The starter smiled faintly. “OK, Tony. Go around the corner, and come back after these people have cleared out.”
Walking away, Garšva hears the starter’s words:
“He’ll present himself to the manager and will be punished. What a criminal! The poor little creatures!”
Garšva comes back and the starter says:
“Bloody chinchillas! They belong in hell. Be careful, Tony.”
“Thanks, O’Casey. I will.”
The express from the tenth to the eighteenth. Your floor, here we are, please, thank you, button, hand to handle, going up. I’m not angry that the old people lodged a complaint. I was inattentive. Who told me to dream about the Valley of Josaphat? Poor, sweet old people. They’re probably childless and will raise those chinchillas like their dearest darlings. Maybe I should follow their example, maybe that would save me?
Elena and I – together. Domestic bliss. A little house somewhere in Jamaica. We have a whole floor to ourselves. We hang some reproductions. We arrange our books. The art books and poets look serious. A separate little shelf for our own people. In the evenings we listen to music, read, and argue mildly, savouring it. The lamp shines, and it has a green glass shade. We find Station C, it doesn’t have marble columns, but its vestibule offers peace. And on the coffee table – fresh flowers. And our faces always contain the possibility of smiles. And our dreams – a sense of awakening. And our embraces – the first trip to Jones Beach. And our emblem is the dead noblemen’s heads. We play at leisure. We stack blocks, build castles, dream about life and death. And the books offer us some help. Not only Homer or Dante. Our own authors too. We drink sparkling wine and a flamingo flares up on the expensive ebony table; we sail on Lake Lucerne, and, in that other land, a dead boy plays a tune on the guitar that has never been heard on this earth. And the rising sun once again awakens our world, and we live in the cool, endless North with field, path, meadow, cross. Palms, my beloved palms, sing slender in this windy oasis.
Zoori, zoori, magical word, magical key, magical desire, magical conventionality, magical nostalgia, nostalgia for an unbreakable cage.
And then one day, in our little cage, a child is born.
48 See note 5.
49Serfdom was introduced in Lithuania in 1447 by Kazimieras Jogailaitis, Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland. The oppression of the serfs became heavier in 1795, when Lithuania was annexed by Imperial Russia. Reforms abolishing serfdom were introduced in 1861 and intensified following the Uprising of 1863.
50Perkūnas, Pykuolis, Patrimpas: the ancient Baltic gods of air/ lightning, the dead, and nature/fertility.
51These refrains appear at various points in the novel. They evoke archaic Lithuanian polyphonic song, and have no literal meaning, except for the phrases, skambinoj kankleliai (the zithers rang) and augo (it grew).
52See note 64 re. vėlės.
53Reference to traditional Lithuanian wooden sculptures (dievukai) depicting a pensive Christ (Rūpintojėlis – “the Sorrowful One”) or other saints, often placed at roadsides.
54Reference to the Lithuanian Riflemen’s League, a volunteer civic defense organisation founded in 1919.
55Lithuanian poets, Antanas Strazdas (1760–1833) and Kristijonas Donelaitis (1714–1780).
56Boris Babochkin (1904–1975), a Russian film actor and director. Best known for playing the lead character in the 1934 film Chapaev, about a Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War.
57All Gaul is divided into three parts (Latin).
58Aestus: the Aesti were an ancient Baltic people, first referred to in this way by the Roman historian Tacitus in his treasise Germania, ca. 98 CE.
59“Išsisupus plačiai vakarų vilnimis,” from the poem “Nuo Birutės kalno” (“From Birutė’s Hill”, 1895) by the Lithuanian poet Maironis (1862–1932).
60“Mano krutinę užliek savo šalta banga,” from Maironis’s poem.
61Ženia is the Lithuanian spelling of Zhenia, the diminutive of the popular Russian name Evgenija.
62Pensive Christ: refers to a Rūpintojėlis (Sorrowful One), a traditional Lithuanian wooden statue of a pensive Christ figure.
63Following the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania (1940), many Lithuanians, still reeling from the mass deportations begun by the Soviets, hoped that the advance of the German army would lead to the restoration of Lithuania’s independence, or at least autonomy. These hopes were soon quashed when Nazi authorities established full administrative control of the country, using lower-level Lithuanian bureaucrats for rubber-stamping purposes. The German occupation lasted until the second Soviet occupation in Summer 1944.
64Ich danke Ihnen recht schoen: Thank you very much (German).
Chapter 9
From Antanas Garšva’s Notebooks
My earliest memories are not dramatic. But they are more vivid and indelible than others that came later and would normally be considered more important. My childhood memories are like those African masks: thick lips, holes for eyes, hypnotic facial relief.
It’s nonsense, of course, to think that my first memory is authentic. It was probably shaped by knowledge acquired later. But today I still believe that I suddenly sensed in the absolute darkness that I existed – without body, space or time. All I had was an abstract sense of myself. As though I were more primitive than an amoeba. As though I were God, hovering in black non-existence before the creation of the universe.
Next there is Karlsbad, a man, a bunch of cherries. Our family spent one summer at that Austrian resort before the First World War. My mother was dissolving her kidney stones in the mineral baths. I have only a vague memory of Karlsbad. My parents bought a lot of coloured postcards and, when showing them to me later, would tell me where we had been and what we had done. And it would seem to me that I could see a vaulted hall, women with pinched waists and enormous hats, blue lake water and little red boats and the cone-shaped, snowy mountains. Even these memories are like the conception of the amoeba or God. But the trip on the funicular is real and indisputable.
We were climbing upward. I was sitting in the cable car by the window. I remember the lace on my mother’s cuffs, my father’s pointy moustache, the crooked, backward-leaning fir trees. And the station and the wagon in front of us. A man was leaning out the window. The man’s face was red, and he was eating cherries of the same colour. I was looking at the cherries and the man was looking at me. Then, reaching out the window, he offered me two cherries and said something. The cherries gleamed in the sunlight. I took them. The cable cars separated. The man’s rattled downward, ours groaned on upward. Two sticky, round, red cherries, which it seemed a pity to eat, lay in my palm. I put them in my mouth and then took them out again.
“Eat them,” said my mother. I didn’t dare, and rolled them in my palms. The cherries were beautiful, so I wanted to look at them. The cherries were sweet, so I wanted to eat them.
I can’t remember the fate of those cherries. I remember my sticky fingers, the cherries softening, a vague resignation.
Then the waiting crashed in. I was eight years old. Our house stood at the edge of the small town, close to a marsh. Hummocks and crooked birches; a spruce forest on the horizon; the mournful cries of lapwings; the mist, which even the midsummer sun couldn’t dissolve. The mist hung over the quagmire, and the frogs, the lapwings and the grasses glimmered, as though reflected in hundred-year-old mirrors. Were you to see Cinderella amongst these pools of water, you wouldn’t be surprised. Cinderella – in her smoky rags, a basket in her hand, an expression that reveals she is searching for her prince, her red slippers muddy from the marsh.
My father had decided that he knew how to plaster walls. Of course, the rough plaster soon dried up, cracked and fell to the floor in geometric shapes. These uneven triangles, squares and rectangles were my favourite toys, which I used to build a castle for my own Cinderella. My parents, both high school teachers, would leave me in the locked, empty flat. I didn’t attend school and did my lesson
s at home. At the time I was weak and often got dizzy, so I wasn’t allowed to go outside on my own.
Waiting would soon arrive. It would stand next to me, like a concerned stepmother. Cold, strict, righteous, inflexible.
And here is a path. A pebbly path through the windless marsh. The wind never disturbs the crown of the spruce forest. I can see my foreshortened body in the marsh water. The hair falling to my shoulders. A golden chain around my neck. Cinderella walking next to me. I’m leading her to the unfinished castle which I built from my father’s rough plaster. In Cinderella’s basket – a single rose. Why? Roses don’t grow in marshes. There, past the spruce forest, another world, another sky. Fragrant, gentle, somnolent. Surrounded by thick walls, where armed guards stand ready to hurl their lances. But the lances will be lowered, the gates will open and Cinderella will lead me inside. And there needn’t be very much inside. Reddish painted floors; cracks; a crawling spider – a wise inhabitant of the unfinished castle. He knows why the rose is scented, why Cinderella’s gait makes the guards reverently lower their lances and kneel.
But… Waiting was standing right there. Suddenly I could see the room in which I was playing. The pieces of plaster arranged in a semicircle. The green painting on the wall, a gift from my father’s pupils. In copying a postcard the artist had made the mistake of erasing the circle that had been so carefully sketched with a No. 1 pencil around the setting sun. I could see the table legs, a twig wedged under one of them. I could see the hole in the sofa, the sawdust escaping from it. I could see my dirty nails. I picked my nose. I wanted to cry, to laugh. I was overwhelmed by waiting for my parents, who wouldn’t be home soon.
Then I would decide to fight. To chase away that anxious feeling of waiting. To frighten it. To destroy it. To make it laugh. And I would open the window, hear the lapwing cries and draw the menacing dampness into my lungs.
I was an Indian. Brave and ruthless. My hands clutched my enemies’ bloody scalps. Waiting was forced to clamber out the open window.
I was a knight. My double-edged sword would slice through the ceiling, shatter the light bulb, slash the sofa. Waiting would be hacked into pieces.
I was a cannibal. Huge cauldrons hissed, white men boiling in them. The room hummed from fire and the smoke. Waiting would be burnt up or choked.
I was a circus clown. I did somersaults, and fell flat on the ground. Laughed with a crazy voice. Waiting would have to cheer up.
And, eventually, I would get tired. Once again I was sitting by the scattered pieces of plaster. The spider and the castle guards have hidden in the cracks in the floor. Cinderella… is gone. There is no other world, no other sky, that is fragrant, gentle, sleepy. Waiting was still standing right there. A concerned stepmother. I would close the window. I didn’t want to listen to the lapwings, didn’t want to breathe the damp air. Once again I was staring at the table legs, the painting, the sawdust, the green lamp, the wispy clouds. An indistinct tune buzzed in my ear. Perhaps that was the birth of the sound that would become the word zoori!
I waited for my parents, my heart pounding. It gradually got darker. Sky and objects turned grey. I no longer resisted Waiting. I sat on the floor, picking my nose. I might have screamed if I had sensed that Waiting was no longer there. Sounds from the town bounced off the windowpanes. A locomotive hooted, truck wheels rattled, church bells peeled. My boyish heart pounded. Louder than the sounds of the waning evening.
My parents would arrive unexpectedly. That’s what happens, when you’re waiting so hard. At first they seemed to ignore me, were busy with their coats, the sentences they had brought in from the street, the lamp, dinner. Shoes fell to the floor and were replaced by slippers, kindling was split, the wood stove began to hiss, and as everything calmed down, I became lonely. Completely alone, as even Waiting had left. Where had it gone? Had it sneaked out through the door and sunk to the bottom of the marsh? Had it slipped in between the floorboards? Could it have curled up into the round sun in the student’s painting? And I was sad that I had lost my stepmother. And I couldn’t understand this contradiction. I had waited anxiously for my parents and was disappointed when they arrived. And I remained silent when my father noticed the scattered pieces of plaster and scolded me for being slovenly, and I was weak because I was lazy, didn’t respect my father’s work, and should be apprenticed to a shoemaker, as God often punishes people with such brats.
Cinderella with a basket in her hand, and in the basket a rose. I had to face arithmetic exercises and my stern father at the other end of the table. Another world? A dirty, awkward nakedness. Zoori, where is the melody? I can’t hear it. Will I ever hear it?
Later still, I saw the tree. I was sixteen. We were on a summer holiday in Palanga. Laughing, my friend Aldona tossed my bamboo cane into the narrow Ronžė river. She added that I am thinner than the stick and have teeth like an ichthyosaur.
That afternoon I was walking alone on the beach near some fishermen’s boats. They smelt of tar and fish. I stopped and dug into the sand with the tip of my shoe. The calm sea rippled nearby. Small waves separated me from the white glow. I wanted to leave the shore and walk into the sea. Like Christ. Just a few steps separated me from becoming a miracle. I knew that a miracle is reality turned into perfection. Like a leap into the air. I couldn’t jump higher than one metre sixty. Even on my best form, I couldn’t jump higher than one metre fifty-seven. I couldn’t walk on the sea; I could only drown in it or look at it, and I was afraid of drowning.
So I continued to look at the sea. Sailboats glided on the horizon. Could I plant a mast with a faded canvas and sail away, gripping the wheel firmly? I breathed in the smell of tar and fish, and turned the sand with the tip of my shoe.
Suddenly, my whole being shivered in ecstasy. It seemed to me that I was stretching upward, that my head was higher that the pines on Swedes’ Hill. I could hold the sun in my hands, and… how silly to want only to walk on the sea! When one could uproot trees and throw them around, causing the inhabitants of Swedish ports to wonder why they were covered in pine needles. Or hang the chapel on Birutė’s Hill up in Heaven. I could fish out my bamboo stick, a Chaldean sorcerer’s wand, and sketch magical symbols in the air. Let the stars shine during the day, let the stars sing and worship me as the most powerful of all. Great miracles aren’t necessary. For I can contain limitless power and joy within myself!
I can’t remember everything I got up to on the seashore by the fishermen’s boats. I sang a toreador’s aria in a false baritone, my leg thrust proudly forward, the high “so” of my tremulous howl softened by the monotonous murmur of the sea.
I danced an improvised dance. It was a priestess’s prayer to Kastytis and Jūratė as they made love in their castle beneath the sea.⁶⁵ My long legs dug up the sand, I squatted down, grasping them, swaying my behind, showing the whites of my eyes.
I even gave a speech to the masses, the words mere symbols of something incredibly important.
“As you know… it is everything… let us stoke the fire, long live… raise and rise up… all… upward… I will show you the way to the magical light, I, I, …”
And I shook the hands of all those greeting me, smiled charmingly, and leapt up as the crowd raised me on their arms and carried me, shouting, “It is him! It is him! He is ours!”
And then another sensation joined ecstasy and irritatingly penetrated my body, and my magnificence faded, like the foam of the waves dissolves in the sand. As though my eyes had just been opened. Here is a fisherman’s boat. Further on, some blackened shells. Ahead – the grey sea. The skinny pines on Swedes’ Hill . The empty seashore disappears around a bend. I understood. I needed to piss. That’s what shattered my ecstasy. I leant against the edge of a boat. And felt relief from having held it in so long. And, just as the sand drank up my urine like foam from a wave, I heard a rustling. I turned my head. Damn! I’d forgotten to look in the direction of Birutė’s Hill. The woman was right there. Very tanned in a bright red bathing suit, an orange
robe hanging off her shoulder. She had probably seen and heard my idiotic song, and dance, and speech, and how I now stood contorted by the boat.
The woman walked past me – a screaming blemish in a grey world. I burst into tears of shame and walked home on the sand. The magical world evaporated. What ridiculously long legs! And teeth like an ichthyosaur’s! And my own stench! What an idiot!
An empty pedestrian bridge lay ahead, like a corroded poker frozen in a puddle. The seaweed washed up by the Baltic reeked, and the rain began to pour, and the dwarf pines murmured. I walked along the streets of the resort. The gravel crackled, my nose was cold and my back itched. There’s the villa where Aldona is staying. The silliest girl in Palanga. Who cares if she has breasts and can wiggle her bum? I decided not to think about it any more.
That evening I lay in bed, looking through the window. It had stopped raining. I saw a tree and two stars. I had calmed down. My fingers wandered around the blanket.
Stars wandering around the blanket. Like two spiders. Both have five legs. The stars wander around on the dark blanket. Legs pressed together, flexible bones, the stars make love or war. A tree stood there, cut out of black tin. I felt it. My toes are cold. I turned towards the wall. The day’s fragments formed a lump in my throat. I shouldn’t have gazed so longingly at that useless girl. And why did I give her that lovely bamboo cane, like a prince bestowing a gift on Cinderella? Aldona is no Cinderella. Her father has an important job in the Finance Ministry, she’ll marry a Kurhauzas regular.⁶⁶
An acute shame washed over me. I curled my toes. That scene on the beach! What impotent grandeur! The tree and the two stars stood out beyond the window.
An impenetrable tin mass. My room is tight. And I am a tiny wad about to be crushed by the encroaching walls. Medieval times are approaching. I’ve been locked up in a torture chamber whose walls will come together. They’ll crush me slowly, so as to prolong my writhing. The world was retreating, the tin walls closing in.
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