I cannot bear religions that intimidate people with a single, common hell. There’s already a hell common to everyone here on earth — that’s the Ass of the Universe.
Apparently, Satan forced VV to fall in love with just that sort of father’s daughter. Povilas Banys is a particularly famous person. “The Voice of America” or “Radio Liberty” is always reading excerpts from memoirs in which he appears in all his glory. He was an apologist for the total annihilation of the human soul, a spiritual executioner with imagination and fancy. The authors of memoirs remember him with reverent horror. He was so horrible, so consistently satanic, that he even inspired reverence. Povilas Banys was the poet of night interrogations, spiritual sadism, draconian judgments, and the ravaging of innocents. This Lithuanian writer, who died in the United States, recalled with sacred trepidation how Povilas Banys beat him with a wooden hammer on the head in his torture chamber. After thirteen blows (exactly thirteen!), he would order him to write one more sentence of his ostensible confession. “I’m perfecting your style,” he explained tenderly, “You’ll learn the fastest way of expressing the essence.”
Colonel Povilas Banys, the bearer of government decorations, was Lolita Banytė-Žilienė’s father. That’s the kind of person’s daughter VV fell in love with. Their story couldn’t have ended any other way; their love was doomed from the start.
Incidentally, Povilas Banys was an enormously educated person, a true scholar. But why do I say “was”? He’s still living today, as pretty as you please. He loves avant-garde jazz, Joyce, and Buñuel. He simply adores the latter.
An American or European would never understand how a person like that could be a poet of spiritual sadism. It’s never fallen to the lot of either Americans or Brits to live in the Ass of the Universe. The corresponding neurological connections don’t exist in their brains. Once I nearly choked with laughter listening to a Harvard professor on the radio defending this Muscovite psychiatrist. The world accused this psychiatrist of stuffing dissidents into secret nuthouses. That’s not true, it can’t be, the Harvard professor railed, that Muscovite is a true scholar; he’s published serious work. I even fell out of my chair laughing. No Harvard professor would be able to understand that a perfectly serious scholar could, of his own free will, be a complete butcher. No American or Frenchman would understand that the manager of a gas chamber in Hitler’s Germany could have played the piano like a virtuoso and worshipped Chopin. No, they won’t understand it. Those American and French brains aren’t constructed right.
I feel sorry for those Americans and Frenchmen. When the all-powerful Ass of the Universe overtakes them, they’ll die in the prison camps without ever catching on.
Lord knows, sometimes I’m glad I was born in the Ass of the Universe. There’s a lot I could teach to the English, and the French, and the Italians, and. . It’s just the Lithuanians I couldn’t teach anything to.
The inhabitants of the Ass of the Universe figured out paradoxes like that much too well. So well, that they’ve completely reconciled themselves to them. Even I, the great writer of the mlog who’s seen everything, am sometimes astounded by this reconciliation.
From my collection:
VV socialized with this Stadniukas, who I believe was one of his former camp guards. Only in the Ass of the Universe can a victim nonchalantly sip cognac with his executioner. They socialized as equals. VV didn’t condemn this Stadniukas openly, and in turn the latter didn’t lick his boots or humiliate himself to atone for his past sins. Lord knows, they acted as if they’d been students together.
But VV wouldn’t be VV if he hadn’t, sooner or later, blown his top. My theory of the balance of passions was once again indisputably confirmed.
This Vasilijus Ivanovičius, who showed up from who knows where and then disappeared again, had his finger in it too. VV, in all seriousness, maintained that this Vasilijus lived in the mud of the bog and only emerged to breathe air once every seven years. He looked that way too — as if he had crawled out of the muck. I never got who he was — a former prisoner, or a guard. He downed vodka by the tumbler and spoke in nothing but swear words, and when he got really drunk, in inarticulate sounds. VV explained that this was the language of birds.
This Vasilijus flew in like a vulture as soon as Stadniukas kicked the bucket. He and VV got it into their heads to bury Stadniukas and beat off the gang of veterans. Who knows how they got hold of a coffin made of rough pine boards. Inside they stuck a half-finished bottle of vodka. They spat on the coffin lid and put their cigarettes out on it. The veterans, sniffing out the funeral anyway, ran off to call the militia; the gravediggers, afraid of trouble, hid themselves. VV and this Vasilijus, as cool as could be, filled up the hole; the militia, hurrying to the scene, found a fresh hillock and an Orthodox priest. It turned out that Stadniukas had managed to convert just before he died, taking communion and the last rites.
It was all like some preposterous farce.
VV couldn’t not know who Lolita’s father is. He simply tried not to think about it — the way we don’t think about how we will sooner or later die. Actually, we all behave exactly as if we were immortal.
Perhaps that disgusting Sunday he and Gediminas intentionally got the better of Lolita, the offspring of an accursed family. But afterwards that accursed offspring turned into a miraculous flower, the center of secret hopes. It wasn’t possible to think of her as her father’s daughter. In VV’s eyes, she was like some kind of orphan, a stray, his ward alone. They both needed to fence themselves off from the entire world — even from their own ancestors. Particularly from their ancestors.
The two of them had to stand all alone against the entire universe. Unfortunately it was, in any event, the Ass of the Universe they stood against.
That was exactly why VV rejected his father; that was exactly why he didn’t want to see his grandfather. And after all, the senior Vytautas Vargalys was unique, perhaps the last descendant of the true Lithuanian gods. A heroic spy for Lithuania in Polish-occupied Vilnius. The secret coordinator for the forest brothers. A fearless rescuer of Jews from the Vilnius Ghetto. A man whom at least three governments should have shot no less than thirty times. The elder Vytautas Vargalys fought all his life and always lost. He was sufficiently intelligent and skeptical enough to grasp this.
I alone, as they say, accompanied him to the other world. He sobbed quietly and called for VV the whole time. He cursed me; the suspicion arose in his deteriorating brain that I was deliberately hiding him from his grandson. At times I would beg the Lithuanian god, bloated from his eternal snoozing, to not let the old man go on suffering, to finish him off quickly. At other times I was overcome with the heart-wrenching feeling that the last descendant of the true Lithuanian gods was leaving this world in front of my eyes — left all to himself, forgotten by everyone, no longer needed, not even by his own grandson. At the time, his son, VV’s father, was lying in a hospital in Druskininkai after his second heart attack. The old man kept wheezing:
“In my lifetime I had eleven passports of five countries under different names. Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish passports, Soviet passports and even a Swedish passport. Sometimes I’d forget my real name. Sometimes I’d forget my native language. I’d speak Latvian and Polish, German and Yiddish — anything but Lithuanian.”
Colon cancer was on the verge of consuming him; they kicked him out of the hospital the last few weeks. The usual thing: so he wouldn’t up and die on them and ruin the hospital’s mortality statistics. It just so happened that the clinics were fighting to lower their mortality rating at the time.