Chapter 6
In 1941 Antanas Garšva was a partisan.{41 Following the second Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1944, the Lithuanian partisans, also known as the Forest Brothers, waged a well-organised guerilla resistance that lasted until 1953. An estimated 30,000 partisans and their supporters were killed.} The Reds were retreating from Kaunas. Their desperate withdrawal, under pressure from the German armies, spawned anarchy. Some of the Reds just threw down their weapons and fell asleep in roadside ditches. They could have been taken prisoner by the gentlest of girls, all they wanted was bread and water. Some of the Reds raped the gentlest of girls and bayoneted those they met. The partisans emerged suddenly. Just like the news of the Reds’ retreat.
Skirmishes followed the principle of hide-and-seek. Ruffians leapt from behind trees or bombed bridges, locking with their foes in deadly embraces. Bullets flew from who knows where, sliced through tree leaves and shattered the windows of the summer cottages at Aukštoji Panemunė. And the days crept along – beautiful, clear, still.
Antanas Garšva was on patrol in Artillery Park. He had an assignment: to track whether any Reds were crossing the Nemunas. He lay on the high bank, his rifle by his side, and stared at the water. The sun shone and the sparrows chirped. On the other side of the Nemunas, the sands yellowed, tidily stacked logs browned. Smoke from buildings burning in Kaunas rose up into the clear sky.
Antanas Garšva suddenly heard an unfamiliar sound. A moaning, rhythmic and waning, as though coming from a child or a woman. Ah-oo, ah-oo, ah-oo, ah-oooo. When it broke off, something splashed into the Nemunas. A stray bullet was ending its flight.
Antanas Garšva realised that later. At this moment he glanced back and saw a young Russian, about seventeen years old, with a pleasant face, blue eyes and a messy mop of blonde hair, described in one song as chubchik kucheryavy.{42 A hairstyle popular with young men at the time, consisting of a thick curly fringe sometimes coming out from under a cap.} The young Russian didn’t have a gun. His arms were stretched out and he was leaning forward, as though preparing to leap.
Antanas Garšva later spent long hours trying to remember all the details. But he couldn’t. The results were engraved in his memory, but he hadn’t registered the fierce struggle itself. He could recall only several relief-like details. The smell of sweat; the red fog in his eyes; the sharp rock he had managed to grab; the blows. The stray bullet continued to fly in the syncopated blows. The red fog slunk down from his eyes and wrapped itself around the Red Army soldier’s head, and the fog became blood. The smell of sweat became sharper. And Antanas Garšva realised he had a body again. He felt pain on the top of his head, in his stomach, his left arm.
The fog crystallised into a man. There, on the bank of the Nemunas, in the gravel, lay the young Russian’s corpse. Chubchik kucheryavy had vanished. Antanas Garšva had smashed in a seventeen-year-old’s head with a sharp rock. For a while he stared at the dead man’s hands. The nails and fingers were losing colour. “I’ve killed a man,” thought Garšva. But these words didn’t mean anything. Others, like “the weather is nice today” or “no thank you, I don’t drink milk,” would have sounded just the same.
Temporary peace in the elevator. The Masons are revelling, the Cardinal is dining, the young people’s dance will start at around ten. The occasional guest goes up or down. But you still have to watch the lights: the red square and the green arrow. A poem about geometric shapes? About a stray bullet? The ecstasy of the soul – I was pure soul when I smashed the young Russian’s head, and Saint Peter saw the universal church in the four-legged creatures, in the worms and the reptiles, in the birds in the sky… when he was hungry. Drink my blood, eat my body. I am a modern vampire, as helpless as a bat in daylight. A poet who can’t write a good poem. Maybe I need to fight? Maybe then my soul would bloom in all the colours of the rainbow?
All I can do is laugh. Out loud. Reality exists. The top of my head, my stomach, my legs, my left arm, they all hurt. For some reason reality likes to beat me over the head, with a fist like a paperweight. And I hit back. The blood of Palaeolithic man still runs in my veins, in my retribution. And I paint my own bison – so that I can kill them. I’m religious. Magic cave paintings and blows with cudgels. Poetic stanzas on paper and a blow with a rock. I was happy after I finished off that young Russian. I dealt with him according to the rules. According to the harmonious laws of battle. My hands glowed with Platonic ideas, with Bergson’s élan vital. I was Nietzsche’s Superman. As that polyglot Hegel would say: the organisation of the world is perfectly rational. The existentialists would probably say that I expressed myself fully, the fatalists that I accurately carried out fate’s judgment. The young Russian can choose his own philosophical system. To explain his defeat. Because I am the victor. And I would really like to dance my victory dance, in the desert, by a fire, waving my cudgel. A ritual dance for my God, whom, for an instant, I embodied.
For an instant? But maybe I am coercing myself because I am possessed by a medieval devil? He holds me in an embrace and occasionally squeezes my throat. What’s the difference? The hotel, the Nemunas, California, one pole or another. Throats are strangled on all continents. And then an annoying analysis comes in. I, I, I, I – no one else matters. I am the centre of the universe. A frightened god; a god who wishes there were a higher god; a god who would like to become a slave, and, once a slave, be only a god. The psychiatrist will tear off a fresh sheet and write down the name of the illness. Saint Peter will pull out a card inscribed with three words: heaven, purgatory, hell. Which one will he underline? And who could write on my card: be a soul? I should pray? I am praying, I have prayed.
I used to enjoy May services.{43 Traditional spring services dedicated to the Virgin Mary.} The incense in the town’s wooden church. The roughly cast saints. The melodious bells. The altar boys’ red-and-white vestments. The thick wax candles, which I imagined as dead parishioners’ vėlės.{44 In Lithuanian folklore vėlė is the term for the spirit of a deceased person, quite distinct from the concept of soul. vėlės were imagined as having some likeness to the deceased and a faint, ethereal physical quality akin to fog. They were thought to live on a high hill and travel on flying benches (vėlių suoleliai).}
The flames sputtered a meditation on the eternal. The priest bent at the altar and the cross on his back bent with him. I stared at the starched cloth covering the altar. I listened to the antiphon.
The gaping mouths produced a chanting that was touching in its disharmony. It filtered out the old men’s dissonant croaking. A pure hymn floated there, by the cupola. I knelt, my head back. With invisible hands, my God grabbed some angel wings and blew forth the Holy Spirit. He had a double face, like Janus – the left side was Jehovah’s, the right Jesus Christ’s. That was how I imagined the Holy Trinity.
I inhaled the smell of incense like an ancient Jew. It was Lebanese cedar and the unlocking of the Ark of the Covenant. It was Job, lying face down in the desert. It was the swelling of Red Sea waves. It was the hand of Christ blessing the lepers. His walking on water. His footprints on the road to Golgotha. It was the lamentation of two women. Mary’s and Mary Magdalene’s. Over the death of their Beloved.
The antiphon. We call to you! To You, to You, to You!
And poor Dostoevsky, who brought together weeping lovers and thought he had found a solution in sexless Alyosha.
The fragments won’t come together. They bounce back like the rocks off the adulteress’s body in ancient Jerusalem. But they bloody the breasts and the stomach, crush the bones.