The fortune-teller’s clear ball. Hold on, Lily. Save your money. Buy yourself a little store and marry a man who drinks beer only on Sundays. Dante himself can’t choose a sphere of paradise for you and Dostoevsky won’t dare make you cry. Keep spinning on your trapeze.
Antanas Garšva glances at his watch. Just seventeen minutes to go. Oh, merciful cigarette, I pray to you! My Christ, what did you feel when Mary Magdalene fell at Your feet? There was a time when I loved Jonė and thought… Does it matter what I thought? If I should go mad and start sobbing in the elevator, I doubt there would be a writer who could create a literary version of my tears. I need to swear. It helps. Goddamned sons of bitches, fucking whores, impotent losers, reeking dysenterics, syphilitic gigolos, shit-eaters, granny-necrophiliacs. What other vile things can I think up?
“Such nice weather today, madam. You look lovely! I barely recognised you,” says Garšva to a sixty-year-old hotel guest.
“You’re so charming,” she replies. And they both smile.
Chapter 5
Women have only been episodic in my life. One hustler’s words really stuck in my head: “Don’t push yourself to the limit. As much fury and as little emotion as possible. The curve of your neck is childlike. Your eyes and eyelashes are feminine. You love like a man. Fight, and you will win.”
And I fought. I perfected the art of love. I developed all sorts of psychochemical techniques. I blended tenderness with biting sarcasm. I would pleasantly quote a good poem and then make a snide comment about a passer-by. I measured passion consciously so that it would erupt into an unexpected storm just when my partner thought that I was completely spent. I knew how to make her think that I will be the one to break it off, so she must cherish me. I knew how to vary things – when to be sad and when to be cheery, when to be angry and when to pretend to be sorry. I succeeded in sprinkling so-called love with the sugar of friendship. So that after the breakup my lovers would go on to advertise me to others.
My women were like Matisse’s Lorrain Chair, which brings out the blue monumentality of the wallpaper behind it. Loving them helped me feel the reality around me more sharply. I would suddenly perceive objects, their manifestations, which I would normally have indifferently passed by. The sky, a masonry wall, a child’s fine hair, the ghostly light of street lanterns, the distant hum of train engines… and it would become clear to me: I have been given live material, I am full, and I must write, and I must leave my beloved, be alone, until everything dwindles, fades, loses all colour and relief.
I could easily tell when the end was near. Just as I fused with my beloved in a heavy, crushing embrace, that point when, as one falls into the abyss, the stems of thought shimmer with the leaves of death, at that very moment I would suddenly feel very sad. As if the last drops of love had run out. And I would feel angry: they were not intended for this woman. And I would remember Jonė. I understood in theory: I won Jonė when I gave her up. But this paradoxical consolation mocked me like a grotesque dervish mask.
About three kilometres from the small town, past the draining marshes – where storks still stepped and lapwings shrieked, where the cries of drowned maidens still echoed – there was a lake. A boring little lake surrounded by greyish hills. And when, as a nineteen-year-old stripling, I would swim to the other side, past the yellow water lilies to the muddy shore, I knew: within an hour or two Jonė will come here, and we will observe each other, and then we will go home.
We couldn’t swim together. The town didn’t approve of bathing suits. Men and women splashed around separately, divided by the narrow lake. They could clearly see each other’s naked bodies, and on Sunday afternoons the men and the women would trade hackneyed jokes about the features of those bodies, and ringing laughter would cut through the air. Often, couples hoping to get married would initiate intimate relations with mere glances, so that, when a blushing bride walked into the church with her pallid fiancé, he was already familiar to her, and she felt safe leaning against his shoulder.
Jonė and I were there on holidays from Kaunas, we wore bathing suits, we couldn’t swim side by side, the town’s moral code forbade it, because Jonė was a poor girl being raised and put through school by relatives, an upstanding notary devoted to Preferans, and his upstanding wife – a dentist who didn’t like doing fillings, preferring to rip teeth out without mercy.
I can still remember her distinctly, a sixteen-year-old girl always wearing some tight little garment, with kind eyes; I haven’t forgotten her slim, athletic back; I still love her nervous embrace, her responsive lips, how she was impressed by my idiotic poems. Losing Jonė was losing my youth – when real life came to an end and the cautious, cunning battle with death began.
We met at the volunteer firemen’s fancy-dress ball. The organisers had laced streamers in the national colours around the ceiling of the small middle school’s auditorium, stringing them to a coloured lantern hanging in the centre, as though the evening were a celebration of Lithuanian-Chinese cooperation.
The masked figures loitered, not sure what to do. Zosė the servant girl, who came as a bale of hay, stood in the corner of the room, the dancers grazed the skirt she had woven for weeks, and the dried-out straw crumbled to the floor, and Zosė was furious because her impressive outfit did not attract a single partner.
The postman Zaleckis, in a devil’s mask, tried to entertain the crowd from the centre of the room. He brushed the dancers’ legs with the black-painted rope he had sewn to his velvet trousers, offering them private rooms in hell. But nobody laughed, and the devil eventually drank himself into a stupor in the canteen and fell asleep face down on a table, snoring loudly, his breathing obstructed by the mask.
There was also a clock with a dial painted on his behind, about six girls in Lithuanian folk costumes, an astrologist (his pointed hat promptly fell apart and lost its stars), two rabbits, one donkey, and so on.
The firemen’s brass band played a suktinis, some waltzes and polkas, “Elytė” (the only foxtrot they knew), and the “Pantera” tango to the tempo of a funeral march.{36 Suktinis: Lithuanian folk dance with pairs.}
The kiosk lady sold only two rolls of streamers, and a kid who had snuck in for free stole a bag of confetti and then ripped it open right there, scattering confetti all over the floor. The most important guests neither danced nor caroused. They drank in the canteen.
I had finished high school that year and was spending the holidays at my father’s. I gave the coat-check lady my white university student’s cap. I walked around the hall proudly. I danced the foxtrot with a Jewish girl from Jonava. We made a date to go for a walk near the semaphore guarding the defunct train station, a spot favoured for illicit love.
Jonė had come with her cousin, the notary’s son. I knew him. Jonė’s boyishly cut hair was slicked back. She was wearing a high school uniform. The notary’s son explained that she was going into eighth grade.{37 In the Lithuanian secondary school of the time this would have been equivalent to the final year of high school.} I asked her to dance. Her slim little body pressed against mine, our heads pressed together, I could feel her childish breasts. That was the style of dancing then. I smelled her hair and suddenly lost my nerve, slowly pushed her away from me, and started doing something strange with my feet to justify my distance. Other couples flashed by. The cymbals went crash, crash, the trumpets told their sincere lies, one of the Lithuanian sashes detached from the Chinese lantern and I pulled it down as I danced. Jonė must have noticed something in my expression.