Keys of Babylon (9 page)

And Pancho will laugh too and go on with ‘Visions of Johanna'. Every verse of that song. His great song he calls it. His prodigious feat of memory. Or I'll hear him tuning up on the gum-blistered pavement when I come out of the Sklep and then that line, the best line, the only line I listen to.
How does it feel
? Pancho who maybe once had a voice, still believing in that line. Still asking the question and knowing its answer. That's Pancho, who'll tell me this morning what it's like to be a rolling stone. And when he's finished he might add his own story of what it is to sit on the dock with the night fishermen, to lie under the esp and breathe good Moroccan draw into the lungs. Right down until it's too hot to hold. As if his body was full of sparks. Pancho who's still asking how it feels. Cracking that word into four shiny pieces.
Fee. Ee. Ee. Eel
. Who should wash his hair. Maybe his shirt. Pancho with his caved-in chest. The only troubadour of this town.

Roly's in too. Strangely, I met him first on the street. I was doing what I do, I was watching the sea. Then this sports car hammers past, brakes, turns round. When it reached me it slowed and the boy in the front passenger seat shouted.

You fucking shit, he shouted. You ignorant shit.

Then the car speeded off again, did a handbrake turn and came back. A black Mazda. This time it was the driver who yelled.

You shit. You bastard shit.

I stared him in the eye. Seventeen maximum. Dark hair with blond streaks. Good-looking kid with Ray-Bans and a big gold necklace. In a wax-polished car. A car like a scarab. There's money here, you see. Villas with high hedges. Personalised number plates. Oh yes. I noted the number.

So I shrugged as if to say, you got the wrong person. But he shouted again, then gunned the Mazda down the straight road towards the beaches.

That's when Roly rolls up.

Take no notice, he said. I know his parents. I'll intercede.

I liked that word. That
intercede
.

No problem, I said.

No, he said. It's unacceptable behaviour. High spirits because their exams have just finished. They're under pressure at this time of year. But a poor reflection. I hope they haven't been drinking.

And here's Roly now. Who is certainly drinking. Roly holding court in the Seagull Room. The barman has taken the Dewar's off its bracket on the wall and it waits at Roly's elbow. His blazered elbow. Roly wears a striped cricket blazer and a red bow tie. Roly is a fat man and his white flannels are stained yellow. And yes, Roly is giving the room his rape stories. Roly knows a good deal about rape. He was once a lawyer and is now a bar-room barrister. His jury grins, winces. Or maybe Roly is an opera star and this his proscenium.

The detail Roly provides is unsparing. The ambushes, the underwear. Every loving spoonful the perpetrators can squeeze out of themselves. Girls used like tissue paper. The eighty year olds accosted with broom handles.

Madge sucks on her Rizla.

Get off, she says. He's making it up.

If Madge was a candleflame you would expect her to go out. She is a happy-go-lucky anorexic, red haired, arms like fire tongs. She sits on a barstool and I can see the cracks in her heels and the dirt in those cracks, the dirt that I know will be there for the rest of her life.

He's making it up, she cackles. He's never seen a minge since his poor old mother got rid. He hasn't a clue. Have you Rolyo? Not a fucking clue.

But as Roly subsides, no one else feels like talking. To me, they're a predictable bunch. A postman with his loaded pouch, bundled letters tied with elastic bands, orders a second pint. A supermarket shelfstacker is sipping the own-brand vodka he brings in himself. Dullards, for the most part. Stammerers and twitchers. Porn-addled doleys. A roomful of ghosts on this July morning with the sun already hot on the tarmac and the light unbearable on the sea. And yet, for an hour, comrades of a sort. They will nod, each to each, on the street. They might even go to the same funerals.

At two minutes to nine I walk out to the car park and at nine Justin arrives with the van. The doors are open and Justin slows down but he doesn't stop. I get in head first through the back.

Now perhaps this is the best time to tell you about a mistake I've made. A mistake about my name. My first name is Nerys. When I arrived I didn't know Nerys was a girl's name in this part of the world. My mother called me Nerys after the river that flows through Vilnius. I hated it. My father hated it. But my mother insisted on Nerys as she insisted on few things in her life. I was her river god. I was the water spirit. That's what she told me.

Even back home it was difficult. My name felt wearisome. Sometimes it plagued me. If it had been up to my father, I would have been
Andrius
. A good masculine name. A warrior's name. But my father was rarely at home. He worked in an office for the Communist Party and after work he sat in bars, smoking, drinking Bajoru. That's all I know. I suppose he commanded a desk and moved papers about. That he spoke into a big black telephone. But if being called Nerys was a problem, having a father in the party in Vilnius was worse. When he died, I tried to atone. For being the son of a collaborator. Who ate sausage when the others ate bread. Who wore good shoes.

That was a difficult time. The Berlin Wall came down, but in Lithuania we'd been ahead of the game. Everyone was restless. There were men coming into Vilnius who had hidden in the forests for forty years. There were writers speaking on the radio when they were supposed to be banned. Or dead. Everything was changing, and fast.

By then, my father had given up. It wasn't long until the cigarettes killed him anyway. My mother had already been put away, locked up in that gloomy castle on Parko, hidden in the pines. So I was the only one left, the river god looking at the green Nerys with its devious current as I look at the tides in this town, spray black against the sun.

I was already staying in Uzupis. That used to be the gypsy district. It was where the ruffians lived. The anarchists. I had a room in a house that was falling down. Outside, there were posts propping up the walls. Dishwater ran along the cobbled street and black flags hung on the lamp posts.

Yes, I can remember. Back in 1991, Gorbachev came to see us. There were crowds and chanting and the certainty, not the hope, the certainty, that things would have to change. That night a friend took me to the Writers' Bar. It was downstairs in the main square. You couldn't move, it was thirty minutes to get served. Some great poet had arrived. He'd come out of hiding upcountry. His children were there too, and everyone was dancing and singing, politicians, Russian-speaking prostitutes, students like me, and the poet sitting on a ledge, high off the ground, reading his poems in this crazy dialect that was ours. Ours.

Me and my friend had one beer each. But we were already drunk. Drunk on adrenaline. We just stood in the crush, laughing at the photographs on the wall.

Because our writers looked like rock stars. Like the Beatles had once, with beards, or the Band, wild as mountainmen, backwoods philosophers with axes and manifestos in their hands. At home we always played the Beatles.
Happiness is a Warm Gun
. Or
As my Guitar Gently Weeps. Okay
, old stuff, but better than techno. Better than poor Pancho's Dylan. More life to it. Oh yeah, the White Album had been Lithuanian nerve gas in the Kremlin. We knew it was changing. Even with the Red Army tanks in the streets, we understood it had to change. Yet it took so long.

What a night that was. I came out two hours after dawn, up that steep flight of steps from the Writers Bar. And there was a girl with me. She came along and we'd never spoken. Just danced. I thought she was a prostitute, but she was a schoolteacher. She came with
me
. We took our shoes off and walked in the flooded gutters down to the Katedros Square. The square was a lake. And we danced in the lake, holding our shoes, the cathedral bells ringing seven or eight, and a woman on a bicycle going past, waving a flag.

Some time afterwards, when the dust had cleared, I was down in Drusk, near the Belarus border, working in an open-air museum. We were all determined to show the world what we'd endured. We wanted to publish our history. I was only a labourer but I did my bit, sleeping in a tent in the forest, or in the wooden huts that held exhibits. So the statues of Joe Stalin and Lenin and the rest of the crew were taken down and brought there. From all over the country. Some of them were already crumbling, the ferro-concrete breaking up, steel reinforcements rusting away.

And I was part of it. Building the huts, laying the paths, cutting grass. At night we'd go drinking under the birch trees. Build a fire and pass round the vodka and the magic mushrooms. There was a man there used to collect mushrooms in his shirt. Brought in these red ones once, with white growths on them. They were death caps, somebody said. Death caps in the death camps. How we laughed.

Because that's what we were doing. We were recreating a concentration camp. To show the world what had happened in our country. Hidden away in the miles of spruce, of birch. What Hitler did. Then what Stalin did. What Snieckus did to his own people.

By then I'd stopped thinking about my father. All the yellow files in his cupboards. The staples going rusty and the cigarette ash in the turn-ups of his trousers. Anyway, this man showed us how to eat them, the red mushrooms. They weren't death caps. They were another amanita. But everybody knew it was risky. And how far away was Chernobyl anyway? We'd often meet old women in the forest, picking berries and fungi to sell at the roadside. It was their only income. Everybody knew it was dangerous. That all the mushrooms were radioactive. But we ate them anyway, as we ate the red amanita.

Oh boy, I felt strange. Maybe it was wonderful but the strange is all I remember. I was inside out. I was a statue of Joseph Stalin with a spider web over my face. I was this old mushroom woman who had survived Hitler and survived Stalin and survived my father. She lived in a hut and grew Michaelmas daisies. And the colour of those flowers was the colour of my dream. Purple haze.
Mauve
. I've hated mauve ever since. I could murder mauve. She told us we should sleep with the red mushroom under our pillows. Then we could dream, she said. If you want to dream, she said, then sleep with the mushrooms. She didn't know we'd been eating them.

But that was the best time. We were a real team who lived there, the girls with money spiders in their hair, the men roasting potatoes in the fire. That's where Andrius really died. Killed by the red mushrooms. But I was never Andrius.

Instead I was the labourer who looked like Richard Manuel from The Band. That's what the others said. Wild and creative. Who took cocaine.Who played the drums and sang. Played the marimba too, the sound of a ghost. Hung himself three months before Chernobyl went up. But every day I went to work in a concentration camp. And every night I drank vodka in the forest. The amanitas put my inside on my outside. They shone the mauve into my mind. Yes, the strange is all I remember. Those mushrooms shook me up. Yes, I had black hair and a beard but I couldn't play one lousy chord on the guitar we passed around.

Sometimes I swept up the gravel at the camp entrance. Not that many visitors came. You see, it's not the kind of history people are proud of. If you are a certain age, from a certain place, it's better not to be asked questions. Because, look, not everyone can be a hero. Not everyone is a poet standing on a plinth telling the world how brave they've been. Holding out against the bad guys.

So, it's wiser not to ask. Over here, in this country, no one's a part of history. History is something you learn in schools and forget. But at home, you're involved. You're part of it, whether you want to be or not. Every thing you ever did there is a historical act. One day you sneak on your friend. The next day you save his life.

I would be at the camp entrance in the morning, and boy, one day, I hear a rumbling. This lorry is coming down the road through the trees. This low loader driven by a man in a tartan shirt. Just a little the worse for wear. He had a gang with him who jumped off and said, give us a hand here. We need a hand.

It took us two days. Two days to put together this statue they'd taken from a square in Kaunas, I suppose, because it never came from Vilnius. Well I never saw it there. Must have been about thirty of us, mainly soldiers, with ropes and pulleys, digging foundations, unpacking the parts. With a professor from the national museum telling us what to do.

And it's there to this day. Near that entrance to the camp. It's called the Spirit of Spring, or the Goddess, though the Soviets weren't hot on goddesses, I know. And yes, I loved that statue, that Russian statue. It was graceful. I'd go so far as to say it was beautiful, though we're supposed to laugh at all those things now. Clumsy, dutiful, uninspired. That's what we're told by the critics to think. But there she was, a concrete dryad, pale as one of that old woman's mushrooms.

I never bothered to ask who was the sculptor. I just loved the sculpture. At dawn, I'd stand in the dew. The mist would be rising and I'd stroke her rough skin. She was chalky, that goddess, and she spread herself like a gymnast. Or I'd look at her from the trees, as the river vapours lifted. It was as if she made herself out of the sky. One week she hadn't been there. The next, there she was as if it had always been so. A miracle, sort of. Because maybe this was the real Nerys. Maybe this was how a river god might look. Not crowned with weeds. Not fanged like a pike. But a gymnast. With the chalk on her hands.