We are unhappy alone and unhappy as a community, married and unmarried, we are like hedgehogs huddling together to stay warm – uncomfortable when crowded, and even unhappier when separated; optimism is a bitter mockery of human suffering; life is evil, because life is war; the more perfect the organism, the more perfect the suffering; history’s motto: eadem sed aliter; higher than conscious intellect is conscious or unconscious will; the body is a product of the will.
So Antanas Garšva absorbed Schopenhauer. But then heroes of thinner books jostled with the fat pessimist. A headless horseman, a halo of tomahawks glowing around his head, a mad Lady Macbeth stretching her unwashable hands towards the footlights, Gustave Aimard’s caballeros – gracious to the end and making countless deep reverences with their feathered hats, a frozen Raskolnikov philosophising as he prepares to murder an unscrupulous old woman, Goethe’s writhing homunculus, a Gogolesque devil rolling a hot, full moon over a Ukrainian village. The books’ sculptural eyes peered into Garšva’s soul, all the chaos contained in them covered by black outspread wings, and there were no more dusty reading room windows, and he was no longer curious about the feminine laughter coming from the second floor of Aušra High School.{27 Aušra High Schooclass="underline" the first Lithuanian high school in Kaunas, founded in 1915.} Life is evil. This phrase seemed final, impossible to counter, just as it was impossible to breathe deeply in Lukšio Street – the suffocating herring smell from the Jewish shops, the homeless drunks’ vomit on the stairs of the People’s House, the permanent odour of Cracow sausage and Dutch cheese, dirty laundry and rotting leather shoes in his small room. Those nails chewed down while solving trigonometry questions. That damned avitaminosis pimple on his forehead, and how the high school girls laugh at him and won’t dance. And that youthful longing for death, before life has even been tested.
Antanas Garšva was defeated by two collaborators: Schopenhauer and the bespectacled clerk with his haemorrhoidal humour: “You’re not going to kill yourself?” Antanas Garšva trusted them and, one fall Saturday, on his way home from school, he stopped by a small store in Lukšio Street. He asked for some rope.
“How many metres?” asked the old Jew with mercantile indifference.
“My death can be measured in metres,” Garšva concluded sadly.
“Three metres, please. That should be enough,” he replied.
“You’re going away?” asked the Jew as he measured the rope.
“Far away,” replied Garšva.
“My death is three metres long,” he considered, deciding that this would be the last entry in his notebook of wise men’s sayings. This one authored by him.
On Sunday he washed his feet, cleaned his teeth and set off for the village of Pajiesys with the rope stuffed into a paper bag. He would hang himself in a thicket, and his body wouldn’t be found quickly. Black crows would peck out his eyes – the poor high school student would hang in a thicket and the mystery of his suicide would never be solved. He had never even been in love! But as the police investigators would conclude, a high school boy’s soul can be as deep as Schopenhauer’s or Dostoevsky’s.
The dampness of the Pajiesys clay soaked through Garšva’s shoes, and he was shivering. The bare willow branches brushed his face, and he gasped when a thicker one hit his pimple. There wasn’t a single tree tall enough in this tangle of shrubbery. He saw the cold grim Nemunas and the hovels of Šančiai bowing to the grim waters. He pulled the rope from the bag, its clean whiteness in stark contrast to the landscape.
“Death is beautiful,” whispered Garšva.
“Death is godlike. I’m nobler than Mucius Scaevola. Burning your hand is nothing. I am the only follower of the Stoics at the Kaunas high school for boys. Soon I will die, because this is the only way I can resist Schopenhauer’s will.”
Garšva finally found a sufficiently thick aspen and began tying his rope to a branch. Though he continued to shake, the aspen stood straight. And with the prepared noose hanging elegantly, Antanas Garšva knelt down by the tree.
“God, oh my God! I’m dying, I’m dying. How sad. I truly am dying.”
Antanas Garšva crossed himself, stood up, and, having broken some branches, piled them below the noose. Then he stood on the unlit bonfire and put his head through the noose. All that was left was to jump to the side.
“Oh, if only this fire would burn! He would stop trembling, he would smell the smoke, his feet would warm up, just like in the heroic deaths of the early Christians. They would raise their eyes to the heavens.” And Antanas Garšva looked up at the sky. The leaden cloud cover was still. Should he jump to the side? It’s cold. It’s cold. Have to repeat to myself that it’s very cold, that I need to warm up, that there are matches in my pocket. Now he clearly felt the matchbox in his right trouser pocket. He could feel the edge of the matchbox against his thigh. And at the same time he almost lost consciousness. Fear came, and then in a mere second saved him. The power of fear almost knocked the pile of branches out from under his feet. But consciousness conquered his pounding heart. Antanas Garšva pulled his head out of the noose and jumped down. He took the matchbox out of his pocket and lit a single match. The little flame singed his fingertips. He dropped the blackened match. Mucius Scaevola, the early Christians, the Stoics, God – they all vanished. He scrambled up the hill to reach the road faster. In the little room in the People’s House he rubbed his feet vigorously with a towel and, later, got under the covers, a collection of Pivoša’s satires in one hand and a good long piece of Polish sausage in the other.{28 “Pivoša” was the pseudonym of interwar Lithuanian satirist Augustinas Gricius (1899–1972).} It was cosy. At one point he remembered the noose in the thicket, but then quickly forgot it. He slept for eleven hours straight.
The elevator rises, the elevator falls. Clean, sensible, business-scented Masons disembark – the express also stops on the mezzanine. Four Chiang Kai-shek officers, cheekbones red from cocktails, emphatically pleasant and spry, leave the elevator on eleven. Four Polish clerics stand close together. Antanas Garšva lets them off on the top floor.
“The eighteenth,” he says in Polish.
“Oh, my son!” Pleasantly surprised, one of them raises a hand, as though blessing him.
The nice old lady reads poetry. She once quoted MacNeice:
I can’t remember any more. Thick and thin, on chalk paper and on wood, on parchment and papyrus, on clay tablets and on hieroglyphs etched with sharp stones into walls in caves. Books. I am not yet born. Have yet to write a good book. But the granny will soon die because she is already reborn. She reads post-war poetry. She doesn’t work, lives off her capital, while I’m stuck being an elevator cog. My face, my white-gloved hand, my appearance, my polished speech – I’m a good cog.
Once upon a time a plant shot up, its roots wrenched from the ground, a gaudy butterfly floats above a field. Once upon a time… the zauras’s jaws gaped, and the pen darts as it jots down a tune.{29 Zauras: from dinozauras (dinosaur), a creature from Garšva’s personal mythology.} Once upon a time amoebas pressed together, and poets sing about love. Once upon a time the wheel of time turned back, and I became a cog. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my progeny turn into donkeys, pelargoniums and eventually stones. How unpleasant! Two stones will lie side by side, unable to chat. About Churchill’s speech, Rilke’s poetry, Parisian hats, how Petraitis is dishonest and how I’m honest: the stones won’t talk about anything. All that will be left is the stars, the rising moon and water’s atonal music.