Darkness and Company Read online

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  KARLA GRUODIS is a translator, editor and artist based in Vilnius, where she founded and edited Lithuania’s first English-language newspaper, The Lithuanian Review, in 1990. She is the editor and author of Feminist Excursus: The Concept of Woman from Antiquity to Postmodernism (Pradai, 1995) and was active in the post-Soviet Lithuanian women’s movement. Her translations include Leonidas Donskis’s A Small Map of Experience: Aphorisms and Reflections (Guernica, 2013), Antanas Škėma’s White Shroud (Vagabond Voices, 2018) and regular contributions to the online literary journal Vilnius Review.

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  Translated from the Lithuanian Tamsa ir partneriai

  Copyright © Sigitas Parulskis 2012

  Copyright © Alma Littera 2012

  English translation copyright © Karla Gruodis 2018

  Preface copyright © Sigitas Parulskis 2015

  English translation copyright © Romas Kinka 2015

  Originally commissioned by Writers’ Centre Norwich 2015

  Afterword © Tomas Vaiseta 2018

  English translation copyright © Karla Gruodis 2018

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

  The moral rights of the author and translators are hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-7206-2033-7

  Epub ISBN 978-0-7206-2034-4

  Mobipocket ISBN 978-0-7206-2035-1

  PDF ISBN 978-0-7206-2036-8

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Cover design: Davor Pukljak, frontispis.hr

  Typeset by Octavo Smith Publishing Services

  The translation of this book was supported by the Lithuanian Culture Institute.

  CONTENTS

  Preface: The Street with No Name

  Darkness and Company

  Pigs

  Three Kings

  Christening

  Pontius Pilate

  Night Watch

  The Artist

  The Cross

  Judita and Aleksandras

  The lost sheep

  Talitha Cumi

  The Father

  Childhood

  Test of Faith: Baltramiejus

  The Mother and the Sister

  Coffin Making

  Lessons in Asceticism

  The Good Samaritan

  News of Aleksandras

  Totenkopf

  Jokūbas the Elder Speaks in Parables

  Odysseus and Christ

  Morta and Marija

  Salome

  The Letter

  Christmas

  Escape

  Paintings

  The Empty Grave

  Afterword by Tomas Vaiseta

  PREFACE

  The Street with No Name

  The very first word that comes to my mind when thinking about the subject of my novel Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness and Company) is ‘obscenity’.

  In J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello there is an episode in which the eponymous writer is reading Paul West’s novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg. Described in it is the execution of the officers who had wanted to kill Adolf Hitler. Coetzee’s protagonist is so disgusted by the naturalistic descriptions that she pronounces the book ‘obscene’. Obscene because such things, generally speaking, cannot happen, and if they do they cannot be made public, they must be kept hidden, as has happened in all the slaughterhouses of the world.

  To write about the massacres of Jews in Lithuania is also obscene. When Tamsa ir partneriai was published, I found out that it was even considered vulgar. And, alas, not for the same reasons that J.M. Coetzee was talking about through the words of Elizabeth Costello. Why did I need to write such a book?

  I was born in northern Lithuania, on the outskirts of the small town of Obeliai – to be more precise, on the lands of a former manorial estate in one of the old estate-workers’ cottages, which still today retain their old-fashioned shingle roofs. Perhaps ten families of peasants, workers and servants had lived there. To the south there was a lake; to the north, on a hill, there stood a windmill; to the east, through the tops of the trees, one could see the twin-towered old neo-Gothic church; and to the west the distillery, built in 1907 by Jan Pszedecki, the former lord of the manor.

  Even further to the north, beyond the windmill, which had long ago ceased to catch any wind, among the bushes and the grass, there was an old cemetery. Headstones decorated with large, incomprehensible, angular marks stood there, crooked, frozen in a variety of poses. We, the children living on the manorial estate, would often play war games there. The adults called it ‘the Jewish cemetery’, and these words sounded most mysterious to us children, almost like the words ‘pirates’ or ‘treasure’, because there had been no Jews in our small town for a long time. The Jews of our town were never mentioned, not at school, not at home. It was as if that cemetery dated from the days of the Egyptian pyramids or the Acropolis.

  In 2010 I was visiting relatives in London. My second cousin Ernestas and his wife Daiva, who was working at that time as cultural attaché at the Lithuanian embassy in the UK, kindly suggested I come to stay with them and take a look around the city, which I had never before visited. One day we visited the Imperial War Museum, and I came across something there that shocked, distressed and shamed me. In the section on the Holocaust there is a diagram showing where and how many Jews had been killed in Europe during the Second World War, and on that diagram I also found my own unfortunate small town in the north of Lithuania, marked with only the numbers and the bare facts: 1,160 Jews were killed there by the Nazis and local collaborators. I don’t know how to explain it, but I suddenly felt unmasked. For f
orty-five years I had taken no interest in this subject, I had avoided it, evaded it, because, most probably, I had been afraid of the truth. And now this truth was formulated and presented in the form of dry facts. I myself now find it strange how that could have happened in the way it did. After 1990, when Lithuania regained its independence, I had already read about the participation of Lithuanians in the mass murder of the country’s Jews, had discussed it, had argued about it, but, all the same, I spoke about it as if it were just my own private, personal matter. As if it were only up to me to confirm or otherwise the participation of Lithuanians in that slaughter. But what I had been thinking about had already been formulated and put on a wall in a museum a long time ago.

  It could not have been clearer; it was public knowledge, and it was shameful. It came as a shock to me. Something clicked in my head. And the worst thing was the shame. The shame that I, like most Lithuanians, had in all manner of ways tried to avoid the simple truth. At that moment, in the Imperial War Museum in London, I very clearly understood what the conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus meant in Christian mythology.

  In the autumn of 2010 I spent a couple of months as a writer in residence in Salzburg. During a conversation a local writer asked me if anything had been written in Lithuania on the Holocaust. I could call to mind a couple of writers who had, but their books had been written a long time before. In present-day independent Lithuania, however, I could not think of any such works. Historians had already been working on this subject for some time, but novelists, for whatever reason, had avoided it. That same evening I found a piece on the internet by the Lithuanian historian Arūnas Bubnys in which he writes about the mass killings of Jews in the Lithuanian countryside. In discussing the Holocaust in Lithuania, the massacres of Vilnius and Kaunas were always mentioned, and it had been the Nazis who had murdered the Jews. I, like most Lithuanians, knew very little about the slaughter that had taken place in the countryside and the fact that, while there were a few Germans in the special squads that perpetrated these crimes, mostly they were Lithuanians. And only because we did not want to know. I did not want to know. And during the Soviet occupation the conditions for us not to know were conveniently created. The vast majority of Lithuanians are still reluctant to speak about this subject, and, if they do, more often than not they fall back on the same arguments: the Jews were shot by the German Nazis and a few Lithuanian degenerates, who perhaps were not even really Lithuanians; the majority of Jews were communists and NKVD agents, and so their destruction under the prevailing conditions of war could be justified; when, in 1940, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet army, it was the Jews who met the Soviet tanks with flowers and then took a very active part in the government structures of the occupying authorities; they were Soviet agitators and political leaders, and they were the ones who also played a part in the deportations of Lithuanians to Siberia; and so on.

  Another very strange, but perhaps no less relevant argument, which I would sometimes hear from my mother, was that the Jews crucified Jesus Christ and that is why such a terrible punishment was visited upon them. In reading the documents and memoirs about the torture, humiliation and murder of Jews in Lithuania, I came across this argument several times. In some paradoxical way, in the thinking of a Lithuanian, Jesus Christ was not even a Jew. Perhaps it was this idea that prompted me in the novel to give the members of the killing squad the names of Christ’s disciples and why they refer to themselves as ‘the apostles’. Of course, this is literature, but I needed a form, a certain religious context, because in Lithuania in the mid-twentieth century Christianity was a very powerful force. Even during the Soviet period, religion for Lithuanians was one of the principal ways of expressing identity, national consciousness and resisting the occupation. Even more important in this regard was the Lithuanian language and literature. With the founding of Saūdis, the Lithuanian independence movement, in its attempt to liberate Lithuania from the Soviet empire, poetry and folk songs were more important than weapons. At the Saūdis rallies talks were given by poets and writers, that is to say, by those who knew the Lithuanian language best and who wrote in it. Of course, the reputation of literature and those who create it is not the same today as it once was, but it seemed to me to be an important act of consciousness to write a book in Lithuanian about Lithuanians who took part in the massacres of Jews. And not just for me but for all our people.

  So this was the genesis of Tamsa ir partneriai. Why did I decide to write such a novel? In the West it would seem the subject has been covered comprehensively in books, in many films and in countless memoirs. The victims and their executioners are now lying under the ground. The first thing that made my head spin was the opportunity to talk about something that in Lithuania was almost taboo. To write on a subject that carries risk, which is unpleasant, and with which one has to grapple like Jacob wrestling with the angel. And even before beginning to write, one already knows that one will at the very least be left bruised and certainly without any blessing.

  What should one do about mass murder, about which both the executioners and the victims have something to say? How should one deal with the obscenity referred to by J.M. Coetzee? Do we really learn anything from the mistakes of the past, and, if we do, do we become better human beings as a result, or do the scum become even smarter and harder to bring to justice? Unfortunately, I was rebuked not for describing the executions but because I had taken on the subject of the murderers in the first place.

  I received all manner of criticism – that the Jews had paid me, that I was defaming my motherland – but I called to mind a line from Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, in which he states that the most patriotic act is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonourably, foolishly or viciously. My book caused great controversy. On the one hand I was awarded the title of Person of Tolerance 2012, but on the other I was called a traitor. It was suggested that in my next book I should write about homosexuals – meaning that the subject I had chosen was sensationalist, and I was just courting cheap publicity. I was admonished for not writing about the members of the Lithuanian resistance who had been murdered by the Soviets, for not writing about the Jewish members of the NKVD and so on. The biggest complaint, which I received from a serious literary critic, was that there was no repentance in my novel and for that reason it was not written sincerely and I was little more than a representative of the Holocaust industry. To tell the truth, I find unacceptable the point of view that literature has to do something, to repent, condemn, judge, that it has to be ideologically committed. At any rate, I became convinced that there exists in Lithuania the premise that if one writes about the mass murder of the Jews, one is after something shameful: money, attention, undeserved popularity. (Just for the record, in my view, for a writer to seek popularity and to be recompensed for his or her work is not a sin.) It is a simple fact that in Lithuania there is a very strong tendency to believe that it is better not to take on the subject of the Jews, and if one does, one is guilty, no matter what.

  Repentance is a complicated matter. A person who repents publically, strenuously, will always be regarded with suspicion, because repentance is a very internal, subtle feeling. Like shame. From the time that I saw that diagram in that museum in London, when I saw the numbers, I was accompanied by a feeling of shame. My favourite Polish writer is Witold Gombrowicz, who spent part of his life in exile. He said that it doesn’t matter what complexes a writer has, what’s important is whether he is able to transform them into a fact of culture. I do not know if I was successful in turning my guilt into a fact of culture of any quality. Some people turn guilt and shame into aggression; others, spurred on by such experiences, take the path of awareness. I really cannot say if my book is just one more statistical achievement or rather a sign of awareness, of a more real relationship with existence. I don’t know.

  As regards repentance, I read a lot of documentary material, interviews with Lithuanians who had directly participated in the mass killings, a
nd I was surprised that I found no repentance there. By way of example, here is an extract from the interview of one such:

  In the first group of Jews that had been brought here there were about thirty persons. We shot at them from a distance of twenty metres. Our group at that time shot about 300 people, mainly men. We took the things belonging to the shot Jews. I took two suitcases, in which there were two men’s suits and a man’s overcoat. Chrome-tanned boots, women’s dresses, men’s over- and underclothes, some strips of material for women’s overcoats, two watches – a wristwatch and a pocket-watch – and other things, which I took home with me.