with the idea of the exile’s fate, others by visions of return. Almost no one lived in the here and now – except for the dead and the sick. When Vincentas’s doctor offered to take him to the French zone he was surprised but elated. The doctor said he had some friends there, a family; the wife has an administrative job and the husband is a teacher. There’s a lot of culture in the French zone; they’re always putting on plays and having films brought in.

  ‘In southern Germany, where the French are in charge, they make sure that the soldiers are exposed to culture; they screen French art films in the soldiers’ cinemas, they bring in concerts and plays from Paris,’ the doctor told Vincentas. ‘Your body has recovered sufficiently – now your soul needs to be healed.’

  Vincentas smiled, for the first time in a long time. If he still had a soul it probably looked like an insect. Like an insect that’s been crushed by a soldier’s boot.

  ‘There,’ said the doctor, pleased. ‘That’s the first sign that things are improving.’

  Vincentas did not try to argue any longer, but he was quite sure that after this war his shares in a soul, faith and God had fallen drastically. The Son of God may have risen, but mankind had not.

  They took the train. Permits were required to cross between the American and French zones, but the two men did not have any. They travelled to the last possible station, then got off and started walking through the fields.

  ‘You know, of all the stories you have told me there are a few that require more detailed explanation.’

  ‘In other words – they sound like fabrications?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t be quite so specific, but still …’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Well, the woman sitting in the kitchen, naked to the waist.’

  ‘Why is that odd?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like something that normally happens – you enter a kitchen and a half-naked woman is sitting there. It’s not usual.’

  ‘Doctor, I can’t prove anything, anything. The only thing that’s certain is that Judita was not an ordinary woman. She was an extraordinary and unusual woman.’

  Vincentas was lying, he could have proved it. He had Judita’s letter, but he didn’t want to show it to the doctor.

  ‘That’s your emotions talking, not reason.’

  ‘To hell with reason.’

  ‘All right. Let’s say she was an unusual woman. But the story about the SS officer … it, too, raises some questions.’

  ‘Yes, that’s an unbelievable story. And I am certainly not happy that it happened to me.’

  ‘I have the impression that he in some way fascinated you, that officer. Would that be true?’

  ‘Really? I would say more that he frightened me. But I don’t know. He, too, was an orphan of sorts – he also grew up without a father.’

  ‘And it’s also hard to believe that there was no retribution after an SS officer died in such a mysterious way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They would have burned half the town for something like that.’

  ‘Didn’t they burn enough towns?’ mumbled Vincentas.

  Yes, the doctor was right, but how could Vincentas have calmly described that he had watched that animal rape his beloved – that he had just stood there and done nothing? Who would gain anything from that? Both the executioner and his victim know the real truth, but the witness, the viewer, he only receives an impression of the truth. It doesn’t matter whether that impression is strong or weak. One way or another it will fade, will become a dim and distant memory, but the victim and the executioner will never forget the truth. And that is what is most important.

  So it may as well just go on like this.

  After that awful night he was no longer required to attend any more operations, maybe because all the Jews in the countryside had already been killed, or maybe for other reasons that were unknown to him. He waited, for many days and nights he waited, for someone to knock on his door – for that fateful knocking. Simonas Petras had split open his ear, but that was unrelated. Vincentas no longer had to be killed. He was already dead.

  ‘War is like a scalpel – it exposes man’s rotten innards pitilessly, with a single cut. And, unfortunately, there is no way to fix him,’ said the doctor.

  Is it possible to heal a dead man? Vincentas wanted to ask. Even our God hangs dead on the cross. Judita, seeing how cruelly and disrespectfully Lithuanians were treating Jews, had once said to him, ‘What can be expected from a nation that worships suffering and death?’ But he remained silent. It would change nothing. Nothing in this world had changed for a long time, apart from the man guarding the cemetery.

  It suddenly became cooler; it began to rain. Vincentas and the doctor continued, all the while trying to find some shelter, from bush to bush, from one grove to another, but sometimes, when there was no shelter, they walked with their heads lowered and hunched over so as to be as inconspicuous as possible.

  ‘We look like criminals,’ said the doctor. ‘But what is our crime?’

  ‘Some things have to be done in the dark, doctor, some things cannot tolerate light,’ Vincentas replied.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘About photography.’

  The doctor laughed. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’

  They came across a huge puddle in the road and skirted it, then suddenly heard a commotion beyond the bushes.

  They froze.

  ‘Well, here we are,’ whispered the doctor. ‘A patrol.’

  ‘Shhh,’ Vincentas silenced him.

  The voices beyond the bushes became louder. It seemed an entire squad was approaching them.

  At first Vincentas thought they should run. He looked around. The soldiers were quite short, wearing winter uniforms much too early in the season, and when they saw the two crouching men beyon
d the bushes they began to bleat.

  ‘Bloody hell – sheep,’ the doctor laughed, relieved. ‘It’s just some bloody sheep!’

  ‘If there are sheep, there will be shepherds near by,’ Vincentas warned him.