The Corrections

Gitanas tried to make political sense of the world around him and could not. The world had made sense when the Red Army was illegally detaining him, asking him questions that he refused to answer, and slowly covering the left side of his body with third-degree burns. After Independence, though, politics had lost its coherence. Even as simple and vital an issue as Soviet reparations to Lithuania was bedeviled by the fact that during World War II the Lithuanians themselves had helped persecute the Jews and by the fact that many of the people now running the Kremlin were themselves former anti-Soviet patriots who deserved reparations nearly as much as the Lithuanians did.

“What do I do now,” Gitanas asked Chip, “when the invader is a system and a culture, not an army? The best future I can hope now for my country is that someday it looks more like a second-rate country in the West. More like everybody else, in other words.”

“More like Denmark, with its attractive harborside bistros and boutiques,” Chip said.

“How Lithuanian we all felt,” Gitanas said, “when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age. So how do I be a patriot now? What positive thing do I stand for? What is the positive definition of my country?”

Gitanas continued to reside in the semiderelict villa. He offered the aide-de-camp’s suite to his mother, but she preferred to stay in her apartment outside Ignalina. As was de rigueur for all Lithuanian officials of that era, especially for revanchists like himself, he acquired a piece of formerly Communist property—a twenty percent stake in Sucrosas, the beet-sugar refinery that was Lithuania’s second-largest single-site employer—and lived fairly comfortably as a retired patriot on the dividends.

For a time, like Chip, Gitanas glimpsed salvation in the person of Julia Vrais: in her beauty, in her American path-of-least-resistance quest for pleasure. Then Julia ditched him on a Berlin-bound jet. Hers was the latest betrayal in a life that had come to seem a numbing parade of betrayals. He was screwed by the Soviets, screwed by the Lithuanian electorate, and screwed by Julia. Finally he was screwed by the IMF and World Bank, and he brought a forty-year load of bitterness to the joke of Lithuania Incorporated.

Hiring Chip to run the Free Market Party Company was the first good decision he’d made in a long time. Gitanas had gone to New York to find a divorce lawyer and possibly to hire a cheap American actor, somebody middle-aged and failing, whom he could install in Vilnius to reassure such callers and visitors as Lithuania Incorporated might attract. He could hardly believe that a man as young and talented as Chip was willing to work for him. He was only briefly dismayed that Chip had been sleeping with his wife. In Gitanas’s experience, everyone eventually betrayed him. He appreciated that Chip had accomplished his betrayal before they even met.

As for Chip, the inferiority he felt in Vilnius as a “pathetic American” who spoke neither Lithuanian nor Russian, and whose father hadn’t died of lung cancer at an early age, and whose grandparents hadn’t disappeared into Siberia, and who’d never been tortured for his ideals in an unheated military-prison cell, was offset by his competence as an employee and by the memory of certain extremely flattering contrasts that Julia used to draw between him and Gitanas. In pubs and clubs, where the two men often didn’t bother to deny that they were brothers, Chip had the sensation of being the more successful of the two.

“I was a pretty good deputy prime minister,” Gitanas said gloomily. “I’m not a very good criminal warlord.”

Warlord, indeed, was a somewhat glorified term for Gitanas’s line of work. He was exhibiting signs of failure with which Chip was all too familiar. He spent an hour worrying for every minute he spent doing. Investors around the globe were sending him gaudy sums that he deposited in his Crédit Suisse account every Friday afternoon, but he couldn’t decide whether to use the money “honestly” (i.e., to buy seats in Parliament for the Free Market Party Company) or to commit fraud unabashedly and pour his ill-gotten hard currency into even less legitimate businesses. For a while he sort of did both and sort of did neither. Finally his market research (which he conducted by quizzing drunken strangers in bars) persuaded him that, in the current economic climate, even a Bolshevik had a better chance of attracting votes than a party with “Free Market” in its name.