“You should have asked the nun on a date – you might have discovered that essence,” added the engineer merrily. Elena’s lips quivered.
“I suspect she would have made the sign of the cross over me and that would have been the end of it,” replied Garšva.
“Did you see the sculptures of dead noblemen on the cornices? On Pylimo Street?” asked Elena without looking at Garšva.
“I have a vague memory. I think I’ve seen them.”
“They led you astray,” she said and smiled to herself, as though Garšva were not there. The engineer turned back suddenly.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing much. We were just remembering Pylimo Street.”
“Ah,” and the engineer turned his attention back to the wheel. The tragic melody of a lost body was replaced by the mezzo-soprano’s sexual moans. The forest’s leafy greenness vanished. The highway cut through marshland. Small marsh lakes dotted with fishing rowboats, wooden changing cabins on the shores, fields of reeds. A great canopy of grey sky hung over the marsh, not a single patch of blue, the light of the sun seeped through the clouds with leaden indifference and a conspiracy developed inside the car. The woman’s hands rested on her knees, the man’s on the vinyl seat cover. And the woman began to breathe faster, and the man could hear his heart beating. The spring water froze the soaking feet, and the faun had to close his eyes from the sun. Like statues nudged by ghosts, they shifted closer.
“If we’re now talking about spiritual matters, I would hazard to say that details illuminate an atmosphere,” said Garšva quietly, so that only Elena could hear.
“Could you tell me about the noblemen’s heads?”
“One day,” replied Elena softly.
“And there’s the Jones Beach tower!” shouted the engineer.
A pointed, four-sided tower rose from the horizon, they stopped at the entrance to a long bridge, the engineer thrust some coins at the guard, and something unravelled inside the car as it once again rolled over the marshland drowning in small lakes. Garšva leaned forward, and Elena leaned back and faded into the corner. And this is how they drove into the parking lot, and the men got out to smoke and waited while Elena changed, and then the men squeezed inside to change, and when all three were finally in their bathing suits, they walked along the cement path, the pine-scented air caressing their liberated bodies, and Elena bent down to pick a daisy, and her husband stroked his hairy chest, and Garšva contemplated Elena in her close-fitting, greenish bathing suit. She walked indistinctly, as she did in her unpretentious grey dress. She was well proportioned to a fine perfection, as though she had been created by a female god. Her husband placed his feet with barbaric fierceness, a centaur turned man just learning to walk. And alongside walked the slim faun, like a Lehmbruck sculpture, an athlete’s gait and the pliant muscles of a youth, if somewhat bent with a forty-year-old man’s fatigue. Garšva.
The sun re-emerged. They passed closed swimming pools, playing fields, an Indian tent with a professional Indian (he told stories to children), and reached the wooden causeway that ran along the cafeteria building. And opposite was the undulating field of sand, like a gigantic Mongolian camp. Multicoloured umbrellas staked into the sand; thousands of sunburnt bodies in constant motion; discarded bottles shining like searchlights; a vibrating racket, as though the Mongolians had just finished an atonal hymn and separate sounds echoed with Dantesque immortality. Young lifeguards sat on high wooden thrones, sceptical wardens who waved with the plasticity of swimmers at anyone who went too far into the ocean. And the great river – the ocean – crashed in double rows of waves, foaming and snorting, giving and withdrawing its waters, and the damp sand happily sucked in its spattered offering.
Three people trudged down the beach. Someone might have noticed that the engineer rented an umbrella, that Elena and Garšva chatted as they stared at the ocean. Soon the trio disappeared. About a million New Yorkers went to Jones Beach that day.
*
I have just forty minutes to go. Then a half-hour break. I’ll smoke two cigarettes. I’ll have a talk with Stanley. Without white gloves. Good. A great calm has suddenly enveloped me. I’m even enjoying riding the elevator. My passengers are pleasant. This Mason with his tasteful, solid-coloured tie, it’s even possible that Wieniawski’s variations would bring him to tears. And if I told him about my past he might offer me a free vacation in Florida. Because back in Hanseatic Lübeck, his forefathers never struck their apprentices on the neck. This woman who has painted herself brown, with her wide red mouth, tiny African blossoms hanging from her ears, on weekends she swears she will love her husband to the grave. It doesn’t matter that she looks like a vampire. Three innocent children hang on to vampire’s skirt while she tells stories about good-natured elves, about the singing bone, about Jorinde and Joringel, about the sorcerer who ordered his wife to carry an egg, about Rip Van Winkle and nine-pins in the mountains, about, about, about – how difficult for the vampire! She left the little children at home for half an hour and is anxious to get back as fast as possible. And here a thin little priest carries just a few tenners in his pocket. He gives his entire salary to the poor. When the priest walks along 3rd Avenue, he’s swarmed by tramps, and they listen to the immortal words. About loving one’s neighbour, how a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, and how Christ could feed bread and fish to multitudes. And the priest hands out dollars and quarters and dimes to the men gathered around him. Word and deed – what a wondrous synthesis the thin little priest carries within him.
A great calm has suddenly enveloped me. I understand the desert. The sands, the hermit’s sackcloth, the rustling of desiccated leaves, a faded tent, oh, meditator, you will win God’s grace, the Holy Spirit hovers above your head and geometric light rays pierce your heart. Ecstasy. No mind, no consciousness, no Greek ideas, no oriental fatalism. The Gnostic demiurge is thrown off, a trembling little devil, terrified and cowering. Oh Holy Spirit, there is imperceptible wisdom in your geometric light rays – they are based on the proportions of cupolas. Up ir down, up ir down. It’s soothing to roll a boulder. I like meaninglessness. People get in, people get out. Is it for me to understand what makes the spokes of the universe turn?
I am a neophyte at solitude and an epigone of Christ. I remember Your outstretched hands and Lazarus’s astounded face. I see the hair on Your legs, Mary Magdalene is kissing them. And I can see Your tensed muscles, feel Your nervous anger, the merchants and their wares flying off the temple steps. I understand Your subconscious intuition. You speak in parables, You know – we must seek. On the road to Calvary You had assistants: blows from sticks, blood, drunken tramps. You were helped along by Your pierced side, by the gathering darkness. Did Your Father remember You? The Capital Letters have endured – Your Name is written in Capital Letters.
My Brother, my Beloved, hear me.
My sin, my madness, my subjectivity, my cry, my vitality, my joy – lioj ridij augo.³³
My Elevator – hear me.
My Childhood – hear me.
My Death – hear me.
Come to this hotel, stroke the lady’s coiffured hair, wink at the manager, give the bellman a tip.
Speak out, Elevator Operator.
Say the only Word.
Because this great calm is killing me.
The New York desert is scorching me.
I will perish, submissive and terrified, clinging to the cowering demiurge.
My Christ – hear me, my Christ, I pray to You.
O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem!³⁴
Zoori, zoori, lepo, leputeli, lioj, ridij, augo, is that the nightingale from Aukštoji Panemunė singing again?³⁵
There is a sixteen-year-old girl who often goes up and down in my elevator, a friend of the cigarette girl’s. She’s direct. She likes me.
“Any big fish on the mezzanine today?” she asks.
“Oh yeah, I think so, and with bulging pockets,” I reply with a
friendly wink.
“Yesterday this old guy fondled me for two hours and didn’t do anything. And paid twenty bucks. Embarrassed, I guess.”
“You lucked out, Lily.”
“It isn’t always like that. A week or two ago, can’t remember, I had to contort myself like a trapeze artist.”
And Lily laughs. She laughs as though she were walking towards a blue lake with a lover who is afraid to touch her hand.
“Good luck, Lily.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
Young girls don’t exist for me any more. Once upon a time I left a small provincial town for a miniature city. For Kaunas. Modest girls with crimped hair, painted lips, hips raised on high heels, girls who would blush just from the warmth of liquor. I could no longer find that most pleasant folly. Walking through the marsh, past the swaying, grassy hillocks, you see an innocent tanned body across the lake – you are a fortune-teller staring into a crystal ball. I could no longer find the noble lie. In my father’s stories, or children’s books, or Boy Scout songs, or cheap oleographs with happy angels painted by some optimistic fool. I could no longer dream. I knew that the only way left to dream was through writing, and encrypted writing at that, so that fault-finding friends and critics wouldn’t protest: “Sir! You are drifting towards sentimentalism!” I often cried if I saw a flower in bloom, moonlight playing on water, light-coloured hair tousled by a spring wind, and even a buzzing fly. Not permitted. A stern clerk sits in the centre of my brain. Sorting thoughts and feelings. The clerk has been sitting in the same chair for forty years. That is why he’s so pedantic and unappeasable. No, sir, you are not allowed to be sentimental! Away with these papers – scrunch, scrunch and into the bin. They belong to the cleaning lady. He’s logical, the stern clerk. If I don’t listen to him, I’ll lose. Like Dante and his heaven, like Dostoevsky and his whining characters.
The fortune-teller’s clear ball. Hold on, Lily. Save your money. Buy yourself a little store and marry a man who drinks beer only on Sundays. Dante himself can’t choose a sphere of paradise for you and Dostoevsky won’t dare make you cry. Keep spinning on your trapeze.
Antanas Garšva glances at his watch. Just seventeen minutes to go. Oh, merciful cigarette, I pray to you! My Christ, what did you feel when Mary Magdalene fell at Your feet? There was a time when I loved Jonė and thought... Does it matter what I thought? If I should go mad and start sobbing in the elevator, I doubt there would be a writer who could create a literary version of my tears. I need to swear. It helps. Goddamned sons of bitches, fucking whores, impotent losers, reeking dysenterics, syphilitic gigolos, shit-eaters, granny-necrophiliacs. What other vile things can I think up?
“Such nice weather today, madam. You look lovely! I barely recognised you,” says Garšva to a sixty-year-old hotel guest.
“You’re so charming,” she replies. And they both smile.
31This refers to the traditional Jewish quarter of Vilnius in the heart of the Old Town, where Jewish life flourished from medieval times up to the Second World War. During the German occupation of Lithuania (June 1941 to January 1945), Nazi authorities established two ghettos in Vilnius: the Small Ghetto, which was located in the area referred to by Garšva and which was liquidated in 1941, and the Large Ghetto, which was liquidated in 1943.
32Aušros Vartai (The Gates of Dawn) a sixteenth-century Vilnius city gate and popular Catholic and Orthodox site of devotion that contains a famous icon, the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Mercy.
33Fragment of abstract Lithuanian folk song.
34“O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer”, a phrase used in the Catholic Easter Vigil Mass.
35Zoori: “zoori” is a magic, invented word in Garšva’s personal mythology.
Chapter 5
From Antanas Garšva’s Notebooks
Women have only been episodic in my life. One hustler’s words really stuck in my head: “Don’t push yourself to the limit. As much fury and as little emotion as possible. The curve of your neck is childlike. Your eyes and eyelashes are feminine. You love like a man. Fight, and you will win.”
And I fought. I perfected the art of love. I developed all sorts of psychochemical techniques. I blended tenderness with biting sarcasm. I would pleasantly quote a good poem and then make a snide comment about a passer-by. I measured passion consciously so that it would erupt into an unexpected storm just when my partner thought that I was completely spent. I knew how to make her think that I will be the one to break it off, so she must cherish me. I knew how to vary things – when to be sad and when to be cheery, when to be angry and when to pretend to be sorry. I succeeded in sprinkling so-called love with the sugar of friendship. So that after the breakup my lovers would go on to advertise me to others.
My women were like Matisse’s Lorrain Chair, which brings out the blue monumentality of the wallpaper behind it. Loving them helped me feel the reality around me more sharply. I would suddenly perceive objects, their manifestations, which I would normally have indifferently passed by. The sky, a masonry wall, a child’s fine hair, the ghostly light of street lanterns, the distant hum of train engines... and it would become clear to me: I have been given live material, I am full, and I must write, and I must leave my beloved, be alone, until everything dwindles, fades, loses all colour and relief.
I could easily tell when the end was near. Just as I fused with my beloved in a heavy, crushing embrace, that point when, as one falls into the abyss, the stems of thought shimmer with the leaves of death, at that very moment I would suddenly feel very sad. As if the last drops of love had run out. And I would feel angry: they were not intended for this woman. And I would remember Jonė. I understood in theory: I won Jonė when I gave her up. But this paradoxical consolation mocked me like a grotesque dervish mask.
About three kilometres from the small town, past the draining marshes – where storks still stepped and lapwings shrieked, where the cries of drowned maidens still echoed – there was a lake. A boring little lake surrounded by greyish hills. And when, as a nineteen-year-old stripling, I would swim to the other side, past the yellow water lilies to the muddy shore, I knew: within an hour or two Jonė will come here, and we will observe each other, and then we will go home.
We couldn’t swim together. The town didn’t approve of bathing suits. Men and women splashed around separately, divided by the narrow lake. They could clearly see each other’s naked bodies, and on Sunday afternoons the men and the women would trade hackneyed jokes about the features of those bodies, and ringing laughter would cut through the air. Often, couples hoping to get married would initiate intimate relations with mere glances, so that, when a blushing bride walked into the church with her pallid fiancé, he was already familiar to her, and she felt safe leaning against his shoulder.
Jonė and I were there on holidays from Kaunas, we wore bathing suits, we couldn’t swim side by side, the town’s moral code forbade it, because Jonė was a poor girl being raised and put through school by relatives, an upstanding notary devoted to Preferans, and his upstanding wife – a dentist who didn’t like doing fillings, preferring to rip teeth out without mercy.
I can still remember her distinctly, a sixteen-year-old girl always wearing some tight little garment, with kind eyes; I haven’t forgotten her slim, athletic back; I still love her nervous embrace, her responsive lips, how she was impressed by my idiotic poems. Losing Jonė was losing my youth – when real life came to an end and the cautious, cunning battle with death began.
We met at the volunteer firemen’s fancy-dress ball. The organisers had laced streamers in the national colours around the ceiling of the small middle school’s auditorium, stringing them to a coloured lantern hanging in the centre, as though the evening were a celebration of Lithuanian-Chinese cooperation.
The masked figures loitered, not sure what to do. Zosė the servant girl, who came as a bale of hay, stood in the corner of the room, the dancers grazed the skirt she had woven for weeks, and the dried-out straw cr
umbled to the floor, and Zosė was furious because her impressive outfit did not attract a single partner.
The postman Zaleckis, in a devil’s mask, tried to entertain the crowd from the centre of the room. He brushed the dancers’ legs with the black-painted rope he had sewn to his velvet trousers, offering them private rooms in hell. But nobody laughed, and the devil eventually drank himself into a stupor in the canteen and fell asleep face down on a table, snoring loudly, his breathing obstructed by the mask.
There was also a clock with a dial painted on his behind, about six girls in Lithuanian folk costumes, an astrologist (his pointed hat promptly fell apart and lost its stars), two rabbits, one donkey, and so on.
The firemen’s brass band played a suktinis, some waltzes and polkas, “Elytė” (the only foxtrot they knew), and the “Pantera” tango to the tempo of a funeral march.³⁶
The kiosk lady sold only two rolls of streamers, and a kid who had snuck in for free stole a bag of confetti and then ripped it open right there, scattering confetti all over the floor. The most important guests neither danced nor caroused. They drank in the canteen.
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