Somehow they had to send a message to the world of men, they all realised this. The only route was the river. The only messenger was the meagre raft, which would probably get caught in the first bend of the river. The men argued and raved. They couldn’t write anything; uselessly they tried to engrave something on the wood of the raft. They had to think of a sign that anyone would comprehend at a glance. The men decided to call a Great Council. This idea, which had struck Bruno, united them all for a moment. Even the delirious bunch fell quite and crept closer to the fire. Chewing on chips, bark and the ends of their felt boots, they all tried to think of something with their frozen brains.
Only the two foreigners remained immune from the encroaching madness. They didn’t go searching for the spur tracks, they didn’t run over the snow banks screaming, and they did not succumb to delirium. They scrupulously washed their hands and faces, and even their feet, five times a day. They always faced the same corner of the shed and intently began to murmur a prayer. They were the very happiest. They didn’t care about the great message, the raft, food, probably not even about life. They were the happiest.
Only after he had gone there, after he had descended into hell and climbed out of it again, only after he had written and sent out the first letter did he understand what it was he had hoped for all along and secretly awaited. He did not expect to find anything there that had been there before, then he could turn around and go back with an unburdened heart, paste the photograph of the tired weaver or milker back into place and settle accounts properly with himself. He tried to do everything he could and even more, but fate itself erased the evil nightmare from the surface of the earth.
Fate had no desire to help him; it was probably sitting comfortably in a soft, easy chair with its knees crossed, carelessly watching to see what Handless would do and how he would behave. Now, when everything was over and done with, he could remember it, even though it was with shyness, always convincing himself that nothing terrible had happened, everything was simple; it hadn’t shocked him and wasn’t driving him crazy. The hangover also helped – it had been a long time since Vytautas Handless had had occasion to drink pure alcohol.
He wrote the first letter just after he arrived in the familiar town, which had turned into a noisy city over the years. Bulldozers buzzed around and construction crews in lorries sang songs at the top of their lungs. The weather was beautiful; he was constantly taking off his coat and carrying it over his arm, always fearful that he’d lose his money and papers. It seemed to him that everyone he met was looking at him suspiciously, but soon he realised that no one was paying him any attention, that he wasn’t in anyone’s way, he was simply unnecessary. All the stares said: what did you come all the way here for, what are you looking for, wake up before it’s too late.
But it was already too late. He said as much in the first letter, still naively rejoicing that the city was so big, noisy and completely different from the muddy town with wooden sidewalks that had remained in his memory. Everything had changed here. Vytautas Handless carefully copied out his address on the envelope; at that time he didn’t think then that there would be many such letters, letters to Ona. Being so far from home, from the chain enclosure of her grave, he suddenly felt that she was still alive. It was thanks to her that he had survived thirty years ago and he’d survive now too, for his Penelope had repulsed the young men and was waiting for his return from the wide and sombre banks of the river.
A solitary raft of rough logs was floating down the river; it was making its way forward slowly, as if dead tired. Driven by the cold, animals stopped on the riverbank and followed it with fearful glances. But the raft did not care about them. It was searching for people who could receive the message. But still there were no people.
He climbed into the bus while whistling fitfully and looked out of the window at the skeletons of factories and power stations, having no doubts that he was performing only a formality. A bad premonition stirred under his heart only after he saw the swamp where they used to dump piles of sawdust back in those days. Even now the stench it gave off was exactly the same. It was even harder to see the barbed wire fence.
It was hard to go inside and step into the living past, to open the zone superintendent’s office door before putting on the mask and making a proper face – one which was both solid and ingratiating, conspiratorial but insistent. Hardest of all was to speak out – up to that second it was still possible to retreat, to flee, to pretend to be lost. The zone superintendent looked at him with his piercing gaze for an infinitely long time, took him apart bone by bone and investigated each one separately, squeezed them, smelled them even; he spent even more time squeezing and looking over the document. To Vytautas Handless it seemed that he would never get out of there; that any moment now he’d be put behind the barbed wire fence for falsification of documents. But finally the superintendent slowly and unwillingly got up from his chair, came around the table and gave him his hand. From that second on everything would succeed. He understood that he was victorious, that he’d calculated everything correctly and that the current of destiny had caught him and would carry him forward like the frozen river had carried the mute raft of rough logs.
Vytautas Handless’s insolence knew no bounds, but he had calculated correctly: everyone here was seeing the certificate of a Supreme Soviet deputy for the first time. It acted like a magic password and right away the secret door opened slightly. The zone superintendent immediately fell to pieces. He was afraid of only one thing: did this not, perhaps, reek of some dangerous inspection. But Vytautas Handless didn’t allow him to collect himself. He had learned his part well and had rehearsed it in front of the mirror a hundred times, even though now he was doing everything differently. He had intended to speak matter-of-factly, but he poured out an entire monologue about old age, the desire to retrace the paths of his youth and said that he had worked here once (it was, after all, true). He related an enormous level of detail, bombarded the chairman with questions, made idle jokes, asked that his visit not be made public, pulled out the grain alcohol and cognac as well as the snack he had brought – the host’s eyes lit up – and kept calling the superintendent ‘my good colleague’. Afterwards everything that took place felt like a dream in which nightmarish landscapes are more real than real ones, monsters are more alive than the most alive of men, and meaningless words have much more meaning than all the wisdom of humanity. But it was far from being a dream. It finally dawned on him that he was caught in a horrible trap. Everything here looked different than it had in the old days, but this had absolutely no meaning. Vytautas Handless visualised the old barracks and paths. He saw the hill that had now been levelled, the holes had been filled, he recognised every tree that had been felled long ago, he smelled the old odour that had dispersed heaven knows when – the odour of injustice and despair that could not be covered up, which had enmeshed the zone more tightly than barbed wire. And the people now looked quite different: gloomy, staring creatures and insolent kids wandered around, but he didn’t see them at all. While he was watching the kids, their faces kept changing and they became completely different. They became the faces of others, familiar and unfamiliar.
‘What’re you in for?’
‘For the cause,’ said Valius. ‘It’s okay, good times will come for me, too.’
‘And you?’
‘I don’t know,’ replied Handless. ‘For nothing. It was a mistake.’
‘They accused me of aiding the guerrillas,’ said Francis. ‘How are you not going to help them? Did they ask my permission when they showed up at night?’
‘Me, I’m in to make up the quota,’ said Zenka from Kaunas, grinning as usual. ‘This good-for-nothing guy, a mate of mine from school days, shows up. He says go, take off to the countryside and hide – your turn’s up according to the quota. You can hide out in the countryside; they’ll take someone else in your place. But by the time I got my stuff together, they nabbed me there and then.’
Vy
tautas Handless finally figured out why there had to be two of him, who needed the second Vytautas Handless who was doing everything differently. Now that the other one was cracking jokes and looking around with an eager eye, he was acting the way he himself, the real Vytautas Handless, never could have managed to act. He certainly could never have pretended to be his own warder here once, to have sent himself out through the snow banks to work, to have left himself and twenty-five other men to slowly go out of their minds in that terrible and frightening winter. He made the zone superintendent laugh and made fun of the prisoners, and then courageously drank the undiluted alcohol and invented even more details. He allowed the real Vytautas Handless time to recollect everything leisurely, let him cry quietly and honour the men with a minute of silence, an endless minute of silence, while the other one carried on and drank and almost fell down the steps before being brought back to the hotel in the zone superintendent’s car. But at one point he couldn’t take it, he suddenly grabbed his host by the shoulders and roared: ‘give me back my hand, return my hand!’ But no one caught the gist of his words, thank God, no one understood. And later he spoke to the bare hotel room walls, to the stars, hidden by the clouds, to the ghosts who had gathered in his room. He wrote the second letter, then the third and the fourth, perhaps even the thousandth, or perhaps none at all. He tried to write on behalf of all twenty-five men, tried to carry within himself twenty-six souls. He heard the men’s voices, saw their faces, felt himself to be all of them at once, but this feeling could not be described in any letter.
The Great Council lasted until evening, without reaching any decision. They had the puny raft and the single axe. They could stick the axe into the middle log and send it off downstream. Would this be a sign?
With their brains frozen, the men’s thoughts turned to ice and had to be thawed out. The men bent their heads closer to the fire, scarcely able to bear the heat, but the ideas didn’t want to come.
The men continually glanced at Valius, but all they saw in his eyes was helplessness and torment. They looked at Bruno, begging, but he only raved on, first more quietly, then more loudly, murmuring his own and others’ confused utterances. Vaclov was incessantly counting his broken teeth; he raked them in the palm of his hand like bits of gravel. Francis for some reason got the urge to take off his clothes and run around naked. Alexis was patiently chewing on Elena’s sausage, one long lost in someone else’s stomach. It was the Council of the Great Silence. The silence of each of them joined with the general silence, and the latter flowed into the silence of the indifferent century-old trees, the blinding snow and the clouds floating across the heavens. It was a council without debates or suggestions. No one could find a sign that all people would understand at once. Perhaps such a sign announcing that they were here, slowly dying in body and soul, did not exist. Before he began to rave, Bruno had suggested that one of them turn into a dwarf so that the raft could support him. Finally Valius spoke and said that in such cold even a dwarf would turn into a piece of ice within the hour.
No one was aware of when and how the great idea dawned. No one knew who was the first to utter the words out loud. Suddenly it seemed to the men that each of them had long harboured this thought. They burst into words, each one talking louder that the other; they didn’t even need to vote. Only Valius tried in vain to make his voice heard over the din of the others. No one was listening to him, they all kept glancing at Handless. He had to be the one to agree. They all waited for him to speak, although there could be only one reply.
‘I agree,’ Handless finally said, ‘I agreed long ago. It’s my destiny. My grandfather warned me a long time ago.’
‘Come to your senses, you madman!’ Valius was the only one to exclaim.
The two foreigners, having understood not a word of the entire Council, sadly nodded their heads and started to wash their hands with snow. It was already midnight, the hour of the final prayer.
The stump had been hurting for a long time; it had already started hurting in Vilnius as soon as the miserable, insane desire had overtaken him. An oppressive, sick feeling troubled his heart too, and periodically everything would get confused. It seemed to Vytautas Handless that his tortured heart was beating somewhere beyond the confines of his body in place of his lost hand. It seemed that he wanted to recover not so much his hand as the heart he had lost. He didn’t blame the men then or later – he never thought about the horrible council at all, and most amazing though it was to him, he didn’t even dream about it. His nightmares were quite different.
But now the awful council appeared, welling up from the depths. He was sitting once more in the shaky shed and by the fire, and he couldn’t run away anywhere because beyond the thin board walls there was the eerie frost and there was no road that would lead him to people. Vytautas Handless wandered around the buzzing, reeking city. He saw the dirty streets, the holes in the foundations, people’s pale faces, but at the same time he was there, at the council. He heard every word, saw everyone’s eyes. Periodically he would stop, lean helplessly against a tree or a wall, concerned passers-by would inquire if he felt all right, and he’d just nod his head. How could he explain to them that just now, right by this tree, he heard Francis’s voice and saw the distorted face of Zenka from Kaunas, that he already knew what his decision would be and was trying to concentrate, summon at least one clear idea? But there was only one idea: if the enemy takes away your hand, this at least is understandable; if your own people tear it off – it means the end of the world has come. He was just waiting for the angel of perdition to trumpet and for the book with the seven seals to be brought.
Vytautas Handless could long since have gone home. It wasn’t easy to get out of there, but with the miserable falsified document he could have brought a ticket at any time, without even waiting in line. It had been a week since he had gone anywhere, but every day he would write a letter and post it. Only the dead could read letters like those without feeling fear.
He felt that he had to explain that which could not be explained. He convinced himself that he wasn’t going home because he was waiting for Ona’s answer. But in reality he was detained only by the pain in his heart, the heart beating beyond the confines of his body, in place of the lost hand. He couldn’t return without having found the hand – which meant his heart. On the evenings of his letter writing his grandfather visited him, smoked his curved Prussian pipe, and nodded his head sadly.
‘My child,’ he would say in a mournful voice, ‘that’s our family emblem. You can’t change it, it’s been that way for centuries. Even our family name is that way. My hand was torn off by a shell, your father’s chopped off by the Bermondtists. I’ve said many times: prepare yourself ahead of time, child, say good-bye to it. It belongs to you only temporarily.’
‘If we send his hand off, anyone will recognise this kind of sign. You understand, if Handless really becomes handless, the secret will of the gods will be fulfilled. You understand? The gods themselves call for it.’
By the middle of the second week he had made up his mind. Now he gave up hope of finding anyone there in the deserted logging camp from those times. If he tried with all his might, he could visualise a vast area of stumps, piles of trunks and the rotten shed. He could make out the gigantic stump that looked like a bull’s head and could feel the hand hopelessly pressing the handle of the last axe. Grandfather sat beside him in the shaking four-wheel drive and for the last time tried to talk him out of it. However, Vytautas Handless knew that he would go there in spite of everything – indeed, he had already gone. It was an accomplished fact, even though it was hidden in the future. The future, the current of time didn’t mean anything anymore. He knew well what was to follow. He could relate everything in the greatest detail to anyone ahead of time and then take them to the logging camp so that they would see that in reality everything would be just as he said.
It is only when he gets out of the vehicle that he will suddenly have the urge to turn back, but his muscle
s will not obey him. Finally, he’ll comprehend that he can’t leave his hand, his heart, to the will of destiny because at the same time he will be leaving the twenty-six souls imprisoned here. He’ll be taken aback because the spot will be exactly the same as it had once been, even the remains of their fire will be untouched. Without anger he’ll kick at the rotten skeleton of the shelter, with a firm step he’ll walk over to the stump that looked like the gigantic head of a bull – now it is looming quite close to the shed, but then they spent a good half hour crawling to it – and he’ll fix his eyes on it. The stump will glance at him, and he will glare back. They will battle it out in the clash of stares; they will contend for a long time, oblivious of time, or perhaps, turning the clock back some thirty years. They’ll try to crush one other because this will be the most important thing in life. He wasn’t afraid at all. He knew he would win just as he had won back then. He knew that he was invincible and had always been so, especially now, when he has twenty-six souls. He was invincible like the river’s current, like the sunlight, like Ona’s eternal patience waiting for him. He knew that in the end the stump would surrender and shake its death rattle when he put his right hand, the good hand, on it, resolutely and firmly.
The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature Page 14