“That’s the blood of my ancestors speaking. I still go to see her. Psiakrew. You have no idea how good she is… you understand? Kocham. Dziękuję. Yeah.”{78}
“And Mozart?”
“Mozart? I can’t sit down to play. I want to rip out the keys and break the boards. Look – my hands are shaking. Once I got an offer to play the electric organ in a tavern. My father was sick, we needed the money. Have you ever heard one of those awful boxes? Playing requests on the electric organ. Bloody hell. Yeah. As though Bach or Handel had gone mad. Working in a tavern you quickly learn to drink. Yeah. I never went back to Mozart. Right. If I didn’t go back it must mean I wasn’t made for Mozart.”
“But Joe…”
“Joe? He started with Faust, but he’ll finish in some nightclub. It would be great if it were a nice nightclub. Have you listened to the timbre of his voice, when he sings in the toilet? It’s a miraculous squeaking. There’s some hope.”
“Fine, Stanley. But forgive me if I ask – why such a firm decision?”
“Why do I want to kill myself? I don’t believe in anything any more. I can’t do anything any more.”
“You’re a neurasthenic.”
“Thanks. Like I said, we’re a couple of neurasthenics.”
“There are three of us.”
“Who’s the third?”
“The lady with the nuts.” Stanley laughs. A youthful laugh, with white teeth.
“This city is going mad,” thinks Garšva.
The writers are now leaving the cafeteria. Kafka stuffs his hands into the pockets of his extra long coat and walks out, stooped over. Oscar Wilde, waving his sunflower, also exits. Baudelaire once more glances at the watchman’s plate. It’s empty. No more Baudelaire. Smiling shyly, Rimbaud takes a virginally pink Emily by the hand, and now carries his burden a little more easily. And Verlaine staggers, miserable, nobody offered him any coffee, his genius is unappreciated. A proud Ezra Pound leaves the cafeteria. He is appreciated. In which hospital is Ezra Pound being treated? Nietzsche raises his arm in a Hitlerian gesture, shouts “I love you, Ariadne!” and leaves through a door opened by Ženia. And Garšva’s mother swims out backward, her last gaze fading.
“Don’t jump out the window, Stanley. It isn’t necessary. Don’t be a Thomas Wolfe character. Do you know how Thomas Wolfe died? Screaming. They sliced open his skull, but couldn’t save him. Before the operation they cut off Wolfe’s hair. His sister said it was beautiful, dark hair.”
Stanley continued, as though he hadn’t heard Garšva’s words.
“Do you know what I’m waiting for? My youth holds me back. I live on Avenue B, on the fourth floor. The stairs are in bad shape. The rooms are dark. The toilet doesn’t flush, you have to pull the handle several times. My mother mumbles something in Polish. My father sleeps, whether he’s drunk or sober. Can you imagine how much fun it was on weekends? When I came home from my music lessons? How can you? I used to take that girl to some joint on the corner. For ice cream. A dark joint. Heavenly. I can still hear Mozart. Dziękuję. But one day I’ll jump. To hell with heaven. And the bed. The clerk can have the bed.”
“You won’t jump, Stanley.”
“You think?”
“You want to live, and that’s why you’re saying that you’ll jump.”
“You don’t know America, Tony. We’re doubles who have just met. I’m not going to weigh the ‘for’ and ‘against’, like you Europeans.”
And Stanley glances at his watch.
“Time to go,” he says. They get up and leave.
Can my youth save me? If I were to write a poem about it, I would probably say what others have already said. It would be a fragile, gentle nostalgia. Marshland. Spruce and birches. A fallen telegraph pole. An old horse dragging itself along a loamy road. A noble lie. Truth can’t be pinned down. But… soon I’ll crawl into the truth. And up ir down, up ir down. And here’s the ninth.
74 Telšiai: a small city in western Lithuania.
75 From Heinrich Heine’s poem, “The Shepherd Boy”: “Here the shepherd is a king,/ His throne a grassy hill,/ The golden sun a wreath / Gracing his royal head.”
76 Panstwo: ladies and gentlemen (Polish).
77 Psiakrew: Bastard (Polish).
78 Kocham: I love (Polish). Dziękuję: Thank you (Polish).
Chapter 12
I was twenty-one, living in Kaunas, studying literature, making some extra money playing billiards.
Laisvės alėja was being modernised.{79} The round cobblestones and tracks for horse-drawn trolley buses disappeared. The street was paved with big-city asphalt. The now wealthy government erected elegant almost-skyscrapers. Red buses softly rocked bouncy-hipped ladies and pointy-whiskered, romantically inclined gentlemen with tailored shoulders as sharp as icebreakers. Artists just back from Paris tossed around French names at Konradas Café and spent hours drinking a single cup of coffee.{80} Bookstore windows displayed current art albums, magazines and books. The State Theatre experimented with lavish productions and announced famous touring performers every week. A jaded mulatto sashayed sexily at the Versalis Hotel and a well-known engineer overpaid for a night with her.{81} Dandies drank and boasted, wearing loud neckties for which they had also paid too much, as they had with the mulatto.
Asphalt ringed the mature linden trees. The most handsome policemen in the Baltics strode down the boulevard, white-coated hot-dog vendors smoked phlegmatically, and famous opera singers paraded by as though in a scene from Othello. Numerous beer halls opened, complete with slot machines and the clamour of second-rate artists, writers, functionaries.
And amid the sparkling of the bright lights, new houses, asphalt, linden trees, policemen, hot-dog vendors and dandies, a new Juozapota, a half-mad old woman, known as Madame Kukureku, no longer paid any attention to “how many gentlefolk, how handsome they are,” but shuffled along, talking to herself.{82}
And when it got dark, and lanterns lit up the dark halos of the linden trees, groups of streetwalkers poured, like believers on a church feast day, on to the sidewalks, their teeth flashing the price of temptation. And high school students loitered on the sidewalks, greedily inspecting them. And the icebreaker-shouldered lovers, escorting their coiffured and fashionably Western mistresses or potential wives to American films, pretended not to notice them.
And a long-haired poet sauntered along the boulevard, his head thrown back as though he were trying to divine the mystery of the stars. The ends of his professional cravat waved rhythmically on his unwashed shirt front, and he had stuffed cardboard into his shoes because the soles had long since worn through. In his imagination sweep-poles rose and fell, cockerels announced the dawn, and the flowering linden trees along Laisvės alėja were as fragrant as they’d have been at the edge of a field.
I was happy that evening. A few dozen litas jangled in my pocket.{83} I had found a victim from Panevežys and really milked the little bald landowner – first losing, then cautiously and insecurely doing a bit better, then disastrously losing again, until, after a few successful rounds and admired by a lot of swearing bystanders, I stuffed the money into my pocket and left the bald landowner slurping his beer with trembling lips.{84}
I took a deep breath as I walked along Laisvės alėja. I had two or three days to myself, and I held my head high, savouring my success. My fingers had slithered along the green baize, my eyes measured the distances accurately, my cue had struck with precision, and impossible shots dropped into the pockets.
Suddenly I felt something new. A faint tremor rolled in waves down my spine. I felt dizzy. A strange thought crossed my mind – “Am I changing?” I paused by the cinema. “Is Laisvės alėja changing?” I leaned against the glass. The waves were still rolling down my back. “I must be tired from playing,” I thought to myself, and then noticed Ženia. Small, clean, conscientious, a cheerful little tramp on a workday. I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the shadows of an alleyway.