The Soboras drew nearer. In the sky, stars that had barely begun to burn faded. Antanas Garšva did not turn into Mickevičius Street. He decided to climb up Vytautas Hill to get a view of Kaunas at dawn. He skirted the Soboras. The stone mass flattened itself against the ground. On this unreal night, this sister of the white nights of the North, the Byzantine force, the arcs of Mongolian swords, and the sleepiness of Russian monasteries were a heavy and divided God who saw only conspiracy amongst his subjects. The carpet of Laisvės alėja led up to the Soboras and Kaunas’s diminutive buildings carried it gifts as if it were a khan of the Golden Horde recently converted to Christianity. The granite steps, the heavy doors, the columns and cupolas, the cross. A golden cube, where both Moscow and Rome prayed.
Antanas Garšva walked along the boulevard and came to Vytautas Hill – dark and fragrant with summer. Flashes of empty benches. Neighbouring rows of two-storey houses. Beyond the promenade, the avenue became a street from a posh summer resort. Garšva heard someone crying and didn’t immediately understand where the sound was coming from. On such a night it could have been a ghost. Garšva was young and his imagination easily evaded the pincers of reason. High tones, full and rhythmic, cut through the silence at the foot of the hill. An old ghost blew into a willow flute, holding the pauses, and the flute moaned. Garšva stopped. “It’s a theme,” he thought. “I don’t care who is crying. In one of these houses there’s an open window, a child has woken up in its crib, but for me it’s an old ghost, from the times when a sturdy castle stood where the Nemunas and the Neris meet. The ghost’s loved ones have died off. His beloved fairy drowned herself because her golden tresses had become frayed and thin. The field god hung himself in the castle ruins because they took away his fields, and he had so loved this fertile triangle. A brave and cruel grand duke’s soul strangled himself with a silk scarf, his steel armour melted, and he could no longer burn crusaders’ souls at the stake. And the spirit of the grand duke’s daughter, the one so beloved by one of Šarūnas’s warriors, went mad. She wandered down to Raudonė Castle, wrapped herself in a white shroud, and walked through the linden tree park singing the same song.
The cry came from nearby. Antanas Garšva glanced at the last bench on the Avenue. Something white lay there. It was a baby. The manikin was wrapped in a dirty cotton apron. The yellowish face wrinkled in the starlight. “Clever trick, to leave the child in a rich neighbourhood.” Garšva took the baby in his arms. In the coolness of the dawn Garšva felt his arms warming up. The foundling stopped crying. “He must have been nursed recently, was just missing his mother’s warmth. But what do I do with him? Could he be a gift from an old ghost? Don’t be silly. This is serious.” Garšva remembered that there was a police station nearby, on Gediminas Street. He went back in that direction, carefully holding the now calmly breathing manikin. “I’ll have one of these when I marry Jonė. When I’m a famous poet and receive a national award. He’ll stop crying when I pick him up. That’s not bourgeois. It’s mystical. It took a long time for the earth, the grass, the dinosaurs and Laisvės alėja to take shape. It’s inexplicable and true. I’ll love Jonė, and I’ll hear cries and I’ll hear laughter. I’ll see my child’s face, full of wisdom. Wise, because he doesn’t yet know anything. A little bubble who’ll inspire optimistic poems. I might even be original, and become famous. To become famous these days you have to write optimistic poems.”
Antanas Garšva walked into the police station. The policeman on duty was writing something.
“I found this,” said Garšva, holding the little person right in front of his face, as though he were a cracked porcelain vase. “On a bench, near Vytautas Hill.”
“What the hell!” exclaimed the policeman. “That’s the second one tonight. Another Jewish girl in trouble from some soldier. Put him over there, on the table. We’ll fill out a report.”
By the time Antanas Garšva returned to the street, day was breaking. He chose the most direct route home. He climbed up Aušra Lane.{99} Kaunas lay below. The cathedral rose above the bluish dusk. He saw the chimneys of the Tilmans textile mill, the bends of the Nemunas, the Linksmadvaris embankment, the sky’s pink rebirth. Rotting leaves crackled. White plastered cottages poked out of the trees, the day continued to brighten. Garšva paused at the top of Aušra Lane. He leaned against the wobbly railing and said to himself, “I want to marry Jonė. I want a child. I want poems. I want money. I want honour. I want to be happy. I want to live,” as though he’d released a golden fish from his net and it had decided to fulfil his wishes instantly.
95 A lavish neo-Romantic estate built for the wealthy Lithuanian-Polish Tiškevičius (Tyszkievicz) aristocratic family.
96 A neo-Gothic chapel that was built in 1898 on Birutė’s Hill, overlooking the sea. The site, on the grounds of the Tiškevičius estate, was a pagan sanctuary and it is thought that during the fourteenth century the priestess Birutė, mother of Grand Duke Vytautas, lived and was buried there.
97 A long, L-shaped wooden pier jutting out from the beach in the centre of the resort town, the Palanga pier is a popular place to walk and enjoy the scenery.
98 Lithuania folk song:
Bloom, oh bloom,
My white apple tree –
Bloom, oh bloom,
Yet dry without leaves!
And how am I to bloom,
A white apple tree, –
And how am I to bloom,
Yet dry without leaves?
99 Aušra: dawn (Lithuanian).
CONCLUSION
Antanas Garšva opens the door and lets out a girl in a painfully red dress, and then he sees Elena. She’s wearing the familiar grey suit, the veil from her grey beret is lowered over her face, and her stockings have been put on properly. She’s speaking with O’Casey.
“Elena!” shouts Garšva. They hear him and come towards the elevator. O’Casey asks, smiling:
“Not too many passengers, eh, Tony?”
“Not too many,” Garšva replies moving his lips but barely making a sound.
“I’m taking number nine out temporarily. Take number seven and have a talk. I’ll give you a shout when there’s work.”
“Thank you, O’Casey,” whispers Garšva.
“Thank you, Mister O’Casey,” says Elena.