Casper fell silent, looked at Martynas, smacking his dried-out lips, swallowed, with difficulty, the saliva that had collected in his mouth. ‘What can you say,’ he asked with a heavy voice ringing like a cracked dish.
‘Maybe you have something to eat?’ asked Martynas, who had not said a word.
One day Casper pulled out a carefully folded scrap of newspaper. The ends of the folded squares were worn away from the endless rubbing in his pocket. He quietly unfolded the scrap in front of Martynas. It was a fuzzy photo – Martynas barely recognised Casper, waving a pickaxe. Next to him were a few prisoners with shovels, and below a caption in Russian said: ‘Our wonderful Komsomol youth are laying the Siberian railroad.’ All newspapers that ended up in the camp were read down to the last detail, and then smoked just as eagerly down to the last scrap. Casper was very proud of this preserved shred of newspaper. He would only show it to trustworthy people and only on some special occasion. It was like his family album, a thin thread tying him with that other world of freedom and people, left for a long time on the other side of the barbed wire fence. That scrap of newspaper, though it was absurdly false, was for him a proof of his existence.
‘We’re not the ones that have been deported,’ Casper would say. ‘It’s the world that’s been taken from us. It’s closed, fenced, hidden, though it’s right here. We don’t see it.’
It was then that Casper invited Martynas to come to the soap factory after work. It was spring and nature, though not very noticeably, was already stretching itself under the snow. The earth was flexing its frozen ice muscles and was getting ready for a short life cycle in summer. It was dark on the premises when Martynas met Casper and a young Ukrainian named Mykola Netrebych, with whom Martynas helped Casper make furniture. The manager would say with a vulgar smile that the furniture was travelling straight to Moscow, but that such counter-revolutionaries as Casper and Martynas were not good enough to make furniture for the capital of this grand state.
Casper’s voice could be heard in the dark: ‘No, here.’ Turning in the direction of the voice, the men saw Casper sitting near a barely glowing stove. He stood up, waved to Martynas and Mykola, brought them near the low tables used for skinning cattle, and pulled out a metal tub from under one, with large pieces of meat swimming inside.
‘Our steaks!’ Casper said with a voice suppressing his euphoria. Earlier, Protasov had worked here; he was once an accountant for some company and had got ten years for fraud. He had recently fallen ill and died. Now his spot had been taken by Casper, the one-eyed devil, as the exiles called him.
The premises quickly filled with the smell of roasting meat. All three men sat with their eyes glued to the stove, their jaws moved slowly, as if they were already chewing on their steaks.
‘What do you think, is it beef or horse meat?’ Martynas asked, wiping his greasy lips and reaching for another piece of meat.
‘Elephant,’ Casper said. All of them laughed.
Having finished eating, the men decided that they should quietly roast another piece for later. Casper went to the table, the sound of the metal tub being pulled on the floor could be heard, the dripping of liquid, a loud curse word, and then silence.
‘Casper?’ whispered Mykola, a man with golden hands and a beautiful voice from the western part of Ukraine. ‘Casper, did you fall asleep?’
Martynas together with Mykola chuckled in unison, but the next moment they were speechless; a naked, white arm of a person popped out of the darkness, held by a dark and calloused hand.
The men sat in the dark in silence. Afterwards, Casper got up and, saying nothing, started walking toward the door. He turned back when he reached it and with a strange, hoarse voice yelled, ‘Not a word to anyone!’ and left.
Martynas couldn’t eat for almost three days. Each time, right when he put something in his mouth, it seemed to him as if the piece came alive and was struggling to get out of his mouth. A few years earlier he had worked at the local morgue. The corpses were frozen with their limbs akimbo; the faces of some of them had been chewed on by rats along with the lips, noses and sometimes the genitals. I never thought that I would become a rat, Martynas thought, and this idea was almost worse than the constant hunger and lack of sleep. He was already unafraid of death – as a partisan he saw the deaths of many close friends and relatives. He saw corpses dumped in the town square and the bodies of friends dying from their wounds. But that was a different kind of death. Watching through the barbed wire fence how a worn-out horse pulled a wagon with dead souls, like a wagon filled with logs, he didn’t feel the fear of death. It was something else – the desecration of life. Before burying the corpses, a guard would stab their chest with a bayonet one more time so they wouldn’t bury them alive – so a person wouldn’t escape to that other world alive. That was the essence of death camps. That’s how it was when they just got here, that’s how it continued, endlessly. Nothing had changed. But a thought struck Martynas: it had changed; I’m not a person anymore, I’m a rat.
Living standards did get better, though only slightly. More food appeared as well as tolerable sanitary conditions, more time and more desires and dreams.
As summer ended, Martynas ended up in a punishment cell.
Aldona didn’t say anything when Martynas came inside. She suddenly stood and began to undress. She threw off her prison clothes and was soon totally naked: her breasts, which earlier had been full, were now sagging, and only by straining your imagination could one recreate their former beauty and see more than the skin and bones.
‘Do you want me like this?’ the woman smiled.
They had gotten to know each other a few months earlier. Martynas would come and watch her work in the glue factory. He would bring her a tasty morsel. Last week he secretly gave her a flower. Afterwards he wrote her a letter: ‘You are a devilishly beautiful woman. Like bread.’ He received a reply the next day: ‘And you are devilishly brazen – like salt.’
Saying nothing, Martynas also quickly threw off his clothes. His body appeared even uglier – his arms and legs were even thinner, his muscles like rags wrapped around his bones.
‘And you want me – like this?’
They both received three days in the punishment cell.
She smelled of sweat, unwashed clothes, bad soap and something else – of what exactly it’s hard to say – that special womanly smell that each one has but is different with every woman, putting off some men and casting spells on others. Martynas licked her neck, shoulder, nipple… He didn’t remember anymore when he had last been with a woman; perhaps it was ten or fifteen years ago.
‘I was still a child fifteen years ago,’ she said.
‘It was so long ago,’ he said, ‘that I’ve forgotten things.’
‘You can’t forget it,’ she smiled. ‘It’s the same as eating. Let me help you.’
She touched him, just barely, softly, but at the same time demandingly, and Martynas was surprised that he was still a man. Goodness, he thought, her hands are miraculous, and Martynas put his heavy hand on her stomach, spread his fingers apart and pointed his middle finger down. At first it seemed that he and his fingers were not the same at all, as if his hand did not belong to him. The white hand of a person flickered in his conscious for a second. It was the one that Casper had held onto like a torch. He grunted: ‘I am a cannibal, I will eat you.’ He bit the woman’s nipple and he sensed that very gradually, but more and more surely, blood was pouring into the valley of her pelvis. He read it like a blind person with his fingers, felt that Aldona understood this as well. While he carefully looked her in the eyes, they narrowed and looked at him from up close and from far away, from the depths. He had not seen anything more beautiful than those narrowed eyes for ten years, nothing more beautiful and more attractive. They made love slowly, so slowly that Martynas even cried. His tears ran down Aldona’s face. It seemed that she was crying.
‘I said that you were brazen as salt…’
The supervisor found
them asleep, half-naked. It might have been that someone had snitched on them.
When Martynas got out of the punishment cell he found out that Casper had died. A prisoner, a thief and murderer from Leningrad with the nickname Krasavchik, pulled out the scrap of newspaper with the picture from Casper’s pocket without him noticing, ripped it up and rolled a cigarette in full view of a horrified Casper. Casper didn’t talk for a couple of days, then said to Mykola the Ukrainian that his life wasn’t even worth a scrap of newspaper. He calmly ate lunch and, when everyone lined up in a row for work, he ran and jumped on the barbed wire surrounding the barracks. The guard who shot him received a ten-day vacation for good service, while Casper’s body hung for the whole day on the wire because, for pedagogical purposes, the camp’s superior didn’t let the prisoners take him down.
Aldona was quickly moved up a level to another camp. All that remained for him were a few of her letters on birch bark. ‘The evil sorcerer turned us into rats, but the light of freedom will turn us into people again,’ she wrote in her last letter. ‘It’s easy to die, but to survive in such conditions is true heroism. We have to bear witness. Don’t in any way give up, just survive.’ Martynas would sometimes take out her letter and feel that her words had miraculous powers. Perhaps because they were written by the hand of a beautiful woman, a woman whose taste he would remember for his whole life.
After the Arctic blizzard ended, he stood leaning up against a wooden wall of the barrack, while opposite him, like on a huge film screen, tongues of light that were greenish, yellowish, bluish and a host of other colours and hues all mixed together. There had been so many events during the last years, so much news. Stalin, who was supposed to live forever, had died, Beria had been shot, a riot that arose in the camp was suppressed, conditions improved, hope had even appeared that he just might someday return to his homeland. However it all seemed distant, as if it was just next to him, as if it wasn’t attached to him.
Martynas stood near the wooden wall and felt like he was one of the logs from the wall – unfeeling, heartless, unable to be happy, or cry. He looked at the sky, which was unbelievably beautiful, grand like some medieval painting or immortal poem by Dante. Who was this beauty for, that divine light above such a horrible place, above factories of death, above camps where everything dies, even hope? It seemed that God himself, confused, was rummaging through the nooks and crannies of the sky with a huge projector looking for the reason why he created his world if he himself allowed it to become a place for horrible suffering and jeering, the triumph of death. What was God looking for, what could it be, Martynas thought – perhaps a wooden cheesecake? Casper’s picture? Aldona, from whom he never got even one letter? An angel with a bag full of presents or the promise of eternal life for those who went through such suffering, the kind even Dante hadn’t thought up? Light was all that was left, the northern lights that shone painfully above the everyday hell of people not wanting to say anything, just to shine and that’s it.
Translated by Jayde Will from Sigitas Parulskis, Murmanti siena, Vilnius: Baltu lanku leidyba (2008).
Sigitas Parulskis (born 1965) is one of his generation’s most important poets as well as a dramatist, prose writer, essayist and literary translator. His poetry was awarded the highest prize in Lithuanian culture – the National Prize. He developed a cult following with his novel Three Seconds of Heaven (Trys sekundes dangaus, 2002), which was based on the author’s own experience as a paratrooper in the Soviet army. His monumental novel The Murmuring Wall (Murmanti siena, 2008) is an original, dramatic metaphor for 20th century Lithuania. He is one of the most translated Lithuanian authors.
You Could Forgive Me
Jaroslavas Melnikas
He crawled through the window while we were sleeping and he wanted to rob us, or maybe even kill us all. It’s why I didn’t really understand very well what I was doing, shooting at him with a revolver and aiming for his head. He, of course, was a scumbag, a criminal. But to see the death throes of the person you killed in your bedroom, well, it isn’t very nice either. And it was like he deliberately lay there dying for a whole half hour, gurgling and crying, all bloody and foaming at the mouth. My wife’s eyes were as big as saucers, her face turning green, sweating and shrieking (she couldn’t shout anymore). The children, standing in the doorway, were red from their ear-piercing screaming, which usually accompanies an endless fright.
I ran out into the yard in just my underwear because otherwise I would have lost it. My body hit the eighth degree of irritation of my nervous system, or something along those lines. Of all the windows, why the hell did he have to crawl into mine?
So, the ambulance, together with the police, took him away. Now I was supposed to go back to my good life, wife and kids. We threw out the carpet with the huge bloodstain – to hell with it. But something’s not quite right. At night I lie down in bed next to my wife, but she moves away from me. ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. And I move closer. And again she unconsciously pushes me away. ‘Luba, what’s with you?’ And again I move closer. And at this point she’s almost in hysterics, whispering unintelligibly, as though to herself: ‘Murderer…’ Honest to God, I’m dumbfounded. ‘Get up,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand.’ And she’s afraid of me. ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. ‘What, would you have preferred it if he had robbed us, killed us?’
‘Maybe he wouldn’t have killed us,’ she says. ‘Just robbed us.’ What a fool. ‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘he would have taken something and left. But now…’
‘Now what?’ I ask, barely able to control myself. ‘But now he’s gone,’ and then comes the shouting and screaming.
Good God. These are the facts. So, I killed a man. I am a scumbag killer. ‘Vitek, I understand,’ she says, shuddering from the crying, ‘you defended us. But why in the head?’
‘I don’t understand!’ I shout.
And she says: ‘When I remember how he lay there dying, poor thing… right here. Dying and crying. Oh, I can’t…!’ And she starts wailing. I see the kids in the doorway, looking and once again shaking from terror.
‘Out! Go to sleep!’ No, I… What, am I suppose to go and kill myself? It’s not possible to live like this anymore.
So I went to his home. I went there on purpose to see just how much of a scoundrel I really am. As if on purpose, his elderly mother looked like my mother: she sat there and did not cry. She just held his dead hands. It was horrible. And then there were his children: a boy and a girl, who were now orphans. The girl, the younger one, was crying, while the boy stood with a look on his face that I will remember to the day I die. Suddenly the girl spoke through her tears: ‘Daddy, my dearest.’ And two teardrops fell on daddy’s forehead. ‘Dad-dy, get up. Daddy.’ She clearly loved him. The little girl with the puffy little red nose, still just a baby.
I left, holding myself up against a nearby wall. What was this? I didn’t understand. Who am I? What was I supposed to do in that moment? Now that he’s lying there, he’s so innocent, an angel, a son, a dad. God’s creation. But then, when he crawled through the window wearing his mask, he was simply a criminal, a scumbag thief who I put a bullet in – a worm who had the gall to interfere in a stranger’s peaceful life. And I suddenly had the desire to eliminate a few more of those vermin in my bedroom, so that the children of those sons of bitches would cry their eyes out, asking their dad to get up out of the coffin.
The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature Page 21