Xx C. Top

By Vytenis Rozukas

Independence period timer, in his work using sensationalist novel principles. Sensational themes, sudden plot turns, pathetic philosophical digressions - these are the main engines Roukas novels, most of them will never go without forthright eroticism. Eccentric mix of genres and prunes language of these works brings us closer to the amateur writings and undisputed expertise and attentiveness to current issues - the cognitive, literary publicist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496976987

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© 2014 Vytenis Rožukas. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/02/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7697-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7696-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-7698-7 (e)

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CONTENTS

A Twentieth Century Top

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

BOOK 2

MOTTO

Foreword

Contents

Anna from Saint Petersburg

Ringo Starr’s Primary School

Chapter I

Annette

The English Club

Rolling Stones show in Prague

Charlie Watts and Rolling Stones show

The bittersweet faecal smell of that enfant terrible Adolph Hitler

Annette

THOSE IMMIGRANTS, SUCH PIGS

A refugee camp in Austria, near Innsbruck, five kilometres from the fine alpine resort of Seefeld

Ringo Starr(Mick Jagger)

The U.N.

Jonas Mekas’ archival material from the Munich laboratory run by the Georgian Zurab Mšvidobadze

Jonas Mekas’ material for a documentary film about Arabs

Love quadrilateral. P. McCartney

Department of Pacifism

Emigration Department Love rectangle—Ringo Starr(Mick Jagger)

Arab Department

Square

A Twentieth Century Top

This is whiskey. Not recommended for women. Neither for the first generation intelligentsia whose roots are wooden ploughs, or who are small-town dwellers. Especially it is not for Lithuanian reviewers, former apologists of socialist realism, that barren trend in art, those whose small ambitions exceed their competence, narrow-minded mediocrities unable to make difference between the excellent, mediocre, or weak technique.

Non nasce in me pensier che non vi sia dentro scolpita la Morte1.

Michelangelo Buonarotti

1 No thought comes to me which should not bear the sign of Death.

A butterfly flew in through the window. It alighted on my hand and thrilled its feelers. I thought: „Before everyone are life and death, whichever they choose will be given them"*

The Wain fluttered outside the barred window, a spring evening was falling, mediating hard on something. The mood was sad and mysterious like snow in the moonlight.

* Sirach 15 : 1

Hitler climbed up to an unpainted window, snatched a dry bit of own faeces and swallowed it down.

Marilyn Monroe burst into tears, the moment she saw the sight in the doorway of the ward, but an Afghan soldier of the Green Army shouted at her in a rasping voice (a dry-stove crackling way):

—Marilyn, what did you find in this miserable degenerate? I am startled to see your boundless love towards Hitler.

—Only several days since Hitler went mad,—she sobbed.—The doctor made me believe that the attack would stop in a month and he would recover.

—Look at yourself! Your lips look like an open wound,—the Afghan went on.—You are the most beautiful attempt of nature and . . .

—You should not trouble, I’m disgusted with men, especially with such apes as you. I just wonder where that impudence of yours is from?

Hitler glanced back and, grinning, rushed at Monroe’s side. Quick as lightning, the soldier pulled the beauty away from the ward and slammed the door. A piercing sound rent the stone walls and a hollow smash died away in the blind silence of the prison yard.

A prison, a prison in Kabul.

—Green jackals are torturing our brother Hitler,—Stalin said to Hemingway, both smoking in the yard under the supervision of a shortish Afghan sergeant.

—Poor Hitler has gone off his head,—answered Hemnigway watching with the corner of his eye how Stalin was stroking a hemp grown from his belly.—Strange things are happening in my head. All of a sudden, I remember Paris, and Spain, and Cuba, like I were Hemingway for certain.

—I do also feel great changes,—started Stalin inhaling his marihuana pot.—A blissful desire comes to pray for all, especially for the Georgians. This is a feeling like a drunken grey-haired woman is watching with a lifeless glance, not to say about this hemp which has grown out of my belly . . . Hey!—he cried to the Afghan soldier,—fetch me a pipe from the ward!

—Stop it,—Hemingway grabbed him by the hand,—you become power-loving like a real Stalin. However you are an ordinary child of a German woman. Only the name Stalin was that your mother gave to you, not his soul. Why do you boss your warden, it’s good he did not heard this!

—Something has changed in me since the day before yesterday, like two ‘I’s’ live in me, one of them being Stalin. It happened after a piece of hemp had grown out of my belly. Oh you my hemp, my honey!

—Look,—Hemingway nodded towards the sergeant urinating in the corner of the prison yard,—pants up to the neck and the jacket like a gown. A tommy-gun like a bike sitting on the back. I did not notice this earlier but I see this now. I wonder whether Marilyn Monroe will fetch cold water for us, will not she? She could take care of other brothers, not only of Hitler. The water in prison is chlorinated to a degree the fabric gets bleached when the water is splashed on the pants.

—She fell into a great sin,—said Stalin,—she sleeps with her brother.

—Judge not lest ye be judged,—said Hemingway, and added without a delay:—all of us are like twenty unlucky hunchbacks importunately getting in the bull’s way, and their hoofs trample us when the Lord, probably, plays with marked cards.

After these words I sent to him a hiccup so he would not pride himself too much upon his youth, optimism and causticity.

On the other side of the planet I allow autumn the tramp to tear away a trembling aspen leaf when a small green warm is creeping along a cabbage leaf but my bottomless heedful thought is spanning the golden threads of the rustling maize, the tranquility of a barren willow, a light-blue amoeba watching flutter of fish’s jaws in the light of a sandy bottom, dew in a meadow, the dew clear as a tear . . .

My name is =. It is Me who tells you this story. This late evening in spring I leave Kabul to come back to an episode of a week before. It could happen at any place. It could happen in the Universe, bright as a nightingale’s heart, as well as outside the Universe. Wishing to match your limited fantasy, I rather depict a desert, its tender oasis where a rivulet burns in diamond sprays, and where crumbled walls are seen overgrown with convolvuli of wild roses.

—Oh L=d,—an apostle fell prone like a garden scarecrow whose staff decayed,—pity a poor woman Maria. After her husband had perished, she gave birth to twenty children. All children were given names of the most famous persons of the twentieth century, and brought up accordingly. She was born in Düsseldorf but lived in Lithuania, later she lived in Tajikistan, and in Afghanistan, each time against her will, forced by circumstances. She and her children belong to a Freemason’s lodge that rules the world. Let souls of her twenty children be doubled and let the ego of their prototype settle in them. This woman, with her life and suffering, deserves your special attention. That Masonic lodge is divided into two fractions. One of them is concerned with the domination of the Jews, the chosen nation. However the other lodge dreams of killing them. Maria and her children belong to different fractions unfortunately. You have destined one of her children to exterminate all the Jewish race. It is necessary to make out who he is. You, oh Ld, have created the Universe expressing your endless love. Will you allow one man to dominate over another? Love, not racism, must gain the upper hand.

Maria has much faith in fortune tellers, she frequently visits them. Let some fortune teller foretell that kinsfolk of her dead husband in Lithuania ostensibly have a map of hidden treasures of the Golden Horde, all the riches of Jochi, the eldest son of Genghis Khan. After Ringold*, the Grand Duke of Lithuania, had defeated Jochi in a duel, he buried Jochi’s treasures at one place. Certainly, this won’t be true. However let her travel back to her native Düsseldorf through Tajikistan and Lithuania. She will not find the treasures in Lithuania, therefore she will go to Düsseldorf after that, with all her children. Germany has been reunified now, hasn’t it? In their second life her children could do something that they did not manage to do in their first life. We shall improve the fate of Faustus in a new way. Let history go back again. This will be the most interesting and instructive story of the twentieth century. Now is just the time. Two Germanies become one again.

*Ringold - Lithuanian Rimgaudas

After hearing this story, I fell into meditation.

The morning was clear and fecund, when loneliness is easy and attractive. I noticed a young man carving name of his beloved on a bridge railing, I watched a corn shoot making its way through the earth’s crust, and I saw a white-shawled woman dollying her wash in a bay of a forest lake, in lingering reeds. An elk swings his horns rushing through raspberry canes. The carpenter of Saardam snatches up his axe again to rebuild his town, but a peasant whets scythe wiping the sweat from his brow in full concord with his soul, in concord with his dream, in concord with his death . . .

Morning. Mist. Horses are flying through a steppe, their manes waving in the wind. Well-water, vanishing into thin air, and the sun, sweet as a forefinger sucked, save a clear and just thought of the apostle: we help the German woman Maria, let it be.

 . . . Before man, life and death, good and evil, what he likes he will be given . . .

Spring was warm in Afghanistan. Marylin Manroe, a member of a Masonic lodge, more precisely a daughter of Maria, called Maeylin Monroe, could hardly bear the heat. She, together with her little sister Greta Garbo, went from Kabul to the mountains where her brothers were herdsmen. One of them was nicknamed Einstein, the other was Proust, both being also masons. She remembered their common childhood, her childhood together with them. A fountain was rustling quietly in the yard and they, their shovels thrown in a sandbox, got into a woodshed. She was five and he was six. The rosy forehead over Hitler’s nose, freckled and sharp, was wet like of a sick man. He was lop-eared. He was somehow attractive, although she had to admit having never seen a more ugly boy. A sunray broke in through a slit in the woodshed, and strips of dust quivered in the light.

—said Hitler,—you told me !

—Now,—she a.

That way their common secret started, lasting for many years afterwards.

They both grew up without a father. All the more strange seemed Hitler’s inclination towards homosexuality. It develops in infancy when a child sits too long on a potty, as their brother Freud explains. Hitler did not have a male object into which he could sublime his passion for a woman, Maria. Strange to him was Marilyn’s attitude towards men. She has always been cold, frigid, so that Hitler called himself a watchman at a mortuary sometimes, a watchman who was in charge of the corpse of royal origin. This was exactly the same that some English journalist once had said about Arthur Miller.

Never mind. Soon masons will liberate Hitler and his brothers, Stalin and Hemingway. The she will wash Hitler’s feet and drink the water. Yea, her love is unhealthy and boundless. They will liberate Hitler and all twenty of them will go across Lithuania to Germany, their mother’s land. Absolutely! One life is not enough to get used to all that destructing passion. Too tasteful is that forbidden fruit.

The backs of hills and valleys blossomed with reddish, bluish and violet hedge-parsley flowers. Yellow tulips showed here and there. Sheep and goats, like locusts, spread throughout the pasture and moved swiftly forward. On a grey boulder there sat two herdsmen discussing losses, victories, or triumphs, they had experienced in their life. Their thoughts crawled through my ears like spaghetti, pouring in a stream into the skies, into my chamber pot, humming in the air like benches eventually thrown at a football reference. Therefore I suggest the reader to avoid an exaggerated enthusiasm, as well as black melancholy, at this point. Let these thoughts be assigned to a a category of the simplest statements.

Marilyn Monroe, together with her sister, looked up the brothers herdsmen again and again, but Hitler was in Marylin’s mind constantly, but I cleared the head of multi-thinking Einstein, so that he said to Proust, in a voice pleasant and plaintive like a cello:

—My amateur interest in mathematics and physics all of a sudden has produced results. A couple of days ago I found that each thought is material, it is made of subject matter. Absolutely, all great thoughts are material. Our consciousness and subconscious are receivers, not only transmitters.

—It’s very interesting,—agreed Proust,—you say material, even before being expressed in words with motion of the tongue, do not you? It is an interesting and intellectual idea. Look, that black ram, how tender it is today. Perhaps it will survive, although mother doesn’t let him herself.

—Your verses are blue and somewhat egoistic,—Einstein answered. He was broadshouldered, one meter seventy six centimeters high, with a broad forehead, of dark countenance and brown eyes which were radiant with soft depth. His Jewish nose was a bit hooked:—You have more egoism than the real Proust, standing farther from Nature and less sincere in nuances. And maybe not. Break off, brother, we’ll have a snack.

—Man is part of Nature,—said Proust,—thus the love for one’s neighbor is the greatest value. It’s so good to philosophize when spring is around One never gets used to it. It is as difficult for our brother Freud. By the way, was it not he who was destined to annihilate the whole race of Jews. Thanks to Freud it is difficult to attune oneself to a corpse of a poorest Afghan peasant. Students in a dissecting lab skin him and cut out his eyes. Once he had a clay hut with a small window, rather like a storeroom, and a hen. He had to sell himself to a dissecting lab because of poverty. A Russian officer found a small-caliber gun in his hut. Probably he used to shoot a bird or a fox with this gun. But the officer took him to a place served as a lavatory for mountain dwellers and he stuck in him a 5,45 millimeter bullet which entered through the forehead and went out through the back with a four-times larger hole. Then Captain Felkovsky came and drove the whole series of tracer bullets into the Afghan: you see, now he is surely dead. The bullets went through the skull, struck the wall and started burning.

—That is what tortures me: if everything can be fixed, there must be technique which can also fix thoughts. Billions of thoughts floating in the universe. They divide themselves and merge together, but not only thoughts of living persons get into our consciousness, also thoughts of dead persons do.

—Our mother Maria went to Bulgaria to the blind prophetess Vanga, who belongs to a Masonic lodge as well,—said Proust, Einstein’s twin brother, but not resembling him, such a delicate and tender, eccentric person.—And that Vanga, I believe, can absorb the thoughts not only of the living, but also of the dead people. It is possible that she will cure our poor half-witted little sister, a charming imbecile with the name of Greta Garbo. Look, a goat herd playing pranks knelt down. Not there, look to the left, where that black sheep is. And what formula have you written in my literary notebook?

—The material character of the thought is best illustrated by Austrian physicist Schrödinger’s wave equation, an expression of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. You see, a temporary change of the wave function is iħ ∂φ / ∂t Hφ, where H means a systemic Planck‘s hamiltonism, i means an imaginary unity, ħ means a small Planck’s constant, t means time. A behaviour of the thought in an environment can be expressed by a wave function. This I can guarantee, because it is a material body. One Herman Minkowski, by the way, born like us in Kaunas, in Aleksotas, took interest in the theory of relativity by my grey-headed prototype Einstein. After having gone deep in this theory, he discovered a light cone, the inner points of which represent past and future events, but the external points represent spatial events. Nothing doing. Thought is one of the forms of the matter.

—Brother, you make me wonder,—said Proust.—You have no higher education, where is that knowledge of yours from?

—I don’t know for myself,—Einstein shook his head.—A couple of days ago it became clear that I knew very much. It is not clear where that knowledge has come from. Ten more years started to rotate in my brains. Probably that is due to the spring sun, or maybe I have really turned into Einstein. Because this morning, when thinking about my life, I suddenly remembered a distant winter of 1912 in Prague when we were playing Bach together with Max Brod in Berta Fanta’s sitting-room. A sad garland of my violin’s melody accompanied the lucid tune of the piano. Franz Kafka was listening there staring unnaturally. There is nothing to Have, only to Be, he suddenly said after we had finished. To Be, longing for the last breath, for suffocation. There is no way back from a certain point. This point should be reached.—You are so mysterious, replied Berta Fanta to Kafka. True art should be wrapped in mystery, said Kafka. Nevertheless it seems to me,—purportedly said I, Einstein,—that the conscious wish of an author to impart mysteriousness to his work is fooling the people. An attempt to seem more important, than you are, is a sign of cunning, but not of talent. True talent seeks pure gold in the dark.—One cannot warm a symbol without a mystery, contradicted Kafka. Then, in a silence, we suddenly heard a deep, voiceless buzzing. Guests in the sitting-room started to look about, but Kafka shouted jumping up to the window: A fly! Upon my word, a fly in the middle of winter! It was like under hypnosis as we followed the flight of a huge gadfly. It knocked clumsily against the walls, pieces of furniture, and alighted on the mirror. Then it continued its drunken trajectory again, and suddenly I gathered what I was striving for my life. Wisdom and greatness of eternity. The hearth was crackling, it was warm and pleasant in the room. To live means to be happy even for that reason. It snowed outside. Like in a vision I realized that this time belonged to me and only to me. I felt happy because I lived: dreams and aspirations had sailed by, success and misfortune lost their value. Happiness was only in breathing, in realizing you were alive. Then I thought for a while about poor halfwits that even their life had a great sense and was an indisputable value. Immediately I heard true Einstein telling me: I would rather be a fly in real life, in authentic Jewish reality, than a masturbating double-I after my death.

—Strange as it is, both of us are sharing our mystic experiences and visions now. Something has happened to us for certain,—said Proust.—I also remember an episode from the life of true Proust. A distant evening at Paris Opera House on the fourth of June 1910 came to me, who am a kind of a poet herdsman only. Nizhinsky was eighteen then and danced a negro slave beside Ida Rubinstein in the ballet of Sheherazade.

I recall myself dining together with Diaghilev, Nizhinsky and Blue [???] Cocteau on the terrace of the La Ruc restaurant. My receptors absorbed their chocolate cream, other senses feeling giddy with the aroma of Cocteau’s perfume. I touched Cocteau’s leg—a beautiful perfect hip, saying: Only with you to enjoy nature in solitude! I am repeating these words of d’Annuncio, dedicated to Isadora Duncan, now addressing them to all our company. Watching the Sheherazada together with Cocteau’s librettist Reinald, I longed for that perfumed aroma in a dotted line marking the path to spiritual heights, since neither words nor thoughts, but intuition penetrates into the depths of life’s mystery. Ida Rubinstein in a short black skirt. Nizhinsky in orange trousers. The first beat: pas de bourrée en tournant (en dedans), finishing the fifth position with the right leg forward demi plié. Then two turns en dehors with a stop demi plié, the right leg led away at forty five degrees pulled closer sur le cou-de-pied behind. After the eighth beat - grand jeté after the step—coupé, grand fauetté sauté, towards Nizhinsky who finishes the turn in the position attitude holding of Rubinstein’s waist with his hand. Plus four arabesaues. Wonderful! Continuation—it is not only the presence that is continuing, but also the unchanging past. Here is a relevé on one foot, performed by Olga Khokhova, the future wife of Picasso. Yea, the real world is beautiful! A graceful dance made me fall into oblivion, I adjusted the flap of my fur-coat (even then I was ill) and remembered the winter in Caumbre, when my mother, noticing that I was cold, offered me some tea with Madeleine biscuits. I raised to my lips a spoonful of tea, in which a piece of Madeleine soaked, and the moment the sip of tea with biscuit crumbs touched my palate. I shivered from a sudden blessing. Felt somewhat indifferent to offences of life, the the briefness of which seemed to be illusory. There is no happiness in reality, the happiness is in our vision. Only real is the paradise lost. Everything proceeds like we were advancing through life with a load of obligations taken in some previous life . . . Sometimes it happens, when listening to music, that we are captured by our fantasies so that it is difficult to align our thoughts into harmonious sequence. Nevertheless, after having come to myself now, to the Russian ballet again, I should like to add a conclusion: I love only the moment in the past, already cut off with the scissors of time and fixed in memory to admire it again, dragged from oblivion like once-worn clothes from depths of the wardrobe . . .

—Your tittle-tattle has some truth in it. You spoke so long that I even felt drowsy,—yawned Einstein.—Your prototype Proust once said beauty is truth and morals. Look, our sister Marilyn Monroe is coming. Maybe she is bringing us something to drink . . .

Both twin brothers rose up and started descending the hill into the flock of sheep through which Monroe, together with a thirteen-year-old half-witted Greta Garbo, were making their way.

—Hello, sisters pilgrims from Heaven,—approached them Einstein,—What’s new in Kabul? Has our mother come back?

—She has. It’s disgusting to look at you suffering in the sun, but the nastiest thing is that our cheese shop will go bankrupt soon. Oh, what a foolish sheept!—Marilyn took a several-week-old lamb into her arms.—That’s beauty! Come here, I’ll kiss you, you beauty, never seen before! Was not it her mother, an affected queen, that did not leave her child with her? I bet a thousand afghans that it’s my dear brother Proust who nursed you, having milked the only bourgeois sheep milk in the world . . .

—How’s my kiddie getting on?—Proust smacked a kiss on Garbo’s cheek and the girl uttered in a very serious and pure melodious voice:

—A map of continents and seas, trickled down in purple blood drops on the grass-snake, which with its hundred-metre body when grown up, raises its head and seduces the whole of mankind. How to flight that?—Garbo fixed her gaze trustfully on her brother, and again became alienated from all of them into her calm brutal tranquility, subconscious of the Masonic lodge.

—I see you talking nonsense as earlier, but this Bulgarian Vanga helped you not a bit,—said Proust.

—Nothing of the sort!—Marilyn pulled her brothers to herself and, rolling her large eyes started to patter:—Soon we’ll be madly rich! All we, twenty brothers and sisters, need is to get together and to go to Lithuania to brother of our mother’s dead husband . . . he has a map of the buried treasures of khan of the Golden Horde. Then we’ll be rich! . . . Money! It is the axis of the spiritual life of mankind, as our uncle used to say. Anything else is nonsense, isn’t it? Look, my hands are trembling! We will be rich! Haa! . . .

—An extremely fascinating thought,—laughed Einstein.—Perhaps it is Vanga who predicted that, isn’t she? I believe not in mysticism but in the power of a logical mind.

—A funny fellow! Of course, it is hers. She also said that the Afghan, who had arrived together with our mother, would not reach home.

—Well, then what’s next?—asked Einstein tenderly.

—What, what . . . He was affected by a stroke and died during the journey, that’s it,—said Monroe.—A kilometre away you can see that Vanga is touched by the finger of G-d.

The brothers became quit for a moment.

—Whether that prophecy is worth believing?—said Proust timidly. He kept silent and added after a while:—Had I money, I would devote myself to literature, I would finish the story about our mother and have no need to be a shepherd. I could also achieve something contributing to division of the world, to that Iliad-like fight. You catch a snow flake but it melts on your palm. Fix the moment since it never returns.

—That’s it!—Monroe nodded her head.—Why not have a try, no need to photograph for these lousy Moslem journals!

—Who’ll do the grave of our mother’s rescuer then? What about a vow?—asked Einstein logically.—My mind is doubting this adventure. No miracles exist in life. Everything is attained little by little.

—With money we can hire an Afghan to look after a grave. Or not, no care, we’ll transfer the grave to Germany. It will be the best thing,—said Marilyn Monroe.—All we need is to liberate Hitler, Stalin and Hemingway from prison. However how to do this? They are to be conveyed to the prisoners’ camp at the border with the Soviet Union.

—Without Bruce Lee we stand stock-still,—said Einstein thoughtfully.—Yeah. Not everybody who is not too lazy to think can make out this mess. But . . . Had I money, I could marry and have sweet and brilliant kids.

The spring was starting, as well as dreams of those four standing in the middle of the meadow. Will everything be scorched by the tireless sun? Will everything be reft by the voluptuous fate? Only G-d alone knew that in advance.

When seized by sorrow, nostalgia or melancholy, imagine a little girl in a delicate lace garment, and a cosy lamb, cuddled up to her breast, so this scene will be a modest stimulator in your further life, it may even give rise to thoughts about My existence and remind you about the protection that you will be really rendered.

*     *     *

I take pleasure in watching my imitators—a weaver, making miracles with her deft hands, and a man of letters, who embroiders a white sheet of paper with words awakening your fantasy . . .

The wind was blowing through woody hills and their misty peaks. Through villages by the river. Through clans of people interlaced on the Earth, whose customs contradict the sound mind. It was blowing through those vibrating between the striving for pleasure (the fear of suffering) and what is accepted (decent). At last the wind wrapped up in a woolen cloth and enjoyed Marlboro with feet soaking in warm water. Yeah. it is fine in an atmosphere soaked with spirituality. He sighed, and his sigh, subtle as