I respected and loved my father when he was contemplating nature. I can only guess whether he loved it himself. He avoided conversations about it, and only spoke about it in fragments:
“Look, the sun, strange that there are six leaves, here in the marsh, when I was little I saw a lot of snakes, look, the cross is glimmering, let’s sit a little longer.”
And so I absorbed through my father the sadness that lies in nature, a feeling of alienation, a solitary silhouette; enveloped by the leaves, the trees, the water I would feel a million pinpricks, the loneliness penetrating my eyes, my mouth, my ears and skin.
Beautiful and terrifying – these are the first abstract words that took shape in my child’s mind as I observed my father, now that he was calm in the countryside.
Sometimes my father would beat my mother.
*
Number nine is a good elevator. It rarely gets stuck between floors and the door opens quickly. Antanas Garšva stands to the right, facing a metal plate with buttons and signal lights. Red square lights up – get ready; green arrow lights up – pull the handle. Guests enter. The starter directs them. The hotel is packed on Sundays. The eighteenth floor contains halls for balls and receptions, whereas the mezzanine has a conference hall and party rooms. The hotel hosts wedding celebrations, Masonic lodge gatherings, foreign national holidays, dentists’ conferences, young people’s dances, parties for “The Ladies of Hercules”, soirées for Russian Orthodox clergymen with red wine and tsarist songs, evenings for former alcoholics, events for Chiang Kai-shek officers, meetings of progressive Armenians, get-togethers for ageing boxers, dinners for the Cardinal and his retinue attended by Polish clerics, live chinchilla exhibitions… It commemorates, celebrates, assembles, dines, remembers, conspires, consults, honours, reviles…
The starter moves like an expressive dancer. “To your left – the expresses, from the tenth to the eighteenth floors, to your right – the locals, for the first to the tenth floors. Yes sir, the chinchillas are at the top, yes, madam, the Masons are on the mezzanine. Oh no, holy father, Parlour B is on the eighteenth, yes, the Masons are on the mezzanine, you are absolutely right – the chinchillas, forgive me, yes, the Cardinal and the chinchillas are on the same floor, Joe. To your left and to your right, yes, no, no, no, yes…”
And Antanas Garšva continues the ritual. The express – from the tenth to the eighteenth. Your floor, here we are, thank you, he presses the button, your floor, thank you, you’re welcome, the button, thank you, here we are, thank you… The green arrow lights up, Antanas Garšva extends a white-gloved hand, all done, going up. He gives the handle a push, the doors close and the elevator rises. The numbers of the passing floors twinkle above him: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Eleventh floor, here we are, thank you, a guest exits, hand to handle, we’re going up, someone has stopped the elevator on the thirteenth, the doors open, a guest enters, your floor, here we are, the button, thank you, hand to handle, going up, 14, 15, the sixteenth, here we are, thank you, a guest exits, hand to handle, we’re going up, 17, the eighteenth, here we are. All exit. Red square, green arrow, going down, the same ritual going down.
Up ir down, up ir down in this strictly defined space. This is where the new gods have put Sisyphus. These gods are more humane. Gravity no longer pulls the boulder. Sisyphus no longer needs sinewy muscles. A triumph of rhythm and counterpoint. Synthesis, harmony, up ir down, Antanas Garšva works elegantly. Here we are, and his teeth flash, thank you, they flash again, he extends his hand gracefully, his slim person is pleasing to the travellers. “You can always recognise a European,” the pleasant old lady once said. “Europeans read books,” she added with a sigh.
20Banned books: books in the Lithuanian language and Latin alphabet were banned by tsarist authorities from 1865 to 1904. Nemunas: the Nemunas (Neman) River flows through the centre of Lithuania.
21Between the wars Vilnius was part of Poland 1920 to 1939, and Kaunas was the capital of Lithuania.
22In the fifteenth century, at the height of its power, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
23A suburb of Kaunas, on the left bank of the Nemunas River.
24A large Italian Baroque monastery complex on the outskirts of Kaunas.
25A battle in 1410 during the Polish-Lithuanian-Teutonic War.
Chapter 3
The dimly lit reading room of the Kaunas Central Bookstore. Long, worn tables, yesterday’s newspapers on yellow sticks, lithographs of Gediminas, Mindaugas and Valančius on the walls.²⁶ And the book section. Bookcases with their backs turned, and in the only opening between them at an unpainted table, a bespectacled clerk languished. Like wet sparrows, the regulars sat bent over their newspapers, unshaven and yawning from late morning boredom. Antanas Garšva was fourteen. He studied and lived alone in Kaunas, his father taught in the countryside. Sometimes Antanas Garšva would skip classes, pick out some books, and, holding his head in his thin hands, would wear out the elbows of his schoolboy’s blazer, his young brain soaking up the letters and sentences. Book spines covered in brown fabric, books sewn into hard black cardboard. Thick books and thin books. Antanas Garšva read one of the thickest ones multiple times, so that the clerk noticed and would ask ironically, “You’re not going to kill yourself, are you?” With a neophyte’s passion, he copied any phrase he grasped into his schoolboy’s notebook.
We are unhappy alone and unhappy as a community, married and unmarried, we are like hedgehogs huddling together to stay warm – uncomfortable when crowded, and even unhappier when separated; optimism is a bitter mockery of human suffering; life is evil, because life is war; the more perfect the organism, the more perfect the suffering; history’s motto: eadem sed aliter; higher than conscious intellect is conscious or unconscious will; the body is a product of the will.
So Antanas Garšva absorbed Schopenhauer. But then heroes of thinner books jostled with the fat pessimist. A headless horseman, a halo of tomahawks glowing around his head, a mad Lady Macbeth stretching her unwashable hands towards the footlights, Gustave Aimard’s caballeros – gracious to the end and making countless deep reverences with their feathered hats, a frozen Raskolnikov philosophising as he prepares to murder an unscrupulous old woman, Goethe’s writhing homunculus, a Gogolesque devil rolling a hot, full moon over a Ukrainian village. The books’ sculptural eyes peered into Garšva’s soul, all the chaos contained in them covered by black outspread wings, and there were no more dusty reading room windows, and he was no longer curious about the feminine laughter coming from the second floor of Aušra High School.²⁷ Life is evil. This phrase seemed final, impossible to counter, just as it was impossible to breathe deeply in Lukšio Street – the suffocating herring smell from the Jewish shops, the homeless drunks’ vomit on the stairs of the People’s House, the permanent odour of Cracow sausage and Dutch cheese, dirty laundry and rotting leather shoes in his small room. Those nails chewed down while solving trigonometry questions. That damned avitaminosis pimple on his forehead, and how the high school girls laugh at him and won’t dance. And that youthful longing for death, before life has even been tested.
Antanas Garšva was defeated by two collaborators: Schopenhauer and the bespectacled clerk with his haemorrhoidal humour: “You’re not going to kill yourself?” Antanas Garšva trusted them and, one fall Saturday, on his way home from school, he stopped by a small store in Lukšio Street. He asked for some rope.
“How many metres?” asked the old Jew with mercantile indifference.
“My death can be measured in metres,” Garšva concluded sadly.
“Three metres, please. That should be enough,” he replied.
“You’re going away?” asked the Jew as he measured the rope.
“Far away,” replied Garšva.
“My death is three metres long,” he considered, deciding that this would be the last entry in his notebook of wise men’s sayings. This one authored by him.
On Sunday he washed his feet, cleaned h
is teeth and set off for the village of Pajiesys with the rope stuffed into a paper bag. He would hang himself in a thicket, and his body wouldn’t be found quickly. Black crows would peck out his eyes – the poor high school student would hang in a thicket and the mystery of his suicide would never be solved. He had never even been in love! But as the police investigators would conclude, a high school boy’s soul can be as deep as Schopenhauer’s or Dostoevsky’s.
The dampness of the Pajiesys clay soaked through Garšva’s shoes, and he was shivering. The bare willow branches brushed his face, and he gasped when a thicker one hit his pimple. There wasn’t a single tree tall enough in this tangle of shrubbery. He saw the cold grim Nemunas and the hovels of Šančiai bowing to the grim waters. He pulled the rope from the bag, its clean whiteness in stark contrast to the landscape.
“Death is beautiful,” whispered Garšva.
“Death is godlike. I’m nobler than Mucius Scaevola. Burning your hand is nothing. I am the only follower of the Stoics at the Kaunas high school for boys. Soon I will die, because this is the only way I can resist Schopenhauer’s will.”
Garšva finally found a sufficiently thick aspen and began tying his rope to a branch. Though he continued to shake, the aspen stood straight. And with the prepared noose hanging elegantly, Antanas Garšva knelt down by the tree.
“God, oh my God! I’m dying, I’m dying. How sad. I truly am dying.”
Antanas Garšva crossed himself, stood up, and, having broken some branches, piled them below the noose. Then he stood on the unlit bonfire and put his head through the noose. All that was left was to jump to the side.
“Oh, if only this fire would burn! He would stop trembling, he would smell the smoke, his feet would warm up, just like in the heroic deaths of the early Christians. They would raise their eyes to the heavens.” And Antanas Garšva looked up at the sky. The leaden cloud cover was still. Should he jump to the side? It’s cold. It’s cold. Have to repeat to myself that it’s very cold, that I need to warm up, that there are matches in my pocket. Now he clearly felt the matchbox in his right trouser pocket. He could feel the edge of the matchbox against his thigh. And at the same time he almost lost consciousness. Fear came, and then in a mere second saved him. The power of fear almost knocked the pile of branches out from under his feet. But consciousness conquered his pounding heart. Antanas Garšva pulled his head out of the noose and jumped down. He took the matchbox out of his pocket and lit a single match. The little flame singed his fingertips. He dropped the blackened match. Mucius Scaevola, the early Christians, the Stoics, God – they all vanished. He scrambled up the hill to reach the road faster. In the little room in the People’s House he rubbed his feet vigorously with a towel and, later, got under the covers, a collection of Pivoša’s satires in one hand and a good long piece of Polish sausage in the other.²⁸ It was cosy. At one point he remembered the noose in the thicket, but then quickly forgot it. He slept for eleven hours straight.
*
The elevator rises, the elevator falls. Clean, sensible, business-scented Masons disembark – the express also stops on the mezzanine. Four Chiang Kai-shek officers, cheekbones red from cocktails, emphatically pleasant and spry, leave the elevator on eleven. Four Polish clerics stand close together. Antanas Garšva lets them off on the top floor.
“The eighteenth,” he says in Polish.
“Oh, my son!” Pleasantly surprised, one of them raises a hand, as though blessing him.
The nice old lady reads poetry. She once quoted MacNeice:
I am not yet born, o fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing [...]
I can’t remember any more. Thick and thin, on chalk paper and on wood, on parchment and papyrus, on clay tablets and on hieroglyphs etched with sharp stones into walls in caves. Books. I am not yet born. Have yet to write a good book. But the granny will soon die because she is already reborn. She reads post-war poetry. She doesn’t work, lives off her capital, while I’m stuck being an elevator cog. My face, my white-gloved hand, my appearance, my polished speech – I’m a good cog.
Once upon a time a plant shot up, its roots wrenched from the ground, a gaudy butterfly floats above a field. Once upon a time... the zauras’s jaws gaped, and the pen darts as it jots down a tune.²⁹ Once upon a time amoebas pressed together, and poets sing about love. Once upon a time the wheel of time turned back, and I became a cog. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my progeny turn into donkeys, pelargoniums and eventually stones. How unpleasant! Two stones will lie side by side, unable to chat. About Churchill’s speech, Rilke’s poetry, Parisian hats, how Petraitis is dishonest and how I’m honest: the stones won’t talk about anything. All that will be left is the stars, the rising moon and water’s atonal music.
I would like to be stone, water, moon, star. With eyes and a sense of my surroundings. But it’s hard for me to become a cog in a machine, because I keep remembering Elena’s fist banging on my door. I didn’t let her in. I heard how she called my name and sobbed and fumed, and then slowly, pausing, went back down the stairs. And through the window I saw her walking in the street. Her face, as she glanced back up several times. And it’s hard, because I still want to write. Will Elena help me write? Extreme individualism? That ancient, egotistical exploitation of one’s neighbour? To be pleasured in bed and even get a few legends out of it? To orchestrate suffering and material for the sake of a decent poem?
Should I hire a servant?
He could follow me around, holding an umbrella over my head, and I would be able to observe and analyse the rain without getting wet. But I want to walk alone, bareheaded, and don’t need any help. Up ir down, up ir down.³⁰ Old legends die hard. There’s truth in Sisyphus’s meaninglessness. When he falls, someone else will put their weight against the boulder.
“Nice weather today,” Garšva says to the grey gentleman who has decided to go for a walk along 34th. “You can have a good meal downstairs,” to the newlyweds who see only reflections of their embraces in each other’s eyes. “Oh yes, Rocky Marciano is sure to win,” to the former boxer who proudly touches his broken nose. “No, madam, I am not French,” to the girlish old lady.
And yet I can’t forget. All my problems dissolve because I can still feel Elena’s greyness. For renunciation was not dictated by boredom and fatigue.
Two people. Two stones, capable of speech and feeling.
“That is correct, sir. The chinchillas are on the eighteenth.”
They squat in their little wooden cages, staring ahead innocently and soiling the straw. They’re like shabby rabbits, those chinchillas. Why the hell would people skin them for fur coats?
26Gediminas: the Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1316 to 1341. Mindaugas: the first Grand Duke and only king of Lithuania, who reigned from 1236 to 1251. Motiejus Valančius (1801–1875): a Catholic bishop and prominent nineteenth-century Lithuanian writer.
27Aušra High School: the first Lithuanian high school in Kaunas, founded in 1915.
28“Pivoša” was the pseudonym of interwar Lithuanian satirist Augustinas Gricius (1899–1972).
29Zauras: from dinozauras (dinosaur), a creature from Garšva’s personal mythology.
30ir: “and” in Lithuanian, often used here in the expression, “up ir down,” as it is in the original.
Chapter 4
The sleek Studebaker raced along the tree-lined highway. Arched bridges flashed above their heads and the radio would fall silent for a moment, and then the singer would rage on again in metal-grinding tones. The engineer drove confidently. He slowed down just slightly at turns, the speedometer going back to seventy as the highway once again narrowed towards a patch of blue sky.
Elena sat with Garšva in the back seat. A small woman with a grey dress, greyish hair, grey eyes and the face of a Baldovinetti Madonna. The full lips, a detail the painter had added to accentuate her greyness. A
cigarette smouldered between her thin fingers, an anachronism that matched the full lips. And she might have pulled her nylons on too quickly, because the right seam was twisted to the side. In front – the engineer’s broad back, a monumental shelter as comfortingly solid as a marble portico, set off Elena’s well-proportioned fragility. A plume of blue smoke rose from the cigarette, the grey eyes scanned Garšva with calm curiosity. The Studebaker careered down the grey highway through a current of green forest, the road a frozen canal, pieces of cloud slid across the blue sky, and the sun poked out unexpectedly, the layer of light powder on Elena’s face a reflection of the greyness enveloping the car.
“Do you like nature?” she asked, a banal way to break the extended silence, then threw the cigarette butt out the window, where it flew off like a lifeless moth, and old, immortal shades quivered in this mechanical little world. A minor nymph dipped her feet in a spring as a slender faun watched her, and grey filaments of smoke crept out the half-opened windows, airing out the smoky car interior.
“I love water,” said Garšva.
The highway curved as they passed by millionaire neighbourhoods. Past a Fred Astaire dance studio, puritanically trimmed parks, colonial-style villas, the odd Cadillac still in the drive, and the final flash of a red Shell sign.
“My wife doesn’t like nature. She’s still in love with Vilnius,” the engineer hurled over his shoulder, turning up the radio. Another pop song, a hoarse mezzo-soprano begged to be embraced and moaned with deliberate sexuality.
Garšva studied Elena’s hair and the sun disappeared once again, like a woman sitting in front of a child focused on his wooden blocks.
“I never lived in Vilnius. I know it only from frequent visits. But I remember one occurrence. A narrow street in the Jewish ghetto.³¹ 1939. It was strange, beneath an archway connecting the low buildings, I met this nun, she was young and frightened and lost, and asked me for directions, but I wasn’t sure myself. I suggested we look for the way together. We walked along, not sure what to talk about. It was summer, late morning, the low buildings looked empty. Along the way we met a street urchin but I couldn’t get anything out of him, even though I gave him a few coins, and my nun smiled. I don’t know how the two of us ended up somewhere near the Gates of Dawn.³² As we parted, the nun said ‘God bless you’ and blushed slightly. I don’t know why, but to me this searching captures the atmosphere of Vilnius. That city’s essence has always eluded me. I often got lost in Vilnius.”
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