A pointed, four-sided tower rose from the horizon, they stopped at the entrance to a long bridge, the engineer thrust some coins at the guard, and something unravelled inside the car as it once again rolled over the marshland drowning in small lakes. Garšva leaned forward, and Elena leaned back and faded into the corner. And this is how they drove into the parking lot, and the men got out to smoke and waited while Elena changed, and then the men squeezed inside to change, and when all three were finally in their bathing suits, they walked along the cement path, the pine-scented air caressing their liberated bodies, and Elena bent down to pick a daisy, and her husband stroked his hairy chest, and Garšva contemplated Elena in her close-fitting, greenish bathing suit. She walked indistinctly, as she did in her unpretentious grey dress. She was well proportioned to a fine perfection, as though she had been created by a female god. Her husband placed his feet with barbaric fierceness, a centaur turned man just learning to walk. And alongside walked the slim faun, like a Lehmbruck sculpture, an athlete’s gait and the pliant muscles of a youth, if somewhat bent with a forty-year-old man’s fatigue. Garšva.
The sun re-emerged. They passed closed swimming pools, playing fields, an Indian tent with a professional Indian (he told stories to children), and reached the wooden causeway that ran along the cafeteria building. And opposite was the undulating field of sand, like a gigantic Mongolian camp. Multicoloured umbrellas staked into the sand; thousands of sunburnt bodies in constant motion; discarded bottles shining like searchlights; a vibrating racket, as though the Mongolians had just finished an atonal hymn and separate sounds echoed with Dantesque immortality. Young lifeguards sat on high wooden thrones, sceptical wardens who waved with the plasticity of swimmers at anyone who went too far into the ocean. And the great river – the ocean – crashed in double rows of waves, foaming and snorting, giving and withdrawing its waters, and the damp sand happily sucked in its spattered offering.
Three people trudged down the beach. Someone might have noticed that the engineer rented an umbrella, that Elena and Garšva chatted as they stared at the ocean. Soon the trio disappeared. About a million New Yorkers went to Jones Beach that day.
I have just forty minutes to go. Then a half-hour break. I’ll smoke two cigarettes. I’ll have a talk with Stanley. Without white gloves. Good. A great calm has suddenly enveloped me. I’m even enjoying riding the elevator. My passengers are pleasant. This Mason with his tasteful, solid-coloured tie, it’s even possible that Wieniawski’s variations would bring him to tears. And if I told him about my past he might offer me a free vacation in Florida. Because back in Hanseatic Lübeck, his forefathers never struck their apprentices on the neck. This woman who has painted herself brown, with her wide red mouth, tiny African blossoms hanging from her ears, on weekends she swears she will love her husband to the grave. It doesn’t matter that she looks like a vampire. Three innocent children hang on to vampire’s skirt while she tells stories about good-natured elves, about the singing bone, about Jorinde and Joringel, about the sorcerer who ordered his wife to carry an egg, about Rip Van Winkle and nine-pins in the mountains, about, about, about – how difficult for the vampire! She left the little children at home for half an hour and is anxious to get back as fast as possible. And here a thin little priest carries just a few tenners in his pocket. He gives his entire salary to the poor. When the priest walks along 3rd Avenue, he’s swarmed by tramps, and they listen to the immortal words. About loving one’s neighbour, how a camel can pass through the eye of a needle, and how Christ could feed bread and fish to multitudes. And the priest hands out dollars and quarters and dimes to the men gathered around him. Word and deed – what a wondrous synthesis the thin little priest carries within him.
A great calm has suddenly enveloped me. I understand the desert. The sands, the hermit’s sackcloth, the rustling of desiccated leaves, a faded tent, oh, meditator, you will win God’s grace, the Holy Spirit hovers above your head and geometric light rays pierce your heart. Ecstasy. No mind, no consciousness, no Greek ideas, no oriental fatalism. The Gnostic demiurge is thrown off, a trembling little devil, terrified and cowering. Oh Holy Spirit, there is imperceptible wisdom in your geometric light rays – they are based on the proportions of cupolas. Up ir down, up ir down. It’s soothing to roll a boulder. I like meaninglessness. People get in, people get out. Is it for me to understand what makes the spokes of the universe turn?
I am a neophyte at solitude and an epigone of Christ. I remember Your outstretched hands and Lazarus’s astounded face. I see the hair on Your legs, Mary Magdalene is kissing them. And I can see Your tensed muscles, feel Your nervous anger, the merchants and their wares flying off the temple steps. I understand Your subconscious intuition. You speak in parables, You know – we must seek. On the road to Calvary You had assistants: blows from sticks, blood, drunken tramps. You were helped along by Your pierced side, by the gathering darkness. Did Your Father remember You? The Capital Letters have endured – Your Name is written in Capital Letters.
My Brother, my Beloved, hear me.
My sin, my madness, my subjectivity, my cry, my vitality, my joy – lioj ridij augo.{33 Fragment of abstract Lithuanian folk song.}
My Elevator – hear me.
My Childhood – hear me.
My Death – hear me.
Come to this hotel, stroke the lady’s coiffured hair, wink at the manager, give the bellman a tip.
Speak out, Elevator Operator.
Say the only Word.
Because this great calm is killing me.
The New York desert is scorching me.
I will perish, submissive and terrified, clinging to the cowering demiurge.
My Christ – hear me, my Christ, I pray to You.
O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem!{34 “O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer”, a phrase used in the Catholic Easter Vigil Mass.}
Zoori, zoori, lepo, leputeli, lioj, ridij, augo, is that the nightingale from Aukštoji Panemunė singing again?{35 Zoori: “zoori” is a magic, invented word in Garšva’s personal mythology.}
There is a sixteen-year-old girl who often goes up and down in my elevator, a friend of the cigarette girl’s. She’s direct. She likes me.
“Any big fish on the mezzanine today?” she asks.
“Oh yeah, I think so, and with bulging pockets,” I reply with a friendly wink.
“Yesterday this old guy fondled me for two hours and didn’t do anything. And paid twenty bucks. Embarrassed, I guess.”
“You lucked out, Lily.”
“It isn’t always like that. A week or two ago, can’t remember, I had to contort myself like a trapeze artist.”
And Lily laughs. She laughs as though she were walking towards a blue lake with a lover who is afraid to touch her hand.
“Good luck, Lily.”
“Thanks, Tony.”
Young girls don’t exist for me any more. Once upon a time I left a small provincial town for a miniature city. For Kaunas. Modest girls with crimped hair, painted lips, hips raised on high heels, girls who would blush just from the warmth of liquor. I could no longer find that most pleasant folly. Walking through the marsh, past the swaying, grassy hillocks, you see an innocent tanned body across the lake – you are a fortune-teller staring into a crystal ball. I could no longer find the noble lie. In my father’s stories, or children’s books, or Boy Scout songs, or cheap oleographs with happy angels painted by some optimistic fool. I could no longer dream. I knew that the only way left to dream was through writing, and encrypted writing at that, so that fault-finding friends and critics wouldn’t protest: “Sir! You are drifting towards sentimentalism!” I often cried if I saw a flower in bloom, moonlight playing on water, light-coloured hair tousled by a spring wind, and even a buzzing fly. Not permitted. A stern clerk sits in the centre of my brain. Sorting thoughts and feelings. The clerk has been sitting in the same chair for forty years. That is why he’s so pedantic and unappeasable. No, sir, you are not allowed to be sentimental! Away with these papers – scrunch, scrunch and into the bin. They belong to the cleaning lady. He’s logical, the stern clerk. If I don’t listen to him, I’ll lose. Like Dante and his heaven, like Dostoevsky and his whining characters.