Jan tells us stories of battles and massacres, and everything he says could be summarized by the single concept: “Yes, it’s possible to stay together, Westerners and Orthodox.” It’s not hard for me to sympathize. I’m a frontier Catholic who goes to Mass in the church of the Greeks on his own turf. But then comes the apocalypse. His discourse turns into a list of martyrdoms and betrayals, of sacraments denied and crypts of relics kissed for the last time by believers condemned to death. He evokes the emergence of a late Christianity erected on a base of tenacious paganism, child of the forest and the long nights of the North.
And it’s always Moscow, the East, the czar, the great Antichrist. “For Russia, I am a renegade, all of us Greek Catholics are.” And then, returning to his Jehoshaphat: “Peter the Great ordered his corpse to be burned, but the monks hid it so well that it was conserved here. And when the time of the Soviets came, Moscow again tried to appropriate itself of the relics, but the Ukrainian cardinal Slipyj succeeded in moving them to Saint Peter’s. That body was not to be left in Muscovite hands. Only when Ukraine became independent was he returned to Lviv, his hometown.”
The obsession with relics: I had heard it with this force only from the Greeks in the temple of the Holy Sepulcher. The body, the body, the heart of the problem. The body that becomes mummy and the mummy that turns into the holiest of icons. “Jehoshaphat had his head broken open with a hatchet because already in the 1600s, three centuries before Wojtyla, he wanted to champion ecumenical ideas. Then they threw his body into the river. But that body was so pure that it shone in the night and, like the body of Casimir, patron saint of Lithuania, it showed no signs of decomposition. So it was brought here, and when Peter the Great conquered the Grand Duchy of Poland and Lithuania, then celebrated the victory for three days in Vilnius, he entered this church drunk and asked whose was the body contained in the case. The monks said, it’s the body of a saint. Then Peter killed them all. In the beginning the massacre was covered up, but later the truth came out.” Night has now fallen in the city of the spirits.
“‘Vilne shtot fun gaist un tmimes, Vilne yidishlech fartracht.’ Vilnius, city of spirit and innocence, where silent prayers are murmured, soundless secrets of the night… I often see you in my dreams, my Vilnius, woods, mountains, and valleys of Vilnius, Vilnius that was the first to raise the flag of freedom…. ‘Vilnius, Vilnius, under heimshtot,’ city of our birth.” What’s left of the myth after the tabula rasa of Nazism, the nullity of Communism, and now the final storm of the market on the ruins of a glorious epoch of spirit and innocence? Maybe there is nothing left for me except this heartrending song in Yiddish that my friend Salamone Ovadia sang to me, many years ago, well before this frontier journey, which he was the very one to suggest that I take. I sing it to myself as I’m digging, exhausted, in the deep of the night after all that light in the North.
But in the midst of this darkness, Monika is searching; I can see her eyes shining like spotlights on the “soundless secrets of the night,” until Vilnius presents her with still another gift, the surprise of a rabbi, black of beard and jacket, who is coming toward her on the sidewalk. There he is, strangely responding to her greeting. I say strangely because an observant Jew, I’ve been told, is not supposed to communicate with a woman in a public place. The shade goes on its way and vanishes, but a little later there he is, reemerging from the labyrinth of the old city, and he bumps into us at the corner of a house. We introduce ourselves. The Jew is Samuel Jakob Pfeffer, he looks to be fifty or so, with wild hair. He is a rabbi who observes the rule of the gaon (genius) of Vilnius, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman Kremer, luminary of the Talmud, who in the eighteenth century declared war on the mystics of the long curls called the Hasidim.
He’s American, Rabbi Pfeffer; that’s why he so nonchalantly responded to the feminine greeting. It’s as though he had been expecting us. He just about takes us by the hand and leads us in front of his synagogue, showing us proudly the date of its construction, 1906, and an inscription beside the Star of David. The words announce the prohibition of entry by the followers of the Hasidic heresy. We ask him, what has been the fate in Lithuania of the mystics who disobeyed the ancient rules? and he answers, “Gone.” And the other Jews, what do they do?
“They are few; what’s more, they’re timid.” And from his lips, as from the lips of the Greek Catholic Jan Pogrzelski, comes another story of martyrdom: the story of Count Valentin Potocki, burned alive for having converted to Judaism. “The gaon of Vilnius wanted to save him,” the American tells us, “but the count said no, because he wanted his death to be his testimony of his discovery of the true faith.”
Rabbi Pfeffer gestures to us and takes us to see what’s left of the Vilnius of the Jews. He looks like a great nocturnal bird, and he does nothing to fit in. “The atmosphere is not healthy,” he confirms. “A lot of people shout at me: Jew! And what else can I do but look them in the face and ask them if they’ve got a problem? Why should I lower myself to their level and shout back?” He talks about a big Jewish cemetery, five hundred years old, which the Lithuanians would like to transform into a shopping center. “The situation is very dangerous for all religions. By now, money rules over all; the sacred is in pieces. Tell me, how can you do business over the bones of the dead? How can anyone think that something like that can bring good fortune? How can we construct a cohabitation by abusing memory in this way? How can we forget what happened here under Nazism?”
Somebody has torn down the street sign for the Street of the Jews, and someone has painted a swastika on the base of the bust dedicated to the gaon of Vilnius. The Zavln Synagogue on Gėlių Street has remained as it was seventy years ago, burned inside and out, and it seems that the land will be sold.
Suddenly Pfeffer’s shadow lengthens and grows larger on the pavement by effect of the only streetlamp on the edge of a public park, which is shining on him from thirty yards away. It happens only to his shadow, not ours, even though we’re fairly close to him. Monika plays with these effects, freezing on film the owl eyes of the Jew and his black hair inflamed by the neon signs of the bars. We sit down in the square, at the open-air tables. Samuel Jakob drinks calmly as though in a saloon; the American in him conflicts with his rabbinical role, with Vilnius itself. Then he starts back in on his gloomy prophecy: “Many communities will be extinguished, maybe even mine. But it is important that something remain, because this was a central place.”
8. K TOWN
RIDING HIGH on its Siberian antisnow heels, the Moscow–Kaliningrad—a snake made of twenty illuminated cars—is rolling along in the early morning light. To board it, at three in the morning, I had to show my passport, visa, and ticket to a sleepy-eyed cop shut inside a glass booth under platform ten in the underground passageway of the Vilnius train station—the only one, surrounded by barriers and guarded by police. On its sides there is a double railing a little bit longer than the train, outfitted with video cameras. I’m on a Russian train going to Russia, but Kaliningrad is an enclave detached from the fatherland. In order to get there, you have to cross Lithuania, part of the European Union, and the Lithuanians have to make sure that nobody tries to sneak off the train along the way. Maybe even the two of us, with our Muscovite visas, are under special surveillance.