This week we bring you a final installation of our series featuring Lithuanian writers inspired not only by these excellent writers, but because the Baltic countries are is this year’s Market Focus at the London Book Fair.
This excerpt of Darkness and Company is by the prolific Sigitas Parulskis. With a healthy sampling of Plato, this piece explores questions of photography, truth, and beauty as a young photographer goes in search of the perfect light to capture a horrific scene of violence and death during the Holocaust. The jarring and unsettling nature of this piece gives us a taste for the rest of Darkness and Company and reveals an incredibly talented writer.
This showcase is made possible by Lithuanian Culture Institute.
The word ‘angel’ was scrawled on the blackboard in chalk. The rest of the sentence had been erased. Angel of vengeance, angel of redemption—it could have been either one.
He got up quietly so as not to awaken the other men and went out into the yard. He couldn’t see the guard, who was probably off dozing somewhere. The Germans were staying at the local police station; the brigade was sleeping in the town’s school. After a night of festivities at a local restaurant, most of the men were indistinguishable from the mattresses spread on the floor.
Vincentas stuffed his camera into his coat and headed off in the direction of the forest. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five in the morning. The sun was just coming up—the best time of the day if you wanted to catch the light. To capture the idea of light, as Gasparas would say. Where could he be now? Underground, probably; still wearing his thick-lensed glasses. Lying in the dark, trying to see the essence of things with his myopic eyes. His grey beard sticking up, his thin hair pressed to his forehead in a black band. Although short-sighted and ailing, he had been a strange and interesting person. His photography students called him by his first name, Gasparas. The photographer Gasparas. It was from Juozapas that Vincentas had first heard about photography, that miracle of light. While still a teenager he had read a few articles and a small book called The Amateur Photographer, and then, when he turned eighteen, he had bought his first camera, a used Kodak retina. But it didn’t go well, so he had found Gasparas. Without his thick-lensed glasses Gasparas couldn’t see a thing. He would take them off, look straight ahead with his strange, empty eyes and say, ‘Now I can see the real world.’
Vincentas liked studying with Gasparas, who did not talk only about technical things—distance, focus, exposure, making prints—but also liked to philosophize and was good at it. A frozen image, Gasparas would say, raising his finger and then pausing, is not an image, because a photograph is a frozen idea. Whose idea? He didn’t know. The world’s, God’s, man’s. Nature’s. When you are photographing a tree and there is no one else around, whose idea could it be? If the world is God’s idea about goodness, beauty and truth, then the tree is also God’s idea about the tree. And man is God’s idea about—about what?
Gasparas was talking about Plato and his cave. About how people are like the prisoners squatting in that cave, underground, chained up so that they can neither move nor turn around. There is a crack behind them, and all they can see is the shadows on the wall before them. If someone walks up there, behind them, the prisoners see moving shadows and their own shadows, but they do not see the true light. People never see the true light because they do not understand its source. It emanates not from the heavens above nor from electric lamps. It is there, inside. Socrates knew that, and Christ knew that, and when they spoke about love they were talking about that very light.
But if the world is made up of God’s bad ideas—if we are ideas about falsehood, malice, envy—then there is no hope for us, no hope for our souls.
Gasparas often talked about Plato’s allegory of the cave and liked to say that Plato was the first theorist of photography. People cannot see the beauty of this world with the naked eye; they generally see only the shadows, not the essence, of things. But photography can do that—it can show us what an object really is. Because photography is not just the object itself; it is always above it, beyond it.
He would speak about the world of ideas and constructs, but Vincentas best remembered the image of people sitting chained in a cave, able only to see shadows. Who are the ones walking by—philosophers? Or prophets, warriors, or perhaps rich men who can purchase anything they desire, even truth?
Feeling somewhat nauseous and light-headed, Vincentas strode down the country road. He wasn’t sure if he felt that way from the alcohol he had drunk or from what he had seen the day before. He remembered Gasparas and his cave, because now he felt as though he were in a cave himself. Everything that was happening around him seemed to be happening somewhere off to the side, as if behind a transparent wall. He felt ill. The invalid’s world is like living in the cave, where one can only see shadows and reflections of the living, the well.
He thought he saw some movement in the pit. The ditch-diggers, in their haste and laziness, had not finished burying the dead—they had just sprinkled them with lime and thrown on a few shovels of earth. The contours of the bodies were sharp in the morning sun, and here and there the sparkling layer of lime looked like snow fallen in midsummer. How many were down there—a thousand, fifteen hundred? He had not managed to photograph anything yesterday. Although he had known and had prepared, when the bullets began to spray and the people, struck by them, to collapse dead, he was overcome by a paralysis that held him until the very end. He had pressed the button a couple of times but doubted that he had captured anything clearly. He had been standing too far from the ditch, scared to go any closer because Jokūbas the Elder had threatened him: if I see a lens pointed at me I’ll shoot you! After that he hadn’t tried to raise his camera to his eyes, had just stood and watched.
Vincentas approached the edge of the pit, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Now he would have to get used to smoking not just after sex but after death. Below, by his feet, lay a little girl. Her slight body was half covered with lime and earth; she lay prone, and you could tell it was a girl only from the stiff braids. He kneeled down on one knee, looked around and stretched out his hand and whispered, ‘Talitha cumi . . .’ Get up, little girl. He was echoing the words said by Jesus to the daughter of Jairus.
He looked around again and was overcome by a feeling of shame and despair. It was all so unexpected—at once horrific and prosaic. As though it were not the thousand people killed yesterday lying there in the ditch but mannequins, or extras in a film, who would soon get up, dust off their clothes and return to the village until the next session.
His hands trembling, he pulled out his camera and tried to find the best angle. One side of the girl was lit up, the other in shadow. Her body is trapped in a cave under the earth, while her soul—or perhaps only its shadow—walks around above. As the sun rises, shadows are long, just as when it sets. It is the best time of the day to take photographs. The best time to become light.
Translated from the Lithuanian by Karla Gruodis
Sigitas Parulskis (b. Obeliai, Lithuania, 1965) is Lithuania’s leading and most translated contemporary writer; his works have appeared in more than ten languages. After his first year of literature studies at Vilnius University he was conscripted into the Soviet Army and served for two years in a parachute regiment in East Germany, an experience that inspired his 2002 novel Trys sekundės dangaus (Three Seconds of Heaven). A prolific writer of poetry, fiction, essays and plays, Parulskis has been honoured with all the major Lithuanian literary awards. He was named Lithuania’s Person of Tolerance in 2012 for Darkness and Company (Tamsa ir partneriai), which explores the Holocaust in Lithuania from the perspectives of local executioners and a young photographer forced to witness the massacres. He lives and works in Vilnius.
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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