The fog crystallised into a man. There, on the bank of the Nemunas, in the gravel, lay the young Russian’s corpse. Chubchik kucheryavy had vanished. Antanas Garšva had smashed in a seventeen-year-old’s head with a sharp rock. For a while he stared at the dead man’s hands. The nails and fingers were losing colour. “I’ve killed a man,” thought Garšva. But these words didn’t mean anything. Others, like “the weather is nice today” or “no thank you, I don’t drink milk,” would have sounded just the same.
*
Temporary peace in the elevator. The Masons are revelling, the Cardinal is dining, the young people’s dance will start at around ten. The occasional guest goes up or down. But you still have to watch the lights: the red square and the green arrow. A poem about geometric shapes? About a stray bullet? The ecstasy of the soul – I was pure soul when I smashed the young Russian’s head, and Saint Peter saw the universal church in the four-legged creatures, in the worms and the reptiles, in the birds in the sky… when he was hungry. Drink my blood, eat my body. I am a modern vampire, as helpless as a bat in daylight. A poet who can’t write a good poem. Maybe I need to fight? Maybe then my soul would bloom in all the colours of the rainbow?
All I can do is laugh. Out loud. Reality exists. The top of my head, my stomach, my legs, my left arm, they all hurt. For some reason reality likes to beat me over the head, with a fist like a paperweight. And I hit back. The blood of Palaeolithic man still runs in my veins, in my retribution. And I paint my own bison – so that I can kill them. I’m religious. Magic cave paintings and blows with cudgels. Poetic stanzas on paper and a blow with a rock. I was happy after I finished off that young Russian. I dealt with him according to the rules. According to the harmonious laws of battle. My hands glowed with Platonic ideas, with Bergson’s élan vital. I was Nietzsche’s Superman. As that polyglot Hegel would say: the organisation of the world is perfectly rational. The existentialists would probably say that I expressed myself fully, the fatalists that I accurately carried out fate’s judgment. The young Russian can choose his own philosophical system. To explain his defeat. Because I am the victor. And I would really like to dance my victory dance, in the desert, by a fire, waving my cudgel. A ritual dance for my God, whom, for an instant, I embodied.
For an instant? But maybe I am coercing myself because I am possessed by a medieval devil? He holds me in an embrace and occasionally squeezes my throat. What’s the difference? The hotel, the Nemunas, California, one pole or another. Throats are strangled on all continents. And then an annoying analysis comes in. I, I, I, I – no one else matters. I am the centre of the universe. A frightened god; a god who wishes there were a higher god; a god who would like to become a slave, and, once a slave, be only a god. The psychiatrist will tear off a fresh sheet and write down the name of the illness. Saint Peter will pull out a card inscribed with three words: heaven, purgatory, hell. Which one will he underline? And who could write on my card: be a soul? I should pray? I am praying, I have prayed.
I used to enjoy May services.⁴³ The incense in the town’s wooden church. The roughly cast saints. The melodious bells. The altar boys’ red-and-white vestments. The thick wax candles, which I imagined as dead parishioners’ vėlės.⁴⁴
The flames sputtered a meditation on the eternal. The priest bent at the altar and the cross on his back bent with him. I stared at the starched cloth covering the altar. I listened to the antiphon.
The gaping mouths produced a chanting that was touching in its disharmony. It filtered out the old men’s dissonant croaking. A pure hymn floated there, by the cupola. I knelt, my head back. With invisible hands, my God grabbed some angel wings and blew forth the Holy Spirit. He had a double face, like Janus – the left side was Jehovah’s, the right Jesus Christ’s. That was how I imagined the Holy Trinity.
I inhaled the smell of incense like an ancient Jew. It was Lebanese cedar and the unlocking of the Ark of the Covenant. It was Job, lying face down in the desert. It was the swelling of Red Sea waves. It was the hand of Christ blessing the lepers. His walking on water. His footprints on the road to Golgotha. It was the lamentation of two women. Mary’s and Mary Magdalene’s. Over the death of their Beloved.
The antiphon. We call to you! To You, to You, to You!
And poor Dostoevsky, who brought together weeping lovers and thought he had found a solution in sexless Alyosha.
The fragments won’t come together. They bounce back like the rocks off the adulteress’s body in ancient Jerusalem. But they bloody the breasts and the stomach, crush the bones.
Christ does not travel all roads, raising his hand in warning. The fairy tale and human longing do not travel all roads.
Tiny shops carry carefully sorted smaller and larger oranges. Banks contain accounts. Statistical bureaus – the numbers for future weekend accidents. Military headquarters – the annual harvests of new recruits.
My Christ, I bow before You because You longed for a fairy tale. And Plato, I find you a bit ridiculous, with your carefully arranged ideas, like freshly planed boards in a tidy sawmill. You missed the powerful tornados that swept away your tablets. You, of course, are allowed to start everything anew. But first read a bit of your conceptual friend Balzac. Generations pass and are replaced by new ones. And suffering, and madness, and not finding.
And a lonely man standing in the elevator, meditating, clutching the handle. I’m afraid of peace. It envelops me. Fear is better. In hell one can dream about a lost paradise. Yes, it requires enormous vats, satanic faces and boiling tar, cries and the gnashing of teeth, dishevelled hair from old hymn books. And there you have it – a fairy tale about how paradise became paradise, because it was never lost.
The fragments are touching. I can’t connect them. Like a child trying to put together cardboard shapes: a road, a stream, hills, a deer. The child clicks his tongue. The landscape comes together.
It’s unsettling to stand against a wall and stare at your torturer’s hands, empty of stones. This peace is bad. The black candles in the silver candlesticks are bad. This woman, with her unevenly painted cheeks, who neglected to blow the powder off her hooked nose, is bad. The little red carpet under my feet is bad. My foreboding is bad. I don’t want peace. I want suffering.
Elena enters the elevator holding a seven-branched candlestick in her hand, the flames trying to jump off it. Elena is a Jerusalem Jew at the Wailing Wall. Elena is a mermaid sewing her detached tail back on. Elena is a kneeling caryatid, with Saint Anne’s Church swaying atop her head. Elena is a baseball lost in the grass. Elena is a little girl, how I loved to kiss her.
What did Saint Anthony feel when devils and women didn’t haunt him? What did the thousands driven into the gas chambers feel, the runny-nosed Jewish kids screaming at their mother’s feet, the mothers chewing their fingers? What did they feel in the Far North, when they froze into stones by felled trees?⁴⁵
Gnothi seauton⁴⁶
I thank God, that I was born
Greek and not barbarian
Mantike manike
Noumenon noumenon noumenon
Epiphenomenon
Naturalism poetically expressed…
Associations of mathematicians, chemists
astronomers, business corporations, labour
organisations, churches, are transnational because…
Because I love you Ilinaa
Mantike manike
Nike
No No No Noumenon
Gnothi seauton
Sounds like an avant-garde poem, doesn’t it?
41Following the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1944, the Lithuanian partisans, also known as the Forest Brothers, waged a well-organised guerilla resistance that lasted until 1953. An estimated 30,000 partisans and their supporters were killed.
42A hairstyle popular with young men at the time, consisting of a thick curly fringe sometimes coming out from under a cap.
43Traditional spring services dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
44In Li
thuanian folklore vėlė is the term for the spirit of a deceased person, quite distinct from the concept of soul. vėlės were imagined as having some likeness to the deceased and a faint, ethereal physical quality akin to fog. They were thought to live on a high hill and travel on flying benches (vėlių suoleliai).
45Refers to the harsh living conditions of Lithuanians deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation.
46Gnothi seauton: Know yourself (Greek).
Chapter 7
Antanas Garšva just had to turn up North 2nd. He stood at the intersection. There was a drugstore, with an old pharmacist wiping bottles and walking carefully between the aisles. On the other side of the street a sagging old Jewess snoozed amid boxes of fruits and vegetables, snoring lightly as she leaned against the golden oranges.
Garšva waited. He could see the corner of Elena’s building. He did not know which apartment was hers. He did not dare cross the street, as that would have made him visible from the windows. The pharmacist glanced sullenly at Garšva a few times, then shuffled towards the register, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and paused by the door to the yard. The drugstore was once robbed, in the middle of the day, by a similar young man with a pleasant face.
Then, unexpectedly, Elena came out. She was wearing a wide, plaid skirt and a white blouse. She looked around, as though unsure of where she was. Garšva strode quickly towards her. The old pharmacist grinned slyly and went back to his bottles. Garšva’s steps awakened the Jewess, who let out a wide-mouthed yawn.
They stood before one another.
“Hello,” said Garšva.
“Hello.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the store.”
“There’s a park near here. The one where the rabbi was shot. If you have a little time, we could go for a walk. Actually, the rabbi was shot yesterday. It’s quiet in the park in the daytime. The rabbi was shot by an eighteen-year-old guy who wanted to hit a moving target. The rabbi was probably meditating with Jehovah. There are benches in the park, and you can see some of the skyscrapers on the other side of the East River. It’s eleven now, so say for an hour, an hour and a half?”
Elena looked at Garšva as though he were a stranger.
“I’m having trouble forgetting the trip to Jones Beach,” Garšva said. “It was so long ago. The day before yesterday.”
“I didn’t think you would come,” said Elena. The words drifted down, holding their notes.
“Even today, after I woke up, I wasn’t sure myself,” replied Garšva. “But I wanted to hear about the noblemen’s heads.”
“Good, then. Let’s go. I know your park.”
“When those two lie side by side… that was Misha and me,” thought the sagging Jewess when the pair passed by her, her eyes glistening with lost dreams.
“This lady has a husband. The husband works, and the lady doesn’t work, so she’s going to do a bit of work with this fellow,” thought the pharmacist. Some time ago his wife left him, and when she died he went to her funeral, he never remarried, he lived alone.
They walked in silence. Elena’s bowed head and Garšva’s bent shoulders. Dirty Bedford Avenue with its street kiosks filled with Asian immigrant papers, horse-racing types loitering around the soda pop stores, cowboyish youngsters riding bikes festooned with bells and horns, the collapsed sidewalk paving, the smell of onion, garlic, trash, the kind of grey sadness that isn’t dispersed by the golden oranges, the golden sun, or the gold watches and rings in the storefronts, or the golden hair of the girl standing in the dry cleaner’s doorway, or the blue strip of sky peeking through gaps down the side streets.
And the two came to the large square that Garšva had called a park. There were baseball diamonds, cement walls for hitting balls, sparse trees, grass, benches. They sat down. And they saw, in front of them, gasoline cisterns, a school building, a few skyscraper towers.
“This will be our only meeting. You are mistaken about me. My husband and I are a model couple.”
“Forgive me. I’ll go, if you want.”
Garšva’s hand grasped the arm of the park bench.
“I’ll be on my way.”
“Why?”
Surprised, Garšva stared at Elena’s eyes. True peace, and a calm curiosity, and a bit of the maternal.
“Why?” repeated Elena. “This is the only time we will meet alone. My husband invited you to visit, and so do I.”
“I didn’t want to insult you,” said Garšva.
“I know,” replied Elena.
Garšva got out his cigarettes and they both lit up.
“I’ll be honest. I’m looking for something.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“Really? What exactly?”
“I’ve heard that you’re a womaniser.”
“That’s the least of it. They say I’m destructive, that I wallow in my own misery. I repeat: I’m searching for something. For a week now I’ve been searching for a few stanzas.”
“I like your poems. They’re true in their incompleteness.”
“I don’t know how to end things. I need peace. My world is falling apart. I’m detail-oriented. I don’t like to buy things in bulk, but I cherish fragments. I want to describe sliding into the abyss. Right now I’m looking for a solution. There’s this boy in my new poem. His mother is dying in the next room. The door is locked, the boy isn’t allowed in. He’s watching a blue fly crawl along the wall. Soon the fly will reach the window, which is slightly open. Will it fly out, or stay in the room?”
“If I understand you to some degree, then … it will fly out. And when the little boy is let in to see his dying mother, he’ll be sad about the blue fly, because it flew off.”
Elena’s words had a new, brittle tone.
“Thank you for the gift,” said Garšva. Elena glanced at him quizzically, and there was fear in her eyes.
“I wasn’t mistaken. I knew I needed your help. That time, in the car, you decided that the nun and I got lost because of the dead noblemen’s heads. I understood intuitively: you will solve the problem of the boy in the closed room.”
“I’m just a former high school teacher. And I love Vilnius,” said Elena. She carefully extinguished her cigarette with the heel of her shoe, and Garšva noticed that her right stocking was on crookedly again today. He noticed that her face powder had been applied unevenly, that her eyebrows had been extended too thickly, her lips painted more brightly, so that Elena was no longer the little grey woman she had been the day before yesterday at Jones Beach. A moment ago there had been fear in her greyish eyes, and Garšva knew this look. From the mirror he used to look at when the invisible hands started choking him.
“I know. Memories mean old age. Oh no, I am thirty-two years old. I meant old age figuratively. And I’m angry. Some ladies I know talk a lot about the past. They remember fashions, faces, dish sets, maids. But I remember the noblemen’s heads, the statues on the roof of the Cathedral, the stone wall by Rasų Cemetery, the columns of the Vilnius University courtyard… I am just like my acquaintances.”⁴⁷
She fell silent, she contemplated the skyscraper towers. Garšva shifted, and she said, “I can guess what you’re going to suggest. I read your poems and articles. I tried to retrace your steps. Yes, I saw Modigliani’s reclining woman in a tiny gallery. The magical yellowishness, the Byzantine sadness, as you wrote. You quoted Cocteau, a fresco related to the ones in the temples at Luxor. At the Museum of Modern Art I looked at your Soutine, the congealed blood in the folds of a young Jewish boy’s clothing. At the Metropolitan I tried to see the ornamental purity of the Persian miniatures. And in the Museum of Natural History I found a copy of a round head, an ancient meteor that had fallen in the desert, just as you wrote. I won’t go to look at them any more.”
“Why not?”
“I won’t go to look at them any more,” Elena repeated.
Garšva shifted.
“You want to run off again?” asked Elena, and Garšva stuff
ed his hands into his pockets.
“Not at all. I just feel a little excited. You are a reader who remembers entire sentences. And you say that you won’t go back to look at them any more.”
Elena laughed. For the first time Garšva had a good look at her teeth. Fine, even, bluish. With good quality fillings. He once again heard a brittle tone in her laugh.
“How old are you?”
“Forty-one.”
“How childish you are! I imagined an ironic character. And you get excited like a high school student.”
“Put your hands on your purse,” said Garšva coldly. “If I’m excited and stuffed my hands into my pockets, so that I wouldn’t clutch the bench, then you should not crumple your skirt. You would do better to crumple the leather of your purse.”
A faint blush broke through the layer of powder, fingers trembled and froze clutching skirt folds. Sharp shoe heels bore into the gravel. Leg muscles, and the ones around the lips, tightened. This went on for a few seconds and then Elena’s body gradually relaxed, and she leaned back like a worker on a break.
“Forgive me. I’m a poet, but I can also be terribly prosaic,” Garšva said softly.
Elena did not reply. Two fat pigeons were strolling along the path, lazily swaying their stomachs like pregnant women. A black-haired boy flew by like a madman on a red bicycle. A silver sweetie wrapper sparkled annoyingly on the ground.
“Tell me about your Vilnius,” said Garšva. Elena’s eyelashes were wet. She was still leaning back against the bench, the remnants of a meagre smile playing on her closed lips.
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