”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.