We were sentimental, exhausted, jealous, angry. And sexual. We seduced each other’s wives, we made love in ditches dug by the Volkssturm, and forgot the previous night’s embraces – often rushed, cowardly, unsuccessful – by morning. And some, who had managed to shed the past, traded in apples, jewellery, gasoline, cows – as if they were the reincarnated vėlės of incinerated tradesmen.
Four barracks, dropped on to the loamy earth. Mounds of scrap metal (airplane hangars, now destroyed by bombs, had once stood there) were our children’s playground. The squelching of our canvas shoes in the mud – it rained often that year – and the interminable talk, in which a future chronicler would hear only one significant phrase: “When I lived in Lithuania…”
Two hundred people. Eighty-four men, eighty-two women, thirty-six children.
I had not written any poems for a long time, but I was up to date with the latest books and magazines, and wrote about Lithuanian and German theatre, painting exhibitions, concerts and books. That was how I scraped together the few marks I needed to buy alcohol.
My skills improved, and the agonies of hell began to look like Gulliver’s adventures among the giants.
Providence had made me an observer of corpses. I saw many, and in different states. In East Prussia I saw a dead woman, she was lying next to a pear tree in full pink bloom. In Weimar I saw a group of uniformed schoolgirls pulled from a cellar, welded together by hot water during the bombing. Inflated, their faces the colour of those women who spend too much time under quartz lamps. By the Czechoslovak border we came across an abandoned, reeking freight wagon. When we opened it we found about thirty decomposing children, aged three to seven. We never learnt who had forgotten them on the reserve tracks. Adult male corpses had no effect on me, as though I were an experienced gravedigger.
I was privileged and shared a small room with the poet Vaidilionis. I loathed his ascetic face, his deep-set eyes, his short, thickset body, his large hands (hundreds of his ancestors had scratched at the infertile earth, and his fingers were bent at the joints, like in a death agony), his coarse black hair combed on to his wide forehead in a special style, his yellow toenails which he liked to cut with a kitchen knife, his sacrilegious posture – the way he sat at the table writing poems, stiff and bobbing like a priest performing the elevation.
I followed Vaidilionis’s rise. The Lithuanian newspapers and magazines published his poems on their front pages and his stern face with its meaningfully closed lips often gazed at the reader. Vaidilionis was recited by actors, amateurs and children; he was quoted by priests, camp officials and reviewers.
Vaidilionis versified effortlessly. He sprinkled our dark green hope with rosy hyssop. He didn’t inscribe quiet melodies in the sand, he didn’t scorch us with the slow fire of loss, he didn’t wander amongst childhood’s happy ghosts, and didn’t look for a castle with clear windows, lanterns or gold carriages. Vaidilionis had a calming, uplifting effect. In a few tight stanzas the horrors of war would slink past and then a powerful voice (God’s, some saint’s or his own) would quickly scatter marble pedestals about the loamy earth and then place us on top of them. There we were in our narrow trousers, grey faces, just like the grand dukes of the past, heads full of fantasies like a poor servant girl. And on the highest pedestal stood Vaidilionis himself. A prophet on a block of stone.
And around all of this Vaidilionis masterfully arranged a thoughtful collection of props: a zinc-coloured Nemunas, varnished country beams, a father’s talismanic pipe, a sprig of chamomile pressed in a prayer book, the star-studded wings of friendly angels, a patriotically howling dog.
And in the final stanzas the grand dukes popped up once again, calling us to a bright future. We, their natural successors, as brave as the legendary Vikings. We who scrabbled for every donated rag, we who waited for overseas passages and imagined ourselves enjoying sofas with firm springs, real, nicotine-rich cigarettes, creams, furs and fresh meat.
My very first meeting with Vaidilionis was disastrous. When I entered the room and threw my thin knapsack on to the floor, Vaidilionis was sitting on his cot, writing.
“Good day, aesthete Garšva,” he said, setting aside his carefully penned manuscript sheets. We had known each other in Lithuania.
“Good day, Vaidilionis, you old corpse,” I replied. He glanced at my shoes, which could not have been more pathetically worn out. I sat down on a stool.
“These shoes are a half-size too small. That’s why my feet reek. Open the window, because the room will start to smell,” I stated.
Vaidilionis looked at my shoes in silence, and I felt a mix of shame and irritation.
“Hide your poems. Temporarily. While I air out and wash my feet,” I said, focusing on the frayed strings masquerading as laces.
“I feel sorry for you,” said Vaidilionis, emphasising each consonant.
“And I for you.”
Vaidilionis continued, as though he hadn’t heard me.
“A number of years ago you and I had it out. You argued your position with paradoxes and supposedly won. You dismissed morality, idealism and the good Lord. You worshipped only literature. Now, I would dare to clarify, it was your own bile. I remember your illness. How many poems have you written in exile?”
“Since I escaped, none,” I said.
I untied the strings and took off my shoes. And looked glumly at the dirty toes peering quizzically through the remains of my socks.
“How many articles and reviews have you written?”
“Many.”
“The washroom is at the end of the corridor,” said Vaidilionis. “When you come back, we’ll have a bite.”
I took my time washing. I couldn’t stand heavy streams of water. They stroked my skin like the caresses of a woman one has gotten sick of, on whom one has become sexually dependent.
When I returned I found Vaidilionis had arranged some preserves, bread and a bottle of beetroot vodka on the stool.
“So where have you been wandering? You lived somewhere privately after the war? I heard something from the editors,” he said.
“I was lucky. I spent three months digging trenches in East Prussia. Then near Czechoslovakia. And escaped. I was only in one bombing in Weimar. And found a place to live in a village. A German lady took me in. I slept with her. I fertilised her garden with my family’s manure. After a while she kicked me out.”
“What for?”
“I drank too much.”
“Are you going to try for America?”
“I’ll try.”
Vaidilionis followed my shaking hands as I sipped the beet spirits.
“Your hands tremble.”
“I’m not dead yet. Unlike you.”
“Explain,” he said calmly.
“Some young guys got together in one of the camps,” I started, greedily swallowing some canned beef. “They write poems. They read Eliot, Pound, others. They know Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre. They love the new painting.”
“They’re untalented Western epigones,” interrupted Vaidilionis.
“They believe in poetry. It’s in their poems that I discovered a love for my country. A love for my childhood. For broken toys. And the question ‘Why?’ And the will to survive. Come to think of it, there’s a colleague of yours in that other camp. He writes ‘classical’ poems, just like you. Old Homer is happily rubbing his hands in Hades. The little old Moirai watch him adoringly. But even they aren’t interested in you.”