I had finished high school that year and was spending the holidays at my father’s. I gave the coat-check lady my white university student’s cap. I walked around the hall proudly. I danced the foxtrot with a Jewish girl from Jonava. We made a date to go for a walk near the semaphore guarding the defunct train station, a spot favoured for illicit love.
Jonė had come with her cousin, the notary’s son. I knew him. Jonė’s boyishly cut hair was slicked back. She was wearing a high school uniform. The notary’s son explained that she was going into eighth grade.³⁷ I asked her to dance. Her slim little body pressed against mine, our heads pressed together, I could feel her childish breasts. That was the style of dancing then. I smelled her hair and suddenly lost my nerve, slowly pushed her away from me, and started doing something strange with my feet to justify my distance. Other couples flashed by. The cymbals went crash, crash, the trumpets told their sincere lies, one of the Lithuanian sashes detached from the Chinese lantern and I pulled it down as I danced. Jonė must have noticed something in my expression.
She asked, “Are you angry?”
“Lousy band,” I replied.
Later I walked her home. The notary’s son had disappeared earlier, with the Jewish girl from Jonava. It was a warm summer evening, we walked along the narrow sidewalk, stepping carefully so as not to fall into the ditch that ran along it. It was a very good sidewalk. Old, worn and slippery, requiring me to grip Jonė’s arm above the elbow. After all, she could have slipped, she could have fallen into the ditch.
And when we reached the notary’s house with its long, open veranda we stopped, not sure what to talk about.
“Nice veranda,” I commented.
“Sometimes, at night, I sit here, when I can’t sleep,” said Jonė.
“What do you think about?”
“I dream.”
“About what?”
We were sitting on a wicker bench on the veranda. Facing us stretched an empty field, watched over by the summer moon. Like faint candles, train lights occasionally flashed in the distance across the field. The twinkling lights and fog hanging over the marsh blended with the moonlight.
Jonė didn’t reply, and I knew what to do. I was only nineteen, but knew something about embraces. I even had a running list of girlfriends. Seamstresses, factory workers, prostitutes. All I had to do was reach over and touch Jonė’s hair. And, if she didn’t turn her head away, I would be entitled to her neck, her shoulders, her lips. Without moving my hand I asked again:
“What do you dream about?”
“Nothing. Anything. I just sit and look at the field. I like warm summer nights like this and often can’t sleep.”
She stirred.
“I’m going to go in,” she said.
“Wait a second. Can we see each other?” It just escaped from my lips.
“I don’t know. They keep an eye on me. I have to listen to them.”
And she told me about her penniless father, a security guard at the Kaunas Conservatory, about her mother, soaking in a laundry, about the great fortune of having been taken into the notary’s care. And she got up.
“Wait until Vytautas gets back,” I said. That was the name of the notary’s son.
“I’m afraid. He’ll make fun of me.”
And I didn’t turn towards her. I got up and squeezed her small, hard hand and gave a gallant bow, as my mother had taught me. Then I turned like a soldier, stopped suddenly, turned around, and clumsily bent over to kiss Jonė’s forehead. Then I jumped from the veranda on to the narrow sidewalk, so that the notary’s house would recede as quickly as possible, so that I wouldn’t appear confused or silly. At the corner of my own street I met the whistling notary’s son.
“How was the Jewish girl?” I asked quickly.
“Tomorrow, by the semaphore. Same deal.” We chuckled cynically.
The same full moon shone the next night. I sat in my room, looking through the window at the moon’s craters, from where I thought poetry would wing its way down. I had decided to study literature. I wanted to write a few good poems over the summer, so I would enter university with some talent. Books lay on the table. Verlaine, Baudelaire, Poe, A Thousand and One Nights. I held a pen in my hand. I was ready to receive a moon crater muse at any moment. She would blind, pierce, reward me. A blank sheet of paper awaited. My alarm clock ticked. There were no dogs barking, no people’s voices, the small town was asleep. I knew that inspiration doesn’t just suddenly jump into a poet’s soul. I observed the moon’s craters, listened to the alarm clock, waited. But the muse wasn’t inclined to visit me. I thought to myself, “If only a dog would bark, or some drunk swear out loud!” It was quiet. I got up and glanced at the mirror on the wall. “Now that’s what I call a poet’s face,” I decided. “My long hair, my dreamy eyes. Yes, my skin is quite tanned – I could be from Brazil. Maybe I should drink wine, smoke a pipe and swear? Do I even need inspiration?” And I calmly began to write.
A good hour later I had a finished poem. It’s hard to remember it accurately now. It was something about three or four hanged men swaying from bleak linden branches. A harsh wind blew. A girl with tousled braids sobbed, her arms around the most handsome hanging man’s legs. And the poet was terribly sorry, because the (two or three) others didn’t have any passionately sobbing girls. At the end of the poem the moon shone, reacting to this tragedy with macabre resignation.
I straightened up victoriously. I glanced in the mirror and grinned, “Now there’s a poet.” But then I realised that another upper tooth had cracked. Black holes were ruining my smile. “Craters everywhere,” I thought to myself. And then, as it had in Palanga, my pride wilted.³⁸ I reread the poem. I didn’t like it any more. “Craters, craters, craters everywhere,” I repeated through clenched teeth. The poets lying on this table are killing me with their perfect stanzas. And where am I supposed to find an olive tree to sit under, like Homer, making beautiful marble arrangements? I need to get out, go for a walk, that’s recommended for anxious types. And I crept quietly out the door.
But as soon as my shoes began rhythmically tapping the sidewalk, I remembered Jonė. I looked at my watch. Just after twelve. Yesterday Jonė said that she often sits on the veranda daydreaming. A counterbalance to the craters! Tonight I will reach out with my hand, I will kiss Jonė’s lips instead of her forehead, I will hold her tight. And no, I won’t take her to the semaphore! I can sit holding her tightly much longer than I can work on my poem about the hanged men.
The veranda was empty. As was the wicker bench. And, like yesterday, the field stood bare, guarded over by the summer moon. And at the other end of the field some train lights twinkled sparsely, like faint candles, the twinkling lights and the fog on the marsh blending with the moonlight.
I waited for two or three hours. Every faint rustling, distant and obscure sound, swooping bat, a silence that was like music, except that the notes were so high I couldn’t hear them – each of these moved me, and I wanted to weep, and tried to control myself. Jonė didn’t come out to dream. I went home and ripped up my poem.
The holidays were coming to an end, and I was still only walking Jonė back from the lake. We traipsed all over the marsh. I would hold her hand, but didn’t dare kiss her, didn’t have the nerve to ask why she didn’t go out on to the veranda. And I had loitered around the notary’s house for two weeks now. Each night was the same. The moon’s left side slowly melted away.
And then one afternoon, as were walking back to her house, Jonė smelling of water, it just slipped out.
“You’re a little liar.”
“Me?” she asked, surprised.
“Yes, you. You never go out on the veranda at night. I know – I’ve been going over to your house. You pretend to be serious, but you’re a little liar.”
Jonė laughed. Her teeth were uneven, but white and shiny. She laughed for a long time, and I got angry.
“You shouldn’t laugh about romance.” Jonė was walking next to me, with her tanned legs, her little cloth sne
akers.
“I can’t sit on the veranda,” she said. “I’d have to go through their rooms, and they’d wake up. I only dream about the veranda.”
“You could climb out the window. You’d just need to jump down about a metre. I know.”
Jonė clasped her hands behind her back, kicking clumps of earth with the heels of her shoes.
“I’ll be there tonight. At exactly midnight.”
Jonė glanced at me. I’m sot sure, but I may have seen fear in her eyes. When the municipal pump house came into view, we parted in silence. I stayed on the marsh and watched until Jonė’s tanned legs disappeared over the bank. But for the next half-day, all I saw was their glistening muscles.
I was standing by the veranda well before midnight. Clouds cloaked the sky. The marsh fog escaped on to the empty field and crept down the street. I could feel its damp caress. Formless bodies wrapped around my own, and when I shook my head trying to get free of them, hundreds of fingers stole under my collar in a gentle frenzy, and my skin trembled and I froze, trapped by a feeling of foreboding. It wasn’t a normal trembling, as the night was warm, but an old and familiar feeling of anxious waiting loomed over me once again like a strict and concerned stepmother.
I wiped my face with my hand. Just like that time in Palanga, I wanted to cry out words, and not ones borrowed from books. This cry slithered through my consciousness like a snake. By a black sea, huge shards of rock lay on the sticky ground. Strange-shaped snails, parched crabs, rotting fish, and ferns hanging before my eyes like stiff fans.
I turned around. Jonė was waiting on the veranda. I hadn’t noticed her jump out of the window. I leapt on to the veranda, grabbed Jonė’s hand and pulled her on to the sidewalk. We almost ran to the train station that never saw any trains, to where the semaphore stood. I pressed myself against Jonė with the full strength of my muscles, and she yelped. I clamped myself to her lips, and at the same time my hands, harsh and tearing, threw her down on to the grass. I saw her nakedness: her hips, the dark triangle of her lower abdomen, and when I detached my lips for a second to draw some air into my lungs, I heard her sharp, deepthroated cry.
Jonė screamed, and once again I saw the black sea, and the messy piles of track links became gigantic shards of rock, and strange-shaped snails, crabs, fish and ferns were coming at us. Jonė screamed, and it was a scream that I had heard before, when I didn’t have arms or legs and had rolled like a ball through the blind darkness. Jonė screamed, and my pulsating blood wanted to burst from my swollen veins. I stifled Jonė’s cry with my hand. She fell silent, and I took her.
When it was all over I said, “You should get dressed.”
And, as she cleaned herself up, I stared at the semaphore. At the leaning semaphore with its smashed signal lights, its post etched with swear words and hearts. And I turned back hesitantly.
“You OK?” I asked.
“You ripped my dress,” replied Jonė, and she broke out in sobs.
“Let’s go home. Walk next to me. I won’t touch you,” I uttered, staring at the ground. We went back. Gradually she stopped crying, and all I could hear was her rhythmic sniffling. We stopped at the veranda.
“Don’t be mad at me,” I said quietly. “Could you wait?”
“For what?” asked Jonė. And I felt relieved.
“I really love you, Jonė. Try to understand, I got carried away, one day I’ll explain. Could you wait until I get settled, until I get a job? I’ll never do that again. I promise.”
And then, with my trembling hand I touched Jonė’s hand, and she didn’t pull hers away.
“I’ll marry you, Jonė. OK?”
“OK,” she said. And she kissed me on the cheek.
“You go to sleep now. We’ll meet tomorrow, at the lake. OK?”
“OK.”
And I went home. And didn’t see, or feel, or hear the enveloping night.
We made love, of course. For three years. In the pine forest at Aukštoji Panemunė, under the hazelnut trees by the Jėsa, in my room, in my friend’s room. And, when I started to cheat on Jonė, I continued to believe: one day I’ll marry her.
A small town. A greyish lake in a ravine. The draining marsh where storks still stepped, and lapwings shrieked, and where, sometimes, you could hear the moans of drowned spirits. The old, narrow, slippery sidewalk. The masked figures, pathetic in their powerlessness. The volunteer firemen’s brass band playing the “Pantera” tango at the tempo of a funeral march. The notary’s veranda. The semaphore. My youth – erupting in poems of hanging and first love.
*
The three men sit on a bench in the changing room, smoking. Joe, Stanley, Garšva.
“I’m going to Philadelphia next week,” says the baritone Joe.
“What for? A girl?” asks Stanley. He reeks slightly. He’s had some whisky. Stanley has gone grey, even though he is only twenty-seven years old. His hands shake, he has a red nose like his grandfather, a bankrupted šlėktelė from Masuria.³⁹ He’s straight and flat. He knows these words in Polish: dziękuję, ja kocham, idz srač, and, for some reason, zasvistali – pojechali.⁴⁰
“No. The Philadelphia radio invited me. They’re paying for my trip, meals and hotel, and another twenty-five dollars in my pocket.”
“You’ll put it in the bank, right?” Stanley asks, to confirm.
Joe’s round face reddens. “Not in the liquor store’s cash register, of course.”
“Then what are you turning red for?”
Joe clenches his fist.
“What a load of crap,” says Stanley, pulling deeply on his cigarette.
“Joe wants to sing. It isn’t funny,” says Garšva.
“Anyone with a gaping mouth makes me laugh,” Stanley notes calmly.
“And what about you?” asks Joe.
“Me too. That’s when I stick a bottle down my throat.”
Stanley shakes the ash off his cigarette.
“My girlfriend has a really deep belly button,” he says suddenly.
Garšva stares at Joe.
“In two years you’ll sound like that too. Two years of working in the elevator would scramble anyone’s brain.”
“You won’t have to wait. Your brain got scrambled when you were in your mother’s womb.”
“Watch it, Stanley,” growls Joe.
“Nice note. B flat, I think,” remarks Stanley. Joe stares, surprised. Stanley starts to whistle.
“Where’s that from?” he asks.
“I dunno,” replies Joe childishly.
“From Allegro assai. Mozart. The Fortieth Symphony. G minor.”
Stanley gets up, passes gas loudly. “Which note was that?” he asks, and goes out into the corridor.
“Funny guy,” says Joe.
And the two men continue along the corridor. I have to fight with both my character and my mind, to fly the elevator and write my poems. It doesn’t matter that I’m worn out. Old man Darwin smiles, surrounded by Spartan masters. Who are my guardian angels? A few lunatics who wouldn’t find peace in paradise. A modest book of poems – that’s all I long for. I’m even starting to pray. Is that a sign of strength – or of weakness? I’m losing the energy to look for the answer in books. I’m losing the energy to look for the answer in myself. I am nature’s excrescence. Like the Bible says – rip out my eye, cut off my hand. But which eye, which hand? I have a hundred eyes and a hundred hands.
More “back” elevator, more lobby, more number nine. Yes, sir, no, miss, oh yes, the Masons, the Cardinal, the chinchillas. Hop, hop through the meadow, your tail up – isn’t that the greatest blessing? With your teeth, your nails, your entire body. And your blood, which is no longer repulsive. And your consciousness, which is no longer there.
36Suktinis: Lithuanian folk dance with pairs.
37In the Lithuanian secondary school of the time this would have been equivalent to the final year of high school.
38Palanga: Lithuanian seaside resort town on the Baltic Sea.
39Šlėkte
lė: Lithuanian version of the Polish term for landed gentry (szlachta).
40Dziękuję, ja kocham, idz srač and zasvistali – pojechali: Thank you, I love you, go to hell, and that which shall be shall be (Polish).
Chapter 6
In 1941 Antanas Garšva was a partisan.⁴¹ The Reds were retreating from Kaunas. Their desperate withdrawal, under pressure from the German armies, spawned anarchy. Some of the Reds just threw down their weapons and fell asleep in roadside ditches. They could have been taken prisoner by the gentlest of girls, all they wanted was bread and water. Some of the Reds raped the gentlest of girls and bayoneted those they met. The partisans emerged suddenly. Just like the news of the Reds’ retreat.
Skirmishes followed the principle of hide-and-seek. Ruffians leapt from behind trees or bombed bridges, locking with their foes in deadly embraces. Bullets flew from who knows where, sliced through tree leaves and shattered the windows of the summer cottages at Aukštoji Panemunė. And the days crept along – beautiful, clear, still.
Antanas Garšva was on patrol in Artillery Park. He had an assignment: to track whether any Reds were crossing the Nemunas. He lay on the high bank, his rifle by his side, and stared at the water. The sun shone and the sparrows chirped. On the other side of the Nemunas, the sands yellowed, tidily stacked logs browned. Smoke from buildings burning in Kaunas rose up into the clear sky.
Antanas Garšva suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound. A moaning, rhythmic and waning, as though coming from a child or a woman. Ah-oo, ah-oo, ah-oo, ah-oooo. When it broke off, something splashed into the Nemunas. A stray bullet was ending its flight.
Antanas Garšva realised that later. At this moment he glanced back and saw a young Russian, about seventeen years old, with a pleasant face, blue eyes and a messy mop of blonde hair, described in one song as chubchik kucheryavy.⁴² The young Russian didn’t have a gun. His arms were stretched out and he was leaning forward, as though preparing to leap.
Antanas Garšva later spent long hours trying to remember all the details. But he couldn’t. The results were engraved in his memory, but he hadn’t registered the fierce struggle itself. He could recall only several relief-like details. The smell of sweat; the red fog in his eyes; the sharp rock he had managed to grab; the blows. The stray bullet continued to fly in the syncopated blows. The red fog slunk down from his eyes and wrapped itself around the Red Army soldier’s head, and the fog became blood. The smell of sweat became sharper. And Antanas Garšva realised he had a body again. He felt pain on the top of his head, in his stomach, his left arm.
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