White Shroud

by Anatanas Škėma

  A broad stream splashed on to his nose and ran down his face to the floor. His consciousness and pupils gradually returned. The skin below one nipple quivered, the heart was beating. His fingers released the edge of his robe. With Elena’s help, Antanas Garšva got back on to the sofa. He wiped his wet face with one hand. Sweat poured out his pores, his body glistened like an oiled athlete’s.

  “Shoes,” he said. “Van Gogh’s shoes. I saw them. It made me angry. Dirty shoes on a table. Give me a cigarette.”

  “Wait a bit. Drink some water.”

  Elena scooped up some water from the bowl, and Garšva took the glass.

  “There’s a little box in my trouser pocket. Give it to me.”

  He carefully opened the lid of the box and shook two celluloid bullets on to his palm, tossed them into his mouth and drank some water. Then he slipped on his robe and tied it at the waist. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “How did I look when I was unconscious?”

  “Don’t ask, it isn’t necessary.”

  “How did I look when I was unconscious?”

  “You were lying on the linoleum, your legs curled, clutching your robe.”

  “That’ll have to do. Like a Venetian doge who poisoned himself by his lover’s bed. Or like a slain beast in a pool of blue blood. That’s how a romantic would resolve it. Leave me now. I’ll go to sleep.”

  “What is your doctor’s phone number?”

  “There’s no need to call him. It’s not the first time. When one of these attacks is over, I don’t need a doctor any more. I’ll sleep and I’ll be fine again.”

  “You don’t want me to stay?”

  “No. It’s a strange psychological reaction. I want to be alone. It helps. I’ll explain it all to you later. Forgive me.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow. I’ll come with my things.”

  “No, not tomorrow. I’ll call you. I might be at the doctor’s. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  Elena put her coat on in silence and Garšva lit a cigarette. He got up without difficulty and kissed Elena, his lips warm with life.

  “Be sure to call me tomorrow.”

  “I will. Thank you, forgive me.”

  “I love you,” said Elena. And she left.

  Garšva poured some White Horse into his glass. He drank it. He glanced through the window. The thirty-eight bathrobes still hung there, the shutters were still closed, the glimmers of sunlight were still trying to break through the clouds.

  “That was the first time. The first time that I fainted. What does it mean?”

  “What!” he shouted. A warm sensation of calm slowly blanketed his brain.

  “Why didn’t I tell her that I’ve spent time in a mental hospital? Why didn’t I write about it?”

  *

  It begins to get crowded at around ten o’clock. The young people’s dance on the eighteenth – young men and women from the curtain factory in Brooklyn will be whooping it up. The Masonic dinner finished a while ago. On time. Rosy old men and ladies in multicoloured paper hats – their Medieval heritage – travelled downward, bells tinkling atop their respectable heads. They blew into small cardboard tubes, making obscene red blobs poke out. Some of the men tried to drop lifelike rubber frogs or lizards into their ladies’ décolletés. And chuckled.

  Now the young people are going up. They go up looking sad, holding on to each other. The colours of the paper hats are reincarnated in the girls’ dresses, earrings, fake flowers, their cheeks and eyebrows; in the young men’s ties, buckles, socks.

  They go up in pairs, barely speaking, looking into each other’s eyes. They’ve been condemned to dance. They stare into each other’s eyes as though they were splitting up. An upside-down world. The people going down are having fun. This is a dolls’ party held in a funeral parlour.

  Some are already drunk as they go up. They smoke cheap cigars and try to make conversation with the same words they use in the factory. Nylon curtains collect a lot of static, so when you hang them on the metal rods you can get shocks in your fingers. These yellow flowery curtains make you cough when you cut them, because of all the starch floating in the air. And it’s really fun with the plain white curtains, the scissors slice them real fast – and the day’s work flies by. Garšva learns all of this from the ones going up without girls.

  “Right, Mac, it’s tough for you too.”

  “I guess I have a good stomach.”

  “Right, Mac, tomorrow it’ll be more curtains.”

  “Too bad we just got the hall from ten o’clock.”

  “Yes, the factory is celebrating its anniversary. We don’t pay, the bosses pay.”

  “The new foreman is too picky. All the new ones are picky.”

  How beautifully the curtains fluttered in Cocteau’s film! The long castle hallway, the open windows, the wind, and the white curtains. The same ones that make the day go quickly when you’re cutting them.

  The young people from the curtain factory. A dolls’ party. The curtains – a symbol of insolubility. Someone stirred on the other side, and Polonius fell, having been stabbed. Curtains – a symbol of solubility. Othello grabbed the curtains one last time. I like curtains. They’re alive, like dolls. They’re eternal in their softness, just as dolls are in their fixed expressions. A subtle combination: dolls hanging from curtains. Let them flutter in the wind. Sad embracing couples. Two hearts pierced by one arrow. A Cupid with good aim walks through a green field, his legs are pink and his nails pearly.

  “Right, Mac. Want a cigar? Here.”

  An upside-down world. Why aren’t you Masons, and the Masons – you? A gangly young man, still pink from Cupid’s arrow, kisses his girlfriend’s neck. They’re pressed against the wall. The doll watches the numbers, mouth ajar, and Garšva waits for someone to squeeze her and for the girl to say “Ma-ma”.

  Your floor. The eighteenth, eighteen-year-olds. Kiss while you dance; kiss on the velvet sofas, the ones in the hotel corridors, I won’t see it. And forget about the curtains. Ave Caesar, vivantes te salutant!⁹⁰

  Strange. The sad couples have brought me hope. Every day, every hour enriches me. I chose a great job. I can even imagine that I picked it on purpose. I no longer have to trudge through the rain. The old woman, a dutiful camp resident, did her bit and lies blessed and rotting in her grave. And the poet Vaidilionis writes poems about a real vaidila he borrowed from the Romantics – one who never played nineteenth-century melodies on the kanklės at the times of the crusades.⁹¹ And he stuffs his stanzas with Jericho flutes. So that the wind orchestra, in which only the cornet comes close to actually playing, can play a funeral march.

  89Čiurlionis: the early modernist Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875–1911).

  90Ave Caesar, vivantes te salutant: “Hail Caesar, the living salute you, which is a play on “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant”, which means, “Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.”

  91Vaidila: a high priest in the Lithuanian pre-Christian religion; “Vadilionis” is an ironic play on this word. Kanklės: a Lithuanian string instrument of the zither family.

  Chapter 14

  From Antanas Garšva’s Notebooks

  The smallish DP camp had been planted on a bare Bavarian field.⁹² Four barracks nailed together by Russian prisoners of war. On the loamy ground. As we walked through the rain to pick up our food rations, clumps of earth stuck to our canvas shoes, impossible to wash off. Clothing was distributed to us – leftover Canadian forest-ranger uniforms. We ripped off the badges and guarded a few ratty shrubs, our anxiety, our hungry anger, our grotesque rations (which for some reason included an excess of toilet paper), our dark green hopes.

  And we elected committees. And celebrated our national holidays. And excited speakers shouted: “We will return next year!” And we wept when a six-year-old girl recited a poem that repeatedly mentioned our country’s name. And in the evenings men sat by the barracks belting out songs, the ver
ses repeating rhythmically until the last note faded. And I thought I saw a bright streak left by a shooting star, a freshly burnt meteor.

  We were sentimental, exhausted, jealous, angry. And sexual. We seduced each other’s wives, we made love in ditches dug by the Volkssturm, and forgot the previous night’s embraces – often rushed, cowardly, unsuccessful – by morning. And some, who had managed to shed the past, traded in apples, jewellery, gasoline, cows – as if they were the reincarnated vėlės of incinerated tradesmen.

  Four barracks, dropped on to the loamy earth. Mounds of scrap metal (airplane hangars, now destroyed by bombs, had once stood there) were our children’s playground. The squelching of our canvas shoes in the mud – it rained often that year – and the interminable talk, in which a future chronicler would hear only one significant phrase: “When I lived in Lithuania…”

  Two hundred people. Eighty-four men, eighty-two women, thirty-six children.

  I had not written any poems for a long time, but I was up to date with the latest books and magazines, and wrote about Lithuanian and German theatre, painting exhibitions, concerts and books. That was how I scraped together the few marks I needed to buy alcohol.

  My skills improved, and the agonies of hell began to look like Gulliver’s adventures among the giants.

  Providence had made me an observer of corpses. I saw many, and in different states. In East Prussia I saw a dead woman, she was lying next to a pear tree in full pink bloom. In Weimar I saw a group of uniformed schoolgirls pulled from a cellar, welded together by hot water during the bombing. Inflated, their faces the colour of those women who spend too much time under quartz lamps. By the Czechoslovak border we came across an abandoned, reeking freight wagon. When we opened it we found about thirty decomposing children, aged three to seven. We never learnt who had forgotten them on the reserve tracks. Adult male corpses had no effect on me, as though I were an experienced gravedigger.

  I was privileged and shared a small room with the poet Vaidilionis. I loathed his ascetic face, his deep-set eyes, his short, thickset body, his large hands (hundreds of his ancestors had scratched at the infertile earth, and his fingers were bent at the joints, like in a death agony), his coarse black hair combed on to his wide forehead in a special style, his yellow toenails which he liked to cut with a kitchen knife, his sacrilegious posture – the way he sat at the table writing poems, stiff and bobbing like a priest performing the elevation.

  I followed Vaidilionis’s rise. The Lithuanian newspapers and magazines published his poems on their front pages and his stern face with its meaningfully closed lips often gazed at the reader. Vaidilionis was recited by actors, amateurs and children; he was quoted by priests, camp officials and reviewers.

  Vaidilionis versified effortlessly. He sprinkled our dark green hope with rosy hyssop. He didn’t inscribe quiet melodies in the sand, he didn’t scorch us with the slow fire of loss, he didn’t wander amongst childhood’s happy ghosts, and didn’t look for a castle with clear windows, lanterns or gold carriages. Vaidilionis had a calming, uplifting effect. In a few tight stanzas the horrors of war would slink past and then a powerful voice (God’s, some saint’s or his own) would quickly scatter marble pedestals about the loamy earth and then place us on top of them. There we were in our narrow trousers, grey faces, just like the grand dukes of the past, heads full of fantasies like a poor servant girl. And on the highest pedestal stood Vaidilionis himself. A prophet on a block of stone.

  And around all of this Vaidilionis masterfully arranged a thoughtful collection of props: a zinc-coloured Nemunas, varnished country beams, a father’s talismanic pipe, a sprig of chamomile pressed in a prayer book, the star-studded wings of friendly angels, a patriotically howling dog.

  And in the final stanzas the grand dukes popped up once again, calling us to a bright future. We, their natural successors, as brave as the legendary Vikings. We who scrabbled for every donated rag, we who waited for overseas passages and imagined ourselves enjoying sofas with firm springs, real, nicotine-rich cigarettes, creams, furs and fresh meat.

  My very first meeting with Vaidilionis was disastrous. When I entered the room and threw my thin knapsack on to the floor, Vaidilionis was sitting on his cot, writing.

  “Good day, aesthete Garšva,” he said, setting aside his carefully penned manuscript sheets. We had known each other in Lithuania.

  “Good day, Vaidilionis, you old corpse,” I replied. He glanced at my shoes, which could not have been more pathetically worn out. I sat down on a stool.

  “These shoes are a half-size too small. That’s why my feet reek. Open the window, because the room will start to smell,” I stated.

  Vaidilionis looked at my shoes in silence, and I felt a mix of shame and irritation.

  “Hide your poems. Temporarily. While I air out and wash my feet,” I said, focusing on the frayed strings masquerading as laces.

  “I feel sorry for you,” said Vaidilionis, emphasising each consonant.

  “And I for you.”

  Vaidilionis continued, as though he hadn’t heard me.

  “A number of years ago you and I had it out. You argued your position with paradoxes and supposedly won. You dismissed morality, idealism and the good Lord. You worshipped only literature. Now, I would dare to clarify, it was your own bile. I remember your illness. How many poems have you written in exile?”

  “Since I escaped, none,” I said.

  I untied the strings and took off my shoes. And looked glumly at the dirty toes peering quizzically through the remains of my socks.

  “How many articles and reviews have you written?”

  “Many.”

  “The washroom is at the end of the corridor,” said Vaidilionis. “When you come back, we’ll have a bite.”

  I took my time washing. I couldn’t stand heavy streams of water. They stroked my skin like the caresses of a woman one has gotten sick of, on whom one has become sexually dependent.

  When I returned I found Vaidilionis had arranged some preserves, bread and a bottle of beetroot vodka on the stool.

  “So where have you been wandering? You lived somewhere privately after the war? I heard something from the editors,” he said.

  “I was lucky. I spent three months digging trenches in East Prussia. Then near Czechoslovakia. And escaped. I was only in one bombing in Weimar. And found a place to live in a village. A German lady took me in. I slept with her. I fertilised her garden with my family’s manure. After a while she kicked me out.”

  “What for?”

  “I drank too much.”

  “Are you going to try for America?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Vaidilionis followed my shaking hands as I sipped the beet spirits.

  “Your hands tremble.”

  “I’m not dead yet. Unlike you.”

  “Explain,” he said calmly.

  “Some young guys got together in one of the camps,” I started, greedily swallowing some canned beef. “They write poems. They read Eliot, Pound, others. They know Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre. They love the new painting.”

  “They’re untalented Western epigones,” interrupted Vaidilionis.

  “They believe in poetry. It’s in their poems that I discovered a love for my country. A love for my childhood. For broken toys. And the question ‘Why?’ And the will to survive. Come to think of it, there’s a colleague of yours in that other camp. He writes ‘classical’ poems, just like you. Old Homer is happily rubbing his hands in Hades. The little old Moirai watch him adoringly. But even they aren’t interested in you.”

  “Be more specific.”

  “Your fate has been spun. You shout out big words about the past, bright words about the future. You’re virtuous, or pretend to be. So you’re lying.”

  “The alcohol is affecting you,” said Vaidilionis in a cold, quiet voice, and drank some beet spirits. “Eat,” he added.

  Then he got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. He stood, and I contemplated the buttons on
his jacket. “Fanatics and their followers tighten both their muscles and their souls,” I thought to myself.

  “And what are you, exactly?” he asked me.

  “I’m waiting,” I said, working on the last bits of meat.

  “I know what you’ve gone through. I’ll say it again. I feel sorry for you. But the end result is sad. You can’t write any more. Envy makes the powerless angry. But at least you’re honest. When you can’t write, you don’t. I respect you for that.”

  I did my best to keep my hands from trembling. I put some meat on a little piece of bread, lifted it slowly towards my mouth, and slowly sipped the spirits, holding the empty glass before my face.

  “May I take a look at your latest poems?”

  “You may. Read them, and, if you like, discredit them. But take note. I am published, read, recited. And they say – I sustain their will to live, their hope. The whole nation’s hope.”

  And Vaidilionis passed me the sheets of manuscript. I read, and the blood in my head pulsed. Vaidilionis was still standing, his hands in his pockets.

  I finished and placed the sheaf on the green blanket.

  “A typical example of impotence. The word ‘Lithuania’ is squeezed in three times over four poems. The main idea in these poems is the racial nobility of the Lithuanian people. The technique is clean. You could advertise shoe polish. The images aren’t demanding. Of course the air is cleaner in the woods. What was it that inspired Vytautas the Great on that green field? You yourself, in your green trousers?”

  “My diagnosis is correct,” Vaidilionis said quietly, shaking his head.

  “Go ahead, shake your head, Mister Popular Poet! You’ll be forgotten!”

  “You’ve already been forgotten,” Vaidilionis said calmly.

  I said nothing. For four months.

  In late fall, as the rain poured relentlessly down on the camp, an old woman died. The first of our barracks community to depart for the afterlife. There was nothing remarkable about the old woman. She had attended mass zealously, enjoyed the food rations, and died from a heart attack, though she had complained mainly of rheumatism in her legs. Since she was the first victim, it was decided that she should have a grand funeral.