The Corrections

On a very gloomy Sunday morning, Lichenkev and his slate of smugglers and hit men on the Cheap Power for the People Party ticket claimed 38 of the 141 seats in the Seimas. But the Lithuanian President, Audrius Vitkunas, a charismatic and paranoid arch-nationalist who hated Russia and the West with equal passion, refused to certify the election results.

“Hydrophobic Lichenkev and his mouth-frothing hellhounds will not intimidate me!” Vitkunas shouted in a televised address on Sunday evening. “Localized power failures, a near-total breakdown in the communications network of the capital and its environs, and the presence of roving heavily armed ‘constabularies’ of Lichenkev’s hired mouth-frothing lickspittle hellhounds do not inspire confidence that yesterday’s voting reflects the stubborn will and immense good sense of the great and glorious immortal Lithuanian People! I will not, I cannot, I must not, I durst not, I shall not certify these scum-flecked, maggot-riddled, tertiary-syphilitic national parliamentary election results!”

Gitanas and Chip watched the address on the television in the former ballroom at the villa. Two bodyguards quietly played Dungeonmaster in a corner of the room while Gitanas translated for Chip the richer nuggets of Vitkunasian rhetoric. The peaty light of the year’s shortest day had faded in the casement windows.

“I got a real bad feeling about this,” Gitanas said. “I got a feeling Lichenkev wants to gun down Vitkunas and take his chances with whoever replaces him.”

Chip, who was doing his best to forget that Christmas was four days away, had no wish to hang on in Vilnius only to be driven out a week after the holiday. He asked Gitanas if he’d thought about emptying the Crédit Suisse account and leaving the country.

“Oh, sure.” Gitanas was wearing his red motocross jacket and hugging himself. “I think about shopping at Bloomingdale’s every day. I think about the big tree at Rockefeller Center.”

“Then what’s keeping you?”

Gitanas scratched his scalp and smelled his fingernails, blending the aroma of scalp with the skin-oil smells from around his nose, taking obvious comfort in sebum. “If I leave,” he said, “ond the trouble blows over, then where am I? I’m fucked three ways. I’m not employable in America. As of next month, I’m not married to an American. And my mom’s in Ignalina. What do I got in New York?”

“We could run this thing in New York.”

“They got laws there. They’d shut us down in a week. I’m fucked three ways.”

Toward midnight Chip went upstairs and inserted himself between his thin, cold East Bloc sheets. His room smelled of damp plaster, cigarettes, and strong synthetic shampoo fragrances such as pleased the Baltic nose. His mind was aware of its own racing. He didn’t fall into sleep but skipped off it, again and again, like a stone on water. He kept mistaking the streetlight in his window for the light of day. He went downstairs and realized that it was already late afternoon on Christmas Eve; he had the oversleeper’s panicked sense of having fallen behind, of lacking information. His mother was making Christmas Eve dinner in the kitchen. His father, youthful in a leather jacket, was sitting in the ballroom in the dim late light and watching the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Chip, to be friendly, asked him what the news was.

“Tell Chip,” Alfred told Chip, whom he didn’t recognize, “there’s trouble in the East.”

Real daylight came at eight. A shouting in the street woke him up. His room was cold but not freezing; a smell of warm dust came off the radiator—the city’s Central Boiler Facility still functioning, the social order still intact.

Through the branches of the spruce trees outside his window he saw a crowd of several dozen men and women in bulky overcoats milling outside the fence. A dusting of snow had fallen in the night. Two of Gitanas’s security men, the brothers Jonas and Aidaris—big blond fellows with semiautomatics on straps—were parleying through the bars of the front gate with a pair of middle-aged women whose brassy hair and red faces, like the heat in Chip’s radiator, gave evidence of ordinary life’s persistence.

Downstairs the ballroom echoed with emphatic televised Lithuanian declarations. Gitanas was sitting exactly where Chip had left him the night before, but his clothes were different and he appeared to have slept.

The gray morning light and the snow on the trees and the peripheral sense of disarray and breakup recalled the end of an academic fall term, the last day of exams before the Christmas break. Chip went to the kitchen and poured Vitasoy Delite Vanilla soy milk on a bowl of Barbara’s All-Natural Shredded Oats Bite Size cereal. He drank some of the viscous German organic black-cherry juice that he’d lately been enjoying. He made two mugs of instant coffee and took them to the ballroom, where Gitanas had turned off the TV and was sniffing his fingernails again.

Chip asked him what the news was.