The Dedalus Book of Lithuianian Literature

by Almantas Samalavicius

  During these séances Glebas, a freight-handler from the ‘Krasnucha’ industrial zone, who lay to my right, would frequently start snoring to our collective horror and to his own misfortune. I’d want to laugh but the psychotherapist, giving an angry shout, would poke Glebas in his bare stomach and start the next part of the experiment. In a high voice, full of drama, he’d start passionately cursing vodka, wine, and beer, comparing the bottle’s neck with a nipple; his eyes probably sparkled. We couldn’t see that – we’d been ordered to lie with our eyes tightly closed and not to stir, otherwise everything would go to hell. But it’s questionable whether he himself believed in the strength of his influence when he reached the culmination and suddenly spouted: ‘There it is, that damned vodka! There! That’s the reason,’ he cried, jabbing the nearest prone chest with a finger, ‘that you lost your job! It’s because of the vodka that your wife left you!’ (He could have correctly jabbed almost anyone at that moment.) ‘Vodka destroyed your brains! Vodka! Vodka did it!’

  By now, nearly hissing in fury, the doctor would order us to open our mouths as wide as we could. Pulling a full bottle of the newly-damned vodka – which had been diluted by half – out of somewhere, he’d start slopping it into our open mouths. He sloshed it about and it would splash onto your face and eyes – so that’s why he told us to close them! Having emptied the entire bottle of spirits he would collapse limply into an armchair, cover his eyes with his palms and, brushing away the black hair that had fallen onto his forehead, ask us in a more normal voice to get up slowly. There were red and blue plastic buckets set on the ground between the couches, but it was only a rare patient, influenced by the doctor’s words or by the vodka splashed on his lips, who would throw up. But that was the purpose of this cruel treatment – to force vomiting, to cause as much disgust as possible. The pukers were encouraged and held up as an example to the non-pukers.

  After a séance like this the doctor would ask every lab rat: ‘Well now, how do you feel? Do you still want to drink?’

  ‘Oh doktor!’ my neighbour Glebas, the freight loader from Krasnucha, would moan, ‘Nikogda bol’she, ei bogu! – Never again, oh God! Chto by ja etu gadost’ bol’she buchal! – I’d rather drink lye than drink this filth! Basta, zaviazyvaju! – That’s it, it’s over!’ The doctor’s bad eye twitched, and he marked something down in his observation notebook.

  ‘Well, and how are you doing, sir?’ he asked me one beautiful autumn afternoon. Grey, green and red maple leaves bigger than your hand fell just beyond the narrow, white window and rays of warm sunlight glittered. How badly I wanted to answer this good person with words like Glebas uttered! Alas! The saddest part was probably that I, like the majority of the inhabitants of this colony of alcoholics, did not, by any stretch, imagine I was some kind of invalid – well, maybe a tired boozer who didn’t have anywhere to live and didn’t, in general, have a life.

  I was ashamed to look at this thin, nervous person’s troubled eyes. After all, he addressed me politely, and it was actually his brother, an actor who had yet to find his destined role, who helped set me up in the sanatorium. He even requested that they did not go overboard with me there and force me to take medicines. It was this doctor I had to thank for a bed in the corner by the window and for the fact that they had already, on the fifth day of my voluntary captivity, allowed me to go into town. I walked down the street knowing I had somewhere to go home to and a blanket to crawl under. ‘I don’t know,’ I’d say to the doctor, the actor’s brother, when I was asked.

  ‘It’s disgusting, of course… believe me, I try, but I don’t get nauseous… I don’t puke! You know, a person gets used to all kinds of smells.’

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ he’d cry almost elated. ‘You just need to hold yourself together and not fall apart, and everything will be okay!’

  I’d nod and together with my other grey-faced colleagues march out to rake armfuls of falling leaves and pile them into the little tractor’s rusty trailer.

  In the evenings, when the guards would wipe the puddles of milk soup and bacon rinds off the long tables – family members would bring the smoked products over; recovering alcoholics were overcome by monstrous hunger! – I would often settle down under this refectory’s dim lamp. I could read there until the middle of the night, or, when woken by my neighbour’s mighty snoring and finding myself unable to manage to fall asleep again. I’d go there with a notebook. I would write down my impressions and try to compile a slang dictionary; but most often I’d write letters to you, Tula. At that time I didn’t send them anymore – and not just because I didn’t have any address for you. Frequently, one of the other guys also tortured by insomnia would pester me – most of the time they were overflowing with a passionate need to let it all out. I would unwittingly fall into empty conversation or listen to interminable monologues about riotous all-night parties, quarrels and fights with drinking buddies, endless escapades in bed and constant battles with authorities, wives, neighbours, with the entire world! Sitting around in the night-time cafeteria, I wrote and wrote letters to you – I wouldn’t cross out anything anymore. I’d tell you about everything in turn, or sometimes just the opposite: I’d confuse everything so badly that I could myself no longer distinguish what was true and what was an invention smacking of quiet insanity.

  It’s as if a deadly spider’s thread

  spreads through darkened streets

  where buggies of blue will convey

  The sleepwalkers out of Tula.

  Something like that. A rhyme like that came into my head and later, I believe, you liked it? Yes, you liked it, you even asked me to write it down. I scribbled it down on the grey wrapping paper that the Rytas café used for napkins. I didn’t write to you much back then. Excerpts from the life of a beetle or a wasp. Reflections on aminazine and amnesia. A short essay: ‘How do Ethics, Aesthetics and Epithets differ?’The answer: ethics and aesthetics are frequently only epithets, for which… Bah. Not a glimmer of hope.

  In a hospital you’re supposed to sleep at night – that’s the way the majority of our grim contingent behaved. Only Glebas, getting up after midnight, would start lifting the two-pood and pester me with his absurd questions: ‘What do you think, if you poured kefir from one bottle to another for six months, would it really turn into pure alcohol?’And once, on the same day in which he swore to the doctor that he would never ‘buchinti’ – drink – again to the day he died, he pulled a bottle of vodka out from under his arm right in front of me, rummaged in the cabinet and retrieved an onion and a dry crust of bread, and threw back his head and emptied more than half the bottle. He would have drunk it all, but it was more than one gulp and I coughed at the wrong moment. He gave me what little remained and said: ‘Go on, drink it!’

  I shook my head. Then Glebas clenched his labourer’s fists – they looked like real three-pounders to me! – and grabbed me by the flimsy lapels of my pyjamas: ‘Well!?’

  His eyes were already crazy by now. I drank it. I didn’t have the slightest intention of turning him in to the ‘caliphate’, what difference did it make to me? I hadn’t drunk in a long time – my head spun, my chest got hot, and opening the air vent wide, I flew out into the star-studded autumn night… And Glebas was left sitting there staring with his red eyes – he couldn’t believe what he had seen! Then he snorted and fell headfirst onto the table. They found him dead in the morning.

  That was the first time I flew to you as a bat, Tula, without even knowing whether I’d find you at home or whether you still lived next to the Vilna River. I flapped my webbed wings, obeying entirely new instincts; I felt the never-before-experienced giddiness of flight and rose higher. I flew above the Butterflies Cemetery – from above the frost on the grass looked like a white shroud… Off in the distance the Belmontas forest glowed in the throes of the damp, but I turned to the west, to you, Tula. There was nothing I wanted to say to you anymore, nor to remind you of, nor to explain. I just wanted to see you and be near you for a while
. Even if I were invisible, what of it?

  But I only saw you on the following day when, after it had gotten quite dark, I once again went out into the city. It was a city preparing to entomb itself – I don’t ever remember streets so dimly, so dismally lit; the lanterns and arched lamps merely emphasised the grimness. To me the people passing by looked like they had only just now been pulled from the water. Half-dead, they staggered lifelessly towards home or some other place. It seemed that the city had forgotten how to talk – only the car engines coughed, sounding like they’d come down with a cold. Yellow trolleybuses would slide past, silent as real ghosts, like coffins with glass windows loaded with someone’s dead loved ones seated side by side. Maybe I didn’t deserve a better life, I thought, creeping down the cement embankment towards the city centre – the ‘heart’ of the city also barely moved – I’m of no use to anyone.

  Many think otherwise and that I’m harmful, a destroyer bound to provoke a citizen’s intolerance; didn’t the episode in the Second City confirm this? Well, then! Yesterday, when I was flying back to the Second Section, my colleagues – several real bats, chiroptera, the common noctule – attacked me. They didn’t want to admit a stranger into their domain; maybe they were from the pan-Slavic Severozapad organization? Now my hand and shoulder hurt, but I got ready to go into town anyway. The evenings had started to feel longer because of the real madmen, who had been sent out for an evening walk in the exercise yard enclosed by the wired fence and were howling and laughing, their voices not drowned out by either ‘Ja uedu v Komarovo!’ playing at full blast in our block, or the heart-rending cries of Glebas’s wife. For the third day in a row she hadn’t left the door of our block, unable to believe that her little Glebas was no longer there. I think they were getting ready to admit her to the women’s section – apparently she wasn’t just wailing but guzzling the wine she’d brought along. And they say no one loves a drunk! They’re loved by the same kind of drunks, and how they mourn when they lose their loved ones!

  I headed down the boulevard. Even the drunk people, who one happened upon with practically every step, rollicked, yelled and shoved as if driven unwillingly by a greater force. Gloomy shadows passed – women carrying huge bouquets of white chrysanthemums – All Saint’s Day was coming. Nothing buzzed in my sober head as I walked and walked; I had no purpose and no one I wanted to see. But at the end of the boulevard, past the square, I bumped into Tula. She was walking by herself, just like everyone else and looking the same way, as if she’d just been pulled from the water. We really did bump into one another. She mumbled ‘tsorry!’ and was going on her way. I held her by her shabby sleeve and then she turned around and recognised me. Hello, hello, she stirred her swollen lips, hello… should we stop somewhere? But she didn’t take hold of my arm.

  ***

  Even this tiny, narrow, normally always jam-packed café, where petty passions eternally boiled over at the bar and where those waiting their turn to down a glass breathed impatiently on the backs of the necks of the drinkers, where almost everyone not only knew one another but saw clear through one another, even this place was half-empty. We sat down at the bar on the high stools – Tula next to the rough-textured square pillar, me next to her.

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered, ‘it’s pretty dark in here.’

  I asked for coffee and vermouth. It seems we didn’t talk about anything, or if we did then it was just trivialities. I took her hand and together with my own put it on her cherry-coloured wool dress. She drank greedily, in small sips. I just watched her in silence. Then she ordered another round of tasty, slightly bitter vermouth from the still brotherly land of Hungary. I felt her inspecting me with her eyes from her comfortable twilight; I was afraid to as much as stir. I just found out today where you are, she said, and here we meet each other, not bad, huh? We drank again. Her eyes glistened but I saw nothing in them, not the slightest desire to talk. Maybe I should have explained everything? Hardly.

  When I remember that evening in the dim café, now when Tula is no more, a shameful sorrow flows over me. Shameful? Who knows? Hey, I don’t display that sorrow, I don’t wear it on my sleeve and what of it, if I did? So why am I ashamed? Maybe it’s my lack of determination, my sheepish, submissive thankfulness for the fact that she was sitting next to me? Perhaps. That gloomy, half-empty café keeps coming to mind as never before. Now that evening seems to me like a clip from a sad Italian film, one of those black-and-white ones they used to call neo-realist. At the time, of course, it didn’t seem that way; it didn’t even occur to me. A gloomy evening with a beloved person and vermouth that triggers sadness. During the dusk, when you look at the chrysanthemums outside the window, all that’s breathing on your neck is the approaching All Saints’ Day and the draft when someone opens the door. Maybe you’d remember everything exactly the same way, Tula. The café is still quiet with a distinctive, but barely detectable smell from the unseen kitchen. Two stools away from me sits, as I remember, a grey-looking conductor with a pointy goatee; he feeds his cat tender, boiled beef and slowly sips brandy. He’s already quite drunk – would he actually take his cat to a café otherwise? The conductor doesn’t pay any attention to me either, even though we’re acquainted. Not far from the big window is a young film and theatre actor, practically a genius. He’s so modest that even in an empty café he shrinks from the glances of chance admirers.

  ‘See,’ I showed Tula.

  ‘I see,’ she says. ‘What of it?’

  ‘Take my hand again, take my hand.’

  I take her hand but look at the actor. An artist: a black, thick moustache, a wide, low forehead and the neck of a master wrestler. Stocky, strong and angry. I know he’s a mean gymnast, fencer, marksman and horseman. His only shortcoming: he can’t pronounce short vowels and so stretches them out like blades of grass. But is that really important? If necessary, he’s Romeo or a Red Commissar or an SS Bannführer, or else Hamlet, Gasparone, Oedipus. He can produce at will a fiery glance, the kind that makes the ladies’ groins wet.

  ‘Hey,’ Tula tugs at me. ‘Where are you?’

  I turn to face her again. She’s in the shadow. She orders us both another glass of vermouth and a piece of cake.

  ‘You’ll get in trouble there, won’t you? They let you rot there in solitary, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we get in trouble for everything, they let us rot in solitary, stick us with needles. How do you know all that?’

  ‘Oh,’ Tula says seriously, ‘I don’t know. I just make an effort, just try to guess.’

  Her cherry dress is nearly black too. We drink vermouth and get depressed, like that grey rough-textured pillar with nothing beyond it. Like beyond Polocko Street? She draws the symbol for gold on the napkin – you could still find them sometimes in cafés – with lipstick.

  ‘You started using make-up?’

  ‘No, I just carry lipstick so that when I meet you I can draw the symbol for gold.’

  Depressing talk. My stiffened fingers on the constantly darkening dress. The meowing of the conductor’s satiated cat.

  Now when I look at that single photograph of you I have left I always remember that café – and it hasn’t been there for some time now! – the same shadows and twilight, and somewhere beyond the edge of the photograph a glass of vermouth giving off the scent of ashes. And not just ashes – maybe gall. Beyond the window white and pink chrysanthemum blooms keep floating by. The superstar actor’s hair shines like a crow’s feathers above a battlefield – he’s drinking vodka while his girlfriend guzzles champagne, of course.

  I see the fleshy barmaid press the ‘old-fashioned’ tape-recorder button. The tape screeches, the machine blares and at last a passionate woman’s voice whacks right in the ear – my ear, your ear, the bat’s wide ear. The barmaid staggers offstage somewhere – what else does she have to do here? Cold wafts from the door and only Gerasimas Mucha, a former pioneer captain and now a doorman, can stand it next to the platform and that is only because from time
to time he downs a glass of spirits proffered by a visitor. Inside it’s dim and outside it’s dark. I see the tape in the recorder become tangled. I see the theatre and film actor go behind the bar, first judiciously and respectfully consulting with his lady – a remarkably thin, big-mouthed girl with fishnet stockings – and press one button, another and then a third. The tape slowly straightens out, stretches, crackles and blares again. This evening I want for nothing.

  Adriano Celentano is then heard singing ‘Yuppi Du’. It was still the era of ‘Yuppi Du’! For some it’s yupidoo, but not for others, of course. I’m still yupidoo. Yupidoo, yupidoo, yupidooo… yupidododoooo… To others it was an era of hopelessness, of Sturm und Drang, a time of souls and gloomy indifference. But there, in that narrow, cramped café, this dramatic ‘Yuppi Du’ completely overwhelmed me. I didn’t even say anything to Tula about it. That’s the way I remember that ‘neo-realist’ Italian evening; you couldn’t imagine a gloomier one, but still! I held her plaid coat – it was the first time I’d seen this one – while she aimed her arms into the slippery sleeves and giggled.

  It was horribly biting cold in the street with those same corpse-people with corpse markings on their foreheads. We got on an empty trolleybus – now that really was a glass coffin. I let you in first. Go on, Tula, they’ll nail the lid on right away. I went along as far as the Antakalnio traffic circle. I didn’t even ask where you were going, or who’s waiting for you, since it didn’t really matter. I went knowing that when I returned I’d find the door to the Second Section locked. No clever handle would help me, it’s already late and if the sister on guard writes in the book that I returned with a smell of alcohol on me, they’ll throw me out of the alcoholics’ sanatorium tomorrow and onto the street again. At night I’ll wander around as a bat, but during the day?