“Be more specific.”
“Your fate has been spun. You shout out big words about the past, bright words about the future. You’re virtuous, or pretend to be. So you’re lying.”
“The alcohol is affecting you,” said Vaidilionis in a cold, quiet voice, and drank some beet spirits. “Eat,” he added.
Then he got up and stuck his hands in his pockets. He stood, and I contemplated the buttons on his jacket. “Fanatics and their followers tighten both their muscles and their souls,” I thought to myself.
“And what are you, exactly?” he asked me.
“I’m waiting,” I said, working on the last bits of meat.
“I know what you’ve gone through. I’ll say it again. I feel sorry for you. But the end result is sad. You can’t write any more. Envy makes the powerless angry. But at least you’re honest. When you can’t write, you don’t. I respect you for that.”
I did my best to keep my hands from trembling. I put some meat on a little piece of bread, lifted it slowly towards my mouth, and slowly sipped the spirits, holding the empty glass before my face.
“May I take a look at your latest poems?”
“You may. Read them, and, if you like, discredit them. But take note. I am published, read, recited. And they say – I sustain their will to live, their hope. The whole nation’s hope.”
And Vaidilionis passed me the sheets of manuscript. I read, and the blood in my head pulsed. Vaidilionis was still standing, his hands in his pockets.
I finished and placed the sheaf on the green blanket.
“A typical example of impotence. The word ‘Lithuania’ is squeezed in three times over four poems. The main idea in these poems is the racial nobility of the Lithuanian people. The technique is clean. You could advertise shoe polish. The images aren’t demanding. Of course the air is cleaner in the woods. What was it that inspired Vytautas the Great on that green field? You yourself, in your green trousers?”
“My diagnosis is correct,” Vaidilionis said quietly, shaking his head.
“Go ahead, shake your head, Mister Popular Poet! You’ll be forgotten!”
“You’ve already been forgotten,” Vaidilionis said calmly.
I said nothing. For four months.
In late fall, as the rain poured relentlessly down on the camp, an old woman died. The first of our barracks community to depart for the afterlife. There was nothing remarkable about the old woman. She had attended mass zealously, enjoyed the food rations, and died from a heart attack, though she had complained mainly of rheumatism in her legs. Since she was the first victim, it was decided that she should have a grand funeral.
By a strange coincidence, a former wind orchestra member lived in the camp. He was able to put together a band, because the UNRRA director, a fervently inebriated Ohio butcher, donated some instruments he had confiscated from the Germans.{93} The wind veteran rounded up a few young men and quickly taught them to play a march, “Two Clergymen Brothers,” as well as a “Potpourri of Lithuanian Melodies”, which some Jew had assembled in pre-war Lithuania. And for “dessert”, as it was put by the bandleader who played the cornet and still wore a traditional moustache, the old woman’s funeral would be celebrated with Chopin’s Marche funèbre.
The old woman was clothed in a black dress which some merciful ladies had sewn from multicoloured rags and tinted with ersatz dye, so that the deceased’s garment was embellished with green spots. The carpenter Rimšinis nailed together a coffin from the less rotten boards lying by an unfinished barracks hut. The bigger camp sent a priest, a pleasant man who smiled demurely if he heard a common swear word.
We had to walk a couple of kilometres to a tiny village with a grandiose name. To Koenigshafen. It was midday and the rain had stopped. We formed a procession. The Boy Scout Povilėnas carried the cross. The muffled-up priest trudged along in borrowed galoshes. The old woman bounced on a simple Swabian cart pulled by a thin horse with a strangely fat belly. And the brass band marched, proud and shining.
The old woman did not have any relatives, so the first rows were graced by the little camp’s officials and a distinguished personage who gave speeches remarkable in their impressive use of ellipses.
We walked in harmonious silence for about a kilometre. The brass band procrastinated. The bandleader did not have much faith in his colleagues, he said he had only once been pleasantly surprised by their playing. Then it began to rain again. The rain sprayed horizontally into our faces and the horse’s ears, drenched the Crucified One, the Boy Scout Povilėnas’s hair, and fell on the coffin, forming brief puddles before streaming down its sides. The coffin was full of cracks and wider along the base, so the rain inevitably soaked the old woman’s dress.
“The old woman is getting wet,” I said to Vaidilionis, who was marching with meaningfully closed lips.
“Don’t mock me,” said Vaidilionis through his teeth.
“That’s not what I’m doing. Cold skin and cold water. An unpleasant pairing. Why isn’t the orchestra from Jericho playing?”
The bandleader waved his hand, and the musicians pulled out green handkerchiefs and wiped off their dewy trumpets. The priest’s galoshes squeaked like old taps. The road was still loamy and it seemed to me that I could feel the earth’s sucking pull. The spire of the village church gradually appeared through the curtain of rain. We were surrounded by submerged fields, a cramped little world we longed to escape.
“Now the rain is melting the ersatz dye. The black liquid is dying the innocent old woman’s skin. Quite an interesting effect. Black is the colour of funerals, after all, and Heaven tolerates human symbolism. If it rains any harder we’ll end up burying a black woman.”
Vaidilionis grabbed me by the shoulder. His wet face was ridiculous with rage. I squealed. Vaidilionis frothed.
“You’re a paranoiac. You belong in a madhouse.”
“Wipe your nose,” I replied.
Suddenly the band piped up. We had approached the village vegetable plots, their summer huts lined up on the wet, naked earth. Chopin sounded in all his horror. The rookies blew into their trumpets, hitting neither the beats of the drum nor matching the bandleader’s menacing upper body gestures. The sound of his cornet carved into an area of a few metres before the melody’s harsh strokes dissolved.
“This old skeleton has almost filled his clarinet with spit,” I said under my breath.
Vaidilionis broke away from me. Chopin collapsed. His patent leather shoes got scuffed, his shirt got wrinkled, he lost a lace cuff, got clay all over his stylish face, gravel tangled in his curls, and he let out a wail. He got chilled. Consumption? No, consumption is slow, Chopin caught a deadly case of pneumonia.
“Every generation experiences the end of the world,” I said to the distinguished speech-maker.
“Look at the bandleader’s moustache. It’s wilting.”
“What are you saying, sir?” asked the personage.
“The Marche funèbre is suitable for Laisvės alėja. For burying a great state figure. A boy scout’s drum would have been enough for a drenched old woman.”
I turned around and returned to the camp. It rained until evening. As I learned later, the funeral procession found shelter in the village pub. I was alone for a few hours.
I wrote long lines. A complicated cocktail flowed through the trenches of my brain. I sat on my cot in my underpants, because my clothes were drying in the laundry room. As I produced stanza after stanza, I saw my marauding letters, my yellow, Swabian-tobacco-stained fingers, the photograph of Maironis above Vaidilionis’s bed. I erected a totem in my mind: an unknown soldier and a soaked old woman, severe statues, kept my words in check.