Translated from the Lithuanian by Romas Kinka, read by Sean Patterson
Thalita, cumi ('Little girl, I say to you, arise')
The day after the mass killing of Jews outside a small Lithuanian town, Vincentas, assigned to the killing squad by an SS officer, goes to photograph the dead lying in a pit.*
On the school blackboard someone had written 'angel' in chalk. Perhaps it had been a part of a sentence. All the other words had been erased. Angel of Punishment, Angel of Salvation – it could have been either one.
He got up and very quietly, so as not to wake the men sleeping on the floor, went out into the yard. The guard was nowhere to be seen, he was most probably snoozing in some spot he had found. The Germans were staying in the police station. Mattresses had been laid out on the floor in the small town's school for the squad to sleep on and after all the drinking at the local restaurant, one could hardly tell most of the men from the mattresses they were lying on.
Vincentas put his camera under his coat and headed in the direction of the forest. He looked at his watch; it was almost five in the morning. The sun was already coming up, the very best time of day if you wanted to catch the light. To stop the thoughts of life, as Gasparas would say. I wonder where he is now? In the ground, he thought. With his glasses and their thick lenses. He's lying in the darkness and trying with his short-sighted eyes to discern the essence of things. His grey beard is sticking up, his thinning hair pressed to his forehead by a black narrow band. He was strange and interesting, even though unwell, and short-sighted. They, who had come to study photography, called him by his first name – Gasparas. Gasparas the Photographer.
Photography at that time was quite a new thing; it was Juozapas who had told Vincentas about this miracle of the light, and he, while still a teenager, had read a book with the title The Amateur Photographer, as well as several articles on photography. Then, when he turned eighteen, he bought his first camera, a second-hand Kodak Retina. Because he wasn't getting on very well with his photography, he searched out Gasparas, Gasparas the Photographer. Without his thick-lensed glasses he couldn't see anything. He'd take off his glasses, look straight in front of him with his strange, empty eyes and say – now I can see the world as it really is.
[…]
Gasparas used to tell the story of Plato and his cave. People are like slaves who have been imprisoned in an underground cave, they are chained down, they can't move or turn around, there's a gap in the wall behind and all they can see are the shadows on the wall facing them. When someone is walking there, above, they see the moving shadows but they can't see the real light. People never see the real light because they don't correctly understand the source from which it emanates. It doesn't emanate from the sky and it's not electrical lamps that emit it. It is there, inside, Socrates knew that, and Christ knew that, and when they talked about love, it was that light they were speaking about.
But if the world is the embodiment of the terrible thoughts of God, if we are the embodiment of thoughts about falsehood, malice and envy then we are damned, our souls are damned.
Gasparas would often remember Plato's Allegory of the Cave and say that Plato was the first theoretician of photography. Human beings are unable to discern the beauty of this world with their naked eyes, they most often see only the shadows of things and not their essence. Photography could do that. To show things as they really were. Moreover, photography is always behind a thing or above a thing but not the thing itself.
[…]
Vincentas walked down the country road, feeling a little dizzy and nauseous. He couldn't be sure if he was feeling that way from the alcohol he'd drunk or from what he had seen yesterday. He remembered Gasparas and his cave, because he himself felt as if he were in a cave. Everything that was happening around was happening as if close by, as if behind a transparent wall. He felt as if he were an invalid. The world of an invalid is similar to life in a cave, where only the shadows and reflections of the lives of the living and the able-bodied can be seen.
It seemed to him that someone was moving in the pit. The gravediggers in their hurry and out of laziness had not finished burying the people that had been shot, all they had dome was sprinkle some lime on them and thrown a few shovels-full of earth on them. The contours of the dead bodies were visible in the morning sunlight, and through the earth here and there a shining layer of lime that been sprinkled on looked like snow that fallen in the middle of summer. How many of them were there – a thousand, fifteen hundred? Yesterday he hadn't been able to photograph anything. Even though he knew about it and had prepared for it but when the volleys of shots started and the people struck down by the bullets began to fall in dead, he stood rooted to the ground up to the very end. He did press down on the shutter release button but did not believe that he had been able to photograph anything clearly. He had been standing too far away from the pit. He had been afraid to come any closer because Jokūbas the Elder had threatened him – if I see you pointing that thing at any time – I'll kill you! So he didn't try to raise the camera to his eye but only stood and looked.
Vincentas came up to the edge of the pit, pulled out a cigarette and lit up. Now he'll have to get used to smoking not just after sex but also after death. At the bottom, by his feet lay a small girl. Her slight body was half covered with lime and earth. She was on her knees with her head down and only from her stiff pigtails could one tell that it was a small girl. He bent down on one knee, looked around, and then stretched out his hand and whispered:
Thalita, cumi. Little girl, I say unto you, arise.1
He looked around him again. A feeling of shame and despair overtook him. All of it was so unbelievable, so horrible and yet at the same time so commonplace. As if it were not a thousand people murdered yesterday lying in the pit but only mannequins or bit players who would soon get up, brush off their clothes and return to town for the next performance.
With trembling hands he pulled out his camera and tried for a long time to find the best angle. One side of the girl was lit but the other in shadow. Her body was imprisoned in an underground cave while her soul was walking above, her soul, or perhaps just her shadow. With the sun rising, the shadows are as long as when the sun is setting. This was the very best time of day to take photographs. This was the very best time to turn time into light.
He liked to photograph Judita, she would get out of work earlier, the sun was going down, she would lie on the bed by the window, one side of her lit up, the other in shadow.
The pubic mound also threw a shadow, as did her breasts and nose, her arm slightly raised or under head, the bend of her knee, the line of her thigh, it all threw a shadow, and all of it was as if just a reflection, as if it were not the real thing, only an intimation of it. Judita had once said to him:
'You look at me as I were a thing.'
'When?'
'When you're photographing me.'
'No,' he answered. 'I don't look at you like that.'
'Like what then?'
'Like at a very precious thing.'
Here, by the pit, full of Jews that had just been killed, he felt that he had betrayed Judita. He would never dare to confess having got involved in such a predicament, and he would feel the guilt forever. Even though he never killed anyone. Yes, he was only an observer. Like that one, the Other. He was hanging on his cross and observing acts of iniquity being carried out in his name. A good excuse – I would do something but my hands are nailed to the cross. With nails of shame to a pillar of shame. Vincentas felt that he was going to throw up at any moment.
As he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, something drew his attention, like a flash of light on a blade. On the right, on a slope, there was the rippling water of the lake, and straight in front stood several solitary pine trees, as if they had escaped from a forest, or perhaps the opposite was true, perhaps they were not able to return to the forest. 'Thalita, cumi,' he muttered again under his breath to himself. Everyone wanted a miracle. Even the slightest one, even the feeblest and smallest of miracles. And then he really did get a fright. His camera fell out his hands and landed at his feet with a soft thud, he began backing away, far away from the edge of the pit.
There, at the bottom someone was moving. A girl in the pit. Her hair was as white as the whitest wool or snow, her feet were like bronze refined in a furnace. Instinctively he began to look for something – a stone or a stick to defend himself with. The girl moved again. And she moved not as if of her own volition, not as if through her own efforts, but as if possessed by some force, emanating from somewhere else, from outside, from the depths. His mouth began to burn as if scalded with sulphuric acid, he tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was as if made of wood and would not obey him. He took a few steps forward, picked his camera off the ground, and came up to the edge of the pit. He climbed carefully into the pit, which was wasn't very deep, at the edges at the bottom it was trampled gravel and then sand further in. Afraid to step on a body that had been buried, he carefully tapped the girl's body with his shoe. The movement stopped. She was no longer moving. If he had had a gun, would he have dared to shoot someone who had already been shot? To finish her off, so she wouldn't suffer any more? Perhaps she could still survive this? Perhaps he could save at least one life and then his guilt would be less? Vincentas looked around helplessly. I died, but look – I am alive forever and ever, and hold the keys of death and the world of the dead.
The girl's body moved again, turned slowly on its side and from under it appeared a hand covered in blood and lime. The world of the dead called to him. And he could not withstand the temptation. He pressed the shutter-release button of his camera several times. He liked the sound. Like that of a small guillotine. That's what Gasparas the Photographer called it. Click, click, click – listen, you hostages to darkness, that is how in reality a head is cut off, it dies so it can be reborn on a roll of film. The same as before but now different. The light cut, the light arisen.
He then stretched out his hand, took firm hold of a child's palm and pulled.
The boy was no more than ten or twelve, with blood on him but uninjured. There were several holes in his underclothes which were clearly too big for him. He had lain there all night; perhaps he had lost consciousness or perhaps out of fright.
'A miracle,' he said as if to the boy, as if to himself. 'You have a chance. We all always have a chance. Get out of my sight. Just get out of my sight,' he said, but could not hear his own voice.
The child understood. He ran through the dewy meadow in the direction of the solitary pines. The sun was barely to be seen above the tops of the pines. He ran towards it not in a straight line but staggering from side to side, his legs bending under him. An ugly trail was left in the grass. Vincentas pointed his camera and pressed the button again: click! Look – I hold the keys of death and the kingdom of life. It was the sin of pride but so sweet. The pear, the juice of which flows through one's fingers, the blade of death cutting through the soul.
From Sigitas Parulskis, Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness & Company). Vilnius: Alma littera, 2012, p. 82-88.
1 'Thalita, cumi' is Aramaic, the words Jesus speaks to the dead daughter of Jairus (Mark 5:41).
(c) Sigitas Parulskis / Romas Kinka, 2012
Sigitas Parulskis (b. 1965) is a poet, playwright and essayist. He majored in Lithuanian language and literature at Vilnius University. All That out of Longing, a collection of his poetry, was published in 1990. Other work includes several plays and books of poetry, four books of essays, two collections of short stories and six novels. He lives in Vilnius.
Sean Patterson trained at RADA. He has appeared in the West End in Michael Frayn's Look Look and The Royal Baccarat Scandal. For the company aboard the QM2 he has appeared in Richard III, Great Expectations and Confusions. On TV Sean has appeared in London's Burning, The Bill, Peak Practice and Mosley.
*Fuller context to the extract published above is here:
In Sigitas Parulskis's novel Tamsa ir partneriai (Darkness & Company) the protagonist Vincentas is a photographer who is stopped in the street by Lithuanian members of a Jewish killing squad in the first few days of the Germans arriving in Lithuania in the summer of 1941, following a year-long occupation by the Soviets.
The Lithuanians take his camera away, ask him if he's a Jew (most photographers before World War II in Lithuania would have been Jewish) and when he replies that he's just a photographer, he's then accused of being a Bolshevik. The encounter ends up with him being taken before an SS officer who questions him about his photography and whether he knows anything about art photography. When Vincentas says he does, the officer tells him to bring him some examples of his work. Satisfied with what he sees, the SS officer, whom Vincentas takes to calling the Artist because of his interest in art, assigns him to the same killing squad to take photographs of the mass murder of Lithuanian Jews and to bring the photographs to him and no one else. Vincentas agrees in order to save his own life.
Vincentas is given no gun, shoots no one other than with his camera. He becomes by chance an observer, not able to change anything. It is also the story of his clandestine love for Judita, a Jewish woman.
Romas Kinka, Translator
This event was part of the European Literature Night VII, 13 May – 9 June 2015, www.europeanliteraturenight.co.uk, organised in partnership with EUNIC, Czech Centre, Goethe Institut, Lithuanian Culture Institute, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, Polish Cultural Institute and Republic of Slovenia Embassy in London.
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