I was already staying in Uzupis. That used to be the gypsy district. It was where the ruffians lived. The anarchists. I had a room in a house that was falling down. Outside, there were posts propping up the walls. Dishwater ran along the cobbled street and black flags hung on the lamp posts.
Yes, I can remember. Back in 1991, Gorbachev came to see us. There were crowds and chanting and the certainty, not the hope, the certainty, that things would have to change. That night a friend took me to the Writers’ Bar. It was downstairs in the main square. You couldn’t move, it was thirty minutes to get served. Some great poet had arrived. He’d come out of hiding upcountry. His children were there too, and everyone was dancing and singing, politicians, Russian-speaking prostitutes, students like me, and the poet sitting on a ledge, high off the ground, reading his poems in this crazy dialect that was ours. Ours.
Me and my friend had one beer each. But we were already drunk. Drunk on adrenaline. We just stood in the crush, laughing at the photographs on the wall.
Because our writers looked like rock stars. Like the Beatles had once, with beards, or the Band, wild as mountainmen, backwoods philosophers with axes and manifestos in their hands. At home we always played the Beatles. Happiness is a Warm Gun. Or As my Guitar Gently Weeps. Okay, old stuff, but better than techno. Better than poor Pancho’s Dylan. More life to it. Oh yeah, the White Album had been Lithuanian nerve gas in the Kremlin. We knew it was changing. Even with the Red Army tanks in the streets, we understood it had to change. Yet it took so long.
What a night that was. I came out two hours after dawn, up that steep flight of steps from the Writers Bar. And there was a girl with me. She came along and we’d never spoken. Just danced. I thought she was a prostitute, but she was a schoolteacher. She came with me. We took our shoes off and walked in the flooded gutters down to the Katedros Square. The square was a lake. And we danced in the lake, holding our shoes, the cathedral bells ringing seven or eight, and a woman on a bicycle going past, waving a flag.
Some time afterwards, when the dust had cleared, I was down in Drusk, near the Belarus border, working in an open-air museum. We were all determined to show the world what we’d endured. We wanted to publish our history. I was only a labourer but I did my bit, sleeping in a tent in the forest, or in the wooden huts that held exhibits. So the statues of Joe Stalin and Lenin and the rest of the crew were taken down and brought there. From all over the country. Some of them were already crumbling, the ferro-concrete breaking up, steel reinforcements rusting away.
And I was part of it. Building the huts, laying the paths, cutting grass. At night we’d go drinking under the birch trees. Build a fire and pass round the vodka and the magic mushrooms. There was a man there used to collect mushrooms in his shirt. Brought in these red ones once, with white growths on them. They were death caps, somebody said. Death caps in the death camps. How we laughed.
Because that’s what we were doing. We were recreating a concentration camp. To show the world what had happened in our country. Hidden away in the miles of spruce, of birch. What Hitler did. Then what Stalin did. What Snieckus did to his own people.
By then I’d stopped thinking about my father. All the yellow files in his cupboards. The staples going rusty and the cigarette ash in the turn-ups of his trousers. Anyway, this man showed us how to eat them, the red mushrooms. They weren’t death caps. They were another amanita. But everybody knew it was risky. And how far away was Chernobyl anyway? We’d often meet old women in the forest, picking berries and fungi to sell at the roadside. It was their only income. Everybody knew it was dangerous. That all the mushrooms were radioactive. But we ate them anyway, as we ate the red amanita.
Oh boy, I felt strange. Maybe it was wonderful but the strange is all I remember. I was inside out. I was a statue of Joseph Stalin with a spider web over my face. I was this old mushroom woman who had survived Hitler and survived Stalin and survived my father. She lived in a hut and grew Michaelmas daisies. And the colour of those flowers was the colour of my dream. Purple haze. Mauve. I’ve hated mauve ever since. I could murder mauve. She told us we should sleep with the red mushroom under our pillows. Then we could dream, she said. If you want to dream, she said, then sleep with the mushrooms. She didn’t know we’d been eating them.
But that was the best time. We were a real team who lived there, the girls with money spiders in their hair, the men roasting potatoes in the fire. That’s where Andrius really died. Killed by the red mushrooms. But I was never Andrius.
Instead I was the labourer who looked like Richard Manuel from The Band. That’s what the others said. Wild and creative. Who took cocaine.Who played the drums and sang. Played the marimba too, the sound of a ghost. Hung himself three months before Chernobyl went up. But every day I went to work in a concentration camp. And every night I drank vodka in the forest. The amanitas put my inside on my outside. They shone the mauve into my mind. Yes, the strange is all I remember. Those mushrooms shook me up. Yes, I had black hair and a beard but I couldn’t play one lousy chord on the guitar we passed around.
Sometimes I swept up the gravel at the camp entrance. Not that many visitors came. You see, it’s not the kind of history people are proud of. If you are a certain age, from a certain place, it’s better not to be asked questions. Because, look, not everyone can be a hero. Not everyone is a poet standing on a plinth telling the world how brave they’ve been. Holding out against the bad guys.
So, it’s wiser not to ask. Over here, in this country, no one’s a part of history. History is something you learn in schools and forget. But at home, you’re involved. You’re part of it, whether you want to be or not. Every thing you ever did there is a historical act. One day you sneak on your friend. The next day you save his life.
I would be at the camp entrance in the morning, and boy, one day, I hear a rumbling. This lorry is coming down the road through the trees. This low loader driven by a man in a tartan shirt. Just a little the worse for wear. He had a gang with him who jumped off and said, give us a hand here. We need a hand.
It took us two days. Two days to put together this statue they’d taken from a square in Kaunas, I suppose, because it never came from Vilnius. Well I never saw it there. Must have been about thirty of us, mainly soldiers, with ropes and pulleys, digging foundations, unpacking the parts. With a professor from the national museum telling us what to do.
And it’s there to this day. Near that entrance to the camp. It’s called the Spirit of Spring, or the Goddess, though the Soviets weren’t hot on goddesses, I know. And yes, I loved that statue, that Russian statue. It was graceful. I’d go so far as to say it was beautiful, though we’re supposed to laugh at all those things now. Clumsy, dutiful, uninspired. That’s what we’re told by the critics to think. But there she was, a concrete dryad, pale as one of that old woman’s mushrooms.
I never bothered to ask who was the sculptor. I just loved the sculpture. At dawn, I’d stand in the dew. The mist would be rising and I’d stroke her rough skin. She was chalky, that goddess, and she spread herself like a gymnast. Or I’d look at her from the trees, as the river vapours lifted. It was as if she made herself out of the sky. One week she hadn’t been there. The next, there she was as if it had always been so. A miracle, sort of. Because maybe this was the real Nerys. Maybe this was how a river god might look. Not crowned with weeds. Not fanged like a pike. But a gymnast. With the chalk on her hands.
That was the time I’d eaten the amanita, and I was quiet. The strangeness had become a silence. So I’d stroke the goddess’ white thigh and think about nothing and not even brush the pine needles off my arse before I clocked on.
As I’m clocking on now. I like Justin and I think he likes me. Not that I care. But you can always tell when a man likes you. Or when he doesn’t. There’s a humour, an almost undetectable regard. Tolerance, I suppose, and an interest. That’s it. Yes, when one man likes another man he finds the time to be interested in him. A little curious. He’s one degree warmer.
Back of the van is okay to sit in because I cleaned it last night. Swept out the cement dust and the Supercrete, the wet building sand and the sharp sand, the brick dust and the chippings, the broken plastic guttering, the empty tins and the tin lids. Collected the screws and the rawlplugs and saved them in a pocket of my jeans, saved any nail bigger than one inch, any bracket or hasp, any quillet because they’re hard to get. Anything useful. Tub of seal and bond with a scrape left. A stainless-steel hammer fixer. That might come in. One day. There was also a new blade slipped from its dimpled Stanley haft. It went in my other pocket.
That’s why I like Justin. He’s small time but he’s meticulous. He takes care of his van, or, rather, I’ve been doing it of late, checking the oil and water, adding a drop of brake fluid because he likes it just past the line. Safe side. Sometimes his kids travel in the van. Sometimes his wife.
First thing I did when I arrived here was ask Justin for work. He was parked outside the Spar, smoking, window down in the heat. Watching the girls go past in their little dresses, showing their tattoos.
Hey boss, I said, putting my pack down. Any work, boss?
Now boss is an interesting word. I found that out a long time ago. A local word but used everywhere. Kind of national patois. Multifarious meanings to you, to me. A word to be careful of, boss.
Justin’s a thin man. Wiry as a weasel. He blew out Benson smoke and looked at me.
What can you do?
Point me at it, I said. And I’ll show you.
That was a month ago. Money was never even discussed. Cash only of course. Divvied up on a Friday evening. But I show willing. And I don’t complain. That’s why Justin likes me.
See you at nine tomorrow in the car park behind here, he had said. Then a girl walked past with a butterfly on her shoulder and whispered something and Justin laughed and that was it. Settled.
Now Justin’s driving. Furiously, like he smokes. Doesn’t drink but the Bensons make up for it. Cled, the plasterer is in the front seat. Don’t know why he’s come because it’s just hard labour today. And Si’s in the back with me. Filthy Si, in broken Army and Navy steelies, their webbing ripped out, his jeans caked white with cement dust, his tee shirt paint-stained. He’ll peel it off soon enough to show his scrawny back with its American bald eagle tattoo. Si’s plugged into his iPod and Si doesn’t speak. Si doesn’t even look at me. So I look at him. His scalp is shaved up to the top of his skull. All that’s left of his hair is a circle, gelled and dyed blue. He looks like a thistle.
How’s the family, Nerry? shouts Justin, changing up.
That’s a joke. Not malicious.
You might be seeing them soon, he laughs. The paper says you’re all going back since the pound’s dodgy. Going back home with your ill-gotten gains.
Yesterday I took four rolled-up copies of The Sun from the front windscreen, five silver-grey Benson empties and more crisp packets and Twix wrappers than I could count. An empty two litre plastic flagon of Tesco cola was wedged under Cled’s seat, and five tropical-flavour Sprite cans rolling about. With one Lipton ice tea. God knows who was drinking that. Not Si.
Since last week Si and I have a bit of a problem. It won’t be resolved. We were in Wickes, the builders’ merchants, with a list of supplies we had to pick up. Si had the paper because he didn’t believe I could read Justin’s scrawled English. So he was leading, I was pulling the trolley, long and awkward to manoeuvre. That’s the word I used that got Si going. Manoeuvre.
Si didn’t like that word. Either I pushed the trolley or I pulled the trolley. What I didn’t do, what I couldn’t do, was manoeuvre the trolley. Because manoeuvre was a bad word. It offended protocol, and like I’ve said, I pay attention to life’s protocols. When you’re an illegal, protocols are life and death. My father was a man of protocols. Okay, I’m not illegal now. But I’m an immigrant. And even if I go home tomorrow, I’ll be an immigrant there.
When I stood in front of Justin that first morning, I put my pack on the pavement. There was a dictionary in that pack, a dog-eared Concise OED. I love that book. In a Camden squat, a fire-ruined, three-storey Victorian townhouse in Cardiff, under the bridge in Bridgend, I’ve sat and read that book. Yes I love that book. I’ve seen manoeuvre in it and I’ve even heard people say it. I knew that word in college. But I made a mistake in Wickes. I should have pulled the bastard thing. Pushed the bastard thing.
It was a scorching day, lunchtime.There was a petrol haze across the roundabout to the McDonald’s drive-thru. We went down the aisles picking up some Marble Tex. Some Powerkote. Then we were down where the timber was, that new wood still smelling sweet despite the plastic wrapping on everything. We wanted some tongue and groove.
What’s wrong with shiplap, I said, thinking of the job.
Si looked at me then. The last time he’s ever going to look at me.
Justin wants tongue, he hissed. It’s on the fucking list. He’s written it here.
Okay, I said.
Si kept looking. What’s that rattling all the time? he asked.
Rattling?
Fucking rattling. In your pocket.
He was still looking at me. I was looking at the timber. Clean, Swedish. Impossible to think it had been a tree. I thought of the birches around Drusk, of Drusk and the camp lost in the birches, the fungus on the birchtrees like rain-swollen bibles, the birchsap wine one of the gang passed round. Cloudy as piss. I thought of the goddess, clumsy, ecstatic. Then I pulled the shells out of my pocket.
What the fuck are those? asked Si.
Mussel shells, I said.
Shells?
Off the beach, I said. I picked them up the other day. I used to collect freshwater mussels when I was a kid. Looking for pearls.
Si was still sizing me up. He had his shirt off, and every step through the depot I’d been staring at the eagle on his back, the bald eagle in front of the stars and stripes. A tattoo that must have taken weeks.
Jesus, said Si. Your name is Nerys and you pick up shells. Jesus Christ.
That’s when I turned to him. I saw the scorn in his eye. He was a skinny kid, twenty say. There was nobody around.We had walked all the way down that aisle on our own. I put my left hand in his crotch and lifted. The tuft on his belly was against my wrist. I had the newly-ground bolster in my right hand and I put it under his chin.
Listen, I said. I’m more than twice your age. But I was in the army, son. I was in the Russian Army. They sent me to Chechnya. Ever heard of that place? You know what happened there? Is still happening?
Si was white. Stiff as a lath.
If it’s on the list we’ll buy the tongue, I said. We’ll get it all. Boss.
Then I stroked the hairs on his belly. Like I’d stroke a dog. Then I kissed him. Once on the cheek. Then I let him go.
That’s when Si stepped away. When he looked away. And he’s never looked at me since. We picked up the tongue and groove. Then ten bags of builders’ sand. A chuck for the Black and Decker. Some sandpaper for chamfering. There was still no one around.
I pulled the trolley behind me and we went out wobbling through the yellow automatic doors to the van. Justin was smoking and reading the paper.
Okay? he asked, not looking up.
Si gave him the change. But he didn’t speak.
Okay, I said. And got in the back.
Now we drive three hundred yards and pile out. All day I sand a floor in a house on the seafront. Its name is ‘Hafan’ and it used to be an old people’s home. Soon it will be apartments. Justin’s been sub-contracted to do a few things. So today I wear a mask and push an industrial sander over varnish that’s thicker than treacle. Every ten minutes I stop and go to the window and take off the mask and suck the air. The sky’s so blue it hurts to look at it. Below are the young mothers with their buggies, men in panamas and white flat caps, kids in long shorts.
The sander is worse than the Wickes trolley. I remember I drove an armoured car once. We went across a field of lupins.
It was like a blue mist. A farmer shouted after us. There was a fox we scared out of a ditch. Our sergeant said it was a wolf but I knew all the wolves were dead. We were just driving around like teenagers with their dad’s car. Nothing much to do.
This sander must be clumsier than a tank but by 6 p.m. I’ve finished a big room, apart from under the walls and around the washbasin. I’ll have to do that tomorrow. The floor is pale and stained, a bit cut up, I’d have to say. But no one could have done this better.
There’s a mirror in the corridor. That word ‘Hafan’ is carved into the frame. I’ve seen it in every room. When I look at myself, even I’m surprised. I’m black as a coalminer from some shithole in Donetz. In the corner are nineteen sacks of varnish dust and all the floorboard shavings the machine’s rubbed up. All the filth of one hundred years. Paint and varnish and old people’s piss. Si’s doing the wallpaper in another room. I saw him at break, down on the esp with his iPod in. Cled’s mooching about, and hours ago Justin was eating an ice cream, talking to the girls. Haven’t seen him since. People say it’s been nearly one hundred today, which might be a record. For here.
I wash the thick off in the sink then undress and beat my jeans, my pants, my shirt against a wall. I take off my shoes and empty the dust and I comb my hair until the needles are clogged with the crap and I wash the comb and repeat.
Up the street near the charity shops is a men’s toilet. This old bloke’s in charge and it’s won prizes for cleanliness. They’re on stickers on the door. Loo of the Year. Every year bar one for the last ten years. What happened that year? I wonder. All the fixtures are brass, the enamel a rosy white.
I speak to the attendant, who’s usually looking for a compliment, and I have a shower. First freezing cold. Then as hot as I can stand. Then I get it just right and the water runs over me and I’m in my element. A kid, seventeen, jumping off the bridge at Uzupis, aiming for the only pool that’s deep enough. A boy in his knickers, clutching his knees, smashing into a roof of green glass.
Keys of Babylon Page 7