Читать книгу Vilnius Poker - Ricardas Gavelis - Страница 5

A narrow crack between two high-rises, a break in a wall encrusted with blind windows: a strange opening to another world; on the other side children and dogs scamper about, while on this side—only an empty street and tufts of dust chased by the wind. An elongated face, turned towards me: narrow lips, slightly hollowed cheeks, and quiet eyes (probably brown)—a woman’s face, milk and blood, questioning and torment, divinity and depravity, music and muteness. An old house entangled in wild grape vines in the depths of a garden; a bit to the left, dried-up apple trees, and on the right—yellow unraked leaves; they flutter in the air, even though the tiniest branches of the bushes don’t so much as quiver . . .

That was how I awoke this morning (some morning). Every day of mine begins with an excruciatingly clear pictorial frontispiece; you cannot invent it or select it yourself. It’s selected by someone else; it resonates in the silence, pierces the still sleeping brain, and disappears again. But you won’t erase it from your memory: this silent prelude colors the entire day. You can’t escape it—unless perhaps you never opened your eyes or raised your head from the pillow. However, you always obey: you open your eyes, and once more you see your room, the books on the shelves, the clothes thrown on the armchair. Involuntarily you ask, who’s chosen the key, why can you play your day in just this way, and not another? Who is that secret demiurge of doom? Do you at least select the melody yourself, or have They already shackled your thoughts?

It’s of enormous significance whether the morning’s images are just a tangle of memories, merely faded pictures of locations, faces, or incidents you’ve seen before, or if they appear within you for the first time. Memories color life in more or less familiar colors, while a day that begins with nonexistent sights is dangerous. On days like that abysses open up and beasts escape from their cages. On days like that the lightest things weigh more than the heaviest, and compasses show directions for which there are no names. Days like that are always unexpected—like today (if that was today) . . . An old house in the depths of a garden, an elongated woman’s face, a break in a solid wall of blind windows . . . I immediately recognized Karoliniškės’s cramped buildings and the empty street; I recognized the yard where even children walk alone, play alone. I wasn’t surprised by the face, either, her face—the frightened, elongated face of a madonna, the eyes that did not look at me, but solely into her own inner being. Only the old wooden house with walls blackened by rain and the yellow leaves scattered by a yellow wind made me uneasy. A house like a warning, a caution whispered by hidden lips. The dream made me uneasy too: it was absolutely full of birds. They beat the snowy white drifts with their wings, raising a frosty, brilliant dust, the dust of moonlight.

How many birds can fit into one dream?

They were everywhere: the world was overflowing with the soundless fluttering of delicate wings, sentences whispered by faces without lips, and a sultry yellow wind. The dream hovered inside and out, it didn’t retreat even when I went outside, although the yard was trampled and empty, and parched dirt covered the ground in a hard crust. It seemed some large, slovenly animal had rolled around there during the night. A scaly, stinking dragon scorching the earth and the asphalt with its breath of flames. Only it could have devoured the birds: they had vanished completely. There wasn’t a single bird in the courtyards between the buildings. The dirty pigeons of Vilnius didn’t jostle at their feeding spots outside the windows of doddering old women. Ruffled sparrows didn’t hop around the balconies. There wasn’t a single bird left anywhere. It seemed someone had erased them all from the world with a large, gray eraser.

People went on their way: no one was looking around with a stunned face, the way I was. They didn’t see anything. I was the only one to miss the birds. Perhaps they shouldn’t even exist, perhaps there aren’t any in the world at all, and never were? Perhaps I merely dreamed a sick dream, saw something menacing in it, and named it “birds”? And everything I remember or know about birds is no more than a pathological fantasy, a bird paranoia?

These thoughts apparently blunted my attention. Otherwise, I would have immediately spotted that woman with the wrinkled face; I would have sensed her oppressive stare. I consider myself sufficiently experienced. Unfortunately . . . I walked down the path that had been trampled in the grass, glanced at the green stoplight, and boldly stepped forward.

Instinct and a quick reaction saved me. The side of the black limousine cleaved the air a hair’s breadth away from my body. Only then did I realize my feet weren’t touching the ground, that I was hanging in the air, my arms outstretched. Like a bird’s wings.

My body saved me. I jumped back instinctively; I won against the car fender by a fraction of a second. My heart gave a sharp pang; I quickly looked around and spotted that woman. Her wrinkled face yawned like a hole against the background of the trampled field. Her stare was caustic and crushing. She gave herself away: none of the people at the trolleybus stop were standing still; they looked around, or glanced at their watches. She stood upright, as motionless as a statue, and only her cheeks and lips moved—you couldn’t mistake that motion, like sucking, for anything else. I also had time to notice that her gray overcoat was frayed (severely frayed). Without a doubt, an ordinary peon of Theirs, a nameless disa. She suddenly shook herself as if she were breaking out of shackles and nimbly leapt into a departing trolleybus. There wasn’t any point in following her (there’s never any point).

I glanced at her for a second perhaps—the black limousine was still quite close. As if nothing had happened, quietly humming, the limousine sailed over the ground. The back window was covered with a small, pale green curtain. They really had no need to cover themselves. I knew perfectly well what I would see if the little curtain weren’t there: two or three pudgy faces looking at me with completely expressionless, bulging eyes.

The birds came back to life only when I got to the library. Two dazed pigeons perched by the announcement post. They practically ignored the passersby, merely rolling their deranged eyes from time to time, without moving their heads. They could neither fly nor walk. Perched on three-toed feet, they listlessly bulged from the grayish cement, as if they were in a trance. The ancient Sovereign of Birds had forsaken them.

O ancient sovereign of winged things, shepherdess of a thousand flocks, give all those hiding in the thickets to me, throw a skein of wool before the man who is searching, tracking the footprints; lead us forward in the eye of day and in the light of the moon, show the way no human knows!

She waited for me in the library corridor. I say “me,” because sometimes it seems that everything in the world happens for me. The grimy rains fall for me, in the evening the yellowish window lights glimmer for me, the leaden clouds contort above my head. It’s as if I’m walking on a soft membrane that sinks under my feet and turns into a funnel with steep sides; I stand at the bottom, and all incidents, images, and words tumble down towards me. They keep sticking to me, each one urging its particular significance. Perhaps only a presumed significance. Although, on second thought, everything could be immeasurably significant. I have found her leaning on the window many times before. She’s probably not waiting for me; maybe she’s waiting for her own Godot, a tiny, graceful Nothing. I know how to distinguish those who wait. She always stands by the window waiting and smokes, the cigarette squeezed between her slender, nervous fingers. Perhaps her Godot is the grayish-blue sun—the color of cigarette smoke—shining outside the window. Or maybe I am her Godot after all, stuck at the bottom of the slick-sided funnel, beset by dreamed-up birds vanishing and appearing again and beating the dusty twilight of the library’s corridors with their wings.

She rocks back and forth almost imperceptibly, a slightly bent leg set in front. It seems she intentionally intoxicates with the hidden curve of her long thighs. They’re not particularly hidden: no clothing can cover her body. I don’t understand her, or perhaps I want her to remain mysterious as long as possible. I don’t turn my eyes away from her; even if I wanted to hide myself, she would force herself on me anyway, through hearing, touch, through the sixth or seventh sense. What is she—fate, or a treacherous snare? She doesn’t force herself on anyone, she simply exists, but incidents, images, and words constantly slide down the funnel’s slopes, closer to me each time. I avoid her a bit, maybe I’m even afraid. I can’t stand it when some person turns up excessively close.

We worked together for two or three years and it meant nothing to me. I scarcely noticed her. And suddenly, one miraculous moment, my eyes were opened. Since that moment she’s all I see.

She’s unattainable; she doesn’t pay the least attention to me. Why should she? I’m old, she’s young. I’m hideous, she’s beautiful. She could at least stop irritating me and distracting me by her mere existence. I know my destiny; I’m not reaching for the stars in heaven.

When was this; when did I think this—surely not today?

She sensed me, turned and showed her eyes (probably brown), wandering in from that morning’s vision. She doesn’t look at me; that brown gaze is always turned towards her own inner being, there, where the drab sun’s rays do not reach. Inside, she is teeming with hidden eyes, while the two eyes that are visible to everyone are merely two lights, two openings breached by the world squeezing its way into her unapproachable soul. Soul, spirit, ego, id . . .

But when, when was this, when did I think this way?

I slipped into my room and quickly closed the door. I closed the door, pulled the curtains shut, and unplugged the telephone. I know perfectly well what I’m hiding from. Particularly today . . . Although what does “today” mean? What does “yesterday,” “a week ago,” “a month from now” mean? What does “was,” “will be,” or “could be” mean? I grasp the world far more essentially, without the deceptive entanglement of time. I was first taught the secret art of understanding in dreams and visions, and then here, in the world we feel with our fingers. I pay less and less attention to humanity’s banal time; it’s too deceptive, it leads you astray from the essence that hides in one great ALL. I can’t allow myself to be deceived by thinking that something has “already passed by,” or that something else is still “to come.” Thinking that way destroys the great ALL’s unity. Now I sit at my desk in the library’s office and painstakingly lay out stiff paper cards. Now I stand entirely naked in front of the mirror. Now I plunge into the dizzying black-eyed Circe’s body. Now I fearfully step into the old house in the depths of a garden . . . I stepped into, I will step into, I could step into . . . All of that happens at the same time in the great ALL, those purported differences have no meaning, they aren’t essential. What is essential? That always, every second, slowly and quietly, I molder in one great ALL.

“How old are you, snot-face?” asks the sniffler.

“A hundred!”

“See—the little bastard is still yapping.”

Swinging his arm, he strikes, the brains disintegrate, from the wall the shit-god of all dogs, the mustachioed dog-god sniffs around Georgianly and smiles.

“Now, how old are you?”

“Six hundred twenty-three!”

The morning’s events weren’t, of course, accidental. I’d like to not pay attention to anything, to say to myself that it was accidental, that there was nothing to it at all. I’d like to forget the wrinkled woman’s oppressive stare, the pigeons by the announcement post, and the murderous black limousine’s fender. But I don’t believe in accidents. They don’t exist. Everything that happens in life is determined by you yourself. All “accidental” failures, all misfortunes, all joys and catastrophes are born of ourselves. Every fiasco is an unconscious fulfillment of our desires, a secret victory. Every death is a suicide. As long as you cling to the world, as long as you don’t surrender, no force can overcome you. Everything, absolutely everything depends on you yourself; even Their tentacles don’t reach as deep as They would want.

I’ve summoned Them again; once more I’ve given myself away, I’ve attracted attention. There can be no doubt: the shabby disa’s stare, the unmistakable movements of her lips and cheeks were excessively clear . . . The horror is to know that it’s as inevitable as the grass greening up in the spring, as the dragon’s fiery breath. For a little while They stopped hiding and took aim at me again. My life is the life of a man in a telescopic sight. There would be nothing to it if the shotgun that is aimed at me would merely kill me. Alas . . . Who can understand this horrible condition, a condition I’m already accustomed to? Who can measure the depth of the drab abyss? The worst of it is that the trigger of that unseen shotgun is directly connected to you. Only you can pull it, so you have to be on your guard every moment, even when you are alone. Perhaps the most on guard when you’re alone. Mere thoughts and desires, mere dreams, can give you away. They watch you, they watch you all the time and wait for you to make a mistake. With the second, true sight, I see the crooked smirk on Their plump faces, a smirk of faith in Their own unlimited power. But I barely try to inspect the mechanism of Their actions when I run into a blank wall. It’s easy to get into Buddha’s world; hard to get into Satan’s.

God’s world, Satan’s world, the worlds of spirit, pain, fear . . . But there is an ordinary world too, the real world; you always return to it, you’ll never escape it—just as you’ll never escape from Them. It counts its absurd time, never missing so much as a second. Now its clock says it’s noon. Two hours have disappeared, devoured by silent jaws. My time frequently disappears that way. You’d think you’ve fallen into a deep pit of time; all that can be seen from there is a pathetic little sky-blue patch of time that’s always the same. And the insane clocks of the empirical world don’t stop going; death hides in their ticking. Thank God, I fall into the pit and calm down there. Sometimes I envy myself this ability. It’s like sleep without dreams. In the forced labor camp I would walk and talk for entire days (now I walk and talk), but in fact I would be on the other side of the barbed wire fence, on the other side of all fences, on the other side of my own self. Later I wouldn’t remember either my words or my actions; that may be the only reason why I survived all the horrors. Unfortunately, from any sleep there is an awakening. It falls to your lot to return here.

Strange—even here I’m appropriate, allowed, possible. That’s practically a miracle. I should have long since flown out of this world to end up in God’s, Satan’s, or fear’s universe. However, for the time being I’m still here. I even almost have friends.

It’s probably all right now to pull back the curtains, to crack open the window—and immediately Stefa, without knocking, sticks her head in through the door. She invites everyone to take a coffee break: a charming little head with white-blond hair and sparkling eyes, hurrying to see everything she shouldn’t.

“Toast his pecker a bit,” says sniffitysniffler.

The portrait on the wall twitches its mustache like mad.

I follow behind her, down a low, straight corridor. Slowly I turn into the ordinary outward “I”; soon he will quietly sip coffee. Brezhnev’s portrait hangs at the end of the corridor; Stefa’s wide hips sway in front of me rapaciously. It’s almost a scene from childhood: Robertėlis sits under a portrait of Vytautas the Great while Madam Giedraitienė, even in front of me, a teenager, sways her hips erotically.

Unfortunately, the portraits differ too much. Bloated Leodead Brezhnev, with grinning, artificial jaws. Even his brains are artificial. More and more like Mao’s last pictures. In the end they all become as similar as twins—there’s some secret hiding here. They’re artificial, put together out of non-working parts; when they speak, barely grunting out the words, it seems they are going to disintegrate any minute. And yet they don’t disintegrate. They’re the live apotheosis of kanukism; They give themselves away, propping up stooges like that.

No, no, better Robertas under Vytautas’s portrait. Later he sits down to play a minuet while I stare at Madam Giedraitienė’s seductive hips, Stefa’s hips, all the hips of all the world’s women; they dive into the opening of a door, Virgilishly and slavishly lead to an apple cake and a circle of hell made up of plump, feminine faces.

Because above the table, shit on the beans, hangs the portrait of the mustachioed man, the rightlower corner cracked, the mustachioed man’s a bit battered. Stalin Sralin,1 baby swallower. But we won’t be afraid of him; we’ll shove a rod up his ass.

Shit on peas, shit on beans,

Shit on Stalin’s flunkeys . . .

One sits across from me, another paces along the wall; his neck is thin and he’s severely adamappled. His nostrils are thin, they quiver frequently; he wants something. He peers at you sullenly, with fish eyes: maybe he doesn’t like it that you are lying naked and spread-eagled like that. They themselves laid you down, they themselves tied you up. Plaits appear on the wall, they shiver and distort themselves. You sprawl at the bottom of a stone pit, all you see is a mustachioed Sralinish little piece of crackedsky. The plaits climb toward the sky, toward the mustache; they glimmer, twinkle, and blink, like little eyes. He gazes from the frame as serene as a god. This stone pit is his altar. But everything’s backwards here—you’re crucified, and he’s praying to you. Backwards: first he says Amen. Amen to you. The holy spiritsralin smiles Georgianly; the tiny chewed bones of infants stick out from under his mustache. Why have they put you here? After all, you didn’t have the time to do anything. They didn’t even give you a pistonmachine; they were saving you for other work.

“Beat him some more,” says quivernostrils. “I’m soaked already.”

Steeling lamp gets up, waves a hose, there’s lead poured into it, to gentlycaress.

“Oh you, devil’s spawn, yob tvoyu mat.”

By now you know what that means: to screw your mother. They can, they can do anything; the mustachioedgod Sralin screws all of your mothers. They hit you on the head, and your kidneys and groin and the soles of your feet hurt. Then they punch you in the void—the back of your head hurts. There are circles all about the stone pit and around the portrait, like cobwebs or bars. There are cobwebs like bars on the window too, or the reverse—you don’t know anything anymore, you’re hit on the head, you’re tied up and there’s nothing you can do. There’s absolutely, absolutely, absolutely nothing you can do. You never could. You didn’t have the time to do anything; they didn’t even give you a pistonmachine.

“My hand’s tired. Lively bastard.”

The pain is white and blinding, like a lamp. Painlamp stands on the table and pokes the eyes with its flashing.

“What a stink,” says the unseen one. “The bottoms of his feet are all scorched.”

“Burn his pecker,” say the quivering nostrils. “Maybe that’ll scare him. Just throw some water on him, he’s not all there.”

The nostrilly face flies around you. There’s smirking and sighing from the frame. Stadniukas is his name, shitty Russian NKVD.

“Aw, go on, burn him yourself,” says the white blinding pain. “The hell he’ll get scared. If he’d say something at least, the little bastard.”

And Lithuania will be free again,

When we drive out the last Russkie,

Machine guns will soon howl bullets . . .

The door slams—it’s over already? No, there’s water yet, icecold, and tremblenostrils, he still wants something, he holds a flame and smiles. What is he going to do?

“You need your eyes burned out,” say the plaits and circles on the wall.

The water soaked into you; you soak up the water like parched earth. It’s spring now; grass will grow out of you. Narrowneck stands next to you, smiles and twitches his nostrils; suddenly he unbuttons his fly and pulls out a limp sausage of manhood. What is he going to do? He was supposed to burn yours. His is slimy, like some strange slug; the hole in the end, like an eye, looks at you. Like it’s alive. And Stalin on the wall. Both of them are alive and looking at you. What will he do now, what will he do? The flame lowers into your crotch, the pain as even and shiny as a needle. Then it curves, touches the heart, kidneys, liver; but you still see, you see everything. The slimy slug slowly coils, raises its head, looks at you with its one skewed eye. Looks at you and relishes it; the little flame between your legs has turned into the flame of hell. You’re an old castle, the Crusaders are burning you. It hurts, oh Lord, how it hurts. The slug devours your pain; it quivers with bliss, its stumpy head upreared. Can it hurt more, can it? Where’s the end, you ask of the slimy fetidstench slug’s eye, and it suddenly spits in your face, a sticky white spittle. The little flame slowly rises from your crotch, you see nothing more: the slug’s sticky spittle sealed your eyes. You hear quivernostrils breathing heavily, everything in your crotch is probably scorched, quivernostrils buttons his fly, hides his slug; it feeds on others’ pain, and you’re probably gone by now. Stadniukas is his name, remember, Stadniukas.

The elegant menagerie has assembled. Nearest, golden-toothed Graž­ina, the legendary heroine; even in a chair she writhes like a cat, crying, pleading for a soft couch, white plush, and a gigantic fat dog—the flabby philistine luxury of the period between the wars. Next, sunken-chested Martynas with yellowed teeth. Stefa—a blond-haired little angel with a spy’s eyes. And further—a veritable lineup of thick-jawed women who know everything in the world in exactly the same way. A postage stamp series, imprinted with a single cliché. Clichés everywhere: ceiling and wall clichés, the view from the window cliché, poster and slogan clichés. A book is the best of friends. Welcome to Vilnius. Regards to our most heroic women. A watery-eyed society of unusual harmony. Only Martynas and Stefa are worth even the most modest of inquiries. The others don’t interest me; I’ve heard their talk yesterday, a year ago, five years ago—time has stopped here too.

“You know, yesterday I spent two hours looking for meat, I was already standing in line, and right in front of my nose . . .”

“They take everything away, you know. In Kaunas some men soldered freight cars, bound for Moscow with meat, to the rails . . .”

“Haven’t you been to Russia? You’ve seen how thing are there? Completely . . .”

“Things have always been like that in Russia, that’s why it’s Russia. What do we have to do with it . . .”

“Don’t worry, Moscow is choking on Lithuanian sausage . . .”

“As if stuffing your face is what matters most . . .”

“A Lithuanian always eats his fill . . .”

“Like there was anything else. There isn’t anything else . . .”

“Ladies, just wait for eighty-four.” That’s Martynas now. “Orwell’s ghost will appear, the system will disintegrate like a house of cards.”

“Comrade Poška, think of what you’re saying!” There’s Elena’s hippopotamus alto.

My eyes start hurting from this talk. Of bread and circuses, only bread is left today. I sneak a look at her. She doesn’t sit with the others, she stands leaning against the shelves and is the only one who is quiet. Her dress lies softly on her thighs, just hinting, just letting you know how perfect they are. Her calves are covered with high boots, but I’ve observed them carefully; in front of my eyes I see the long thin calves of summer, the skin as soft as willow buds. Strange currents, menacing fluids of beauty, flow through her legs. They rise upward, to her waist, caress her flat belly and curvaceous hips, fall downward, turn a circle around the knees, slide down the calves and pour through slender heels into the delicate feet, all the way to the toes. Her legs are a work of art. It seems to me that at night they should glow, enveloped by the fluid’s tender halo. It’s dangerous for me to look at them; I ought to lower my eyes, to cover my face with my hands, to hide from myself—but I greedily eyeballed them, nearly losing consciousness.

She felt my look; she feels everything. At intervals she would slowly raise the cup to her lips and freeze. She didn’t glance at me even once; she didn’t glare angrily. She didn’t hide from me; I was allowed to admire the barely visible wrinkles of thin material in that place where the legs secretly join the flat, even belly. Her beauty is full, it breathes with real life. It’s dangerous. She is like a live rose in this garbage-pit of deformed bodies. That’s why an ominous doubt slowly creeps into my heart. Can it possibly be, I think involuntarily, is it at all possible? Beauty should be limited; otherwise it inevitably turns into evil. This was etched into my brain by an incident from long ago, the first bell that invited me to the great spectacle. A wretched spectacle, where all of the roles are tragic and bloody; an intricate and brutal performance, whose rules will sooner or later drive me out of my mind.

Gediminas was still alive then, and I was only forty years old. Was, is, could be . . . I don’t know if Gediminas could be alive. I don’t know if I would want him to be more alive than he is now. A person’s non-being isn’t absolute: the thread of fate breaks, but after all it doesn’t burn up, it doesn’t melt in the air; it remains among us, the living. Every one of us could seat our own dead in front of the hearth: our own Gediminas, our own grandfather, constantly griping sullenly about God and all of his creation. There shouldn’t be such a feeling on earth as “lost to the ages.” Only you yourself can be lost to the ages. Loss merely freezes a person’s existence, as if in a piece of clear ice. Now Gediminas will never turn gray or be sickly; he can’t be that way anymore. Now he’ll never climb the Tibetan peak he dreamed of; he’ll always just want to climb it. Perhaps it’s for the best, that now he can’t do what he didn’t do, say what he didn’t say, turn into that which he wasn’t (now isn’t). I don’t need to be afraid he drinks too much—he will always drink and always enjoy it, now he really won’t turn into a doddering wreck who can’t hold a glass. He won’t betray me or neglect me in misfortune. He is the way he is, now he will never change. Maybe it’s better that way: it would be better, it could be better, it will be better . . . Gediminas hasn’t vanished anywhere; even now he’s standing on the corner of the sidewalk (that evening he stood). The impassive Vilnius autumn lingers about; the air smells of damp dust—like a giant whale pulled out of a sea of dust. The evening wraps itself in a barely noticeable mist and the wet glitter of lights. No one drives by, everyone has forgotten us, Vilnius has abandoned us. A gust of wind carries off the mist, the ripples in the puddles slowly settle down, the pale reflections of the lights float again. This quietly steaming broth of autumn quietly intoxicates. On evenings like this, Vilnius, with its toothless whale-mouth, whispers hoarse, mysterious words, entices and lures you, swallows you up and spits you out—appreciably the worse for wear and soaked in the smells of the whale’s guts: vapors of wine, vodka, and rum.

When you’ve been spat out, you see the damp, dusk-enveloped buildings of Vilnius lurking in the dark corners of the streets in an entirely different way (that evening I saw it that way). It seemed they were lying in ambush. It seemed Vilnius no longer breathed at all; it crouched and settled down, grimly waiting. The drab monuments and the dirty, smoke-ridden lindens of Vilnius waited too. Something had to happen; this the two of us, deluded into the depths of Old Town and saturated with the city’s fine rain, realized particularly well. We stood (now we stand), waiting for something to happen. For a mangy, wet dog to cling to us (all stray dogs love Gediminas; they all consider him their only leader and master). For the wind to suddenly whistle like a bird, and a vengeful moon, marked with mysterious crooked symbols, to show up in a rift in the clouds. But nothing happened; the toothless whale spat the two of us out, and forgot us.

Gedis saw that woman first. She emerged as if from the earth, or perhaps she was born of the fall dampness—she hadn’t even managed to wipe the dew off her cheeks yet. It seemed an eddy of wind had brought her here from a gloomy side street. She swiveled to the sides, as if finding herself in this world for the first time. This can only happen in dreams or at night in Vilnius: just now, as far as you could see, the street was empty, but here a black-haired woman in an expensive elegant overcoat is standing next to you, and you aren’t in the least surprised. She’s one of yours now; she had to show up here, according to the imponderable laws of the dream of Vilnius. A gust of wind whisked the thick black hair from her face, but a shadow hid her eyes. It was the clothes I saw most clearly—the kind sewn by only the most expensive of tailors. I had no doubt she was the something we were waiting for. Vilnius’s Greek gift, immediately attracting the eye (and not just the eye). You would instantly spot a woman like that in the thickest forest or crush of people; you would see her dressed in any fashion, hidden under a dark veil, or disfigured.

There didn’t seem to be anything special either about her oval face, or in the predatory thighs, visible even through the cloth of the coat, or in her indolent breasts. There wasn’t that mysterious harmony in her that sometimes links coarse details into a wondrous whole. However, she attracted me (attracts me) like a large, warm magnet. She wanted touching. She wanted us to think only of her. Gedis and I had just been getting ready to go somewhere, to do something, and now we stood there, forgetting all of our plans, completely stunned. The woman smiled and waited for us to come to our senses. A beautiful, long-legged, perhaps twenty-five-year-old, with dreamy breasts and hair tousled by the wind. A strange, damp warmth, like that from a heap of rotting leaves, emanated from her.

She really did want touching. She craved this herself, she entwined us both with long, invisible arms; you wanted to obey her, but within that sweet obedience a melancholy fear flared—it seemed as if this Circe of Vilnius’s side streets could at any moment turn you into a soft, brainless being.

An automobile, apparently lured by her, stopped next to us. Naturally and inescapably, she turned up inside it with us, naturally and inescapably, she got out at Gediminas’s building and went up to the fifth floor. She smiled the entire time. I leaned on an armchair, secretly watching her, and still she smiled; she never uttered a single word. She wasn’t made for small talk.

In the room I finally saw her eyes. I had never seen eyes like that before: huge, enormous, velvety, inviting you closer. I had never seen hair like that before: soft black curls slid down her grayish dress all the way to her waist. Later, when I felt them, I discovered that you couldn’t squeeze them in your hand—they writhed and slipped out like a nimble black snake. Hair like that doesn’t exist in the world. Probably there was never a body like that, either: the regal clothes, supposedly designed to cover it, denied their purpose; her nakedness strained and forced its way to the surface. She couldn’t hide (maybe she didn’t want to, either) her long legs or her oval breasts that shouted for caresses. She couldn’t hide even the smallest details of her hypnotizing body. She was more naked than naked.

I completely forgot Gediminas, and he forgot me; both of us saw only her. He sat closer, but he didn’t dare touch her; he didn’t even dare to open his mouth. I didn’t, either: it seemed words would instantly break the spell. I would never have dared, but Gedis nevertheless carefully caressed her with trembling fingers, then again and again, more and more—sensing she desired that herself, desired only that. I slouched on the other side of the table, but I knew, I felt, that she was with me—it didn’t matter who caressed her or how. She was my woman that even­ing—from beginning to end. Gedis, completely forgetting himself, caressed her with my hands. My hands slowly stroked her neck and breasts, which swayed to the sides, felt them growing heavy and full, beseeching me not to pull away. Her gigantic velvet eyes asked the same thing. I couldn’t hold their gaze, I lowered my eyes; she thought I no longer saw her. Unfortunately, I always see everything. I see in the dark, when others go helplessly blind. Looking straight ahead, I see everything around me, even what’s going on behind my back. I saw everything then too: Gedis’s groping hands—by now they had pried their way to the naked body—a trembling twofold shadow in the corner of the room, cigarette ashes herded along the table top by heavy breathing. I saw her face too. She secretly fixed her gaze on me, the second gaze, the eyes of the ashen desert, which I know so well now. At the time it occurred to me that it was a hallucination, a brief nightmare that hadn’t appeared from without, but had emerged from within me. That gaze destroyed space; it seized everything for itself (it seemed that with her gigantic eye sockets she would suck in me, and the armchair, and the entire room). It seemed as if narrow cones of pale light, two steely barbs, emerged from her eyes. I flinched as if I had awoken during the night and felt cockroaches crawling on my face. I lifted my eyes, and Lord, I believed I was imagining things. I was caressed by the glossy black velvet eyes of a beauty begging me to approach. And breasts. Gedis peeled the pale blue lace from her shoulders and, stunned, looked at two dreamy hemispheres with dark, erect, brown nipples. “Oh Lord, Vytas, do you see?” I saw; I stared there as if entranced. Breasts strikingly inclined to the sides; each one swayed entirely separately, you could put a palm between them. I had already seen these breasts, as white as the ivory figurines in my father’s study.

Only the nipples are dark brown. And you are red, blood rushes to your entire face. It’s red as well, it protrudes from below, and you are even more ashamed because she’s looking there too.

“Come on, come on, don’t be afraid,” say her voluptuous swollen lips, “It’ll be nice, really nice in a minute.”

Janė sits on the cot, leaning against the wall, bent legs spread a bit, and smiles gently. There are boxes and pieces of lumber thrown about the shed and colorful rags hung from the hooks under the ceiling. The cot by the window is hard; your knees even hurt, but you kneel, anyway. Janė smiles encouragingly; her teeth are white, white. She’s white all over, only her nipples are dark brown, and the hair below her belly. You look there and you feel faint. You’ve tried so many times to penetrate there, through the clothes, with your stare, and you would die, die, die. Now you see, and your head spins, and it’s awful. With her clothes off, she looks thinner; her legs have grown even longer. And she keeps looking at it.

“That’s an unusual little beast you’re growing. How old are you, anyway, fourteen? My, what an early little gent you are . . .”

You tremble when she touches it; it seems she’ll burn her hand—it’s so hot there. Her breasts are acutely inclined to the sides; you could put a palm between them. Janė lies on her side, pulls you down with her, not letting it out of her hands. She smells of bitter herbs and the steam of the kitchen. You throw back your head to catch your breath, and suddenly your heart stops. Outside the shed’s window floats a man’s head. He’s looking at you. Looking straight into your eyes and chewing a yellowish blade of grass. You want to run away, to escape, but she holds you firmly in her embrace and doesn’t let go. Don’t be afraid, little gent, she whispers, don’t be afraid. Her eyes are closed, she doesn’t see anything. And the man is still looking; he’s spat out the grass. You want to tell her, but you can’t catch your breath. You want to vanish into the earth, but you’re tied down: it’s tied down, it’s disappeared inside her. You want to die, you want it to break off, so you could run away. The man looks, his eyes huge. She gently lies on top on you, she’s going at it from above, breathing heavily. And it’s doing something inside of her, chomping and shuddering, extended like never before. Now it has become part of her. Janė has completely turned into it; she writhes and wriggles without your consent. The man’s head licks its lips, swallows its saliva. He’s looking straight into your eyes, as if he wants to suck in all of your insides, all your blood, all your brains, leaving only an empty skin . . .

Completely stupefied, Gediminas carried her out in his arms. Without a sound she invited me, begged me, to come along. But I remained in the room, remained alone with breasts inclined to the sides, these and the others. And with her second gaze. No, the gaze didn’t re-materialize; rather I seemed to imagine those dreamy breasts, black hair, long legs, and slightly wry smile. Perhaps everything about her was invented; however, the barbed gaze was real. I remembered it—no, not that; something nameless, perhaps even senseless: the gray emptiness of the abyss, an obscure picture, an invisible light. People are accustomed to ignoring indistinct accumulations of memory like that. They are horrendously mistaken.

The most important episodes in life aren’t lit up by the rays of the sun; fate does its dreary work in twilight, in a murderous clarity, in a sooty dusk—out of it, bats come flying; the eyes of meaningless nonexistence lurk within it. Our fate is measured out there, where owls hoot gloomily. Only the gray, dirty pigeons of Vilnius escape it into the light of day.

I felt the black-haired woman’s second gaze spreading through the room like an invisible will-o’-the-wisp. In vain, I tried to hide from it. I drank the cognac left on the table and looked around with growing suspicion. I had been led into an invisible labyrinth where roving eyes followed me from its identical corridors. Her second gaze reminded me of my mother’s gaze as she stroked my head, of the grim stare of the camp barracks’s broken windows, of the stare of the colorless river pool—numerous spines piercing straight through, but most significantly—it reminded me of eyes I had never seen before. It reminded me of the narrow little snouts of rats and dilated pupils. Reminded me of reddish foam on painfully compressed lips, of the eyes of the yellowish, vine-entangled old house. I didn’t try to understand anything, otherwise I would have run out of Gedis’s room, to wherever my feet took me. A person who starts remembering the future shouldn’t expect anything good of it. But I still didn’t know my “future,” I hadn’t realized that only the one huge ALL exists. I was blind, I was a headless stuffed dummy, a doll drowsing on a bed of dreamy breasts; no signals could arouse me. I swigged cognac and stared moronically at the window. No, not out the window—there were neither buildings nor lights outside it, Gedis’s windows looked out straight into the void. Perhaps that was why frightening memories slowly encompassed me. A strange presentiment would flow over me in gusts and then retreat, the way a headache sometimes momentarily comes and goes again. I looked around at Gedis’s pedantically arranged living room; I even counted the leaves of a spreading, flowerless plant. It seems to me that this counting determined everything.

The memory stood in front of my eyes like a large, old painting. Only the dust needed to be brushed off. It was hidden in between the real things, inside them themselves, in the ghostly forms of Gedis’s living room, quietly playing a melody heard once upon a time: the melody of some other room, some other space.

On the right a mahogany dresser, submerged in an indistinct sha­dow, some other gloomy low furniture. On the left, a mirror and a wall with torn wallpaper. A pale-colored runner on the floor and a window—most significant of all—a window, outside which yawns a gray void. It’s dim in the room, but it’s brighter there than it is on the other side of the grimy glass; through it, the interior is lit up by the darkness, by the drab rays of the pallid sun. Just exactly that: the darkness lights up the dimness; the blackish rays suck the last remains of the day out of the room. This picture didn’t so much as breathe; it cowered in a boundless silence, grimly waiting for me to guess its secret. On the right an old dresser and some other low furniture . . . on the left a mirror, a full-sized mirror with a carved frame; an empty glass left by father . . . And all of it is looking at you. All of it is looking at you. Looking without eyes. There are no eyes in the picture; there is nothing that would remind you of eyes, nothing that would even let you think of eyes. There’s nothing there; however, the picture stubbornly, annoyingly, is looking at you with the biting stare of the spiritless void. The stare of a maw entangled in yellowish vines. I do not remember who saved me from it at other times.

That evening Gediminas did the saving. He crept into the room like a thief, or perhaps like the victim of a theft—he kept glancing backwards, as if an apparition were following him. I didn’t recognize him. I couldn’t believe that indistinctly babbling figure with sunken eyes was The Great Gedis. It was some other person, frightened and enfeebled. No stray dog would rub up against a person like that. I didn’t recognize Gediminas. Someone else looked at me with a stare full of horror: “Go on, go on in yourself, you’ll see.” Lost between the dreamy breasts and the barbed eyes, everything seemed clear and inevitable. I had to get up and go into the bedroom. There I had to slowly undress and feel a strange, damp warmth rising from the bed. As if from a heap of rotting leaves. Only the smell, sugary and voluptuous, was different, entirely different. Everything was ordinary and inevitable, like the grass turning green in the spring, like the dragon’s fiery breath. The scene was satanically real, but entirely unreal—a dusky shot from a Buñuel film. In the swath of bleak light sprawled the intoxicating body of a woman, inviting me, waiting for me. She lay naked and not naked (doubly, triply naked), wrapped in strands of black hair, in a frame of shiny black snakes. The legs were outlined in long taupe stockings (those stockings hid treachery, I know that now). The breasts fell completely to the sides and looked at me with the large, dark brown eyes of the nipples. But her eyes were even bigger, brimming with intoxicating voluptuousness and a mute invitation. Her look seductively and despairingly whispered that she is waiting for me alone, that she lives for me alone, that she surrenders all of her essence, to the very end and beyond. Just for me alone. Slightly bent knees spread open like a flower bud, enticing and brooking no delay: she had waited for me for so long. I kneeled between her legs, put my hands on her breasts (they were somewhat limp, like those others). My fingers, it seemed, would instantly melt, disappear within her, meld with her breasts, her shoulders, her thick black hair. Her intoxicatingly scented body even rose up in the air to meet me; it clung to me, the silk of the stockings gently stroked my sides and back. In astonishment I dived into her, it instantly dived into a damp, sugary heaven; it was at once caressed, fondled, embraced by myriad tiny little hands and mouths. Her breasts thrashed and nibbled at me, the hair snakes wound about my elbows, and it constantly reveled in sweet heaven, continually climbing, climbing to a boundless height. In her body the bodies of all women intertwined, the bodies of women who could or could not possibly be, everything that could be the best in them. She was created for this alone.

I came to completely sucked dry. I wanted to flee as quickly as possible, but she didn’t let go of me; even the limp breasts rose, following my receding body, and the black hair snakes shackled my elbows and pulled me back. A single thought throbbed in my head: it can’t be this good, in this world it isn’t this good. I got up, even though a thousand gentle little hands held me back. I didn’t look at her; I knew that if I looked back I would instantly end up next to her again, inside of her, inside the damp, sugary heaven. I returned to the living room naked and sat down across from Gedis, probably repeating out loud: it can’t be that good, it’s a lie, in this world it isn’t that good. Gediminas looked at me with sad, stray dog eyes; it seemed at any moment he would lick my hand. I knew he had experienced the same thing. “Vytas, what will we do?” he mumbled quietly. “If she stays here, the two of us won’t be able to do anything else. It’s all we’ll be able to do.” “Yes,” I answered, “it can’t be that good in this world.” “She’s like a cosmic black hole, she’ll swallow us both, Vytas.” “Yes, there’s no point in useless discussion. I’m going to her.” “Who sent her, who sent her, Vytas?” “Just one more time, one little time, the last . . .” “Get hold of yourself, Vytas, get hold of yourself. It’ll be the end of us!” “Yes. I’m going now . . . We’re not dreaming?” I was blind, I was on the verge of falling into a trap, but Gedis saved us both. I believe he knew even then. He shoved me into a corner and blocked my way. It’s a rare person who can block my way by force. Gedis could. I was left to squat stark naked in the corner and I cried genuine tears. I cried that it could be that good, and that it could no longer be that good. Her entirely real breasts, legs, belly, damp, warm vagina (particularly that, particularly that) probably came from the Other Side, from the threefold cosmos of Nirvana, where thoughts aren’t necessary to understand the world. That had not been just a perfect act of lovemaking, that had been . . .

Had been, is, could be . . . If Gedis were alive, I could ask where it was he put that woman—one way or another, she wasn’t a spirit; blood coursed through her veins. Maybe he would tell me now. Then he was quiet. He expelled her by force. She left dismayed and sad—sorrowful in a pure, pure way. Cinderella in a princess’s gown, driven out from the king’s palace. Gediminas, that black-winged angel, cruelly separated us. After all, she was mine. I sat, shoved into a corner, completely crushed. And she obediently went out the door, throwing a longing glance at me. Throughout it all she never uttered a word. She just looked at me: not just with her eyes—but with her shoulders, her breasts, her knees, and with her incomparable vagina, the black hole, which shone through all her clothes, sucked me inside, and perhaps wanted to destroy me. I wanted nothing more than to be destroyed within it. I craved that sugary, damp annihilation. But Gedis was stronger; he locked me in, and when he returned he was alone.

I searched for that black-haired woman—fitfully, depending on vague instincts. It seemed to me that she would, without fail, show up at twilight, on just such a damp, murky evening, in just such a labyrinth of Old Town’s streets. I stubbornly scoured the crumbling gateways and the narrow courtyards that reeked of urine. Sometimes I would go around to the nastiest of drunken dens, where unshaven lumpens guzzle cheap wine, and then, remembering her expensive clothing, I’d tumble into one or another of the expensive dives and, to the maître d’s horror, scour the private niches. At first I probably wanted only to experience the miracle’s sugary blessing once more, and later . . . Later my life was lit up in an entirely different light; I began to search for Old Town’s Circe, wanting something else. Unfortunately, she vanished like a flame. She no longer inhabited the wet streets of Vilnius, Old Town’s filthy bars, or the automobiles flying by. All that was left was Gediminas, scowling angrily, like a killer. He probably buried her underground, submerged her under water, dissolved her into the air. Or perhaps, having appeared out of nowhere, she vanished into nowhere; born of the wind, she disappeared in the wind—but here another appears, she stands in front of me, and again I want to touch her.

Of course, Lolita is completely different: different eyes, a different body—not open, but as secretive and quiet as an abandoned lagoon. She is still standing there when the others finish jawing, start to disperse, and Martynas is saying something to me.

My head’s in a fog—that’s forgivable in a person who was caught in the vortex the moment he woke up, who once more parted the curtains of the secret spectacle, once more remembered the script of the inevitable role. Sometimes I think the best thing for me to do would be to go out of my mind. It’s too difficult to grasp everything with a clear mind. There are things that no human can do. Almost cannot bear, no matter how strong he is or how powerful his intellect may be. It is this “almost” that is my foolish hope, my wise hope. It is this “almost” that is all of me. For the time being I still am. In this world the easiest thing is to lose yourself. Most of the time you don’t even realize you no longer are, that only a stuffed dummy crammed with blood vessels and nerves, truly not your “I,” remains. You aren’t aware that They’ve already devoured you. You aren’t aware of anything. You don’t even remember that you once were.

It wasn’t easy to understand this, to open the door to the vague world of drab nothingness. For such exploits Their secretive system takes a cruel vengeance. I’m already almost a corpse. I’ve paid dearly for every crumb of understanding. What is the world worth, if it imposes so many tribulations and such pain without promising anything—neither paradise nor felicity on this earth? I didn’t expect requital, but I fought nevertheless. And I continue to fight. For what?

What the hell—for you, and you, for all of you!

I know that no one will put up monuments to me: I am a nameless soldier. But I fight every minute, even now, sitting in my office at work, repeating like a prayer: a clear head, cold logic, and caution. Those are the three whales on which my world depends. Outside the window the dirty pigeons of Vilnius are once more lazily soaring about, and once more time is throbbing in my temples. On the other side of the glass—bushes whitened by cement dust and construction scaffolding. Two figures drag themselves along slowly; one steps inside the shrubbery and unbuttons his fly. Between his spread legs I see a little stream watering the ground.

You don’t see anything, it’s dark, there’s nothing, although you strain to see, even your belly hurts. On the right an old dresser, on the left a mirror, they help you to see. It’s there! Really, really, it’s there, pale little faces coming up to the window.

“Mama, they’re looking! Little chubby faces! Who are they? What do they want?”

“Bugbears,” says mama. “They live in the forest beyond the Giedraitis house, and in the evening they look for naughty children. They search and hunt high and low.”

“Where do they hide in the daytime? Why doesn’t anyone find them?”

“During the day they turn into rats. Gray rats. When they catch some naughty child, they suck out his blood, so he walks around all white.”

“Like little Giedraitis?”

“Even more so, without even a drop of blood. The child doesn’t want anything, he doesn’t remember anything . . . but you’re a good boy, they won’t touch you.”

You raise your head quickly, quickly—really, they’ve disappeared; it wasn’t you they were looking for.

“I already know. They’re kanukai.”

“What, what?” Mama’s red lips smile.

“They’re not bugbears,” you say proudly, because you’ve thought up a new word. “They’re kanukai. When I grow up, I’ll catch them.”

Let’s reason this out logically. The black limousine intimidated me far less than it would have once. I’ve experienced too much to be terrified by the chilly whiff of Death’s shroud. I’ve consorted with that eyeless one for a long time; on meeting, we smile at one another like old acquaintances. Death is a woman whom I once had, but cast aside. Always expect revenge and treachery from a woman who’s been cast aside; don’t allow yourself to be caught by surprise. They know this perfectly.

Let’s reason this out logically. They couldn’t have intentions on my body. They need more, far more. True, Their plan could have been this: a broken spine, paralyzed limbs, battered brains. That’s hard to believe: They know I couldn’t be dealt with like that. And I know, but all the same I’d rather think about realistic, common sense punishments. However, every last thing—even my liver, kidneys, and lungs—is screaming and shouting that the great game has begun again, and the price is my “I.”

Besides—where had all the birds disappeared to, anyway?

Some other, more fundamental logic must be sought in this case. Images and moods speak more effectively and astutely than words, you just need to listen carefully. You need to listen in a particular way; after all, I’ve studied this art in my nightmares and while awake, in dreams and behind the barbed wire of the prison camp. It’s imperative to hear what the united ALL whispers to me. Now I enter the old house in the depths of a garden. Now I pass slowly between the bookshelves, shadowing the small head of a woman with closely cropped hair. Now I slowly pull back the little curtain that hides two grim paintings. Now I shake Suslov’s flaccid hand. Incidents arrange themselves into a complex tangle, announcing the great secret in a drab script.

A clear head, cold logic, and caution! The clock shows two o’clock in the afternoon; more than anything, I want to slowly die. If only someone were to know how solitary I am!

The black bricks of the boulevard’s paving reflect a woman bent under the weight of a shopping bag, the emptiness of windows crammed with junk, the roof cornices’ ornamentations. Vilnius pants convulsively, like a dying beast. It’s close to three, prime work time, so no one is working: faceless figures keep trudging by—I don’t want to grace them with the word “faces,” those skulls with skin stretched over them. They walk along without even suspecting they no longer are. But after all, at some point they were, and could still be. Although no, they couldn’t, it’s too late. They’re all doomed already. All that’s left is to socialize with Vilnius itself—it understands me, and I have compassion for it. Vilnius suffers, oppressed by inactivity and somnolence, remembering the Iron Wolf like a dream. It should have howled through the ages, but grew decrepit long ago, sickened with throat cancer; its metastases eat away at the city’s brain too. Perhaps only we two, Vilnius and I, are still alive. The stream of the unalive constantly flows down the boulevard like a murky river. The messengers of gray nonexistence crawl over the city’s body like an invincible army of cockroaches. The history of the world is a chronicle of humanity’s futile war with cockroaches. Alas, the cockroaches always win. Vilnius sprawls helplessly, almost paralyzed, its hands shackled and its mouth gagged. However, it can still think. The two of us are still alive; for the time being still alive.

The best place to hide yourself from passersby is next to Vilnius’s real river. The Neris is the river of Vilnius’s time, the river of memory. It remembers nothing itself; it just carries other’s memories. It’s not true that you can’t wade into the same river’s stream twice. Heraclitus was mistaken, or more accurately, he had some other river in mind, certainly not this river. The water of the Neris turns and turns in a circle, you can wade into the same stream many times. You can scoop up a handful of water that saw the founding of Vilnius, drink a gulp the Iron Wolf once drank. You fling a pebble into the murky current, it plops into the water, and its echo summons some ancient sound, words pronounced once upon a time—maybe even your own. The Neris remembers everything; it’s a miraculous river, you just need to hear it talking. Sometimes I hear it.

There now, I pick up a small stone and throw it into the current. You’ll find the river said something, but I didn’t make it out: the cars got in the way. You need to listen to the Neris talking in the quiet of the night, or at least not here, where automobiles roar by.

I walk away from the river; I’m drawn to wander aimlessly, even though I’ve long since memorized all the byways of Vilnius. Saint Jacob’s church nestles beyond the square where Lenin rules. The church doors are securely locked, and the stairs to the bell tower are fenced off with the thickest possible grade of sheet metal, so the nonexistent Lithuanian terrorists won’t climb up during some parade and aim a shotgun above Lenin’s bronze pate—straight at the government podium. It really would be handy to shoot from here, but who aims at puppets? Except perhaps the spirit of our platoon leader Bitinas.

Lenin has turned his back to me; his arm points at the KGB building. I obey; I go straight up to it and stop for a minute, although others automatically quicken their step here: the building repels them, acts like some sort of anti-magnet. No one wants to be guarded, to be even more secure than they are. Only I don’t hurry away; this building hasn’t intimidated me for a long time, I’ve already been where this earth’s tortures seem like silly games. Only someone who has borne real torture can stand here calmly and think about the newest legend of our times: people say the KGB has outfitted bunkers under Lenin’s square, connected to the buildings by a tunnel. Times change, and so do the legends—earlier in Vilnius they would tell tales about ghosts and the accursed gold buried in churches’ naves. And about the Vilnius Basilisk.

Most likely there’s neither tunnels nor bunkers here, but there are other, invisible tunnels and cells, I know quite a bit about them. The things that matter most in this world aren’t those you can see with ordinary sight. Only the second sight perceives the essence. Looking casually, you see only one interesting thing there: a deep hole dug up in the middle of the sidewalk—for absolutely no apparent reason. Bending over, I peer down: there are no bunkers to be seen.

I’ve been gawking too long: a figure with puffy eyes dressed in canvas clothes blows his nose right by my ear and declares angrily in Polish:

“What’s the gentleman standing around for? There’s people at work here, we don’t need any gawkers!”

A Pole. One head of the multilingual dragon of Vilnius. A dragon that speaks ten languages, but doesn’t know how to speak a single one correctly. Someone from Warszawa or Kraków wouldn’t understand his accent. He spoke Polish on purpose, even though he sees that I’m Lithuanian. Many Poles still haven’t backed off; they naïvely remember the period between the wars, when they had seized Vilnius. Jokers—they seized it without even knowing why, the city always suffered economically. Vilnius, the city of Polish poets: the city of both Mickiewicz and Miłosz. Apparently, it’s the city of this bard of canvas clothes and cheap wine too. The poets wrote poems and the simpler Poles raged over Vilnius. It’s not just them; all of the dragon’s heads bite each other—the Lithuanian one, the Polish one, the Russian one, and . . . No, the Jews live here quietly. Folk wisdom gives birth to myths, but there is no mythology that would reflect Vilnius. Where else would you find a dragon like this, whose heads fight among themselves, swearing in different languages?

“I’m talking to you—can’t you hear?”

The puffy little eyes stare, enraged and insolent. The righteous fury of a lumpen who’s forced to work hung over, aimed at a well-dressed idler. It’s horribly depressing and dull; around us it’s even thick with the stinking pigeons of Vilnius, and here that still-not-sober Pole too.

There’s your grandfather, he’s a hundred years old. His jaws tremble frequently, but his eyes flash lightning. A disheveled bag of bones in a corner of the hospital room, he moans and rocks his bandaged hand like a baby.

“Grandfather, can I help?”

“I can still walk,” say his angry, narrow lips, “look out for yourself.”

Staggering, he crosses the room; he is followed by perhaps ten pairs of old, feeble eyes. Along the ground hovers an oppressive smell of sweat and carbolic acid. Grandfather is making his way down the narrow corridor by now, bracing himself constantly against the wall.

“When I was fifty years old, you were born,” says his hunched back, “Now you’re fifty yourself, and who has been born to your son? Where is your son? Where are your grandchildren?”

The nauseating smell of corpses emanates from the beds lined up in the hall. The eyes of the live corpses next to the wall follow us. The hall is jammed full of patients, they moan and writhe like little worms.

“Give me a cig,” says grandfather’s trembling chin.

He blinks frequently from the smoke, but he doesn’t cough. He carefully looks to the sides, leans down over the stair railings, and finally he raises his withered head next to your ear:

“There are eleven carcasses in my room. At least seven are Poles.”

He stares at you without blinking, testing if it’s possible to trust you with the great secret.

“Three of them are pretending to be Lithuanians,” he explains further. “They’ve invented Lithuanian last names for themselves. They don’t speak Polish. But I saw through them: they’re secret Poles. The secret Poles are the worst.”

He scratches his leg with a scrawny hand, pulls up one leg of his pajamas. Grandfather’s calf is mined with deep scars, something like a rotten tree trunk.

“You know,” he says with his head hanging, “It’ll turn out they’ve slipped in among the doctors too. They’re giving me the wrong medicine on purpose! . . . They’re not ready to murder me . . . They want me to rot alive . . . They’re taking revenge: I’ve ruined a lot of blood for those Polacks . . . They saw Vilnius like they saw the back of their heads . . .”

Grandfather giggles foolishly, winks at you, and nods his head, inviting you to come downstairs. He doesn’t manage to wink with one eye; he flaps both eyelids at the same time. You go through the landing below and descend to a door under the stairs. By the time you adjust to the dark, a sickening lump comes up at the back of your throat. It’s an unbelievable hospital latrine, walloping you with soured excrement. The tiles on the wall have been broken out, the floor is fouled, there are puddles stagnating everywhere. Grandfather, giggling, squats by a hideous heap of waste, an entire tower of it. It looms there like a symbol of humanity; it’s the Absolute, the Shit of All Shits, with a puffy, pulpy body. Tongues of fresh waste cover it like a mantle—all colors, from yellowish to black. You feel sick, you want to scream, but the old man just giggles insanely.

“You know a person by his shit, Vytie!” His hands grub around in the heap of waste, separating them by color. “I’ll get even with those Poles! Let them all devour their own shit . . . See, these pale ones—they’re Vacelis’s. You hear, Vyt, they all gorge themselves without blinking an eye, they’re just surprised: why does that gravy have such a strange scent? A scent, you hear, it’s a scent to them! And they devour it—the more they shit, the more they devour, eh?”

The black tiles of the boulevard, laid, incidentally, during the Polish period, remain behind my back. I climb the steps to Pamėklių Hill. The Polish years, the German years, before them and after them—the Russian rule. You won’t even remember Vilnius’s Lithuanian years; it flows only in the Neris, with its waters it keeps turning and turning in a circle. I’m almost the only one climbing the stairs, everyone else is headed down. Why are they so ugly? Surely there aren’t people like that walking around in other beautiful cities? Do faceless figures tread the streets of Bologna too? Or Lisbon’s? Do people’s innards spill out so vividly everywhere, does consciousness shape existence so clearly everywhere? I keep asking myself this, even though I know very well that They paint the landscape of both Portuguese and Italian faces. Their system didn’t show up yesterday, nor a century ago. And certainly not in Lithuania. When and where? No one knows. The sphere of the earth, speedily spinning to destruction, doesn’t bother with such metaphysical problems; it’s too busy spinning to destruction.

I had already raised a leg to take a step, but suddenly I froze. I had expected it, waited for it, but the sight still caught me by surprise: around the corner a black limousine quietly hums; two (or three?) pudgy faces, with large vacuous eyes, stare from inside. The faces of priests who were never ordained.

“Don’t pay attenshion,” a wheezing voice suddenly says.

I jerk back, but the speaker has already shuffled off. An old, old Jew—Lord knows, there aren’t any like that left these days. You’d think he’d climbed out of a Chagall painting or a Sholom Aleichem book. Just now he was walking on the roofs, or perhaps even flying; barely a second ago he put away his flea-ridden, dirty wings. His face is nothing but wrinkles and the round glasses with fractured lenses on his nose; his clothes are practically from the last century. A genuine eternal Jew. Maybe he really is Ahasuerus. I’ve seen him somewhere before. He approached and mumbling horribly, said:

“Don’t pay attenshion!”

The automobile suddenly roars and screeches, tearing off down the street. Only now do I realize this is the same place, maybe even the same time, the same fear, the same despair. The Russian Orthodox Church sullenly waits for something; on the left darts a girl with a cocoa-colored raincoat. The morning image of the old house I’d never seen before has unlocked the fateful day’s fettered box. Today the birds, grandfather pressing his soiled hands to his cheeks, Lolita’s divine legs, eternal Ahasuerus in the middle of moribund Vilnius, and the pudgy faces of unordained priests were hidden inside it. Now the box is left empty, because I myself am as empty as a dry well. I have arrived at the critical juncture; beyond it is the final stretch. I begin the inevitable race to doom. A race with myself; in it, the faster you run, the more you try to stop. Lord, give me secret powers, give me strength and reason. Strength and cold reason.

I began on The Way against my will. I had already settled down and forgotten all the quests for meaning. Even chest pains no longer upset me—it was just the first ones that were frightening. I no longer tormented myself if I didn’t feel the slightest desire when I saw an ideally sexy woman. I was forty-three years old.

I remember the day and the place very well. The same place: across from the Russian Orthodox Church on Basanavičiaus Street. The day was sunny and clear—not just externally, but also on the inside. A brilliant clarity ruled in my soul. On days like that your intellect works smoothly and gracefully; you suddenly understand a number of things you hadn’t even tried to grasp for months. Perhaps it’s only on days like those that you sense you have a soul at all, not just a computer of brains crammed with neurons.

I made careful note of the date: it was the eighth of October, the height of Indian summer. I sensed that something particularly important was about to happen. My internal clarity allowed me a brief glimpse of the future, to see that which was yet to be. It was probably the first time it occurred to me that there is no past and no future, there is only one great ALL. To the left, a girl in a cocoa-colored raincoat kept darting by. Lazy cobwebs—witch’s hair—floated in the calm sea of the sky. Every single thing was infinitely significant. Every single thing brought the climax closer; it was inevitable. Everything had already been determined before I was born.

Suddenly I felt a strange stab; it hurt the most tender, delicate places of my being. A keen danger signal flew from the deepest nooks of my soul. I quickly looked around, but all I saw was a grimy cat, furtively crouched by the Orthodox Church’s stairs. The piercing danger signal resounded louder still. I felt brazen proboscises shoving their way into the very core of my being, there, where there is no armor. I automatically looked about for the limp-breasted woman of the dusk, the Circe of Old Town: at that time, I still naïvely believed that only she could have such proboscises.

Instead I saw that man. The sight changed my entire existence; however, I can’t relate anything particular about him. The man’s hair was the color of straw and the pupils of his bloodshot eyes were colorless. He stood unsteadily on his feet; he kept pulling up his falling pants with his left hand. With his right he pressed a puppy, a few weeks old and blinking in fright, to his chest. A drunk like thousands of other drunks, selling stolen pedigree pups or flowers from someone’s garden. But I immediately realized it was a disguise. I abruptly turned around and hastened to catch the glance of his pallid eyes. My past and my future lurked inside them. Inside them hid the last drop, the critical link that joined all the connections. I finally saw through it all. The long, narrow cones of pale light protruding from the man’s colorless eyes instantly vanished, but it was too late. I understood him. I looked at him for an endlessly long moment, the kind of moment that escapes the real world’s time. Somewhere else, in some other time, it lasts for centuries on centuries. During those centuries of divine clarity, my intellect surpassed its own self; for a short time it turned into not just intellect. Even the most perfect logic doesn’t reveal the kind of connections that opened themselves up to me. Suddenly I understood what Saul heard on the road to Damascus. What Mahomet saw during the short moment before the water poured out of the overturned jug. I experienced that myself.

In the meantime, the straw-haired man looked about, frightened; from him, as important evidence, emanated the smell of rot, like from a damp pile of old leaves. Suddenly he flung the puppy aside and galloped off into the gateway, not staggering in the least.

It seems to me I saw Ahasuerus that time too. I could swear that at that moment he was shambling over the nearest roofs. I really do remember; he had taken his shoes off, and he carried them in his hand. He was walking around the roofs barefoot, but proudly and at the same time respectfully, as if he were walking through a palace hall. I believe he looked me over from above.

At that moment he wasn’t what was on my mind. I realized I had to find Gedis right away, and not waste a second. The fateful spectacle’s curtains opened wide; I saw everything with the second sight, with pupils narrowing from an invisible light. Facts, incidents, dreams arranged themselves into a harmonious system (an excessively harmonious system); every thought, every detail strengthened my conviction. I hurried; I was in a huge hurry to see Gediminas. I didn’t know yet that it was already too late.

When discovered, They immediately change tactics. There are numerous means of damage, a host of methods of crushing a person, within Their power. It’s impossible to surround Them, to trap Them in a corner, to push Them up against a wall—it’s They who surround you, who hold you in a siege like a live castle, whose walls, alas, are pathetically weak. A human being can’t withstand a siege. He can hold out for a month, a year, a decade; but sooner or later he breaks, at least temporarily. He doesn’t even feel when and how They break into his inner being, crawling inside like omnipotent cockroaches.

I had found Their ghostly organization. I am surely not the only such investigator. There are no unique things in the world, just as there are no unique people. Certain books prove that I am not completely alone. That is all that upholds me in moments of absolute despair.

When defending yourself from Them, even thinking about Them, you cannot give in to feelings—fear in particular. The most important thing is to not allow yourself to be lulled or intimidated, to keep your hold on cold reason. The only way to save yourself from Them is with the constant vigilance of reason. In a certain sense, They behave logically—true, according to their own peculiar logic, which is nearly impenetrable to man, but they behave logically regardless. It’s probably Their only weak spot (if they have a weak spot at all). Only facts deserve attention; it’s worthless to trust in feelings or speculations. A clear head, cold logic, and caution. A clear head, cold logic, and threefold caution. That’s what keeps me alive.

At least now I’m alive; until my great insight I merely vegetated, passed the days like everyone else, knew what everyone else knew, was doomed like everyone else was. Although no, I wasn’t doomed in any case, my Lithuanian luck was different. Nothing in this world happens accidentally. Only a complete idiot, a completely blind person, could suppose that I saw that straw-haired man by accident, that I discovered the link between his and the black-haired Circe’s gaze by accident; after all, it’s possible it would never have happened if I hadn’t paused by the Russian Orthodox church on Basanavičiaus Street that day and stayed to watch that furtive cat. No! All of that had to happen, a crack had opened in Their harmonious system, and it was exactly my fate to break in. Years upon years, entire decades went by, unconsciously preparing themselves for that moment. Only great insights give meaning to a person’s existence. I’ve already justified my existence: I discovered Their system. My life at last took on meaning when I took up my clandestine investigations. Let me die, even if today—all the same in the book of fate it will be written: he was able to understand, he fought until the end. He tried.

For the sake of my clandestine investigations, I got employment at the library. It’s convenient to have the necessary books at hand. I say “necessary” even though I don’t myself know (no one knows), which ones they are. There are not, and cannot be, specialized studies about Them. This sort of knowledge has to be gathered by the grain. Not only that, but egoism and vanity keep whispering that I am the first to uncover the configuration of the world. The structure of Good and Evil. This is the most dangerous blunder a person walking The Way can make. It isn’t possible that The Way has gone undiscovered for thousands of years. There are hints of it in many books—hints that are perhaps excessively vague, sometimes almost incomprehensible, however, those quiet warnings and lessons are essential to someone who has begun clandestine investigations. Numerous names have been lost to the ages, but one or another survived. Saint Paul, Bosch, and Blake tried to warn humanity about Them—each one differently; de Sade, Nietzsche, and Socrates all paid for their daring in different ways. I am convinced that there have been direct studies of Their organization as well. Fires in the most magnificent libraries, the auto-da-fé of well-known books, manuscripts, and papyruses, weren’t accidental. We can only speculate about the real role of Herostratus in the history of the world. They know perfectly well what they’re burning every time, which of a thousand burning treatises had revealed Their secret. Their logic is truly ghastly: They don’t destroy one or several books; They understand perfectly well that this would give them away, attract attention. Sensing the danger, They destroy everything at once; They can destroy a city of millions on account of a single person who has grasped the Essence. The demise of Atlantis and the tragedy of Sodom and Gomorrah carry the traces of Their work to this day.

And how is someone supposed to bear it all alone, seeing the wisdom of millennia going up in flames, hearing the moaning of millions of innocent people?

When I found myself back at the library, Martynas instantly cornered me. He announces himself, without fail, the moment I want to be left alone. A short Vilnius thinker: hair shaved in a crew cut, sharp eyes, and the pale tongue of an invalid. He blocked my way, apparently emerging from the dusky corridor wall. A shabby pale blue couch and a crooked little table protruded from the wall; an ashtray made of bent tin, full of cigarette butts, billowed dust from the table. Tufts of hair and dust dirtied the linoleum floor; distorted, cheerless rays fell inside through the grimy windows. Scattered pieces of boards and little piles of brick dominated the world outside the window. The only thing that drew attention was a lonesome, miserable dog: a horrible mutt with a big, square head, a long rat-like body, and a thick tail dragging on the ground. He was snuffling at the earth; this he did so diligently, so devotedly, that the thought came to me automatically: he’s shamming. He’s sensed that I’m watching him, so he’s acting as if he has nothing to do with anything, that he’s idling about without any purpose. He vaguely reminded me of something—not some other dog, but an object, or an incident, or even a person.

Martynas was the only male in my absurd group of programmers who didn’t have a computer. And the only one to study the humanities. According to someone’s sometime plans, we were supposed to eventually computerize the library catalog. Martynas would have been the one to prepare the index, bibliography, and classifications of literature. Under that pretext, he scurried about writers’ homes, ostensibly for consultations, but really just wanting to meet them and chew the fat. Like all of us, he essentially did nothing. In my eyes, he had no firm answers, but he craved an explanation for absolutely everything. His very life was an attempt to explain something. His apartment, in a cramped room, was stuffed to the gills with the oddest things. He called it his collection. You could sit in that room for hours on end, just staring at those things: vases, clothes, ashtrays, scrubbing brushes, canes, little boxes. It seemed that even they questioned you, that they wanted something explained. But that wasn’t enough for Martynas—he would keep questioning you himself too.

“Listen, Vytautas, hasn’t it ever occurred to you that we have no past?”

I had calmed down by then and caught my breath, so I could answer:

“It depends on what we call the past. On who those ‘we’ are.”

“Me, you, that bowlegged babe outside the window. And that laborer on the scaffolding . . . We have no past, we never were. We just ARE, you know? We’ve lost our past and now we’ll never find it. We’re like carrots in a vegetable bed. After all, you wouldn’t say a carrot has a past?”

Martynas’s chin quivered, ever so slightly, with emotion. His own worldly discoveries always shocked him. I was more interested in the dog: he suddenly started wheeling about the yard, sketching a crooked circle in the dust with his tail. As if he were trying to write a giant letter.

“So, what of it?” I growled. “If we don’t have it, we don’t have it.”

Martynas’s little eyes popped out; he gasped for air with his mouth open. I didn’t understand why he was getting so worked up.

“Whoever doesn’t have a past, doesn’t have a future, either. We never were and we never will be, you know? We can’t change anything, because we don’t have a past, you know? . . . We’re a faceless porridge, we’re a nothing, a void . . . We don’t exist, you know? We don’t exist at all. Absolutely! Someone has stolen our past. But who?”

Martynas even broke out in a sweat. He had fingered the secret’s cloak, crumpled it fearfully in his hands. Had he sniffed out Their scent?

“I keep thinking—who was it?” he murmured breathlessly. “And it’s not just people . . . I had this white ashtray . . . A featureless mass production. It had no past—like us, you know? And one day it suddenly disintegrated, crumbled into white dust—and that was it . . . It didn’t have a past, either. It affects even things, you know?”

I glanced at a tuft of dust and hair that had wound itself up in a corner. It suddenly fluttered, even though there wasn’t the slightest draft in the corridor. It slowly rose up from the floor, as if picked up by a live human, hung in the air, and descended again into the corner. Some invisible being turned that tuft around in its hands and put it back in its place. I quickly glanced out the window: the dog glared at me and shambled off. Carp walked down the path next to the slowly growing brick wall. He tiptoes past our windows several times a day, but every time I see him I get agitated. He is my talisman. I don’t remember his real name; in the camp everyone called him Carp. It’s a terrible thing: when we meet in the street, we don’t greet each other. Many of the camp’s unfortunates don’t let on they know one another when they meet. Maybe we really don’t have a past?

The shagfelted Siberian dogs didn’t chew through the backbone of his spirit. There he is, walleyed Stepanas, nicknamed Carp. He’s pestering the Russkie commies again:

“You’re like those carp! Carp! They’re frying you in a skittle, and you’re writhing and singing a hymn to the chef! It’s Stalin that’s cooking you, Stalin—don’t you understand? Are you as stupid as a carp?”

He raises his arms to heaven and thunders as if he were on stage:

“I’m ashamed that I’m a Russian! Ashamed! I’ll never be a carp!”

You look at him, and it’s easier for you to breathe, easier to bear it, easier to wait for your doom. No incisorfanged Siberian huskies will bite through the backbone of his spirit. To you Carp is beautiful, even his crossed eyes don’t spoil his face. If you have a spirit, you’re beautiful.

Martynas is probably right: I don’t have a past. It’s like a boundless country, one I’m destined to never find myself in. On long winter evenings I fruitlessly attempt to remember my own past. Memory willingly recreates sights and sounds, but those talking pictures aren’t my past. What of it, if those episodes once happened? That jumble of people and things doesn’t change anything in my life, doesn’t explain anything. It cannot become my past. All of that probably happened to someone else, not to me at all. That’s not the way my Vilnius night was, not the way my camp’s fence was barbed, not the way my sweat smelled. The real past couldn’t stay so impassive, it has to be your own: recognizable and tamed. It’s like the nails with which your present is constructed. There are no nails holding mine together. I do not have a past, although there were many things in my life. It seems all I have is a non-past. In the great ALL there are no episodes that once were, and are now past; inside it everything is still happening.

That’s why I took note of Martynas’s unexpected unveiling and his ideas, though they’ve been heard elsewhere many times before. That’s why the image, yet another vision of my non-past, engraved itself: Martynas, the thin little deity of all those with crew cuts, stands leaning sadly against the wall; cigarette ashes billow indifferently at his feet, and walleyed Carp tiptoes outside the window, stinging my tired non-heart.

It was all too much for me already: the morning’s half-witted pigeons, the Russian Orthodox churches, the girls in cocoa-colored coats, Vilnius’s stray dogs, the flat kanukish faces. That day (if that was one day) had tired me to death. A crushing, stunningly lucid despair came over me. All I wanted was to die on the spot. Nothing in heaven or on earth had the power to drown out that desire.

All there is left to do at moments like that is to wait. To wait for who knows what, because there is no hope whatsoever. It’s as if you were sprawled all alone in a broken-down dinghy with your legs and arms paralyzed, and a mountain stream was quickly carrying you closer to a waterfall; not a soul about—only steep rocky shores and the thunder of water plunging into the nearby abyss. The spray from the waterfall hangs above the foaming rapids, the end is near, and you can’t even roll out of the boat and sink to the bottom with a rock, to finish everything in an instant. You have to suffer until the chasm snatches your body for itself: the stream of the waterfall will smash it against the splinters of sharp rocks, and then cast you, still alive, into the boiling cauldron of the gray vortices. You’re already dead, but you can think; that’s the worst of it: you grasp everything.

Danger hid everywhere, just about anything could determine the outcome: the grim, hunched-over laborer on the scaffolding, the books on the shelves, the smell of linoleum. They watched me all the time, themselves invisible, inaudible, indiscernible. I was absolutely alone, but I couldn’t for a moment be by myself; I couldn’t avoid Their hellish guardianship.

It seemed to me that the office was slowly widening, that the walls were receding from me—or perhaps I was the one cowering and shrinking and growing ever smaller. I knew I was sitting in my office, that the wide dirty window yawned behind me, but the inner vision was stronger: the room slowly turned into a desert, a scorched, sallow expanse where no plants grow and no animals wander. This landscape of gloom was more real than the view of the real office. It was empty inside of me, so the surroundings became empty too. I was suffocating; I was so alone and unhappy that all that remained was to die immediately. I was already on the verge of dying. Some life, even the most miserable desert creature, could have saved me—anything. But the desert was absolutely empty—only a distant thunder reminded me that the thunderlord is also always alone.

It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t thunder, but just a knock at the door. Somebody’s knuckles ordered me to come to my senses, tapped to a swinging rhythm, one of many of Gediminas’s swinging rhythms. Creaking, the door opened; Lolita stood on the threshold.

“May I come in?”

She carefully closed the door, awkwardly fixed her hair, and smiled guiltily:

“If you only knew how sick I am of those women . . . Is it okay if I sit with you for a bit?”

Somewhat flustered, she settled on the sofa, stretched out her long legs and leaned back, lowering her eyes. She probably expected that her pose, her slender waist, and her loose hair would explain everything on their own. She had never been to see me like this before; we rarely exchanged so much as a word. But there she sat on the sofa with her eyes lowered; with her forefinger she gently caressed her other hand. That defenseless caress completely did me in. Lolita, it seemed, begged me to sit down next to her, to help her, so she wouldn’t have to caress herself. She showed up just in time; she came true, the way an intoxicating dream comes true. A moment ago I really could have died. She saved my life. My dream came calling on me, even though I had never dared to summon it.

And I stood there like a blockhead and got even more breathless. The silliest of all possible thoughts ran through my head: it’s not proper for a boss to turn red like a teenager in front of his employee. That was how much was left of my intellect. I was probably hallucinating. Her appearance was much too unexpected, entirely impossible. It was a miracle, although she sat there in an exceptionally earthy and ordinary way: a somewhat irregular oval face, not particularly symmetrical features, legs that had blundered their way out of my dreams, rather large, upright breasts. But the brown eyes, always turned in towards herself, towards her own inner being, suddenly looked at me. They spoke to me of plain and simple things, so plain and simple that I couldn’t believe it. I ought to have rushed to kiss those nearly unfamiliar (so familiar, so wished for and dreamed of!) woman’s hands, to tell her everything—not silly words of love, no—to scream that she is everything to me, that she had saved me from death . . . that I had conceived her during sleepless nights . . . That without her the world wouldn’t exist, the stars would stop moving . . . I ought to lick her feet, to crawl in front of her . . . I needed to at least temporarily go out of my mind and risk it, but I stood there like a statue and felt I would ruin that miracle myself. I didn’t believe the signs in her eyes. I believe in nothing.

I probably gave her a terrible look—she bit her lip and again smiled guiltily. Unfortunately, my eyes don’t give away any feelings, they simply look. At the very best they frighten or insult. She fidgeted as if she were sitting on hot iron, then suddenly leaned forward with her entire body, closed her eyes, and murmured despairingly:

“Vytautas! Vytautas, t . . . t . . . touch me . . .”

Some sort of gigantic bubble instantly burst, splattering me with its hot spray. My gigantic bubble of fear and absurd doubts. In that instant, I understood everything I should I have understood some time ago. A difficult, hysterical happiness took my breath away. Why, she had been searching for me for some time already, searching for me herself! She would wait in the corridor for me to pass by, aim to stand as near as possible, to catch my glance with all of her body. Why, she had been searching for me herself: suddenly I saw her breast heaving in fear and her hands desiring caresses with entirely different eyes. That divine woman was desperately searching for me! Crazy circles swam before my eyes, and when they cleared, I saw her smile, Lolita’s familiar, dear smile. Everything was so plain and simple that I was mortified, and felt some other, nameless sensation—perhaps shame. After all, she had walked next to me for a year, for two, for three; I saw her a long time ago, but I was blind and an idiot, and a coward, and . . .

“Lord of mine,” I squeezed out by force, “Lord of mine . . . A hundred times, a thousand times . . . What nonsense . . .”

“Jesus. At last . . .” She kept smiling; that smile cut me like a scourge, punished me for the lost time, for my blindness and my wretched fear.

I still didn’t believe that her hands, her lips, her breasts finally belonged to me, that she was perhaps even happier than I . . . that here she is . . . that here is Lolita . . . that I, wretched fool, could have ruined everything today as well . . .

I didn’t hear what she said afterwards. She glanced archly with her brown eyes and spoke as if we were old lovers who had no end of common memories, as if no wall had been left between the two of us for quite some time. And still I feared that I was only imagining it all, that I had concocted that miracle while sitting in the sallow, empty office, trying to save myself from death, that I had put my faith in a hallucination and would soon pay for it dearly . . .

But Lolita was as real as my pain, as my despair; she laughed soundlessly, throwing back her long chestnut hair.

“Jesus, Jesus,” she kept repeating, “all this time! . . . And if I hadn’t happened for no reason whatsoever to . . .”

Again she laughed soundlessly, as if the heaviest of rocks had rolled off her chest, while I, in horror, sensed the sallow desert, the dirty city pigeons, the flat faces of the kanukai, Ahasuerus, and the Orthodox Church receding and disappearing—the whole lot slowly receding and disappearing. I sensed an empty hope reviving within me, a hope I’d lost many times before; the desire to do nothing but caress and kiss Lolita was strangling me—but my heart was knocking a warning to Gediminas’s beloved swinging rhythm.

Now I stand completely naked in front of the mirror—my body’s chilled, but I stubbornly look at myself—for an hour now, or a day, or a week. My dusky, tanned skin stands out from the red wallpaper in the background; the portrait in the mirror, painted in excessive detail, stands motionless, hinting of a slick kitschy spirit: the overly pretentious red color of the background and affectedly smooth lines. Something here’s not real, not believable, as if the painter had merely sought a cheap effect. Or perhaps he was seeking a genuine effect, but inadvertently overdid it: the portrait’s particularly fatalistic stare . . . the convulsively clenched fists . . . the coarsely emphasized sex . . . the theatrical pose . . .

I myself am in the frame of the mirror, but at the same time it’s not me, it’s some he, looking at me with angry eyes. Sometimes he rubs his temple with a finger or brushes his palm across his chest. You would think he was ashamed of his nakedness. What could Lolita have found seductive about this person in the mirror? What attracted her to this mistrustful person with edgy nerves and an enigmatic martyr’s smile?

I still cannot convince myself that she was really searching for me. I looked through her file at work: she is exactly half my age. If I were rich, or at least a minister, I could understand. If she were some awful old maid I could understand. But her body, her eyes, her mystery would seduce any man. And she picked an old geezer. I see all of him; he won’t hide anything from me. That man really is large and powerful, tall, and broad-shouldered: a person accustomed to pushing others aside by force. He really doesn’t look even slightly aged, or exactly twice as old as somebody. His smooth skin is nicely tanned, his muscles aren’t flabby, there isn’t an ounce of fat on his waist. His body’s still very firm (outwardly firm); a truly rare firmness in these days of flabby bellies. So far, he’s not even graying: only the hair on his temples and chest is scattered with silver dust. A peculiarly attractive, mostly older youngish Apollo, who apparently knows his own worth very well. A male by no means beset with infirmity, a voracious predator grinning with healthy little white teeth. The Vargalyses’ teeth don’t rot. That brazen man in the mirror almost believed he could catch the eye of a beauty half his age. But why doesn’t he calm down, why doesn’t he leave the mirror?

Merely because he’s afraid. He’s afraid of losing, afraid of being left disappointed. Afraid of falling into a trap, but most of all he fears that all his faith in himself is no more than a pathetic deception.

I do not love this person. He isn’t repulsive or unpleasant, but I don’t see the light in his eyes, the light that indicates a healthy spirit. I don’t sense the strength in him to give anything to others, even to Lolita. His gaze, brimming with rage, is the gaze of a prisoner who has been sentenced to death. Don’t tell me Lolita doesn’t see his eyes, doesn’t understand the despair in the blackened irises?

True, Lolita is, in any case, a woman. Women hate abstractions; they place more value on tangible things. I’m sufficiently cynical; I can spit the disgusting truth in his face, explain what most attracts and astounds Lolita. It senses this as well: that thing hanging threateningly under his belly, that abnormally large organ of love, full of seductive, beastly power. His masculinity isn’t like others’— convulsively crooked with the foreskin always pulled completely back and deep scars marring (or decorating?) the head—signs of a brutal duel in a soft, one-eyed face. A man by the name of Stadniukas burned those scars in for eternity. He wanted to cripple it, but instead he strangely improved it: that scarred beast, instead of frightening women, awakens a tripled desire. So that’s how I would cynically explain to him what most attracts and astounds Lolita.

But that would be a terrible deception too. For some reason, I don’t just crave demeaning him, but her as well. After all, she has never seen or experienced that thing. She hadn’t seen it when she started searching for me; she hasn’t seen it even now, as I stand in front of the mirror and pointlessly torment myself.

But what, what, did she see in me?

Grandfather sits hunched over in a deep armchair in the middle of the room, as always scowling angrily, soundlessly muttering curses on the entire world. Through the open window yellow and red leaves have fallen inside; they move as if they were alive, striving to get back to freedom. They are afraid of grandfather.

“So, you’re fourteen,” says grandfather. “Seven times two.”

He beckons with his finger; you must come closer. The dry leaves angrily rustle below your feet; for some reason it’s uncomfortable, almost frightening. Everyone avoids grandfather. When he shuffles down the little street of Užubaliai village, people quickly close their windows. Even the leaves of the trees fear him.

“So, you’re fourteen . . .”

Again you hear the rustle of dry leaves: grandfather’s big dog, as black as coal, is sitting next to the armchair and staring at you with an impenetrable stare. Grandfather stretches out a withered hand and starts feeling you over. With his fingers he kneads your shoulders and your elbows, squeezes harder on your upper arm, and despite yourself you stiffen your muscles.

“All right,” grandfather mutters. “Rock and earth . . . Copper and flint . . . Everything is all right . . .”

His words are strange, while his hand probingly explores your body. At last he has poked around all over you, you think you’ll be able to go now, but suddenly you break out in a sweat. Grandfather thoroughly prods everything there too, and angrily blurts out:

“Unbutton it . . . Give it here!”

You feel sick; you don’t want to obey, but the dog growls threateningly and you give in immediately. Frightened, you take out that thing, throbbing and flinching from every touch. Maybe grandfather has gone completely insane; but no, he’s as serious and intense as if he were praying. You look at the leaves on the floor, at the fire in the fireplace, and suddenly it starts to seem as if all of this has already been; at some other time you stood in front of a gray old man with long hair down to his shoulders and a wild beast as black as night. You’ve already waited for them to inspect you all over and give their blessing.

Grandfather carefully turns your masculinity over in his hand, weighs it in his palm, squeezes its head.

“A good pecker!” he says at last. “A genuine Vargalys pecker. With a copper end.”

He hides it and buttons you up; probably he realizes you’ll keep standing there, completely dumbfounded. The dog gets up and rustles the red and yellow leaves, while tears gather in your eyes: grandfather is grandfather, but why did he have to show everything to that angry black beast?

“You know, my child, you can have a woman already, any woman,” says grandfather. “Every Vargalys can have any woman. Even your shitty father.”

You’re dumbfounded again, because grandfather is smiling. That’s impossible, grandfather doesn’t know how to smile, he doesn’t have the section of the brain that creates a smile. Even now, hardly born, the smile dies.

“Go on!” says grandfather in his usual brusque voice. “And remember—you’re a Vargalys now. Persevere, my child, being a Vargalys is no kind of luck. And don’t try to understand yourself. No Vargalys has ever understood himself.”

You walk out as if you’re dreaming, turn back once more, and see grandfather in the midst of the red and yellow leaves scattered about the floor, already muttering curses under his breath. He curses everything by turns: first Żeligowski and the Poles of Vilnius, then all the Poles in the world, the Russians and the Germans, life, God, the sun and the moon, father and mother, the Milky Way and every last galaxy.

Unfortunately, she has never seen or experienced me at all; all she knows is the Vytautas Vargalys who walks the corridors of the library or the streets of Vilnius. Then what did she choose, who is that person who is twice as old as she is? Is it me, or not me? This person in the mirror, or maybe the phantom of her dreams, whom not even the real I could equal?

If she really chose that person in the mirror, the one who has lost all hope, I must warn her, restrain her, before it’s too late. I don’t even know what’s more important to me—to help her, or to harm her, to take revenge (revenge for what?) on that mean-eyed man, attentively inspecting my nakedness. Surely she sees, surely she understands that beneath that solid-looking exterior hides a body that disobeys its master, a body living an independent life? That’s a dangerous body, the husk of an unnamable creature, into which my innards have been forcibly stuffed. You can look at that husk for hours upon hours, but you’ll see nothing real. I’m not there; there’s only that sad person of the mirror. Even I’m not able to penetrate his depths. And thank God for that!

I have an inkling of what would happen if you were to worm your way even a bit deeper, if the exterior armor were to open itself up and uncover the weedy undergrowth and cobweb-caked corners inside. What would go on, if, somewhere in the world, there were a torch you could use to light up all of the little nooks of the spirit, or better yet—to scorch the bestiaries of the interior, so that all of the inner creatures, all of those abominations, would start clambering out in fright. It would be appropriate to classify people based just on the monstrosities crawling about inside them, on the basis of their profusion, types, and variety. All you would need to do is invent that torch, and nuns with modestly lowered eyes would instantly be stuck all over with warty toads, and holy martyrs would be covered in swarms of poisonous mosquitoes. So then what would it tell us about all the others?

I know that naked person of the mirror well; I know what a procession of hellish monsters would swarm out of him. Creatures with the bodies of toads and the eyes of birds, lurching along on short little legs, twisted long-nosed heads with deranged stares, old women with swollen bellies splattered with warts, greenish slimy faces, fish-human servants of Satan with the snouts of mice, birds with hairy beaks and transparent guts in which pieces of human flesh were being digested, round glassy eyes without pupils, rotting bodies overgrown with tree bark, gigantic breasts with pimply, bloody nipples, spreading a hideous stench with every movement, clumsy dwarves belching waste, innocent girls run through a meat grinder and put together again into a single thing, smiling little figures pierced with needles, and then women, women, women, embracing the rot of tree trunks, with pockmarked frogs greedily mouthing at their crotches and blood-sucking bats stuck to their bellies, women distorting their faces in pleasure, giving themselves to long-bristled boars in lacy beds . . . And that’s just the edges of the gray hell, the good-natured periphery; the most essential thing is to see how he himself, that motley crew’s leader, appears, to see what he himself is up to . . .

I stand completely naked in front of the mirror and almost admire him. His body has gone completely numb, but he patiently (and probably insolently) continues to stand against the bloody background, defying me. Suddenly I realize he sees straight through me too. I confess: I like those kind of people.

Only those who have lost their spirit fear the monsters of the interior. Only those who have lost their balance pretend their insides are pure and refined. You can only become truly great by joining your heaven with your hell. All of the good in people is the same, but the kingdom of evil is different in everyone. I truly think this way, but could I confess this to Lolita? Does she have even the slightest idea of what’s going on inside of me, of what a quagmire she’s stepping in to? Wouldn’t she be frightened, seeing even one of my billions of Bosch-like inner landscapes? And how could I show them to her?

Maybe I have to stand completely naked against a bloody background in front of her too, stand for hours upon hours, so that she could scrutinize my graying temples, my nearly pupil-less eyes with their darkened irises, my scarred masculinity—so she could look until she saw the headless monsters inside of me (or see me myself as a headless monster), until she could hear my inner music, until she could sense my true scent . . .

No, all the same I do not understand why she chose me. There’s no explanation for it, or more accurately, there is only one explanation (so far only one) that I don’t even want to think about.

Now I stand on the street by the bus stop across from the Russian Orthodox Church and absentmindedly look around (who knows when I stood and looked around). Not far off a girl in a cocoa-colored raincoat flashes by, on the church’s steps a furtive cat curls itself up; but that’s not what matters most. What plagues me the most is the memory of the limp-breasted Old Town Circe, her spirit hovering about. Even the trees are as quiet as she was then.

Now I see the man with straw-colored hair, unsteady on his feet, now I sense the glare of his pallid eyes fixed upon me, smell the odor of rotting leaves. And it’s in that glare, in that odor, that the answer hides, an answer that unifies the scattered details into an excessively harmonious whole.

All of Their subspecies watch you, secretly shadow you—even if they’re eyeless; eyes are not at all what matters most in this case. I could call Them “the observers,” “the watchers,” “the stalkers;” however, these names would imperceptibly lead away from The Way. Our language is merely a collection of labels, stuck alike to entirely different things, because those labels always run short, there’s never enough of them. (It’s They who always strive for words to come up so short, to be so inaccurate and deceptive.) But after all, it isn’t Their oppressive meddling that determines everything. The crushing groping about in the dark and the unceasing shadowing are probably the most obvious, but by no means the most dangerous things.

I had been warned about Them when I was still a child, but I didn’t pay attention to it. I suppose that everyone (or almost everyone) is warned. Unfortunately, our civilization has taken such a turn that no one pays attention to the warnings. They drown in the stream of other impressions, images, and words. They’re decided, almost by agreement, not to notice, not to explain the odd things. Sooner or later that custom will push humanity to its doom.

It’s imperative to save ourselves before it’s too late, to take at least the first small step towards The Way. Everyone must ask themselves if they have ever seen the stare of the void. I can’t think of a better description. I’ve devotedly investigated Their stares (a stare that’s one and the same), overcoming fear and disgust. And I always saw one thing in it: a hopeless void. Their boundless subspecies, Their infinite hierarchy, in which, it seems, even they ought to get confused, doesn’t help matters . . . Brazen youngsters, sullenly staring at you in a cafe. Pale-faced, pustular women spying on you through the glass of unwashed windows. Straw-haired, broad-shouldered men, secretly piercing you with the glare of colorless eyes. Filthy city pigeons, hypnotizing with their soulless bird pupils. Cockroaches twitching their antennae, staring at you from all corners without any eyes. Swamp sinkholes smelling of rot, they’re looking at you too, they’re destroying you too . . . Let’s start from the beginning, with humanoid creatures (Their subspecies, having the form of human beings). You will, without fail, see signs of an inner life in even the most miserable little human’s eyes. Even a lunatic’s eyes flash with a live spark from time to time. Lord of mine, even a dog’s eyes are alive! But not Theirs. Look around, I beg you . . . spot those who are secretly watching you . . . they don’t even particularly hide . . . examine their eyes . . . study them . . . study them well . . . You’ll surely see: all of those brazen youngsters, pustular women, broad-shouldered men with obnoxious faces, look with the stare of the void . . . No, their eyes aren’t empty; they simply look with the stare of the void. I can’t say it better . . . Imagine a beast that devours light—and not just light: words too, and love, and music, and dreams, and . . . Imagine its stare . . . No, I don’t know how to express it. All I can do is hope every thinking person understands what an absolute, oppressive void is.

Study them, first of all study those deranged gawkers, those kanukai in human form, maybe at last you’ll feel uneasy. Follow them yourself and perhaps you’ll begin to see things clearly. Perhaps you’ll grasp the danger that’s impossible to overestimate; perhaps you’ll even have the strength to resist. Perhaps you’ll at least have the strength to shout for help. Perhaps it won’t be too late yet.

They start with the children first of all. For the love of God—guard the children!

I wanted to run, to flee, from that accursed Russian Orthodox Church, but in spite of it all I held on to cold reason. I walked slowly, placing my feet carefully. Around me an unfamiliar world was in its death throes: angry women with puffy faces, crumbling gateways where staggering apparitions and withered trees with dried-up leaves took refuge. It even seemed to me that all the passersby spoke some unintelligible, hissing language.

A murky brew bubbled in my brain. My head puffed like a steam boiler without a release value, ready to explode at any moment. My swelling skull did nothing but hum and clatter: inside a multitude of tiny little doors opened and slammed shut, and my thoughts ran along new, unfamiliar routes.

At the instant of insight you fall into a new, absolutely different world. A universe of strange episodes and images that your mind isn’t adapted to, that no part of you is adapted to. Your eyes and ears, your arms and legs aren’t suited to this novel world. You could trip in a level place or crash into an invisible wall that everyone else sees and goes around. I passed through Vilnius and sensed that the streets were no longer streets, the trees no longer trees, even I was no longer myself. I couldn’t even stop, close my eyes and calm down—I didn’t know if that might not be the most dangerous thing of all. A strange equilibrium only slowly (very slowly) appeared. The streets once more turned into streets (different streets), the trees—into trees (different trees); however, the new status quo only deepened the inner upheaval. I couldn’t orient myself in this new world. The ground eluded my feet. It seemed I understood everything, but I experienced no joy. I kept thinking: it’s much better not to know anything at all. It’s really not worth envying Saul, fallen to his knees on the road to Damascus, or Mahomet, transfixed in front of the falling jug. The grand insight brings only torment.

I had to find Gediminas right away. Things that had been long since forgotten and had been thrust to the very bottom of my consciousness became enormously significant in the new world. Vague images flashed in front of my eyes, stories without beginning or end, which brought on a strange presentiment. In that muddle, like a leitmotif, Gedis kept appearing. I saw his sarcastic smile, heard his hoarse voice whispering, “Who sent her, who sent her, Vytas?” I could swear he once said, “I always feel like someone is watching me when I’m with a woman.” Yes, yes, he’d say something like that to me all the time.

I hurried. I still didn’t know how to express my great revelation in words; I didn’t know what I would have said to him. However, I didn’t in the least doubt that he would understand me. I spun the telephone dial and considered how I should begin. Gedis, I have finally grasped the secret: They are watching us. Did you know? Aren’t you horrified? Or perhaps like this: Gedis, surely you remember the black-haired Circe who wanted to destroy us both. Did you notice the look she would secretly steal at us? . . . Or maybe start straight off, like this: Gedis, surely you don’t think that those observers, those pathological stalkers, are merely snooping, merely registering facts? Surely you don’t think they’re gathering the consummate card index just for the sake of the index itself? Do you have any idea of what their intentions are, or could be? . . . Finally his work telephone answered: “Riauba just ran out to the repair shop to get his car, and then probably he’ll get it into his head to take a spin around the highways.”

Of course he’ll get it into his head: besides logic and music, Gedis also worshipped speed. In the middle of the night he’d get up from his work table and go tearing around, who knows where, with his Opel. He always drove like a god.

I waited for him for an hour, then another and another. Calling over and over, I slowly aligned the most important observations. They spy on you with pathological attentiveness, even when they really can’t see anything hidden or meaningful. They hysterically avoid publicity and openness; They are always obscure, sodden, and colorless. (Then what about the Old Town Circe?) I carefully prepared for my visit with Gediminas: in discourse he recognized only logic; he left emotions to music, and ecstasy—to speed. I gathered theses for a simple introductory lecture. First: we have all experienced that oppressive evening mood, when we’re compelled to pull curtains over the windows. We say “it’s more comfortable that way,” but actually we’re unconsciously hiding ourselves from Them, from the empty expanse of the evening’s stare. Second, how many times have we heard Vilnius’s impotent intelligentsia complaining: “Oh, I can tell when the KGB is following me.” How many times have I had the urge to irritably reply: stop posturing, you just want to convince everyone that you’re aren’t a nothing, that you’re secretly fighting for justice—after all, The KGB is supposedly interested in you. Now those complaints were illuminated in an entirely new color. That evening everything colored itself in different colors, the true colors.

Gedis didn’t come home; neither at ten, nor at eleven. I got dressed and went out to wander the streets. Something inside of me forced me to take just exactly that route, pushed me along like a doll. Vilnius turned into an empty, meaningless labyrinth in which you could wander until you died without ever understanding there is no exit, that this is an absolute labyrinth. The kind where you’d never come across a dead end—that’s how gigantic it is. But you will never get to freedom. I walked aimlessly; I didn’t even go by Gedis’s apartment—even though his phone could simply have been out of order. The streets grew narrower all the time, they kept pressing in on me more and more from both sides. At first I didn’t pay any attention to this (I didn’t pay attention to anything); then I was astounded. A ceiling had appeared above my head; the labyrinth’s burrow did lead to a dead end after all. Something incomprehensible was going on: the narrow little streets turned into corridors and bloody, beaten figures sat along the walls. It seemed some of them had no eyes or noses. I tried not to look at them. Someone tried to restrain me, demanding something. Horror slowly came over me. I didn’t understand where I was; I started suspecting that something evil was going on. I doubted whether I was still in the real world—there was nothing recognizable left around me. I kept hearing a strange noise—something like the shoving of paper cartons, like the whispering of giant lips. Someone spoke to me (or I spoke to someone); then a young woman led me somewhere (or I led her somewhere).

I came to my senses in a small, uncomfortable room. The intent stare of a man in a white coat brought me back to reality.

“You’ve found out already?” he asked, somewhat surprised.

The man was impossibly lean. A bearded head, overgrown with curly hair, was stuck on his thin neck as if on a pole. An ascetic, truly Semitic face, the face of a man who had gone through the desert and fed on the manna of heaven. And in it—an ideally straight Grecian nose and bright, bright eyes.

“Kovarskis is what I go by,” the man blurted out, “Remember my name, we may meet again sometime. I’m Kovarskis.”

His gaze studied me for a long time, at last he decided (I saw it in his bright eyes), that he could tell me the truth.

“Don’t get your hopes up. He’s ground into a mush. I don’t understand how there could be that much vitality in him. His heart and lungs are still working. His Opel was smashed by a run-down old MAZ truck without a license plate. It drove off. The strangest thing is that no one saw a driver—you’d think the MAZ was driving itself. Without any plates.”

It was only then I understood he was talking about Gedis.

“How long?” I believe I asked. “A week, a day?”

“Until the first infection. Then there’ll be pneumonia—and the end.”

“Lord willing that happens as soon as possible,” I answered.

It was imperative I see Gedis. I don’t remember how I convinced the doctor. Probably he thought I was in a hurry to give Gedis that redeeming infection as quickly as possible. Once more I was led down narrow corridors between bloody, bandaged figures. A young nurse shot glances at me curiously from below. I’d like to know what I looked like then.

Gedis was lying in a room by himself. He resembled a giant spider: wires were strung from him on all sides; he was joined to the shining machines. It seemed he was feeding those metallic contraptions with his own blood, his own fluids. At first sight, I wanted to rush and tear out all the wires. Gedis couldn’t be trusted to machines. Gedis was never a machine; even his body wasn’t a machine. I procrastinated for a few seconds, weighing how to push the people in white coats out. Gediminas himself stopped me. He suddenly raised his right hand and waved convulsively.

“The remains of his motor reactions,” Kovarskis muttered.

He understood nothing. Gediminas moved his hands, writhed like a bug pinned to a board. A well-known bug. With his finger he perfectly repeated the movements of a smashed cockroach.

I didn’t ask anything; I didn’t jump up to pull out the wires. I didn’t stay in the room for a second. I calmly walked out and went home. The facts stubbornly pounded in my head, but still I resisted. The facts can be arranged in various ways, particularly when they are incomplete. I avoided grasping everything in the only possible way.

While I was still wandering the labyrinth of Vilnius that had led me to the hospital, I remembered with amazement and horror an interesting item that could have become yet another introductory (and not just introductory!) thesis of my lecture on Them.

From Marshall Zhukov’s memoirs about Stalin.

He was never likable, not even for a second. Everyone who saw him up close noticed his stare: rude, biting, pricking the visitor’s softest spots. You would go into his office as if you were going into a torture chamber. Anyone who had been there could testify: you left there sucked dry, debilitated—as if you had left part of your strength behind with him.

I rode home completely on edge. I was prepared to at last see through everything, all I needed was a sign, a crucial stimulus. I began to understand what a terrifying game I had become embroiled in. The first naïve conclusions scattered like fog. It seemed to me I awoke from an oppressive dream (it seemed to me like an oppressive dream) in order to clearly see that it was merely a respite before the real nightmare. I began to understand a thing or two. They don’t exist just so, of their own accord. They are the product of our dismal existence and at the same time its cause. During the twenty-minute trip many things became clear to me, although I just couldn’t fathom Their purpose, the great worldwide purpose. Now I know it. Many things that people value or fear appear equally insignificant to me.

The night trolleybus was practically empty; I had a good view of all the riders. The stage was set, the only thing lacking was the lead actor. It didn’t take long for him to show up: a young, perhaps twenty-year-old imbecile. I craved an answer, anything could turn into an answer, so I attentively examined his round head, stuck right onto his shoulders, and his fleshy nose, which was reminiscent of a beak. Overall he looked like a large, swollen bird. His fleshy, markedly bloated face shone with a friendly smile. I was just waiting for a sign; I stared at him with a pathological hope. Perhaps he was the one who was to send that sign. Perhaps he himself was that sign. He behaved sweetly and excessively politely, almost perversely so. He loitered between the seats and spoke to the riders. With impeccable pronunciation he asked what time it was; he asked nearly everyone where they were going. His urgent craving to socialize, his desire to please everyone, was revolting. He spoke to the riders by a strange logic which apparently only he understood—not in turn, but not in random order, either. He knew what he was doing. By no means did he appear wronged by nature or God; more as if he was just exactly the way he should be. The irritated riders, scowling as soon as he gently reminded one of them it was time to get off, were less convincing. The imbecile’s inner satisfaction grew right before your eyes, it shone in the pudgy, full-cheeked face. There was no room for sadness or pain in that face, it could only show a cretinish impassivity or bliss. Its owner was satisfied with himself and others, he loved himself and others . . . and the trolleybus, and the rain outside the window, and the trashed bus stops—he loved the entire world without discrimination. He wanted for nothing, everything was clear to him. His pronunciation annoyed me most of all; it nearly drove me out of my mind. He spoke exceedingly properly—like the linguists on a television show. His lumbering body at times even twitched from the effort, he fawned so violently. But I saw a strange fear hiding in him too. That he could even have those kinds of feelings surprised me, but I quickly figured it out. He was afraid to be left forgotten and alone, to fail to attract others’ attention for even a second. Every person who still has a thing or two left inside is able to be alone with himself. There was nothing inside this lumbering figure that could be relied on. He no longer had himself, so a secret fear constantly gnawed at him.

A chill suddenly pierced me; then in horror I felt a nearly inexplicable stitch, a strange stab that wounded the most tender, delicate places of my being. The stench of rotting leaves emanated from the imbecile; it seemed the danger signal that had sounded inside me before was recurring. Involuntarily I thought: so it’s They who sucked out this person’s soul; the kanukai kanuked him. Once he was human. The spectacle was probably over, the sign given, even though the actor was still standing on the miserable stage. Gediminas’s final convulsions, the black Circe’s gaze, all of the horrifying pictures were numbered and almost explained. Everything was much too clear—I actually felt faint on account of that purity and clarity. But what of it—I didn’t know what should be done. No one knows what should be done.

But still the spectacle continued. The imbecile, with his piggish little eyes, stared at a girl who was sitting not far away. Apparently she had emerged from underground, or appeared out of nowhere. She sat quite close to me, daydreaming and completely forgetting herself, and looked at the rainy window glass. Both her coat and skirt buttoned up the front and had spread out somehow obscenely—they uncovered her long thin legs and the lace of her underwear; under them the dark, warm triangle of hair was apparent. Her dreamy face and that voluptuous, dangerous tunnel extending between her thighs straight to the tempting, damp mystery was horrifyingly incongruous, but all the more enticing. The imbecile felt it too; he carefully sat down on the neighboring seat, quickly stuffed his hands into his pockets and froze as if he’d had been paralyzed. I was completely done in by that girl’s involuntary voluptuousness, the imbecile’s fingers moving hysterically in his pants pockets, and his face, which he suddenly turned towards me. He looked at me as if I was one of his own, smiled knowingly, and turned back again to the sugary damp tunnel. Strings of slimy saliva dripped from the corners of his lips. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and intently stretched them towards the girl’s legs. Slowly, carefully, he thrust them into the tunnel between her thighs. I swear, at that moment there wasn’t a drop of fear left in his face.

I jumped out of the trolleybus; I thought I heard the horrified yell of the girl as she was awoken from her daydreams. There was just one thing on my mind—that my apartment was right near by, and I had to get to it. I doubted I would succeed in returning home alive. Afterwards, an interval of several days disappeared from my consciousness.

Thank God, Stefa took care of me. Thank God, the Academy of Science took care of Gediminas’s funeral. Thank God—after all, like me, he lived all alone. And he died all alone (as I am destined to do). It’s just that the Academy of Science, which suddenly honored the eternally chastised Gediminas Riauba after his death, won’t bury me.

In Lithuania, truly great people are valued, if at all, only after their death. In the very best case.

That live skeleton crawls on all fours through the pen and nibbles at the grass. That skeleton of a tall man with a toothless mouth and bloody gums rips out a dried-up clump and slowly chews it. There is nothing left in his eyes; Plato and Einstein are dead, Nietzsche and Shakespeare are dead. In his eyes a void remains, a boundless, bare expanse. You know this man. You know his name. You’ve spent hundreds of nights talking together. Vasia Jebachik sprawls next to you and giggles. If they should catch us, we could end up in the pen ourselves. The man suddenly stops and spreads his legs. It seems some kind of thought flickers on his face. He strains to think, tries to remember something, while between his legs hangs a thick sausage of waste. It dangles for a long time and finally falls down. Your heart wants to jump out of your throat, but you can’t pull your eyes away from him.

“Bolius!” you say in despair.

He doesn’t hear. That human animal no longer knows his own name; he turns around and sniffs at his waste. He calmly leans over and chomps the steaming, reeking sausage with his toothless mouth. He chews it blissfully, with his head thrown back no less. You know this person.

“They’ve done your prof in, Ironsides,” Vasia Jebachik grins, “And there’s another one.”

The second shaved head is much younger; he doesn’t crawl, he reclines with a pained expression on his face. He still has a human face. The older one suddenly yowls. You’re wracked by spasms, because you know this person’s name. All of Lithuania knows his name. You want to kill someone, because it’s impossible to go on living. Whom should you kill? Perhaps Bolius? Or maybe yourself? It’s the fundamental question of philosophy: do you kill someone else, or yourself? God was killed a long time ago.

“The other one’s supposedly a Swede,” Vasia whispers. “Balenberg, or something . . . Ha! Do you see a Swede? He’s the King of the Jews! I’d recognize a Jew a mile away!”

Your hands shake, your heart no longer beats, you’ve died already. You no longer are, there is only an all-encompassing NOTHING, which has no meaning nor objective, no purpose, which looks with a multitude of invisible eyes, gorges with a multitude of invisible mouths, and blankets the entire earth—it has no cracks, no weak spots; it’s invincible, eternal, unchanging. Under it cities disappear, people disappear, the whole lot disappears, Bolius disappeared, you’ll disappear in a minute, sooner or later nothing will be left—just that nothing, existing for itself and because of itself, but it’s almost all the same to you, since you no longer are. You’re dead already.

“Let’s get lost, Ironsides,” Vasia Jebachik blurts out. “If they catch us here, it’s all over for us. They’re hiding that Swede like you wouldn’t believe!”

For two or three days I lay in a fever, then suddenly I came to my senses—with a dull head and an empty heart. I felt somewhat like the only life left among the dead. Everything in the world appeared to be as usual, left standing in the same place and the same way. But everything was illuminated in a new light, arousing the second, the true sight. It’s not difficult to get used to obvious, tangible changes. It’s much more difficult when things seemingly haven’t changed, but mean something else entirely. If you were to try to reconcile the old and the new perspectives, you could go out of your mind. I saved myself simply by not even attempting to remember the old world; I accepted the new without any stipulations. I saw it clearly, like a finished painting, like the dragon’s fiery breath.

All of Their subspecies—from the commissars of gray powers down to the last peon, all of the beasts marked by Their sign, seek the same thing. They suck, devour, and ingest your essential powers, the inner strength, thanks to which you are human. They devour people, but leave them looking perfectly healthy on the outside. They suck out just the insides, leaving an ashen emptiness inside. They suck out fantasy, inspirations and intellect, as if it were everyday food or a refreshing drink. They are able to adjust to circumstances better than any other living creature. It’s impossible to avoid Them; They are everywhere. It’s They who fixed things so that in the eternal war between the darkness and the light a soulless gloom always wins. They discovered the near truth, which is worse than the blackest lie. If the human race really is doomed to extinction, it will be solely thanks to Them.

A hundred times I tried to logically refute Their existence. But I reached the opposite goal—I unarguably proved that They really exist. The simplest proof—an argument ad absurdum. Let’s say They don’t exist. There is no such subspecies of live creatures whose sole purpose is to kanuk people, to take away their intellectual and spiritual powers; that kingdom of sullen, flat faces doesn’t exist. Let’s say none of that exists.

Then how can you explain humanity’s structure, all the world’s societies, all human communities, their aspirations and modes of existence? How can you explain that always and everywhere, as far as you can see, one idiot rules a thousand intelligent people, and they quietly obey? Whence comes the silent gray majority in every society? Would a person who wasn’t kanuked think of vegetating in a soulless condition and say that’s the way everything should be? Why is it always enough to arrest a thousand for the just cause of a million to be doomed? Who raises and sets all governments on the throne, who hands the scepter to Satan’s servants—to all sorts of Stalins, Hitlers or Pol Pots? How do thousands, even millions of people disappear in the presence of all, and the others supposedly don’t even notice? How does humanity manage to forget its history and repeat that which has already caused catastrophe more than once? Where does everyone’s intelligence and memory disappear to at such moments? What instills the tendency in a human to betray the seekers of justice, knowing perfectly well that they are seekers of justice? Where does that secret desire come from, when a person is up to their neck in shit, to use all his strength to drown another who’s still trying to scramble out? How could censorship, whose sole purpose is to hide the truth, exist in a human society that hasn’t been kanuked?

Why doesn’t a single theory answer these simple questions? Why do all the great philosophical systems, all the Hegels and Kants together, fail to explain these basic things? Why?

Maybe that’s the way, and just that way, that man unavoidably is? Maybe all of these horrifying things aren’t the province of theory, but rather axioms that you’ll neither prove nor disprove? Maybe a soulless doom is programmed into all of us from the start? Every nation has the kind of government it deserves, and so on?

I cannot bear assumptions like that, assumptions that acrimoniously belittle people. I can’t bear them! But an investigator must be calm and objective, he must rely only on facts.

Children deny those revolting assumptions. The very existence of children. A foolish boy who tries to boss the neighborhood kids around will be ridiculed immediately. There is no silent gray majority in the world of children. You could arrest a thousand, a million children, but as long as at least one remains alive and free, there will be a child’s view of justice in the world, there will be someone to shout that the king is naked. An unspoiled child tries to be more like the stronger or smarter ones, not to pull them down. No, no, a human isn’t born a kanukas!

The ruination takes over later, when children are taught to rat on others, when they learn it’s not worth ridiculing the kid with pretensions to be a little king, since he’s the boss’s son. When someone convinces them (convinces without presenting any arguments) that it’s imperative to participate in the idiotic play of life, even knowing it’s idiotic. Convinces them there is no choice—either float in the ship of fools, or drown.

How can you explain all of this, supposing They don’t exist?

ERGO: THEY EXIST.

Thank God, even Their system isn’t omnipotent. Not everyone gives in to being kanuked. Some people have an incomprehensible metaphysical power (frequently not even suspecting it themselves) to elude the thickest of Their nets. Alas, there’s very few of them, terribly, tragically, few.

At that time I hadn’t comprehended Their abnormal logic (Their patho-logic). I didn’t know even a hundredth part of their methods, but I had already started to grasp what sort of threat hung over all of us. Gedis was the first victim to die in my presence. To this day I’m not sure he knew about Them. Without a doubt, Gediminas was better, smarter, more energetic than I am. Unfortunately, it’s by no means a given that every good and intelligent person will come across Their system. You must experience a great deal of evil in your life, real evil; you must thoroughly scrutinize its pupil-less eyes. Besides, you must have a seed of real evil in yourself. It’s awful, but that’s the way it is: if you don’t have evil within yourself, you won’t be able to recognize and comprehend the evil in the world. So I cannot be sure that Gedis knew. He was only the first victim I recognized—who can count how many of them I had seen just in the Stalinist camps, without even suspecting they were Their victims. I have no doubts about the reasons for Gedis’s death. I hastened to find regularities of a more general nature. I searched gropingly: I tried to remember all mathematicians, all musicians, all car crashes. At last, I turned up a significant car crash in my memory. I remembered how Albert Camus died. That was how my research moved into a completely new sphere.

The entire story of Camus’s life always seemed somewhat strange to me. Hidden in the sands of Algeria, he could, of course, come across more essential things than the inhabitants of large metropolitan centers can. In a center of culture and science, in the hum of people, They feel safe; They blend into the throng, into the profusion of words and opinions. They always dictate intellectual fashions, by this method concealing things that are troublesome to Them. Inhabitants of obscure places have far more time to delve into the essence of the world, but also far fewer chances for their ideas to reach humanity. Camus successfully reconciled the qualities of a hermit and Europe’s darling.

His spiritual activity was twofold. Some of his writings, let’s say, The Myth of Sisyphus, seem to indicate that Camus was practically an apologist for Their activities. This is confirmed in part by his Nobel Prize (almost always it’s Their emissaries who determine the awarding of official prizes: I emphasize—neither Joyce, nor Kafka, nor Genet received any prizes).

On the other hand, The Plague or The Stranger brazenly intrude into Their inviolable domain. The portrayal of the plague is strongly reminiscent of an allegory of Their system, while Meursault is one of the most influential portraits of a kanuked being. There’s no sense delving into Camus’s actual activities—the most significant things won’t be found in the tangle of his biography. But his death is worth pondering. Perhaps at first Camus was an obedient (let’s say an inadvertent) servant of Theirs, and later he saw through things. Maybe he was cleverly feigning all the time, secretly damaging Them. We can only speculate. One way or another, he slowly began behaving in an unacceptable manner; maybe he even did things to Them that we are forbidden to talk about (even to think about them is dangerous). Retribution was quick. The fatalistic death, the lost manuscripts—all of that’s in an all-too-familiar style. Gediminas’s letters also disappeared without a trace.

Camus’s precedent was the first I wrote into the great list of Their victims.

The fact that you won’t find straightforward information about Them in books ultimately proves They exist. It would be easy to fight with a concrete societal or political organization that everyone knows or has at least come across. An identified enemy is almost a conquered enemy. Everyone would have risen up against Them a long time ago; They would have been destroyed at some point. Unfortunately, Their race exists and works harmoniously. This proves that they’re hidden, undiscovered, uninvestigated. But whether They want to or not, they leave traces behind. All of Their victims are indelible footprints. Let’s take the story of Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. Anyone who’s seen Polanski’s films will understand that he should have shut his trap (or more precisely—broken his film camera). Both his vampires and Rosemary’s Baby slowly, but unavoidably, lead to Their lair. True, Satan Manson (his leaders!) miscalculated something, Polanski was left unharmed, his wife died (or maybe that was just exactly Their patho-logical plan). However, the time will come yet when some barb-eyed Circe of the Hollywood villas will do him in. It’s silly to talk about a shortage of footprints. There are plenty of prints—it’s even horrifying how many there are, those most often bloody footprints of Theirs.

Sometimes it’s almost suspicious how far individual researchers manage to get. I’m not even talking about Kafka. There’s another one who particularly astounded me. He’s from Buenos Aires, by the name of Ernesto Sabato. I was simply horrified when I read his book. I couldn’t believe my eyes: Sabato openly described some of Their methods—although it’s true, he didn’t mention anything at all about Their goals. In addition, he persistently associated them with the powers of hell. That aroused my suspicions. Strangest of all, he wrote about the blind, and they, after all, don’t have a gaze. At first I just couldn’t understand this inversion. It sufficed to scrutinize two words—AKLAS and AKYLAS: AK(Y)LAS, the words for blind and sharp-sighted. Perhaps the particularly archaic Lithuanian language has preserved even more secret connections, connections which They have managed to eliminate from other languages?

However, this discovery didn’t solve the problem of Ernesto Sabato, and it didn’t dispel my suspicions. It wasn’t plausible that an Argentinean would know Lithuanian. Unfortunately, I’ll never travel to Argentina, I’ll never speak to him nor track him down. However, his picture fell into my hands in the nick of time.

A man with a pudgy little face and small eyes looked out of the photograph, a man who looked sufficiently satisfied with himself. Not at all like a man condemned to death, a man who knows the secrets of The Way. Besides, he’s too well-known, at least in Argentina. Argentina—where a good number of Hitler’s toadies hid! All of these facts opened my eyes. Sabato’s book is merely a clever attempt to turn the search in an erroneous direction. They set quite a few traps like that. I was saved by my native language and vigilance. They didn’t succeed in fooling me.

I don’t know why it’s the Lithuanian language in particular. I don’t know why it’s in Lithuania in particular that They so openly show themselves, or disguise themselves so poorly. I don’t know why it’s Vilnius in particular that’s so important. All of that is still a mystery to me.

They overshot, if they think that I’ll study only the books in my own library. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the University’s manuscript sections. There I came across a manuscript, a transcript of a pre-war dissertation, that shocked me.

During the time of Zygimantas Augustus (the second half of the 16th century), a Basilisk appeared in Vilnius that killed people with its gaze. It was the horrible metamorphosis of a bird; it killed people with the power of its eyes, or sometimes with a deep breath. It hid in the mysterious Didžiosios Street district and had been discovered, but later disappeared. It was possible to temporarily defend yourself from its powers with dry tree leaves—they absorbed the strength of its gaze.

In the dissertation, this unique information was described as if merely in passing, as one of many legends of Vilnius—with the author’s (a woman’s!) perfectly understandable caution. After I read this, I didn’t sleep for several nights. I frantically looked for information about the Vilnius Basilisk—unfortunately, in vain.

Yet one more very important observation: students at Vilnius University used to organize ceremonies celebrating victory over the Basilisk, but later they were forbidden and forgotten.

How much more invaluable information from the past is still hidden in manuscripts!

She talks and talks; she’s been quiet for too long. Even now she’s silent the entire workday and doesn’t even glance at me, while I fume, irritated by blond-fluffed Stefa buzzing around me. At one time I used her in some of my inquiries. Lolita avoids her; she avoids them all, but after work, left alone with me, she bursts out. We spend entire evenings walking around Vilnius; I haven’t roamed through the city this much in a long time. Lola constantly scatters words, sentences, and difficult tirades about. In the narrow little streets, in the grim gateways, next to the old houses, the words she’s spoken pile up in heaps. They are distinctive: smaller or larger, arranged tidily or thrown about any which way. They pretend to be rocks, tree leaves swept together, or even trash.

She talks incessantly.

“Vytas,” is how it most often starts, “Vytas, do you want me to tell you about . . .”

A typical woman’s question. How can I say what I want? But the worst of it is that I do enjoy it when she talks. I enjoy listening to her like music. She improvises as she speaks, returning to the same place (in the story and in the city) a hundred times, or turning in circles, or wandering aimlessly. She starts to talk about her village, about her grandparents, and I know we’ll shortly turn up in Gediminas Square. Mentioning her husband, we’re surely cutting across Vokiečių Street (now it’s Muziejaus). Her jazz of words and routes has become part of me; we’re not just walking through Vilnius, but through my internal streets too.

“I’m drawn to horrible people,” she says with inner fear. This is a favorite theme of hers (down Gedimino Boulevard, then to Tortorių Street, deeper and deeper into the bowels of Vilnius). “I’m fascinated by doomed men, the ones that smell of misfortune from a distance . . .”

Now she’s a bodiless, extinct, paralyzed fairy of Vilnius: a pale shadow on the dark background of a wall, a dark shadow on the background of a bright wall. The charms of Lola’s body have vanished somewhere. I don’t even notice her breasts or the mysterious roundness of her belly; I listen more than I look. I like Lolita’s voice. In it I hear the quiet rustle of an inner fire; the fire there isn’t extinguished yet. Her voice is multifaceted: you can hear her girlish dreams and her desires in it, her favorite music, even her breasts and her long legs wrapped in fluids of beauty.

Now I’m walking beside her; I see her lips, I even see the words themselves—it’s a shame they fall on the sidewalk and roll into the dark portals; they should be collected and saved.

“I’m persecuted by people who are marked with the sign of misfortune,” she repeats seriously. “It sounds silly: marked with the sign of misfortune, like in a Russian ballad . . . We no longer know how to say what we want to say, there are just strangers’ phrases in our heads . . . Although, no, I know: if everyone were to speak their own language, we’d never understand one another. But it would be so beautiful! . . . The sign of misfortune . . . I look for that kind of person myself, that’s the worst. The other kind don’t interest me . . . What is a man, Vytas?”

“A face and sexual organs. To distinguish them from others and to multiply!”

“Jesus and Mary,” she sighs, “You’re a silly, foul-mouthed person. A man is his eyes. Eyes are everything, even if you’re physically blind. And the invisible fiery brand on a person’s forehead.”

She suddenly stops. She frequently comes to a standstill this way, as if she had to hammer in a little stake here, to leave a sign. In just this spot. Here, where she spoke of eyes.

“And me?” I ask, because by now we have turned in the direction of the University and my turn to speak has come. “What’s written on my forehead? Or written on some other spot? What’s written there that’s so significant, that you fell for a dying old man? It isn’t by chance an Electra complex?”

“You’re a pig. And terribly spiteful,” she says, after a long, long silence (all the way to Stiklių Street). “You hate me. This always, always happens to me . . .”

Suddenly she stops on the very corner, and leans against the wall; her face looks up, straight at me. Now she has a body: and eyes, turned in towards herself, and breasts (they furiously press up against me), and the curves of the thighs hidden under her clothing, and her flat goddess’s belly. She suddenly comes to life, her eyes blaze and her fingers angrily pick at the wall.

“And if I were to start needling at you too? We’d go on picking on one another? You’d get mad first. Men are very touchy.”

I follow from behind, hanging back a bit, and wait patiently, because she speaks of intimate things only in Didžiosios Street. (Now she’s in Gorky Street. What a sad, sad absurdity—what does some Gorky, a miserable kanukized servant, have in common with Vilnius?) It’s only in this street, descending downwards, that she talks about what matters most to her. (Climbing up she always asks me about the camp.) It’s probably still quite early, but Vilnius is empty. Vilnius gets emptier by the day—the emptier it gets, the worse the crush in the streets. A dead city, and above it hangs a fog of submissive, disgusting fear. Vilnius, which I love, Vilnius, which is I myself, buried under lava like Pompeii, under the seas like Atlantis. Lolita and I are shadows: the live Vilniutians, that throng of ants, that murky river, don’t wander the evening streets, don’t talk the way we do.

“I can’t stand dead ideas,” she suddenly says. “I can’t stand symbols and metaphors . . . My mother was obsessed with the idea of innocence. The idea of consummate innocence. Do you know what innocence is?”

“This membrane in the vagina. Sometimes very difficult to tear.”

“Vytas, stop it,” she fumes. “You’re making fun of me. I won’t tell you anything . . . Although as it happens, it was exactly with a membrane that everything started . . .”

Agitated, she looks around as if she were searching for ears in the walls, then she cowers and whispers. Even her whisper plays its own music. She doesn’t hiss like others do; you’d think she was uttering secret curses—only genuine fairies know them.

“Whoever walks between these walls can’t be innocent. This damn city wouldn’t put up with innocence . . . But no, I was talking about the past, about my mother . . . At first my maidenly innocence really was what mattered most to her. You can’t imagine how much you can talk about that. How many days, evenings, nights. For years! Mother started when I was about six. I’d run around the yards, mostly with the boys. For some reason I wasn’t attracted to dolls; I liked hideaways, ruins and boys better . . . She immediately started in giving me lectures about innocence. She wanted to explain what innocence is. Abstract innocence—that’s what mattered most to her. It was complete mysticism . . . Later she switched to concrete maidenly innocence, as a separate example. She explained in excruciating detail all the methods whereby, in her opinion, it was possible to lose your innocence. All night long—so I would know what I had to avoid. Her imagination was nightmarish. But enough of that . . . Of course, I didn’t understand anything, but an image of mystical innocence formed within me. A live innocence . . . Practically a little beast . . . It was so . . . sticky, without any holes or openings, hairy, and really cold—so you wouldn’t want to touch it. My six- or seven-year-old brain was full of that cold, hairy innocence, can you imagine? I’d dream of it. And how did everything turn out?”

She stops again, as if she needs to concentrate to answer, and takes a deep breath of air, Vilnius’s gray air. It smells of decay. Every evening street of Vilnius looks like a narrow path through an invisible bog. If you were to go a couple of steps to the side you’d immediately feel the sweetish breath of the swamp, the smell of peaceful decay.

“Do you know how it all ended up? Quite naturally: I began to hate any kind of innocence. If I had only understood what my mother was explaining to me, I would have lost my maidenly innocence by all possible means. I’ll tell you about my mother’s fantastic invented methods later, all right?”

I can’t be all right: we’re approaching the Narutis, approaching the lonely portal that quietly chats with Saint John’s church. There’s no talking here; I have to go by calmly, without disturbing the old smells that have seeped into the walls. And Lolita understands me, understands without a word, by now she’s standing in my room by the window and stroking the curtain. But no—she’s lying on the couch with her legs curled up under her.

Now she’s lying on the couch completely naked, her head leaning on her left hand, with her soft-skinned legs curled up under her. A secret fire burns within her—I still don’t know if she won’t set me on fire too. I only know what I see and feel now. I feel Lolita’s warmth, and I see her herself: the large, firm breasts, the belly hidden in half-shadow, the folded, twisted legs. I understand why an artist took her for a wife: he wanted to have an ideal model at hand every day. You could draw her, exclusively, your entire life. Not just her portraits—you could paint a meadow or a room: on the canvas there really will be a meadow or a room, but actually you’d draw her all the same. You can delve into her, express her, even though at that moment your paintbrush will leave an image of the Last Judgment on the canvas, or a still life of space-rending green peaches, or symmetrical gray squares. That’s just what the ordinary sight will see, but the second, true sight will invariably discern Lolita there.

“Why do I talk about it? I don’t know . . . Sometimes it seems to me that she was a genuine Lithuanian, a Lithuanian of Lithuanians—with that idea of hers, of innocence. It’s like a national illness, you know? She tried to be innocent in absolutely everything. It was practically a religious aspiration, an unrealistic yearning. Her slogan should have been: ‘Never take a step!’ And: ‘If someone comes close to you, don’t wait, don’t stand in place—run as fast as you can!’ She wanted to be innocent in absolutely everything . . . Not God’s fiancée, no, no, not that at all . . . I’d say she didn’t want to surrender to the world, or something. If it were at all possible not to do something new, something unknown, something she hadn’t experienced yet—she wouldn’t do it. Understand? . . . If she had never been somewhere, she avoided going there. She tried her best to never go beyond the borders of the smells, events, and ceremonies she had already experienced; anything new could injure her mystical innocence . . . Don’t touch that flower, she would say, don’t show it to me! . . . Don’t tell me about the sea, never, ever, tell me about the sea! We got into a horrible row the first time I secretly ran off to the sea! . . . Never mind the sea, she had never tasted lemons! A lemon could injure her innocence, you know?”

“So, it’s always about your mother. And you?”

Lolita moves her legs uneasily, rubs her cheek with a finger; bars of light slink over her chest, briefly light up her navel and the lower part of her belly, the thick, curled-up hair. Her mother intimidates me. I don’t want to hear another word about her mother. She was my age. Someone my age, obsessed with a pathological idea of innocence.

Lolita suddenly sits up, bends her somewhat spread legs and leans on her knees with her elbows, her hands hanging down, her fingers almost reaching her ankles. The halo of thick hair glows with an angry fire around her head. Her body, unusually coarse, almost vulgar, looks at me rapaciously; the plainly visible dark sexual opening irritates me. It’s only like that for a few moments. The lamp is ashamed and hides behind her back; now her face, her entire front, is in shadow, and her voice is much calmer.

“Don’t make fun of my mother. Her world was bigger than ours. Just think how much she invented about those things she never experienced, the things she denied herself . . . I envy that ideal world of hers . . . Imagine it—you invent a lemon yourself. With all the details, with a bunch of non-existent characteristics . . . Come on now, a real lemon compared to an ideal like that—nothing more than a fog, a banal yellow fruit, while yours . . . She was a theoretician, an aesthete; I went for practice and experimentation. She pounded that abstract idea of innocence into me so thoroughly that to this day I’m dying to lose my innocence in every possible sense, to try out everything immediately, to run looking who knows where, and to constantly look, to look for something never seen, never experienced, never known . . . And I like just exactly the kind of men I can’t understand, the kind I don’t know what to expect from . . . Understand?”

“And I’m that kind?”

“You understand . . .” she blurts out, and continues down the street. “You understand everything perfectly well. You’re intelligent. Besides, you have your secret, and I don’t know what it is . . . And I don’t want to know . . . If I were to know, then at least I could predict what you’ll do, how you’ll behave . . . And I don’t want that . . . I want to experience everything myself, understand?”

She gets more and more furious; her voice angrily cuts the air of Pilies Street into pieces, and then flings them in my face. It is slowly getting lighter, or it hasn’t gotten dark yet. By now we have almost gone the entire street to the end. By now she has almost gotten all of it out—earlier, now, later.

“What did you ask me to begin with?” she says sadly. “Why am I telling you this drivel?”

“You were explaining why you’re attracted to horrible people.”

“Oh . . . Because I can see only two signs in a person’s face—either unhappiness, or peace. The kind of peace that means stupidity, clean business, bacon, money, very soft furniture, fear of authority, endlessly just and moral behavior, shiny shoes that are never dirty, perfectly even dentures, a precise daily schedule, peaceful sleep . . .”

In an instant the mood changes; suddenly Lolita is quiet, and without her voice something inexplicable is going on in the dimness. I’m walking down a street of Old Town, a woman walks beside me, but I have absolutely no idea who she is—I know her name, a few of her real or invented stories, but does that really mean I know her? A completely strange, dangerous woman is walking next to me and probably wants something from me—at this moment or in general. She probably wants to use me, like all women do, or perhaps even to deceive me cruelly. An extremely graceful woman—I can’t get enough of her walk, her legs gliding as smoothly as in a dream. She’s very young; it’s not clear what she wants from me, this fairy of Vilnius. At any moment she could look at me with a magic glance and turn me into a stone, or a submissive slave. I feel I am in her power. She controls me with magical powers, or at least she could control me: if she were to look at me with her entrancing eyes I would obey, I would carry out any order. But she doesn’t look—maybe she thinks it’s still early, maybe she’s saving her authority for the critical moment. You have to guard against her; you shouldn’t admire her.

There’s practically no fog left; I see the streets, the square and the most important thing—the hill and Gediminas Castle. Here the Iron Wolf howled in Grand Duke Gediminas’s dream and promised the castle a great future. Now Vilnius itself is a dream city, a ghost city. Among the faceless figures walking the streets, the good dead of Vilnius (the old ones and the entirely new ones from the post-war period, the last Lithuanian aurochs) look much livelier. It’s not clear which is a dream—the ancient city or the Vilnius of today. Only the ancient castle in the new city is unavoidably real: a lonely tower, emerging from the overgrown slopes of the hill—the phallic symbol of Vilnius. It betrays all secrets. The symbolic phallus of Vilnius: short, stumpy and powerless. An organ of pseudo-powers that hasn’t been able to get aroused in a long time. A red three-story tower, a phallic NOTHING, shamelessly shown to everyone, Vilnius’s image of powerlessness. The great symbol of a castrated city, of castrated Lithuania, stuck onto every postcard, into every photo album, every tourist brochure. A perverted, shameless symbol: its impotence should be hidden, not acknowledged, or it should at least pretend it’s still capable of a thing or two. But the city has long since lost everything—even its self-respect. Only lies, absurdity, and fear remain.

For some reason I’m sitting in the break room again, someone’s tossed me into a room with peeling plaster and set women around me. Besides myself, there’s only one man here—Martynas Poška, our library’s sad little chatterbox, a weird variety of crew-cut deity, a pathetic searcher for justice, and a collector of absurdities. At one time I even thought he was walking at least in parallel on The Way; I was shocked by his thin, long face, his eyes brimming with horror, his spineless whispers: “They don’t need it . . . it was done intentionally . . . a Satanic system . . .” But you scarcely start to think Martynas could be one of your own, when he brushes his hand across his face, suddenly changing it for another, and again I see the sneering crew-cut Martynas, the library’s sad little chatterbox. Someone like that can’t walk The Way, thank God, he can’t be Their spy, either: in whatever company, he’s the one that talks the most. And I always listen. I don’t disdain any conversation, any company. He who knows The Way doesn’t have the right to disdain people who have been kanuked; he knows all too well that his great discoveries and advantages are just a matter of fate, and only his mistakes are truly earned. You cannot condemn those around you; the desire to demean others is inspired by Them. Everyone should be viewed with secret hope, and their words examined for expression of a strong spirit. Almost no one is completely kanuked.

Take Martynas: some spiritual organ of his secretly manufactures anti-kanukas hormones; I’ve been convinced of this many times. Inside of him hides a deep protest against Them, although unfortunately, he hasn’t an inkling of Their existence.

Martynas was always a person of faith. He had faith in the power of reason. He thought the majority of our misfortunes proliferate because there aren’t enough virtuous, stubborn, and talented young men to sacrifice themselves and fix at least the biggest idiocies of our life. Martynas feels he himself is one of those young men. He dedicated his dissertation to the study of education, although its scope was much larger. He even flushed out a few substantial things. It wasn’t just a standard dissertation, but two full-scale treatises. One was philosophical for the most part, written like Spinoza: axioms, theorems, and their proofs. The other was almost sociological: a lot of rich documentation confirming the already proven theorems. Martynas carried out a titanic labor: he began it in his sophomore year and labored over it twenty-five hours a day for an entire eleven years. He was even left without a wife or children. Martynas Poška was a scholarly fanatic.

He painstakingly studied the path of the Soviet citizen from preschool to a university degree, and with mathematical precision proved that everywhere and at all times the only thing taught is how to swallow ready-made propositions, lifeless tropes, and barren constructions. Nowhere is thinking taught. No one is taught to create images for himself, to find propositions, to arrange logical schemes. No one is taught to search for truth, no one is taught to doubt. And worst of all—no one is taught the fundamentals of morals and humanity. In a word, we raise imitators, talking parrots, soulless automatons—but not Homo sapiens. Martynas always had a boundless respect for the concept of Homo sapiens. In the second part of his opus he scattered a bouquet of the most dreadful examples—from moronic educational programs to young killers spouting off: they had murdered just for the hell of it—not even out of anger, nor out of any dark instinct, but merely because they hadn’t grasped the simplest rudiments of human morality.

When his dissertation immediately stumbled on every rung of the bureaucratic ladder, Martynas understood nothing. He still believed in the power of the intellect. After all, an educational system like that ruined absolutely everything: the economy, politics, people’s souls; in a word, his dissertation bolstered the entire country. But no one, absolutely no one, would even consider speaking of its shortfalls or merits. A multitude of identical faces and identical voices vaguely muttered, “Come on, now, how can you, you understand yourself, after all, you understand everything.”

Force is neither Their only nor Their basic method. Treachery, deceptive persuasion, and a peculiar hypnotism are far more significant, far better suited to Their purposes. It’s always Their bywords:

“Come on now, you understand, you surely understand everything yourself!”

“The time hasn’t come yet for ideas like that!”

“Is it worth your while to be in such a hurry?”

They don’t try to merely break your spirit, but to force you to break it yourself. Obviously, They must occupy key positions in the educational system. It’s particularly important for Them to start with children as soon as possible.

For the love of God, guard the children!

Martynas refused to understand this. He still believed in the power of intellect. Besides, he was a sufficiently bold and brazen young man. He marched on Moscow itself, camped overnight in the reception rooms of the masters, took Olympus by a long-term siege. He climbed quite high; the only thing higher was the very apex, the banquet table of the gods.

One sad evening Martynas, well into his cups, leaned over to me and whispered enigmatically: “That muckety-muck talked to me for two hours! I understood it all . . . they don’t need it . . . it was done on purpose . . . you can’t imagine what a Satanic system it is!” He spoke in a whisper, casting furtive glances at the corners of the empty room. It was then I thought he probably was walking right next to me on The Way. Alas, alas.

On his return from Moscow, he quickly went through all the bureaucratic offices, collecting copies of his opus. That’s when remarkable things started happening. He didn’t find a single one. All of the offices claimed they never had a copy. The manuscript he had left at home vanished without a trace. Then they fired him from his post, quite officially, for not having defended his dissertation on time. He couldn’t manage to find other work. Openings would mysteriously disappear as soon as he approached the personnel department’s door. At last, late one evening, an unfamiliar voice telephoned him and suggested he apply at the library. That was how he ended up: without a wife, without children, without his great work. But he didn’t fall into hysterics, didn’t drink himself to death, and didn’t start fearing his own shadow.

On the contrary, he started expressing dreadful heresies out loud—the way people sing as loud as they can when they’re going through a haunted forest. I suspect Martynas sees apparitions too. Even now he almost never shuts his mouth. For some reason we’re sitting at the coffee break table again and talking about something. And again it repeats itself: more and more often, my time turns in circles and returns to the same spot.

Leodead Brezhnev’s portrait listens indifferently. An abundance of the usual conversational themes: Lithuanians and Russians, the food that isn’t, rising prices, Russia as the kingdom of idiots, America as a paradise where dollars grow on trees, the decrepit government, youth has no ideals, the world’s ecological system is disintegrating, we were born Lithuanians, will there be a war?

Now the theme approaches the eternal circle, which is nearly impossible to escape from: the absurdities of propaganda, what are they blathering, who do they think we are? The theme has been discussed and dissected to death, but Martynas is still pontificating:

“They actually know no one will listen to them. No one will hear what they say. So there’s no need to put even a speck of logic into what they’re spouting off about. It would be a useless waste of effort. Besides, they’re concerned about people’s health. Imagine what would happen if a political commentator suddenly said something intelligent. A catastrophe! Fifteen hundred people would get a heart attack. Three thousand would go into nervous shock from the unexpectedness of it. At least several dozen would start prophesying: they’ll decide the end of the world is coming . . .”

“Comrade Martynas, Comrade Martynas . . .” Elena drawls lazily.

Pretty Beta, who separates me from Elena, is completely stunned: she showed up here recently and isn’t used to Martynas yet. Whenever he opens his mouth, every newcomer or stranger thinks a platoon of soldiers will pile into the room at any moment and drag Martynas off to a penal colony. The old-timers are used to it, even Elena, even though she represents the Communist Party in our company. She interrupts Martynas’s heresies with the monotony of a robot, but she doesn’t even bother to scare him or lecture him.

Laima took advantage of the silence. She resembles a fish, a large cod. I always want to let her back into the ocean. She looks around quite serenely and announces:

“Last night I saw an evening with Marcinkevičius on the television. A very good poet.”

My neighbor Beta’s jaw even dropped: you need to get used to Laima too. She always speaks out of turn. That’s her style. She’s even weirdly secretive, like every fish.

Elena willingly takes up the theme of nationality. She likes to play the knowledgable Lithuanian. The wolf’s satisfied, and the sheep’s healthy too:

“He’s the only true Lithuanian poet.”

Martynas’s eyes bug out horribly:

“Oh, yes, no one else knows how to exclaim with such sad, longing pathos: O sancta Lituanica! I suggest introducing a unit of yearning sadness, let’s say . . . hmm . . . a marcinkena or a marcena. One marcena would be equal to . . .”

“His trilogy is a true Lithuanian epic.” Elena’s knowledge is wide, she reads the newspapers diligently. “The people create a national poet with their own hands.”

”Yes, I see how that nation, its sleeves rolled up, under the careful eye of the KGB and censorship, dripping with sweat, swiftly creates a national poet,” this from me, needlessly of course.

Elena gives me a murderous look, but lets it pass. She’s afraid of me.

“And the national poet doesn’t snooze, either,” Martynas interrupts in a sweet little voice, “I can literally see him, taking heed of strict instructions from the authorities, practicing profound Lithuanian poses in front of the mirror. Do you know what’s the most Lithuanian pose of all?”

“He’s going to say something nasty!” Laima announces with cheerful horror.

But Martynas doesn’t get the chance to say anything nasty. Elena cuts him off angrily:

“You despise your own nation, Comrade Poška. You don’t like Lithuanian art.”

The great Lithuanianist Martynas ought to explode in fury, but he just swallows his saliva three times and says rather calmly:

“Where is it? Where’s the art? Where? Show it to me.” Anxiously, he looks under the table, out the window; he even sticks his nose behind the cabinet. “You know, there is no art. I can’t find it anywhere! Maybe someone took it and carried it off? Where, my dear, is your art?”

The newcomer Beta got truly intrigued, she even leaned forward. I’ve such an urge to stroke her little short-haired head, and then her firm, probably not very large breasts.

“You don’t even know Lithuanian art, Comrade Poška!”

“That’s a lie! I know eighty-five kilometers of Lithuanian writers, I’m an expert! Lithuanian writers are divided into the sad ones and the cheery ones. The latter I refuse to study. And the sad ones’ sadness is of two types: a tearful sadness, measured in marcenas, more typical of poets, and a sighing sadness, more typical of prose writers. They sigh because the censor’s framework is suffocating them. They sigh in an apartment with a custom kitchen, custom bath and custom toilet provided by those setting the censorship framework. It’s particularly important that the Lithuanian writer have a custom toilet. He spends most of his time sitting on the custom toilet and writing nothing. Because his creative freedom is restricted. If he were given freedom, wouldn’t he just write like mad! Now, it’s true, he can’t very well imagine what that ‘like mad’ would be, but that’s secondary. You can’t demand too much of a Lithuanian writer’s imagination.”

Martynas’s high spirits were interrupted by a creak of the door. Fyodorov, a Communist from another section, is making some sort of Communist signs at Elena. Elena, with the proud grace of a hippopotamus cow, sways out to see him.

“Vytautas, what milksops we all are, huh?” Martynas sighs in my ear. “Why aren’t we Irish? The same size country, the same number of inhabitants . . . Even Dublin’s almost the same as Vilnius . . .”

“Only Russia’s not next door.”

”There’s England!” Martynas continues buzzing in my ear like an evil spirit. “They fucked the Irish good too, but they held out.”

“They lost their language.”

“A language spoken by men with no balls is shit!” Now Martynas is hissing like a snake.

“Martis, maybe you really do hate Lithuanians?”

“I’m a hundred percent Lithuanian, and no one’s going to force me to love myself,” Martynas says in a deathly calm, and moans again: “Well, why aren’t we Irish? Where’s our IRA? Where’s our Sinn Fein? Where are the bombs? I want to be a terrorist!”

“Martis, finish about the writers,” Stefa offers lovingly, “the censor’s gone, you can go on.”

Stefanija is mistaken: the biggest censor is still hanging on the wall. A humanistic person, looking at that portrait, would have to feel pity and pain: a broken-down, barely creeping stiff, exhibited by his colleagues for threefold ridicule, like an old buffoon. But he’s staring too, his grim eyeballs are even bulging from the portrait—just that it means nothing to Martynas.

“Yes . . . So, at night he prays to God that no one gives him that freedom, because if he got it, he wouldn’t know what to do with it. Now Lithuanian writers have an ironclad alibi: there’s no freedom. But what would happen then?”

A fog slowly comes over me again. Martynas mouths off soundlessly; all of the women and girls explode in laughter. Only Laima is completely serious. She’ll laugh suddenly, ten minutes later, after she’s returned to her room.

Why exactly did all of these people end up in the library? Why is Lolita hiding out here, why am I sitting here? There is plenty of other work for a good programmer. In our situation, who needs an experimental computerized card index? So someone can find out with blinding speed that he won’t get this or that book, because it’s hidden in a closed special collection? I myself suppose I ended up here of my own accord; I still naïvely believe in my own free will. But after all, only They could have let me in here. Maybe it’s more convenient for Them this way to watch what I’m reading? Or maybe all books are nothing but lies, maybe reading makes Them happy, because it leads me further from The Way? Or maybe They’re too lazy to rummage through books themselves, maybe I’m only supposed to come across the texts that are dangerous to Them? Maybe that’s the only reason I’m kept alive?

Bookshelves, bookshelves, bookshelves. Books, books, books. Narrow passageways—a secret labyrinth where it’s easy to get lost, to turn and turn in circles, never to return again. From all of the bookshelves there drifts an identical, barely noticeable warmth—as if from a raked-up pile of autumn leaves. Who knows what sorts of minotaurs wait in ambush for you in the dimness spreading from the concealed ceiling lights. (The library collection’s lights always spread dimness, not light.)

The soundless picture continues to flicker before my eyes. Martynas has tickled everyone so much they’d laugh if you showed them a finger. Still going on about the writers?

“. . . every seven years a creative fever overcomes him. The symptoms: muses and ghosts torment him. His entire body starts itching. The pain is horrible. The time has come to beg the authorities for a new apartment. There aren’t many apartments, but writers multiply like dogs. That’s when the Shakespearean passions boil over. Sung in tones of the highest spirituality. What eloquence! What depth! You see at once that these are artists. What Greek tragedies! The Soviet writer could kill his brother or sister over a new apartment, or still worse—he could kill himself! I know at least six writers who publicly threatened suicide if the state wouldn’t give them a new apartment.”

“So what happened?” Stefa laughs.

“Two of them did it. One with tablets from America; the second used a really awful method. He categorically refused alcohol! His death was inevitable.”

“Martis, tell us about creativity, something about creativity,” Marija begs through her tears.

“My dear, it really is true creativity! The applications to get an apartment are great pearls of poetry! In it you’ll find living pain, true torture. True passion. I’ll devote the rest of my life to the publication of a collection of writers’ applications for their apartments. Otherwise history won’t forgive me.”

“That’s enough!” Laima declares, unexpectedly as usual. “It’s time to go to work. The boss is already frowning.”

The boss—that’s me. I thought about Martynas and frowned despite myself. I listen to his mockery and sarcasm, more often I listen to his serious conversation, occasionally I visit his strange collection. All of it leads somewhere, unfortunately, not where The Way leads; Martynas has turned down a side path. Even people who aren’t at all stupid frequently turn down them. Almost all do.

Most likely he thinks, as the majority do, that everything is determined by two elements; the battle between good and evil, black and white, light and dark. The great contradiction: we are light, while the others—darkness, underground vaults, bats, obscene birds of the night. Heaven and hell, God and Satan.

No one, almost no one draws the obvious conclusion: the battle between light and dark is always won by grayness and twilight. As long as the essential elements, black and white, God and Satan, exist—all is not yet lost. The end comes when everything mixes into a unbroken sugary fog, when nothing no longer differs from anything else.

It is this fog that is the eternal gaze that lurks even in our dreams. It is the Vilnius Basilisk’s gaze, piercing me every morning, a morning that begins with the overcrowded trolleybus, the crush of figures, the journey from non-existence into non-existence: from the drabness of dreamless sleep to the unthinking work machine. It’s only by Their will that the tired figures with puffy eyes cram into iron boxes with fly-covered windows and slowly creak towards their daily bondage. The day begins with smells: the stink of rancid sweat and cheap soap, the stench of last night’s drinking, and a whiff of nightmares.

But most important of all—the birds have disappeared somewhere. (Which morning was it they disappeared—today, yesterday, always?) The birds have disappeared, and I’m slowly losing my soul, I’m starting to turn into something else. I’m even curious: who is this other? A beast or a demon? A madman? An envoy of the dark? My shape probably won’t change—only my eyes will lose their fire, their secret signs; I’ll quietly turn into a man blind to his soul, into a void, a fog. I’ll feel the blessed nirvana of imbecility. I won’t have to remember anything anymore.

For the time being I still remember. Like it or not, I remember my grandfather. Like it or not, I remember my father. Perhaps one of the secret gazes examining me is my family’s history?

In front of me, pressing a glass of first-class liquor in his hand, father sits and pushes words out his twisted lips. He scans the shining tabletop as if there, underneath his pointy chin, the words would quietly lie one atop another like dry tree leaves. My father, the one-time prodigy of Göttingen and Copenhagen; his intellect, probably equal to Dirac’s or Einstein’s, crumbled and turned into a sickening half-spirit gazing out of narrow, dull pupils. An invisible cudgel trounced him. But no, a cudgel wouldn’t have vanquished him. Father is very large, like all of the Vargalyses, he would just shake a blow off—we’re accustomed to blows. That intellect could only have been vanquished by a plague, a cancer slowly eating away at the brain.

“Except maybe a writer,” father pontificates, “perhaps it’s still possible to be a writer in this world. There was this colleague of mine in Göttingen . . . Sometimes he sends a line . . . His name’s Robertas . . . He’s writing the story of his life now. A book about non-possession. Do you know what non-possession is?”

The liquor glitters in the glass: Hennessy or Courvoisier. (Where does he get the money?) Father’s hands are beautiful, their movements smooth. They reek of nobility and inborn elegance. Even on the worst mornings his hands tremble elegantly. I do not love my father (I never loved him), but his hands fascinate me. If I were to draw a real human, I would paint him with my father’s noble hands. Hands are a man’s beginning of beginnings. Hands and eyes.

My father, a downed bird floundering between Kaunas and Polish-occupied Vilnius, the doctor of Göttingen who sometimes raves about the new European physics and Dirac’s delta function, now speaks of non-possession. He’s always talking about non-possession and loss. He breathes non-possession and loss; he lives by them. Winning or possessing, he’d die, the way others die of hunger or thirst.

“Non-possession is our core,” father lectures. “Even that which we possess—we don’t really possess, understand? We only supposedly possess it . . . What do we have—this or that object: houses, cars, books. These or those ideas, or women . . . But is your woman really yours? Do your ideas really belong to you? Not true! When things are bad, you’re invariably left all on your own . . . And all ideas instantly turn foreign . . . We’re permeated with non-possession, Vytie . . . We ourselves are living non-possession. Even our daydreams are taken away from us . . . WHO takes everything away—there’s the essential question of existence, Vytie. Everything that could really BE OURS is taken away and hidden somewhere . . . Or maybe there really isn’t anything on earth that could be ours . . .”

Father’s speech sometimes rises to holy revelation and sometimes falls to a drunk’s blathering. His ruin is inexplicable and therefore even more frightening. We’re born lost already, father likes to say; our birth itself is a loss. Sometimes I would secretly pray to all the gods for the slightest excuse for his ruin. He didn’t have any and didn’t even try to look for one, like other drunks do. (The greatest unwritten novels molder in the boundless inventions of drunks, blathering away about the tragic reasons for their downfall.)

It’s unbelievably difficult for me to understand him even now—and at the time I was only twelve, and later sixteen. Father disappeared at the very beginning of the war; there was talk that he had, by unknown means, run away to Switzerland, and then to America. I don’t know if that’s true; no one knows if that’s true. All I know is that father could do anything, overcome whatever obstacles. He could swim right across the Atlantic if he wanted to. The war meant nothing to him. I don’t think there was anything in the world that would have meant anything to him. I don’t think he vanished in the Americas; his mysterious disappearance and reappearance aroused completely different suspicions, the very worst of suspicions.

Sometimes I see my father writing articles (I see it now: maybe nineteen thirty-six, maybe forty). Suddenly he sits, leaning on an elbow, for three days, filling sheets with complex formulas, and then carelessly tosses the scrawled-over pile of sheets onto the armchair. There it lies for two, three, five months. Lies there until it’s covered with a thick, fuzzy layer of dust, other papers, and forgotten time. Forgotten time hovers about our house constantly. At intervals someone finds those discarded articles and sends them off somewhere—probably grandfather, he visits us two or three times a year. The shabby sheets of paper disappear, do something in the secret cosmos of written sheets, and then they return multiplied; enormous bundles of paper descend upon the house. I don’t know who publishes those articles—Zeitschrift für Physik or Physical Review—but the house is always full of author’s copies, postcards from some physicist or another, and father’s astonishment. Stunned, he turns those papers over in his hands, even forgetting his glass of cognac; it seems he keeps wanting to ask me something. Maybe he wants to ask me what’s the point of it all. What’s all this about, Vytie? Am I the one responsible for this? That’s what happens when a person absentmindedly tries to accomplish something.

Sometimes I see my father drawing. He can draw anywhere and with anything, but above all else he values first-class Chinese ink. He has it sent from Paris. (Where does he get the money?) There is life and death in his drawings, there’s soul in them. You can find God in them. Sometimes father draws without looking at the paper—his hand draws the lines itself, as if it had both eyes and memory.

All father needs from this world is paper and marks he can write or draw on the greedy surface of paper. And a glass too, into which this or that has been poured. Nothing more. The smell of paper and liquor lingers in his office. Here, the feeling experienced in a gloomy forsaken house, or in a dusty old attic filled with mysterious things, comes over you. Here, everything has died; inside you can only imagine ghosts. It’s the excavated room of an inhabitant of Pompeii. Miraculously extant furniture. Ancient Pompeian books. The smell of thousand-year-old wine. You immediately feel like you’re under thick layers of frozen lava, that the sun and light are far, far away. Here, only the stunning Pompeian drawings provide heat and light. It seems to me they weren’t designed for this world, or for the light of day. My father (his hands?) drew them, so that, blazing up briefly in the real world, they would vanish again for eternity. And when the world tried to take them, father instinctively defended himself. Once some passerby visited his office and saw the drawings. I wasn’t the only one to sense they were drawn by the hand of a genius. Several art buyers immediately flocked into our courtyard (they did resemble shabby birds); one of them moaned wordlessly, another conceived the idea of immediately taking the drawings to Paris. For several days the courtyard resembled a gypsy camp.

Father finally saw his drawings himself. Closed up in his office, he glumly looked through sheet after sheet, talking out loud to himself. He spoke a secret language that was unintelligible to me. Maybe he had thought up one that could describe his drawings.

He built the bonfire at night. The drawings went into the fire only at the very beginning. Then father started carrying his manuscripts, journals, and books into the yard: slowly, seemingly weighing things over calmly, he piled ever more bundles of paper into the fire. Soon clothes, grandfather’s carved chairs and Turkish carpets began falling into the bonfire too. Mother stayed in her bedroom, never taking her eyes from that bonfire of the world, but she didn’t even try to restrain father; she didn’t say anything at all. She waited for father himself to stop—she waited all of her life for him to stop. But father continued burning his world according to a spectral scheme. He’d fling some item into the fire, and leave another identical item unharmed. He chose certain cups, plates, and glasses as sacrifices to the fire. There’s no telling what gods he made offerings to, what demons he wanted to scare off. He finished that ceremony of fire just as calmly as he had started. It lasted for maybe an hour, maybe two, but that dance of fire didn’t stay in the great ALL; it crumbled into bits. I see only individual burning things, my inhumanly calm father, and my mother’s pale face in the window. There are no smells left, and neither the fire’s crackling nor the hubbub of the agitated household can be heard. Everything goes on in complete silence, just from time to time a dry heat wafts onto your face.

I regretted father’s sketched portraits most of all. He always drew the same person—a strange hermit of the swamps by the name of Vasilis. Vasilis would wander into our yard at regular intervals; father got along with him perfectly—you see, the two of them never said a word to each other. Vasilis would come silently and leave silently, piled up with healing herbs and bundles of roots. Grass snakes wound themselves around his arms and tiny, nimble little birds would perch on his shoulders. For posing father would pay him with salt. He would draw the portraits quickly, with enormous inspiration. The real Vasilis didn’t appear in any of them; the people in those portraits would always be different, as if that hermit who lived on vipers and frogs changed his face every day. But actually he was always the same: ragged, tanned almost black, murmuring something to his snakes and birds, showing his eyes to no one. He came to the great auto-da-fé too, and helped father throw books and drawings into the fire. Then he slowly shuffled off into the darkness, accompanied by an owl flying in circles above his head. He didn’t show up in our yard again; I would only see him out in the middle of the swamp, calmly walking through the most treacherous bogs, like Christ walking on water. When father burned his portraits, it was as if Vasilis lost touch with reality, with the ground beneath his feet. To me it seemed as if those portraits contained absolutely everything: the swamps, and the auto-da-fé that was to be, and Christ, and the night owls, and non-possession, and impotence. But it was all destroyed in the flames. I managed to hide only “Woman-spider,” “Faithfulness,” and “The Crane”—I stuck the names on myself. That crane is the most nightmarish bird ever drawn by a human. I’ve never seen another creature so obviously flying to destruction. That crane radiates pure despair; it knows itself that by now it’s almost disintegrated, that it almost isn’t there anymore. But it flies anyway—just above the ground, slowly and weakly. It’s a flying stuffed bird of doom, a ghost appearing in broad daylight through some mistake. Perhaps a bewitched princess turned into a bird who will crumble into ashes at any moment. That crane is the sister of the woman who, in another drawing, is slowly turning into a giant hairy spider. Or maybe the spider is turning into a woman; one way or another, change, by some inexplicable means, is depicted in the drawing. The change is what’s so horrifying; it’s brimming in every line, in every little hair on the spider’s legs. Horror reigns everywhere, except for the woman’s face and eyes. She is completely indifferent; it’s absolutely all the same to her that she will soon turn into a disgusting anthropod. Or the opposite—it’s all the same to her that she’s a spider almost turned into a woman. In “Faithfulness,” an attractive young girl with gigantic breasts, on all fours, devours her dead husband. There’s emptiness in her face and eyes, but her whole body, every seen or only imagined little muscle, is brimming with a rich, bloody ecstasy. She loves her husband—even dead. She wants to become one with him. Her gigantic breasts keep swinging lower, it seems as if the devoured flesh of the dead merges into them, embellishing them even more. The dead husband’s body adorns her, beautifies her for another man.

My father could have been the best artist in the world. He truly could. However, he refused to budge from the spot. He didn’t in general want to move.

Oftentimes I see him leaving the villa, slowly walking out to the car. Opening the door, he stops and starts groping for a cigarette. I follow his movements through a grimy window and I know very well (now I know) what it is he’s waiting for, what he hopes for. Any incident whatsoever, the slightest excuse, so he could immediately return to his room, calmly settle himself in the armchair and pour himself a brimming glass. But no one will save him. I see so much suffering on his face that I want to scream at the top of my voice, to rush to mother, to grandfather, to everyone in a row, to every passerby in every city under the sun, today, yesterday, tomorrow, at all times, to shake them all at the same time and beg: leave him alone, don’t torture him, let him, at last, do nothing! I want to lie down under the automobile’s tires and shout: see, he can’t drive, let him return to his drink!

But he has to sit at the wheel, he has to drive to the university, he has to go into the lecture hall and be a professor (act a professor?). To repeat words repeated many times before, to draw marks on the blackboard drawn many times before. To look at the faces of students seen a hundred times before. You can’t shake all of that off. There is no bonfire that would burn up the Kaunas highway and his lecture hall . . . and the alien ideas of long dead physicists . . . and the motley crowd of students . . . There is no such bonfire, so father futilely tried to set it on fire in his mind at least, throwing everything in one after another: our house . . . the surroundings’ wretched meadows . . . the entire swamp together with Vasilis . . . the stream frozen in fear . . . mountains and seas . . . all of rotten humanity . . . the tiniest of creations, even bacteria . . . even ideas, all ideas of all time . . . And most importantly—man’s immortal soul.

He begins speaking only on those mornings when, in spite of it all, he succeeds in escaping from the unbearable circle of events, in returning to his office and filling a brimming glass of champagne. (Where does he get the money?)

“Equilibrium is the lowest state of energy,” his deep voice slowly explains. “The lower you get, the greater your equilibrium. That’s a cardinal law of nature, Vytie . . . People do strive so for equilibrium, therefore they sink even lower . . . Into an even deeper pit, into an even greater equilibrium . . . There is no road up, Vytie, ALL roads lead only downward.”

But father speaks less and less often. Speech is a type of interaction with the world, and father only wants to interact with himself. That’s why he surrounded himself with mirrors. They’re hung everywhere: in the hall, in the corridors, in the bedrooms, in the bath. Mirrored walls, mirrored ceilings, only mirrored floors are lacking. Mother couldn’t bear those mirrors taking over the house, but father immediately found a Solomonic solution. Now it’s as if they’re not there—as long as father doesn’t take possession of a room. Upon entering, he immediately takes it into his power. He opens every little cabinet’s, buffet’s, and secretary’s doors (on the inner side of the doors are mirrors). He pulls back innumerable little curtains, drapes, portières (mirrors crouch, cowering behind them). He turns pictures hung on long strings around (mirrors are set into the other side of the canvas). When the ceremony’s finished, father can see himself all the time. He can drink and painstakingly follow how he drinks.

Drunkenness is his separate world. Father drinks all the time. Grandfather, in one of his fits of cursing, said that if he couldn’t find anything in the house to drink, he’d cut open one of father’s veins and fill a glass with blood. A watery shit courses through most people’s veins, grandfather sullenly explained, but this specimen differs from others in at least this respect: a cocktail of cognac, rum, champagne, port, and all types of vermouth flows in his veins.

Almost every day I secretly watch father. It’s a shameless, dirty pursuit, the most disgusting of all possible thieveries—the theft of a person’s solitude. Spying on father, I turn into the most revolting creation of the Universe, coming alive as eyes, as a kanukas sucking others’ vital fluids. I curse myself afterwards, even slap myself in the face, but all the same I cannot stop. Our house itself tempts and entices you to secretly watch others. Corridor after corridor covered in carpets, doors always ajar, mirrors reflecting the view around the corner, around a bend, in a far-off room. Dusk always hangs over the house; it turns you into a nameless, faceless spy searching for a victim. Here, like it or not, you see what you shouldn’t see. Here you are beset by the urge to inspect another person through the tiniest crack. In this house my acquaintance with the world goes on (now it goes on), it’s only here that I can study a person from so close up, like a large worm pinned to a board with a cold silver pin. (The Russians burned our house down when they invaded again in forty-four.)

Now I kneel in front of a door that’s been left ajar and in astonishment watch my father drink. My heart thumps in my chest and my head spins slightly. I can’t believe my eyes. Father, stark naked, has rolled himself up into a thick carpet. At first it’s even hard to notice him; it seems there’s nothing more in the room than a roll of carpet and a glass set at one end of it. Father sticks his head out of the inside of the roll, takes the glass with his lips and teeth, turns it up, drinks a gulp, and carefully sets it down again. And then—strangest of all—he pulls his head back inside the carpet. For a minute father’s not in the room, there’s only a rolled-up carpet and the glass set at one end. Then father sticks his head out again, grasps the glass with his teeth again . . . The way a snail emerges and hides again in his rugged home. I’m not horrified at all. I don’t think for a second that father’s gone out of his head. I’m so stunned I don’t think at all, I just look. I’ve turned everything into looking. Now I am an eye, an eye without a brain. Father sticks his head out of the carpet. Pulls it back again. Out again. He drinks in small gulps, barely sipping.

For a long, long time I don’t understand what he’s doing. My face gets hot, my thoughts scatter. At last I vaguely realize: he can’t drink in the usual way; he’s obliged to perform this absurd ceremony. He’s obliged to pour alcohol into himself in an immeasurably serious, intricate, and aesthetic way. That’s how he lives. And I steal his most intimate secrets: I look and don’t close my eyes, not even at the most horrifying moments; that’s how I live. I want to understand my father, because it’s the only means by which to understand myself.

It’s just unclear what the view outside the trolleybus window, of the gloomy wooden houses of Žvėrynas and dirty frightened dogs, has to do with this. And there are still no birds, although by now the metal box carrying me is turning to the left, shortly there’ll be the bridge, and beyond it the library. But that doesn’t concern me; I just want to understand my father. It isn’t just a few isolated threads that join the two of us, but a wide current overflowing from one to the other. Once I seized father’s limp hand: for some reason I wanted to feel his heartbeat, but I couldn’t find his pulse. It seemed as if his heart had stopped. It was only after a few long seconds that I realized our heartbeats were the same, as if a common heart drove common blood through both our veins. Maybe that’s why I always look at father as if I’m looking at myself. Maybe that’s why I never understand what he’s doing. It’s only yourself you can’t understand that way.

I don’t understand now, either: he ordered Janė to undress, while he himself casually walks around, constantly sipping from a glass. Janė undresses without hurrying; I glue myself to the keyhole and nearly choke. I used to be dazed if she so much as leaned over to clean the table, generously revealing her loose breasts; I’d lose my breath as soon as I attempted to scrutinize the divine roundness of her belly through her flowered apron. Now she’s undressing right here, without even glancing at father; she’s undressing for me, she’s looking straight at me, maybe she knows that I’m glued to the keyhole, whereas father’s standing next to her and doing nothing. Why does he need it? Why does Janė need it? Why is she looking straight at me? She looked exactly the same way when four Russian soldiers raped her: two of them held her knees spread, one pressed her shoulders to the ground, while the fourth just couldn’t hit the right spot. She didn’t scream, she didn’t struggle, there was no sign of suffering on her face, and her eyes gazed at me attentively. She didn’t shout for help, not even with her eyes, she calmly gazed straight at me, although she really couldn’t see me; I watched her unseen from a hiding spot.

Perhaps that look got confused with yet another—when she discovered me in a secluded spot, by the window to the inner courtyard. No one ever wandered by there, a thick layer of dust had settled on the floor. I sat on the window sill, horribly exposed, having pulled out that burning masculinity that wouldn’t fit in my clothes, and looked at it with an imbecilic gaze. During those years there were moments when I felt I could rape a dirty wall or a window frame. Or all of the house’s mirrors. Or the air above the hilly field. I just didn’t know what to do with it.

I didn’t hear her footsteps. I turned my head and realized she had been standing there for some time already.

“Poor thing! You don’t know what to do with yourself anymore?”

She looked at me shamelessly, taking me apart bone by bone. I couldn’t imagine how I was to go on living. In an instant she had realized my secret, learned of my great shame. She, of whose breasts, legs, and belly I would dream at night, whom I could not imagine dressed, who, in whatever clothes, would appear more naked than naked. My fantastical erotic plans collapsed in an instant; Janė became unattainable. I could no longer either buy her or catch her accidentally; now she would just laugh at me. I was eternally separated from her heavy breasts, from the secret blackness below her belly that quivered erotically underneath her clothes. Now she could only despise me. And she kept looking below, at it.

“Poor thing!” she repeated in a throaty voice. “Come to the shed after dinner. You know—where the boards are . . .”

And I went to the shed; it remained a sacred place to the very end. There Janė took away my virginity. There, four years later, the Russian soldiers raped her. There my mother hung herself. There, in the summer of nineteen-forty, my grandfather built his altar of horror. Misfortune after misfortune burdened our shed; it should have broken into flame sometime of its own accord.

I see grandfather ripping off the shed door so it will be brighter inside. I see a little silver pail falling out of his hands.

“Shit!” grandfather howls. “Shitty shit!”

I already know that the Russian tanks are in Kaunas, that Lithuania has met the doom grandfather predicted.

“Shit!” grandfather roars. “The little fools—they fought with the Poles over Vilnius, only to live to see the Russkies! A shitty nation!”

Grandfather rushes headlong with the little silver bucket from the outhouse in the bushes to the shed and back again.

“Over here!” he nearly roars, “Let’s pray! I’ve built an altar!”

To me it’s both kind of awful and funny; for the time being I don’t understand anything, even though by now the stench has reached me. It floats along the ground, slowly climbs the walls, pushes through the windows, it’s no longer possible to stand it in the house; it descends to the yard, but the stink lingers there too. It seems that nightmarish stench has permeated all of Lithuania’s air; you can’t escape it anywhere. Grandfather’s already lining everyone up: Janė’s brother, who’s overslept (I cannot look at him, I’d strangle him); the frightened cook; mother looking about with horrified eyes, apparently waiting for grandfather to stop. We all turn our noses aside, but we crowd inside the narrow shed and stare, stunned, at grandfather’s altar, blinking our eyes, teary from the keenness of the stink. The altar is a cracked pig’s trough, decked with flowers, stuck with crosses made from old bunches of twigs and decorated with a yellow wax candle. The candle’s flame quivers; it flutters from the stream of poisonous stench rising from the trough.

“Kneel! Everyone kneel! Kneel in front of God!”

But no one kneels, not even grandfather himself; everyone is staring at the teeming, swarming, reeking trough. The little silver pail lies tossed to the side, as if in mockery. It’s as silent as a tomb, except that water irritatingly drips from the ceiling. I look too, gazing through fluttering spider webs, and I can’t believe my eyes. The trough is full of reeking waste; grandfather carried it here with the little silver pail. That teeming, seemingly live waste, the waste of us all, in which satiated little white worms writhe. The sight is instantly nauseating, and the hideous stink is suffocating besides. Grandfather grins wickedly, fixes his hair with his befouled hand.

“Here’s your god! A new kingdom’s come, a new government, and here—the new god of the Lithuanians. The age of Perkūnas is over, the era of Christ is over. The Russkies brought you a new god, kneel in front of him and pray. Here he is, get to know him, The Shit of Shits, now he’ll be the god of the Lithuanians! A shitty god for a shitty nation, and I’m his priest. Hosanna!”

Grandfather laughs raucously, while we stare at the trough as if in a trance. I no longer know what to think, the oppressive smell pushes the thoughts out of my brain, the air is nothing but a stench, the entire world is a stench, it’s the only thing in my head, in place of thoughts, in place of words—just the stench.

“Today is the beginning of a new epoch! A new god has come to our land, by command of a prophet by the name of Stalin Sralin. Now he’ll shit on your heads for the ages. Get used to it! Pray to him!”

A glass clinks; I see father, like a doll, drink a sip of champagne (he brought his glass with him even here). This infuriates grandfather. His eyes flood with blood like a bull’s; he’s no longer speaking, but rather hissing:

“It would have been better if a plague had overrun us, at least some survive. But we’ve been overrun with shit, and no one will stay clean! We ourselves poured shit on our own heads. Ourselves! Now we’ll live in the kingdom of shit. The slogan of the Lithuanian people: it may be shit we’re living in, but at least we’re alive! Do you have any idea what the Soviets are? They won’t leave a single person unshat upon, not a single thought unshat upon, do you understand? In the Soviet communion everyone will have to swallow a piece of fried shit. The Soviets discovered a great secret: the major part of any human being is shit, so you need to value him as shit, address him as shit, treat him like shit. This is Sralin’s doctrine of faith: you are shit and don’t even try to be anything else. Rejoice: we’ll be slaughtered; we’ll fertilize Siberia’s fields! They’ll grow bread for the Russians out of us!”

Grandfather has gotten hoarse; he jabs his finger at the trough, although he doesn’t need to jab, everyone is looking at it as if they were entranced, the white of the little writhing worms is in everyone’s eyes, the lush stench is burning everyone’s nostrils. It seems to me that the teeming shit is looking at us from the trough—pleased and sated—it’s mocking us; it knows that now will be its right and might. Horror overtakes me: suddenly I see a gigantic wave of shit relentlessly creeping towards Lithuania’s meadows and forests, its cities and villages. It creeps along like a glacier, consuming everything in its path, flooding over the earth. Little figures wave their little arms, try to defend themselves, shriek and instantly suffocate—what can they do, if even hundred-year-old firs snap like matchsticks and drown in the teeming glacier. The wave of shit doesn’t hear the moans, it has neither ears nor eyes, it’s soulless and all it knows to do is to creep forward. Everything is done for; nothing remains alive, nothing really alive. I understand now what grandfather wanted to say. I’m the first to rush outside; I suck air in and look around, as if I really could see that novel glacier. Behind me father and Janė’s brother come out, mother creeps out last of all; she looks around with eyes that see nothing, and, addressing no one, asks:

”How did you allow Lithuania to disappear? Why didn’t you do anything? Were you poisoned in advance with something that took away your power?”

It was practically the first time I realized that mother also thinks. As if she had read my mind, she slowly turns towards the forest, smiles to someone unseen and clearly, intelligently, says:

“God is love. Is it possible that excrement can be love? Is it possible to love excrement? Is it possible that excrement can love someone?”

A majestic vat of shit looms on the sleigh, filled with a hundred buckets, the entire camp’s efforts. Two frost-covered men pull the sleigh, while other skeletons-to-be battle with dreams on three-tiered bunks. Not far away someone is furiously masturbating—it’s always the ones who won’t be around in a few days who suddenly start up. They want to reproduce themselves, but there’s nothing here to impregnate, except for the air.

You and Bolius haven’t slept for several nights, there’s so much accumulated inside the two of you that there’s no room left for sleep.

“Then the Germans took a dislike to our university. They closed it and threw us into a camp. I remember the railroad meandered along a ravine, and on its slope Hilterjugend kids danced a devil’s dance. There was nothing human left in them anymore, just the Nazi plague’s bacillus. That’s the worst of it—children! They unbuttoned their flys, shook their little peewees, and tried to pee on us. They were breathless with the sensation of power.”

The professor didn’t see it, but you did: the fifteen-year-old stribai,2 reeking of moonshine, with shotguns on their shoulders, were children too. And not some Hilterjungends, but the sons of Lithuanian ploughmen. Bolius didn’t see them. Give a half-grown kid vodka and a gun—he’ll do whatever you say. And those others, without pausing for a second, keep pulling and pulling at the sleigh with the vat of shit.

“Before that they drove us in trucks, while we were still on Lithuanian soil. There were just a couple of guards; they were playing cards. And we rode—thirty healthy, unchained men—and did nothing, we didn’t even try to run. We sat and waited for something . . . Why do we Lithuanians always just wait?”

Bolius looks sadly at the camp’s night shit carriers and nods his head:

“There you have it: we obediently drag a pile of waste . . . There you have it . . . I’d lay a wager they’re Lithuanians . . . that’s so Lithuanian . . .”

But the professor is wrong: the wind carries their somnolent voices; you can easily hear that they’re speaking Russian:

“Forgive me, colleague, but I cannot agree with that conception of yours. Besides, Berkley ultimately proved . . .”

It’s my mother I’m most sorry for. I never spied on her, but she was in view all the time—always with Janė’s brother. I would accompany them to the bedroom and then retreat, I couldn’t stand to see more, but sometimes I would hear those sounds. I saw how she paid Janė’s brother money for that. The sullen, eternally unshaven boy would later shamelessly count the litai, and she would stumble down the house’s corridors like a ghost. A slender, beautiful ghost with an upright posture. She was lost in the world; she never found any road. They poked out the eyes of my mother’s soul, took away any feeling for life. All she saw around her was a labyrinth and steep walls, it was entirely the same to her whichever direction she turned, whatever she did. You could never guess what mother would do the next minute, what else she would think up. Sometimes she would chop the heads off the geese in the inner courtyard. Once a cat got underfoot—she did the cat in too. Perhaps she didn’t distinguish cats from geese. Sometimes she would quietly swig from father’s reserves, until she’d collapse, lifeless, on the floor in the middle of the corridor. Sometimes she would start breaking the mirrors. Sometimes . . .

It’d be better to be quiet about my mother. But I feel compelled to tell at least one person in the world some tiny speck of truth. Perhaps some time I’ll tell Lolita about her. About her, about the labyrinth of the world, about the determination to do anything—whatever occurs to you.

Sometimes I get the urge to do almost anything, because I feel trapped, driven into a pointlessly spinning wheel it’s impossible to escape from. It makes no difference that this wheel of life, or labyrinth, is alive. A strange vitality throbs below the cobblestones of the street, hums soundlessly in the walls of old houses. The gray houses quietly mutter curses and the churches whisper between themselves in Latin, so no one will understand. They exist apart from the city’s morning clamor; there’s nothing here that affects them. They seem ready to slowly, with difficulty, lift up into the air and float off somewhere, where it’ll be better for them; it’d be better there for me too. Where? I don’t know of a place like that, I only know the direction: as far as possible away from here, as far as possible from dead Vilnius. Vilnius has been dead for a long time: the rumbling of barrels rolled along the pavement, the motley little shops’ signs, the secret tangle of narrow little streets are no more. The Lithuanian quarter, the Jewish quarter—the colorful towns within the city are gone. The face of Vilnius is gone; all the new neighborhoods are identical, they are nothings: soulless conglomerates of drunks, lines in the stores, and trolleybus wires. I look with my eyes wide open, but I can’t perceive anything more. No secret signs, no deeper meaning; there is only a monotonous, endless dream I am forced to dream against my will. A soulless play staged by a half-witted director: against the mysterious backdrop of old facades, the pseudo-drama of the world’s most dismal lifestyle goes on. The plot is known from the start, nothing unexpected can happen—unless the stage sets themselves were suddenly to start speaking in gloomy voices: they are the most alive things here. Vilnius’s heart beats in the walls of the buildings; it alone here has a soul. The streets turn towards the lazily rising hill, and on it, like in the nightmare of an impotent, sullenly protrudes the short and stumpy phallus of the castle tower, the godsend of the inhabitants of Vilnius, a universal symbol of debility. Everything, absolutely everything here is a dream. The Italian Renaissance buildings that you’d think were transported directly from Bologna or Padua, the ornate church towers spiking the sky, and between them—the faceless crowd of the giddy spectacle’s extras. It can’t be this way; God or Satan got something wrong here. Either these people ended up in the wrong city by mistake, or they’re in the right place, but the buildings, the churches, and the smell of ancient times have lost their way. Vilnius is a ghost city, a hallucination city. It’s impossible to dream it up or to imagine it—it is itself a dream or the concoction of fantasy. The spirits of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania walk about Vilnius, greet acquaintances, accost the girls, and grimly shove at the trolleybus stops. Here the smell of the Polish years, the smell of fires and plagues, and the most banal stench of cheap gasoline hover and mingle. Here, at night, the Iron Wolf howls desolately, calling for help. Here you can unexpectedly meet the dead, tortured once upon a time by the Gestapo or the KGB, repeating over and over again the name of their betrayer, which no one wants to hear. In Prague or Lisbon the past lingers next to today’s soullessness. In Vilnius, every building, every narrow little street crossing is simultaneously the scene of ancient life and today’s catalepsy. Vilnius is innumerable cities laid one atop another. It isn’t just the earth that lays down archeological layers here, but time, and air, and language do too. In the same spot, layers of Eastern and Western cultures lie hidden and turn into one another. Vilnius is the border where Russia’s expansionism and Europe’s spirit went to war. Here absolutely everything collided and mixed. Vilnius is a giant cocktail, stirred together by the insane gods of fog. If a city could exist alone, without people, Vilnius would be the City of all cities. But it’s people who express the spirit of a city, and if you attempt to understand what the figures in Vilnius’s streets mean, what that atrophying spectacle in which you yourself play means, you’d immediately realize you’re dreaming.

I walk slowly through a dream called Vilnius, while the weird sensation that all of this has already been pierces my brain. Once I went down the street in exactly the same way, in exactly the same way I considered what the dream—the yellowish leaves, blown about by the wind, and the old house in the depths of a garden—could mean . . . The exact same pair of dazed pigeons have already perched by the announcement post. Lolita has already waited for me in the corridor, rocking her waist back and forth in exactly the same way . . . Everything has already been, everything, everything, has already been. I know it’s just déjà vu, but all the same a sense of fear stabs right through me. In exactly the same way Stefa’s hips sway before my eyes, the hips of all the women in the world, Virgilishly leading me ever closer to the secret . . . The exact same shabby dog with a huge head and still larger sexual organs and a long body like a rat’s sniffs the ground outside the window . . . The coffee break table seems just as unreal as it has seemed many times before.

Why do I come here? Why do I waste the time—I should devote every instant left to me to a single purpose. I don’t understand what my employees are doing here, why they gathered here (or maybe—who gathered them here?) Sometimes it seems they all have a secret purpose here—just as I do. The library is essential to my clandestine investigations. But what do the others find here? Don’t tell me things are as ordinary as they seem at first glance? The majority found a place where it’s possible to do nothing and get some kind of pay. The authorities needed to shove Martynas off into a corner, to dupe him with an abundance of books, to isolate him from the scholarly centers. The communist Elena was introduced to look after everyone. And so on. (It’s not clear to me why Lolita ended up here.) Which of these women are nothing more than silent victims, and which are Their secret agents? Stefa is the only one I don’t suspect—I have carried out certain experiments with her. Which one? Maybe Gražina, the plump petite with the greasy glance? Or Marija, the mustachioed green finch with the burned-out bass? Or Laima—the exhausted fish, constantly blurting out some sort of nonsense? Or maybe the newcomer Beta, blinking goggle-eyed? (Can short hair have some essential meaning here?) They could have picked any one of them, or all of them together. All of them in front of my eyes, all of them sitting at the table, only Lolita stands by the window and follows Carp with her eyes: he’s hobbling by the construction site again. It’s Saint Carp, my talisman, a person who even in the face of death wasn’t afraid to call a tyrant a tyrant and a slave a slave. (Who knows which is more dangerous—probably calling a slave a slave to his face.) Lolita follows him with her eyes and smiles: I’ve told her about Carp. My Lolita. My, my Lolita. But can anything in the world really be mine anymore? Have I ever really had my own woman?

Like it or not, I think about my wife. After all, I had a wife—a loved one, the only one, the true one. I had . . . I should call her my savior and the one who opened my eyes (unfortunately, Irena opened my eyes not just to happiness, but to horror too). She showed up when my entire life was distorted into a hideous hallucination. That was the Narutis period; drunkenness, a premonition of insanity and a very real, boundless pain jumbled together in it. I had just been released from the camp. I have no idea where I lived; I have no idea how I scraped together money. I remember, as if though a haze, loading freight cars at night and hunkering down during the day in ground-floor rooms with broken-out windows and doors that wouldn’t close, getting drunk with seedy companions. To me, the morning didn’t differ from the night, and the sun never rose at all; in my Vilnius there was nothing but a lingering, dismal haze. I was drunk all the time. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I do not regret those days, months, years. I was obliged to live through all of that; my path led through the Narutis, through syphilitic dumps, through the very bottom of Vilnius. Every true search is hellish; great discoveries are made on the edge of insanity. I don’t at all regret ending up in the gutter, the same way I don’t regret landing in camp. I had to go through all of the circles of hell, so that I would, in the end, grasp what matters most, so that I would discover Their footprints. My circles of hell were marked by barbed wire, and then by alcohol. Good Lord, the amount I drank! Only my father’s iron genes saved me—according to all the laws of nature I should have gone insane or turned into a wreck. I searched for truth, delving into the very cheapest alcohol. I searched for an answer (already then I searched for an answer) by destroying myself. There’s probably no other way. A person can escape his limits and exceed himself only by sacrificing a part of himself. But I sacrificed too much. Many times I thought I surely won’t find any secret here, between the scattered, reeking clothes, puddles of vomit, and cockroaches crawling up the walls. I realized what direction I was heading in, but I didn’t have the strength to stop. Returning to Vilnius after nine years, ostensibly released to freedom, I couldn’t live just any old way: I no longer knew how to live. I had never been destined to experience freedom. I was the slave of a single, sole idea, and the worst of it was—for a long, long time I didn’t know what idea. I understood just one thing: everyone lives in error, the world doesn’t behave the way it should; once upon a time it erred, and it can’t manage to fix its great mistake. Why did I, even though I had been exonerated, have to wander the garbage dumps like a stray dog, while the person (or dragon?) whom I was once supposed to hunt relished life in the radiance of absolute power? At that time I thought of nothing but him. Now I think about him too.

“Anyone can grab a pistonmachine and spray in every direction,” Bitinas’s long, bare head says softly. “Any fool. That’s not your destiny, my dear Vargalys. You’re destined for the great dragon hunt. Think about him, think only about him. Dream of him, become one with him, my son. Devour him, like he devours Lithuania. Drag him out of his stinking tank . . .”

Why, to what purpose was I assigned ordeals that made me doubt afterwards whether there is a human in the world at all? I doubted whether humanity is, on the whole, fit to exist. I couldn’t understand who devised that horrible mechanism, or who controls it. The idea of a merciful God is absurd: if God exists, he is a madman and a sadist; he needs to be fought. The Buddhist theory of inescapable pain doesn’t explain anything, it’s merely an observation. The abyss of the Apocalypse is an effective metaphor—but who can get concerned about all the world’s inevitable end? No, the explanation had to be here; I searched for it within myself and without. Nothing else concerned me. Not even myself. Nothing! I wasn’t intimidated by the puffy faces of my drinking partners, the bloody knives that could stab me too, or the grotesque sluts indifferently smearing fetid unguent on hardened chancres in my full view. I was on the other side of everything. And still I drank, Lord of mine, how I drank!

Probably I approached the secret regardless, approached along the paths of death and insanity, gathering horrible experience grain by grain. It has been said that to kiss a leper all over is a holy sacrifice. It has been said that after long prayer and fasting, the Holy Virgin reveals herself. I sought that in my own way. Who can appreciate the sensation you experience when you watch your penis penetrate the rotten vagina of a syphilitic? Who tells the truth about the revelations that beset you after a week of drinking, when the vodka for sobering up runs short? I realized I was drowning, but I held it sacred that at the very bottom, before releasing the last gasp of air, I would find the answer. And I kept drinking. At the end of the inclined plane a church waited for me, Vilnius’s Basilican Church. I very well remember the torn-down crosses in a corner of the courtyard and the walls sullenly bending in on me, ready to collapse at any moment. The old churches of Vilnius are desecrated in various ways—some as warehouses, some as museums of atheism. A little factory that made the crudest wine had been set up in that one. I came across a breach in the fence and slipped in with the entire gang; I could drink without restraint. Inside, contorted piping branched about, grim vats loomed, and dust reigned. The dust of dust. The drunken guards slept it off right there, on the stone floor, with their greasy faces turned to the vandalized altar. We would sit around a brimming vat like devils and drink to the point of insanity. The wine there was brewed from anything—from rotten fruit, from garbage, even, it seems to me, from the church’s sticky dust. They must obscure everyone’s intellect at whatever cost. I spent my nights right in the church; I wanted to meet my end there. The time and space of Vilnius were deranged. I would sit down on a broken chair in some dump, and I’d end up in the church next to a bucket of garbage wine. Occasionally I would be surrounded by talking animals or the chopped-off heads of people with little legs; sometimes Plato would climb out of the church walls—wearing a dingy cap with a peak and a leather jacket—the harsh commissar of the kanukai. There was only one way to determine what was a hallucination and what was reality—to drink still more, then the hallucinations would usually disappear.

I nevertheless prayed my holy virgin into existence. I don’t know when she presented herself for the first time, there couldn’t be a first time anyway—Vilnius’s time was completely confused. Irena emerged from the fog, gazing at me pitifully. Sometimes she would come arm-in-arm with Plato, half-naked, vulgarly made up. I would seriously ponder why that pederast Plato gave up boys and broke his own famously declared principles. I would down a glass and still another glass, but only Plato would disappear, Irena wouldn’t vanish, and one day I woke up not in a nook of the church, but on a folding bed in her apartment.

She lived in a decaying room, a former nun’s cell; her window looked straight out at the breach in the wine factory’s fence. To this day I still don’t know why she stopped me on the very edge. I was a drunken scum with puffy eyes. More than once I again fought with headless figures or poisonous white rabbits. More than once I again climbed into the ruinous breach in the fence. But Irena didn’t order me to do anything, didn’t preach, and didn’t scold. She simply opened my eyes. The road of my life was truly unique: I had already almost acquired the second sight, but I didn’t have the first; I had never known the ordinary world that everyone sees. It was only thanks to Irena that I experienced for the first time what a friend is, what a woman is. She was my friend for a long time—that one and only, the true one, a part of your own self. Only Irena forced me to realize that in this world a man means nothing without a woman.

Up until then I didn’t know what a woman was, I hadn’t had the time to perceive it. Janė wasn’t my woman, she wasn’t anyone’s woman; she was the live embodiment of a vagina, a mystical symbol, the goddess of a teenager’s wet dreams. Madam Giedraitienė wasn’t a woman—merely a voluptuous female, a voracious, sadistic slave driver. I didn’t have the time to know a real woman, and the camp wrecked everything for good. Months upon months, years upon years, I didn’t so much as see them. They slowly turned into mythological beings capable of anything—maybe even of bringing the dead to life. I wasn’t even able to dream of women. I would dream of gigantic birds with breasts swaying to the sides and women’s faces. Those women-birds would surround me, greedily stretching their long necks at me, wanting to peck at me, peck at me, peck out my masculinity . . . Released to freedom, every woman I met seemed miraculous but intimidating at the same time. They were all like unfathomable, unattainable beings from another world. I was afraid to go into the street because they walked there, I feared that fairy-tale world where women walked around as if it were nothing. I didn’t know how to behave, what to do; I didn’t believe it really was that way. It couldn’t be that way. It wasn’t just horrible to touch a woman, even accidentally; it was horrible to speak to her, or even look her in the eyes. Maybe I would have finally ended up in the madhouse that way, but three bitches of the ground floor snatched me in time. I don’t remember why I gave myself up to them, why I didn’t get scared they would feed on me (even they looked miraculous to me). They adroitly cured me: in place of the beings of my dreams, the goddesses of legends, I found a dirty, stinking female who wanted only money and an iron penis. I would find the money somewhere, and my thing suited them too—although it wasn’t made of iron, but rather with a copper end.

And after all that, after a hundred months of drunkenness, Irena suddenly showed up: tall, slim, agile, with eyes as black as tar. I don’t know if she was pretty. Probably not. Could that have been of consequence? Does it matter how my Irena’s legs, breasts, or her face’s oval looked? If someone had inquired about her figure at the beginning of our life together, I would have knocked him out cold. Who would dare to analyze whether a Madonna’s body is sexy?

I would tell her everything. That’s a huge thing—the opportunity to tell at least one person absolutely everything (now there’s no such person near). Irena wasn’t afraid of me, even though I threw out all the bile, the blackness, and the pain inside me. She got to see the disgusting wound—teeming with quivering, satiated little worms—inside me. But she didn’t retreat. She was like a spring in which I could wash my soul without polluting it. It was impossible to pollute her. She bravely took on a part of my load, and her narrow little shoulders didn’t so much as tremble. I could trust her completely. She gave birth to me.

Life was difficult, but we were the happiest people on earth. I remember the banged-up buckets in which I carried water, because the only tap was outside. A Polish tap; grandfather wouldn’t have drunk a drop out of one like that, even if he were dying of thirst. I remember miserable, washed and re-washed duvets and sheets. But most often I remember Irena. Irena, Irena, Irena. Scores of her portraits, a secret photo album that’s invisible to everyone but me. She smiles, having calmed my rage again. She sits with her chin on her hand. She speaks in a low, somewhat throaty voice, while I listen and understand that only she can give me meaning, that she herself is that meaning. She washes her feet in a large rusty basin, and I want to kiss her everywhere, all of her. I could think only of her; I experienced a miracle that was destined for no one else. The two of us really were the two halves of an apple that had miraculously found each other.

There was only one thing that divided us—she liked to stare at the television. I’m afraid of it. I hate it. Television is Their magic weapon; with its help They surround you with troops, throngs, legions of hideously kanuked beings. They strive to convince you those beings are the real, normal representatives of the human race, and if you’re not like them—it’s your own fault, it’s you that’s abnormal. At that time my second eyes were only beginning to emerge. I watched those television creatures almost morbidly. Understandably, I can’t study American or Italian television, however, I firmly believe Their television traps encompass the entire world. They just subtly adapt to the country’s traditions and political system. Doesn’t an American or Frenchman experience the same fear and disgust—seeing some television beauty almost have an orgasm after taking a whiff of some toothpaste or tomato sauce—that I do? Doesn’t it arouse the most hideous suspicions in him? After all, those television beings have nothing human about them in any country; they’ve traveled here from Their soulless kingdom. Of course, our television beats them all. The announcer tries to persuade you that these are some kind of workers . . . some kind of farmers . . . some kind of writers . . . or scholars . . . There’s masses of them; they appear every hour, every second . . . planted on identical little chairs, by identical tables, frequently wearing medals or ribbons of honor, and most often with unhealthy, pudgy faces. There’s something essentially unalive in them, something inhuman, particularly the eyes—or more accurately, the place where the eyes should be: those narrow cracks without any expression, without a spark of spirit. In those cracks you can perceive the grim wasteland’s void, a pulsating swarm of innumerable cockroach legs. Those creatures repeat the same words over and over; they’re very pleased with themselves, they know everything and believe in everything. They fruitlessly try to act like people, to give their face expression . . . Probably they haven’t yet forgotten what a human should look like . . . And it’s totally irrelevant that on American television the beauties’ eyes are huge and the hosts’ faces aren’t fat—They know perfectly well how to disguise themselves . . . What matters most is the stare, the stare of the void. What matters most is that imbecilic ecstasy, no matter what provokes it in the television being—a slogan of the Russian plenary or a Japanese kitchen mixer . . . What matters is that they’re all so assured . . . So clever . . .So happy . . . Such idiots . . .

I’m afraid of television; I’ve always been afraid of it. But Irena liked to stare at the screen—to her that spirit-crushing image was nothing more than chewing gum for the brain, as it is for most people. It doesn’t seem there’s anything so terrible about it. But for some reason everyone forgets that the brain is surely not the proper place to plaster with used chewing gum. Alas, alas . . . Every detail matters when you’re up against Them.

Sometimes life’s time rushes along too fast. One day it struck me that I’m already forty, that Irena and I live in a new, somewhat larger apartment, and that I am a programmer. (Gedis convinced me to finish in mathematics at the university.) Everything was getting on well, it seemed; I slid smoothly down the path of life, but somewhere years upon years had disappeared as if they had never been—I remember much less from those times than I do from the Narutis period. I was stuck in a calm, healthy, everyday bliss. It seems to me that I was almost happy—Irena at my side, in the midst of intelligent books and my memories. But one morning I woke up and suddenly realized that something had happened. Something, something, had happened. I don’t know who was to blame for that. Maybe Gediminas. It was just then that he started acting strange, stranger and stranger all the time. Perhaps it was Vilnius. Just at that time it was sprouting the new, nothing neighborhoods; for the first time it occurred to me that my city had died and would never rise from the dead again. Perhaps it was Irena. I suddenly noticed her gaze was worn and dazed, that more and more often she didn’t hear what I was saying to her. Something, something, had happened; I had overlooked an incident of monumental importance and realized it only when everything began to change. I began to sense smells I’d never noticed up until then. I smelled the trees, the dust of the streets, my writing desk, and the sound of a distant airplane. I began to see things I hadn’t noticed before: a grimy cat cowering under the balcony, or a hunchbacked dwarf quietly hobbling home along the wall. An abundance of details, details which had meant nothing to me earlier, mysteriously whispered something; they wanted to warn me that something fundamental and horrible had happened.

Then I had a terrifying dream. In this dream I sluggishly made love with a plump, overripe beauty. I didn’t feel the least pleasure, but she kept pestering me, embracing me, virtually sucking me dry. At last I escaped by force, withdrew my penis in relief from the sodden damp space, and abruptly went into shock when I looked at it. It was studded all over with dark, moving spots; it was crawling, teeming, with disgusting brown cockroaches. There were hordes of them. They twitched their thin whiskers and rolled their unseeing eyes. My penis was covered with cockroaches, the way a rotten banana is covered with fruit flies. Hysterically I tried to shake them off, to clean them off, to pick them off one by one, but in vain. I had fallen into a trap; the cockroaches were in control. Meanwhile the plump, overripe beauty glanced at me sullenly; sharp, leaden barbs protruded from her eyes. When I awoke, I got really scared that something, something, had happened. I didn’t feel like myself all day. Lord knows, I went to the toilet several times and determinedly searched for marks on my masculinity. Of course, I found only the old scars Stadniukas had burned on it, but that didn’t reassure me. I went home early and waited for Irena, anxious to talk it over with her; finally I saw her through the window, but I didn’t feel the slightest joy, much less relief. Something, something, had happened. Irena wasn’t what she had been until then, even her walk was strangely altered. She didn’t notice me; she didn’t notice black Jake, either, the neighbors’ dog, and our family’s great friend. He ran up to Irena, sniffed her knees, and suddenly barked at her sharply. His entire pose showed horrified disgust and fear at the same time. I didn’t get it: Jake? Irena? She stopped and fixed the dog with a serious gaze. She didn’t pet him, but she didn’t raise her arm, either; however, Jake instantly jumped back, curled up pathetically, and started to whine, as if he wanted to warn the entire building, his entire doggy world, about something horrible and sinister. He announced a great danger. I thought Jake had simply gone nuts. Irena continued to calm him with a serious look and smiled wanly. That was not her smile. She went on walking in that unfamiliar manner. Jake has gone nuts, I kept repeating to myself, but I didn’t believe it. Irena was radically different. Her thighs rubbed together revoltingly under her dress. The joints of her fingers were unnaturally thickened and pale.

Suddenly I realized that the poor dog didn’t recognize Irena’s scent. She no longer smelled like herself. Jake barked at a strange, intimidating intruder, whose stench aroused a boundless doggy horror in him. But it was far worse that suddenly I didn’t recognize Irena myself. I didn’t say anything to her, I didn’t complain. I merely began to secretly observe her.

All the gods in the world know how difficult it was for me: I was spying on the person who was closest to me—not just her behavior, but she herself, even her body. I didn’t know which direction to turn, what to look for. I feared giving myself away inadvertently, I feared hurting Irena. I was still afraid of hurting her. I was afraid of many things, most often myself. It’s always easier to be ignorant; the search for truth is fraught with mortal dangers. Something is invariably lost—either faith, or happiness, or the past. Or everything at once.

I started with what seemed like insignificant details. Visiting (I never did understand why we visited all those people), or at home when her so-called friends came over, I secretly listened to what she was talking about when she thought I didn’t hear her. I was overcome with horror. Her melodious voice grew hoarse; it was left dull and hollow, like an echo in a mossy old cellar. It lost its colors and hues; it became a monotone, like tapping on a torn drum. But her speech was far more shocking. I had never heard such things from Irena’s lips: she prattled on about clothing fashions and furniture, about wages and responsibilities. Explained that she had pulled me out of the quagmire. Complained about prices, about my lack of a career. With a strange malice she smeared friends who weren’t there, and when they showed up, she would take apart those who had just left. Maybe it wasn’t so terrible—she was exactly the same as others are. But Irena couldn’t talk that way. I glanced at her through the crack in the door many times, risking discovery. She was the one talking, all right. I didn’t understand where her real words had gone—her talk about heights and precipices, about man crushed and man defeated, her naïve attempts to understand all the wisdom of ancient and modern times—where everything I had loved her for had gone. True, even now she spoke to me in exactly the same way she had before. However, I immediately realized that she was lying to me, and speaking the truth there. The dull, monotone voice was ideally suited to those other words. It occurred to me that if I looked into her throat, there, deep, deep, inside that pink pipe, I would see a woven knot of little worms. Something was strangling and suffocating her, but at the same time she was becoming dangerous herself. She was intentionally playing a role for me. This dull-voiced woman probably had been playing my Irena for a long time; the latter was gone, vanished or degenerated. And until then I had felt nothing—I was deaf and blind. I was truly horrified. I grew three times as careful, three times as watchful, I feared inadvertently giving myself away. After all, she lived right here, next to me; I needed to hide my knowledge from her. Hide it from everyone. Who could I complain to? Except maybe Gedis.

I didn’t discuss it with Gedis. I decided to act on my own, and I made one of my many irrevocable mistakes.

I began to follow her even more closely. Her skin turned gray and grew coarse; she wandered lazily through the rooms or the kitchen, doing pointless things: she ironed the same clothes several times, moved them from one shelf to another and then back again, and ceaselessly watered the flowers. Mostly she did nothing at all, just stared vacantly in one and the same pose, turning some object over in her hands. She didn’t read books; she just stared at her television. True, as before, she would take my books and pretend she was reading them at work. Later, supposedly charmed, she would praise them, but I already knew they had been stuck in a kitchen cabinet all week, gathering dust. I just couldn’t understand when I had missed what. After all, that transformation couldn’t have happened overnight. I was deaf and blind: my Irena had been exchanged for another, and I hadn’t even felt it. Everything in her was artificial: her ingratiating voice, and the words stolen from Irena, and her purported deep gaze. I didn’t love her, I avoided her, sometimes I loathed her—and she didn’t even feel it, didn’t notice it! She’d drag me to bed even more often than Irena did. However, love play, that miraculous kingdom, suddenly turned into an oppressive, soulless exercise. It seemed to me that at any moment I would break into tears or start howling—she knew all of Irena’s erotic games, you could almost confuse the two of them. She sucked my penis inside in exactly the same way, pressed it and caressed it with hidden little muscles, as if there, deep inside, were scores of tiny little hands. Against my will I would forget for a short time, I’d nearly feel a climax, but quickly, breaking into a cold sweat, I would get hold of myself. She destroyed my Irena and crawled into her skin, but couldn’t play the part to the end. I was making love to a stuffed doll. Horror would come over me. To save myself I searched for differences. Thank God, the two were still different, even in bed. She always tried to end up on top (Irena didn’t like positions like that). In addition, she pathologically avoided light, she made love only in semi-darkness—Irena would turn on all the lamps, even in the middle of the night. For a long time I wracked my brains over this, but the mystery was completely ordinary: she was afraid that I would see her. She was afraid that I would see her body.

Now, carefully, gropingly, I explore her body (I’ve already explored it a hundred times). The night spreads a somewhat bitter smell; not far off a dog barks gruffly. I practice seeing in the dark—not with my eyes, but rather with my fingers, my fingers turn into eyes, I see all of her in a halo of pale light. I see her for the hundredth time, but all the same I cannot control my disgust. That woman’s breasts are swollen, three hideous rolls lie pressed together below. It seems that if you ran your finger over them, you’d clean a tangle of cobwebs and putrefaction out from those wrinkles. The waist has disappeared somewhere; square thighs stick out immediately below the bulging breasts. Between the legs, almost from the knees up, sprout fat globs of flesh—something like thick ropes. They rise right up to the hair below her belly; it seems that they twist themselves straight into that woman’s innards and pierce her through. Under that woman’s arms upright globules of fat converge. Coarse tufts of hair curl on her nipples and even between her breasts. I see only the threatening parody of a body; the separate parts don’t suit one another—it seems she could crack apart at any moment, disassemble like a matrioshka doll. And from her entire body, from every pore in her skin, a sour smell spreads; the smell of night’s blunt knife, the smell of mold. It intensifies my disgust; I realize that what I’m seeing is no laughing matter. It isn’t her frivolous twaddle, or her husky voice; it’s real and tangible. A mysterious deformation is ravaging that woman. It’s not some kind of illness; the bristling mane of our neighbors’ black Jake proves it’s not an ordinary illness, one that medicine can cure. It’s something else, entirely, completely, something else, something mysterious and somber, connected to mold . . . to cockroaches . . . to oppressive smells . . . connected to me, to my life . . . perhaps earmarked for me, aimed at me, destroying me first of all . . .

I sensed that the catastrophe couldn’t hide only inside her. I knew I had to investigate what she did outside of the house, whom she met with and where she went. I had already caught on to a few things, but I still couldn’t entirely grasp what path I was taking, my thrashing heart squeezed into a fist.

She didn’t sense she was being followed (I had opportunities to convince myself of this), but she always escaped from me. This stunned me: even without sensing the real danger, she maintained an absolute conspiracy. She would disappear through courtyard passageways, or simply turn a corner and vanish, as if she had floated off into the air. I would search for at least a door, a window, a crack in the wall where she could have disappeared. Unfortunately, always unsuccessfully. She was attracted, drawn into the old part of Vilnius, closer to the narrow little streets and churches, the neglected buildings and gloomy, filthy courtyards. You’d think it was only in Old Town that she could disappear, in league with the spirit of Vilnius itself. That spirit of the city intimidated me. All of Vilnius grew faint and muffled, all there was left of it was crooked, fly-stained little streets and dirty courtyards with whitewashed toilet stalls. The city shrank into the narrow, decrepit buildings, into the realm of the ground-floor dives. In the courtyard passageways I would be met by bandy-legged dogs and dirty chickens. The entire motley pack would furiously sniff me over. Dazed men staggered along the walls. Shrill women hung laundry on sooty clotheslines. In the squares, sullen groups guzzled the cheapest garbage wine out of bottles. Hoarse, drunken cries bounced between the thick walls; I practically didn’t hear a word of Lithuanian anywhere. It seemed I was no longer in Lithuania, that at any minute I was going to have to speak a narrow gutter language I didn’t know. My ancient, sacred city was beset by the lowest order of lumpen. I had to shove my way through them to follow the waddling woman’s figure. She felt at home between the fly-stained walls, even her walk would improve. But I was an alien here, and not welcome. Bleary-eyed men looked at me with surprise and a strange malice. Surprised dogs would sniff at me, unable to understand what that smell was doing here. I was shocked: it had been many years since I had seen this Vilnius. But after all, my own old spirit had to linger here; I myself, as I was ten or fifteen years ago. Perhaps she was intentionally attempting to lure me back to the past.

There was no peace left at home, either. Increasingly weird characters began visiting, as if bugs had converged on my apartment from unknown cracks and corners. They beset my house like apparitions. They were seemingly different, even very different, but at the same time exactly the same as her. My practiced eye already distinguished the critical details: the unusual movements, the emptiness of the gaze. All of their hands were chubby, with swollen joints, and covered in small, tawny freckles. From every one emanated the familiar sour smell of decay. One sturdy fellow, by the name of Justinas, seemed especially typical to me. (He was some sort of party functionary, a representative of the nomenklatura, a person from a special world where everything is different than it is in our life: things, and food, and hospitals. Even bread is baked specially for them. Even the rules of the road are different for their cars.) I kept trying to talk to him, even though I didn’t know what I needed to question him about. I simply tried to earn his confidence, to encourage him to chat freely. I would fix the coffee and make toast myself, leaving Justinas in the room with her. I would secretly listen to what the two of them talked about. But he didn’t give himself away: not a word about Old Town, the Narutis neighborhood, or the courtyard passageways.

Justinas immediately made himself completely at home; it seemed entirely natural to hug my wife in a friendly (or not just friendly) way, or to pat her on the knee. Once, when I had stayed a bit longer in the kitchen and returned quietly, I caught him pressing her breasts in his hands. We were all a bit drunk. I pretended I hadn’t noticed, but before going to bed I threw a jealous fit. I was stunned by her reaction. Suddenly she got really nasty and launched into an attack. I was the one who was to blame. I had invited Justinas over. I had created an unhealthy atmosphere. I alone. I listened to her croaking voice, looked at the pimply face, the deformed fingers, the bloated breasts, the globs of flesh between her thighs, which she hid under a thick nightgown but weren’t difficult to infer; I looked and I couldn’t help but be charmed. This time she played the part perfectly. She smeared her face all over with mascara, writhed like a snake, and heaved in the most disgusting convulsions of kanukism. She truly had not lost the talents with which she had deceived me our entire life together.

She didn’t lose her ability to disappear, either. It seemed I should have given up my useless stalking long ago, but my determination never knew any limits. Determination sooner or later pays off. One time, as usual, I lost sight of her and aimlessly went in circles around the neighborhood of the Narutis; finally I went out into Didžiosios Street, stopped, and lit up a smoke. Apparently, the tension was already accumulating within me; the second sight was already emerging. I sensed that I had to look to the right; I sensed this command coming from within. First I saw her; then that creature too. She slowly crept towards him; without turning his head he muttered something to her and continued to stand there, as if he were rooted to the spot. She hunched over even more, and, obediently, as if she had received a blessing, hobbled off. She no longer concerned me; I fixed my eyes only on him. He was stocky and square. He stood by the wall next to the door of a store. Next to the scurrying, rushing figures he looked like a hole in a colorless carpet. He had no neck at all. His massive head was set directly onto his shoulders; if he wanted to look to the side, he had to turn his entire body. But he didn’t turn; he merely devoured everything with his eyes. That neckless thing had grown into the paving stones, into the grim walls, into Old Town’s close air. Passersby would slow when they passed him; it seemed they forgot for a moment where they were going. But this didn’t interest him; he simply stood there and devoured everything with his eyes. He riveted my attention, riveted even my willpower. The eyes in his pudgy, flat face were like two holes—if it’s possible to imagine holes in a hole. His face was completely expressionless, but it was just this lack of expression that broadcast his oppressive menace, his universal scorn, and his firm belief that this was his domain. Superficially, he looked like an imbecile, but I didn’t doubt for a second that inside him an iron, dispassionate intellect was working like a machine. His head jutted out of his shoulders and was bent somewhat forward; he seemingly charged forward, but at the same time remained as unmovable as a rock. He was like a wolf poised just before a leap, but firm in the knowledge that it would be unnecessary to pounce—the victim would climb into his jaws on its own. A pathological threat, indescribable in words, was hidden inside him. It was only possible to feel it; it penetrated my innards like a plague bacilli, like a sense of impending doom. At intervals, faceless figures would approach him for a blessing; he would growl something, and they would slink off again. I saw he was the secret king here, whom everyone obeyed without knowing whom they were obeying, and naïvely thought that they were acting independently. He held all the strings in his hands (whose strings, what strings?); he loomed above Old Town like a gigantic octopus, connected by innumerable threads to the mass of drab figures who were crawling here and there. His proboscises reached everywhere; they reached my innards too—my chest was encompassed by a torpid weakness. I felt I had already found it, but I still couldn’t understand what I had found. I was alone—frightened and helpless. I was and I remained alone.

Now I understand how lucky I was. I never again succeeded in seeing one of Their commissars, a high overlord, so close up—simply in the street, in the crush of passersby, for some reason breaking the codes of secrecy. I don’t know what I would do now, but at that time I simply froze, gasping for air with my mouth open, feeling nothing but a boundless fear and a pain in my chest. That creature stirred and slunk off along the wall, but I couldn’t budge: I was paralyzed. I had come across Their outpost, but I wasn’t prepared; I didn’t have sufficient strength to risk it. Apparently, They had undermined me too; the tree of my spirit was not exactly flourishing. However, there was still sap there, even though They believed they had already dealt with me. It wasn’t true—I was still alive. It was just that the time hadn’t come yet. Only a person who is focused and resolved to sacrifice himself can begin to do battle with Them. A person who has no other out.

. . . and everyone’s lounging about as if they were at a health resort. It’s some kind of communist holiday today; for breakfast you each got a genuine roll with marmalade. You’re sitting in your nook by the garbage cans again. A couple of Russkies rummage through the refuse—today no one will yell, no one will assign you to solitary, no one will knock your teeth out. Bolius is terribly emaciated; even here it’s rare to see such a tortured face: a desiccated, sapped, disfigured face. But it’s a human face regardless. No blind strength, no hatred can wipe off the marks of a great intellect, the marks of a great heart; nothing can extinguish his eyes. You’re actually intimidated. The man who is probably the greatest intellect of Lithuania, the honorary doctor of a hundred universities, the intellect of Lithuania’s honor, is sitting next to you, talking to you and teaching you, Vytautas Vargalys, as if you alone were all of poor strangled Lithuania, waiting for his word.

“After the war the Russians took land, technology, and gold away from Germany, but they never managed to appropriate German Ordnung,” Bolius lectures. “In a German camp, the sadism is precise and refined; here the sadism is primitive and brutish. Russia is still Russia—even in a camp . . .”

“You were in Russia before the war?”

“No, this is my first time here. They brought us here by train straight from Auschwitz—without switching trains, without any visas. Like in a relay race—straight from Hitler to Stalin. Not just me—all of us—millions . . .”

“Why?” You ask involuntarily. “In the name of what?”

“Why me?” Bolius rephrases the question, his eyes gleam with a strange sarcasm, “You? All of us? Because we’re breathing. Because we’re alive. Lithuania without Lithuanians! You know, after all, that’s the Soviet leaders’ slogan. You know that.”

“Then why the Russians?”

“Oh, they’re just along for the ride.” Bolius grins, his crooked smile is awful. “It’s nothing, they’re used to it. It’s worse for us, because we’ve already gotten a whiff of freedom and will never be able to forget it. Blessed are the ignorant . . . The Russians never experienced freedom, so they can’t even dream about it. Blessed are the . . .” Bolius’ voice unexpectedly trembles. “In Auschwitz I used to secretly give lectures: about art . . . about literature, philosophy . . . Dozens of people risked their lives for those lectures . . . They had to feel human, they couldn’t do otherwise . . . But these do without it quite nicely . . . They don’t need it, do you understand?”

You’re sorry for the Russians, who have never tasted freedom, who need nothing. There now, a couple of them are rummaging through the refuse, they’re happy to find a bite. Don’t tell me man was created for this, to rummage through a camp’s refuse, and then for weeks upon weeks, years upon years, to chisel out Stalin’s portrait, as big as an entire village, on the rocky slope of a mountain? You no longer know what a human is. Perhaps Vasia Jebachik is a human? He’s next to you, he’s adjusting his still, but he won’t make moonshine—it’s a tea brewer. Vasia Jebachik is the ruler of this world. Bolius looks at you, and he sees right through you.

“You think I’m not sorry for them?” he says. “You think I’m not driven to despair that I can’t do anything? . . . Look around: this is what their world is. The sun shines, so they’re all happy. They each got a roll, so they’re all satisfied . . . They have no doubt that things are the way they should be . . . The doubting ones are long since under the ground . . . Still others console themselves with the thought that it’s an unfortunate mistake, but shortly a bright future will arrive . . .”

Bolius closes his eyes; he doesn’t want to show the suffering in them. He wants you to see only wisdom in his eyes, a clever Voltaire-like little smile, so that at least in your thoughts you’d forget your desecrated body and believe that the spirit can’t be fenced in with barbed wire.

“They’ll do the same thing to us,” you say suddenly. “We’ll be praying to the Shit of Shits too.”

Bolius opens his eyes in a flash, you actually recoil—the anger that flows from his gentle eyes is so unexpected.

“Son!” he spits out fiercely between clenched teeth, “You don’t know what a human is. Listen carefully: HUMAN! It’s impossible to defeat a human. You can kill him, but defeat him—never. They’ve taken everything away from me: my wife, children, freedom, love, the world, God, learning, the sun, air, hope, my body, they’ve done everything so that I would no longer be myself, but they haven’t overcome me. And they won’t! Within me lies an immortal soul, whose existence they deny!”

Bolius roars, even Vasia Jebachik lifts his eyes from his still and glares sullenly at the two of you.

“Ironsides, shut your prof up,” he says sarcastically, “He’d better be quiet. The Doc keeps staring at him, and if he takes him to the fifth block—none of his gods will help him. Neither Buddha, nor Shiva, nor that little Jew Einstein.”

Justinas was like a splinter driven into my life: I stumbled over him wherever I turned. He acted friendly with me, but somewhat from above: after all, he belonged to the cream of the party, and I was nothing more than a computer specialist. I no longer listened to what he was saying; I sensed he wouldn’t give himself away with words. I studied only his face and hands. I would look at the double roll that was forming under his chin, at his soft, indistinct features. His face was covered with a thin, barely noticeable layer of fat, but it wasn’t just an ordinary layer of fat, the result of pointless gluttony. That layer—puttied over the sharp corners, protrusions, and hollows—was a natural part of his construction. Justinas’s face couldn’t express sudden or strong emotions, that’s not what it was made for. It was designed for something like emotions, for half-feelings and a calm, stable existence. His eyes were the color of water. His hands, however, held the most meaning. A strange, unfathomable hieroglyph hid inside them. A hieroglyph of decay, stagnant water and twilight. They were pale and covered in brown freckles, with swollen joints. The fingers were stumpy, bloodless, and almost transparent. There were no veins to be seen on his hands. Those hands wouldn’t leave me alone. An irresistible desire kept coming over me: to cut into Justinas’s finger and see what would run out of the wound, what there was inside of him. Probably a continuous gray mass, a sticky bog of non-thoughts and non-feelings.

He got along famously with my wife—their thoughts and words, and even their movements, coincided. The two of them looked like brother and sister. I felt I was standing on the threshold of the secret. Sometimes I got the urge to track Justinas, and sometimes I unexpectedly felt sorry for her, or more accurately, for the pathetic remains of my Irena that would at intervals flare up in her. A human is weak: I would caress her secretly in the dark of the night, examine the body, lost in dreams, with the tips of my fingers. A human’s sensations are deceptive: sometimes it seemed that I didn’t feel the triple rolls under her breasts, I didn’t find the disgusting globs of flesh between her thighs, I didn’t feel the coarse hair tangled around her nipples. I was completely deranged: sometimes I talked to her, sometimes to my Irena. I had to resolve to do something, but I didn’t know what. I kept trying to lure her out into the yard when I heard Jake barking. I wanted to bring the two of them eye to eye, and see either bristling hair on the nape, insane eyes, and bared fangs, or a tail wagging hysterically and a tongue trying to lick. But as soon as Jake’s yelping sounded, she would find piles of work that couldn’t be put off. The longer I failed to bring the two of them together, the more I believed the dog would decide everything. Sooner or later the two of them had to meet, and then . . . “Then” came one gloomy Saturday morning. She was bored and, of her own accord, suggested we go outside. I was about to argue against it; I wanted to read, but I glanced out the window and saw Jake romping around the yard. I went down the stairs with a numb heart; I almost wanted to grab her by the hand and drag her back home. I secretly hoped Jake would have run off somewhere.

But Jake was lying next to the bench, all tensed up, ready to jump up and bound towards us. She turned to him first, squatted carefully, stretched out her hand and, crying out, jumped back. A bitter smell of mold suddenly spread through the yard. My leaden feet wouldn’t carry me closer, I didn’t want to know anything, and for a few long moments I didn’t know anything, but suddenly, almost against my will, I understood it all. It would have been better not to. The dog was dead. His infinitely lifelike pose, his open eyes gazing forward, completely did me in. An instant before he was energetically romping about, even now his doggy soul hadn’t yet entirely left his body, but at the same time he was somehow especially, hopelessly dead. She wailed out loud, caressed the rigid, curly-haired body, and I dare say even forced out a tear. I didn’t believe a single one of her wails, not a single one of her movements. That time she played her role badly, no one in the world would have believed her. The yard immediately got sickeningly colorless; the smell of mold or decay became unbearable. I was seriously frightened; I was afraid to even get close to her. The cowardly, nervous little person deep inside my soul just wanted to run, to escape as far as possible, to dig under the ground, to crawl into a cave and tremble there. The other—the brutal man who had gone through hell—wanted to strangle her with his bare hands. I wanted to howl, when suddenly she turned around and looked at me with Irena’s pure, sad eyes.

I hardly moved all day. I was half paralyzed, and on top of it all, Justinas showed up that evening and tormented me with his talk about women and his sexual prowess. He had never spoken about it before. This time you’d think he’d opened a bag of obscenities and uncovered his filthy insides. He never said the most important word aloud, but it was heard most, without actually being said a single time; all the talk, all of Justinas’s thoughts, revolved around it. It seemed he wasn’t in the least concerned about the women themselves, just their vaginas. In Justinas’s world, the streets were full of walking vaginas with completely unnecessary appendages: arms, legs, heads. The more I listened, the more I started becoming some kind of vagina maniac myself. To my own surprise, I praised my wife’s erotic talents in a mysterious whisper, and wasn’t in the least ashamed. He infected me with his mania; it was only a good deal later that I became disgusted. They really are capable of infecting people with all the forms of their plague; this must be strictly guarded against.

I needed to run off somewhere as soon as possible and think things over. I signed up for a business trip to Moscow and packed my bag in an instant. She didn’t seem to want me to go, and she kissed me just like Irena when I left. I was stunned. She was intentionally driving me insane. I stood on the stairs for a long time, but I went to the station anyway. Too well I remembered the neckless ruler of the Narutis neighborhood. Too well I remembered the hopelessly, irretrievably dead Jake. Suddenly I felt there was no turning back. In the station bar, all my doubts began to bubble up again; once more, the simplest question arose: what’s going on here? Suddenly I realized that people, entire nations, the greatest countries come to ruin in just exactly this way—they fail to ask out loud in time: what’s going on here? (It’s enough just to remember the birth of Nazi Germany.) Of course, man became man because he’s able to adapt to anything; however, that adaptability will be his ruin in the end.