Christ does not travel all roads, raising his hand in warning. The fairy tale and human longing do not travel all roads.
Tiny shops carry carefully sorted smaller and larger oranges. Banks contain accounts. Statistical bureaus – the numbers for future weekend accidents. Military headquarters – the annual harvests of new recruits.
My Christ, I bow before You because You longed for a fairy tale. And Plato, I find you a bit ridiculous, with your carefully arranged ideas, like freshly planed boards in a tidy sawmill. You missed the powerful tornados that swept away your tablets. You, of course, are allowed to start everything anew. But first read a bit of your conceptual friend Balzac. Generations pass and are replaced by new ones. And suffering, and madness, and not finding.
And a lonely man standing in the elevator, meditating, clutching the handle. I’m afraid of peace. It envelops me. Fear is better. In hell one can dream about a lost paradise. Yes, it requires enormous vats, satanic faces and boiling tar, cries and the gnashing of teeth, dishevelled hair from old hymn books. And there you have it – a fairy tale about how paradise became paradise, because it was never lost.
The fragments are touching. I can’t connect them. Like a child trying to put together cardboard shapes: a road, a stream, hills, a deer. The child clicks his tongue. The landscape comes together.
It’s unsettling to stand against a wall and stare at your torturer’s hands, empty of stones. This peace is bad. The black candles in the silver candlesticks are bad. This woman, with her unevenly painted cheeks, who neglected to blow the powder off her hooked nose, is bad. The little red carpet under my feet is bad. My foreboding is bad. I don’t want peace. I want suffering.
Elena enters the elevator holding a seven-branched candlestick in her hand, the flames trying to jump off it. Elena is a Jerusalem Jew at the Wailing Wall. Elena is a mermaid sewing her detached tail back on. Elena is a kneeling caryatid, with Saint Anne’s Church swaying atop her head. Elena is a baseball lost in the grass. Elena is a little girl, how I loved to kiss her.
What did Saint Anthony feel when devils and women didn’t haunt him? What did the thousands driven into the gas chambers feel, the runny-nosed Jewish kids screaming at their mother’s feet, the mothers chewing their fingers? What did they feel in the Far North, when they froze into stones by felled trees?{45 Refers to the harsh living conditions of Lithuanians deported to Siberia during the Soviet occupation.}
Gnothi seauton{46 Gnothi seauton: Know yourself (Greek).}
I thank God, that I was born
Greek and not barbarian
Mantike manike
Noumenon noumenon noumenon
Epiphenomenon
Naturalism poetically expressed…
Associations of mathematicians, chemists
astronomers, business corporations, labour
organisations, churches, are transnational because…
Because I love you Ilinaa
Mantike manike
Nike
No No No Noumenon
Gnothi seauton
Sounds like an avant-garde poem, doesn’t it?
Chapter 7
Antanas Garšva just had to turn up North 2nd. He stood at the intersection. There was a drugstore, with an old pharmacist wiping bottles and walking carefully between the aisles. On the other side of the street a sagging old Jewess snoozed amid boxes of fruits and vegetables, snoring lightly as she leaned against the golden oranges.
Garšva waited. He could see the corner of Elena’s building. He did not know which apartment was hers. He did not dare cross the street, as that would have made him visible from the windows. The pharmacist glanced sullenly at Garšva a few times, then shuffled towards the register, locked it, put the key in his pocket, and paused by the door to the yard. The drugstore was once robbed, in the middle of the day, by a similar young man with a pleasant face.
Then, unexpectedly, Elena came out. She was wearing a wide, plaid skirt and a white blouse. She looked around, as though unsure of where she was. Garšva strode quickly towards her. The old pharmacist grinned slyly and went back to his bottles. Garšva’s steps awakened the Jewess, who let out a wide-mouthed yawn.
They stood before one another.
“Hello,” said Garšva.
“Hello.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the store.”
“There’s a park near here. The one where the rabbi was shot. If you have a little time, we could go for a walk. Actually, the rabbi was shot yesterday. It’s quiet in the park in the daytime. The rabbi was shot by an eighteen-year-old guy who wanted to hit a moving target. The rabbi was probably meditating with Jehovah. There are benches in the park, and you can see some of the skyscrapers on the other side of the East River. It’s eleven now, so say for an hour, an hour and a half?”
Elena looked at Garšva as though he were a stranger.
“I’m having trouble forgetting the trip to Jones Beach,” Garšva said. “It was so long ago. The day before yesterday.”
“I didn’t think you would come,” said Elena. The words drifted down, holding their notes.
“Even today, after I woke up, I wasn’t sure myself,” replied Garšva. “But I wanted to hear about the noblemen’s heads.”
“Good, then. Let’s go. I know your park.”
“When those two lie side by side… that was Misha and me,” thought the sagging Jewess when the pair passed by her, her eyes glistening with lost dreams.
“This lady has a husband. The husband works, and the lady doesn’t work, so she’s going to do a bit of work with this fellow,” thought the pharmacist. Some time ago his wife left him, and when she died he went to her funeral, he never remarried, he lived alone.
They walked in silence. Elena’s bowed head and Garšva’s bent shoulders. Dirty Bedford Avenue with its street kiosks filled with Asian immigrant papers, horse-racing types loitering around the soda pop stores, cowboyish youngsters riding bikes festooned with bells and horns, the collapsed sidewalk paving, the smell of onion, garlic, trash, the kind of grey sadness that isn’t dispersed by the golden oranges, the golden sun, or the gold watches and rings in the storefronts, or the golden hair of the girl standing in the dry cleaner’s doorway, or the blue strip of sky peeking through gaps down the side streets.
And the two came to the large square that Garšva had called a park. There were baseball diamonds, cement walls for hitting balls, sparse trees, grass, benches. They sat down. And they saw, in front of them, gasoline cisterns, a school building, a few skyscraper towers.
“This will be our only meeting. You are mistaken about me. My husband and I are a model couple.”
“Forgive me. I’ll go, if you want.”
Garšva’s hand grasped the arm of the park bench.
“I’ll be on my way.”
“Why?”
Surprised, Garšva stared at Elena’s eyes. True peace, and a calm curiosity, and a bit of the maternal.
“Why?” repeated Elena. “This is the only time we will meet alone. My husband invited you to visit, and so do I.”
“I didn’t want to insult you,” said Garšva.
“I know,” replied Elena.
Garšva got out his cigarettes and they both lit up.
“I’ll be honest. I’m looking for something.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“Really? What exactly?”
“I’ve heard that you’re a womaniser.”
“That’s the least of it. They say I’m destructive, that I wallow in my own misery. I repeat: I’m searching for something. For a week now I’ve been searching for a few stanzas.”
“I like your poems. They’re true in their incompleteness.”
“I don’t know how to end things. I need peace. My world is falling apart. I’m detail-oriented. I don’t like to buy things in bulk, but I cherish fragments. I want to describe sliding into the abyss. Right now I’m looking for a solution. There’s this boy in my new poem. His mother is dying in the next room. The door is locked, the boy isn’t allowed in. He’s watching a blue fly crawl along the wall. Soon the fly will reach the window, which is slightly open. Will it fly out, or stay in the room?”