My dear friends
On a streetcorner in the old Vilnius Ghetto, on the block where I was staying, there’s a bronze statue of Leonard Cohen, wearing a bronze hat and bronze box-shouldered suit, looking intense in his brazen, lady-seducing way. He doesn’t have a pedestal but stands admirably two-footed on the paving stones like anyone else, and each time I pass I touch my own invisible hat brim in greeting, but on my last morning I saw he wore a woolen blue-checked scarf wound around his bronze neck.
“It’s a tradition,” a local told me. She was pouring a Ukrainian cherry liqueur into a tall glass and demonstrating how to drink it without using your hands. “When autumn is over and winter arrives, Leonard gets a scarf. If you are uncertain whether it’s winter, don’t look at the thermometer, look at Leonard.”
“Does the scarf stay all through the winter?”
“If someone is cold and needs a scarf, they can take his and someone else will replace it. In spring, his scarf comes off. If you want to know whether spring is here, don’t look at the trees or the birds, look at Leonard.”
(This isn’t a letter about statues, but I do like the Lithuanian approach to statues. Elsewhere in Vilnius there’s a bronze bust of Frank Zappa. Leonard Cohen was at least of Litvak descent, but Frank Zappa had no connection to Lithuania at all, so what is he doing there? After the fall of the Soviet Union, or perhaps we should say after the temporary contraction of the Russian Empire, a local sculptor named Saulius Paukstys left Lithuania for the first time. His destination: America. He duly returned and told all his friends down at the coffee shop what a time he’d had. The skyscrapers! The cars and wide-open spaces! The art and the cheeseburgers and the blue jeans! And he’d met Frank Zappa! Yes, Frank Zappa! They’d hung out and discussed art and freedom! He hadn’t been a Frank Zappa fan before the trip, and to be honest Frank Zappa’s music was still a little noodly and obscure to him, but still! Frank Zappa!
Everyone was very impressed. More than impressed, they were stirred. The world was open now, and everything was possible. A man from Vilnius, a schmo and a schlepper just like them, could get on a flight and go to America and mingle with so celestial a body as Frank Zappa! Anything, my friends, in this new world anything is possible!
It’s unclear how the real story emerged. Perhaps a jealous rival did some investigating, or perhaps it was simply that Saulius Paukstys – dedicated in the way of all artists to the pursuit of truth and beauty, beauty and truth – was so tormented by his conscience that he finally threw down his chisel, ran to the coffee shop and confessed of his own volition that while he had indeed been to America, he had not in fact met Frank Zappa at all.
But the thing is, this didn’t much change the way people felt. No doubt Saulius came in for his share of ribbing, and perhaps he had to stand more than his share of rounds of kavos puodeliai, but if anything, the artistic community of Vilnius embraced the story even harder. Creative freedom is what they craved, and what says creative freedom more than a good story? Anyone can meet Frank Zappa, not everyone can enjoyably make something up.
“So Saulius made the sculpture of Frank Zappa?”
“No, another sculptor made the statue of Frank Zappa.”
“Because he liked Frank Zappa?”
“Because he liked the story.”
“And why did the city agree to put up the statue?”
“They also liked the story. Lithuanians like a funny story.”)
I spent a couple of days in Vilnius then caught the train back to Latvia. Autumn had come to Riga while I was gone. When we first arrived near the beginning of October the parks were a sea of green, but the Baltic autumn is gold glittering in darkness: the leaves of the linden trees blazed against their wet black trunks like the gilded domes of the Orthodox cathedral; they fell brightly across the sidewalks like golden coins. The night of Halloween was all yellow candlelight glowing through orange pumpkins in darkened doorways, firelight in their eyes.
Autumn is lovely in Riga, but winter comes behind it, heavy-shouldered, with a heavy tread, seeking whom it may devour. “In Latvia, we say that winter comes from the East,” said the barista at Ezisa Kofisops. “Like Russia.”
In the Baltics, they know all about Russia. In the past year, Riga has renamed the street on which the Russian embassy stands. It used to be Antonias Street; now the Russian Ambassador’s business card lists his street address as “Independent Ukraine Street”. In Vilnius, the Russian embassy now stands on “Ukrainian Heroes Street”.
“Even if Ukraine falls this winter,” said the barista at Ezisa Kofisops, handing me my coffee, “we know the West will protect us.” He twisted the corner of his mouth. “That is Latvian sense of humour,” he said.
We kept talking about winter. I told him that my winter started in August, in South Africa, and that since then I’ve been in various stages of autumn, in Normandy and Greece and now in the Baltics. I told him that I had an operation in August that I thought would be minor – that was minor – but that I haven’t been quite right since. I’m physically fine, I told him, but I’ve scarcely written a word. I haven’t written any letters. I’ve neglected my friends and ignored my enemies. I’ve hardly checked the news or cared what anyone else is caring about, let alone cared about it myself. All I’ve wanted to do is sit on the right side of a locked door and read books and talk to the only person I want to talk to and watch old movies. I haven’t been unhappy, I told him – just the opposite, I’ve been very happy, but that species of happiness worries me because it’s a hiding from the world, it’s a slow snow-muffed slide into silence.
“It is only winter,” he said. “When it is spring, you will wake up.”
The next day, in the Janis Roze bookstore on Krisjana Barola street, I came upon the book “Wintering” by Katherine May. In winter, she says, nature knows to conserve its resources. The trees and the squirrels and the grass know to hunker and be patient and build their strength for when seasons change and life speeds up again. The trees and the squirrels and the grass know this, and so should we. Winter, she says, isn’t only the weather outside, it’s any time when we feel fallow, sidelined, cut off, blocked from progress, cast into the role of outsider in our own lives. It’s part of the lifecycle, it comes round to us all. The wisdom of nature is to recognize the season and live through it, to trust that the seasons will turn again, as they always do, that everything is always changing and always staying the same.
At the end of the week, I’ll be going back to Cape Town. It will be summer, there will be sunshine and braai smoke and Christmas. Christmas holidays is an odd time for Capetonians – we always think that’s when we’ll stop working and do things and see people, and it’s always when we find that we don’t have time to do all the things and see all the people that we’ve been putting off till summer. I hope my winter will be just about over when I get back, but seasons are peculiar things. Still, I’ll be around. Hope to see some of you then.
Much love
Darrel
Riga, November, 2024
