The steady rhythm of the lobby is broken by the red bellhops: they attack the luggage of the arriving and departing, they chat up guests who feel like talking and are discreetly silent if a new arrival doesn’t want to, and many have the psychological insight of a psychoanalyst. It’s as difficult making it into the bellhops as getting into the French Academy. Unless someone retires or dies. In a week, an experienced bellhop can collect a hundred dollars in tips.
One minute to start time. Antanas Garšva walks along, observing himself in the mirrors. There’s Garšva, there’s Garšva, there’s Number 87. I have acquired a new coat of arms. My genealogical tree has branched out. My mother’s coat of arms contains an upright fish. Some kind of carp, maybe a crucian. The roaring lion has swallowed the rotten fish. Long live the digestive capacities of foreigners. Long live paralysed England, reincarnated into a hybrid between a fish and a lion. Long live grapefruit and the fusion of hydrogen bomb elements before the explosion. Long live my break periods. The American Dream. And the fog. You can’t come near me. The hotel guests, the manager, or the starter. Not even the starter. The last mirror. Look at yourself one last time, Antanas Garšva. Suddenly, perhaps accidentally, you look like your father. Company over for tea and wild strawberry jam would say: “Sooooo like your mother! Turn around, Antanukas. Look – a perfect copy!”¹⁹ If they thrust a violin into your hands it would befit you to play Wieniawski’s gypsy variations. My friend Joe, the baritone, is already waiting. And my friend Stanley, the drunk.
Antanas Garšva finds himself in a spacious sunken area of the lobby lined on two sides by elevators. Six to the left and six to the right. To the left – the locals. They go up to only the tenth floor, stopping at each one in between, and then return. To the right – the expresses. They stop once at the tenth floor and then at each one after that, up to the final, eighteenth, floor. The hotel elevators are automatic, manufactured by Westinghouse. Signalling machines mounted on the walls flash with green and red lights that track the movements of the elevators. Like at intersections. This area of the lobby is bordered by the window of the flower shop. Beyond the polished glass – roses, gladioli, rhododendron, carnations, azaleas, and white- and red-veined hothouse leaves, an anatomical atlas woven of human blood and nerves.
By the window of the flower shop, the starter is waiting for a new shift of elevator operators. A tall, bilious, blue-uniformed Irishman, he is short-tempered and swift, and prone to sudden, inexplicable bouts of anger. He collects the cards and assigns the elevators.
“Number nine, Tony,” he says, handing out a pair of white gloves. Above the elevator door – numbers and arrows. Antanas Garšva waits for his friend to descend. The arrow shows twelve, stop, down, no stop at eleven. Number nine will soon shoot down to the lobby. I have put on my surgical gloves. My grandmother’s ring, from the time of the rebellion, is hidden. Dear madam, you are strange, I no longer care about Elena. I am a dreamer, just like my father. I am a Lithuanian kaukas in the biggest hotel in New York. Forty elevator operators alone. Number nine has flown down. The door opens. Seven passengers stream out. The short Italian says, “Today one drunken idiot stuffed a dollar into my hand. You’ve got your red. Goodbye, Tony.”
Garšva enters the polished box. The pen, as the elevator operators call it.
19Antanukas is a diminutive of Antanas.
Chapter 2
From Antanas Garšva’s Notebooks
My father loved to play the violin. Though he had no formal training, he played with talent. He performed the Wieniawski variations furiously, but I doubt he could have handled Bayer. He would drop whole rows of notes, replacing them with brilliant improvisation. Like all amateurs, he had a tendency to stretch, emotionalise and accelerate. His attitude was that of the quintessential violinist: a thin and agile body, nervous and elegant hands, a sharp profile with a long, hooked nose. Good God, how he flew around the room! Each pose was worthy of art photography. Later, I would recognise my father in Walt Disney films, in different cartoon characters. When I first started reading serious books, I saw the image of the “genius” in my father’s violin gymnastics. Listening to his infernal playing, I would feel tears of beauty well up, a longing to die in the name of the ecstasy exploding inside me.
It would happen in the evening. We had a fancy oil lamp with a green glass shade. In the evenings the lamp glowed, softening the shabby walls and furniture, making them look splendid and cosy.
As my mother embroidered and I played with my hands, my father would turn his eyes away from us and then, seemingly by chance, graze the surface of the violin hanging on the wall above our heads. He waited to be asked. The clocks ticked – our family loved clocks. The glowing wall clock, the twin bell alarm clock, my father’s silver watch on the table, my mother’s hanging from her neck like an enlarged medallion. We would listen to the clocks’ introductory accompaniment. I would clench my fingers. My mother’s stitching would slow down, the last petal of a tea rose would not be threaded into the tablecloth. The accompaniment ticked on for too long, as though the listeners had not yet settled in their seats, as though someone had coughed. My father was now tapping the surface of the violin nervously. How clearly we could hear the clocks! Flat stones falling into water, the sowing of fir needles, a pin digging into unpolished metal, the short, rhythmic steps of motherly love. And my mother would utter a few words, and my fingers would continue their squirrely gymnastics – as my father’s melted into the violin’s lacquered surface.
“What do you think?”
“About what?” my father would ask.
“I’m thinking about Wieniawski. Does his music really lack…”
“Are you trying to say – it doesn’t have depth? Yes, that’s true. But it is valuable for its tonal beauty. It is virtuoso, and I like virtuosity in violin music. For example…”
The violin was in his hands. I never managed to see it being taken down. As though it had autonomously removed itself from the wall and jumped into my father’s hands.
“For example, this fragment from Concerto Number 2. In D minor. The very last moment. The gypsy variations. They’re gems.”
And my father would begin to hurl those gems around. The first to fall were tiny and unpolished, the pizzicati. These my father would throw from a seated position. Then came the turn of the larger, more polished stones. My father was now standing, and it seemed to me that he had not unfurled himself, but rather that the springs of the chair had hurled him into the centre of the room. Gems flew around in the green light, variation upon variation, while I bent my head down and curled up to avoid being injured by those musical gems. But nevertheless, the occasional sharpedged stone would hit me in the spine and I would feel the thrill of a cold shiver. My father was very wealthy – he had more gems than a Nepalese maharaja. And he flew with them around the green room. And he contorted and raged. I couldn’t understand why Wieniawski lacked depth. Gypsy variations? As far as I knew, gypsies were a deep people. They sat or danced by bonfires at night, they thrust knives into their enemies’ bodies, and were good at stealing other people’s horses. They were brave and dirty. Their women had a particular way of swaying from the waist, they read cards, and one wanted to embrace them to hear the jingling of the medallions hanging from their necks. Now my father was a gypsy, the green lamp a bonfire, my mother a gypsy queen, and I…
Black hair and black hair. A red sash, a bent waist. Glances meet, sparks like fireworks. I’ve always thought of Lermontov’s Tamara as such a gypsy. How could a demon wear a red sash – he should be as black as insomniac fear in bed at night, and dancing doesn’t suit him, but he can stand by the fire if the gypsy Tamara’s medallions are jingling.
My father would end his variations on a long, fading note. It’s possible that he got tired. Both he and his violin. I could clearly see the thinning varnish, the impressions from his fingers. The violin was old, it had to be hung carefully back on the wall, and the chair wouldn’t slip under him on its own, so my father would
collapse, the room having absorbed his musical enthusiasm. My mother could now return to her tea rose petal, I to my hands, my father to his thoughts. The conservatory… He had been poor – he was able to train as a teacher, but the Conservatory… the unfinished Wieniawski variations, wrinkles on the violin and on his face – two friends who joyfully throw their arms around each other and soon again part ways, two friends evading sadness. The green light inspires him to be exceptional, but that exceptionality lasts only a few minutes, and then all that’s left is a cosy, bourgeois green lamp and a teacher’s long evening. Notebooks, errors, problems – if there are so many kilometres from station A to station B, how many kilometres are there to station C? How far is it to station C where a conservatory stands, its magnificence confirmed by its marble columns?
And then my father wrote dramas. They were brutal, bloody and spectacular. He distinguished positive and negative characters by nationality. Lithuanians were honest, Poles – traitors, Russians – sadists. And the themes? The dissemination of banned Lithuanian books, an innocent girl’s rape and tragic drowning in the Nemunas, gold prospecting in the Siberian taiga, and with it a rich accompaniment of folk songs, as though the hero’s pure feelings were being poured into irregular antique pots.²⁰ In a small town whose once lively and noisy train station had been forgotten by the government, in the trade school building among tables, sled runners and benches smelling of resin, my father staged these dramas himself, dragging his adolescent students on to a wobbly stage that swayed on wooden trestles in the former second-class waiting room. Like the rest of the audience, I was stunned by the scenographic effects my father achieved with his naturalistic staging. Actors would scythe real rye (industrious pupils had stacked it into wooden blocks) and a special machine blew fluff representing snow, which would stick to the wool clothing of the people sitting in the front row (the front row contained the town dignitaries: the priest, the notary, the police chief, the deep-voiced midwife). The heroine of the work, sullied to the point of pregnancy by a Polish gentleman, would drown herself in a hole in the floor (the Nemunas), while a boy crouching there would hold up a bottle of seltzer so that water could spray from the drowned girl’s body. When the curtain was drawn back open, my victorious father would blow symbolic kisses in response to the audience’s aesthetic tears. He could hear the midwife’s piteous bass: “What a backward era!” An intonation that would introduce a note of humanity to the proceedings.
My father was an excellent public speaker. During ceremonies people would crowd around the linden trees and stone altar by the station. Flags fluttered, the trumpets in the firemen’s orchestra sparkled, the drunken drummer belched, the town’s worthies turned out in their blue and grey suits and their their facial muscles flexed with concern – an artificial convulsion to express the solemnity and grandeur of the moment. And plenty of the spectators were grateful: women eager to cry and children desperate for a show, something so rare in the town. Smoke rose from the monument. To make sure that the fire caught, the stationmaster had stuffed old newspapers under the kindling, and singed scraps flew over the assembled heads. The ladies wore hats in the Kaunas style, with multi-coloured, shimmering feathers, so that they looked like domesticated birds waiting for their feed. And my father’s brain contained granaries of that kind of feed, so easily digested that it could bring tears to the eye, a slackening of the lower jaw, applause, envy for the last speaker and his family, and such a loud and unanimous “hurray” that the sound of its “ay” would penetrate the open windows of the train station restaurant and ping against a row of vodka shot glasses. My father’s slim figure stood erect in its pre-war frock coat, like an obelisk staked into the ground. As in his dramas, the theme of his speech was the negative traits of Russians and Poles. His speech was structured like a Wieniawski gypsy variation. Here too he would use his introductory pizzicato, as though he were unprepared, as though he was just now searching for his words – and this search would sink into the listeners’ souls, and the pizzicato would echo within their souls, and they would feel that the speaker had amassed within himself much great and meaningful content. The firemen’s painstakingly polished trumpets, the nickel on the bicycles, the sand freshly scattered between the railway tracks, they all sparkled, as did the men’s freshly shaven chins, the old women’s dampening eyes and the silk lapels on my father’s frock coat. His voice rose.
Trotsky and his accomplices were dining on the second floor of a hotel in Taganrog, throwing plates on to the street. The hungry crowd below caught the plates as though they were manna from heaven and licked them on the spot, their blue tongues quivering.
When they had Vilnius, the Poles would lure Lithuanian patriots into special interrogation rooms and pour water down their noses, and the patriots’ stomachs would blow up like orchestra drums.²¹
My father would raise his arms. He shook his fists menacingly, his frock coat sleeves slicing through the air. He hurled lightning bolt glances. His vocal cords would tire. And then silence would descend. My ashen father would again stiffen, like a freshly painted obelisk on which the painter had missed two spots. His cheeks glowed with two red circles of excitement. The crowd roared, the ladies cried, the men’s lips narrowed, the children’s mouths gaped wide, some of them would even forget to wipe their runny noses. Round bluish clouds rolled towards the town of Žiežmariai. Members of the firemen’s orchestra were already moistening their parched tongues, and the eyes of the black-whiskered conductor glanced at the sheet music. The poor drummer, stunned and exhausted, belched dwindling chords. He looked at his drum with horror, as though it were his own stomach. My father’s knees slowly relaxed. The obelisk slumped, as though it had been sculpted of snow and coal, and was melting under a rain of emotion, or a fierce spring sun. My father knelt in the square by the station, by the smouldering altar, mystical fairy-tale smoke floated by his face, his arms spread wide.
“We ruled from sea to sea,” he would assert.²² “To sea” – these words would inflate and gently float away. My father would get up suddenly and walk briskly through the scattering crowd. A mad fray would crash against his back – children threw hats, trumpets rattled the beer glasses in the station restaurant, clouds rolled. My father walked like Icarus, as though he were about to ascend into the heavens and fly through the round clouds rolling towards Žiežmariai. At that time I still believed in my father – the flyer – and would not have been surprised had he actually started to fly, his long legs clearing the red-brick chimneys of the train station.
My father was a charming liar, while he lived with my mother. Later he would redirect his eloquence to a German-language teacher, and I no longer heard his heroic stories.
He studied in Tbilisi, at the Pedagogical Institute. He had no money, had survived on grapes and cheese. But he was elegant and did his best to wear well-cut clothes. Once, in the city gardens, during the evening promenade, the Georgian princess Chavchavadze ordered the driver of her open landau, drawn by four white-maned horses, to stop. My father was leaning against a blooming acacia tree, smoking a long, expensive cigarette. It was love at first sight. My father stepped into the landau without a word. The invitation was issued by Princess Chavchavadze’s coal-black eyes, Princess Chavchavadze’s rose-red lips, Princess Chavchavadze’s hands, white as the snow atop Mount Kazbek. It was a re-enactment of the story of virtuous Joseph and Lady Potiphar. My father was proud and uncooperative, and I can’t possibly understand why. He would not go to the princess’s hut, he declined the shashlik she offered, he refused to drink the red wine that had been buried so far underground in sheepskin bags, or to kiss even her smallest finger. He stepped out of the landau and went off down a narrow path between sharp-peaked cliffs. Below the road was a deep canyon. Princess Chavchavadze ordered her driver to return alone with the horses. When they disappeared around the turn, she leapt down into the roaring, foaming Terek River. Her body was never found. The swift waves of the Terek carried it to the Black or the Caspian Sea, I can’t reme
mber which one. Love died barely having been born, while my father continued to stand around in the city gardens during the evening promenade, leaning against an acacia tree. Promenaders pointed him out, beautiful women turned away timidly, and though some glanced at him admiringly from a distance, he was as immovable as that rock against which Prometheus was once chained.
Listening to these very interesting – especially to her – legends, my mother would occasionally spit out an ironic comment. That in the Caucasus, under the tsar, there were many impoverished princes and princesses, some of whom even worked as footmen, or waitresses in Tbilisi’s cheapest restaurants, where you could order nothing but grapes and cheese. But my father didn’t listen to these comments as he should have.
My father loved nature. I remember our walks along the Nemunas in Aukštoji Panemunė.²³ They were filled with obstacles. Flowers, juniper bushes, flowing water, clouds, the tangy smell of a pine forest – all of these would make him stop. And I found these static poses of my father’s to be the most aesthetic ones.
My father kneels before a simple daisy and counts its petals. Like a botanist, like a man in love, like an orphan in a children’s fairy tale.
My father stands on the bank of the Nemunas, watching it curve around Pažaislis Monastery.²⁴ His silhouette gives meaning to the landscape, and my imagination revives the past. Napoleon at the Berezina; Vytautas the Great watching the Battle of Žalgiris;²⁵ Genghis Khan on the Russian steppes; Nero reciting poetry as Rome burns; a pilgrim waiting for a boat to carry him to the other side, to a feast day at Pažaislis; someone about to commit suicide dismissing the final argument for the meaning of life.
My father lies on the grass, his eyes wandering among the clouds and the tips of the pines. He lies there a long time, chewing blades of grass, his chest rising rhythmically, the wind stirring his whiskers, and I expected him to utter momentous words, so all my fears and doubts would be dispelled.
White Shroud Page 4