White Shroud is Škėma’s most autobiographical work. Specific events (described in some of Škėma’s non-fiction texts) from the author’s childhood can be found in the “notebook” entries about Garšva’s mother and father. The killing of a young Russian soldier in Chapter 6 echoes an episode from Škėma’s participation in the resistance to the Soviet Army. While the conflict with the patriotic DP camp poet Vaidilionis and the confrontation with an NKVD officer during the first Soviet occupation were events the author did not experience personally but was certainly very close to, the author was of course intimately familiar with and spent a great deal of time analysing the impressive hotel at the core the novel, and its complex, central symbol.
While Škėma did not inherit his mother’s mental illness, he possessed some of her sensitivity and anxiety – the kind, he once joked, that “was typical of plants that have been transplanted by an amateur gardener.” But as world-renowned Lithuanian-American poet Tomas Venclova suggests, “Garšva’s illness is a metaphor for the whole world, which the Second World War and its totalitarian regimes threw out of kilter. It is a sick world, one in which a normal person appears ill.”
Although White Shroud was the first work by Škėma to be published in his homeland, his writing was known by anyone who took literature seriously thanks to the steady stream of émigré fiction, poetry and criticism smuggled into Lithuania under Soviet censorship. As Venclova, who lived in Lithuania until 1977, has said, Škėma’s work was a revelation and had a profound impact on the development of Lithuanian prose both within and outside the country.
White Shroud was followed by another important prose work, Izaokas (Isaac, first published in a three-volume anthology of Škėma’s writing in 1985), which opens up a painful wound in Lithuanian history: the participation of ethnic Lithuanians in the killing of Jews during the Nazi occupation of the country. Drawing on a real historical event, the Lietūkis Garage Massacre in Kaunas on 27 June 1941 (which the author probably either witnessed or heard first-hand accounts of), Škėma probes the existence of one of the killers in post-war America, raising fundamental questions about the executioner’s and the victim’s roles in history, and humankind’s innate sadomasochistic tendencies.
Although Škėma began his writing career believing in “man’s power to survive even in the most appalling situations”, by the end of his life Škėma had lost much of this faith:
Creative nihilism is my religion. The moment of death is the most meaningful reality. And the tangle of illusions we cling to while alive. We die and others are born, live, and die. I admit that I may be wrong. And my world view is the vision of an exhausted man. But it is real.
Škėma died in 1961 in an automobile accident while returning to Brooklyn from an annual gathering of Lithuanian liberal intellectuals where he had been celebrated by friends and colleagues – one of his plays was staged, and his fiftieth birthday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of his creative career were marked. His friends felt that his death was the most refined and absurd manifestation of fate, chance, or a prank of the gods. In 1964, the émigré poet Algimantas Mackus wrote a book of poems dedicated to Škėma called Chapel B (after the chapel in which Škėma was laid out) and later that year also died in a car accident. These were strange coincidences with the similar death of the French existentialist philosopher and writer Albert Camus, whose ideas had had a great influence on Škėma’s writing.
Decades later, Škėma’s death has become a kind of legend and the writer himself a symbol of freedom and rebellion. His work gains new existential and aesthetic meaning with each epoch. During the years when Lithuania was regaining independence, White Shroud was especially important for its harsh, evocative depiction of the Soviet occupation and how it damaged those who remained in Lithuania as well as the refugees who were forced to retreat. The massive wave of economic emigration that Lithuania has experienced since it regained independence (500,000 people have left the country since the 1990s) highlights the conflict between individual aspiration and the need to make a living that often leads to the tragic but conscious choice of becoming a “cog in a wheel”, like Antanas Garšva.
“I should have listened to a well-known Vilnius clairvoyant’s advice and learned English,” Škėma once said, and indeed it seemed fated that he would have trouble with that language. For decades after his death, White Shroud failed to appear in English, despite several translators’ attempts. This task would require a translator with a particular combination of qualities – not only an excellent command of both languages, poetic intuition, and the requisite academic training, but also some of Škėma’s (whose friends called him “the opposite of an archivist of traditional values”) courage and innovation. White Shroud found such a translator in Karla Gruodis, a daughter of the DP generation, who grew up in Montreal, where most of the novel was written.
Remembering America’s inhospitality towards Škėma’s work, one last coincidence is worth noting. The first Lithuanian edition of White Shroud was published in London, in 1958; now, seventy years later, it makes its English-language debut thanks to the determination of another UK publisher.
Prologue
BMT Broadway Line. The express arrives. Antanas Garšva steps on to the platform. Six minutes to four in the afternoon. He strides along the half-empty platform. Two black women in green dresses observe people exiting the train. Garšva zips up his plaid jacket. It is August in New York, but his fingers and toes are cold. He climbs the stairs. His freshly shined loafers shine, and there’s a gold ring on the little finger of his right hand – a gift from his mother, a memento of his grandmother. Engraved on the ring: 1864, the year of the Uprising.{1 The 1863–64 Uprising (or January Uprising) against Russian imperial rule in the countries of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine). The revolt was brutally repressed – over 20,000 were executed, deported, or sent into forced labor – and was followed by a strict ban on Lithuanian publications that lasted until 1904.} A fair-haired nobleman knelt gallantly at a woman’s feet: “I may die, esteemed lady, and if I perish, my last words will be – I love thee, forgive my boldness, I love you…”
Garšva continues along an underground corridor to 34th Street. Mannequins pose in the storefronts. Why not install exhibits in such windows? Say a wax Napoleon, standing at ease, his hand tucked behind his lapel, and next to him – a wax girl from the Bronx. The price of the dress – tik twenty-four dollars.{2 tik: “just” or the sound of a clock in Lithuanian.} Tik tik tik tik. Heart beating too fast. I need to warm up my fingers and toes. It isn’t good to get chilled before work. There are some pills in my pocket. Good. Most geniuses were ill. “Be glad you’re neurotic.” A book by Louis E. Bisch, MD, PhD. Two doctors in one. Because double Louis E. Bisch contends, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Michelangelo, Pascal, Pope, Poe, O. Henry, Walt Whitman, Molière and Stevenson were all neurasthenics. A convincing list, ending with Dr L.E. Bisch and Antanas Garšva.