(an excerpt)
Jurgis Kuncinas
But then, Domine, I was already in the Second Section – I’ve already mentioned it rather vaguely. Vasaros, Rudens and Olandu streets, right up to the rise of the Polocko line on the southeast, were its natural boundaries, where I felt at home for almost two months. The hospital’s territory was, obviously, much more restricted. On the east side rose a steep, pine-covered slope, which, when climbed, opened the valley to the Butterflies Cemetery. It was above it, domine, that I would fly on sleepless nights to the corner of Filaretu, and there, making a turn to the west, I’d be fluttering into Malunu Street…
There’s no reason to hide it: the Second Section was a poorly disguised alcoholic sanatorium – most of the time they’d write into the hospital admission records that such and such a person suffered from a disturbance of the central nervous system. That’s certainly truthful, but there wouldn’t be a single word about hallucinations or phobias, or about hangover syndromes or cirrhosis. It was an open secret, a finger on the lips when someone from outside asked: Second Section, what is that really?
It was the dullest section. Those slaves to the bottle, whose remains of reason still whispered: ‘go on, take a break, then you can booze it up like a man again!’ – accompanied by tearful wives or girlfriends, or else alone like me – came to this shady park, lived in blocks that were built in a style reminiscent of a whimsical summer house and would loll about there for a good month, guzzling vitamins and tranquillizers. In their free time they would corrupt the unhinged young girls who filled both the beautiful park and the woods around the lunatic asylum. The beige blocks held only an assemblage of recovering alcoholic males. In the other sections enclosed by brick buildings with barred windows and a tall, wire-entangled enclosure for walking there were would-be suicides, handsome young men beset by depression, curly-haired schizophrenics with eagle noses and fiery glances, unfortunate students who had decided it was better to sit in a nuthouse than go into the army, hysterical teenagers in conflict with their parents and lonely old people who no longer wanted to go anywhere except the kingdom of heaven. The latter were the ones who fluttered off to that vale, to the Butterflies Cemetery; there they would be quietly buried in a still quieter slope, mostly at night for some reason. I saw it – the soft sand, the restless butterfly graves, the pockets of the dead filled with wind-blown sand.
The alcoholics got better right in front of your eyes – they would lift a rusting two-pood1* weight by the door, hang around the kitchen, play cards, and nearly all of them had a handle that would open almost every door.
As not just a drunk but also a homeless drunk, I felt particularly good there. Clearly the Second Section was also, in a certain sense, a concentration camp whose administration and personnel attempted to turn the ‘drinking animal’ into a human again, even though the detox specialists and psychotherapists had long since given up believing in miracles and therefore in the meaning of their work. But they did what they could, or at least pretended to do so. A thin, nervous doctor with a sternly twitching cheek signed me up for the experimental group right away – I agreed to all the conditions. Every other afternoon he would take six or seven of us wretches to the attic and lie us down on roughly chest-high platforms, brown oil cloth-covered couches. He would slowly repeat pleasant words before urging us or even forcing us to relax. After a filling lunch the body would grow lazy and the eyes would shut of their own accord.
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?
‘Maybe I’ll come visit you,’ says Tula, her eyes lowered at the cracked sidewalk. She strokes my old jacket with her glove and leaves so quickly I don’t even have time to ask: when will that be?
I return plagued by the sweet torture I’d already forgotten – that’s the kind of guy I am! I was with her for a few hours, and I’m happy! Only an honourable person, only a person who loves selflessly can do that! I headed for the sanatorium’s white gates without in the least blaming myself for flagrantly breaking the rules. I sobered up quickly in the biting cold, but I chewed on some green cedar from the hedge just in case. Maybe its bitterness will overwhelm the bitterness of vermouth and chrysanthemums?
I was in luck, for the sister who smelled the reek of alcohol from the door and was already leaning forward to write my surname into the journal of miscreants, unexpectedly raised her eyes and briskly asked if I wasn’t… Domicele’s… Domicele’s cousin? I stared and asked: whose? But I immediately confirmed: aha! She really is my relative, my cousin, yes! The middle-aged sister shone with little golden wrinkles which didn’t age this woman in the least. She and Domicele had danced in the same ethnic folk dance group in exile! Oh, those were the days! Exile, of course, was an injustice but when you’re young… Domicele played there, and sang, and what a comic!… Domicele a comic? I thought. And why not? It’s just in the long run that everything atrophied – humour turned to sarcasm, irony to malice, and so forth. The sister forgot both her infamous journal and my bad smell. She reminded me of how pretty, intelligent and friendly Domicele was… But how badly things turned out for her there! Of course, no one did well, but for her? She was madly in love with an Estonian, you see, this mechanic who played the accordion. But it turned out he was already married and ridiculously stubborn. He wouldn’t agree to divorce the wife he had left somewhere on the islands – you know how it is with those Estonians. I didn’t know this dramatic detail from my relative’s life, how could I? So that’s what happened! The sister nearly cried because she was so sorry for Domicele. Even now, after so many years! She made me swear not to let anyone see me, but when I started moaning that I badly needed a little drop, she sighed and trickled a drop of pure alcohol into a beaker, diluted it with water out of a fly-splattered carafe and gave it to me: ‘Go ahead, choke!’ she said, but not angrily, not angrily…
***
Incidentally, our senior doctor, the actor’s brother with the twitching cheek, would cure the most hopeless drunks with spirits. Not everyone, of course not – just those who were brought in already flying with the pink elephants. The sisters and veterans said they were delyrikai, the dis-lyricists instead of the usual diagnosis of delirium tremens. At first I just shrugged – those guys didn’t resemble degenerate lyricists, or artists of any kind for that matter. Defined by their dazed eyes, crazed movements and endless struggles to get free, they would be tied up in the tiny sixth ward not far from the bathroom. They would tie the drunks up tightly with sheets, soaking them first so the knots wouldn’t come loose. We, the comparatively recovering ones, would take turns watching at their deathbed, moistening their dried lips with a rag and wiping the cold sweat from their brows. Furnished with an intravenous drip, continually poked and otherwise prodded, the dis-lyricists either recovered or rather quickly gave up the ghost. They’d have time to rave all kinds of nonsense, some of which really would have been worth writing down. Actually, they did manage to haul some of them off to the intensive care ward where they would bid farewell in peace to the seas of vodka and their drunken non-life.
But to my great surprise, after a few days those who returned to this terribly imperfect and disorderly world began looking longingly again at the woods beyond the wire fence and towards the noisy street where the dreary Rytas loomed – a store that sold liquor. The orderlies, and even the sisters would say, as if in their defence, that they didn’t remember anything. So you see, it was those raving under a death sentence that the doctors would water with pure medical spirits. With a sudden, well-practised movement they would open their firmly-clenched teeth and slosh in a good dollop of burning liquid, all the while holding the jawbone pressed in a way so that not a drop splashed out to the sides… I’ve held one by the feet during this operation: the poor guy thought they wanted to kill him – maybe strangle him? Lo and behold, most of the time this medicine would raise them from the dead. The revived patient would start demanding a second dose and the doctor almost always poured him some.
One day the senior doctor called me in. A week had already gone by since the meeting on the Boulevard and the visit in the café – don’t tell me they’d sniffed out something? I waited all that week for Tula to show up but she didn’t come. On my way to drink tea I’d glance at the intersection, loiter in the gateway, sit around on the bench next to the registry office – but no, she’s not coming.
The senior doctor took my blood pressure and listened to my heart. I saw how he loathed these procedures. Then he punched me and his eye twitched, maybe even more than usual.
‘You see,’ he began, ‘my brother told me everything… well, you know, that you’re… this vagrant.’ He tried to giggle. ‘Forty-five days have passed already, it’s actually even more now…’
I looked at him silently. That’s how long the course of treatment takes, as determined by the specialists – forty-five days.
‘I’m releasing you,’ the good man decided. ‘Tomorrow. Stay somewhere for a week, okay? Well, drink or not, whatever works out for you. It’d be better not to, of course! Then come again on Monday, I’ll take you in. You can stay today.’
He only wished me well, this neurasthenic who, as I later discovered, was an unhappy man in his own right, but he wasn’t omnipotent, either. I used to see that type, men and women with folders and briefcases, dashing into his office, some of them waving their hands in the doorway or even wagging a finger. No, not omnipotent. Apparently even he fails to carry out some responsibility or another, or treatment plans, or maybe even the percentage of cures is too small. So there you have it, he has worries up to his ears! Maybe even serious vexations. But to me he only complained that his brother hadn’t gotten the lead role again. Instead, he’ll be standing there again with a halberd, like a stuffed dummy! He tried to smile. This time he almost succeeded.
I went out into the yard, smoked a cigarette under a brown chestnut, and from a distance saw Tula hurrying along the gravel pathway. She ran straight for the horribly green office door. So she wasn’t here to see me. My heart beat calmly again, my blood pressure returned to normal. Not to see me. Just to the office. I gave a shout. She turned, squinted and recognised me. She waited for me to come up to her. She looked thoroughly irritated, maybe even angry, even though she spoke in a half-whisper like she always did. She needed some paperwork from the hospital office.
‘Wait a bit, if you want,’ she said. ‘If you want,’ she emphasised again, or maybe it just seems that way to me now, suspiciously assigning significance to everything? Possibly.
What paperwork could she need there? To travel out of the country? Hardly likely! Or maybe she is leaving, what do I know. After all, anyone travelling beyond the cordon has to show that they’re not insane – the insane asylum bureau searches through its extensive card catalogue and if you aren’t in their archive, they give out a certificate that maybe you won’t pull any tricks and you can go… I waited for you for a good half-hour. Coming out you looked even more grim and angry. Not a word about paperwork. No polite questions about how I, the patient, was feeling. We quietly headed off to that same Rytas for a coffee. I climbed the stairs and stood in line while she ran into the store and said something to a woman standing in another line. It was only as I finished slurping the coffee that I suddenly realised it was Tula’s mother. I was itching to ask her what the two of them were doing here, what they needed here. I barely restrained myself. Tula was no longer in a hurry. The muscles in her face composed themselves, her lips seemed more seductively swollen than ever. The wrinkles next to her lips relaxed and straightened out. Apparently her mother had agreed to wait somewhere for her. There was surely a great deal I didn’t know. We went out into a cool sunny day. When I suggested a smoke, she nodded vigorously: let’s go!
Manoeuvring between the cars, we ran across the inhumanly wide Olandu Street. On its opposite side the comfortable two-storey townhouses that had earlier belonged to Polish military officers had been completely renovated some time ago. Their entire grey and brown neighbourhood nestled in what was once a quiet and remote area next to Vilnius. The main road seethed, roared and wheezed now; the cars, it seemed, climbed atop one another as if marked with the sign of death. To me, at least, they resembled those pedestrians I had seen – barely animated drunks, bodies just pulled from the water.
There were no doors left anywhere and the two of us entered a narrow corridor and then went into the former kitchen. A smashed gas stove still stood there. I picked up the air-vent frame – the glass had been smashed out – that had fallen from the air vent and raised it to the hole that was once the window.
‘The frame,’ you muttered, ‘what a beautiful little frame!’
I immediately noticed the writing in black paint on the wall, which for some reason was in German: Wir sind ein okkupiertes Land! Oh well, at least it was there, in those Polish ruins. It should be photographed and sent to Der Spiegel, I said, and I translated it: ‘We are an occupied country!’ But it seemed occupation didn’t much concern you, Tula; you sniffed your little nose and that was all. I even remember what we smoked then as we sat on a fragrant stack of boards – it was Salem, long cigarettes smelling of menthol and packaged in Finland according to some kind of licence. It was you, Tula, who had them. You even gave me a couple of those cigarettes; I smoked them later, thinking about this strange meeting of ours. It was completely different from the other one, the meeting in the café.
It was as clear as day that she hadn’t gone there with her mum to visit me. But it wasn’t because of that fictional paperwork, either. And what of it, if after so many years I know the truth: you, Tula, were supposed to be committed to the First Ward with the milder cases and the losers tortured by romantic depression. But your mum, when she found out that my sullen shadow dragged itself around even here – you never did, after all, hide anything from her? – she immediately dropped the idea. Yes, Tula, it was only because of me that you evaded milk soup for supper, MGB in the vein, the silly interns with their psychological test folders – all of that merry madhouse. And after you left I was there hardly a half a day! Maybe something else really would have happened? You know, patients are like family. Maybe something would have changed? Changed where? Well, in our relationship, maybe even to our fates, what do I know? Maybe we would have been together after all, smoking fragrant Salems, spicy Ronhills or ordinary Primas, turning endless circles in the madmen’s lanes, climbing the wooded slopes, snuggling in the cold shade or even wandering as far as Butterflies Cemetery? You always did want to see it, at least once. I had filled your ears talking about it. Maybe we would have laid down there ourselves?
I put an arm around your shoulders and you didn’t so much as stir. I quickly pecked your cold, bloodless cheek and for some reason jumped back, but you sat there like a stone. Only the hand with the smoking Salem cigarette slowly swung down as you blew out a column of white smoke before swinging up again. You greedily inhaled, the cigarette shortening by nearly a centimetre.
‘Nothing would have turned out well for us anyway, nothing at all!’ you suddenly shouted so angrily that I cringed and slid off onto the ground. It was the first time I had heard your low voice so angry, Tula. It was so different from all the tones, nuances and modulations I had heard up until then! I wanted to ask: what wouldn’t have turned out well? Or maybe I was already asking, what should have happened? How badly I wanted to be disappointed in you then! Certainly all it would have taken was a single glance full of scorn or disgust, or even a carelessly thrown ‘drunkard!’ No, no, nothing of the sort! You sat there as before and from the little tip of your nose a clear drop trickled.
You sniffed, wiped it off with your plaid sleeve and laughed: ‘You see, I’m crying! You should be pleased!’
You announced this so solemnly, so seriously, that I was astonished – you weren’t putting on an act, you weren’t mocking me? I didn’t even suspect what it was that threatened you, but you already knew: from the Second City our militant, organised family had already raised its wings to move to somewhere near the border with Belarus… But even if I had known! Everything was already decided, as if it had been precisely drafted on a white piece of paper. This was the plan and I know this now: the daughter would rest in the hospital, and when she had recovered she would go straight to the refuge of the peaceful, natural surroundings of the small town of Pagude. There were too many ghosts of all sorts in the Second City. That’s the story!
I was powerless, but you, Tula, were even more so. Anyone observing us from outside would probably have said: run as far as you can from one another, you’re doomed! I’m already doomed as it is, I would have said to any such prognosticator, but what would you have answered, Tula? After all, you still suffered and how! But no one asked anyone anything. We stubbed out our cigarette butts and went out the opening into the suddenly gloomy street. Goodbye!
You went off without turning around even once, a grey knitted hat pulled over your head. Back then half of Lithuania wore hats like that. Some peevish guy who came out behind us started yelling – all the scum that come around here! – but I continued to watch you, silently. You walked faster and faster. All I saw was a woman come out from behind a dogwood bush – your mum, that time I recognised her. You linked arms and immediately disappeared from view. I didn’t even see where the two of you turned off. And how could I foresee that the next week I’d finally fall into the hands of the bluecoats, that after rotting in a temporary holding cell they wouldn’t release me into the sodden autumn but instead take me straight to the Drunkard’s Prison? Actually it was called by a much more innocent name. I didn’t foresee either that I wouldn’t see you, Tula, for three whole years or that when we did see each other again it really would be the last time. No premonition. Only an emptiness in my heart and completely normal blood pressure. All I knew then was that I wouldn’t be returning here on any Monday. Or any Tuesday, either.
Having made up my mind about this, I slowly crossed the roaring racecourse of Olandu Street and it was there that I was stopped by a writer I knew who was wearing dark glasses, a white coat that reached to his ankles and the elaborate walrus moustache. He was the one who was actually preparing to travel past the cordon; to West Germany no less, or the ‘moneyland’ as he himself called it. So it was he who had gotten that piece of paper, Tula. Even I was certain this guy wasn’t going to raise a stink while he was away; he’d know how to use both a bathroom and a fork. That type doesn’t disappoint. ‘Wir sind ein okkupiertes Land!’ – the writing on the wall in the Polish townhouse’s kitchen came to mind…
Translated by Elizabeth Novickas from Jurgis Kuncinas, Tula, Vilnius: Lithuanian Writers’ Union Publishers (1993).
Jurgis Kuncinas (1947–2002) began his literary career as a poet, but later became one of the most prominent prose writers of his generation, as well as a respected translator from German. His novels Glison’s Noose (Glisono kilpa, 1992), Tula (1993) and Movable Röntgen Stations (Kilnojamos Rontgeno stotys, 1998), and his short story collections, including Good Morning, Mr. Enrike (Laba diena, pone Enrike, 1996), are notable not only for their plots, but also for the copious histories that flow from his narrators’ memories. His prose works, which are full of humour and irony, most often depicted Soviet era Vilnius through restless, bohemian characters who cannot adapt to the rhythms of official life.
1* A pood is a unit of measure used in the Russian Empire equal to about 36 pounds.