And Antanas Garšva turns to the right. More stairs. Too many stairs, they’re repetitive. The fall of Surrealism? So be it. I’ll erect Saint Anne’s Church in Washington Square (Napoleon, who wanted to transplant it to Paris, can rage), and pretty nuns will file in, yellow candles in their virginal hands.{3 A Gothic church in the Old Town of Vilnius. Passing through Vilnius, the Emperor Napoleon is said to have been so struck by its beauty that he wanted to take it back to Paris.} In 1941 in Vilnius, Elena saw a group of nuns being deported by the Bolsheviks.{4 During the first Soviet occupation of Lithuania (May 1940 to June 1941), Soviet forces organised the first deportations of Lithuanian citizens to remote parts of Siberia as part of a campaign of repressing resistance to Sovietisation policies. From June 14 to 19, 1941, 17,485 people, the majority women and children, were deported. The deportations continued after the second occupation of Lithuania in 1945 and lasted until 1953; an estimated total of 245,000 Lithuanians were deported.} They were taken away in a dilapidated truck, along a poorly paved street, so the little truck shook and the upright nuns kept falling down, they weren’t athletic. Guards stood in the corners, pushing away the tumbling nuns with rifle butts. They split open one nun’s forehead, and the nun didn’t wipe away the blood, maybe she didn’t have a handkerchief.
Antanas Garšva passes through the glass doors of Gimbels department store and on to the street. He holds open a door so that a freckled young woman with obviously padded bras, sixty-seven cents a pair, can slip through. He’ll stop seeing her. Elena – he’ll stop seeing her. Elena, I will give you a carnelian ring and an abandoned streetcar in Queens Plaza. Elena, you will mould me a nobleman’s head, it’s in the cornice of a house on Pylimo Street, in Vilnius. Elena… don’t make me cry.{5 Pylimo is a street in Vilnius.}
Antanas Garšva walks along 34th Street to his hotel. Here’s a snack bar. 7UP, Coca-Cola, ham and cheese sandwiches; Italian with lettuce. Here’s a store. Sturdy English shoes, plaid socks. Elena, I will buy you new stockings. You’re a bit careless – your stockings are crooked, the seam is all twisted, take them off, take them off. I will pull the new ones on to your legs myself. Firmly. Elena, I like saying your name. To the tempo of a French waltz. Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na-a. A little sorrow, a little taste, esprit. Pangloss was a professor of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology. Stones are required for the construction of fortresses, he proclaimed. Roads are a means of transport, proclaimed a transport minister. I need your name in order to remember you. It’s all reasonable. I want to kiss you again. Reasonably. Only on the lips, tik on the lips. I will trace Tristan and Isolde’s sword on your neck with magical chalk. I will not kiss you below the neck. Tik tik, just just. Thank God my fingers and toes aren’t cold any more. Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na, Ele-na-a. And here’s my hotel.
Antanas Garšva goes through the door “For employees”, he waves to the watchman in the glass booth, he pulls a white card from the black board. On the card – last name, elevator operator, days, hours. Clack – the clock in the metal box punches the time. One minute after four. His heart goes tik, the clock goes clack. The night watchmen patrol at night, punching time, clocks hanging from their necks in leather sheaths. Slender steel rods are mounted in nooks throughout the hotel. Clack – they punch. The clock is like a whore wandering from house to house. Every two hours a night watchman is allowed to smoke a cigarette, and the clock rests on his sagging stomach. As a Lithuanian poet writes, my castle’s dead sundial sleeps on the sand.{6 From a 1952 poem by Lithuanian émigré poet Henrikas Nagys (1920–1996).}
Antanas Garšva climbs down the stairs to the basement. He meets a black guy who lost his right forearm to an ice machine.
“How’re you doing?” the black man asks him.
Garšva replies, “Fine, and you?”
The black guy doesn’t answer and climbs the stairs. One day his arm suddenly felt very hot, it fell on to a block of ice, the hot arm must have melted the ice. This black guy is a fanatic. To sacrifice your arm for a piece of ice? A heroic gesture. He’s paid a dollar fourteen an hour.
Garšva walks along the basement corridors. Tin casks line the walls. Heating pipes snake along the ceiling. You can reach them with your hand. No need. His fingers are warm now. His system has performed its own blood transfusion. Leonardo da Vinci needn’t have bothered with anatomy. He should have painted another Last Supper on canvas, and the dinner wouldn’t have gotten mouldy. And I shouldn’t have gone to the tavern to talk with Elena’s amiable husband.
Antanas Garšva walks into the changing room area. He inhales the familiar stench. The first space he passes through contains the john. The toilets are separated only by panels, so if there’s someone squatting next to you, you can see his shoes and his trousers down at his ankles. And the sinks and mirrors are right there. The hotel instructions state: employees must be clean, their hair smoothly groomed. Unruly poetic locks are forbidden. As are yellow socks and smoking in areas frequented by hotel guests. I remember the old chaplain’s words, when we were children: “Now here’s an example for you. Now look at this lovely child – so nice, so pretty, so clean.” Oh how we loathed that teacher’s pet!
“What’re you so sad for today, Tony?” asks Joe, another elevator operator. A stocky, ruddy fellow. He’s sitting on the bench, leafing through the Faust libretto. He’s learning to sing baritone.
Antanas Garšva belts out, “Aš turiu apleisti jauuu… That’s how Valentin’s aria begins in Lithuanian.”{8 “Before leaving this plaaaa…” from the opening line of Valentin’s aria in Gounod’s 1859 opera Faust.}
“What a musical language,” says Joe.
“Look at me, now I’m an ambassador for the Lithuanian nation,” Garšva reflects.
To the right, a doorway, and beyond it the green lockers. Antanas Garšva unlocks his locker and unzips his plaid jacket. He undresses slowly. For a while he’s alone. If Vilnius didn’t exist, Elena wouldn’t talk about it. If a woman were not hanging on a wall (holding a violin like a prayer book, her hair loose and blue), I wouldn’t talk about her. And I wouldn’t hear the legend of the harpsichord or be interrogated by the judges. Ein alltaeglicher Vorgang, A hat mit B aus H ein wichtiges Geschaeft abzuschliessan… and so on, like in Kafka’s story. A triangle: wife, lover, husband. A Lithuanian actor waved his little hand and said, “You Buridan’s ass: I am the lover!” What’s wrong with me today? One scene after another. Should I take a pill? Today is Sunday, today is a difficult workday.
Antanas Garšva takes out his elevator operator’s uniform. Blue trousers with red piping, a beet-coloured jacket with blue lapels, “gold” buttons, braided epaulettes. Shiny numbers on the corners of the lapels. An 87 on the left, an 87 on the right. If a guest is dissatisfied with an elevator operator he can note the number and report him to the starter. “That 87 is a son-of-a-bitch, that 87 took me four floors too high, 87 87 87, I wasted two minutes in this box, that goddam son-of-a-bitch 87!” It’s fun to berate a number. It’s fun to use numbers. 24,035 deported to Siberia.{9 See note 4.} Fun. Forty-seven dead in an airplane crash. Fun. 7,038,456 needles sold. Fun. Tonight Mister X got lucky three times. Fun. Today Miss Y died once. Fun. Right now I’m alone and I’ll take a pill and have more fun. Antanas Garšva fishes a small, long, yellow bullet from his trouser pocket and swallows it. He sits on an empty box and waits. Tik tik, tik tik – my heart. In my brain, in my veins, in my dreams.