By a strange coincidence, a former wind orchestra member lived in the camp. He was able to put together a band, because the UNRRA director, a fervently inebriated Ohio butcher, donated some instruments he had confiscated from the Germans.⁹³ The wind veteran rounded up a few young men and quickly taught them to play a march, “Two Clergymen Brothers,” as well as a “Potpourri of Lithuanian Melodies”, which some Jew had assembled in pre-war Lithuania. And for “dessert”, as it was put by the bandleader who played the cornet and still wore a traditional moustache, the old woman’s funeral would be celebrated with Chopin’s Marche funèbre.
The old woman was clothed in a black dress which some merciful ladies had sewn from multicoloured rags and tinted with ersatz dye, so that the deceased’s garment was embellished with green spots. The carpenter Rimšinis nailed together a coffin from the less rotten boards lying by an unfinished barracks hut. The bigger camp sent a priest, a pleasant man who smiled demurely if he heard a common swear word.
We had to walk a couple of kilometres to a tiny village with a grandiose name. To Koenigshafen. It was midday and the rain had stopped. We formed a procession. The Boy Scout Povilėnas carried the cross. The muffled-up priest trudged along in borrowed galoshes. The old woman bounced on a simple Swabian cart pulled by a thin horse with a strangely fat belly. And the brass band marched, proud and shining.
The old woman did not have any relatives, so the first rows were graced by the little camp’s officials and a distinguished personage who gave speeches remarkable in their impressive use of ellipses.
We walked in harmonious silence for about a kilometre. The brass band procrastinated. The bandleader did not have much faith in his colleagues, he said he had only once been pleasantly surprised by their playing. Then it began to rain again. The rain sprayed horizontally into our faces and the horse’s ears, drenched the Crucified One, the Boy Scout Povilėnas’s hair, and fell on the coffin, forming brief puddles before streaming down its sides. The coffin was full of cracks and wider along the base, so the rain inevitably soaked the old woman’s dress.
“The old woman is getting wet,” I said to Vaidilionis, who was marching with meaningfully closed lips.
“Don’t mock me,” said Vaidilionis through his teeth.
“That’s not what I’m doing. Cold skin and cold water. An unpleasant pairing. Why isn’t the orchestra from Jericho playing?”
The bandleader waved his hand, and the musicians pulled out green handkerchiefs and wiped off their dewy trumpets. The priest’s galoshes squeaked like old taps. The road was still loamy and it seemed to me that I could feel the earth’s sucking pull. The spire of the village church gradually appeared through the curtain of rain. We were surrounded by submerged fields, a cramped little world we longed to escape.
“Now the rain is melting the ersatz dye. The black liquid is dying the innocent old woman’s skin. Quite an interesting effect. Black is the colour of funerals, after all, and Heaven tolerates human symbolism. If it rains any harder we’ll end up burying a black woman.”
Vaidilionis grabbed me by the shoulder. His wet face was ridiculous with rage. I squealed. Vaidilionis frothed.
“You’re a paranoiac. You belong in a madhouse.”
“Wipe your nose,” I replied.
Suddenly the band piped up. We had approached the village vegetable plots, their summer huts lined up on the wet, naked earth. Chopin sounded in all his horror. The rookies blew into their trumpets, hitting neither the beats of the drum nor matching the bandleader’s menacing upper body gestures. The sound of his cornet carved into an area of a few metres before the melody’s harsh strokes dissolved.
“This old skeleton has almost filled his clarinet with spit,” I said under my breath.
Vaidilionis broke away from me. Chopin collapsed. His patent leather shoes got scuffed, his shirt got wrinkled, he lost a lace cuff, got clay all over his stylish face, gravel tangled in his curls, and he let out a wail. He got chilled. Consumption? No, consumption is slow, Chopin caught a deadly case of pneumonia.
“Every generation experiences the end of the world,” I said to the distinguished speech-maker.
“Look at the bandleader’s moustache. It’s wilting.”
“What are you saying, sir?” asked the personage.
“The Marche funèbre is suitable for Laisvės alėja. For burying a great state figure. A boy scout’s drum would have been enough for a drenched old woman.”
I turned around and returned to the camp. It rained until evening. As I learned later, the funeral procession found shelter in the village pub. I was alone for a few hours.
I wrote long lines. A complicated cocktail flowed through the trenches of my brain. I sat on my cot in my underpants, because my clothes were drying in the laundry room. As I produced stanza after stanza, I saw my marauding letters, my yellow, Swabian-tobacco-stained fingers, the photograph of Maironis above Vaidilionis’s bed. I erected a totem in my mind: an unknown soldier and a soaked old woman, severe statues, kept my words in check.
Somewhere there was much light and transparent air. From the past, another town, another Kaunas came back to me. I spent a lot of time looking for a door hidden in a stucco wall. There were many small bumps on it. Too many. Yes, I was conscientious and spent a lot of time feeling the wall, looking for a button to press. But I didn’t find it and lost strength. I stood paralysed by the invisible door and all I could do was describe the monotonous bumps, the abstract, repetitive relief.
A dutiful camp resident, a naive old woman who liked prayers and order in her little world, had passed away. And she was laid out, stuffed into a coffin in a dyed dress, and transported in the rain, angry and wet. In the greyness of the Swabian fields, in the grotesque funeral procession, I was allowed to stop and look back. A harmless old woman pressed a little bump that only she knew, and the door opened. Expecting no gratitude, my totem stretched out an arm to show me the way, and I entered obediently, my marauding letters accompanying me.
I worked for a week. Vaidilionis didn’t bother me. We exchanged only essential phrases. Sometimes I felt his inquisitive gaze on my crown, my temples, my forehead. Nevertheless, Vaidilionis was tactful. I often jumped up and tried to walk around that wooden cage. Then Vaidilionis would leave, and I would be alone for two or three hours.
A week crept by, and the two of us were silently eating pea soup from tin cans. A sheaf of handwritten pages lay under my pillow.
“Salty soup,” Vaidilionis said unexpectedly. His coiffured hair fell on his forehead in a so-called “unruly mop” which he curled every morning with a wide-toothed comb. In his agrarian hands the aluminium teaspoon was a titan’s parody of a toy civilisation. An ascetic’s face? Today I saw a combination of will, popular adulation and constipation.
“Peas aren’t a good idea. They cause gas,” I replied.
“We’ll open the window. You’re not writing any more today?” Vaidilionis’s expression was pure. He used this expression on the stage, when reading his lyric poems.
“Your eyes are innocent today. Like that old woman’s, the one we buried.”
“You didn’t bury her.”
“That’s correct. I immortalised her. In myself.” I got up mechanically, pulled out the sheaf of papers and handed them to Vaidilionis.
“Read it. It’s a first draft.”
He read, and I observed his face. He pressed his lips together in stereotypical intensity. His coarse, straight eyelashes descended like jail bars. He must have already come across my hopeless trudging along the loamy road, the screeching of the trumpets, the muddy Chopin, the rain, and the peaceful, blackened old woman. And far away in the North, a series of Kaunas buildings walked by. The Soboras’s elephantine feet trampled the little houses of Šančiai as they scattered to the sides. The red-brick cathedral snorted like a locomotive. A lone island poked out near Pažaislis Monastery. My mother was standing on it. She held a dirty piece of cloth embroidered with little crosses in her hands as angels and arc
hangels hovered over her. An army of angels above a lost Kaunas. At night the angels poured sparkles over the city, their glowing hands slipped into the lanterns on Laisvės alėja, their wings cast long shadows on the icy pavement. And the mute brass band marched on. Their trumpets polished by the moonlight shone, the band was led by the devil, who had sewn a black-dyed rope to his velvet trousers. And the band was followed by a swaying coffin carried by four lighthouse keepers, and the old woman in the coffin sat up and smiled. A full moon floated by, as did my mother, Chopin’s lace, the green Nemunas, the smiling old woman.
Vaidilionis was done. Not a single facial muscle quivered. His upper lip was still missing. He gave me back the sheaf of papers. I stuffed it under my blanket. I grabbed the empty cans.
“I’m going to go wash them,” I said.
Vaidilionis glanced at me. The jail bars rose.
“What are you planning to call – that?”
“What do you mean – that?”
“That question. If you like, the whole poem is only a question.”
I didn’t answer, just clanged the empty cans. Like the cymbals in the band my poem had conjured up.
“This is bad news. Much worse than in Kaunas, when you still controlled yourself. I wouldn’t want to argue that the lack of metre necessarily means a poet’s decline. But you juggle with imagery … in a meaningless manner. It’s a cleverness inspired by neurasthenia. You can dismiss my opinion, but this isn’t the time to be thinking about ourselves. We have to think about the nation. I don’t expect you to imitate anyone. Write about yourself. But remember – intellectual neurasthenia and decadence are one and the same thing.”
“You speak clearly. Periods, commas. It’s a pity I don’t do shorthand. If I did, I would have your words put up on a bulletin board,” I said, no longer clanging the cans.
“You’re trying to be ironic. Irony is part of your pathology. You saw trees covered with toadstools, which are ironic. But are they healthy?”
And Vaidilionis carefully stroked his special hairstyle. My arms hung down, and the cans hung down from my fingers like weights from a scale.
“We’ll find ourselves a judge.” I swung a can in the direction of Maironis’s photograph.
“Maybe him? Though I fear he would condemn you … for being an actor who recites for actors. You should be reciting your poems in Lithuania, in the forest.⁹⁴ Those men and women awaiting their deaths would listen to you. Your patriotism would be one more weapon for them. Here you are safe and receive a salary. It’s obscene.”
A spark flashed across Vaidilionis’s pure expression. He stood up.
“But still, I respect you. For your technique. ‘And the homeland will be free!’ Change a few letters. ‘And the homeland we won’t flee.’ Your technique is unrivalled. You know, you remind me of another poet. Zuika. Remember him? You’re both cynics. But, pardon me. You’re stupider. Soon you’ll be convinced you’re some kind of missionary.”
“Get out of the room! Get out this minute!” Vaidilionis shrieked. I launched the left can at the window. It broke the grimy glass and landed at the feet of an ex-general’s wife who happened to be walking by.
“The poe-ets are fie-ting!” shouted the ex-general’s wife in the yard.
Vaidilionis ran out the door. I broke out in convulsive, hysterical laughter.
There was the bed, covered with the green blanket, depressions showing where I had sat. And higher up, on the wall, hung Maironis. I walked to the washroom, waving a can. The hallway had filled with camp residents.
The doctors examined me thoroughly but found no signs of insanity. I was moved to another camp.
*
Antanas Garšva is smiling. Strange that these are the kinds of things that I recorded. I left out equally important ones. I killed a man, I wanted to kill myself, I was beaten, I survived, unconscious, in Aukštoji Panemunė, in a Kaunas hospital. All that has faded. But there are things I should remember. Those who walked beside me. I bathed my surroundings in the green of an El Greco Toledo landscape. I shortened the perspective. My Valley of Josaphat is the size of a room. My childhood, my youth are the size of a room. I was too negative about my past. I chose the same method as those who extract only elegiac sadness from theirs. I had fewer crystals, of course. But they still sparkled. I emphasised a particular attitude towards my own reality. And I was given more hours in which to find myself. Perhaps they were important, perhaps they are what I should focus on. Then I might be able to remember all that I missed. The Toledo landscape has bathed my unconscious. The crystals have been tossed into its darkest corner. I need to drag them back like keys stuck behind a cupboard. I have to stretch out on the floor, focus my entire being, and reach out my arm. Once I have the keys I’ll be able to unlock the cupboard. Now I was looking at the cupboard’s impenetrability, as though at mysterious curtains. I’ll take a look inside the cupboard and then, may all the gods help me, I will understand the curtains.
“Oh yeah, it’s not so bad. You get a few dozen dollars. Sometimes there’s overtime. Do you do overtime? Want a cigarette?”
“Thanks. I’ll smoke it later. It’s not allowed in the elevator.”
“Stupid box.”
“Pretty stupid.”
Garšva puts the cigarette in his breast pocket. I want to be happy, I want to live. Up ir down, forty dollars, happiness. There are counterarguments. It could be worse.
Cancer, labour camps, torture, losing loved ones. What’s a breakup in comparison? I split up with Jonė, but I remember her when I feel sad. Sadness only lasts so long. It’s a self-defence mechanism. A confession after which, for a while, it’s a little more pleasant to live. My memory of Elena will fade away sadly like that. I’ll write. And I should be happy. I’m alive and free. An absurd man, in Camus’s terms? So be it. An absurd man who speaks to Christ. And with philosophers. That’s okay. Philosophy is also an art. Fine. I’ll see reality as material from which my soul will create eternity. Which will die with me, and which another newborn will glance at briefly before creating his own eternity. It doesn’t matter that I won’t have anyone to love. Hello, Professor Spinoza! There’s a rumour that you threw yourself into philosophy after you were dumped by a girl?
Fine. My eyes are binoculars through which everything appears backwards. The world recedes as it comes into focus. I can make a stone sing about spring. I can order tulips to play a Gregorian resurrection. And what if Saint Anthony stands on the roof of a skyscraper in the moonlight, crossing himself because two shabby and obsequiously smiling kaukai have brought him a Lithuanian Ophelia. “Saint Anthony, you should give us some new pants – you’re a saint after all.” And my childhood friends could gather in Stevens’s tavern: a girl who made me urinate in a wooden cup when we were pretending to be guests drinking tea, a kid with whom I used to bang telegraph poles, and then all my lovers, escorted by the three senior wives of the harem: Jonė, Ženia, Elena.
And Christ. We’ll greet Him reverently. We’ll kneel and kiss the edge of His garment. And Stevens will serve everyone the most expensive scotch, knowing that the bottle will always remain full. And we’ll sing a hymn about childhood, life and death. And Christ will challenge His rival, Buddha. “Very well,” Buddha will say. “I am a free, educated spirit. You are the Son of God. And I’ll drink with You, even if this means I’ll be haunted by nightmares in nirvana. And Christ will touch Buddha’s forehead with the palm of His hand and say: “No, they will not haunt you. You will rest in peace, Buddha.” And Christ will serve Buddha, who had spoken earlier than He had.
Fine. My entire universe fits within me. Past, present, future. But I am not a superman. I am a manikin, swaddled in a dirty cotton apron, who wants to devote himself to self-revelation. I will ignore apparent reality. I won’t be afraid of auto-da-fé. Let them lead me, barefoot, covered in a yellow mantle with a diagonal cross, let them hang long scapulars around my neck and press a yellow candle into my hand. I believe that eternity’s inquisition will spare me, and
its sentence will be the same as the one Giordano Bruno received.
“Execute most mercifully. Without drawing blood. Burn alive.” Fine.
92Displaced persons (DP) camp. At the end of the Second World War, refugees from Lithuania and other Eastern European countries, and survivors of Nazi concentration camps, were housed in DP camps located in Allied-controlled Germany, Austria and Italy. Here they awaited visas to the countries accepting post-war refugees/immigrants, primarily the United States, Canada and Australia. The Lithuanian DP community included members of the intelligentsia, business and government leaders, who quickly established their own social, cultural and political organisations, as well as publications, sports teams and schools.
93UNRRA: United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.
94See note 61 re. “Forest Brothers”.
Chapter 15
A marsh, too, can be beautiful. When the morning sun hovers over the tips of the firs. When gleaming arrows, shot by the bog’s revelling spirits, fly down through the puddles into a deep sky. When the grassy hummocks along the edge sway with asthenic daisies, sickly girls who get better in the spring. When shimmering lapwings make you jump on to the windowsill, dangle your legs and whistle. When the locomotive hoots like a child playing hide-and-seek, and the church bells hang right here, on the telegraph posts, ringing invisibly. And their peals fall on to the greening earth, and the earth steams.
Garšva recalled the joy he felt after transforming his parents’ night table into an altar. He pushed the little table up to the window, covered it with a clean tablecloth that shimmered with his mother’s embroidered lilies and tulips. He found himself a white candle in a clay candlestick. He put on his father’s summer coat, draped a linen towel around his neck, the red fringe swaying. And Garšva lit the candle. The pale flame quivered in the sunshine. He spread out his arms and raised his head, like a real priest at a real altar. Christ was right there, invisible, just like the church bells. Several Christs were there. The lapwing feathers, the pealing bells, the locomotive whistle, the daisy hummocks, the pale flame.
White Shroud Page 17