It’s the satisfied and content farting of that same sublime ass.
I have also created a story about the love of a prisoner. This prisoner was confined behind barbed wire. Behind what barbed wire, or whether he’s guilty or innocent, is completely irrelevant. At intervals, very infrequently, he’d succeed in seeing a woman from afar. She was so far away that he couldn’t make out her features, so he would invent them himself. He would draw these imaginary women. Sometimes they would resemble madonnas, sometimes street prostitutes, but that prisoner of mine no longer remembered what either madonnas or prostitutes looked like.
One day a miracle occurred. A young girl showed up right next to the barbed wire. She came again the next day, and the next. She was the daughter of the prison warden. The prisoner’s life acquired meaning. He could look at that girl. He would steal glances at her or watch her openly — she never noticed him, anyway. But others noticed.
In stories about convicts, they love to portray how brotherly they all are, how they help one another out. That’s very nice, but in actuality things are completely different. I know this — we’re all convicts, and I’ve never encountered any solidarity. The other prisoners cruelly mocked the young lover, told dirty jokes about the girl, and crudely assessed her attractions and her shortcomings.
The girl was the daughter of the prison warden. She didn’t consider the prisoners human; she didn’t even consider them animals. Her favorite entertainment was to sic the guard dogs on careless prisoners. She didn’t feel hatred for them; she simply thought that these people were considerably lower than dogs.
However, my young man didn’t see this; he didn’t want to see it. He loved her, and that was all. He was envious of the shaggy dogs she petted. He was envious even of the bucket she carried out every day. Maybe he would have gone completely out of his mind, but the girl disappeared after a month or so and never appeared again.
Later, the young man was unexpectedly set free, slowly recovered his strength, and began to live almost normally. It was just that he judged women oddly. Not a one could please him. It seemed there wasn’t a single woman in the world who could attract him. But that wasn’t true. There was one such woman in the world. And my young man (no longer a young man and no longer a prisoner) met her. He recognized her immediately, while she, understandably, didn’t remember him at all.
Here my story breaks off, because there’s no way I can think of an ending. I really can’t write stories. All I can write is an mlog.
The Lithuanian writers immediately jump on me the moment I say that prisoners don’t commiserate with or support one another. They quote somebody’s pretty phrase: people aren’t united by common joys and victories, only by common sufferings and misfortunes. I agree, this rule holds true for some people. But it doesn’t in the least apply to the human herd. I immediately give an example from my collection.
This took place during the time the new Brezhnev Constitution was under consideration. We all know how these considerations go. The people driven into the hall snooze off or read books, while the apathetic orators explain how wonderful everything is and how many rights we all have. But out of the blue, a scandalous incident took place at the Engineering Institute. One assistant professor of philosophy decided to actually consider the constitution project. He stated out loud that the articles of the Constitution should conform to the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Furthermore, he had the gall to mention that our great country had signed that declaration and was obliged to follow it. Obviously, the meeting was hurriedly called off, its minutes destroyed, and the assistant professor dealt with. All of that’s perfectly natural. That’s everyday stuff for the Ass of the Universe. But perhaps you think his colleagues secretly shook the professor’s hand and unanimously, even if quietly, supported him? Maybe deep in their hearts they were proud of him? Maybe they at least sympathized with him? No, everyone got totally furious because the Institute was immediately beset, like wasps to honey, by all sorts of commissions, so everyone had to write a million reports and plans for the future, and on the whole to tremble for their hides. Everyone sincerely cursed the poor upstart who had caused so much trouble and angrily voted to do him in. That’s what he had coming, everyone thought, you live peacefully, doing nothing, and here this guy shows up — he gets a hankering for a Declaration of Rights, the rat!
Obviously, his defense of the Declaration wasn’t at all why the professor was fired. It was painstakingly proven that he didn’t have the proper qualifications. He didn’t understand dialectics and other subtleties of Marxism. He couldn’t nurture the younger generation. And so on.
Incidentally, about the younger generation. The students didn’t react to this incident at all. The slogan of today’s students is: “It makes no difference to me!”
This story also interested me because the ex-professor, after a prolonged and pointless search for work, was offered a job in a library.
More and more, I am beginning to believe that some metaphysical secret — some secret that I haven’t grasped yet — lies hidden in libraries.
VV and Lolita liked to walked through Old Town. To them, those few blocks substituted for all of Vilnius. I met them there more than once. “Met” isn’t the right word. They would apparently be going down the street, but in essence, they wouldn’t be there. You’d think they were walking down completely different streets, through a city they carried within, inside themselves.
They walked through Vilnius as if through a library.
You could put it this way. The houses and side streets of Old Town are yellowed manuscripts, full of wisdom and undeciphered mysteries. The new districts are identical, faceless political brochures or ROF leaders’ speeches that differ only in their title, and they’re as short-lived as the block construction buildings of Vilnius.
I could go on in this vein, but I’m much less concerned about the library than I am about the readers — VV and Lolita. They could wander the streets for days on end. A strange pair: a calm giant with graying temples and a long-legged girl humming something under her breath, perhaps “The Last Tango in Vilnius.” They searched for small joys and sometimes found them: a hunched-over, lisping old woman selling the first violets; a bristling little kitten, mewing non-stop, its little pink mouth wide open; a flaming, fancifully formed autumn leaf — unique and different from all others.
Say what you will, but it’s miraculous when two worn-out people who have been halfway to hell manage to find such small joys, the way children find fragments of colored glass in a stinking garbage dump.
Lolita’s father, Colonel Banys, performed unbelievable experiments on her in her childhood. She was an only child, and her father wanted only a son, an heir to his ideas. He tried to raise a future apologist for terror, a secret police genius. He dreamed of a dynasty of Banys KGB men. He would take the delicate girl to interrogations; he forced her to love the smell of jail. He beat his oppressive philosophy into her head.
It’s not hard to guess what vestiges this left in Lolita’s brain.
However, it’s impossible to guess what vestiges his grown daughter’s behavior left in her dear father’s brain. No one could make sense of Colonel Banys’s brain.
As far as I know, the Lord God denied having created Colonel Banys; he announced he didn’t know himself how that one got put together.