“Wake up!” was all I managed to say.
“Maybe you’re right,” VV unexpectedly agreed. “If there’s no dragon, there’s nothing for the brave prince to fight. Let’s go down to the river. Let’s go down to the river.”
We hurried past all the guards who were posted near the store without anyone stopping us. It was only then that I saw I was still holding the pineapple in my hands. Apparently, it had become our authorization.
The two of us quietly polished off the pineapple next to the Neris. We sat down on the river bank across from some construction site, the Exhibition Hall, I believe.
VV really loved the banks of the Neris. Although, hell, he didn’t love it. The Neris drew him the way a loved one’s grave does. He would talk about something to the dirty current of the Neris. Probably the Neris seemed alive to him.
After eight shots: I don’t care about anything, everything is shit. Well, I’ll have some hangover tomorrow!
I was quite right: the hangover is horrible. I no longer know whether today is Sunday, or if it’s Monday already. I went over to see this alcoholic writer, got some money, and was sent out to buy some wine. I bought twelve bottles.
Elena will fire me. But no, the KGB won’t let her. After all, I’m working at the place they chose for me.
I’m behaving like a pure-blooded homo lithuanicus. Alcohol is a great way to hide from everything.
Monday or Tuesday: “non stop.”
Tuesday or Wednesday: I called Elena at the library and told her I had a dreadful cold. Elena, in the voice of an executioner, announced that even over the telephone I reeked of booze. I boldly asked her to join me; I said girls were in short supply. Apparently I hit the mark. You can never figure these communists out. She giggled and in a completely pleasant voice explained that I had better show up at work in the morning. Otherwise, it was curtains for me.
Just think — it was already curtains for me a long time ago.
I’ve emerged from those nightmares at last and can work at my mlog again. I perceive the world with unusual clarity. A frequent post-binge sensation irritates me intensely: the feeling that everyone’s following you. Even the basement cats. It’s a truly disgusting sensation. It seems like everyone’s counting the remaining minutes of your life.
I shouldn’t drink so much.
VV mentioned a dragon more than once. Maybe he really did feel that he was a prince, sent to save the princess. Was Lola really a princess?
But oh Lord, what a prince!
Apparently, a person can only take it up to a certain point. If you pass that, something disintegrates. Something irreplaceable.
VV would raise essential questions much too often. Let’s take the most ordinary one: who really rules the ROF? Asking questions like that is deadly. But what an itch! No person in their right mind would believe that all sorts of Brezhnevs and Suslovs actually rule. So, who really does rule us? Who planned and created the Ass of the Universe? Who assembled the mechanism for crippling children?
VV asked questions like that all the time.
I’m secretly envious of him. We all envy people who do what we couldn’t do or wouldn’t dare to. I, for example, do nothing; I just rattle on.
Unfortunately, people can’t choose their path in life. They have what they’ve been given — from heaven or from hell. By the way, I suspect it’s nothing more than two different names for the same institution. So, I live a wonderful life. Like everyone else, I don’t do anything at work, and for that, like everyone else, I receive beggarly alms. I dress like everyone else. I eat what everyone else eats. In addition, I get to feel spiritually superior to others. Those others certainly don’t envy VV, write an mlog, or gather a collection.
Lordee, I’m such a brave man!
Someone has rummaged through my room. Everything has been left lying where it was, even the dust on the tables hasn’t been touched, but someone has obviously rummaged through my things. By the way, it’s long since time to get used to it. In Vilnius even dissertation manuscripts disappear without the slightest trace.
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if some uninvited visitors didn’t from time to time cut off a little piece of a person’s arms or legs. Anything is possible in the Ass of the Universe. No one would be surprised by it, no one would object. They’d grumble for a week or two, then they’d get used to it and wouldn’t pay attention to it anymore.
That’s the psychology of the inhabitants of the Ass of the Universe.
If it were different, the Ass of the Universe itself couldn’t have been constructed. The psychology had to be altered first. Alter the children. Create new conditional reflexes.
And so on.
Why have they gotten interested in me just now? I know the answer, but I’m afraid to say it even in my thoughts. I’m afraid to even think about it.
Every inhabitant of the Ass of the Universe is afraid to think. What’s more, he imagines a nimble dwarf with piles of notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders is poking around in his brain.
For the third day, I haven’t been able to add to my mlog. I haven’t even touched it. The word “touched” sounds funny when you’re talking about a purely metaphysical object, doesn’t it?
However, the only means of staying alive in the Ass of the Universe is to devoutly believe that the fruits of your imagination are far more real than so-called reality.
It can’t be otherwise. In the Ass of the Universe, everyone, by definition, is shit. So the only solution to avoid simply fertilizing the earth, is to turn into thinking shit. This is a byproduct of the Ass of the Universe, and its most advanced creation: thinking shit, or homo lithuanicus.
The abyss gazes at us, or perhaps we’ve long since been gazing at the world from out of the abyss ourselves.
Everyone keeps asking me about VV. But what can I say? “The man has killed the thing he loved, and so the man must die.” Every Lithuanian, intentionally or not, has murdered an abundance of things he loved. He’s murdered everything he loved.
Although for some reason, he hasn’t killed himself. Apparently, he never loved himself.
If even I feel this way, how must VV have felt all his life?
How must he have felt visiting Lolita’s father, the Colonel Banys we all love and revere?
After all, Lola’s father wasn’t some abstract monster to him. VV had literally been through Colonel Banys’s hands.
I know this for a fact. That former KGB agent Mackus showed me the records of VV’s interrogation.
It follows that Banys and VV were especially old acquaintances. The executioner and his victim.
Christ Almighty, what’s going on in the Ass of the Universe!? Some things are impossible to comprehend. Impossible to bear. Impossible to even imagine.
VV had to socialize with Colonel Banys on a family footing!
Maybe, like that time in the Erfurtas store, he had a gigantic knife inside his jacket? Or maybe Colonel Banys was already sharpening his own knife?
One way or another, when two such opposing elements collide, the occurrence of a cosmic catastrophe is inevitable.
I never liked to wander through Vilnius, but now that’s all I do. VV was a true poet of Vilnius, while to me this city always seems to be a soulless mechanism, a vengefully wheezing machine of inexplicable purpose. Even on our madly spinning planet, speedily rolling to its doom, cities of this kind are rare.
We don’t have our own city. There are Moloch cities and tyrant cities. Museum cities and Tower of Babel cities. Snoozing cat cities and cities of the absurd. But ours is a nothing.
Like the Jews, we’re eternal exiles, but we don’t even have our own Israel. I’ll add that we don’t even have our own Jerusalem.
Dammit — why was I fated to be born in a crossroads trampled by whoever gets the urge? Why did I have to be born in the Ass of the Universe, through which every conceivable shit pours?