When I woke up it was evening. My date with Jonė was in half an hour. I felt oppressed by the scent of the linden trees, the lights starting to flicker on the slope of Aleksotas, the cool evening air, the muffled rattling on the streets, my stiff muscles, Jonė’s kind eyes, those fateful words: “I will marry you.”
I shouted out louder than I had earlier in the day by the Maistas store. I slammed the window shut. I took the bromide. I moaned into my clenched fists in the twilight. Until the sedative washed over me.
…Now she’s walking, stopping by the post office, glancing at the arms of the clock. Two minutes past nine. He’s a little late, she thinks to herself, finds a shoe store, takes a look at the latest style from Switzerland. Fifteen minutes past nine. Jonė walks slowly, every man is the one she is waiting for. Twenty minutes past nine. Maybe he’s sick, she would go and visit him but doesn’t know his address. Exactly half an hour. Jonė goes home…
It’s over, Antanas Garšva. You’ll sleep with Ženia or some other one, when you need a woman. You’ll play much more pool. You’ll sit in bars with talkative friends. You’ll study literature more seriously. Of course, if you start thinking, “I can’t live like this,” you could kill yourself. But… you have a strong will to live, toned muscles, a healthy heart, clean lungs, good digestion. It’s over, so start again, Antanas Garšva.
I was sentimental that evening. I felt sorry for myself. And I wrote Jonė a letter. I wanted to break up because I was bored to death with her.
A few weeks passed and I wrote a poem. It was my twentieth or so, and I timidly went to Konradas Café, where I hoped to meet a critic I knew. The critic was sitting by himself in a corner of the café, reading a French newspaper. We had met at Versalis and I had once asked him to take a look at my poems. When he gave them back to me I had detected an ironic sympathy in his expression. The critic was bent from consumption, wore spectacles, reddish shadows stretched across his grey face. That time he had said, “You want to be a poet?”
“I do,” I replied.
“None of this is yours. You’re searching for a ‘classical’ image, metre, rhyme. It’s artificial, young man. You’re different. I wouldn’t recommend this rubbish to any serious magazine.”
He noticed my disappointment.
“I’m not saying that you can’t write. Try. But… don’t depend merely on technique. Poetry is a demanding mistress. She despises con men and impotents. You’re probably good at billiards, right?”
“Quite good,” I boasted.
“That’s what I thought after reading these,” and the critic handed back the sheaf of papers.
Today I approached him quietly. I pulled up a chair, the critic stirred, the glass of his spectacles flashed, and he put his newspaper on the little table.
“Sit down.”
I sat down, crumpling the single poem in my pocket. His glasses were searchlights pointing at the hand in my pocket.
“You’ve done some more writing?”
I pulled out the sheet of paper.
“Only one?” he said in feigned surprise. He took the sheet, carefully straightened it out, and started to read. He read much longer that I had expected, as the poem wasn’t very long. And, when he had finished, he asked me in a warm, pleasant voice, “What is the matter with you? Are you ill?”
I felt my lips tremble, tears gather in my eyes.
“An incurable disease,” I replied.
“It’s not a bad poem,” said the critic. “I’ll try to get it published.”
A tall brown man enters the empty elevator on the eighteenth. His face looks like it was carved from a pumpkin. A grown-up in a Halloween mask. Lips turned up at the corners, round, colourless eyes, an inflated forehead – like a genius, or someone with dropsy. A bald head, thick triangular eyebrows. A polka-dotted sports suit, the narrow jacket cinched at the waist. The brown man smiles evenly, his large, yellow, pointed teeth leaning against his upper lip.
“Down. Press ‘pass’,” the man orders colourlessly.
“Are you a… hotel employee?” asks Garšva.
“Yes.”
Garšva presses the “pass” button, the elevator plunges down, no one can stop it at the intervening floors.
“Nice summer,” notes the man.
“Very.”
“Felix culpa doesn’t suit you. I think you have already entered autumn.”
“You can read my mind?” asks Garšva.
“A little. And I see a certain disproportion.”
“In me?”
“Absolutely correct. The right side of your face is somewhat crooked. To be sure, the crookedness is barely noticeable, but in photographs…”
“I resisted slithering into this world. They pulled me out with forceps. The doctor pressed a bit too hard and… that’s why I always have my picture taken at an angle,” says Garšva, interrupting.
“That’s what I wanted to emphasise.”
The brown man’s hands are thick and freckled.
“Are you… Irish?” asks Garšva.
“I’m not interested in my past, because I don’t have one. But you – you’re a different story. I’m not being critical, it’s normal, you’re following an ancient tradition.”
“Excuse me, but…”
The man looks at Garšva. An experienced priest with a thorough knowledge of sinners.
“It’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“O Felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem.{88} You haven’t forgotten?”
“I can’t.”
“There you are.”
“If you remember,” Garšva quickly begins to explain, “If you remember I kept thinking and thinking, when I was praying, that I want to make up for everything.”
“It’s too late,” says the man, waving a freckled hand.
“You like to dream about Christ. Did Christ talk about his past?”
How long the elevator falls without stopping at any of the floors in between! And it occurs to Garšva that he would like to always have this person by his side, to always be able to talk to him.
“Then the devil took him to the holy city, to the top of the temple, and said: ‘If you are the Son of God, jump down,’” says Garšva.
“Megalomania is not dangerous for you,” the man says gently.
He glances at the numbers. They no longer light up, they are just dark ornaments at the edge of the ceiling. But the elevator continues to fall.
“Jonė’s feet in their little white shoes,” the man says colourlessly. “And your father staring at Pažaislis Monastery. And your mother screaming on a dying Earth. And two soft, sticky cherries, and a single poem on a crumpled piece of paper. And the smiling old woman.”
“And lioj, ridij, augo?” Garšva asks hopefully.
“A vėlė wrapped in a white sheet. Your salvation.”
“I’ll pick up all the shards,” Garšva promises. He would so like to touch the freckled hand, but doesn’t dare.
“I won’t forget you.”
“You will. And now here’s the lobby,” says the man.
“The lobby already?”
“Yes, already. Do you remember the story about the angel and the newborn?”
“No.”
“When an angel says goodbye to a newborn, he touches its face with a finger, so that the new arrival on Earth won’t remember Heaven. That’s why there is a little groove between the nose and the upper lip. Your face is slightly crooked in photographs. Do you see the connection?”
Garšva looks at the man’s face. The Halloween mask is missing that groove.
“You don’t have a groove – you don’t have one!” exclaims Garšva.
“Zoori. The only word. It’s a good word. Dream about zoori. It’s good to dream about zoori. And now… open the door.”
79 Laisvės alėja or Freedom Avenue: a 1700-metre pedestrian boulevard running through the centre of Kaunas, from the Old Town to the Church of Saint Michael the Archangel (popularly called the “Soboras”, a variation on “Sobor,” the Russian word for a Russian cathedral. The large, square neo-Byzantine church was built as a Russian Orthodox garrison church in 1895, when Kaunas was still part of the Russian Empire.). With two rows of linden trees, planters and benches, and many shops and restaurants, it was the social and business hub of the city during the interwar period, when it was also Lithuania’s temporary capital while Vilnius was occupied by Poland.